Thank you very much for saying this, I totally agree.
This is despite the fact that I want absolutely no part of "the metaverse" or whatever folks want to call ubiquitous AR/VR, and I don't want it to become commonplace in society. This is mostly for personal reasons, as I feel like I've finally gotten a handle on my cellphone addiction and have recently started realizing how much happier I am spending extended amounts of time in nature and away from tech. I like the idea of tech as tools, and I've enjoyed playing games on VR headsets for a short while, but extended use of a computer strapped to my face is a WALL-E nightmare for me.
All that said, I really didn't like the tone of this article. Yes, I agree that "big tech" has caused a lot of harm in society. But it's not that hard to separate that from many good things it has done, and this article felt so cynical like it just wanted to piss in everyone's soup.
We should celebrate it when big companies take real risks, even if they swing and miss. What would the author of this article prefer, more stock buybacks?
The author's articles seem to be relentlessly negative about all technology. Being negative on everything is a low-effort way to get attention, but it doesn't really contribute much to anything.
The amount of energy invested in pointing out the flaws in a 1.0 release of something reminds me of the ridicule heaped on the iPad.
It’s much easier to tear down something than it is to create something. It also garners a lot more clicks for someone whose primary contribution in life is pontification on the internet belittling the achievements of people who actually -do- something and -create- and take risks. Those people still do, after all, have to eat so thank god for advertising platforms and breathless naysayers.
It's really not a 1.0 though. Yes the vision pro itself is 1.0, but 99% of people's complaints are not with the vision pro directly, but more about the entire concept of AR headsets. These issues have been known since at least the hololense era of 2017 and despite incremental improvements to software and hardware, the firm Factor can never escape these issues without massive leaps like eye glass or contact lense sizes hardware ... which is sci Fi for at least 20 more years
Apple’s core competence is to wait for some good product hit the market and later improve it to make it much better and fetch their market share. Being forefront of the tech is not their skill, their skill is integration , supplier, and supply chain Logistics’s, and a design
The experience you get is probably better than any existing VR headset but I struggle to see myself valuing it at more than $500. The FOV and resolution still both suck and the headset is super bulky. I would rather use a phone or laptop/tablet to co some content since it’s much more pixel dense. If they can make a slimmer, lighter version with much higher pixel density it might be worth getting one but the tech is nowhere near there yet.
I don’t think this has ever been true. There are too many things they do where they have created a market out of nothing. The general public had never paid for digital music or apps until apple created the market. Same with contactless payment from phones.
You can argue that any of these technologies existed before and they “followed”, but that’s a pretty distorted view when apple made the market - they didn’t take market share from others.
I would go farther: we should be concerned if there aren't flops like this, as that would indicate big tech isn't pushing the boundaries nearly hard enough.
Big swing? VR and AR have been around for a very long time. Apple is good at making things that already exist nicer. They aren't big risks at all, they are generally safe bets. Take something that's out there, put 3 years of design into it and act like you invented it.
Apple's miscalculation here was overestimating the market's price tolerance for a category whose prosumers have already explored for 1/3 Apple's price point.
If this had been 5 years ago at half the price, they'd own the category.
But we don't actually want big corps to take swings to build the torment nexus.
There's a wide consensus that this kind of tech is going to have a negative effect on society and how humans interact with each other, but there's also this myth that this is inevitable and that we just have to accept it.
But it's not reality: there's no reason for it to be inevitable, and it's just that the most wealthy companies are pushing it hard, because they see it as a big money maker.
I totally agree with this on the surface, but I never know how to align it with trying to solve larger problems we often hear people raising alarm bells about.
For example, if we really are concerned with climate change do we really want companies spending small fortunes to either fail or build an expensive product that takes a ton of resources to create? If we really are worried about health concerns related to excessive screen use, do we really want companies trying to strap screens on your face? If we're really concerned with inflation, is it beneficial for a company to spend this much money and resources to try to build a very expensive product that could very well become more of a novelty than anything else?
The problem with your argument is there is no singular "we" here. The are groups of people with a range of concerns and goals all working simultaneously, often at cross-purposes to each other.
Climate change isn't a matter of energy consumption; it's about massively affecting the balance of the carbon cycle. Fix the carbon cycle issue, and there's likely no reason to tie the development of technology to climate change. No amount of ceasing further technological experimentation will correct climate change the way moving away from fossil fuels would.
Would those companies otherwise have bothered to do anything productive toward reducing climate change or inflation with those resources instead of chasing novelty toys? I doubt it.
Agreed, but I don't think Apple published their VR set because they actually thought it's ready. They did it because Zuck is playing around with the idea and they didn't want to look less innovative.
It will be career death in apple to suggest anything like that for the next ten years..
Wish there was something like
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructive_vote_of_no_conf... in company culture, as in you can only express "I'm against that" , if you suggest some other similar bold endeavor. Not this "let's milk bettsy to death and then loose the farm" mindset that uses bold leaps as ammonition.
> Juicero was an expensive plastic box that squeezed a bag of juice and Theranos’ finger-prick blood tests were a big fraud that eventually sent its founder to prison for 11 years.
I guess.. the issue is that it's blatantly obvious how crappy the thing is. It's not that they failed but the disconnect.
But, some engineers got to work on some new green field tech which is pretty cool. All to often at work I'm presented with interesting problems that I have to solve with hacks / least amount of resources. I envy those that know how to convince a company to take swings.
It's true. But what we often lack in tech is an understanding of humans.
Like, real people.
Big swings in tech almost always fail when we push tech fantasies but don't understand humans.
And my fear is they actually set the industry back several years, because people start to believe a concept isn't desired by the populace, when really it was just the execution.
