I feel like we're reaching an inflection point where tech-companies are about to discover whether humans are willing to live in an all-digital world, or if they would rather just continue physical reality with digital-enhancements.
Tech companies keep pushing towards all-digital because they carry a lot more power in a world of their own making. They keep trying to get away from solving real-world pain points (e.g. being able to talked to loved ones) to solving for manufactured pain points (e.g. dopamine addiction to short-form content).
Smartphones (still) offer novelty, and there are no alternatives to some of their useful functions, hence popularity. I’ll be livid if smartphone-type devices are popular a century from now.
Multi-monitor support might have made this worthwhile for professional / prosumer users.
But you can only have a single display in VR. My single oldschool physical display works way better. So this limitation makes it an expensive curiosity than a useful tool.
I actually really enjoy mine, and having fun learning how to do iOS/VR development. That being said, until it can run MacOS apps I can't really replace my laptop (instead have to connect it to the AVP). Assuming that's a software limitation and not something that requires upgraded hardware I hope they plan to release that functionality soon
It is highly unlikely that iPads or AVP will ever natively run Mac apps. At best, you would be able to run MacOS as a VM with some clever maintenance/windowing/storage tweaks.
I do, too, and agree with what you're saying. This device is great if you can afford to drop the cash on it and have use cases for which it excels. I would love it to run Mac apps, but am just as happy projecting my Mac to it. Content consumption is great on it, and I really enjoy working with it on. If only my coworkers didn't find my ghostly Persona do off-putting during Zoom calls.
I do use projecting the mac, but it's not a great experience overall. Like it doesn't utilize any of the AVP interaction paradigms and if I want to use a keyboard I have to decide to hook it up to my mac or my AVP
Apple wants you to buy both (as with the iPad), and maybe more importantly wants the OS of new device categories to be much less open (more controllable) than macOS is. So that’s very unlikely.
I mean, i'm all in on apple and have all that stuff. Would be fine if it's up offloading compute to a mac or something like that and make the integration more seamless
Quest 2: 20 million (installs?) from oct'20 - q1'23, so lets say 2.5 years. (makes sense, Qualcomm said 10m in dec'21)
Quest 3 Sold an Estimated 900K-1.5 Million Units in Q4 2023.
Vision Pro is nice and all, but it's such a high price to pay although you're essentially buying a macbook pro. Still, in terms of revenue is still $1.4B for the quarter
This proves that there are at least 400k die-hard-price-insensitive Apple enthusiasts who are willing to spend that much for Apple’s latest gadgets. If I was Apple’s executive, I would double down on more high-priced novel products, even niche ones, that integrate in various ways to the Apple ecosystem.
That's a projection for the rest of the year and probably still way optimistic. It's quite possible that the current trend is for a much smaller number.
Yeah I'm the only person I know who has one (I know one other buyer but they returned it). I'm honestly shocked it's over 100k sold since I feel like i'm in a pretty tech-early-adopter bubble
I think Apple was out of touch releasing such an expensive product with such niche use cases in the current times. If they wanted us to become early adopters and proof-of-concept testers, they should've subsidized the cost, to grow the market while working on improving the device.
This isn’t Amazon. There is no 10 or 20 year vision. These Fortune 500 companies only have visions that last a couple of years, and in some cases a few quarters.
Apple has released dev kits before. Most recently the apple silicon devkits. Those have pretty much universally been explicit and have come with a requirement to return the devkits once consumer hardware capable of being development hardware is released.
They were hoping for consumer (or industry) acceptance. They visibly did not get that.
It doesn’t even support IMAP email credential payloads in provisioning profiles. This is some of the bare minimum required for enterprise use. I haven’t tried to MDM one yet. I don’t even know how you’d supervise one without a port to connect it to AC2.
It’s quite clearly not designed for mainstream use without enterprise features or a consumer price point.
Remember also that hardware pipelines are 2-3 years long. They almost certainly are well into the design of the consumer model that will come out in 18-24 months. By that time, there will be many apps available for them because of the AVP1 being in the hands of tens of thousands of developers for 12+ months.
