Thank you very much for saying this, I totally agree.
This is despite the fact that I want absolutely no part of "the metaverse" or whatever folks want to call ubiquitous AR/VR, and I don't want it to become commonplace in society. This is mostly for personal reasons, as I feel like I've finally gotten a handle on my cellphone addiction and have recently started realizing how much happier I am spending extended amounts of time in nature and away from tech. I like the idea of tech as tools, and I've enjoyed playing games on VR headsets for a short while, but extended use of a computer strapped to my face is a WALL-E nightmare for me.
All that said, I really didn't like the tone of this article. Yes, I agree that "big tech" has caused a lot of harm in society. But it's not that hard to separate that from many good things it has done, and this article felt so cynical like it just wanted to piss in everyone's soup.
We should celebrate it when big companies take real risks, even if they swing and miss. What would the author of this article prefer, more stock buybacks?
The author's articles seem to be relentlessly negative about all technology. Being negative on everything is a low-effort way to get attention, but it doesn't really contribute much to anything.
The amount of energy invested in pointing out the flaws in a 1.0 release of something reminds me of the ridicule heaped on the iPad.
It’s much easier to tear down something than it is to create something. It also garners a lot more clicks for someone whose primary contribution in life is pontification on the internet belittling the achievements of people who actually -do- something and -create- and take risks. Those people still do, after all, have to eat so thank god for advertising platforms and breathless naysayers.
It's really not a 1.0 though. Yes the vision pro itself is 1.0, but 99% of people's complaints are not with the vision pro directly, but more about the entire concept of AR headsets. These issues have been known since at least the hololense era of 2017 and despite incremental improvements to software and hardware, the firm Factor can never escape these issues without massive leaps like eye glass or contact lense sizes hardware ... which is sci Fi for at least 20 more years
But it’s also fair to say (imo) that AVP has made massive leaps. Are we now taking for granted the major leaps in nailing the interaction model (look and finger-tap), and delivering display tech that makes watching movies on it unlike any other movie experience just 85 days after release?
Yes, it needs to be lighter. Yes it needs more software/apps/content to fit greater use cases. Yes it needs to be less expensive to broaden its appeal, etc. Apple has a decent track record of patiently iterating YoY, polishing products to their mature, stable design state (thus giving rise to a new cycle of complaints about stagnation and not being bold and innovative).
Wait, who is actually defending look and finger tap as primary interface?
Psvr2 can do look, and it is largely best used as a rendering optimization, not as input detection. For controls, haptic is so important that the most emersive game is driving, but only if you have a good steering setup. Indeed, driving doesn't even need vr to be emersive with a good steering setup.
Ok - fine - but unless people keep working and innovating for those 20 years, then it never happens right ? and the fact is Vision Pro is science fiction compared to HoloLens (which is an era that’s only 7 years ago)
The issue with Vision Pro IMO is that it costs so much and includes price boosting features like the creepy eye see through that are interesting in a prototype release like this but can be cut to reduce cost weight and other factors. If it had cost 1/2 as much it would have sold more than twice as much, and while it might not become the next iPhone, it would have a much more established user and developer base to build on over the next 5 years as they iterate. Then I think by 2030 we would have both the social understanding of where headsets and AR fit and Apple will have had the chance to iterate designs, software, supply chain, materials, etc and we would have a practical device for a much larger addressable market. But even so, the die has been cast and things will improve.
All that said, the point isn’t this - it’s that the tech critic authors are the worst type of people - the people who make their living nit picking great achievements in the goal of tearing them down and regarding investment and purchase for no other reason than “engagement.” Their points are only right from the narrow view of some people, cherry picked and mixed together, into a giant breathless fallacy. It’s lazy and slimy.
Apple’s core competence is to wait for some good product hit the market and later improve it to make it much better and fetch their market share. Being forefront of the tech is not their skill, their skill is integration , supplier, and supply chain Logistics’s, and a design
The experience you get is probably better than any existing VR headset but I struggle to see myself valuing it at more than $500. The FOV and resolution still both suck and the headset is super bulky. I would rather use a phone or laptop/tablet to co some content since it’s much more pixel dense. If they can make a slimmer, lighter version with much higher pixel density it might be worth getting one but the tech is nowhere near there yet.
Facebook bought Oculus 10 years ago. Nothing is better about weight. It's worse, in fact. The 1.5 pound dorkbox smashed against your face is literally heavier and uglier than it was a decade ago. Take that Moore's law bullshit somewhere else. These things aren't going to be 30 grams for 30 years.
I don’t think this has ever been true. There are too many things they do where they have created a market out of nothing. The general public had never paid for digital music or apps until apple created the market. Same with contactless payment from phones.
You can argue that any of these technologies existed before and they “followed”, but that’s a pretty distorted view when apple made the market - they didn’t take market share from others.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen them claim to invent any of those things. I’ve only ever seen other people claim they do.
> They don't invent much
They probably invent at the same rate as others investing in R&D.
> and willingly lock you into it.
They vertically integrate. Their customers obviously like this and aren’t bothered that it isn’t open. It’s not a bad thing, unless you consider the behaviour bad from all companies.
I would go farther: we should be concerned if there aren't flops like this, as that would indicate big tech isn't pushing the boundaries nearly hard enough.
Big swing? VR and AR have been around for a very long time. Apple is good at making things that already exist nicer. They aren't big risks at all, they are generally safe bets. Take something that's out there, put 3 years of design into it and act like you invented it.
Apple's miscalculation here was overestimating the market's price tolerance for a category whose prosumers have already explored for 1/3 Apple's price point.
If this had been 5 years ago at half the price, they'd own the category.
But we don't actually want big corps to take swings to build the torment nexus.
There's a wide consensus that this kind of tech is going to have a negative effect on society and how humans interact with each other, but there's also this myth that this is inevitable and that we just have to accept it.
But it's not reality: there's no reason for it to be inevitable, and it's just that the most wealthy companies are pushing it hard, because they see it as a big money maker.
Well for VR headsets people actually don't buy these products. And we now have 2 of the biggest companies in the world who have each burned a dozen billion trying to make it happens.
Also, even if people did this isn't a argument either: people do buy Fentanyl, and that's not a good justification for inventing it.
Ah yeah, the most hyped device since the Game Boy selling out like the Wii U is the canonical definition of success.
Worse than that, even people who bought it aren't actually using it. No wonder why Meta's VR division operational losses are higher than their turnover…
Nope, you are: I never said the consumer base size is strictly zero, what I'm saying is that it's not the market driving the pursuit of this technology (as can be seen by the low traction compared to the enormous expanses it incurs on Facebook and Apple) but the ideology of technological inevitability, and the desire of the big corporations to create a new market from scratch in opposition to consumers preference (who aren't really interested).
But there is “no market” in the sense that it's just a heavily subsidized product (except the subsidies come from private companies and not from the public sector) and if it wasn't driven by this multi billion yearly subsidies, the product would not even exist.
I totally agree with this on the surface, but I never know how to align it with trying to solve larger problems we often hear people raising alarm bells about.
For example, if we really are concerned with climate change do we really want companies spending small fortunes to either fail or build an expensive product that takes a ton of resources to create? If we really are worried about health concerns related to excessive screen use, do we really want companies trying to strap screens on your face? If we're really concerned with inflation, is it beneficial for a company to spend this much money and resources to try to build a very expensive product that could very well become more of a novelty than anything else?
The problem with your argument is there is no singular "we" here. The are groups of people with a range of concerns and goals all working simultaneously, often at cross-purposes to each other.
Maybe I could have phrased that differently, I said "we" there thinking about all of us individually running into situations where we make choices that go in the face of bigger concerns we otherwise feel.
In this case, I'm torn on the idea of us needing companied to take shots like Vision Pro when I also personally think we as a society need to be consuming less and using fewer natural resources overall. I see others run into the same thing when someone, for a very specific individual example, uses petroleum based products to glue their hands to a street in protest of climate change.