For example, thank goodness Elon came along and rescued the image of the electric car by grasping we humans want good-looking fast cars.
The strange EV designs out of Detroit always killed me.
Yet, it was hard for Tesla to overcome the impression left by those past failures.
I hope the industry doesn't abandon headsets because of the execution mistakes we're seeing now.
What I loved about Jobs is he understood humans so well.
I miss that about him.
His big swings felt natural once in your hand.
Tech CEOs are often taking big swings, but we tech people can be so nerdy sometimes that we struggle to understand how to make products look fashionable and feel natural to use.
That was Jobs magic sauce. Apple struggles with that now.
MP3 players we're clunky until Jobs added the scroll wheel.
Just a stunningly natural solution.
In comparison, the vision pro is clearly too bulky to be practical.
I was excited for the vision pro. But when I tried it, I was shocked at how front heavy it is.
I think it's a solid product for certain niche uses.
But we need a Jobs or Elon, to identify the heart of what humans really need out of a headset.
Zuckerberg is this generation's Bill Gates. Smart. Successful. But mentally and emotionally disconnected from the rest of humanity.
The successful headset innovator needs to shed the 'ready player one' fantasy that we humans want to live in a digital universe or to consume large amounts of entertainment this way.
In my opinion (just my opinion), for the foreseeable future, any non-productivity use of headsets will wear off as novelty.
We will power through the isolation and awkwardness of headsets for the right productivity tools.
But so far it seems that too much energy is going to entertainment and social concepts.
Edit: I see replacing the mouse, in mouse heavy productive activities, as the main use case for headsets.
Drawing, diagramming, navigating visualizations, reviewing large project timelines.
And then you take it off.
And then, incremental improvements to increase wearing time without eye strain, etc.
I do like the vision pro concept of immersive video and pictures to capture memories. That's definitely a nice-to-have feature.
Please don’t erase Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning out of Tesla’s history. They were the ones with that idea of making EVs sexy and then Elon came along and slowly ‘manoeuvred’ them out. He wanted to be known as the founder.
He”s a good marketer, but not a good ideas person or leader.
Look at the cyber truck, hyperloop, twitter and his crazy and damaging rants on twitter.
I tried it for the first time last night and I was not too impressed. It felt like a solution in search of a problem.
For the past decade Apple’s product lineup has pretty much remained the same (faster, lighter, etc), while they invested heavily in spatial computing (flop) and autonomous vehicles (scrapped). All while totally neglecting the industry they pioneered (Siri) and should have been perfecting. Instead, OpenAI came along and ate their lunch and Apple was caught completely flat-footed. And now they’re way behind.
It’s shocking to me how bad the above bets and non-investments have played out for Apple. Tim Cook needs to ride off into the sunset. It’s been a good ride. He ran the business well. They need an innovative CEO at the helm that can make better bets.
> For the past decade Apple’s product lineup has pretty much remained the same
You seem to have forgotten the M1 Mac, which was released in 2020. It was followed by the complete overhaul and revitalization of the Mac lineup, all to critical and popular acclaim.
I'd prefer them to keep using Intel, if you ask me. M1 brings to me nothing but issues with different architecture. So much that I had to switch to Linux because can't take it anymore.
Don't really feel it faster than Intel, TBH. May be better regarding battery, but who cares, definitely not me, working from AC outlet 24/7.
I think that depends on how you're defining product lineup here. Apple doesn't sell the M1 chip itself, so really the product lineup remained unchanged other than shipping with a new processor.
The watch is the most recent new product I can think of from Apple and that was 9 years ago.
if by "complete overhaul and revitalization of the Mac lineup" you mean took their own chip production in-house, i agree. most revolutionary thing Apple has done since the iPhone.
I’d say “way” is a stretch, and the technologies that largely are making it such could be argued were popularized by ggml which was written originally for the M1 platform.
You seem to have forgotten that "Dodge swapped out the Chrysler engine for a Mitsubishi engine" isn't much of an innovation claim. Tim Cook is a bean counter. He's done nothing at Apple except add a couple of iPhone accessories and optimize the supply chain, which is all the M1 Mac was, a slightly optimized Steve Jobs creation.
Perhaps but after a spike in 2020-21 their Mac sales are about where they were back in the Intel days.
If you take into account the inflation since ~2017 M1 hasn’t really been that extraordinarily successful and their past couple of quarters were the worst in the last 10 years or so.
The Age of Diminishing Return for Digital Innovations began right after the smartphone and it has only become more pronounced since.
My layperson’s prediction for the next big thing is cheaper and cheaper techs. I believe that there will be a race to the bottom. Both hardware and software will become commodity. Even all these new AI technologies will become commodities. The true Cyberpunk take is that technology is boring and commonplace.
Lots of amazing hardware is still way too expensive to make it into ordinary consumer hands, or hasn't even been invented yet.
What's keeping the future bleak is a low business appetite for risk. The wringing out of current tech for every last cent will eventually stop when there's no other way to profit but actual R&D. Until then, yeah things will be boring nonsense like AI and ridiculous marketing. We're in the doldrums until some heads start to roll.
I can see that happening. My vision for the future is that voice assistants and LLMs will converge into something as useful and powerful as “Computer” in Star Trek. And that this assistant that will know you and all of your accounts/online profiles, will only need a microphone and an internet connection to function.
So the Apple Watch, for example, could be everything you need to carry around because the voice assistant can literally do everything you can possible think of (besides consume social media and YouTube content).