Except all of their previous developer kits have been about the same cost as the consumer version.
Intel DTK - $999
Apple Silicon DTK - $500
iPhone - No DTK, just released without third party native apps at all.
That combined with how Apple regularly whiffs enterprise support and the fact that it sits right in the middle of their current display prices looks very much like they intended it to be a true consumer/industry release.
Well, with a working simulator and hundreds of thousands of them in the wild, I imagine it is possible to develop for one and test on one without actually buying one of your own.
Then ship it opened up, but perhaps more unpolished, to devs. Right now I think it's lack of success is that it's inbetween both. It's useless as a dev kit, too polished and locked down. Useless as a consumer unit when no one makes things for it.
While Oculus didn't take off, the DK1 had a massive hype and a large community building stuff.
Is there a market for a "simple" Google Glasses type product, to show alerts and overlays in a regular set of glasses?
For productivity, I could see replacing my Apple watch with a pair of Apple Glasses. Useful for alerts and basic data such as exercise stats and GPS overlays, etc.
Add a few buttons to the side of the glasses for core functions.
Is there no market for such a product, or is the tech for this still to primitive?
I own an AppleVision (and am mostly happy with it), but this is not surprising. The current system isn't worth $3500 to consumers.
It is priced at about twice what people will expect, has very limited apps, and very limited "immersive media". Some of that will get better over the next year ... but a promise of "better next year" won't move units today.
From what I remember the number of people who bought a watch was small, but they wore it.
The problem with AVP is that the people who DID buy it can't manufacture reasons to USE it. Apple needed to have a very strong push out of the gate with new content weekly.
No. They didn't. They said it was missing some fitness features they wanted and hoped that software updates or next year's rev would fix that -- which they did.
It was always clear that the form factor was workable and the execution just needed to evolve a tiny bit. The AVP has an unworkable form factor: 2 pounds of headset and battery, and wearing it means mussing your hair and makeup and smashing a strap-on dorkbox to the front of your face.
That's entirely unworkable in ways that cannot be fixed with a software update or even next year's incremental hardware improvements. This form factor is a decade away from mainstream at best.
This is nothing like the Watch and only someone with a child's view of these products would make that claim.
You and I have very different recollections of the Apple Watch’s launch then. Everyone was convinced that the battery life would doom the product into obsolescence before it was even shipped to consumers. Only someone with a child’s view of these products would be unable to see the similarities between the two launches.
The only reason I have an Apple Watch today is because I 1) broke my iPhone when the waterproof case I had failed, and 2) sale on amazon pushing it below $200. If the watch waterproofing fails, it's a lot less catastrophic than an iPhone would be.
I only use the watch when surfing or doing mountain biking. It's still not all that great of a device, and not much (in a practical sense) has changed since 2015. Limited functionality and what is there is frustrating to use, especially while in action.
I disagree. It delivers too little for the cost. I'm sure you could sell a $3,500.00 face computer but it's got to deliver more - smaller, lighter, faster, etc. - then this does.
Low value + high cost is a tough sales even for a company with a pretty impressive brand quality. That said I am interested to see the third iteration and where that lands.
Meh. I think it's about the right price for the quality.
However I can't think of any actual applications for it that would have a return on investment which means it's not worth spending that money. Literally everything it does can be done better elsewhere for less money.
The expectation pre-launch was in the 150K - 250K range. It revised upward based on pace of sales in launch weeks, which I think was thrown off by the number of people buying to review and return.
Market consensus went through the roof based on pace of initial sales then those numbers stuck, but some Apple numbers at the time seemed to suggest this same 400K range.
Yeah I can't imagine why something that cost $3500 that was heavy and required an external battery pack that had almost no reason to exist would sell poorly.
VR is cool but it's not "$3500 for a toy" cool, at least not for me and I think not for most people.
This might just be the cynic in me, but people walking around with a $3500+ item attached to their face just screams "rob me!"
