I just don't think the watch market is really there. I feel like its shrinking steadily among younger people as the need for a time teller is replaced by the modern cell phone. I believe people have convinced themselves into convincing companies that they actually want a high tech wrist watch when, in reality, the market isn't that big and it is shrinking.
To me these seem pretty stupid. Major features (to me) of ear-buds with wires and 3.5" jack are: 1) being attached with wires means I don't easily lose them when they slip out of my ear/hand/pocket. 2) the 3.5" jack actually keeps them pretty solidly attached to my phone (again, less risk of losing them). Walking around with two loose tiny objects seems less than ideal - at least to me; I'd lose them within days.
Ok, but $3,499 is a steep price tag. Granted, the pixel density and design look amazing. They are probably the absolute best VR/AR goggles on the consumer market to date, but to try something out and totally shift your computing habits at that steep of a tag is going to be a stretch for a lot of people.
Like it might be worth it if you really are able to replace your standard monitor setup and use these for long stretches with out neck or eye strain. But how will you know until you try?
I saw someone say elsewhere, these are not for consumers in general. They are for developers to work with, build software for, come up with new things… then, if and when a niche is found, they’ll probably make a much less expensive consumer model that focuses on that use case.
That being said, I would love to try these, but I’m more interested in an upgraded laptop at the moment, and that money would buy a nice one.
The original iPhone cost so much people mocked it. It costs twice as much now and people buy them for their 8 year olds. If the device provides enough utility (and I imagine down the line these will replace laptops, tablets and TV’s for a lot of people), the price won’t matter.
I'm no Apple hater or VR hater, but am I the only one who thinks that the design of this thing looks utterly ridiculous? It's a scuba mask.
At best, it's looks marginally less ridiculous than its competitors (which might be all that it needs to be), but I don't see anything about it that looks amazing.
Sure, $3,500 is too steep for this to be a mass market hit with v1. But I think it's a fairly reasonable price to get the ball rolling, and they will see a fair number of early adopter consumers (much more than Google Glass or Magic Leap, less than Oculus).
And yet it is possible that in the alternate history where apple had not done those things, tech might be better. Note that they all came out during the booming times of the 2010s with cheap money for consumption.
For example, the Samsung S10 had a headphone jack, an SpO2 meter (who knew we wwould need this in the pandemic!), an FM radio, great screen, lightweight. Their newer models have no jack (to sell more wireless earphnes), no spo2 (to sell more watches), no fm radio (unknown reason), and its heavier. The perceptible difference in performance is miniscule despite all these years. So , some changes do need to be ridiculed
That said, i dont see this headset in a similar league, this seems an experimental prototype because none of the use cases mentioned have been proved.
Nitpick: the lack of the FM radio stems directly from the lack of headphone jack - the radio relied on wired earphones to work as they were used as an antenna.
So losing the FM radio is more a consequence of the decision to remove the headphone jack, rather than an active decision to remove it.
Still sucks, though. The FM radio was one of the most useful features of my previous phone. By the time I upgraded to a newer phone, its battery lasted for an hour at most during normal tasks, but I could get 12+ hours from the FM radio.
There are now very few phones that have my personal "wishlist" of removable battery + headphone jack + FM radio. And these are all budget phones so if you value a decent camera, you may be out of luck. Add 5G and I'm not sure there are any options.
> it is possible that in the alternate history where apple had not done those things, tech might be better
This. I think Apple has actively made the cellphone space worse in a number of ways, from removing the headphone jack through eliminating user-replaceable batteries. When Apple does a thing, everyone else takes it as permission to do the same thing.
So why are people still writing “Apple’s entry into this new product category is doomed because it does not meet my personal expectations for the category” articles without discussing the outcomes of previous doomsayings?
