Comment by hinkley
3 years ago
> Smart watches have been anything but a groundbreaking technological revolution.
I think Apple has made a tactical error here. The days of the shrinking iPhone are long gone, but not forgotten. It was the iPhone 3G that was a turning point for people who hadn't bought an iPhone yet. It was smaller with better battery life.
If the Apple Watch 3 had followed a similar pattern, they would have had to skip adding the next additional sensor to the device, but I think in the long term that would have just delayed us one design cycle but still given us a thinner and lighter watch, which we would have needed for a deeper impact.
Apple needs to do 3 things for the Vision Pro to be successful.
1. Convince enough people to buy one via halo use cases
2. Leverage or buy developer adoption
3. Create a decent enough developer experience to produce high quality apps
On 2 & 3, Apple has a proven track record, or at least amassing enough market share to force developers to ignore deficiencies in 3.
Which means 1 is going to be make-or-break.
The Apple Watch is a great analogy here, because it was evolutionary rather than revolutionary.
It did not let you do anything you couldn't before. It did let you do it better.
Consequently, this won't be (and doesn't need to be) an iPhone level smash success. It just needs to be volume and financially self-sufficient enough to get them to iteration N+X.
Because iteration N+X is "We shrink the iPhone down to a minimally-screened compute/network node, and the Vision SE becomes everyone's must-have companion, and then Apple owns a better-than-iPhone platform."
I think Apple made the right move in trumpeting its non-work use cases, because Apple has let macOS atrophy for enterprise use. And priced-for-work is a trap market they don't need to pursue (see: Microsoft).
But I don't know if most people want a better consumptive device $3500-badly... time, will tell.
Regarding #2 and #3, Apple has been working on this for years. ARKit for instance, is hugely gimmicky if not silly on iPhones, and LIDAR on the same had incredibly limited real world utility for that device. Yet for years they've been deploying millions of equipped devices, building it out, expanding the SDKs, doing developer outreach, and so on. They've even built shared AR spaces when the viewport is just a phone, again despite it being pretty goofy and of limited value.
They've been building towards this for years.
I suspect for most apps supporting the Vision Pro will be supporting variable resolutions (for resizable windows) and clicking a checkbox on the targets.
Surely $3500 and "Pro" in the product name implies they think it'll mostly be used for work? I didn't quite understand why they branded it that way given the heavy consumer focus in the demos. It implies that they intended for it to be a consumer device for a long time and got cold feet at the end when they realized they couldn't reduce the price.
I think it's the other way around -- they expect it will be used for work, so want to focus on hyping it as consumer.
Enterprise will take care of enterprise.
Better to invest the marketing dollars and mindshare on consumer, because that's where they're going to get the volume.