Comment by njovin
4 hours ago
A better way to frame this might be that Apple tried VR and quickly realized the market wasn't there and moved on.
Compare that to Meta, who went all-in (so much so that they changed the company name) despite apparent overwhelming user apathy toward the product.
The estimates I've seen say that Apple spent ~$10b on their VR program, whereas Meta is in for about $80b.
The Apple Vision is at least two or three generations away hardware wise, it not only has to be several times faster (M8, M9 with a R2 or R3 processors) than what it is. The battery life needs to be better a lot better and it has to be half its current size weight wise.
And the price has to be half as much with all of those improvements. And last but not least the software needs to get even better all of that sounds like iteration over what? 3-4 years.
Fortunate for Apple, the competition is even further away…
Meta had more than 10x the install base of Apple's headset. And they shipped real VR that was compatible day-1 with standards like OpenXR; Apple didn't.
If we're being actually honest with ourselves, Apple did not even try to make a VR headset. They tried to carve out a nonexistent niche with AR, and bashfully wrote it off as a Tim Cook folly like the Apple Car or Airpower.
It would be a better way to frame it if we were strictly talking about VR. But my point was to show Apple is not some infallible genius company, they make plenty of mistakes. Why are we assuming being behind on AI is not a mistake but rather amazing foresight is the issue? We are only considering yeah the bubble bursts and apple is like oh yeah dude we told you hahahaha, but what if the bubble doesn't burst? What if there isn't a bubble and it just evolves naturally into something less exciting and fundamentally useful? Wouldn't it be fair to say Apple was wrong in that case? Why are we congragulating them for a hypothetical right and not worried about the hypothetical wrong, both of which are possibilities.
Yes Meta spent 80 billion sure, but did you know Meta never had a loss-making quarter in their entire history as a public company?
My overall point is that its not as clear cut as Apple is smart for willingly not being good at AI and they will win in the end.