Perhaps the headset deserves ridicule and will fail. Given Apple’s track record, perhaps it would make sense to acknowledge their many successes with products people dismissed, and explain why this one is more similar to their failures that people dismissed (Ping, anyone?)
tbh the real question is not the output (whether this succeeds or fails), it's whether Apple followed the same inputs that made prior products category-defining like Apple II, Mac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, Watch, and Airpods. All of those took niche computing ideas and made them mainstream, creating a new market and new way of life, and did so by following a playbook of timing the tech right, scoping narrowly, and understanding which use cases were worth targeting.
Personally, I feel Vision is a bit too broadly scoped for a v1. 3d photos really didn't need to be in there. The consumer use cases that Apple loves really aren't where Vision is providing next level value add, whereas the remote workplace ones are. But I understand those alone are not enough to drive adoption so I can see why they wanted to make it more consumer oriented.
My hunch is they pivot slightly toward workplace in subsequent versions, much like they did with Apple Watch pivoting toward health and away from luxury.
Don’t seem entirely comparable in that both watches and iem were legitimate markets to which Apple brought an innovative products while AR and VR headsets are a notoriously difficult market where plenty of products have already tried and failed to make money.
If this succeed, to me it will be more akin to what the iPad did than to what the watch did.
It’s also extremely expensive. I’m curious to see how Apple will market it. We will see.
I think this will be quite successfully marketed as a status symbol.
Obviously, it was intentional to create a scenario that there are viral videos of people gasping at the price reveal.
I do think this is a revolutionary day but in a totally dystopian way. I suspect this is the start of where the tech innovations are more and more not going to be targeted at the mass market. The mass market is financially tapped out. The future is what Bernard Arnault and his 200 billion dollars figured out a long time ago. As AI starts to make society more and more unequal the money will be more and more in the high end luxury products. Everyone else can eat cake.
I assume it's more of a prototype targeted mainly at developers and enthusiasts at this point. They're probably betting that by the time they can decrease the price significantly somebody would've figured out what can you actually do with this thing.
Yeah. Apple enters categories that already have product-market fit. It outsources market research to first movers.
VR has only significant traction for a handful of games. iPad is indeed an exception while watches and fitness trackers were popular and a growing market before Apple entered.
At first when I read this I didn't understand that they were examples of people predicting the failure of newly launched apple products. I was nodding along agreeing with each point. I have used "smart watches" and "ear buds" (admittedly not apple) and got bored with the watch after I learnt nothing that suprisingly or actionable, and continually lose ear buds, or have them go through the wash.
Garden variety no-analysis hot take demonstrating a lack of understanding of how platforms launch & grow and what trajectory this is going in.
Personally I think Apple missed a bit in the marketing by positioning this so heavily on average consumer use cases (3d pics of kids!) rather than professional use cases, where yes, having immersive shared environments can be helpful while avoiding any of the legitimate 'consume your life' issues with tech in our personal lives. "Boot up an office at home when you need it" is an extremely compelling use case and is compatible with the ideals of making computing (and work!) more humane.
Unfortunately the author doesn't seem to understand product positioning or have the vision to see possibilities enough to discuss the consumer v work nuance. And the isolation critique could have been interesting but it just defaulted to 'big company bad, tech bad.' Critics are essential, we deserve better ones.
it may lack understanding the technicalities around marking and product launches...
but instead it has a mundane understanding of what most people actually consider important in life
fortunately his critique is not around the specifics of how this product was made (and 'launched') but about whether this product should be made in the first place
technologically it looks about the same as a hololens, which seems like the same 'product idea' as already launched by microsoft whenever ago; but where is that now?
Any 'should this product be launched' critique should come armed with an understanding of what the product's trajectory is and what it could be capable of, which the author failed to demonstrate. That's not particularly surprising, most people aren't very imaginative, so it read like something most people would write: a hot take with a few old talking points.
