Comment by LordDragonfang
3 years ago
It's a jump from what we've seen in the consumer space. It isn't priced like other consumer VR hardware though, it's 4-8x the price; much closer to enterprise pricing. If you include the wider space with things like the Varjo XR3 (which released 2 years ago at only 2x the price) then it looks a lot less impressive of a jump. Plus there's things like the Bigscreen Beyond which actually manage a slim form factor. Really the only thing Apple has a chance to differentiate on is software, and they've got a lot of catching up to do there.
But they do have a huge head start in apps, movies, tv, games, sports rights compared to the makers of any other device. They are well positioned or make this work by integrating tightly to their own eco-system
> movies, tv, sports rights
2D content in 3D is a gimmick; it's nice to have, but it's not going to sell consoles. And even beyond that it's not a "head start"; almost all of that content is already available on other platforms, even other VR platforms. Just owning the content doesn't get Apple much if anything here.
>apps, games
...I don't know how you can possibly spin it as them having a head start here. Meta has a multi-year lead on them, and PC is even further, in games. Apps will need a lot of work as well - just throwing a 2D app in 3D space doesn't provide a compelling use case. You may as well just use a tablet.
Despite spending a lot of time pushing for AR apps on iPhone, Apple is still way behind on the VR/AR race. They need to get developers working on novel applications that utilize the full possibilities of a headset like this, and they need it yesterday if they don't want Meta to own the space.
Which brings us to the real reason that they released this $3.5k device: it's not actually for consumers, it's ultimately just a fancy, overly-polished dev kit.
Sorry, what I meant was, they have the whole App Store, plus the games in the App Store, plus Apple Arcade etc. These things are packed with games and apps that people care about and use every day.
Those are a few reasons that people will find this device compelling.
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