>underscoring the narrative that the company’s biggest victories were initiated under his predecessor, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs
What does the author consider to be a victory?
Tim Cook was elevated because he had the operational capability to grow Apple. Jobs did not consider Cook to be a product design person. But Jobs trusted Cook to find and keep people who could design products.
By any stretch of the imagination, the company's biggest victories have been in growing and holding together the vast ecosystem of HW / SW and services that continuously deliver the highest customer satisfaction ratings. The reward for that has been becoming the biggest company in the world. (Some might consider this a victory.)
If introducing new hit products is the only kind of victory that can exist, then Apple Silicon and AirPods victories also go to Cook.
Absolutely. Between Apple Silicon, Apple Watch, AirPods, and scaling operations to be able to sell the amount of products they do in a year, that is hard to argue against being an overwhelming success for Tim Cook as CEO.
Is it equal to the legacy of Apple under Jobs? Definitely not. But how many other companies/people released 3 revolutionary products?
It is hard to not compare the breakthrough product release count between Jobs and Cook.
If that is the measure, then we have to bring in Jobs' tenure as not only CEO but company founder that stretched 25 years as CEO, 1976 to 1985 and 1997 to 2011.
Cook only took the reins in 2011, and at that time arguably the company should not have focused on releasing yet more revolutionary products.
iPhone is the most successful consumer product in history, focus was correctly placed in supporting that, building moats around it and positioning the ecosystem to support the next big thing.
One product often left out, which may have started with Jobs, but delivery should be attributed to Cook is the new Apple HQ. The initial impact has crumbled due to Covid WFH.
However, this campus may turn out to be a force multiplier going forward. If so, it is a victory, but not in the minds of consumers.
I think even if Apple went bankrupt in 5 years, what Tim Cook has achieved is extremely good. It was not sure at all that Apple would grow this much over 12 years. It is not clear Steve Jobs himself could have had this success.
AirPods where and are loathed by some, but ultimately they present a well designed product that made the underlying product category more seamless and consumer friendly and accessible.
Their winning traits may seem banal, but in everyday carry objects small utility improvements play a huge role. Not having to deal with cables and increased range of movement are enough - what elevated AirPods though is that a visible, wearable product is an implicit fashion statement. Apples product designers succeeded in making st thing that is clearly recognisable and stands out against similar products already on the market, but is subtle enough not to disturb anything or polarise by totally overthrowing stylistic and societal convention. Perfect mix of identity and brand that is easy to integrate with your personal image.
Apple silicon is another kind of thing: it's just the same thing as before but cheaper and more powerful, without compromising any trait that made the predecessor products appealing.
Apple "reality" or whatever - I don't see carrying any of those same traits. It's much too visually disruptive to become an AirPod, it's much too close to similar products to be an M1, and on top of this it's success fully depends on expensive-to-produce software content within a technically complicated ecosystem, while Apple has long lost it's profile as a developer centric and welcoming brand and rather capitalized on it's ubiquity and alienated many developers who only still contribute to the platform it because they have too by sheer numbers.
Apple might be able to not totally fail spinning up the platform, because of buying power, image and again numbers.
But those just slightly more practical, still bulky and odd looking VR glasses are nowhere near replicating the seamless product fit of iPods, IPhones, AirPods or CPUs.
> Not having to deal with cables and increased range of movement are enough
I don't think that's enough. AirPods "just work" in a way that no prior Bluetooth headset ever did. Everything else was a kludge, particularly when it came to switching between multiple devices.
I would argue that the move the Apple Silicon was in the pipeline long before Cook took over. I mean PA semi was purchased in 2008 and the first A4 processor was 2010, the writing was already on the wall a good decade out.
But Air-pods, Apple Watch and Apple TV streaming were all under cooks watch. Maybe not as ground breaking but still very important. Mind you, who else has been doing ground breaking stuff like under Steve? I cannot think of anything other than the recent AI stuff. It kind of feels like Steve picked the last of the low hanging fruit and then bowed out before it came to stagnation.
Are Air-pods, Apple Watch and Apple TV actually VERY important? The whole Wearables, Home and Accessories category is 10% of Apple's revenue and that includes Beats and what not.
> I mean PA semi was purchased in 2008 and the first A4 processor was 2010, the writing was already on the wall a good decade out.
Is this similar to how AMD's Bulldozer architecture back around that timeframe was the writing was on the wall for their current competitive dominance over Intel?
PA Semi was a great talent accu-hire, but AFAIK at the time of acquisition they only had Power-based designs ready for market.
> It kind of feels like Steve picked the last of the low hanging fruit and then bowed out before it came to stagnation.
PT Barnum was a renowned showman as well, but that doesn't mean he trained all the elephants.
For instance, I would hardly say the release of a market-dominating phone was a foregone conclusion based on the success of the iPod, and an Apple without the iPhone would look incredibly different.
Sure, people wanted to take their music with them, but the nearly purely multitouch interface was a fresh invention - the iPod did not have a touch interface AFAIK until three years later.
I just don't see something which was such a fresh take and new engineering - to the point that other smartphone vendors thought the original keynote demos were staged - was low-hanging fruit.
Well, there's the Apple II, the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone...
Apple has had a long history of products that redefined the future of entire categories, and almost all of them up to this point except the Apple Watch included deep involvement by Jobs.
Apple watch? Airpods maybe? Apple silicon for sure.
Other than that not much, but to be clear there has not really been any other inventions in this time span like those you mention. The market is more mature.
Forstall’s first big unguided product delivery was Maps. He royally screwed the pooch with the release. By all accounts, he was fairly toxic in the executive group, he had to go.
Airpods were handed to Cook on a platter, honestly. It doesn't take a market savant to realize apple can make a killing selling the ever popular and sexy earpod in bluetooth form. Once the battery technology was available to resell the same earpod but with bluetooth it would have been made no matter who was CEO.
In retrospect, every invention is obvious. I think it's fair to say that Apple went a bit beyond just slapping bluetooth onto their existing headphones. The instant pairing experience alone makes them stand out against the standard competition.
iPhone was handed to Jobs on a platter, honestly. It doesn't take a market savant to realize apple can make a killing selling the ever popular and sexy iPod in touchscreen form. Once the battery technology was available to resell the same iPod but with cellular it would have been made no matter who was CEO.
It looks like so obvious in retrospect, but it wasn't sure. Bluetooth audio was somewhat a niche until Apple removed 3.5mm.
Maybe noise cancelling boom is another reason. NC also requires battery and amp so why don't make it wireless? IIRC until Sony MDR-1000X sold well (that's sold in 2016, same year as iPhone 7!), noise cancelling market was minor Bose's market for airplane user.
“When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while.”
I don't think there is a consumer market for head mounted AR anymore - if there ever really was. That makes me sad having been in AR since 2010 - and knowing what we could do with it if done right.
I just don't think society currently has an appetite for a $3000 product that gives the wearer visual superpowers (that is the promise after all) and is an impossible to ignore distinction between classes. I honestly think we're at the point where I wouldn't be surprised if it's google glass all over again x 100, where unhinged people are attacking and pulling these expensive devices off of people's heads [1][2].
Maybe in 2017 when AR was really hot could it have gotten adoption, but as it stands in 2023 the average consumer is starting to reject this level of tech and fewer and fewer people have the wallet that could support this.
I also suggest avoiding a comparison with the VR market - the only thing they have in common is that it's a thing you put on your face. The infrastructure, deployment, product features, economics, user interfaces, battery, environmental use, UX, legal etc... are all doubly complex with HMD AR over HMD VR
I think it's going to continue to be a long time before persistent everywhere HMD AR is going to be a reality
> I don't think there is a consumer market for head mounted AR anymore - if there ever really was
I suspect there's a market there, but only if the device can be made to look like a pair of fashionable sunglasses, and was driven by the phone in your pocket, adding a customizable HUD to the real world, doing all sorts of things, from translating foreign-language text to overlaying directions or providing real-time info about the bus or train you're trying to catch.
But for now, that's science fiction. Even if we could make the screens/optics work, the glasses still need power, and batteries are still relatively bulky. It wouldn't be much use if it had a short battery life, or drained your phone battery too fast.
Google Translate in Lens mode is pretty much the killer app for this type of device. Having the in-place translation working feels like damn magic, and if you could do that while in a foreign country then it would be amazing.
> I don't think there is a consumer market for head mounted AR anymore
anymore, or yet? I think the biggest barriers are form factor and price. History suggests that price of such devices will increase over time. Whether the tech can be squeezed into a form factor that will be desirable to the masses is another problem altogether. The fact that apple (according to this article) have not managed to do it suggests to me that it might be some time off.
Right. $3,000 is obviously a luxury/niche product, but $450 Nreal Air (which is a product you can buy today off Amazon) much less so. It's like 3D TVs, the idea will never die. Even if it's doesn't work out time around (which I doubt, having spent a tiny bit of time with an Nreal Air), expect to see it again in 10 years or so.
I think there is a much more important question, which is: what can you do with the tech that makes it valuable at any price point? Like cool, I can augment my vision. Now what? Now much... at least from what I've seen.
> I just don't think society currently has an appetite for a $3000 product that gives the wearer visual superpowers (that is the promise after all) and is an impossible to ignore distinction between classes.
Entire industries are built upon impossible to ignore distinction between classes - 100 thousand dollar watches, 10 million dollar cars, designer clothing, and a thousand other examples that come under the category of "bling".