Re:HoloLens, it failed because Microsoft is not an organization that can build category-defining consumer products. Vision is worlds apart technically from the HoloLens' tech demo level quality. Whether or not it succeeds in the market, Apple was not fucking around or half-assing the tech. This was spare no expense, leave no nuance unpolished, culmination of a decade of deep technical investment and the merging of 30 different workstreams stuff. I can hardly imagine the complexity of the product roadmap that led to it.
Re:mundane understanding, I'm not so sure. Taken as-is with the gen1 hardware we saw, I think Vision should have been targeted a bit more at workplace than consumer given the form factor. But more broadly, the whole product is really just a prelude for what experience we can expect within an AR glasses form factor in the coming decade(s), and products like this need to put a stake in the ground on what they're going to be about.
To give you some sense of why HoloLens never made it: it was timed wrong for the tech (way too early), it was incubated in a company that has never defined a consumer product category and lacks the talent / organizational structure / gravitas to do so, Microsoft lacked the courage to invest in it, it failed to define valuable broad market use cases, it couldn't leverage developers, it lacked multi-year investments in like 10 different key technologies, it had entirely the wrong form factor, etc etc. There wasn't a snowballs chance in hell HoloLens was going to be a consumer product without being fundamentally different.
> technologically it looks about the same as a hololens, which seems like the same 'product idea' as already launched by microsoft whenever ago
If I recall MSFT had demos of people jumping around shooting aliens in their living room. That's a very different product idea than what Apple showed today – a "product idea" is specifically not about the technology, but what you the company thinks people will do with it.
Just felt an overwhelming sense of isolation and loneliness in so many of their demos.
The ones of parents wearing the helmet while interacting with children just were straight up depressing to me as a parent.
I’m all for spatial cameras in the phone and having better ways to view them later but this “future” looks lonely.
I've been following the Tilt five AR sets, and frankly those look like a better advancement of social shared virtual reality tech. https://www.tiltfive.com/ They're targeted much more narrowly though.
It does feel like they're well into the uncanny valley. We'll see how they fare against the ineffable "ick" factor.
Google Glass cost half as much and was in a much tighter form factor, but it failed because the general public perceived it as creepy and isolating.
If this product gets associated with people striving to wall themselves off from the world in their own personal dreamscape...well, I don't know. Maybe that sort of personality type will become a virtue in the zeitgeist. Maybe it already is.
Agreed. I get that these would probably be great for me at work, but I have a 5-year-old who has limited screen time. There’s no way I would use this at home in front of the kid. They would just want to use it and if they did use it, I could
see them getting hopelessly addicted. I see uses in industry for this (AR for fixing complex machines, VR for editing 3D data), but hope these never catch on for day-to-day use. I just can’t get over how isolating and sad these things look when demoed. I think part of Apple feels this way too. It’s interesting that all of the Apple promos for this that I’ve seen show a person by themself using this. In the past I recall seeing Meta and others showing more than one person in the same room using VR devices and it always looked horrifying to me.
I agree. I think the work they put into the eyes feature is evidence of their concern about this issue. I'm really curious to know what the "feeling" is like to be in a room with someone wearing one of these.
3d photos should have been an iPhone feature for sure, it felt really out of place on Vision. Generally using this in a physical social context doesn't make a lot of sense except in a workplace with others wearing them and working on specific tasks together.
However, this is probably the best device ever made for remote work and I think can make it far less lonely, with an immersive shared environment, 3d avatars that have real facial expressions and visibility of hands, etc. I'd so so much rather use this than sit at a monitor on Zoom.
I was neutral on it until I was told that I could “remember” a special moment by detaching from reality.
Total bullshit. We’re at total tech: a point where tech is so pervasive we think making it the point of things (rather than an enabler) is perfectly fine. Witness the scores of people grasping at likes, awkwardly binging social media in public, putting giant screens in cars, etc etc.
I find it amusing that the first headset with a very thoughtful approach to trying to maintain connection to other people is faced with even more forceful condemnation of its isolating effects.
Apple developed and invested significantly in a system to make interaction possible and (relatively) natural between users of the headset and others in their environment. I applaud that first step towards an AR future that doesn't isolate us from others.