There are no solutions to such dilemmas, only actions which suck in different ways. Ultimately, I think big changes have to come from governments for this sort of thing. The ozone hole wasn't fixed because all the peoples of the world made separate and independent decisions not to purchase and use products with ozone-depleting agents. Even if there were big public awareness campaigns and giant warning labels. There would still be many people deciding to buy/use them because of the local short-term needs trumps long-term global effects. It was only when these products were simply never made in the first place that things changed.
I've always seen it as two different solutions depending on timing. Collective action, from governments usually, is most effective when we already broke something. Individuals are much better at avoiding problems before they occur, usually dependent on people being informed enough to know what they opting into.
I do wish more consumers would be hesitant to buy new products when they know little about how they're made or how they work. Ironically the more government we throw at preventing problems the more likely consumers are to skip past being skeptical and blindly trust that the big, regulated company must be doing what's best for us.
> individuals are much better at avoiding problems before they occur
I think this is only really true for themselves, but even then short-term vs long-term biases affect decision making. Even when people know what the overall best choice is, they often just make the choice that makes them happy in the now. They will also tend to discount ill effects to others if those people are unseen and unheard.
> usually dependent on people being informed enough to know what they opting into
> I think this is only really true for themselves, but even then short-term vs long-term biases affect decision making.
I can't think of a decent example of governments effectively avoiding a problem beforehand, curious if you have any for comparison though. I'm used to seeing governments either blindly ignorant of problems before they happen, or unwilling to act until something breaks and it becomes a talking point for elections.
> This is not a small qualifier.
We're in total agreement there. It shouldn't be a needed qualifier at all, but our education system is junk and we have collectively leaned into trusting experts rather than informed consent.
> a decent example of governments effectively avoiding a problem beforehand
This would be hard because it would be counterfactual. Like if a rule/policy was put into place to prevent/avoid BAD_THING and then BAD_THING did not happen. It's not really news or remembered. In fact, the opposite can happen. The fact that BAD_THING is not happening becomes a reason for dismantling the original rule/policy because since there is no BAD-THING, we obviously don't need this rule. I think of recent moves in some states to re-enable child labor as a good example of this thinking.
Airline safety is another. Government intervened with rules that made planes really really safe. But since air travel became so safe (as a direct consequence of these rules), then operators/builders started chipping away at them (or circumventing them, or straight-up ignoring them) because they aren't needed because air travel is so safe.
So its tough to cite and example, because I'd need to point at something that didn't happen because of a rule, and that's hard to do.
Climate change isn't a matter of energy consumption; it's about massively affecting the balance of the carbon cycle. Fix the carbon cycle issue, and there's likely no reason to tie the development of technology to climate change. No amount of ceasing further technological experimentation will correct climate change the way moving away from fossil fuels would.
The carbon cycle is a massive over simplification of how the ecosystem works though. Nature isn't that simple and we are fooling ourselves thinking that we can boil it all down to one simple lever.
Beyond that, energy consumption just can't grow indefinitely without having a negative impact on carbon, if that's your primary concern. Not only would the entire energy infrastructure have to be carbon neutral, everything we use that energy for would have to be carbon neutral as well.
Let's say that is even possible, if all that matters is the carbon cycle are we totally fine with cutting down every forest on the planet as long as we find a different way to sequester carbon?
I'm well aware that scenario takes it to am extreme, but we have to play it out that far to see if the core principle is right. We need to use less energy and consume fewer resources, we can't get around that fact by moving around carbon in computer models and mathematical equations.
Would those companies otherwise have bothered to do anything productive toward reducing climate change or inflation with those resources instead of chasing novelty toys? I doubt it.
The companies presumably already have the piles of cash to burn on failed investments, unless your argument is that their R&D moonshots bid up the price for components of important research.
Agreed, but I don't think Apple published their VR set because they actually thought it's ready. They did it because Zuck is playing around with the idea and they didn't want to look less innovative.
It will be career death in apple to suggest anything like that for the next ten years..
Wish there was something like
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructive_vote_of_no_conf... in company culture, as in you can only express "I'm against that" , if you suggest some other similar bold endeavor. Not this "let's milk bettsy to death and then loose the farm" mindset that uses bold leaps as ammonition.
> Juicero was an expensive plastic box that squeezed a bag of juice and Theranos’ finger-prick blood tests were a big fraud that eventually sent its founder to prison for 11 years.
I guess.. the issue is that it's blatantly obvious how crappy the thing is. It's not that they failed but the disconnect.
But, some engineers got to work on some new green field tech which is pretty cool. All to often at work I'm presented with interesting problems that I have to solve with hacks / least amount of resources. I envy those that know how to convince a company to take swings.
It's true. But what we often lack in tech is an understanding of humans.
Like, real people.
Big swings in tech almost always fail when we push tech fantasies but don't understand humans.
And my fear is they actually set the industry back several years, because people start to believe a concept isn't desired by the populace, when really it was just the execution.
For example, thank goodness Elon came along and rescued the image of the electric car by grasping we humans want good-looking fast cars.
The strange EV designs out of Detroit always killed me.
Yet, it was hard for Tesla to overcome the impression left by those past failures.
I hope the industry doesn't abandon headsets because of the execution mistakes we're seeing now.
What I loved about Jobs is he understood humans so well.
I miss that about him.
His big swings felt natural once in your hand.
Tech CEOs are often taking big swings, but we tech people can be so nerdy sometimes that we struggle to understand how to make products look fashionable and feel natural to use.
That was Jobs magic sauce. Apple struggles with that now.
MP3 players we're clunky until Jobs added the scroll wheel.
Just a stunningly natural solution.
In comparison, the vision pro is clearly too bulky to be practical.
I was excited for the vision pro. But when I tried it, I was shocked at how front heavy it is.
I think it's a solid product for certain niche uses.
But we need a Jobs or Elon, to identify the heart of what humans really need out of a headset.
Zuckerberg is this generation's Bill Gates. Smart. Successful. But mentally and emotionally disconnected from the rest of humanity.
The successful headset innovator needs to shed the 'ready player one' fantasy that we humans want to live in a digital universe or to consume large amounts of entertainment this way.
In my opinion (just my opinion), for the foreseeable future, any non-productivity use of headsets will wear off as novelty.
We will power through the isolation and awkwardness of headsets for the right productivity tools.
But so far it seems that too much energy is going to entertainment and social concepts.
Edit: I see replacing the mouse, in mouse heavy productive activities, as the main use case for headsets.
Drawing, diagramming, navigating visualizations, reviewing large project timelines.
And then you take it off.
And then, incremental improvements to increase wearing time without eye strain, etc.
I do like the vision pro concept of immersive video and pictures to capture memories. That's definitely a nice-to-have feature.
Please don’t erase Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning out of Tesla’s history. They were the ones with that idea of making EVs sexy and then Elon came along and slowly ‘manoeuvred’ them out. He wanted to be known as the founder.
He”s a good marketer, but not a good ideas person or leader.
Look at the cyber truck, hyperloop, twitter and his crazy and damaging rants on twitter.
> Please don’t erase Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning out of Tesla’s history. They were the ones with that idea of making EVs sexy and then Elon came along and slowly ‘manoeuvred’ them out. He wanted to be known as the founder.
All the history is captured on Wikipedia including such bits as Musk funding $6.5m of Tesla’s initial $7.5m series A round.
I tried it for the first time last night and I was not too impressed. It felt like a solution in search of a problem.
For the past decade Apple’s product lineup has pretty much remained the same (faster, lighter, etc), while they invested heavily in spatial computing (flop) and autonomous vehicles (scrapped). All while totally neglecting the industry they pioneered (Siri) and should have been perfecting. Instead, OpenAI came along and ate their lunch and Apple was caught completely flat-footed. And now they’re way behind.