While I have similar doubts about the short to medium term AR/XR future, I don't think it's based on people not wanting to be seen as better than everyone else. As a society we basically encourage that behaviour.
People aren't in their EV while sitting in a restaurant, talking to you at a party or standing in a checkout line. It's literally in their face while talking to you.
That said, usually people tend to seek out status symbols. People obviously wear Gucci sunglasses in their faces because they are Gucci and expensive. However, I also wonder if this case would be different because of the growing anti-tech resentment and the wearer now being associated with issues liked gentrification, disliked mega corps etc.
I assume that it means you'll have people walking around wearing glasses that basically plug them transparently into all sorts of information. However, we've had an uneven rollout of mobile technology for the last 25+ years and that factor hasn't slowed anything down. If (and I agree it's a significant if over the next x years) AR is a genuinely useful mainstream technology people will adopt it even if others don't like it.
I agree that getting to a genuinely useful/comfortable/fashionable AR device is a pretty heavy lift. (And that it's arguably unrelated to VR except maybe to some degree at the tech level.)
But, if you get there, I'm pretty convinced that you will have a population of adopters whether it creates a class divide or not. Certainly cell phone adoption wasn't held back by this factor.
There is a market for AR glasses, it's just not wireless or tethered to a smartphone, on your face, walking around and using them like that, at least right now.
I think the SpaceTop laptop[0] shows an excellent use case for a realistic AR device.
Right now, the kind of AR headsets that companies seem to think they can produce are all fantasy/sci-fi, not much different than the whole Dream of Self-Driving Cars. Sure, it's probably possible eventually, but not anytime soon, or at a price point most can afford in the case of self-contained AR headset that look like normal glasses
“ I just don't think society currently has an appetite for a $3000”
Yep, that’s an easy one. Guess what. It’s not for general use.
I have no idea where AR/VR is going. However, I’m all for Apple spending part of its large cash reserve in R&D. I guarantee something useful will come out of it.
Hopefully, someone with a little vision comes along and says “you know what we could do with this technology…”
>I don't think there is a consumer market for head mounted AR anymore - if there ever really was.
All it takes is a killer app to come along. AR music instrument instruction is my bet. If Apple released this one app along with the glasses it would become a massive hit.
> and knowing what we could do with it if done right
The implication here is that you know a compelling case for "what we could do with it" and how to "do it right", so what are the answers (because I'm stumped)?
For military or police use I can imagine superimposing models of hidden targets derived from aerial imagery. Granted the derivation part is presently missing.
Interior design is another subject that comes to mind.
> don't think society currently has an appetite for a $3000 product
Apple currently sells a pair of 500$ headphones and a 5000$ monitor. High margin products that are sold as fashion to their top fans is Apple's thing.
They will need one killer app and a sleek enough package, and those are the main bottle necks. The money is hardly an issue.
Technologically, Apple has the distinct advantage of having the best power efficient mobile chips which Facebook did not. Other than that, I don't see how they can solve all the other open problems in VR/AR right now.
The whole concept of AR/VR rises dystopian red flags, everything Mark Zuckerberg did with their attempt looked somewhere between scary and dumb.
I think this is because these companies are preoccupied with controlling the content, they envision doing the same things we do IRL but on their platforms. This is problematic because it means people instead of improving their lives and actually doing things are expected to be pretending doing it and spent their precious lives and money away on this BS.
VR and AR becomes exciting only when you can explore yourself and the world by doing things you can't do in real life. Maybe you want to try being assassin? Maybe you you want to try being from another gender or species? Maybe you want to try being in an actual war zone? Maybe you want to try to create a society with completely different rules from we have now? But no, these are too dangerous because someone might be offended, so in VR you are supposed to go to Paris and spend real money throwing virtual darts or something. They also can't distance themselves from the moral panic because they must milk the platform by controlling the content.
It is outright dystopian and dumb. The core promise of the platforms is "do the same things you do when you don't already do on our platforms so we can monetise that too" and this doesn't converge with the core promise of the tech which is to do things you can't do in real life.
From the information available so far, the Apple headset will be fairly close to Meta's Oculus Quest in terms of hardware: Portable and with external cameras to allow for orientation and "mixed reality".
Maybe Apple is on the right track here, since the Oculus Quest has sold more units than all the other VR headsets combined. But there is one big difference: Apple's headset will be a very expensive premium product (apparently around 3000 USD), while the Oculus Quest costs just 400 USD.
I think consumers just don't want to spend a lot of money on VR. Except for the Quest, they are all far too expensive, and that's why they didn't sell. Apple just makes the problem worse by increasing the price even more.
John Carmack has made the same point repeatedly: VR is not a high price product category. If he is right, the Apple headset will fail. It may be more feasible to sell $3000 smartphones than to sell VR headsets at this price.
> From the information available so far, the Apple headset will be fairly close to Meta's Oculus Quest in terms of hardware
That's not really accurate. The rumours suggest optics at least as good as the Meta Quest Pro ($1k), possibly with a substantial move forward from there. They suggest resolution of 3k per eye, significantly above the Meta Quest Pro, and using Micro LED for a big improvement on the screen door effect, brightness, quality. Then there's the compute, with 2x M2s, this is quite possibly going to be able to run AAA VR games (if they're compatible with iOS) – the M2 is running some AAA games on things like the MBA, and this one has an M2 per eye.
These rumours might turn out to be rubbish, but they seem to be credible rather than speculation, and they would suggest a high price tag. If this was a Meta Quest Pro "Ultra" it might be >$2k based on Meta's pricing, so Apple charging $3k for it given their "tax" (and high production quality) feels about right.
You are misunderstanding what I said. Of course the Apple headset would have much higher quality components. But it is similar to the Oculus Quest in that it is a standalone device which uses external cameras to track the environment. It's easy to use.
My point was that it seems consumers don't care about expensive high performance VR headsets. They want something that is both easy to use and inexpensive: The unusually early Quest Pro price drop suggests as much.
It's like the Nintendo Switch: If it had cost substantially more, much better graphics, screen resolution etc would have been possible, but it almost certainly would have been a flop. The same thing seems to be true for VR headsets.
If we ignore the biggest problem that VR has (power) then the second biggest problem VR has to deal with is heat dissipation.
> an M2 chip per eye
first, the definition on an M2 chip is very murky. There is a massive difference between an M2 targeted for small mobile, compared to a M2 found in a laptop.
A mobile can't sustain power draw of 5 watts for very long.
A headset can't sustain power draw of 10 watts for that long.
AAA graphics needs >40 watts of power. You can't have that next to your face without large amounts of cooling. Now, I'm assuming that Apple will offload graphics to phones/tablets/laptops in the style of oculus link. This solves a bunch of other problems like weight, size and battery life.
This is where Apple has the great advantage of course, not only does it control the entire vertical there, but they actually have a QA team, product metrics and leadership to make sure that the link will be seamless, easy and reliable. Meta will devote a team to it for a year, who will build a totally new system, sling it over the fence and move on to make sure that they get promotions. It never really worked of course, but it pushed the promotions metrics, and the leadership don't care about users, only moving a synthetic metric so they can be made VP of cables.
I digress.
However, for remote rendering to work reliably, you'll either need decent wifi(new time machine anyone?) or a decent quality cable. Wifi is a right shit to make work reliably at full throughput, if not impossible. so I'd assume cables would be the way forward (or some fancy 60gig networking stuff, but that seems unlikely)
> Micro LED for a big improvement on the screen door effect, brightness, quality
Nope. The screen is not actually the limiting factor, its the optics. The "barn door" and brightness is almost entirely down to the style of lenses.
I'm willing to spend a lot on VR, but Apple would have to absolutely blow everything else out of the water at that price point. I have no doubt that a lot of Apple enthusiasts will buy them, but they've certainly chosen a specific market.
You could buy a full Index kit, get the wireless upgrade for it, and then a full Vive Pro kit and its wireless upgrade, and have spent about the same amount of money.
Just with the rumor that the new Apple headset is sporting an M chip, it will likely blow everything else away in terms of potential. Apple will also be focusing on everything that isn’t gaming, meaning that XR people can finally get some work done in mixed reality. Compared to other companies, they don’t like gaming. They just put up with it because of the massive revenue.
Sure PCVR still might have better specs, but they’re primarily wired and that’s a huge con if you want to use VR for fitness and it kills immersion when you have to turn a lot. I’ve tried to mitigate this problem with hooks and pulleys on the ceiling. It didn’t help much and it caused additional issues.
You also still can’t do serious work with most of the existing standalone or PCVR headsets. Why? Because you need a minimum PPD of 35 (where 50 PPD is retina quality). To date, HP Reverb G2 and the meta Quest Pro are around 25 PPD. Only the PCVR varjo aero is at 35 PPD, but it’s wired, costs $2000, and doesn’t come with either the $600 base station / controller combo or the $3000-$4000 PC needed to power it
> You could buy a full Index kit, get the wireless upgrade for it, and then a full Vive Pro kit and its wireless upgrade, and have spent about the same amount of money.
You’re not accounting for the $2000-$3000 PC needed to run an Index or Vive Pro 2. Also both headsets are wired, and both rely on base stations. While they have the best tracking accuracy, they’re a pain to set up right and they’re one more thing you have to worry about. It’s not for normal people or even the average PC gamer. If it wasn’t for the lockdowns, I wouldn’t even have had the motivation to finish setting up my base stations. Until the pandemic hit, my PCVR sets where just languishing in their boxes. Self contained tracking is the way to go for normal people and most techies
The form factor for PCVR headsets is also terrible. It’s too intimidating for normal people to put a giant bucket on their faces. Even meta’s quest 2 suffers from this problem. This is yet another reason most people won’t even try modern 4th gen VR.