I think that’s exactly the problem, the “relatively” natural is still pretty darn awkward and freaky. With gaming VR, you’re not expected to be interacting with people who are co-present at the same time, it makes sense to spend an hour or two in this space having some fun.
With this, the intent is clearly to have you wear it all the time and let it be your entire interface to the world. And that, Apple trying to insert itself into regular human face-to-face interaction where technology is completely unnecessary, is what’s off putting about this.
I think it's commendable they tried but at the same time I'm going to be 100% annoyed conversing with someone who has one of these things on pointed at me while I'm trying to talk to them. Call me old fashioned but if these things ever catch on mainstream it's going to take me a while to adjust.
This is true, but on the other hand the previous VR/AR headsets confine their usage themselves, especially in social situations because they are not accepted by other people. Blurring that boundary might cause less isolation compared to other headsets - but might cause more isolation in the long run as an indirect effect due to more widespread usage.
This post has big "No wireless, less space than a nomad, lame" energy. Right off the bat, the whole "don't sit too close to the TV or your eyes will fall out" concerns seem a bit ignorant. AFAIK every VR headset uses lenses so that your eye focuses as if it were looking at something much further away (Oculus headsets are 1.3-2 meters). Unless there's evidence that Apple screwed this up, seems like a moot point.
Full disclosure- based on the typos and unnecessary FUD in the first section of the article, I didn't bother to read the whole thing.
We've wanted virtual environments from moment that William T. Riker stepped onto the Holodeck. We've been dreaming of a cyberpunk reality since the first snow crash. It feels strange to blame Apple for this "vision" of computing.
The facetime video (https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2023/06/introducing-apple-vis...) shows the faces of the people she's online with, but they will not be able to see her face while she's wearing the "spacial computer", unless it generates a fake avatar for them.
Exactly. There is no royal we here. Just people who will either buy this thing or won't. And then people like this who are telling other people what to do and think. Which is never a good look.
I'm not actually an Apple fan boy. I have a Pixel 6 and a Manjaro computer at home. I do use a mac book pro for work but without having bought into the I everything ecosystem. But, I can see the attraction of this device. I don't have that kind of cash rolling around in my bank account so I won't be able to get one any time soon. Also, I'm not in the US so I wouldn't be able to anyway at the launch.
But I think the price point isn't that steep and very reasonable actually. People spend much more on sports cars, plasma TVs, and other things they don't need but that are a hell of a lot of fun. And this looks like it should be fun to use. And arguably this could end up delivering a bit of a premium experience over e.g. the best plasma TV money can buy. It certainly looks like the ultimate in personal entertainment. For anyone with the cash on hand, this kind of looks like a very desirable thing to own.
People make the mistake of focusing on just the hardware. Which looks awesome. But what really caught my attention here is the fact that they lined up a lot of compelling content and applications and are effectively leveling up the content ecosystem they already have. That is the smart move because they were already leading here. So, they are technically extending their lead combining scarce and premium content with a superior premium experience that you can't currently get from anyone. It's basically premium squared.
Having the disney CEO on stage is a bit of a stake in the ground. Avatar, Star Wars, etc. all in glorious 3D. And some of the apps aren't that bad either. And they cleverly sneaked in some announcement about making it easier for game publishers to port their games over to mac. Unrelated at face value, but duh, which game publisher would not want a piece of this action?!.
And basically infinite screen real estate to project your applications in your field of view alone is quite a step up from having just a laptop screen with some shitty external screen to extend that. Looks like that should work with just about any 2D application too. You could spend many thousands on expensive monitors and still have less real estate. I could see myself using that professionally just coding.
They will sell as many as they manage to produce, which probably will be around a million or so. This could be a multi billion business in its first year. It will be some time before they have real competition so they can ask whatever they want for this. Apple has got a new money printing machine here. And it's not like their old ones were struggling.
