Comment by ztrww
3 years ago
> The VR gaming market is microscopic compared to what Apple is likely aiming for here. They do not give a single flying fuck about this "established market", nor have they for any other market they've entered. The entire Apple ethos is to completely change the narrative for whatever product category they enter. They did this for phones, for bluetooth audio, for watches, and—whether or not they're ultimately successful—you can bet your ass this is their intent for wearable headsets.
Apple is also the company which released https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Newton back in the day… They turned out to be right at the end but still had to renter the market entirely from scratch after 10 years. So far Apple has been great in “perfecting” products that already exist by doing the right thing at the right time.
They weren’t the first or the second to release a smartphone, smart watch, tablet, BT earphones etc. all of those had established markets and somewhat clear use cases Apple “just” streamlined and turned them into something that normal people would actually want to use. It’s seems a bit to early to do that for VR yet. So in a certain way they are in somewhat uncharted territory.
Whether or not they're successful is irrelevant to the question of what their intent is. But I find it telling that your initial reaction is to reach for a device that failed thirty years ago as if it has any relationship to modern Apple.
They didn't "just" streamline the smartphone. They destroyed virtually overnight the existing dominant players in the smartphone market and within a few years essentially ended the existence of non-smartphones as a market category entirely. They didn't "just" streamline the watch. Again, within five years of entering the market they overtook (in units) shipments of the entire traditional watch industry. Both of these examples are significantly larger and more entrenched than the existing VR gaming market.
Of course not every product of theirs is successful in doing this. But without question, this is their aim a majority of the time.
> find it telling that your initial reaction
Telling what? My point was that Newton was a brilliant idea yet the hardware wasn’t there yet and it didn’t have clear use cases. Both concerns apply for Vision Pro so at this point it’s still closer to the Newton than the iPad
> They didn't "just" streamline the smartphone
They did exactly that which is why it was so brilliant. You could do everything you could with an iPhone with other devices before it came out. It’s just that the experience was quite poor and all other devices were underdeveloped and had serious flaws in comparison (to be fair the first gen iPhone was a pretty lackluster device too).
You could browse the web, watch video content, send messages/emails, listens to music, play games, make video calls. Did Apple invent any of that? The iPhone was a just a device which could do it all with much nicer UX than anything on the market.
VR is very different in that regard.