I think it's worse than that. It's an age when technological innovation is not only diminishingly useful, it's actively, primarily, intended to hurt our interests. Surveillance and enshittification and advertising have become the reason for innovation, and actual benefit to consumers is secondary and shallow.
My prediction is that the combination of AI and robotics will conquer specific business applications, and in time will make its way into consumer markets. Think iRobot & robot lawnmowers, but for way broader applications.
Within the next couple decades there will be another disruptive innovation in a new hardware form factor. Maybe not AR/VR goggles but something else that no one beyond a few visionaries is even thinking about today.
OpenAI isn’t really a competitor to Siri. It’s a competitor to Google Search. And Apple has never been in the search market.
OpenAI doesn’t work without internet. Siri does. OpenAI can’t do anything on your phone. Siri can. They’re fundamentally different services.
Yes, whatever Apple does with Siri next will be LLM based and will compete with other on-device LLM assistants. But I expect that to be a fairly different market from the cloud-based LLM assistants.
Hell, the next Siri might just forward questions to a third party cloud based LLM assistant for answers to complex questions. Like it does with google now and did with wolfram alpha at one point
Though I expect Apple is also waiting for the quality of LLMl AIs to be good enough. Even ChatGPT 4 isn’t really good enough to be trusted. They’re way too confident when they should be answering “I don’t know” or “I’m unsure but I’m guessing the answer is: …”
Like, what Microsoft is doing is absolutely reckless. It’s insane to integrate an AI assistant that constantly and confidently lies to you into the OS.
It’s not a competitor to Siri…yet. But it’s pretty easy to see the two converging in the near future. The best way to make sure that your voice assistant is used and useful is to back it with an LLM that literally does and knows everything. That’s the future OpenAI is chasing, and the one Apple should be chasing. I’m hopeful that this year brings some quick advancements in this area. But judging by the fact that it’s a year behind OpenAI in the timing, it’s hard to believe that Apple isn’t behind right now.
I’m confused. Which of Apple’s lunch is OpenAI eating? OpenAI does not offer a voice assistant that competes with Siri. Google and Amazon do, and their usage is way down as well; voice assistants in general have lost consumer preference.
You must not have tried the voice feature in the ChatGPT app yet. Try it out, it’s amazing. It pairs the power and functionality of a conversational voice assistant with all the power of ChatGPT and LLMs. Obviously the integration isn’t as convenient as Siri’s yet, but the utility is infinitely higher.
My point is that it seems pretty clear that the future is in the space that OpenAI is right now. And that isn’t a bet that Apple was investing in very heavily.
Not yet. Voice assistants will massively benefit from LLM integration which will benefit OpenAI for sure.
It's just that nobody has built one yet, I'm surprised because it's a very suitable application. But I think the cost is much higher than the current scripted models, which means there must be a payment model attached. Right now all the major voice assistants are free and I have a feeling they're all waiting to see who makes the first paid LLM-based product, and how the market reacts.
> All while totally neglecting the industry they pioneered (Siri) and should have been perfecting.
Going by the rumors, there should be some interesting announcements at WWDC that may explain where all their effort has been going instead of improving the current version of Siri.
> They need an innovative CEO at the helm that can make better bets.
ARM chips maybe? How the hell do you space something like that out? That's like the only thing of consequence that any of these companies have achieved since 2020
The gushing of the Apple faithful was eye rolling.
> Om Malik, who has been writing about tech since tech reporters used to write about calculators, he was even more effusive. “It’s amazing! It’s incredible!” he enthused. “You can feel a vibration in the universe!”
I often look to my children to help portend the future. They had a demo of it last week on Spring Break. Needless to say, they were wowed. It’s the first version of the product, folks. Yes, it’s expensive and hard to justify its cost. But, it is work like that pushes us beyond the edge of what we know and what we have. It inspires our creativity. And, yes it may take time but people want something like this because it has the power to suspend disbelief and transport you to new worlds. Thank you Apple for taking a shot.
Everyone's impressed with VR the first few times. For me that was 1991 and 1993 but unfortunately it's not that much better today with Quest so I see zero point in trying AVP.
But did they buy it? That's the question. When the first iPhone launched people actually bough it instead of just being wowed by it and then walking away.
A lot of commercially failed products were successful on wowing people. Making people buy it so you can be profitable is the real deal. You don't make money wowing tire kickers.
No. As I admit in the comment, it’s too expensive. It’s similar to the Mac II, the first color Mac, which was also, for the time, inaccessible to most households. But, it often takes a few tries before a technology vision sticks.
The idea that 400K units of this is a "big flop" requires some sort of fundamentally broken thinking (that applies to AAPL as well, if they have a similar view), wildly out of touch with reality.
The reality distortion field is dead. Perhaps the memo was missed.
Apple is so huge, with such a large and fervent fanbase, they could literally release the MacBook Wheel per the Onion it would still probably sell a couple hundred thousand units.
It's not like they're selling at small volumes at first, i.e. to early adopters who love it and will convince their friends to be later adopters. Early adopters are mostly either returning it or saying it's basically shelfware now.
"It remains to be seen if the Apple Wheel will catch on in the business world where people use computers for actual work instead of just dicking around" resonates for whenever Apple/Meta claim a VR headset is a productivity/business tool.
"everything is just a few 100 clicks away"... sounds like Apple's regulatory compliance. Might become mandatory if you want to use side-loading/3rd party app stores.
The article says they spent 10 billion developing the Vision pro. If they sell less than a million units and no one is actually using it (so there's no software ecosystem being developed for it) then it's a flop.
What an interesting number! The original iPhone is reported to cost only $150M (~$225M today) to develop. Sure, Apple from 2006 is not the same as today's Apple, but I find it still amusing that they try to create a new revolution with throwing money around, instead of a real new idea, like the iPhone was.