It’s shocking to me how bad the above bets and non-investments have played out for Apple. Tim Cook needs to ride off into the sunset. It’s been a good ride. He ran the business well. They need an innovative CEO at the helm that can make better bets.
> For the past decade Apple’s product lineup has pretty much remained the same
You seem to have forgotten the M1 Mac, which was released in 2020. It was followed by the complete overhaul and revitalization of the Mac lineup, all to critical and popular acclaim.
I'd prefer them to keep using Intel, if you ask me. M1 brings to me nothing but issues with different architecture. So much that I had to switch to Linux because can't take it anymore.
Don't really feel it faster than Intel, TBH. May be better regarding battery, but who cares, definitely not me, working from AC outlet 24/7.
Seems like the thousands of people who bought it care, myself included. My role has significant on-call responsibility. It's nice to be able to take it charged anywhere I could need it and know that for several hours it can handle anything I will throw at it, reliably.
From a security perspective, I prefer the separation from the x86 architecture if for no other reason than it imposes extra cost for exploit development.
That wasn't the point. On a long enough timeline, the security of all systems drops to zero. If the entire world is running x86, then the threat model for attackers revolves around abusing x86. If things are homogeneous, it raises the bar and resourcing required to make attacks.
As always with security, everything is a tradeoff.
Your argument is basically security by obscurity. You're better off in an ecosystem where a lot of attention is paid to exploits and patches then in another where it might be a long time before a zero day becomes known and fixes are issued.
None of what i said is security by obscurity (which is also can be an effective tactic,but obviously not the only tactic).
There are only so many human hours and minds interested or allocated to exploitation and offensive security. If everyone used the same architecture for everything, the economies of scale on the offensive side (due to state funded actors) would blow everyone else out of the water.
From a software perspective, Windows has an incredible amount of skilled eyes on each patch release, but we still see new exploits. Same for Linux. Likely same for MacOS.
All i'm advocating for is that having separate hardware architectures is good because it raises the barrier to entry, even if it's only the next marginal step.
Security by obscurity isn’t even bad. It’s only bad if it’s your sole defence.
I am confident that my non-default SSH ports, that only accept connections after a sequence of port knocking, adds a slight bit of security to nothing. For example: xz backdoor.
> My role has significant on-call responsibility. It's nice to be able to take it charged anywhere I could need it and know that for several hours it can handle anything I will throw at it, reliably.
You could do that for years with an extended battery in ThinkPads (and Dell I think, never used them). More so, you could just bring additional charged batteries with you, in case you really needed.
But yes, it took a little more space and weight than M1.
So M1 didn't allowed people on-call to be able "to throw anything at it for several hours", the tech was already there. The only thing M1 did bring is a small savings in the weight and space for the people who needs a glorified terminal with them.
The M-serious brought an absolutely insanely big jump on the performance-energy efficiency graph, and that’s without doubt. Nothing came even remotely close to that before.
Those ultrabooks were insanely expensive and had like 3 hours of battery life.
Ok, 4 hours vs 10. It is still the difference between not powering off between bringing it from one power source to another and an actually portable use-case.
I sold it because I am not on all anymore but my GPD Pocket 2 was much smaller (it would fit in the pocket of my pants) and it would charge on a 20W smartphone usb-c charger.
My wild guess is if you are taking a laptop with you, you are likely to use some kind of bag so having a charger around is no big deal, especially if you are in someone's home. And if you are in a social place, you won't stay connected for hours as it is pretty antisocial, you are likely to have to have several phone calls and you will be asked to leave anyway so you usually fix the problem quickly and if not possible you just pay the bill and go back home.
I like how you ignored the price, build and battery capacity.
And how ignore where this thread started: "on-call".
There is a lot of things in M-series which are good, but it's totally not the price, not the starting model performance [for anything better than being a terminal] and definitely no 'the autonomy breakthrough'.
[1] says "AMD 5850U beats Apple M1 in multicore performance by 29% having the same power consumption (15 Watt)", "Nothing came even remotely close to that" sounds like an exaggeration if that was to be believed.
I don't know whether you like that aesthetics of those laptops or whether the price fits in your budget or not, but I kind of feel that getting 3 or 4 hours of battery is price you pay for falling for way too thin flashy white brushed aluminum stuffs. Hardcore roadwarriors like ThinkPad X1 Nano users seem to be reporting 7-10 hours new for their machines.
I'm not saying that I think M-series CPUs are all fad - every datapoints available suggest it's just -fine- , I'm just saying they're probably not like decades ahead of everything else.
Why even bother linking to a comment that was thoroughly debunked at the time? Making a claim about power consumption (ie. a measured quantity) while using a number that represents TDP (a value assigned by the marketing department with no objective connection to reality) may have been an honest mistake for the original poster, but is quite dishonest on your part.
I wonder what makes you choose such expressions as "thoroughly debunked", but that aside, It's not like 15W processor actually runs at 95W. It's still a close enough number to real power draw, especially when a laptop with "15W" CPU comparable to M1 runs for same 10 hours anyway.
That's great if all you do with a computer is browse facebook (or hacker news). Pros of all kinds have specific platform/software requirements and Apple chucked a lot of that out the window (again) with a move to a new platform - and it isn't optional, intel Macs will be extinct soon and so will software support for them. They don't care about pros, they care about money and the money is in selling to people who only browse facebook.
Apple Macintosh started on Motorola processors. Then they moved to PowerPC processors. Then they moved to Intel processors. And now they've moved to ARM processors. It's happened 4 times in the same product line.
2006 wasn't the first such transition Apple did, just the previous one. Their transitions from 68k to PPC and from classic MacOS to OS X were similar to the PPC to x86 and x86 to ARM transitions from an application compatibility standpoint.
i was in the same situation with the switch to silicon. I have some obscure industry software that i use on a rare basis that only runs on x86 - i just bought a cheap thinkpad (x220 i think) and have XP on there.
silicon (m2) is worth its weight in gold to me for the battery life and functionality.
I think that depends on how you're defining product lineup here. Apple doesn't sell the M1 chip itself, so really the product lineup remained unchanged other than shipping with a new processor.
The watch is the most recent new product I can think of from Apple and that was 9 years ago.
if by "complete overhaul and revitalization of the Mac lineup" you mean took their own chip production in-house, i agree. most revolutionary thing Apple has done since the iPhone.
I’d say “way” is a stretch, and the technologies that largely are making it such could be argued were popularized by ggml which was written originally for the M1 platform.
You seem to have forgotten that "Dodge swapped out the Chrysler engine for a Mitsubishi engine" isn't much of an innovation claim. Tim Cook is a bean counter. He's done nothing at Apple except add a couple of iPhone accessories and optimize the supply chain, which is all the M1 Mac was, a slightly optimized Steve Jobs creation.
Perhaps but after a spike in 2020-21 their Mac sales are about where they were back in the Intel days.
If you take into account the inflation since ~2017 M1 hasn’t really been that extraordinarily successful and their past couple of quarters were the worst in the last 10 years or so.
The Age of Diminishing Return for Digital Innovations began right after the smartphone and it has only become more pronounced since.
My layperson’s prediction for the next big thing is cheaper and cheaper techs. I believe that there will be a race to the bottom. Both hardware and software will become commodity. Even all these new AI technologies will become commodities. The true Cyberpunk take is that technology is boring and commonplace.
Lots of amazing hardware is still way too expensive to make it into ordinary consumer hands, or hasn't even been invented yet.
What's keeping the future bleak is a low business appetite for risk. The wringing out of current tech for every last cent will eventually stop when there's no other way to profit but actual R&D. Until then, yeah things will be boring nonsense like AI and ridiculous marketing. We're in the doldrums until some heads start to roll.
What would be examples of such hardware? Any exciting tech is commoditised fast. Vision Pro would go down $500 in a few years if there would be demand.