There are more downsides I can list. I'm very familiar with them because I still own both headsets including the wireless kit for the Vive. I also own the HP Reverb, the Quest 2 and Quest Pro.
As imperfect as they may be, my go to headsets are still from meta for now, mainly because of wireless which is why I’m excited for the new Apple headset
I'm willing to spend $3,000 on a device that I would want to use every day. The reason I don't spend that much on existing VR tech is that I don't want to use it.
Weeks before the original iPad was released, the very same people were speculating a starting price of $1000, this site, amongst others, collectively lost their shit. Release price? $500.
I’m not saying that it will be the same this time, but equally won’t be making statements based on what at the moment is a guess, educated or not.
> I think consumers just don’t want to spend a lot of money on VR
And I don’t think Apple wants those people as customers, at least not initially.
$3000 for a headset from a company that sells $1000 monitor stands for $5000 monitors and $500 wheels for the computers doesn’t seem about right to me. In a year or two, the next generation of VR headset will be much better and still $3000 and you will be able to buy this one for, maybe, $2000.
There’s an awful lot of people who can afford $2k for a piece of hardware if it’s good enough.
All that said, I suspect the headset will be priced well under $3000.
The current best uses for VR are engineering and gaming. Given this is a consumer product, it won't be used for engineering, and given it's Apple, it won't have a big gaming library.
Apple will have to come up with something new for users to do for this product to justify a $X,000 price, almost regardless of how good the hardware is.
All the expensive VR headsets sold terribly, except for the cheap Oculus Quest. The lesson seems clear: When it comes to VR, people strongly favor price over quality. Which in turn suggests the Apple headset will fail.
VR is perhaps like the original Game Boy: Not very powerful, no color screen, but low price and long battery life. It sold a lot, unlike the competition.
There is an absolutely gigantic market for computers (and the monitors to go with them), it's almost impossible to do any kind of business without them.
Do people even buy those $1000 monitor stands, like really? Or is it just a highball so Apple can get better deals negotiating enterprise-size deals with larger companies buying in bulk?
I think with respect to compute/GPU capability the Apple headset will be vastly superior. One of the major issues with the Quest is the lack of graphics quality that can be brought to the virtual environments. Unless you run it via Link to a PC with a top end GPU it is just a toy. Having VR experiences like the recent Unreal Engine provides is simply orders of magnitude away for Quest in the current state... Thats one major reason that this thing does not take off for FB
I don't think casual users care at all about graphic quality. Just look at how the Switch or Wii exploded over every other game console. Same thing for games like Roblox. Graphic quality is purely an enthusiast niche target. If you want mass adoption you need to fix comfort and nausea.
Problem is: Apple mostly ruined their relationship with Epic, Meta and even Valve. Whatever excellent VR tech they come up with will be mostly ignored by the game industry. Good part of iPhone / iPad success was due to the excellent apps ecosystem. Who gonna make VR experiences for Apple new VR ecosystem?
F2P game companies? I guess they won't be interested either because Apple will try to bite off a lot of profits from their ads by not letting anyone but themself to run targeted ads.
> I think with respect to compute/GPU capability the Apple headset will be vastly superior.
They still have the same issues that everyone else has: compute/heat/battery. Sure they have the vertical and are able to offload rendering onto ipads or laptops, but then you're basically tethered like the quest/vive/etc.
Running unreal requires a 300watt graphics card, plus ~60watt CPU. even assuming apple can quarter that, its still 90 watts. and not 90 watts of 37 degrees, its 90 watts at 65c. you can't keep that kind of heat next to your face.
> I think with respect to compute/GPU capability the Apple headset will be vastly superior.
They still have the same issues that everyone else has: compute/heat/battery. Sure they have the vertical and are able to offload rendering onto ipads or laptops, but then you're basically tethered like the quest/vive/etc.
many little niceties you hardly notice but would immediately notice the loss of.
with vr and ar you are placing yourself directly within the ecosystem. (the os becomes your reality, if you will, extended… xr… wasn’t that clever of them…)
the iPhone long game shows apple’s willingness to creep slowly into lower cost tiers to preserve the brand value.
carmack doesn’t need to be wrong for apple to succeed. apple just needs to be patient. (and maybe get back to some fundamentals on the software, the operating systems fee like they are beginning to rot a bit.)
That is, if they develop and produce something nearly impossible - a wearable glasses-like (in terms of size and weight) headset that can project color images non-multiplicatively overlaying the reality in user's eyes. If they had somehow figured that out (I'm no expert, but I don't think anyone did - at least I haven't heard anything) and if there's a decent SDK then 3 grands is a discount price for such a device.
But if it's yet another VR headset, it won't work. Camera passthrough is a gimmick that even with most advanced eye tracking and fanciest foveated rendering provides merely a limited approximation of AR that only leads to headaches and eye strain. Despite the article's claims such devices won't be worn all-day on a regular basis.
Apple is also all about being a closed ecosystem, and if the open VR/AR/XR community struggles with content, then Apple is not magically pulling out ton of quality apps (of any kind) out of some hat. I assume its "killer" app would be some AR assistant that would provide various additional contextual information at a literal glance. And then maybe some AR/XR game, maybe something like Ingress/Pokemon Go on steroids. But for an assistant, it has to be smart, and Siri's intelligence is a joke... so I'm skeptical it will be worth the money at launch.
Similar story with all of their products. Apple has a history of releasing new product lines with the "top end" expensive models (remember in 2017 when they released both the iPhone X and iPhone 8). Early adopters will be early adopters. It should also speak volumes that this is likely to be introduced at WWDC; the first iteration may be extremely developer focused, to help build the platform, with more consumer-oriented and priced devices next year.
Historically: It has practically never been a good bet to bet against Apple, even if all the logic says to [1]. This time could be different. I would not bet on it.
The flip side of that as a consumer is all of those first generation devices we’re also quickly iterated in to the point where the second or third generations were markedly improved. I don’t think I want to spend $3,000 just to have the version that comes out the next year be significantly better.
> Historically: It has practically never been a good bet to bet against Apple, even if all the logic says to [1]. This time could be different. I would not bet on it.
Historically? What?! Apple had about 15 years of lukewarm products. Even during their initial phase many products were commercial flops.
The price drop would have to be a lot stronger than that for their VR headset, considering that apparently people even find $1000 way too much, let alone $3000. The Quest is the only headset that sold substantial numbers (20 million) and it costs $400.
This is effectively a reasonable graphics card per eye. Sure it's no Nvidia 4090, but the M2 is running recent games with very good graphics on Macs.
Combine that with foveated rendering, possibly implemented deep in Metal, and being careful about graphically intensive applications, and this could be high FPS on 3K resolution, and be a significant step up in immersion.
now that is an interesting thought, they would be more powerful than current MBPs... Screen Mirroring can already be done from MacOS to iPadOS for example. It would be super awesome if one could connect the headset to another Mac and use the screens / keyboard / touchpad of that device. Ideally it would allow virtual desktops to have quick access to both devices by simply swiping on the touchpad.
If you use it for a high value application then a high price isn't a barrier. The fundamentals that are shifting here are: (a) Apple is going to push a massive increase in quality (b) Apple is accessing a different market - cashed up professionals
So the real question here is, does the increase in quality get it into a space where new high value applications become viable.
For me, it would only have to be equal or better than using a physical monitor and that would probably justify its value. The fact I could just go anywhere and a full multi-monitor setup with me would be enough.
It's a wild thing to go for, the demonstrated usefulness of VR/AR in business is still very niche. The vast majority of businesses will simply have no use for them, and those that do have a use for them will likely buy them in single digit volumes.
It seems like consumers just don't want VR/AR. We've had compelling experiences for a decade. But it seems like only a subset of console gamers, already a small population, care to buy a VR headset.
Part of it is that the cost to play VR - which is primarily the time cost - is too high for the experience you get out of it. For example, the only games that provides a true VR-only experience you can boot up on a dime are Beat Saber and VR Chat - other VR titles tend to follow the pattern of "<existing genre> but in VR". To add, you need 2x the processing power since you need to render the game twice, so you are going to take a hit in visual fidelity, AND you typically want 90fps or higher to avoid motion blur, which raises the bar for playing any high-fidelity VR game (at least until generalized foveated rendering APIs become available and headsets implement it).
There hasn't been any compelling reason that makes it necessary for me to use VR/AR. It's still at the "fun" category, which make it hard to justify spending much money for "fun". Especially when the low-end headsets is about the price of a phone or a (low-end) GPU, which undoubtedly can have more uses And play more games.
Consumers don't want VR/AR that requires wearing a deeply uncomfortable bulky headset, that means facing a significant chance of framerate- and tracking-induced nausea, and that isn't good enough resolution to use for even basic stuff like web surfing.
I would be very surprised if Apple releases a device that has those problems.
I don’t think it’s wise to trust the rumored prices much. Even if the rumors are overall right because of multiple points of leakage in the supply chain, price would be one of the easiest information for Apple to keep secret.
In fact the rumored price may even be planted by Apple to create an anchor and make the product look cheaper once released.
Yeah. I think Carmack said even the Quest was still too expensive.
The PSVR2 has the additional problem that it requires a PS5. It's not a standalone system. That's like a Game Boy for which you need to own an NES. Or like a Wii U console, where the tablet controller wasn't a standalone system, and which flopped, in contrast to the Switch.