Only if you are thinking about it on a small scale. If it will have a second iteration, which becomes a huge hit, then all that 10 billion R&D was happily spent.
Based on some reports that’s way below their estimates and they were forced to cut production even before releasing it in other markets. That’s basically the definition of a “flop”..
Because 400K units of this kind of product, at this price point, with this lack of “killer app” solving a problem people didn’t know they had, is a phenomenal success.
If they expected …that… to sell millions of units straight away, well, as I wrote.
Appl is not interest in niche products. they are not in biz to sell 200 products at 400K units each. they are in the biz to sell 20 overpriced products at 30M units/year each.
Sort of. That's the shape of their portfolio and long-term strategy, for sure, but they clearly didn't target "30M units/year" for the launch of Vision Pro any more so than they've targeted that scale for for AppleTV or the Airport and Time Machine product lines.
It was plainly a test of both manufacturing and market. To the GP's point, I think it's hard for anyone on the outsjde to judge whether they hit their marks for it or not right now. It certainly wasn't grossly short, as there's no indication that they overshot manufacturing by an order of magnitude or something, but it certainly could have been disappointing. We really can't guess right now.
Good, traditional reporting might be able to surface some insight with real footwork and investigation. Armchair blogspam writing like the article is pointless and is really just clickbait.
Innovator's Dilemma demonstrated wonderfully right here.
If VR is the next big thing, but will take years of niche smaller profit margin products to launch it, established tech companies will struggle to justify the products existence wherein a smaller player could go all in, achieve roughly equivalent results, and be quite content.
I don't think it's really a question of how many units they sell.
It's more how quickly those units sell. How many get returned. How much activity is happening on the platform.
Apple knows all of those numbers. They also know what the potential improvements are and they probably have a really good idea what improvements would move the needle on the numbers that matter.
If Apple kill the AVP it may well look odd from the outside but they'll be well informed.
Funny - To put things in perspective, The Wii U sold about 14M units if I am not terribly mistaken, and is considered a flop so legendary that almost ended Nintendo.
Now take in consideration that Nintendo is a fraction of the size of Apple.
400k units is nothing, less than a rounding error for a company the size of Apple. They are not in the business of selling some hundred thousand units of hardware.
How many Mac Pro's have ever sold? Or the Pro Display XDR that costs more than the Vision Pro... Apple are in the business of generating hype and a ladder of hype and glam around what would otherwise be boxes of electronics. They then sell millions at the bottom end whilst everyone aspires for debt to buy the high end.
TVs, computer monitors, actual conversation, and books are just too "good enough" for VR to compete.
After owning a Quest 3 for a while, it's just too isolating and cumbersome an experience. It can't compete with the freedom of my laptop when I want to be in the digital world and it can't compete with legitimate social interaction when I want to be with people.
The biggest place it can compete is games, but outside of a few really solid, and really compelling experiences, most games in VR aren't enough to warrant strapping it to your face.
VR is still missing the killer app/experience to take off. Video games aren't it for most people.
I can't see VR ever being a thing beyond video games and maybe some forms of other media. People are social creatures. The idea is that people want to sit around staring into goggles rather than interacting with other human beings is the kind of weird stuff that gets baked up by socially underdeveloped Big Tech nerds.
Unless the form factor can be significantly minimized this is not going to be the next iPhone.
Looking forward to this comment ending up in some HN retrospective on the success of Vision Pro 20 years from now like some of those old iPhone takes from the mid 2000s lol.
The killer app might be live sports. Did you see the guys setup watching the Masters? Having one of the best seats in the house to your favorite team from the comfort of home would be amazing. But that experience is not available.
It really is too isolating. You can have the coolest immersive experiences but at the end of the day no one can see you do it. You get done with an "adventure," to take off your headset in an empty room. That comedown is worse than the actual experience in the headset.
Until they figure out Star Wars hologram style communication VR will forever be in the niche category.
I love Apple swung for the fences. I bought one, but ended up returning it within the window.
The technology is amazing, with a few caveats, but they shot themselves in the foot with the launch.
They had no 3rd party software at launch. Developers couldn’t get the device ahead of time, at most you could get two short hands on labs if you flew to one of a handful of cities in the world.
Apple didn’t have anything amazing themselves to keep people coming back. Personas are interesting but not enough. Mac Virtual Display is neat but not going to sell 2 million units.
But that’s OK. That’s what third parties are for. But basically no one was there. Between the issue above and knowing how few would sell it didn’t make sense. Apple should have been paying companies to seed the launch with cool/useful apps. Enhanced ports from other systems, wild ideas, anything. Apple’s secrecy probably meant they weren’t going to do this.
Hopefully they show some great stuff at WWDC. Apple has the money to keep it going for quite a while while they fix the price and get some killer apps. But developer sentiment towards Apple in general isn’t good and some cool possibilities for apps would likely require more room data than I think Apple gives apps for privacy reasons.
I do want to see where it goes. The Apple Watch took a while to find its real place, but it was cheaper and had a more obvious initial value proposition.
—-
Meanwhile, Meta is losing $1B a month on AR/VR. “Why would I want a Vision Pro? A Quest 3 is the same for $3000 less.” isn’t doing them enough favors it seems.
I feel like Meta's basic problem is the exact reverse of Apple's: literally the only thing the Quest platform is good at is specific, isolated pieces of immersive content, with nothing to connect them or make them "Meta-y", to the point that there's no reason to even stick with the Quest OS over casting from Steam on a PC.
