Comment by 59percentmore
3 hours ago
His read on the Apple Vision Pro (both the circumstances of its creation and its path forward) are incorrect in quite the discouraging manner for me. AVP wasn't released early (late, if anything), and it wasn't a dud because of Tim Cook's disinterest.
I also think it's irresponsible to not broach the obvious implication of "PC components becoming prohibitively expensive" + "untold amounts of compute sitting in compute warehouses with nothing to do because the AI companies that used to own them folded". You probably won't even notice when everything in Best Buy becomes a thin client.
> AVP wasn't released early (late, if anything), and it wasn't a dud because of Tim Cook's disinterest.
Depends on what you mean by early.
WAs it released before the market was proven? yes.
Was the whole user experience up to scratch before it was released? no.
As someone who worked on the Quest pro/3 ecosystem, We were shitting our selves, because we knew that apple would only release something when the user experience was right.
Oculus just shat out features as and when performance cycles needed juicing.
Sure the UX was good, but it was less good than I expected. The headset was bulky and surprisingly off balance. It wasn't an all day wearable (i mean the quest pro was actually comfortable by comparison)
The resolution wasn't that great and the only thing you could do with it was either look like a twat recording video or have spreadsheets pasted everywhere. I was expecting an OS where we could put things on work tops, create augmentations to my room, decorate or be creative. Instead we got OSX XR.
Tim Cook was probably mostly disinterested because it didn't seem like a real business opportunity. Wherever AVP fell on the VR/AR spectrum, VR (while having other opportunities) was mostly a niche for high-end gamers and AR, whatever the possibilities in some future idealized form with fashionable glasses that give you lots of information about what/who you're looking at is a long way from reality.
I think it's the opposite. None of the players in XR wanted to be Apple'd, least of all Apple. That is, create a base product that someone else would refine in order to drink their milkshake. Apple delayed the AVP multiple times hoping to avoid getting sniped by Meta and Google et al., each time requiring a partial rebuild as the underlying tech advanced. They would have loved to have been able to get something out when Robert Scoble was initially raving in the late 2010s, but everyone was on the same page about not wanting to sink billions into development only to have to cede the market to someone responding to your strategy. So, instead, they all dragged their feet.
If XR companies had been as "reckless" with their product strategies as mobile companies in the 90s and 2000s, AVP would have had its iPod moment 6 years ago and we'd be hurtling towards the facephone. The market suffered because of the entrenchment of incumbents with all-too-clear memories.
Think Apple fell for the trap of assuming they would eventually solve the glasses form factor and then fell for the second trap of convincing themselves that passthrough VR was the same as their real XR vision.
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It was released to appease investors.
Ultimately as a manager you are held accountable to your investors and the cost-benefit analysis is such that it was the right action to take.
I think you're absolutely right. Apple couldn't be seen as ignoring the gamer geek (or other potential opportunities) space as it wasn't very interesting to them at their scale and that automagical AR was a decade or more away.
Agree. Apple Vision Pro was a dud because the whole VR category is a dud.
People are starting to kinda hate tech. People don't seem to be looking for yet another "smart manacle". Time to move on.