Readit News
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8291898
To me these seem pretty stupid. Major features (to me) of ear-buds with wires and 3.5" jack are: 1) being attached with wires means I don't easily lose them when they slip out of my ear/hand/pocket. 2) the 3.5" jack actually keeps them pretty solidly attached to my phone (again, less risk of losing them). Walking around with two loose tiny objects seems less than ideal - at least to me; I'd lose them within days.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13169937
$350 and not out until "early 2015" Dead in the water. That's insanely expensive and too late in the smartwatch market in my mind.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8291889
Like it might be worth it if you really are able to replace your standard monitor setup and use these for long stretches with out neck or eye strain. But how will you know until you try?
I saw someone say elsewhere, these are not for consumers in general. They are for developers to work with, build software for, come up with new things… then, if and when a niche is found, they’ll probably make a much less expensive consumer model that focuses on that use case.
That being said, I would love to try these, but I’m more interested in an upgraded laptop at the moment, and that money would buy a nice one.
I'm no Apple hater or VR hater, but am I the only one who thinks that the design of this thing looks utterly ridiculous? It's a scuba mask.
At best, it's looks marginally less ridiculous than its competitors (which might be all that it needs to be), but I don't see anything about it that looks amazing.
I remember admiring flat screen TVs in the early 2000s when they cost like $10k: https://www.applianceretailer.com.au/eeqycmzusg/
I also used to have this SGI 1600SW monitor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_1600SW. 1600 x 1024 17", $2,500 (equivalent to $4,490 in 2022)...
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For example, the Samsung S10 had a headphone jack, an SpO2 meter (who knew we wwould need this in the pandemic!), an FM radio, great screen, lightweight. Their newer models have no jack (to sell more wireless earphnes), no spo2 (to sell more watches), no fm radio (unknown reason), and its heavier. The perceptible difference in performance is miniscule despite all these years. So , some changes do need to be ridiculed
That said, i dont see this headset in a similar league, this seems an experimental prototype because none of the use cases mentioned have been proved.
So losing the FM radio is more a consequence of the decision to remove the headphone jack, rather than an active decision to remove it.
Still sucks, though. The FM radio was one of the most useful features of my previous phone. By the time I upgraded to a newer phone, its battery lasted for an hour at most during normal tasks, but I could get 12+ hours from the FM radio.
There are now very few phones that have my personal "wishlist" of removable battery + headphone jack + FM radio. And these are all budget phones so if you value a decent camera, you may be out of luck. Add 5G and I'm not sure there are any options.
This. I think Apple has actively made the cellphone space worse in a number of ways, from removing the headphone jack through eliminating user-replaceable batteries. When Apple does a thing, everyone else takes it as permission to do the same thing.
https://www.apple.com/healthcare/apple-watch/
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207934
There’s a few comments like these that people are posting in the big apple vision post as well.
Yes. People have been wrong in the past.
In all seriousness, I think it is helpful context that people have ridiculed every Apple product launch since the iPhone.
Perhaps the headset deserves ridicule and will fail. Given Apple’s track record, perhaps it would make sense to acknowledge their many successes with products people dismissed, and explain why this one is more similar to their failures that people dismissed (Ping, anyone?)
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All it says is predicting the future is incredibly hard and all predictions (the ones predicting success as well as failure) are without much weight.
I wrote about some of these input factors in my post on category defining products a few years back: https://nickpunt.com/blog/category-defining-products/
Personally, I feel Vision is a bit too broadly scoped for a v1. 3d photos really didn't need to be in there. The consumer use cases that Apple loves really aren't where Vision is providing next level value add, whereas the remote workplace ones are. But I understand those alone are not enough to drive adoption so I can see why they wanted to make it more consumer oriented.
My hunch is they pivot slightly toward workplace in subsequent versions, much like they did with Apple Watch pivoting toward health and away from luxury.
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If this succeed, to me it will be more akin to what the iPad did than to what the watch did.