I agree. I had a Quest 2. It was fine, could’ve used some hardware improvements that I’m sure the 3 fixed.
But it’s just an overcomplicated game launcher. The environment between VR apps isn’t important or memorable in any way. And once you’re in the game it could be any piece of VR hardware. It’s just a commodity. I think the main reason it’s popular is it just doesn’t seem to have much direct competition (stand alone VR headsets).
Apple chose a few differentiators like ultra-high resolution, entirely hands free (no controller) operation, and a ton of processing power relative to a Quest. That means they’re capable of doing things no one else could, if they can find compelling things to do.
I had one. Yeah you could watch movies. Ok. But can do that on my phone or iPad or computer or TV. It may be a different experience, but it’s not something only the VP can do.
I was referring to compelling things that existing devices can’t do well. There don’t seem to be many/any now, let alone at launch.
I saw Vision Pro demos with extending a MacOS desktop into the field of view, and I was highly intrigued, even at that price, as I've been hoping for something like this since Google Glass (which yes, I have). Everything seemed perfect until a reviewer stated that it only worked with a single monitor display, and I was like "what!?" This seemed entirely a waste of the concept!
My normal desktop is 3x 50" TV's I work in front of, which is more or less what my first thought of doing in Vision Pro with their ability to pull in the Mac desktop, but I would want it as multiple displays as well, same as I use my displays today. Only a single desktop seemed unnecessarily limiting, and apparently I'm not alone as someone has even come up with a product (Splitscreen app) to expand on this at least to 2, but it's still hackish and far from ideal.
Maybe this is a Mac limitation, as looking at what sort of Mac I would need to support a Vision Pro indicated I would need M3 Pro to do 2x displays, or a M3 Max for 3x displays. This seemed absurd as I am typing this on a 7-8 year old dell xps driving 3 displays at 4k on an intel gpu, and a brand new M3 needs a top spec Pro or Max to do so?
If I could replicate my 3x desktop experience in Vision Pro, I had honestly considered maybe even trying a MacOS system again (I use Linux for the past 20 years full time), but without at least that, it's all a half-baked tech demo today. Ideally I could even pull in application windows from the desktop apart into Vision Pro space as well, but multiple desktops otherwise would be the barrier to entry.
Here's to hope Collabora/Valve hasn't given up on XR Desktop for Linux VR Desktop integration entirely yet.
Regardless of limitations on the Mac side, there's simply no way to stream data into the Vision Pro fast enough. WiFi can only come close with very heavy compression and a low bar for reliability. One 1080p60 uncompressed video stream is 3.2Gb/s, already well beyond what WiFi can be relied upon to deliver. The existing single 4k desktop streaming is pushing the limits of low-latency, high-quality compression.
You’re forgetting about foveated rendering. You don’t need the 4k60 stream if you’re not looking at it, and you can only look at one screen at once. I think it’s doable.
And yet my Quest will do 6 screens just fine. You don't need every the content of each screen to update at 60-120fps. You only need it's representation to move smoothly.
If I had a video or game in every screen then yes, I might need the bandwidth. But most screens are mostly static with only the cursor and my input making any changes.
You can have more ultrawide retina displays going than your neck will let you crane your head at.
Only one display needs be hardware, the others are virtual.
PS. Separately, for real displays, most likely your Intel is doing DisplayLink (and most likely not retina resolution), while the Mac is not compressing the video. The Mac can also support a slew of DisplayLink monitors if you get a DisplayLink driver. Elegato and others use the standard driver to run their monitor accessories like Elegato's teleprompter, but you can also use DisplayLink on lower end Macbooks that only support 2 or 3 uncompressed 4K+ retina screens at once as well as on certain docks that split to multiple DisplayLink screens.
I've had the HTC Vive, bought a million games, done virtual desktop and then last year bought the Quest 3. The fact you can pick it up and get going without tethering to a computer or setting up base stations and see through it is amazing for €500.
Had a friend show me the Vision Pro and couldn't believe the cost and how similar it was to the Quest 3. I asked him if you can install Steam etc and he's like nah... ok so you paid €4500 to look at a dinosaur tech demo and do a virtual desktop.
It just doesn't make sense why anyone would buy one over the Quest other than to show people in public they can afford a 5k device and have people looking at them
The lack of features/services you describe are all software: which explains exactly why they’re so expensive.
The displays they’re using is in limited supply. And they primarily want to get the headsets into the hand of developers to make apps for them. If some enthusiasts buy them and give them some feedback for OS development that’s also great. The high price makes it more likely that the AVP doesn’t get bought by people that Apple doesn’t have any interest in getting it yet.
You also gotta keep in mind that the AVP has an incredibly powerful processor. That drives a lot of the cost and downsides compared to the quest (a lot of heat from those chips.. metal helps conduct it away). I think the point is to get developers to start thinking primarily about developing professional apps. Apple can’t afford to be stuck with just a casual consumer market. Quest will be too strong there. I’m sure they will launch a “non pro” Apple Vision for this market eventually (I suspect when they can get the same processing power as AVP with less power consumption so they can drop the fan and integrate a battery). But they need the halo-effect of a “pro” product line to drive sales.
Readit News
All that said, I really didn't like the tone of this article. Yes, I agree that "big tech" has caused a lot of harm in society. But it's not that hard to separate that from many good things it has done, and this article felt so cynical like it just wanted to piss in everyone's soup.
We should celebrate it when big companies take real risks, even if they swing and miss. What would the author of this article prefer, more stock buybacks?
It’s much easier to tear down something than it is to create something. It also garners a lot more clicks for someone whose primary contribution in life is pontification on the internet belittling the achievements of people who actually -do- something and -create- and take risks. Those people still do, after all, have to eat so thank god for advertising platforms and breathless naysayers.