I'd pay $200 tops for a VR headset (not that I'd buy one even then...), given how jank the experience is, how much money I would spend to power and use the bloody thing anyway, and how quickly it will become antiquated.
Anything more for something that is essentially a short-lived toy is a fool's errand. Fool in this case meaning someone with more money than they know what to do with. I'd get better value from a Louis Vuitton handbag.
> It may be more feasible to sell $3000 smartphones than to sell VR headsets at this price.
Sure, now it is. But what about when the iPhone was first introduced? It didn't cost anywhere near this much money. For a new product category such as this it makes sense to start out with a cheap product so that as many people adopt it as possible, then you can begin introducing more expensive versions when you have the apps ecosystem to support it.
The original iPhone was cheaper than iPhones are today, but it was ridiculously expensive compared to every other phone on the market including smartphones. It was $800 after the carrier subsidy with a two-year contract. Most windows phones and blackberries and trios and comparable devices that had substantially more functionality at the time were between free and $200 with the carrier subsidy. The iPhone had a superior user experience, but very limited functionality and an extremely high price point. Obviously the functionality improved pretty quickly and the price point came down a bit, although it never really came down much, mostly everything else just got more expensive.
Apple has almost never started out with a cheap product. The only notable exception would be the original iMac G3, and even then it was significantly weaker than every competitor in its price range [1].
I’m a pretty big fan of VR, and am currently developing a VR game in what little free time I have. I don’t think I want to spend that much. It would have to be such a huge, amazing leap forward and I don’t understand how it possibly could be right now.
It's just as well. Apple knows that this is not going to be a blockbuster product, but probably a lot of architects, engineers, doctors etc will buy the unit for work. I wouldn't be surpised if they don't focus on games at all.
If they don't use Bosch retinal projection, its going to bomb because no one with the money to buy it will want to wear that stupid shit on their head because they live the rest of their lives in comfort and luxury.
Quoting wikipedia: "Positional goods are goods for which the satisfaction derives (at least in part) from higher pricing."
High price is just part of the appeal of Apple products for many.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out, and if there really is a viable Apple-scale device here.
The overarching XR vision makes sense to me -- that you could instantly drop into any kind of environment you might want to, whether for work or entertainment or socializing.
But who creates these environments, and for what purpose? They seem like they'd be quite expensive if done well, and if not done well, you wouldn't want to go there unless you had to. If there aren't great places to go, what justifies a $3K headset?
Meanwhile, with the reality of technical limitations, how good is the experience really going to be?
I suspect you're going to be able to pay $3K to buy into some games and productivity software that, once the novelty wears off, are going to feel pretty mediocre and may never really get past the tech demo stage. And your hardware is going to be dreadfully obsolete in about 2-3 years too.
IDK, maybe I just have a lack of vision and I'm too down on this stuff.
For me it comes down to optics. I've tried damn near every VR headset ever made, including many that never made it to production, and they all suffer from the same core issue: poor optics. Even industrial headsets that costs thousands are still using flat screen and lenses with fixed focal points (with few exceptions, but even then nothing truly extraordinary).
Current optical designs mean that there is a large out of focus area when you look anywhere that isn't forward. That's just never going to fly for the general consumer. For VR to truly go mainstream you needs an optical system that is truly sharp, edge to edge. That probably means some kind of active optical system (like reverse OIS) or some kind of magic lens that currently only exists in theory. Instead what manufactures keep doing is trading off FOV for sharpness.
If Apple has implemented a new optics system here I think they have winner and the industry will change overnight. If it's the same as current designs just a little better it feels DOA to me.
I'm optimistic because I can't imagine Apple, of all companies, putting out a headset that's blurry at the edges.
> Current optical designs mean that there is a large out of focus area when you look anywhere that isn't forward
You sound like you are a year or two out of date with your "current" understanding. The industry has moved to pancake lenses which make the view clear edge to edge. There's no more out of focus peripheral view, in recent headsets you read and look around using your eyeballs and not your head just like you would naturally.
It is already known that the Apple headset uses this updated optical system, along with micro OLED displays at super high resolution (approx double current industry standards). The clarity and focus are going to be absolutely amazing.
This is true - but let me say this, you couldn’t pay me to wear an Apple Watch all day and you won’t be able to pay me to wear a headset.
There’s just no dang reason to use these things like their creators want. Someone needs to be brave in these organizations and say “hey look, we tried pushing Siri for years and never gained the loved adoption that chatGPT has, why are we trying the same strategy here?”
If the compute offering is not excellent, it does not deserve to be in a new context. Period.
Had this Twilight Zone-like dream that all our visions of the future which include a screen are utterly wrong, Sci-Fi included.
It's somewhat hard to argue that the Command-Line Interface is better overall than the Graphical User Interface, look at Apple, they made $2.75 trillion for themselves from the GUI. But with large language models now the easiness and even the beauty falls back into the CLI, a simple blank screen with a blinking prompt awaiting your commands, and maybe we could remove the screens altogether. Why do I have to write this message while staring into, funnily, an Apple screen, when I could be drinking my coffee admiring the city skyline and the mountains nearby while whispering gently the words into the wind. Why must I know that for whatever need that I have from a software product, I must press some menu button, then 3 drop downs down, select some weirdly named options, and then go back and drag and drop some asset into the window: just do the thing already, I don't care about your software-y details. The GUI might be dying, perhaps we should strive to kill it.
I continue to believe that IF (and that is a big if) anyone can make AR/VR a mainstream market it would be Apple.
Just for the simple fact that Apple has in multiple occasions done 2 things:
1. Come out with something that shapes the rest of the industry. I mean how many times has Apple done something and within a year or 2 basically the entire industry follows.
2. Not captured a large (or majority) percent but continued to invest in a platform. I don't think anything they are in (except maybe the smart watch) do they actually have a majority marketshare but they continue to work on those platforms.
So there is a part of me that hopes that Apple realizes that this platform will be the same way. It will be a very niche product that will take years of iterating on (like the Apple Watch) with it in consumers hands to turn it into a mainstream product.
We have had too many failed attempts (Google Glasses and Microsoft HoloLens) just fail since they were not major successes right out the gate.
They also have the developer buy in on their other platforms that they may be able to transition that to this if they handle that properly.
That isn't saying that this is anywhere near a guarantee and obviously the hardware has to be there, the societal acceptance, etc. But I just don't currently see another company that is in the position to possibly pull this off.
- Smart phones were already growing in popularity.
- Bluetooth headphones were already growing in popularity.
- Home automation was already growing in popularity.
Apple usually takes a look at a growing trend and decides that it can provide a far better experience.
... with the exception of: Apple Watch.
- Apple Watch defined the smartwatch category. Smart watches weren't that popular before the Apple watch. But, watches and luxury watches have been fashionable for a long time.
As awesome as AR / VR headsets are, they are practically dead on arrival. This will be the most challenging product launch in Apple's history.
From a marketing perspective, an Apple Car makes more sense.
And then Apple introduce the Macintosh and changed the industry forever.
- Mp3 players were already growing in popularity.
And then Apple introduce the iPod and iTunes and changed the industry forever. The ability to purchase and download music sealed the deal.
- Smart phones were already growing in popularity.
LOL. Blackberry? Windows Phone? And then Apple introduce the iPhone and changed society.
- Bluetooth headphones were already growing in popularity.
Meh. I'm not sure these are game changing, but that said my technophobic wife loves her AirPods Pro and has somehow not lost them, so shit, actually that's pretty game changing.
- Home automation was already growing in popularity.
Well, Siri kinda sucks TBH, and Alexa works just fine, so maybe not this one
Let's hope this is a Windows Phone situation, and Apple's headset is night-and-day compared to previous headsets. If it's a me-too like home automation, then it can only be a flop.
Yeah. Apple enters when there’s clear product-market and out-executes everybody. For the watch, notice that fitness trackers (Fitbit) were already getting popular.
A study of futurism I read made the insightful observation that things which explode in popularity don't just do things differently -- they let you do new things.
Apple II - graphical OS
iPod - music in your pocket
iPhone - smartphone with cellular data
iPad - large screen low cost
iWatch - phone functionality on wrist
These are all different in kind, not different in amount products.
What does AR allow you to do, that you can't already do on a screen?
It's different... but different in amount. It's a better screen.
That might be enough to ship units, but it's not enough to explode in popularity.
Hell, even mystical eyeglass AR that was actually just a pair of eyeglasses would struggle. "Why don't I just do the same thing on my screen?" or "But I'm already constantly connected when I'm mobile."
The Apple II OS wasn't graphical. The hardware had very simple colour, which made it stand out.
Mac was graphical, but it was a productised/commodified version of someone else's R&D.
Nokia's Communicator range had cellular data long before the iPhone was a thing. What iPhone did differently was - again - productise and commodify existing technologies to create something that was more than the sum of its components. Touch was the biggest part of that, but the App Store really killed the competition.
iPads were never particularly low cost. There were numerous tablets before the iPad. The iPad difference was - again - touch. And the App Store.
iWatch wrist phone may be true, but I suspect it's not the main use case. (I've yet to see anyone talking into an iWatch. I'm sure it happens, but not nearly as often as phone conversations do.)
The common factor - apart from iWatch - is taking/blending existing tech and packaging it into an accessible non-nerdy form with obvious and instant mass market appeal. And creating a vibrant developer ecosystem around it. And adding design stylings that make the product cool.