I can see that happening. My vision for the future is that voice assistants and LLMs will converge into something as useful and powerful as “Computer” in Star Trek. And that this assistant that will know you and all of your accounts/online profiles, will only need a microphone and an internet connection to function.
So the Apple Watch, for example, could be everything you need to carry around because the voice assistant can literally do everything you can possible think of (besides consume social media and YouTube content).
> So the Apple Watch, for example, could be everything you need to carry around because the voice assistant can literally do everything you can possible think of (besides consume social media and YouTube content).
An all knowing ever listening assistant strapped to your wrist, completely connected to all of your accounts financial, medical, social media, monitoring your vitals, measuring your acceleration, deceleration, steps, altitude, and gps position, bundling it up, and then selling it to whoever wants it for pennies on the dollar.
This is going to be an absolutely enormous market, and it would be really good if an open source option wins it, instead of another big tech walled garden.
The good news is that it’s a software solution, not hardware. Open source can only win in software. So it has a chance.
Open source, self-hosted, all-knowing assistant connected to the Internet, that doesn’t leak data to companies, and that filters out all their ads, messaging, and CTA’s.
Tech-savvy people will be able to have one of these pretty soon even if big tech wins the broader market.
Open source can never "win" a consumer market because a team of engineers is never going to be able to live off of giving away software for free, nor can you sell free software to the public at large. Open source works in B2B contexts because businesses either collaborate on building infrastructure they need to sell their core product, or because you can sometimes sell support and commercial licenses to businesses.
This is precisely why Linux has overwhelmingly won the server market for at least a decade, but it is still a bit player in consumer devices (except Android, which is barely open source and is controlled by a huge corporation selling our data).
Perhaps open source doesn't devalue consumers in a way that they are a thing to be won - not even in aggregate.
The network devices in my home are open source, as is most of the OS. With my customers it's a mix - but where there is open source, it pretty much just works.
Meanwhile, any complaining is typically due to the ongoing poor treatment by Microsoft, Intuit, et al.
> Perhaps open source doesn't devalue consumers in a way that they are a thing to be won - not even in aggregate.
You can win a market, that doesn't mean you're winning the participants. You could at best be winning them over, which is a positive for anyone.
> The network devices in my home are open source, as is most of the OS.
The software on those devices is open source, or in other words, the companies selling your devices are using OSS to power them (or you yourself installed software mostly created for this purpose by similar companies).
> This is going to be an absolutely enormous market, and it would be really good if an open source option wins it, instead of another big tech walled garden.
That’s a nice thought, but IBM would probably just buy it then kill it.
I think it's worse than that. It's an age when technological innovation is not only diminishingly useful, it's actively, primarily, intended to hurt our interests. Surveillance and enshittification and advertising have become the reason for innovation, and actual benefit to consumers is secondary and shallow.
My prediction is that the combination of AI and robotics will conquer specific business applications, and in time will make its way into consumer markets. Think iRobot & robot lawnmowers, but for way broader applications.
That's the current playbook isn't it? OpenAI has basically said they're trying to bootstrap robotic intelligence. It remains to be seen if they can manage that before the cost of running huge gpu farms brings them down.
Within the next couple decades there will be another disruptive innovation in a new hardware form factor. Maybe not AR/VR goggles but something else that no one beyond a few visionaries is even thinking about today.
OpenAI isn’t really a competitor to Siri. It’s a competitor to Google Search. And Apple has never been in the search market.
OpenAI doesn’t work without internet. Siri does. OpenAI can’t do anything on your phone. Siri can. They’re fundamentally different services.
Yes, whatever Apple does with Siri next will be LLM based and will compete with other on-device LLM assistants. But I expect that to be a fairly different market from the cloud-based LLM assistants.
Hell, the next Siri might just forward questions to a third party cloud based LLM assistant for answers to complex questions. Like it does with google now and did with wolfram alpha at one point
Though I expect Apple is also waiting for the quality of LLMl AIs to be good enough. Even ChatGPT 4 isn’t really good enough to be trusted. They’re way too confident when they should be answering “I don’t know” or “I’m unsure but I’m guessing the answer is: …”
Like, what Microsoft is doing is absolutely reckless. It’s insane to integrate an AI assistant that constantly and confidently lies to you into the OS.
It’s not a competitor to Siri…yet. But it’s pretty easy to see the two converging in the near future. The best way to make sure that your voice assistant is used and useful is to back it with an LLM that literally does and knows everything. That’s the future OpenAI is chasing, and the one Apple should be chasing. I’m hopeful that this year brings some quick advancements in this area. But judging by the fact that it’s a year behind OpenAI in the timing, it’s hard to believe that Apple isn’t behind right now.
I’m confused. Which of Apple’s lunch is OpenAI eating? OpenAI does not offer a voice assistant that competes with Siri. Google and Amazon do, and their usage is way down as well; voice assistants in general have lost consumer preference.
You must not have tried the voice feature in the ChatGPT app yet. Try it out, it’s amazing. It pairs the power and functionality of a conversational voice assistant with all the power of ChatGPT and LLMs. Obviously the integration isn’t as convenient as Siri’s yet, but the utility is infinitely higher.
My point is that it seems pretty clear that the future is in the space that OpenAI is right now. And that isn’t a bet that Apple was investing in very heavily.
Apple is also not in the business of losing money. It's much easier to make something new and shiny when you can run it at a loss and your investors are happy for you to light piles of money on fire year after year.
That's also probably why most AI research published by Apple is about on-device inference. It's expensive to run inference servers at scale. Apple is a hardware company, so it makes sense they want to focus on what you can do on a local device (or more accurately, how they can sell you a new piece of hardware).
Interestingly, for my elderly Russian-speaking mom’s benefit, I had an English conversation with it and asked it to reply only in Russian. It complied, and spoke and reasoned no worse than usual.
Not yet. Voice assistants will massively benefit from LLM integration which will benefit OpenAI for sure.
It's just that nobody has built one yet, I'm surprised because it's a very suitable application. But I think the cost is much higher than the current scripted models, which means there must be a payment model attached. Right now all the major voice assistants are free and I have a feeling they're all waiting to see who makes the first paid LLM-based product, and how the market reacts.
I think there is an important distinction to make. Siri is actually two things — there are voice informers (“Please explain how photosynthesis works”) and voice assistants (“Remind me to call Dave when I reach my work location”).
The former is really straightforward to implement with an LLM — it’s basically what an LLM is.
I mean, the latter is basically OpenAI’s assistant, that has some APIs it can autonomously call.
The open problem here is making it on-device, and privacy preserving. Though I’m optimistic about this, as Apple has bought up a huge number of AI startups in the last couple of years, so they are probably onto something.
> All while totally neglecting the industry they pioneered (Siri) and should have been perfecting.
Going by the rumors, there should be some interesting announcements at WWDC that may explain where all their effort has been going instead of improving the current version of Siri.
> They need an innovative CEO at the helm that can make better bets.
ARM chips maybe? How the hell do you space something like that out? That's like the only thing of consequence that any of these companies have achieved since 2020
The gushing of the Apple faithful was eye rolling.
> Om Malik, who has been writing about tech since tech reporters used to write about calculators, he was even more effusive. “It’s amazing! It’s incredible!” he enthused. “You can feel a vibration in the universe!”
I often look to my children to help portend the future. They had a demo of it last week on Spring Break. Needless to say, they were wowed. It’s the first version of the product, folks. Yes, it’s expensive and hard to justify its cost. But, it is work like that pushes us beyond the edge of what we know and what we have. It inspires our creativity. And, yes it may take time but people want something like this because it has the power to suspend disbelief and transport you to new worlds. Thank you Apple for taking a shot.
Everyone's impressed with VR the first few times. For me that was 1991 and 1993 but unfortunately it's not that much better today with Quest so I see zero point in trying AVP.
But did they buy it? That's the question. When the first iPhone launched people actually bough it instead of just being wowed by it and then walking away.