The experience you get is probably better than any existing VR headset but I struggle to see myself valuing it at more than $500. The FOV and resolution still both suck and the headset is super bulky. I would rather use a phone or laptop/tablet to co some content since it’s much more pixel dense. If they can make a slimmer, lighter version with much higher pixel density it might be worth getting one but the tech is nowhere near there yet.
You can argue that any of these technologies existed before and they “followed”, but that’s a pretty distorted view when apple made the market - they didn’t take market share from others.
Deleted Comment
Apple's miscalculation here was overestimating the market's price tolerance for a category whose prosumers have already explored for 1/3 Apple's price point.
If this had been 5 years ago at half the price, they'd own the category.
There's a wide consensus that this kind of tech is going to have a negative effect on society and how humans interact with each other, but there's also this myth that this is inevitable and that we just have to accept it.
But it's not reality: there's no reason for it to be inevitable, and it's just that the most wealthy companies are pushing it hard, because they see it as a big money maker.
For example, if we really are concerned with climate change do we really want companies spending small fortunes to either fail or build an expensive product that takes a ton of resources to create? If we really are worried about health concerns related to excessive screen use, do we really want companies trying to strap screens on your face? If we're really concerned with inflation, is it beneficial for a company to spend this much money and resources to try to build a very expensive product that could very well become more of a novelty than anything else?
Wish there was something like https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructive_vote_of_no_conf... in company culture, as in you can only express "I'm against that" , if you suggest some other similar bold endeavor. Not this "let's milk bettsy to death and then loose the farm" mindset that uses bold leaps as ammonition.
Nah, we don't want any of that.
But, some engineers got to work on some new green field tech which is pretty cool. All to often at work I'm presented with interesting problems that I have to solve with hacks / least amount of resources. I envy those that know how to convince a company to take swings.
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
Like, real people.
Big swings in tech almost always fail when we push tech fantasies but don't understand humans.
And my fear is they actually set the industry back several years, because people start to believe a concept isn't desired by the populace, when really it was just the execution.
For example, thank goodness Elon came along and rescued the image of the electric car by grasping we humans want good-looking fast cars.
The strange EV designs out of Detroit always killed me.
Yet, it was hard for Tesla to overcome the impression left by those past failures.
I hope the industry doesn't abandon headsets because of the execution mistakes we're seeing now.
What I loved about Jobs is he understood humans so well.
I miss that about him.
His big swings felt natural once in your hand.
Tech CEOs are often taking big swings, but we tech people can be so nerdy sometimes that we struggle to understand how to make products look fashionable and feel natural to use.
That was Jobs magic sauce. Apple struggles with that now.
MP3 players we're clunky until Jobs added the scroll wheel.
Just a stunningly natural solution.
In comparison, the vision pro is clearly too bulky to be practical.
I was excited for the vision pro. But when I tried it, I was shocked at how front heavy it is.
I think it's a solid product for certain niche uses.
But we need a Jobs or Elon, to identify the heart of what humans really need out of a headset.
Zuckerberg is this generation's Bill Gates. Smart. Successful. But mentally and emotionally disconnected from the rest of humanity.
The successful headset innovator needs to shed the 'ready player one' fantasy that we humans want to live in a digital universe or to consume large amounts of entertainment this way.
In my opinion (just my opinion), for the foreseeable future, any non-productivity use of headsets will wear off as novelty.
We will power through the isolation and awkwardness of headsets for the right productivity tools.
But so far it seems that too much energy is going to entertainment and social concepts.
Edit: I see replacing the mouse, in mouse heavy productive activities, as the main use case for headsets.
Drawing, diagramming, navigating visualizations, reviewing large project timelines.
And then you take it off.
And then, incremental improvements to increase wearing time without eye strain, etc.
I do like the vision pro concept of immersive video and pictures to capture memories. That's definitely a nice-to-have feature.
He”s a good marketer, but not a good ideas person or leader.
Look at the cyber truck, hyperloop, twitter and his crazy and damaging rants on twitter.
For the past decade Apple’s product lineup has pretty much remained the same (faster, lighter, etc), while they invested heavily in spatial computing (flop) and autonomous vehicles (scrapped). All while totally neglecting the industry they pioneered (Siri) and should have been perfecting. Instead, OpenAI came along and ate their lunch and Apple was caught completely flat-footed. And now they’re way behind.
It’s shocking to me how bad the above bets and non-investments have played out for Apple. Tim Cook needs to ride off into the sunset. It’s been a good ride. He ran the business well. They need an innovative CEO at the helm that can make better bets.
You seem to have forgotten the M1 Mac, which was released in 2020. It was followed by the complete overhaul and revitalization of the Mac lineup, all to critical and popular acclaim.
Don't really feel it faster than Intel, TBH. May be better regarding battery, but who cares, definitely not me, working from AC outlet 24/7.
Apple's Silicon Magic Is Over: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOlXmv9EiPo
The watch is the most recent new product I can think of from Apple and that was 9 years ago.
I’d say “way” is a stretch, and the technologies that largely are making it such could be argued were popularized by ggml which was written originally for the M1 platform.
Perhaps but after a spike in 2020-21 their Mac sales are about where they were back in the Intel days.
If you take into account the inflation since ~2017 M1 hasn’t really been that extraordinarily successful and their past couple of quarters were the worst in the last 10 years or so.
My layperson’s prediction for the next big thing is cheaper and cheaper techs. I believe that there will be a race to the bottom. Both hardware and software will become commodity. Even all these new AI technologies will become commodities. The true Cyberpunk take is that technology is boring and commonplace.