It’s also extremely expensive. I’m curious to see how Apple will market it. We will see.
Obviously, it was intentional to create a scenario that there are viral videos of people gasping at the price reveal.
I do think this is a revolutionary day but in a totally dystopian way. I suspect this is the start of where the tech innovations are more and more not going to be targeted at the mass market. The mass market is financially tapped out. The future is what Bernard Arnault and his 200 billion dollars figured out a long time ago. As AI starts to make society more and more unequal the money will be more and more in the high end luxury products. Everyone else can eat cake.
I assume it's more of a prototype targeted mainly at developers and enthusiasts at this point. They're probably betting that by the time they can decrease the price significantly somebody would've figured out what can you actually do with this thing.
VR has only significant traction for a handful of games. iPad is indeed an exception while watches and fitness trackers were popular and a growing market before Apple entered.
But perhaps I am turning I to an old man?
https://www.counterpointresearch.com/global-smartwatch-shipm...
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Personally I think Apple missed a bit in the marketing by positioning this so heavily on average consumer use cases (3d pics of kids!) rather than professional use cases, where yes, having immersive shared environments can be helpful while avoiding any of the legitimate 'consume your life' issues with tech in our personal lives. "Boot up an office at home when you need it" is an extremely compelling use case and is compatible with the ideals of making computing (and work!) more humane.
Unfortunately the author doesn't seem to understand product positioning or have the vision to see possibilities enough to discuss the consumer v work nuance. And the isolation critique could have been interesting but it just defaulted to 'big company bad, tech bad.' Critics are essential, we deserve better ones.
Yeah especially with bringing iOS ecosystem, it means that for (general) developers it's not interesting.
If they were demoing a shell, a code editor, etc. But if it's iOS it's just too locked down.
Developers are actually good first generation buyers. They can likely make their boss pay for.
So it's such a waste, they are excluded because iOS
but instead it has a mundane understanding of what most people actually consider important in life
fortunately his critique is not around the specifics of how this product was made (and 'launched') but about whether this product should be made in the first place
technologically it looks about the same as a hololens, which seems like the same 'product idea' as already launched by microsoft whenever ago; but where is that now?
Re:HoloLens, it failed because Microsoft is not an organization that can build category-defining consumer products. Vision is worlds apart technically from the HoloLens' tech demo level quality. Whether or not it succeeds in the market, Apple was not fucking around or half-assing the tech. This was spare no expense, leave no nuance unpolished, culmination of a decade of deep technical investment and the merging of 30 different workstreams stuff. I can hardly imagine the complexity of the product roadmap that led to it.
Re:mundane understanding, I'm not so sure. Taken as-is with the gen1 hardware we saw, I think Vision should have been targeted a bit more at workplace than consumer given the form factor. But more broadly, the whole product is really just a prelude for what experience we can expect within an AR glasses form factor in the coming decade(s), and products like this need to put a stake in the ground on what they're going to be about.
To give you some sense of why HoloLens never made it: it was timed wrong for the tech (way too early), it was incubated in a company that has never defined a consumer product category and lacks the talent / organizational structure / gravitas to do so, Microsoft lacked the courage to invest in it, it failed to define valuable broad market use cases, it couldn't leverage developers, it lacked multi-year investments in like 10 different key technologies, it had entirely the wrong form factor, etc etc. There wasn't a snowballs chance in hell HoloLens was going to be a consumer product without being fundamentally different.
If I recall MSFT had demos of people jumping around shooting aliens in their living room. That's a very different product idea than what Apple showed today – a "product idea" is specifically not about the technology, but what you the company thinks people will do with it.
I’m all for spatial cameras in the phone and having better ways to view them later but this “future” looks lonely.
Google Glass cost half as much and was in a much tighter form factor, but it failed because the general public perceived it as creepy and isolating.