A lot of commercially failed products were successful on wowing people. Making people buy it so you can be profitable is the real deal. You don't make money wowing tire kickers.
No. As I admit in the comment, it’s too expensive. It’s similar to the Mac II, the first color Mac, which was also, for the time, inaccessible to most households. But, it often takes a few tries before a technology vision sticks.
I used to own two generations of Oculus Quest devices and while they wowed me and got me to buy several games that wowed me even more, I eventually sold them because they were gathering dust.
Do you see the problem? If not, I'll go deeper. I rarely used them despite the wow factor since I rarely had the motivation of strapping them to my face and wearing them for too long despite me not having issues sitting playing PC games for hours or being for hours on my phone. Do you see the issues now? It was not a comfort issues, it was a motivation issue. It's just much less friction to stare a screens around you than strapping goggles to your face and wearinng them for long.
Wow factor is not enough, and neither is being cheaper. You need to convince people why they should strap goggles to their face and wear them prolonged.
The gap between woowing people and getting the to use some long therm is huge. While is why apple's VP and the other VR Googles are failing mainstream.
Your thesis may be true, but there are some factors worth teasing apart. Suppose the current product were $300 instead of $3500. I bet they’d sell a lot more of them. I bet they’d sell 30x more of them. That doesn’t mean we can’t improve on it. For us, the cost was the barrier. If enough of us buy it, it would be hard to say that it’s a flop. Your version, of course, is preferred. But it may take longer to get there.
The idea that 400K units of this is a "big flop" requires some sort of fundamentally broken thinking (that applies to AAPL as well, if they have a similar view), wildly out of touch with reality.
The reality distortion field is dead. Perhaps the memo was missed.
Apple is so huge, with such a large and fervent fanbase, they could literally release the MacBook Wheel per the Onion it would still probably sell a couple hundred thousand units.
It's not like they're selling at small volumes at first, i.e. to early adopters who love it and will convince their friends to be later adopters. Early adopters are mostly either returning it or saying it's basically shelfware now.
"It remains to be seen if the Apple Wheel will catch on in the business world where people use computers for actual work instead of just dicking around" resonates for whenever Apple/Meta claim a VR headset is a productivity/business tool.
"everything is just a few 100 clicks away"... sounds like Apple's regulatory compliance. Might become mandatory if you want to use side-loading/3rd party app stores.
The article says they spent 10 billion developing the Vision pro. If they sell less than a million units and no one is actually using it (so there's no software ecosystem being developed for it) then it's a flop.
What an interesting number! The original iPhone is reported to cost only $150M (~$225M today) to develop. Sure, Apple from 2006 is not the same as today's Apple, but I find it still amusing that they try to create a new revolution with throwing money around, instead of a real new idea, like the iPhone was.
The expectation and capability of the first iPhone is a minuscule fraction of what's expected of the Vision Pro. The iPhone wasn't a new idea, there were other smart phones before it, but they hit it out of the park with the interface and understanding what customers would want, before they wanted it.
The entire computing environment has evolved dramatically since then, as have the expectations of the once scrappy underdog to the second largest company in the world. At some point, AR / VR will eventually become good enough, and it's good that they are investing in it. It forces Meta to innovate and become better as well.
I personally hope that it will get to the point that i can go anywhere and take my ideal workspace setup with me and lose little to no productivity.
> understanding what customers would want, before they wanted it.
"relentlessly telling customers what they want, regardless of what they might need."
The walled garden doesn't appeal to most people, which is one reason why worldwide Apple has a very small market share. Price is another, and paying more for a device I have far less control over never made sense to me.
>I personally hope that it will get to the point that i can go anywhere and take my ideal workspace setup with me and lose little to no productivity.
My laptop has 3 very portable screens. I don't have to strap anything to my head to be productive. Sure, I'm not going to spread out 3 screens on an airplane, but I'm not typically going to work if I'm on an airplane (YMMV). I'm not sure how you get to be productive living inside a strap-on-bubble even with the passthrough video. It just seems so clumsy. Maybe it will improve, but that's a big maybe and I'm not sure Apple is going to be the one to perfect that experience, especially when their platform is so curated. Where am I going to run my servers and software development stack, on the Vision Pro? No. I still need a laptop to be productive, no matter where I am.
> The walled garden doesn't appeal to most people, which is one reason why worldwide Apple has a very small market share. Price is another, and paying more for a device I have far less control over never made sense to me.
Take off your HN glasses for a few minutes. I don’t think the vast majority (I’m talking 80-90%+) of people could even tell you “walled garden” means. It doesn’t even start to factor into most people’s buying experiences. In fact, to the average consumer Apple and Google’s policies for the App Store are identical.
Apple could allow sideloading tomorrow and it would not make an appreciable difference in sales worldwide because the people who say they care about it (let alone the subset of that who actually take advantage of it) is vanishing small. I know people on HN will bristle at that but it’s just the truth.
I don’t care what OS you use but I find it hilarious that I have some friends who are staunchly pro-Android/anti-Apple because <insert tired talking point> and then they proceed to use their phones in a way that never exceeds what they could do on iOS.
Price is a much larger factor.
As for your comments on the AVP I agree, at least at its current iteration.
It's a premium product. Iphone has the majority of US (and thus wealthy) customers. It's seen as premium in other wealthy nations as well. Second largest company in the world by market cap means that they clearly operate with more than enough customers who matter to get things done.
I used to be a hardcore linux everything person. Over time I stepped into the walled garden and found I enjoyed not having to constantly think about the interop of everything. It's different for everyone.
> Where am I going to run my servers and software development stack?
Right now you need a laptop. Rapidly approaching a future where devcontainers and remote dev servers will let you dev anywhere you want, where you just choose the interface of choice. You may want a laptop,
I may want to have multiple screens for analyzing data, modifying code, and doing other operationsy things.
The point overall is: Apple is good at shipping products that people want and iterating and improving them. That is undeniable. It does take time to iterate and improve, and Vision will probably get there because this pattern of product is in their DNA.
I attribute this to something else, something that’s operating across many different sectors.
Technologically, we’ve exhausted the low hanging fruit of various scientific and engineering disciplines. Energy, transportation, construction, computing devices, software, medicine, surgery and more - all these things rode enormous waves of potential in the postwar era that have now ebbed.
The iPhone was a low hanging fruit made possible by developments in compute, connectivity, and software.
The next set of fruit is much higher up the tree: see avp, development costs of.
The thing is, the original iPhone was bad. By today standards. But it came out at a time when it was leaps and bounds ahead of a good chunk of the competition. But you can’t release a product like that anymore, at least if you are Apple. People expect so much more these days.
Only if you are thinking about it on a small scale. If it will have a second iteration, which becomes a huge hit, then all that 10 billion R&D was happily spent.
Based on some reports that’s way below their estimates and they were forced to cut production even before releasing it in other markets. That’s basically the definition of a “flop”..
Because 400K units of this kind of product, at this price point, with this lack of “killer app” solving a problem people didn’t know they had, is a phenomenal success.
If they expected …that… to sell millions of units straight away, well, as I wrote.
Appl is not interest in niche products. they are not in biz to sell 200 products at 400K units each. they are in the biz to sell 20 overpriced products at 30M units/year each.
Sort of. That's the shape of their portfolio and long-term strategy, for sure, but they clearly didn't target "30M units/year" for the launch of Vision Pro any more so than they've targeted that scale for for AppleTV or the Airport and Time Machine product lines.
It was plainly a test of both manufacturing and market. To the GP's point, I think it's hard for anyone on the outsjde to judge whether they hit their marks for it or not right now. It certainly wasn't grossly short, as there's no indication that they overshot manufacturing by an order of magnitude or something, but it certainly could have been disappointing. We really can't guess right now.
Good, traditional reporting might be able to surface some insight with real footwork and investigation. Armchair blogspam writing like the article is pointless and is really just clickbait.