Lots of amazing hardware is still way too expensive to make it into ordinary consumer hands, or hasn't even been invented yet.
What's keeping the future bleak is a low business appetite for risk. The wringing out of current tech for every last cent will eventually stop when there's no other way to profit but actual R&D. Until then, yeah things will be boring nonsense like AI and ridiculous marketing. We're in the doldrums until some heads start to roll.
So the Apple Watch, for example, could be everything you need to carry around because the voice assistant can literally do everything you can possible think of (besides consume social media and YouTube content).
OpenAI doesn’t work without internet. Siri does. OpenAI can’t do anything on your phone. Siri can. They’re fundamentally different services.
Yes, whatever Apple does with Siri next will be LLM based and will compete with other on-device LLM assistants. But I expect that to be a fairly different market from the cloud-based LLM assistants.
Hell, the next Siri might just forward questions to a third party cloud based LLM assistant for answers to complex questions. Like it does with google now and did with wolfram alpha at one point
Though I expect Apple is also waiting for the quality of LLMl AIs to be good enough. Even ChatGPT 4 isn’t really good enough to be trusted. They’re way too confident when they should be answering “I don’t know” or “I’m unsure but I’m guessing the answer is: …”
Like, what Microsoft is doing is absolutely reckless. It’s insane to integrate an AI assistant that constantly and confidently lies to you into the OS.
My point is that it seems pretty clear that the future is in the space that OpenAI is right now. And that isn’t a bet that Apple was investing in very heavily.
It's just that nobody has built one yet, I'm surprised because it's a very suitable application. But I think the cost is much higher than the current scripted models, which means there must be a payment model attached. Right now all the major voice assistants are free and I have a feeling they're all waiting to see who makes the first paid LLM-based product, and how the market reacts.
Going by the rumors, there should be some interesting announcements at WWDC that may explain where all their effort has been going instead of improving the current version of Siri.
They sold more AirPods than there are people in the United States.
ARM chips maybe? How the hell do you space something like that out? That's like the only thing of consequence that any of these companies have achieved since 2020
> Om Malik, who has been writing about tech since tech reporters used to write about calculators, he was even more effusive. “It’s amazing! It’s incredible!” he enthused. “You can feel a vibration in the universe!”
I mean, oof.
Great with the numbers, bad with innovation.
They need a Nadella -- e.g. someone who follows and navigates trends with great skill.
Cook knows he needs to innovate, but he doesn't know how.
I honestly think he follows the rumors moreso than the rumors follow him.
Media: Is Apple going to do a smartwatch?
Cook: Hey guys, we should do a smartwatch.
Media: Is Apple going to do a car?
Cook: Hey, guys. Maybe we should do a car.
Media: Is Apple going to do a headset?
Etc. etc.
The smartwatch worked out. But honestly, I feel that was moreso accidental low-hanging fruit.
Like Ballmer, Cook has done an amazing job maximizing shareholder value by good old financial execution.
But, in an industry like tech, you can only live off of old products for so long.
> Cook: Hey, guys. Maybe we should do a car.
It was Jobs’ idea, not Tim’s.
But did they buy it? That's the question. When the first iPhone launched people actually bough it instead of just being wowed by it and then walking away.
A lot of commercially failed products were successful on wowing people. Making people buy it so you can be profitable is the real deal. You don't make money wowing tire kickers.
The reality distortion field is dead. Perhaps the memo was missed.
It's not like they're selling at small volumes at first, i.e. to early adopters who love it and will convince their friends to be later adopters. Early adopters are mostly either returning it or saying it's basically shelfware now.
https://www.theonion.com/apple-introduces-revolutionary-new-...
"It remains to be seen if the Apple Wheel will catch on in the business world where people use computers for actual work instead of just dicking around" resonates for whenever Apple/Meta claim a VR headset is a productivity/business tool.
"everything is just a few 100 clicks away"... sounds like Apple's regulatory compliance. Might become mandatory if you want to use side-loading/3rd party app stores.
So it’s limited as hell in terms of distribution
If they expected …that… to sell millions of units straight away, well, as I wrote.
It was plainly a test of both manufacturing and market. To the GP's point, I think it's hard for anyone on the outsjde to judge whether they hit their marks for it or not right now. It certainly wasn't grossly short, as there's no indication that they overshot manufacturing by an order of magnitude or something, but it certainly could have been disappointing. We really can't guess right now.
Good, traditional reporting might be able to surface some insight with real footwork and investigation. Armchair blogspam writing like the article is pointless and is really just clickbait.
If VR is the next big thing, but will take years of niche smaller profit margin products to launch it, established tech companies will struggle to justify the products existence wherein a smaller player could go all in, achieve roughly equivalent results, and be quite content.
It's more how quickly those units sell. How many get returned. How much activity is happening on the platform.
Apple knows all of those numbers. They also know what the potential improvements are and they probably have a really good idea what improvements would move the needle on the numbers that matter.
If Apple kill the AVP it may well look odd from the outside but they'll be well informed.
Now take in consideration that Nintendo is a fraction of the size of Apple.
400k units is nothing, less than a rounding error for a company the size of Apple. They are not in the business of selling some hundred thousand units of hardware.
After owning a Quest 3 for a while, it's just too isolating and cumbersome an experience. It can't compete with the freedom of my laptop when I want to be in the digital world and it can't compete with legitimate social interaction when I want to be with people.
The biggest place it can compete is games, but outside of a few really solid, and really compelling experiences, most games in VR aren't enough to warrant strapping it to your face.