That's exactly what this display project doesn't have. Even if it does its job well it has no obvious instant applications.
And clamping a rubber facehugger to your head is the opposite of cool.
It may have mass appeal after version 4 or 5 when it's closer to the ideal of stylish glasses with a supporting ecosystem. But I suspect version 1 is going to have a very limited market.
If "phone functionality on wrist" counts as a "different in kind" product, why on earth wouldn't "smartphone functionality without looking down at a smartphone, watch, or other device" qualify?
For that matter, if "smartphone with cellular data" counts, why not "smart glasses with cellular data and apps"?
As you can tell, I'm a skeptic of this difference in kind v. difference in quantity construct.
I think that is shortsighted. If you could realize a futurists dream of AR, i.e. smooth overly interacting properly with anything in your view, with context aware detail etc, it would pretty clearly be a game changer (I think).
On the other hand, existing AR, like existing VR, just doesn't deliver on that promise, not even approximately.
With current tech, it's more an issue that the juice isn't worth the squeeze. That can change when either (or both) side of the equation changes.
I'm utterly unconvinced that AR/VR is a large market or is going to be game changing in every day life. I can see why Apple feel that they need to have a product in the market, but I wouldn't be surprised if its presented as “Just a Hobby” the same way that Steve Jobs presented Apple TV back when it launched (and for a good few years later).
I really do think that Apple are much more likely to present some interesting AI products that run locally on Apple Silicone, thats where they truly can do something different and new that will impact all their customers. It will help them sell the next generation of iPhone and Macs.
I want my AI to be local and privet.
In some ways I think Humain have a better idea where this market is going to go. I'm not convinced by their product, I think it should be built into a phone, and I would be suppressed to see Apple do some stuff similar.
To copy what I put in a comment the other day, a next gen Siri with chatGPT like functionality, trained on all your docs, email, calendar, movements, browser history, video calls. All local and not in the cloud:
"Hey Siri, I had a meeting last summer in New York about project X, could you bring up all relevant documents and give me a brief summary of what we discussed and decisions we made. Oh and while you're at it, we ate at an awesome restaurant that evening, can you book a table for me for our meeting next week."
Seems pretty simple. If you could have UI overlayed on the world around you, it would be huge, and would change how people use computers, like the smartphone did.
The current stumbling block is that the tech sucks and the headsets are enormous. If someone got it into a lightweight pair of glasses or contact lenses, the use case is obvious, and it would be a big of a shift as the smartphone.
Denying this is like being the guy in 1993 saying “why would I want a computer in my pocket? Am I going to work on spreadsheets on a tiny screen in the bathrooom? And where would I plug it in?”
> If you could have UI overlayed on the world around you, it would be huge, and would change how people use computers, like the smartphone did.
Is this really a game-changer? Technology adoption is all about tradeoffs. We already have location-based services and applications that are granular enough for most purposes. AR applications add sensory awareness and localized interaction at the cost of distraction and intrusiveness.
History is littered with inventions that were supposed to be the next telephone, computer, smartphone, etc., but most of them never materialize because they don't meet people's practical needs. And if AR/VR isn't the quintessential solution in search of a problem, I don't know what is.
But yeah, so many things are obnoxious and clunky about smartphones. Glancing down is never a good look, let alone glancing down and then walking into a wall. The moment that minimum viable AR tech happens, people will suddenly remember how many compromises we have to make for smartphones.
VR and AR are a solution looking for a problem. It's admittedly a cool tech demo. I enjoyed my time playing Half Life: Alyx and The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners on my Valve Index before I decided to sell it out of disuse.
The article says that Apple has a glasses product and a VR/AR product that sounds similar to a Quest Pro.
So if we look at the glasses product it immediately runs into a lot of issues. Do I want to be wearing glasses? Do I already own glasses? Do I like how glasses look on my face? Wearable tech is very personal especially when it's sitting on your face. At best this is a product for industrial environments.
Then the Quest Pro-like VR/AR product...separate battery pack in your pocket, need I say more? Now compare that experience to an Oculus Quest for $300. It doesn't really matter that the Quest is a less capable product, it's at the right price point and form factor and its strong sales show it.
I don't think it's a solution looking for a problem. I'd be willing to put them on at work and see which pins on a piece of hardware do what instead of looking back and forth between a datasheet. Lots of examples exactly like that, especially if the glasses are fed sensor data so the temperature/pressure appears right beside the area it is measuring.
Agreed. The technologies will have their uses, like entertainment, training, education, and therapy, but it will never meet mass adoption for practical reasons like price, safety, and power consumption. I'd be curious to know why so many people think otherwise.
With Apple Silicone, I think Apple is in the perfect place to take advantage of the AI craze to sell hardware with something like "Neural Engine V2". If they can figure out how to run AI workloads at fraction of the cost of what is costs on current hardware, I can see there being a huge market for their Mac's and they could even bring back XServe and become the predominant player in the "Server Hardware for AI" space.
It's discussed quite a bit on this site, but I wouldn't expect Apple to pull ahead in the GPU department. They really lit a fire under Intel and AMD's ass with the M1's IPC, but Nvidia laughed their way to the bank with every M1 upgrade. Even the 5nm M1 Ultra struggled to keep up with Nvidia's 10nm, bog-cheap 30-series cards. In the datacenter it's even more of a blowout, Apple would have to invest in something competitive with CUDA to turn heads. That's no small feat, and I don't think it's possible with an overnight API launch. It takes time and integration into the industry, something Apple wasn't patient enough for (see: Xserve).
> I'm utterly unconvinced that AR/VR is a large market
Gorilla Tag, an indie VR game where you're an ape and run around with your hands and tag people (seriously, that's the whole thing) has made $26 million selling virtual hats and has peaks of 90,000 concurrent users.
Wow, I had no idea it made that much money. My kids love it.
I think what makes it stick is that it's more than just a game. It's a social space where my kids jump in to sometimes just to chat with their friends from school. Reminds me of hanging out in Team Fortress 2 game servers and just chatting while casually screwing around in the game.
Here's the interview where those stats came from for those curious.
Biggest red flag is the part about Tim Cook being disengaged.
But I'm much more bullish than most of the commenters here. Many seem to not have shifted their understanding of progress in VR/AR in the last 5 years, when there have been fundamental tech advances. Then, others don't seem to understand how much Apple is planning to push the state of the art here. Their headset will have roughly double the resolution of existing devices, and contain not one but two, laptop level mobile chips. The lenses / optics are going to solve a lot of issues people have had, the pass through quality is going to be near photo-realistic - you won't feel you need to take these off at all. Some of the apps we know about include photo-realistic video conferencing with quality that is unheard of outside of laboratory conditions before.
Readit News
What does the author consider to be a victory?
Tim Cook was elevated because he had the operational capability to grow Apple. Jobs did not consider Cook to be a product design person. But Jobs trusted Cook to find and keep people who could design products.
By any stretch of the imagination, the company's biggest victories have been in growing and holding together the vast ecosystem of HW / SW and services that continuously deliver the highest customer satisfaction ratings. The reward for that has been becoming the biggest company in the world. (Some might consider this a victory.)
If introducing new hit products is the only kind of victory that can exist, then Apple Silicon and AirPods victories also go to Cook.
Is it equal to the legacy of Apple under Jobs? Definitely not. But how many other companies/people released 3 revolutionary products?
If that is the measure, then we have to bring in Jobs' tenure as not only CEO but company founder that stretched 25 years as CEO, 1976 to 1985 and 1997 to 2011.
Cook only took the reins in 2011, and at that time arguably the company should not have focused on releasing yet more revolutionary products.
iPhone is the most successful consumer product in history, focus was correctly placed in supporting that, building moats around it and positioning the ecosystem to support the next big thing.
One product often left out, which may have started with Jobs, but delivery should be attributed to Cook is the new Apple HQ. The initial impact has crumbled due to Covid WFH.
However, this campus may turn out to be a force multiplier going forward. If so, it is a victory, but not in the minds of consumers.
Their winning traits may seem banal, but in everyday carry objects small utility improvements play a huge role. Not having to deal with cables and increased range of movement are enough - what elevated AirPods though is that a visible, wearable product is an implicit fashion statement. Apples product designers succeeded in making st thing that is clearly recognisable and stands out against similar products already on the market, but is subtle enough not to disturb anything or polarise by totally overthrowing stylistic and societal convention. Perfect mix of identity and brand that is easy to integrate with your personal image.
Apple silicon is another kind of thing: it's just the same thing as before but cheaper and more powerful, without compromising any trait that made the predecessor products appealing.
Apple "reality" or whatever - I don't see carrying any of those same traits. It's much too visually disruptive to become an AirPod, it's much too close to similar products to be an M1, and on top of this it's success fully depends on expensive-to-produce software content within a technically complicated ecosystem, while Apple has long lost it's profile as a developer centric and welcoming brand and rather capitalized on it's ubiquity and alienated many developers who only still contribute to the platform it because they have too by sheer numbers.
Apple might be able to not totally fail spinning up the platform, because of buying power, image and again numbers.
But those just slightly more practical, still bulky and odd looking VR glasses are nowhere near replicating the seamless product fit of iPods, IPhones, AirPods or CPUs.
It's Metaverse all over again.
I don't think that's enough. AirPods "just work" in a way that no prior Bluetooth headset ever did. Everything else was a kludge, particularly when it came to switching between multiple devices.