Innovator's Dilemma demonstrated wonderfully right here.
If VR is the next big thing, but will take years of niche smaller profit margin products to launch it, established tech companies will struggle to justify the products existence wherein a smaller player could go all in, achieve roughly equivalent results, and be quite content.
I don't think it's really a question of how many units they sell.
It's more how quickly those units sell. How many get returned. How much activity is happening on the platform.
Apple knows all of those numbers. They also know what the potential improvements are and they probably have a really good idea what improvements would move the needle on the numbers that matter.
If Apple kill the AVP it may well look odd from the outside but they'll be well informed.
Funny - To put things in perspective, The Wii U sold about 14M units if I am not terribly mistaken, and is considered a flop so legendary that almost ended Nintendo.
Now take in consideration that Nintendo is a fraction of the size of Apple.
400k units is nothing, less than a rounding error for a company the size of Apple. They are not in the business of selling some hundred thousand units of hardware.
How many Mac Pro's have ever sold? Or the Pro Display XDR that costs more than the Vision Pro... Apple are in the business of generating hype and a ladder of hype and glam around what would otherwise be boxes of electronics. They then sell millions at the bottom end whilst everyone aspires for debt to buy the high end.
TVs, computer monitors, actual conversation, and books are just too "good enough" for VR to compete.
After owning a Quest 3 for a while, it's just too isolating and cumbersome an experience. It can't compete with the freedom of my laptop when I want to be in the digital world and it can't compete with legitimate social interaction when I want to be with people.
The biggest place it can compete is games, but outside of a few really solid, and really compelling experiences, most games in VR aren't enough to warrant strapping it to your face.
VR is still missing the killer app/experience to take off. Video games aren't it for most people.
I can't see VR ever being a thing beyond video games and maybe some forms of other media. People are social creatures. The idea is that people want to sit around staring into goggles rather than interacting with other human beings is the kind of weird stuff that gets baked up by socially underdeveloped Big Tech nerds.
Unless the form factor can be significantly minimized this is not going to be the next iPhone.
Looking forward to this comment ending up in some HN retrospective on the success of Vision Pro 20 years from now like some of those old iPhone takes from the mid 2000s lol.
The killer app might be live sports. Did you see the guys setup watching the Masters? Having one of the best seats in the house to your favorite team from the comfort of home would be amazing. But that experience is not available.
For most sports, the reason to not sit at home watching on your giant TV is to have social interactions with other people at the event.
Yes and that’s only a subset of the social interactions. Many people prefer to have friends over and enjoy home cooked food and liquor store priced (cf. stadium prices) beverages. Watching the big game on a giant TV with friends is not going to be beaten by clunky headsets any day of the week.
Sports maybe... still not really sure why we don't have body cam's for a lot of sports so I can experience it from the players perspective. Would work better for some sports than others. Maybe that's a WIP.
I'm an avid golfer and watcher of Golf on TV. I'm not entirely sure I want to watch The Masters in VR. I really enjoy The Masters but it's still a social event for me on Sat/Sun at a bar and Thurs/Fri it's up on a screen near my work computer.
Every so often they try something clever with video to try to give you player POV or to make you feel "part of the action" and it drives me absolutely bonkers because it takes you out of the game and you lose all sense of the flow.
Admittedly this is because they just do ham-fisted cuts - a full POV throughout a game would be different, but for a lot of the sports I watch it just seems like it's going to make watching the game as a spectator more frustrating.
Many years ago, I bought an Oculus Rift and one of the apps was for broadcasting NBA games. I watched one, and it was great! And then I went back to watching NBA games on my television. It was definitely better in some sense but not enough to change my normal viewing habits.
The company that broadcast NBA games in VR was acquired by Apple.
I remain firmly convinced that Apple is planning for 10 or 15 years down the line, when there is no special "thing", just face screens that are light and compact enough to start piecemeal replacing phones as a product category.
In principle it should be possible to do away with screens altogether and generate an image by shining low power lasers from eyeglass frames into the wearer's eyes. This will require some major technology breakthroughs, but I think that's what will really make AR cross the chasm into the mainstream market.
It’s been used by surgeons in the operating room already, so that’s promising.
Of course, Apple once made another product that, despite its popularity among medical professionals was ultimately not commercially successful enough to survive: the Newton.
It really is too isolating. You can have the coolest immersive experiences but at the end of the day no one can see you do it. You get done with an "adventure," to take off your headset in an empty room. That comedown is worse than the actual experience in the headset.
Until they figure out Star Wars hologram style communication VR will forever be in the niche category.
I love Apple swung for the fences. I bought one, but ended up returning it within the window.
The technology is amazing, with a few caveats, but they shot themselves in the foot with the launch.
They had no 3rd party software at launch. Developers couldn’t get the device ahead of time, at most you could get two short hands on labs if you flew to one of a handful of cities in the world.
Apple didn’t have anything amazing themselves to keep people coming back. Personas are interesting but not enough. Mac Virtual Display is neat but not going to sell 2 million units.
But that’s OK. That’s what third parties are for. But basically no one was there. Between the issue above and knowing how few would sell it didn’t make sense. Apple should have been paying companies to seed the launch with cool/useful apps. Enhanced ports from other systems, wild ideas, anything. Apple’s secrecy probably meant they weren’t going to do this.
Hopefully they show some great stuff at WWDC. Apple has the money to keep it going for quite a while while they fix the price and get some killer apps. But developer sentiment towards Apple in general isn’t good and some cool possibilities for apps would likely require more room data than I think Apple gives apps for privacy reasons.
I do want to see where it goes. The Apple Watch took a while to find its real place, but it was cheaper and had a more obvious initial value proposition.
—-
Meanwhile, Meta is losing $1B a month on AR/VR. “Why would I want a Vision Pro? A Quest 3 is the same for $3000 less.” isn’t doing them enough favors it seems.
I feel like Meta's basic problem is the exact reverse of Apple's: literally the only thing the Quest platform is good at is specific, isolated pieces of immersive content, with nothing to connect them or make them "Meta-y", to the point that there's no reason to even stick with the Quest OS over casting from Steam on a PC.
I agree. I had a Quest 2. It was fine, could’ve used some hardware improvements that I’m sure the 3 fixed.
But it’s just an overcomplicated game launcher. The environment between VR apps isn’t important or memorable in any way. And once you’re in the game it could be any piece of VR hardware. It’s just a commodity. I think the main reason it’s popular is it just doesn’t seem to have much direct competition (stand alone VR headsets).
Apple chose a few differentiators like ultra-high resolution, entirely hands free (no controller) operation, and a ton of processing power relative to a Quest. That means they’re capable of doing things no one else could, if they can find compelling things to do.
I had one. Yeah you could watch movies. Ok. But can do that on my phone or iPad or computer or TV. It may be a different experience, but it’s not something only the VP can do.
I was referring to compelling things that existing devices can’t do well. There don’t seem to be many/any now, let alone at launch.
I saw Vision Pro demos with extending a MacOS desktop into the field of view, and I was highly intrigued, even at that price, as I've been hoping for something like this since Google Glass (which yes, I have). Everything seemed perfect until a reviewer stated that it only worked with a single monitor display, and I was like "what!?" This seemed entirely a waste of the concept!
My normal desktop is 3x 50" TV's I work in front of, which is more or less what my first thought of doing in Vision Pro with their ability to pull in the Mac desktop, but I would want it as multiple displays as well, same as I use my displays today. Only a single desktop seemed unnecessarily limiting, and apparently I'm not alone as someone has even come up with a product (Splitscreen app) to expand on this at least to 2, but it's still hackish and far from ideal.
Maybe this is a Mac limitation, as looking at what sort of Mac I would need to support a Vision Pro indicated I would need M3 Pro to do 2x displays, or a M3 Max for 3x displays. This seemed absurd as I am typing this on a 7-8 year old dell xps driving 3 displays at 4k on an intel gpu, and a brand new M3 needs a top spec Pro or Max to do so?
