Comment by lbourdages
13 hours ago
They failed to come up with a strong selling point. Health is the big seller for Apple Watch. But AVP, at its price point, needs something better than "well you can watch movies on a big screen or work in a café while looking silly".
As a medical device for the vision impaired, AVP has a built-in audience that is used to paying top dollar, especially if paying means just a co-pay. It also eliminates popular disquiet about improper recording--no one will complain about a device that helps the vision impaired get around. Why neither Apple nor Meta went down this path is inexplicable.
I'm partially sighted. I've yet to see an AVP demo that made me want to try one out as an access tool. In fact, everything I've seen so far suggested it would be a hinderance. Can you suggest how it could help? What am I missing?
(I accept, I could book a demo at an Apple Store...)
It absolutely failed to justify its price point IMHO. If it were affordable people would be finding uses for it, but when it is that expensive you basically need a business justification for buying one. That means you won't have a hobbyist community finding new and interesting things to do with it.
This leaves Apple and maybe a handful of subsidized third parties as the only people making applications for it, which is pretty much a guarantee that it will remain a tiny niche industry.
As someone else said, it’s a developer kit. It was supply constrained and priced accordingly. IMO it was a mistake to not just call it a developer’s kit, abd promoting it as a consumer product was just weird.
But I guess the downside of the DK approach is it means telling developers when the “real” device will ship, which I’m not sure anyone knows.
The Apple Vision Pro is basically a developer kit.
This, 100%. The only other headset I was aware of even remotely in AVP's price zip code was the Valve Index, priced at $999 and the AVP was three times that.
And even then I proooobably would've been able to justify it? But no external connectivity at all just sank it for me. Like if it had a DP port on it so I could hook it up to a gaming PC, I would've probably at least picked one up second-hand, possibly even new when my bonus hit but 3 large for... what? Email in my house? Movies shown in a way that makes it damn hard to eat popcorn?
Agree, it’s basically the Apple Lisa all over again. Innovative, but not mass market.
But I think Apple learned some things from the Lisa, even though it barely sold.
I have no interest in using a headset in public or doing work on one.
Watching movies on a big screen would be interesting, but they still do not sell the device in my country in Europe, so I had no way to demo it and judge whether the quality is adequate for a home theater experience.
You might use such a device if you were vision-impaired and it helped you see.
But remember health was a small thing when the watch was launched. Then the focus was on notifications, communications etc. Fitness was more of a ”oh and it also tracks your heart rate”
True. Seems like none of the VR devices have found their killer app.