But Air-pods, Apple Watch and Apple TV streaming were all under cooks watch. Maybe not as ground breaking but still very important. Mind you, who else has been doing ground breaking stuff like under Steve? I cannot think of anything other than the recent AI stuff. It kind of feels like Steve picked the last of the low hanging fruit and then bowed out before it came to stagnation.
Is this similar to how AMD's Bulldozer architecture back around that timeframe was the writing was on the wall for their current competitive dominance over Intel?
PA Semi was a great talent accu-hire, but AFAIK at the time of acquisition they only had Power-based designs ready for market.
> It kind of feels like Steve picked the last of the low hanging fruit and then bowed out before it came to stagnation.
PT Barnum was a renowned showman as well, but that doesn't mean he trained all the elephants.
For instance, I would hardly say the release of a market-dominating phone was a foregone conclusion based on the success of the iPod, and an Apple without the iPhone would look incredibly different.
Sure, people wanted to take their music with them, but the nearly purely multitouch interface was a fresh invention - the iPod did not have a touch interface AFAIK until three years later.
I just don't see something which was such a fresh take and new engineering - to the point that other smartphone vendors thought the original keynote demos were staged - was low-hanging fruit.
Well, there's the Apple II, the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone...
Apple has had a long history of products that redefined the future of entire categories, and almost all of them up to this point except the Apple Watch included deep involvement by Jobs.
Other than that not much, but to be clear there has not really been any other inventions in this time span like those you mention. The market is more mature.
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Tim Cook's first major executive move as CEO was to fire Scott Forstall.
Dead Comment
Maybe noise cancelling boom is another reason. NC also requires battery and amp so why don't make it wireless? IIRC until Sony MDR-1000X sold well (that's sold in 2016, same year as iPhone 7!), noise cancelling market was minor Bose's market for airplane user.
I just don't think society currently has an appetite for a $3000 product that gives the wearer visual superpowers (that is the promise after all) and is an impossible to ignore distinction between classes. I honestly think we're at the point where I wouldn't be surprised if it's google glass all over again x 100, where unhinged people are attacking and pulling these expensive devices off of people's heads [1][2].
Maybe in 2017 when AR was really hot could it have gotten adoption, but as it stands in 2023 the average consumer is starting to reject this level of tech and fewer and fewer people have the wallet that could support this.
I also suggest avoiding a comparison with the VR market - the only thing they have in common is that it's a thing you put on your face. The infrastructure, deployment, product features, economics, user interfaces, battery, environmental use, UX, legal etc... are all doubly complex with HMD AR over HMD VR
I think it's going to continue to be a long time before persistent everywhere HMD AR is going to be a reality
[1]https://www.businessinsider.com/i-was-assaulted-for-wearing-...
[2]https://mashable.com/archive/google-glass-assault
I suspect there's a market there, but only if the device can be made to look like a pair of fashionable sunglasses, and was driven by the phone in your pocket, adding a customizable HUD to the real world, doing all sorts of things, from translating foreign-language text to overlaying directions or providing real-time info about the bus or train you're trying to catch.
But for now, that's science fiction. Even if we could make the screens/optics work, the glasses still need power, and batteries are still relatively bulky. It wouldn't be much use if it had a short battery life, or drained your phone battery too fast.
anymore, or yet? I think the biggest barriers are form factor and price. History suggests that price of such devices will increase over time. Whether the tech can be squeezed into a form factor that will be desirable to the masses is another problem altogether. The fact that apple (according to this article) have not managed to do it suggests to me that it might be some time off.
Entire industries are built upon impossible to ignore distinction between classes - 100 thousand dollar watches, 10 million dollar cars, designer clothing, and a thousand other examples that come under the category of "bling".
While I have similar doubts about the short to medium term AR/XR future, I don't think it's based on people not wanting to be seen as better than everyone else. As a society we basically encourage that behaviour.
What do you mean by that?
Just curious because I feel the same about EVs, when I see one I think that's a richer than average person.
So I don't see how an AR headset would be a problem. It really depends how does it look like though.
That said, usually people tend to seek out status symbols. People obviously wear Gucci sunglasses in their faces because they are Gucci and expensive. However, I also wonder if this case would be different because of the growing anti-tech resentment and the wearer now being associated with issues liked gentrification, disliked mega corps etc.
But, if you get there, I'm pretty convinced that you will have a population of adopters whether it creates a class divide or not. Certainly cell phone adoption wasn't held back by this factor.
I think the SpaceTop laptop[0] shows an excellent use case for a realistic AR device.
Right now, the kind of AR headsets that companies seem to think they can produce are all fantasy/sci-fi, not much different than the whole Dream of Self-Driving Cars. Sure, it's probably possible eventually, but not anytime soon, or at a price point most can afford in the case of self-contained AR headset that look like normal glasses
[0] https://www.bigtechwire.com/2023/05/19/spacetop-the-groundbr...
Yep, that’s an easy one. Guess what. It’s not for general use.
I have no idea where AR/VR is going. However, I’m all for Apple spending part of its large cash reserve in R&D. I guarantee something useful will come out of it.
Hopefully, someone with a little vision comes along and says “you know what we could do with this technology…”
Even as an Apple enthusiast, I think this product is destined to be this year’s HomePod.
All it takes is a killer app to come along. AR music instrument instruction is my bet. If Apple released this one app along with the glasses it would become a massive hit.
https://youtube.com/shorts/eeMte5UbFJ4?feature=share
Might as well just buy a keyboard with lights built into the keys.
display in-coming text messages and caller ids, a navigation arrow and take snaps. that's it
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The implication here is that you know a compelling case for "what we could do with it" and how to "do it right", so what are the answers (because I'm stumped)?
Interior design is another subject that comes to mind.
Apple currently sells a pair of 500$ headphones and a 5000$ monitor. High margin products that are sold as fashion to their top fans is Apple's thing.
They will need one killer app and a sleek enough package, and those are the main bottle necks. The money is hardly an issue.
Technologically, Apple has the distinct advantage of having the best power efficient mobile chips which Facebook did not. Other than that, I don't see how they can solve all the other open problems in VR/AR right now.
It’s might have been possible 5 years ago, but they missed the bus.
I think this is because these companies are preoccupied with controlling the content, they envision doing the same things we do IRL but on their platforms. This is problematic because it means people instead of improving their lives and actually doing things are expected to be pretending doing it and spent their precious lives and money away on this BS.
VR and AR becomes exciting only when you can explore yourself and the world by doing things you can't do in real life. Maybe you want to try being assassin? Maybe you you want to try being from another gender or species? Maybe you want to try being in an actual war zone? Maybe you want to try to create a society with completely different rules from we have now? But no, these are too dangerous because someone might be offended, so in VR you are supposed to go to Paris and spend real money throwing virtual darts or something. They also can't distance themselves from the moral panic because they must milk the platform by controlling the content.
It is outright dystopian and dumb. The core promise of the platforms is "do the same things you do when you don't already do on our platforms so we can monetise that too" and this doesn't converge with the core promise of the tech which is to do things you can't do in real life.
Maybe Apple is on the right track here, since the Oculus Quest has sold more units than all the other VR headsets combined. But there is one big difference: Apple's headset will be a very expensive premium product (apparently around 3000 USD), while the Oculus Quest costs just 400 USD.
I think consumers just don't want to spend a lot of money on VR. Except for the Quest, they are all far too expensive, and that's why they didn't sell. Apple just makes the problem worse by increasing the price even more.
John Carmack has made the same point repeatedly: VR is not a high price product category. If he is right, the Apple headset will fail. It may be more feasible to sell $3000 smartphones than to sell VR headsets at this price.
That's not really accurate. The rumours suggest optics at least as good as the Meta Quest Pro ($1k), possibly with a substantial move forward from there. They suggest resolution of 3k per eye, significantly above the Meta Quest Pro, and using Micro LED for a big improvement on the screen door effect, brightness, quality. Then there's the compute, with 2x M2s, this is quite possibly going to be able to run AAA VR games (if they're compatible with iOS) – the M2 is running some AAA games on things like the MBA, and this one has an M2 per eye.
These rumours might turn out to be rubbish, but they seem to be credible rather than speculation, and they would suggest a high price tag. If this was a Meta Quest Pro "Ultra" it might be >$2k based on Meta's pricing, so Apple charging $3k for it given their "tax" (and high production quality) feels about right.
My point was that it seems consumers don't care about expensive high performance VR headsets. They want something that is both easy to use and inexpensive: The unusually early Quest Pro price drop suggests as much.
It's like the Nintendo Switch: If it had cost substantially more, much better graphics, screen resolution etc would have been possible, but it almost certainly would have been a flop. The same thing seems to be true for VR headsets.
> an M2 chip per eye
first, the definition on an M2 chip is very murky. There is a massive difference between an M2 targeted for small mobile, compared to a M2 found in a laptop.
A mobile can't sustain power draw of 5 watts for very long.
A headset can't sustain power draw of 10 watts for that long.
AAA graphics needs >40 watts of power. You can't have that next to your face without large amounts of cooling. Now, I'm assuming that Apple will offload graphics to phones/tablets/laptops in the style of oculus link. This solves a bunch of other problems like weight, size and battery life.
This is where Apple has the great advantage of course, not only does it control the entire vertical there, but they actually have a QA team, product metrics and leadership to make sure that the link will be seamless, easy and reliable. Meta will devote a team to it for a year, who will build a totally new system, sling it over the fence and move on to make sure that they get promotions. It never really worked of course, but it pushed the promotions metrics, and the leadership don't care about users, only moving a synthetic metric so they can be made VP of cables.