If this product gets associated with people striving to wall themselves off from the world in their own personal dreamscape...well, I don't know. Maybe that sort of personality type will become a virtue in the zeitgeist. Maybe it already is.
Me too. I'm predicting "creeped out".
However, this is probably the best device ever made for remote work and I think can make it far less lonely, with an immersive shared environment, 3d avatars that have real facial expressions and visibility of hands, etc. I'd so so much rather use this than sit at a monitor on Zoom.
Total bullshit. We’re at total tech: a point where tech is so pervasive we think making it the point of things (rather than an enabler) is perfectly fine. Witness the scores of people grasping at likes, awkwardly binging social media in public, putting giant screens in cars, etc etc.
Apple developed and invested significantly in a system to make interaction possible and (relatively) natural between users of the headset and others in their environment. I applaud that first step towards an AR future that doesn't isolate us from others.
With this, the intent is clearly to have you wear it all the time and let it be your entire interface to the world. And that, Apple trying to insert itself into regular human face-to-face interaction where technology is completely unnecessary, is what’s off putting about this.
I suspect that I won't be willing to interact with them.
Full disclosure- based on the typos and unnecessary FUD in the first section of the article, I didn't bother to read the whole thing.
Was a relatively small group of tech-enthusiast and socially-awkward people, trying to hide behind cool digital lives? Sure, guilty as charged.
Was the world population at large asking for the same...? Eh.
I remember owning one of the earliest smartphones and sitting on the bus every day being the only person playing on my phone.
I remember being the only person with a smartwatch (the Pebble).
It's like calling and getting a "virtual background" - to me it says you're ashamed of where you are.
https://twitter.com/highsnobiety/status/1665794429364604928
???
I'm not a fan boy, but if there's a market with unmet needs that can be solved by $3,500 helmet, so be it.
The market will decide.
I think Apple will have no problem with 500,000 in pre-order by the time this ships.
$3,500 is a lot of money, but many consumer electronics have cost far more adjusted for inflation. It's not an insurmountable cost.
The question is, is the product compelling enough? I personally think it is.
I'm not actually an Apple fan boy. I have a Pixel 6 and a Manjaro computer at home. I do use a mac book pro for work but without having bought into the I everything ecosystem. But, I can see the attraction of this device. I don't have that kind of cash rolling around in my bank account so I won't be able to get one any time soon. Also, I'm not in the US so I wouldn't be able to anyway at the launch.
But I think the price point isn't that steep and very reasonable actually. People spend much more on sports cars, plasma TVs, and other things they don't need but that are a hell of a lot of fun. And this looks like it should be fun to use. And arguably this could end up delivering a bit of a premium experience over e.g. the best plasma TV money can buy. It certainly looks like the ultimate in personal entertainment. For anyone with the cash on hand, this kind of looks like a very desirable thing to own.
People make the mistake of focusing on just the hardware. Which looks awesome. But what really caught my attention here is the fact that they lined up a lot of compelling content and applications and are effectively leveling up the content ecosystem they already have. That is the smart move because they were already leading here. So, they are technically extending their lead combining scarce and premium content with a superior premium experience that you can't currently get from anyone. It's basically premium squared.
Having the disney CEO on stage is a bit of a stake in the ground. Avatar, Star Wars, etc. all in glorious 3D. And some of the apps aren't that bad either. And they cleverly sneaked in some announcement about making it easier for game publishers to port their games over to mac. Unrelated at face value, but duh, which game publisher would not want a piece of this action?!.
And basically infinite screen real estate to project your applications in your field of view alone is quite a step up from having just a laptop screen with some shitty external screen to extend that. Looks like that should work with just about any 2D application too. You could spend many thousands on expensive monitors and still have less real estate. I could see myself using that professionally just coding.
They will sell as many as they manage to produce, which probably will be around a million or so. This could be a multi billion business in its first year. It will be some time before they have real competition so they can ask whatever they want for this. Apple has got a new money printing machine here. And it's not like their old ones were struggling.