If I could replicate my 3x desktop experience in Vision Pro, I had honestly considered maybe even trying a MacOS system again (I use Linux for the past 20 years full time), but without at least that, it's all a half-baked tech demo today. Ideally I could even pull in application windows from the desktop apart into Vision Pro space as well, but multiple desktops otherwise would be the barrier to entry.
Here's to hope Collabora/Valve hasn't given up on XR Desktop for Linux VR Desktop integration entirely yet.
Regardless of limitations on the Mac side, there's simply no way to stream data into the Vision Pro fast enough. WiFi can only come close with very heavy compression and a low bar for reliability. One 1080p60 uncompressed video stream is 3.2Gb/s, already well beyond what WiFi can be relied upon to deliver. The existing single 4k desktop streaming is pushing the limits of low-latency, high-quality compression.
You’re forgetting about foveated rendering. You don’t need the 4k60 stream if you’re not looking at it, and you can only look at one screen at once. I think it’s doable.
Applying foveated rendering to compressing video streams would require the Mac transmitting video to have realtime access to the Vision Pro's eye tracking data—which even apps running on the Vision Pro don't get access to for privacy reasons. And with the latency of WiFi plus encoding, the foveated rendering/compression would have to be fairly conservative about resolution changes to avoid distractions from detail popping in your peripheral vision. Dropping the frame rate of video streams the user isn't looking at would probably work very well for streams that are mostly static windows. Overall, it might be workable, but it definitely isn't trivial from a technical or UX perspective.
Maybe he didn’t forget but left this thought out for brevity: foveated rendering and other tricks is certainly possible. But that requires a lot more software development. Apple is launching an MVP. Probably primarily to get developers to start making apps for it. They haven’t had time to develop all the features that would make the AVP great.
I suspect next generation of this solution will stream each window individually, and let you place Mac windows freely around your environment. Then you don’t need to stream anything from static windows, you mainly just need to stream data from the window you’re interacting with at the moment.
> Strapping on a helmet with 4 HDMI cables running out of it
Like 4 HDMI streams can't go into 'one' cable?
My Samsung TV has a box where all the inputs connect, and then there's one cable the diameter of a spaghetti noodle that carries the video signal AND power to the TV.
> Multi-screen Mac use is already an extremely niche market
Because much as I am all-in on Mac, it's a niche market because multi-monitor support on macOS is largely garbage.
And yet my Quest will do 6 screens just fine. You don't need every the content of each screen to update at 60-120fps. You only need it's representation to move smoothly.
If I had a video or game in every screen then yes, I might need the bandwidth. But most screens are mostly static with only the cursor and my input making any changes.
You can have more ultrawide retina displays going than your neck will let you crane your head at.
Only one display needs be hardware, the others are virtual.
PS. Separately, for real displays, most likely your Intel is doing DisplayLink (and most likely not retina resolution), while the Mac is not compressing the video. The Mac can also support a slew of DisplayLink monitors if you get a DisplayLink driver. Elegato and others use the standard driver to run their monitor accessories like Elegato's teleprompter, but you can also use DisplayLink on lower end Macbooks that only support 2 or 3 uncompressed 4K+ retina screens at once as well as on certain docks that split to multiple DisplayLink screens.
I've had the HTC Vive, bought a million games, done virtual desktop and then last year bought the Quest 3. The fact you can pick it up and get going without tethering to a computer or setting up base stations and see through it is amazing for €500.
Had a friend show me the Vision Pro and couldn't believe the cost and how similar it was to the Quest 3. I asked him if you can install Steam etc and he's like nah... ok so you paid €4500 to look at a dinosaur tech demo and do a virtual desktop.
It just doesn't make sense why anyone would buy one over the Quest other than to show people in public they can afford a 5k device and have people looking at them
The lack of features/services you describe are all software: which explains exactly why they’re so expensive.
The displays they’re using is in limited supply. And they primarily want to get the headsets into the hand of developers to make apps for them. If some enthusiasts buy them and give them some feedback for OS development that’s also great. The high price makes it more likely that the AVP doesn’t get bought by people that Apple doesn’t have any interest in getting it yet.
You also gotta keep in mind that the AVP has an incredibly powerful processor. That drives a lot of the cost and downsides compared to the quest (a lot of heat from those chips.. metal helps conduct it away). I think the point is to get developers to start thinking primarily about developing professional apps. Apple can’t afford to be stuck with just a casual consumer market. Quest will be too strong there. I’m sure they will launch a “non pro” Apple Vision for this market eventually (I suspect when they can get the same processing power as AVP with less power consumption so they can drop the fan and integrate a battery). But they need the halo-effect of a “pro” product line to drive sales.
The current best mass market VR is Meta Quest 3. However, Apple first VR headset is an opportunity for developer to start & learn how to use visionOS, experimenting spacial computing.
One french developer like the interaction with the Apple VR compared to the quest 3, it's not perfect but it's working, it's natural to use, but she warn that first good apps will arrive in two years
https://youtu.be/UKsSPF5pT88?si=8VqwkGvprqlE1uy2
The VR market is emerging and new ideas is coming (microled, holographic lens, vergence accomodation conflict solutions...)
Douglas Lanman makes a long video on how to pass the visual turing test on AR/VR with tons of ideas
https://youtu.be/EJ_-n7Syz0s?si=yc90uRFyOlPIeT3D
The VR market was "emerging" in the 80s when VR setups made it to our mall video game arcades. Then it was "emerging" again in the 90s when VR kits toured universities across the country. Then VR was "emerging" in the aughts with military and medical systems getting a bunch of attention. Then VR was again "emerging" in the teens with Oculus and Hololens. Now it's once again "emerging" because Apple's joined in. Great. With all this emergence, you'd expect we'd have something that didn't suck shit through a Slurpy straw, but alas we do not.
This article reads more like a manifesto against tech, and somewhat specifically against certain kinds of tech (face-strapped computers vs. hand-held ones) rather than a careful analysis of what happened with Vision Pro and why. It pretty much has nothing to do with Vision Pro other than it serving as a piñata for the author.
What VR is lacking is content. Apple needs to make a user friendly 360 camera in an approachable price range. I take a 360 camera whenever I travel and rewatching 360 videos in a VR headset can put me back in time. Being able to relive the moment I saw the total eclipse or walking through my childhood home is not something a phone camera can do.
Currently the image quality of consumer grade 360 cameras are webcam level and having to edit and export 360 content then side loading it to a VR headset is not a very user friendly experience.
For a company as rich as Apple it's hardly a flop. Even if it doesn't do well I'd imagine they can recycle a lot of the R&D that went into it for their other tech areas.
So when you follow the link under "Apple initially had a sales target of 3 million Vision Pro units in its first year", you'll see that this number came from Bloomberg's Marc Gurman, and is based on nothing.
The author bolsters his argument by quoting Ming-Chi Kuo's similarly unsubstantiated "800,000 units" claim. Since the 72.5% accurate¹ Kuo can't possibly have guessed wrong, his face-saving explanation is that Apple intended to hit that number but has since had to slash production.
Only, this doesn't agree with Kuo v2023.09, who noted, "Based on some component suppliers’ maximum production capacity estimates, Vision Pro shipments in 2024 will be at most 400,000–600,000 units"². (The Financial Times, The Information, and The Elec all reported on the 400-500K unit limit imposed by the availability of the ultra-high-resolution OLED microdisplays manufactured by Sony.)
Also, Apple was telegraphing fewer than 400,000 units in 2024 way back in July of last year.³
Look, I understand that analysts gonna analyst. But anybody with even a tiny bit of tech history knowledge should understand by now that Apple plays the long game. This is just poorly-researched, long-form, "gotta generate engagement" shitposting.