I digress.
However, for remote rendering to work reliably, you'll either need decent wifi(new time machine anyone?) or a decent quality cable. Wifi is a right shit to make work reliably at full throughput, if not impossible. so I'd assume cables would be the way forward (or some fancy 60gig networking stuff, but that seems unlikely)
> Micro LED for a big improvement on the screen door effect, brightness, quality
Nope. The screen is not actually the limiting factor, its the optics. The "barn door" and brightness is almost entirely down to the style of lenses.
You could buy a full Index kit, get the wireless upgrade for it, and then a full Vive Pro kit and its wireless upgrade, and have spent about the same amount of money.
Sure PCVR still might have better specs, but they’re primarily wired and that’s a huge con if you want to use VR for fitness and it kills immersion when you have to turn a lot. I’ve tried to mitigate this problem with hooks and pulleys on the ceiling. It didn’t help much and it caused additional issues.
You also still can’t do serious work with most of the existing standalone or PCVR headsets. Why? Because you need a minimum PPD of 35 (where 50 PPD is retina quality). To date, HP Reverb G2 and the meta Quest Pro are around 25 PPD. Only the PCVR varjo aero is at 35 PPD, but it’s wired, costs $2000, and doesn’t come with either the $600 base station / controller combo or the $3000-$4000 PC needed to power it
> You could buy a full Index kit, get the wireless upgrade for it, and then a full Vive Pro kit and its wireless upgrade, and have spent about the same amount of money.
You’re not accounting for the $2000-$3000 PC needed to run an Index or Vive Pro 2. Also both headsets are wired, and both rely on base stations. While they have the best tracking accuracy, they’re a pain to set up right and they’re one more thing you have to worry about. It’s not for normal people or even the average PC gamer. If it wasn’t for the lockdowns, I wouldn’t even have had the motivation to finish setting up my base stations. Until the pandemic hit, my PCVR sets where just languishing in their boxes. Self contained tracking is the way to go for normal people and most techies
The form factor for PCVR headsets is also terrible. It’s too intimidating for normal people to put a giant bucket on their faces. Even meta’s quest 2 suffers from this problem. This is yet another reason most people won’t even try modern 4th gen VR.
There are more downsides I can list. I'm very familiar with them because I still own both headsets including the wireless kit for the Vive. I also own the HP Reverb, the Quest 2 and Quest Pro.
As imperfect as they may be, my go to headsets are still from meta for now, mainly because of wireless which is why I’m excited for the new Apple headset
I’m not saying that it will be the same this time, but equally won’t be making statements based on what at the moment is a guess, educated or not.
And I don’t think Apple wants those people as customers, at least not initially.
$3000 for a headset from a company that sells $1000 monitor stands for $5000 monitors and $500 wheels for the computers doesn’t seem about right to me. In a year or two, the next generation of VR headset will be much better and still $3000 and you will be able to buy this one for, maybe, $2000.
There’s an awful lot of people who can afford $2k for a piece of hardware if it’s good enough.
All that said, I suspect the headset will be priced well under $3000.
Apple will have to come up with something new for users to do for this product to justify a $X,000 price, almost regardless of how good the hardware is.
VR is perhaps like the original Game Boy: Not very powerful, no color screen, but low price and long battery life. It sold a lot, unlike the competition.
VR is not there and maybe never will be.
F2P game companies? I guess they won't be interested either because Apple will try to bite off a lot of profits from their ads by not letting anyone but themself to run targeted ads.
They still have the same issues that everyone else has: compute/heat/battery. Sure they have the vertical and are able to offload rendering onto ipads or laptops, but then you're basically tethered like the quest/vive/etc.
Running unreal requires a 300watt graphics card, plus ~60watt CPU. even assuming apple can quarter that, its still 90 watts. and not 90 watts of 37 degrees, its 90 watts at 65c. you can't keep that kind of heat next to your face.
They still have the same issues that everyone else has: compute/heat/battery. Sure they have the vertical and are able to offload rendering onto ipads or laptops, but then you're basically tethered like the quest/vive/etc.
Running unreal re
many little niceties you hardly notice but would immediately notice the loss of.
with vr and ar you are placing yourself directly within the ecosystem. (the os becomes your reality, if you will, extended… xr… wasn’t that clever of them…)
the iPhone long game shows apple’s willingness to creep slowly into lower cost tiers to preserve the brand value.
carmack doesn’t need to be wrong for apple to succeed. apple just needs to be patient. (and maybe get back to some fundamentals on the software, the operating systems fee like they are beginning to rot a bit.)
But if it's yet another VR headset, it won't work. Camera passthrough is a gimmick that even with most advanced eye tracking and fanciest foveated rendering provides merely a limited approximation of AR that only leads to headaches and eye strain. Despite the article's claims such devices won't be worn all-day on a regular basis.
Apple is also all about being a closed ecosystem, and if the open VR/AR/XR community struggles with content, then Apple is not magically pulling out ton of quality apps (of any kind) out of some hat. I assume its "killer" app would be some AR assistant that would provide various additional contextual information at a literal glance. And then maybe some AR/XR game, maybe something like Ingress/Pokemon Go on steroids. But for an assistant, it has to be smart, and Siri's intelligence is a joke... so I'm skeptical it will be worth the money at launch.
- Apple Watch: $447 at release (inflation adj); $250 today.
- iPad: $695 at release (inflation adj); $450 today.
- iPhone: $877 at release (inflation adj, carrier subsidized); $800 today.
Similar story with all of their products. Apple has a history of releasing new product lines with the "top end" expensive models (remember in 2017 when they released both the iPhone X and iPhone 8). Early adopters will be early adopters. It should also speak volumes that this is likely to be introduced at WWDC; the first iteration may be extremely developer focused, to help build the platform, with more consumer-oriented and priced devices next year.
Historically: It has practically never been a good bet to bet against Apple, even if all the logic says to [1]. This time could be different. I would not bet on it.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U
Historically? What?! Apple had about 15 years of lukewarm products. Even during their initial phase many products were commercial flops.
Their post iPhone era is an outlier.
If they provide some dock so that headset can be used Mac mini/ultra style as desktop + VR/XR is more like a bonus then this could still sell well.
Combine that with foveated rendering, possibly implemented deep in Metal, and being careful about graphically intensive applications, and this could be high FPS on 3K resolution, and be a significant step up in immersion.
If you use it for a high value application then a high price isn't a barrier. The fundamentals that are shifting here are: (a) Apple is going to push a massive increase in quality (b) Apple is accessing a different market - cashed up professionals
So the real question here is, does the increase in quality get it into a space where new high value applications become viable.
For me, it would only have to be equal or better than using a physical monitor and that would probably justify its value. The fact I could just go anywhere and a full multi-monitor setup with me would be enough.
I would be very surprised if Apple releases a device that has those problems.
In fact the rumored price may even be planted by Apple to create an anchor and make the product look cheaper once released.
So a $3000 VR headset with a FOV that's still the equivalent of looking out of a periscope on a submarine. Fantastic.
The PSVR2 has the additional problem that it requires a PS5. It's not a standalone system. That's like a Game Boy for which you need to own an NES. Or like a Wii U console, where the tablet controller wasn't a standalone system, and which flopped, in contrast to the Switch.
Anything more for something that is essentially a short-lived toy is a fool's errand. Fool in this case meaning someone with more money than they know what to do with. I'd get better value from a Louis Vuitton handbag.
Sure, now it is. But what about when the iPhone was first introduced? It didn't cost anywhere near this much money. For a new product category such as this it makes sense to start out with a cheap product so that as many people adopt it as possible, then you can begin introducing more expensive versions when you have the apps ecosystem to support it.
[1]: http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9811/09/macvp2.idg/
Apple feels that eventually this class of devices will replace smart phones. It’s the same reason meta is betting almost everything on XR
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The overarching XR vision makes sense to me -- that you could instantly drop into any kind of environment you might want to, whether for work or entertainment or socializing.
But who creates these environments, and for what purpose? They seem like they'd be quite expensive if done well, and if not done well, you wouldn't want to go there unless you had to. If there aren't great places to go, what justifies a $3K headset?
Meanwhile, with the reality of technical limitations, how good is the experience really going to be?
I suspect you're going to be able to pay $3K to buy into some games and productivity software that, once the novelty wears off, are going to feel pretty mediocre and may never really get past the tech demo stage. And your hardware is going to be dreadfully obsolete in about 2-3 years too.
IDK, maybe I just have a lack of vision and I'm too down on this stuff.
I would like to try it and see!
Current optical designs mean that there is a large out of focus area when you look anywhere that isn't forward. That's just never going to fly for the general consumer. For VR to truly go mainstream you needs an optical system that is truly sharp, edge to edge. That probably means some kind of active optical system (like reverse OIS) or some kind of magic lens that currently only exists in theory. Instead what manufactures keep doing is trading off FOV for sharpness.
If Apple has implemented a new optics system here I think they have winner and the industry will change overnight. If it's the same as current designs just a little better it feels DOA to me.
I'm optimistic because I can't imagine Apple, of all companies, putting out a headset that's blurry at the edges.
You sound like you are a year or two out of date with your "current" understanding. The industry has moved to pancake lenses which make the view clear edge to edge. There's no more out of focus peripheral view, in recent headsets you read and look around using your eyeballs and not your head just like you would naturally.