I mean, I got my comparatively-cheaper 2-year-old iPhone 12 Pro Max stolen from me about a year ago in a mugging, and that wasn't even nearly as flagrant. A person who wants to mug someone sees someone wearing an Apple Vision Pro, and they know that this person has a $3500 item glued to their face, as well probably an expensive iPhone in their pocket as well.
> I got my comparatively-cheaper 2-year-old iPhone 12 Pro Max stolen from me about a year ago in a mugging
That is just a dumb mugger since those phones can only be sold for parts given the way Apple locks them down with your password/Pin/Face. The only place those phones can go is on a ship container to China to be recycled for spare parts, and even that's dubious.
Not that I really want to defend someone who mugged me, but to be fair I don't think he knew it was an iPhone. I keep mine in a case and they grabbed it out of my hands pretty quick and ran. Even if they knew it was an iPhone and that I was going to lock it once I get home, I doubt he would go "Oh shit, is this an iPhone? Nevermind, you can have it back".
Fun fact, when I got home, I of course locked it right away, but I got my wife to call it to see if we could get ahold of the mugger, and we did, and he said he would give it back to me for $300.
There was no chance in hell I was going to give him money and reward extortion, and I had no guarantees that even if I did give him the money that I'd get the phone back anyway [1], but I suppose that that's still a market right? I suspect at least some percentage of people do end up paying just to minimize the headaches of having to buy a new phone. I'll admit that while it was never really "on the table", for just an instant I did consider just paying the guy instead of having to buy another expensive phone while unemployed.
[1] In this case I am principled to a fault. I have a very strong "I will not be extorted, I will not reward extortion, and I do not negotiate with terrorists" policy in my life. It's one of the very few hills I will actually die on, and it's bitten me a few times.
If they targeted you specifically because you had an iPhone to steal (or really, any Apple hardware), that would be dumb. If Android phones were easier to unlock when stolen, and could be confused for iPhones, that makes more sense. The extortion thing also makes sense, but I don't think many victims would take the chance that the situation would become worse after that (when handing over the cash).
Yeah, fair, and maybe people wouldn't bother stealing the Vision Pro. It's just not something I would walk around wearing, for the same reason I wouldn't walk around wearing a real Rolex (if I could afford one).
A Rolex is much more steal-able than a Apple device, since you can't lockdown mechanical movements. However, most of the people walking around with Rolexes are probably wearing fake ones, so even then its a crapshoot.
I don't know "numbers", they're probably not very high, but I have seen exactly one person walking around with one on Times Square.
I feel like that's been the discourse around it though, that this is something you're supposed to wear all the time and it gives you a proper augmented reality experience. Maybe that'll be the case eventually but I do not think we're there yet.
YES! That is the tech we should be racing towards. I dream of having a pair of glasses that can display information for me a la Google Glass but not so obvious. I also wish I could record everything I see, and have software analyze it for me later picking out things I might have missed. Creepy and unsettling to everyone else, but I would love it.
A first gen, $4K (minimum) piece of equipment didn’t live up to its hype.
Who could have predicted this?!
It’s a good looking piece of tech, but unfortunately like the rest of the Apple ecosystem. It’s locked down. It’s out of reach (price wise) for most people. The mandatory App Store from a user perspective is dead to me.
Repair process looks painful.
Facebook and Apple need to change their shit up. Open up the ecosystem. Let users load up their own OS/Apps. Stop tying it down to your locked down ecosystems and warranty programs. Give us root, build schematics, and let us build.
It's really mind boggling with all of the money they earn why they can't fund a sort of "open source skunkworks" where a team is dedicated to building open source tooling that can create a symbiotic relationship with the dev community. And of course, be back-fed into their own products.
Microsoft does this sort-of with language development (C#) and VS code on the software side. Now imagine a Microsoft "VSCode Box" or "VSCode portable", i.e. a hardware device they could sell that builds upon the OS work.
In my example, Microsoft has the software side but not the hardware. Currently Apple has the hardware side but not the software.