The article is bad but just look at the engagement!
Notably, the Forbes article mentioning the 400k units "telegraphed" is sourced from a Financial Times article that cites two sources close to Apple and the supplier Luxshare. [1]
Also, an insider was very actively leaking information about Vision Pro and other Apple products at this exact time. [2]
It is believable that actual internal unit estimates would have come out of this source.
The article also pulls in the Humane pin, and Cybertruck which have nothing to do with the Vision Pro.
If the article were presented as something intended to showcase perceived new product failures hey, it is okay to editorialize something like that. What is this author other than some self-presumed analyst themselves?
Instead, it looks like something that may have started that way and then got editorialized into a VP hit piece.
Gurman seems to get some controlled leaks from headquarters from time to time but interprets them wrong all the time. Kuo gets some supply chain leaks and everything else he says can be ignored. But of course there’s an entire industry pumping out highly engaging Apple rumors and analyses like this one based on what might have been one sentence leaks Gurman or Kuo originally got.
LOL. Your argument amounts to "the analysts who named a high number had no idea what they were talking about, and had no evidence" while "the analysts who named a lower number, with no evidence" were much better?
I disagree with the article's comment on inevitability. Sure, if society wants to put a lot of effort into stopping something, we can. For instance, nuclear rock blasting might never happen, despite us having the technology to do so since the 50s. Getting to that point, however, required a massive geopolitical movement powered by everyone being terrified of nuclear weapons.
The problem with VR is simply that the technology is still not there yet. The Vision Pro is cutting edge technology; but it is still cumbersome. The display might be technically impressive, but it still offers less pixels per degree than a typically monitor at typical distances.
All that the Vision Pro demonstrates is that optics, computers, and display technologies are not yet advanced enough to make VR a mass market viable technology. I see no reason to believe that there is any barrier that means they will never become sufficiently advanced. And once the technology does reach that point, I see no indication that it will not be a success.
Even given the limitations of the technology, VR products that are technologically inferior to the Vision Pro seem to have found a sustainable niche.
So? Everything did less back than. The Vision Pro needs to compete in a world filled with smartphones, tablets, laptops, monitors, computers with multiple monitors, docking stations, televisions, etc. Most of what the Vision Pro offers is also offered by those existing technologies. And they can do a lot of it much better because they do not need to work within the same constraints as VR devices do.
We are slowly inching our way toward the type of AR / AI get up featured in that infamous Black Mirror Episode. Once you can wear your Vision Pro contact lenses, with streaming to AI assistant that can whisper in your ear, respond to a rhythmic movement of the fingers, or a focused thought, it will be ready to shape us for the better or.. worse.
The whole glasses thing might be more like Apple Watch. Feel like it has to be used with the hands to be tool-like enough. Our hands and fingers are so evolved to using things, it's a big part of how we do anything.
Sure there will be smart glasses, but it might be more of a peripheral thing.
> Apple publicly stated they expected to sell 3 million of the things in the first year.
If they did, I'm sure that OP or you can find a source for this statement. A rumor published by Bloomberg (or, in a more charitable interpretation, an estimate given on background) is not "publicly stated".
> As the article states, Apple publicly stated they expected to sell 3 million of the things in the first year.
This is false. The link goes to a Mark Gurman article in Bloomberg that claims Apple at one point had an internal prediction of 3 million, and that it was revised down before it went on sale. That may or may not be accurate reporting, but it’s not close to claiming they publicly predicted 3M sales.
When the iPhone came out, it was perfectly positioned. Smartphones weren’t new of course, but they were clunky devices with tons of compromise. The iPhone was designed to fix a lot of the problems around existing smartphones by having great built in apps, a great browser, and great usability thanks to many novel and intuitive forms of interaction. When it came out it was a must-have device and it solved so many problems for so many people.
For everything I’ve seen of the Vision Pro it has represented a solution in search of a problem.
Also worth noting they sold about 270,000 of them during the first week of sales, which is about $1 billion of revenue in just the first week. I think if they didn't over-manufacture them against unrealistic expectations that they may have gotten a reasonable profit, or broke even on paper (at least, ignoring their IRR baseline). $1 billion is enough to pay 500 engineers $300,000/year for 6 years.
But I'm sure the cost of components ate a ton of that, and I'm not sure how much of that would be fixed vs. marginal costs. For something like the custom silicon, I could imagine fixed costs were substantial compared to marginal costs. I'm also not sure how much of this can be amortized across future versions of the Vision Pro, or if a huge amount of the fixed costs will need to be repeated.
Maybe for the amount of silicon fabrication tooling, and the complexity of manufacturing tooling for something so unique, the fixed costs required the sale of 2-3 million units to break even. If so, I could see various parts of the organization feeling pressured to deliver analysis which confirmed the necessary level of demand, especially if executives expressed bullishness on the project.
It's certainly not a success, but Apple just beat Meta in almost every way except price while not burning O(10B) in the process. That gives me a lot of confidence that they will dominate this space if it ever takes off.
It has been reported Apple spent an estimated $15 Billion on research and development for Vision Pro, that's a lot more than 10B. Meanwhile, Quest has sold over 20 million units. Apple might have beat Meta in "almost every way except price", but for now Meta has Apple beat in every way that matters.
Apple spent about as much on AVP as Facebook did on Quest, starting about the same time (10 years ago) and all Apple's done to date is release a Quest Plus with slightly better specs and premium materials for 7X what Facebook charges and that's why Apple only has tens of thousands of monthly AVP users and Meta has about 10 million monthly Quest users.
I don't think it's a huge surprise that a company that has been designing hardware and selling it to consumers for 30+ years beat another company for which this was both the first hardware they ever designed and the first time they ever tried to sell something to consumers.
He briefly mentions self driving cars along with a bunch of other unwanted and failed tech (metaverse, crypto etc)
The difference with self-driving cars is that everyone [1] wants them, and once "done well" they'll take off quickly.
The advantages are just too obvious;
mobility for those too young or too old, or medical unable to drive.
The lack of needing parking right near your origin or destination.
The expensive asset that is tied to single human location, so meaning it spends 98% of time idle.
The road deaths caused by bad driving, drunk driving, stupid driving etc.
Indeed self driving cars have so much upside they are inevitable. Sure the tech is hard, and we're not there yet, but the payoff is too big not to keep working on it.
[1] yeah I get that there's some percentage of people who like driving and will continue to do that. Perdonally I enjoy driving, and I drive stick. We also have people who like riding horses. But that group will make a big noise for a while, but ultimately dwindle into a niche hobby.
> Indeed self driving cars have so much upside they are inevitable. Sure the tech is hard, and we're not there yet, but the payoff is too big not to keep working on it.
As are fusion reactors that generate more energy than the total that goes in. Or room-temperature super conductors, or AGI, or Quantum computers, or…
Not all technologies that appear possible will be achieved in practice. It’s not inevitable. I would argue it’s not even likely at this point.
Of course there's an argument it can't be done. Which is fair enough. Some things are harder to do than others.
Yes, I'm skeptical of fusion, and quantum computing for that matter. Both are hardware problems though while self-driving is software.
History is littered with things that "couldn't be done" and which are part of life today. So im not sure I'd bet on them "never being done". And self-driving seems solvable, I don't see any physics being stretched here.
Even the best public transport has downsides relative to personal vehicles. A perfect self driving car is a drop-in replacement for a current car that is simply a better product.
You basically described all the advantages of public transit. And in fact fully automated vehicles are actually not that uncommon among public transit systems that operate on fixed guideways (most recently Skyline [or HART] in Honolulu).
The only problem with a public transit system that gives you all of these advantages is the expensive infrastructure and operations required. However compared to everyone waiting for the tech to arrive (which may never happen) and then buying and maintaining a very expensive and bulky machine, building and operating a good public transit system using common funds is actually orders of magnitude cheaper, and far more economical.
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