I can't see VR ever being a thing beyond video games and maybe some forms of other media. People are social creatures. The idea is that people want to sit around staring into goggles rather than interacting with other human beings is the kind of weird stuff that gets baked up by socially underdeveloped Big Tech nerds.
Unless the form factor can be significantly minimized this is not going to be the next iPhone.
Looking forward to this comment ending up in some HN retrospective on the success of Vision Pro 20 years from now like some of those old iPhone takes from the mid 2000s lol.
But we don’t have that amazing thing for AR yet either.
Until they figure out Star Wars hologram style communication VR will forever be in the niche category.
The technology is amazing, with a few caveats, but they shot themselves in the foot with the launch.
They had no 3rd party software at launch. Developers couldn’t get the device ahead of time, at most you could get two short hands on labs if you flew to one of a handful of cities in the world.
Apple didn’t have anything amazing themselves to keep people coming back. Personas are interesting but not enough. Mac Virtual Display is neat but not going to sell 2 million units.
But that’s OK. That’s what third parties are for. But basically no one was there. Between the issue above and knowing how few would sell it didn’t make sense. Apple should have been paying companies to seed the launch with cool/useful apps. Enhanced ports from other systems, wild ideas, anything. Apple’s secrecy probably meant they weren’t going to do this.
Hopefully they show some great stuff at WWDC. Apple has the money to keep it going for quite a while while they fix the price and get some killer apps. But developer sentiment towards Apple in general isn’t good and some cool possibilities for apps would likely require more room data than I think Apple gives apps for privacy reasons.
I do want to see where it goes. The Apple Watch took a while to find its real place, but it was cheaper and had a more obvious initial value proposition.
—-
Meanwhile, Meta is losing $1B a month on AR/VR. “Why would I want a Vision Pro? A Quest 3 is the same for $3000 less.” isn’t doing them enough favors it seems.
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/meta-loses-another-38-billion-...
But it’s just an overcomplicated game launcher. The environment between VR apps isn’t important or memorable in any way. And once you’re in the game it could be any piece of VR hardware. It’s just a commodity. I think the main reason it’s popular is it just doesn’t seem to have much direct competition (stand alone VR headsets).
Apple chose a few differentiators like ultra-high resolution, entirely hands free (no controller) operation, and a ton of processing power relative to a Quest. That means they’re capable of doing things no one else could, if they can find compelling things to do.
I was referring to compelling things that existing devices can’t do well. There don’t seem to be many/any now, let alone at launch.
My normal desktop is 3x 50" TV's I work in front of, which is more or less what my first thought of doing in Vision Pro with their ability to pull in the Mac desktop, but I would want it as multiple displays as well, same as I use my displays today. Only a single desktop seemed unnecessarily limiting, and apparently I'm not alone as someone has even come up with a product (Splitscreen app) to expand on this at least to 2, but it's still hackish and far from ideal.
Maybe this is a Mac limitation, as looking at what sort of Mac I would need to support a Vision Pro indicated I would need M3 Pro to do 2x displays, or a M3 Max for 3x displays. This seemed absurd as I am typing this on a 7-8 year old dell xps driving 3 displays at 4k on an intel gpu, and a brand new M3 needs a top spec Pro or Max to do so?
If I could replicate my 3x desktop experience in Vision Pro, I had honestly considered maybe even trying a MacOS system again (I use Linux for the past 20 years full time), but without at least that, it's all a half-baked tech demo today. Ideally I could even pull in application windows from the desktop apart into Vision Pro space as well, but multiple desktops otherwise would be the barrier to entry.
Here's to hope Collabora/Valve hasn't given up on XR Desktop for Linux VR Desktop integration entirely yet.
Besides you could use eye tracking to only transmit what's being seen in high quality.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11ay
If I had a video or game in every screen then yes, I might need the bandwidth. But most screens are mostly static with only the cursor and my input making any changes.
https://immersed.com/
You can have more ultrawide retina displays going than your neck will let you crane your head at.
Only one display needs be hardware, the others are virtual.
PS. Separately, for real displays, most likely your Intel is doing DisplayLink (and most likely not retina resolution), while the Mac is not compressing the video. The Mac can also support a slew of DisplayLink monitors if you get a DisplayLink driver. Elegato and others use the standard driver to run their monitor accessories like Elegato's teleprompter, but you can also use DisplayLink on lower end Macbooks that only support 2 or 3 uncompressed 4K+ retina screens at once as well as on certain docks that split to multiple DisplayLink screens.
Had a friend show me the Vision Pro and couldn't believe the cost and how similar it was to the Quest 3. I asked him if you can install Steam etc and he's like nah... ok so you paid €4500 to look at a dinosaur tech demo and do a virtual desktop.
It just doesn't make sense why anyone would buy one over the Quest other than to show people in public they can afford a 5k device and have people looking at them
The displays they’re using is in limited supply. And they primarily want to get the headsets into the hand of developers to make apps for them. If some enthusiasts buy them and give them some feedback for OS development that’s also great. The high price makes it more likely that the AVP doesn’t get bought by people that Apple doesn’t have any interest in getting it yet.
You also gotta keep in mind that the AVP has an incredibly powerful processor. That drives a lot of the cost and downsides compared to the quest (a lot of heat from those chips.. metal helps conduct it away). I think the point is to get developers to start thinking primarily about developing professional apps. Apple can’t afford to be stuck with just a casual consumer market. Quest will be too strong there. I’m sure they will launch a “non pro” Apple Vision for this market eventually (I suspect when they can get the same processing power as AVP with less power consumption so they can drop the fan and integrate a battery). But they need the halo-effect of a “pro” product line to drive sales.