This is peak capitalism. The middle class is almost no existent. Big companies are making products that regular people can't afford. It's kinda like the time workers at the old Ford plants couldn't afford the cars that they were making. Eventually they started paying their employees enough to do so. I just looked up the price of a base model Jeep Wrangler, it's 31K, probably closer to 38K out the door(financed of course). That's a lot of money. I wonder if the average factory worker can TRULY afford the base model version of the vehicle they help assemble.
absolutely bizarre that imessage is considered a lock in tactic when all they do is green bubble blue bubble phoneshaming and whatsapp exists for the other stuff
Ralph Lauren had a lock on my friend cohort in 10th grade. If you didn't have the polo logo on your shirt, you were ridiculed. If you had a logo that looked a little bit like the Polo logo but wasn't you got cast out. My parents said "but this other shirt we bought you is superior in every way and doesn't break our budget" and I said, "I need the Polo or I'm killing myself."
Kids care what their friends think. A lot. Green bubbles are the same thing and so parents get their kids iPhones instead of Galaxies and the lock continues.
Android has ~70% of the global smartphone marketshare.
Personally, I've moved off of Android to Apple in 2019 because I was done with tinkering and just wanted a device that worked well (even if locked down in an ecosystem).
Top 20 Countries and Territories with the Highest iPhone Market Share (2022 full year):
North Korea 99.49%
Tokelau 94.44%
Bermuda 92.32%
Faroe Islands 92.23%
American Samoa 85.85%
Niue 79.86%
Saint Pierre and Miquelon 70.6%
Monaco 69.42%
Jersey 67.65%
Guernsey 67.51%
It seems like it's been 3 decades and no one ever learns the lesson that normal people don't want to put a computer on their face. It's a weird thing to do.
As for productivity, typing would have to... work...? For this product to be useful.
A lot of people have made a lot of money arguing that users want immersive computing, and the more immersive it is, the more they'll pay for it — therefore, the next biggest VR product is gonna be The Big One. It doesn't seem like it's going to pay off.
unfortunately, AVP has ignored gaming altogether (to apple it is an annoyance). At least it could have had some kind of push forward of the industry in that front.
The resolution is not yet good enough for work either. The only thing that it does well right now is laid back video/media entertainment, and that's it.
I don't think they ignored gaming; they just knew they would fail if they designed a gaming-first device.
Their best bet to bootstrap the platform is to make it computing-first around the iPad platform, and that means leading with multitasking, AR/MR, and with computing-oriented inputs.
Actually they should’ve limited it to being a spatial computing productivity headset to enhance the productivity of actual professional Mac users, like 3D artists, music producers, programmers, etc. They could’ve severely reduced the size and weight of the headset, maybe even made it glasses form, if they simply anchored it, wirelessly even, to a nearby Mac.
From there they could’ve expanded the spatial capabilities over time and eventually create a consumer version. The Vision Pro is the Newton of mixed reality.
Seems like a pretty large market of people who want to watch something in bed while their partner sleeps or watches something else. but it would need to be a lot cheaper for just that use.
I used the Hololens it was pretty janky. I will say the AVP is the first device I used that nailed the AR interaction/display stuff PERFECTLY. It really is just lacking the software ecosystem but they've got the fundamentals worked out at least. I'm hopeful it doesn't die and keeps getting developed
This feels like a thing where Apple needs to be very clear on who their early adopters are. The only situation I could see myself wanting this is if I was on a plane/train for several hours a day and needed to work or just wanted a good place for entertainment.
Seems like they haven’t really pinned that crowd down though and not being able to have multiple virtual monitors is a sales killer imo.
Cost (and style… and comfort… and…) aside, I can’t see spatial computing taking off until co-located experiences become well refined.
For instance, can a small group of people play a table top game together where half are in the room, half are remote, and the experience feels quite fluid.
The only companies that can be considered to have changed humanity are the various European East Indian Companies. Apple is not even close to that ballpark.
Tech companies keep pushing towards all-digital because they carry a lot more power in a world of their own making. They keep trying to get away from solving real-world pain points (e.g. being able to talked to loved ones) to solving for manufactured pain points (e.g. dopamine addiction to short-form content).
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