It is already known that the Apple headset uses this updated optical system, along with micro OLED displays at super high resolution (approx double current industry standards). The clarity and focus are going to be absolutely amazing.
There’s just no dang reason to use these things like their creators want. Someone needs to be brave in these organizations and say “hey look, we tried pushing Siri for years and never gained the loved adoption that chatGPT has, why are we trying the same strategy here?”
If the compute offering is not excellent, it does not deserve to be in a new context. Period.
It's somewhat hard to argue that the Command-Line Interface is better overall than the Graphical User Interface, look at Apple, they made $2.75 trillion for themselves from the GUI. But with large language models now the easiness and even the beauty falls back into the CLI, a simple blank screen with a blinking prompt awaiting your commands, and maybe we could remove the screens altogether. Why do I have to write this message while staring into, funnily, an Apple screen, when I could be drinking my coffee admiring the city skyline and the mountains nearby while whispering gently the words into the wind. Why must I know that for whatever need that I have from a software product, I must press some menu button, then 3 drop downs down, select some weirdly named options, and then go back and drag and drop some asset into the window: just do the thing already, I don't care about your software-y details. The GUI might be dying, perhaps we should strive to kill it.
Just for the simple fact that Apple has in multiple occasions done 2 things:
1. Come out with something that shapes the rest of the industry. I mean how many times has Apple done something and within a year or 2 basically the entire industry follows.
2. Not captured a large (or majority) percent but continued to invest in a platform. I don't think anything they are in (except maybe the smart watch) do they actually have a majority marketshare but they continue to work on those platforms.
So there is a part of me that hopes that Apple realizes that this platform will be the same way. It will be a very niche product that will take years of iterating on (like the Apple Watch) with it in consumers hands to turn it into a mainstream product.
We have had too many failed attempts (Google Glasses and Microsoft HoloLens) just fail since they were not major successes right out the gate.
They also have the developer buy in on their other platforms that they may be able to transition that to this if they handle that properly.
That isn't saying that this is anywhere near a guarantee and obviously the hardware has to be there, the societal acceptance, etc. But I just don't currently see another company that is in the position to possibly pull this off.
- PCs were already growing in popularity.
- Mp3 players were already growing in popularity.
- Smart phones were already growing in popularity.
- Bluetooth headphones were already growing in popularity.
- Home automation was already growing in popularity.
Apple usually takes a look at a growing trend and decides that it can provide a far better experience.
... with the exception of: Apple Watch.
- Apple Watch defined the smartwatch category. Smart watches weren't that popular before the Apple watch. But, watches and luxury watches have been fashionable for a long time.
As awesome as AR / VR headsets are, they are practically dead on arrival. This will be the most challenging product launch in Apple's history.
From a marketing perspective, an Apple Car makes more sense.
And then Apple introduce the Macintosh and changed the industry forever.
- Mp3 players were already growing in popularity.
And then Apple introduce the iPod and iTunes and changed the industry forever. The ability to purchase and download music sealed the deal.
- Smart phones were already growing in popularity.
LOL. Blackberry? Windows Phone? And then Apple introduce the iPhone and changed society.
- Bluetooth headphones were already growing in popularity.
Meh. I'm not sure these are game changing, but that said my technophobic wife loves her AirPods Pro and has somehow not lost them, so shit, actually that's pretty game changing.
- Home automation was already growing in popularity.
Well, Siri kinda sucks TBH, and Alexa works just fine, so maybe not this one
Let's hope this is a Windows Phone situation, and Apple's headset is night-and-day compared to previous headsets. If it's a me-too like home automation, then it can only be a flop.
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What does AR allow you to do, that you can't already do on a screen?
It's different... but different in amount. It's a better screen.
That might be enough to ship units, but it's not enough to explode in popularity.
Hell, even mystical eyeglass AR that was actually just a pair of eyeglasses would struggle. "Why don't I just do the same thing on my screen?" or "But I'm already constantly connected when I'm mobile."
The Apple II OS wasn't graphical. The hardware had very simple colour, which made it stand out.
Mac was graphical, but it was a productised/commodified version of someone else's R&D.
Nokia's Communicator range had cellular data long before the iPhone was a thing. What iPhone did differently was - again - productise and commodify existing technologies to create something that was more than the sum of its components. Touch was the biggest part of that, but the App Store really killed the competition.
iPads were never particularly low cost. There were numerous tablets before the iPad. The iPad difference was - again - touch. And the App Store.
iWatch wrist phone may be true, but I suspect it's not the main use case. (I've yet to see anyone talking into an iWatch. I'm sure it happens, but not nearly as often as phone conversations do.)
The common factor - apart from iWatch - is taking/blending existing tech and packaging it into an accessible non-nerdy form with obvious and instant mass market appeal. And creating a vibrant developer ecosystem around it. And adding design stylings that make the product cool.
That's exactly what this display project doesn't have. Even if it does its job well it has no obvious instant applications.
And clamping a rubber facehugger to your head is the opposite of cool.
It may have mass appeal after version 4 or 5 when it's closer to the ideal of stylish glasses with a supporting ecosystem. But I suspect version 1 is going to have a very limited market.
For that matter, if "smartphone with cellular data" counts, why not "smart glasses with cellular data and apps"?
As you can tell, I'm a skeptic of this difference in kind v. difference in quantity construct.
On the other hand, existing AR, like existing VR, just doesn't deliver on that promise, not even approximately.
With current tech, it's more an issue that the juice isn't worth the squeeze. That can change when either (or both) side of the equation changes.
I really do think that Apple are much more likely to present some interesting AI products that run locally on Apple Silicone, thats where they truly can do something different and new that will impact all their customers. It will help them sell the next generation of iPhone and Macs.
I want my AI to be local and privet.
In some ways I think Humain have a better idea where this market is going to go. I'm not convinced by their product, I think it should be built into a phone, and I would be suppressed to see Apple do some stuff similar.
To copy what I put in a comment the other day, a next gen Siri with chatGPT like functionality, trained on all your docs, email, calendar, movements, browser history, video calls. All local and not in the cloud:
"Hey Siri, I had a meeting last summer in New York about project X, could you bring up all relevant documents and give me a brief summary of what we discussed and decisions we made. Oh and while you're at it, we ate at an awesome restaurant that evening, can you book a table for me for our meeting next week."
The current stumbling block is that the tech sucks and the headsets are enormous. If someone got it into a lightweight pair of glasses or contact lenses, the use case is obvious, and it would be a big of a shift as the smartphone.
Denying this is like being the guy in 1993 saying “why would I want a computer in my pocket? Am I going to work on spreadsheets on a tiny screen in the bathrooom? And where would I plug it in?”
Is this really a game-changer? Technology adoption is all about tradeoffs. We already have location-based services and applications that are granular enough for most purposes. AR applications add sensory awareness and localized interaction at the cost of distraction and intrusiveness.
History is littered with inventions that were supposed to be the next telephone, computer, smartphone, etc., but most of them never materialize because they don't meet people's practical needs. And if AR/VR isn't the quintessential solution in search of a problem, I don't know what is.
But yeah, so many things are obnoxious and clunky about smartphones. Glancing down is never a good look, let alone glancing down and then walking into a wall. The moment that minimum viable AR tech happens, people will suddenly remember how many compromises we have to make for smartphones.
The article says that Apple has a glasses product and a VR/AR product that sounds similar to a Quest Pro.
So if we look at the glasses product it immediately runs into a lot of issues. Do I want to be wearing glasses? Do I already own glasses? Do I like how glasses look on my face? Wearable tech is very personal especially when it's sitting on your face. At best this is a product for industrial environments.
Then the Quest Pro-like VR/AR product...separate battery pack in your pocket, need I say more? Now compare that experience to an Oculus Quest for $300. It doesn't really matter that the Quest is a less capable product, it's at the right price point and form factor and its strong sales show it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laconic_phrase
It's discussed quite a bit on this site, but I wouldn't expect Apple to pull ahead in the GPU department. They really lit a fire under Intel and AMD's ass with the M1's IPC, but Nvidia laughed their way to the bank with every M1 upgrade. Even the 5nm M1 Ultra struggled to keep up with Nvidia's 10nm, bog-cheap 30-series cards. In the datacenter it's even more of a blowout, Apple would have to invest in something competitive with CUDA to turn heads. That's no small feat, and I don't think it's possible with an overnight API launch. It takes time and integration into the industry, something Apple wasn't patient enough for (see: Xserve).
Gorilla Tag, an indie VR game where you're an ape and run around with your hands and tag people (seriously, that's the whole thing) has made $26 million selling virtual hats and has peaks of 90,000 concurrent users.
I think what makes it stick is that it's more than just a game. It's a social space where my kids jump in to sometimes just to chat with their friends from school. Reminds me of hanging out in Team Fortress 2 game servers and just chatting while casually screwing around in the game.
Here's the interview where those stats came from for those curious.
https://venturebeat.com/games/how-gorilla-tag-made-it-big-on...
Apple execs: "why not both?"
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But I'm much more bullish than most of the commenters here. Many seem to not have shifted their understanding of progress in VR/AR in the last 5 years, when there have been fundamental tech advances. Then, others don't seem to understand how much Apple is planning to push the state of the art here. Their headset will have roughly double the resolution of existing devices, and contain not one but two, laptop level mobile chips. The lenses / optics are going to solve a lot of issues people have had, the pass through quality is going to be near photo-realistic - you won't feel you need to take these off at all. Some of the apps we know about include photo-realistic video conferencing with quality that is unheard of outside of laboratory conditions before.
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