I completely agree with all of this. I think Apple is spread too thin and the lack of innovation software-wise is starting to set in. Which is what also happened about the time of the Newton. Too many products.
I also think that a few people will buy it and try it, but eventually it will kind of be such a niche product that it never catches a hold of the general populace.
It would either have to be straight up glasses (which the tech can’t support yet) or true VR with gaming and virtual worlds—instead of AR. AR needs to be subtle and I can wear it everywhere without people thinking I look crazy.
Possible counterpoint, Apple needs to get in on 3D UX development early (in case it does become big).
We know the Apple truism that people “come for the hardware, but stay for the software”: iPhone dominance was entirely predicated on Apple being the first to the consumer mobile app market and maintaining that lead by carefully tending their ecosystem.
Right now, all the VR headsets are focused on niche gaming; none have broken into the consumer space. But with recent advances in hardware design, Meta, HTC, Valve, Sony all are approaching more wearable headsets and software maturity with the potential to target mass market.
Apple must get in now, start seeding ecosystem development and fine-tuning their OS for this (likely in some form) new medium, in preparation for the battleground of 2025-30.
I don’t see how it can’t be big — once we have the software to support it, at least one of which will be a “killer app”.
I know I’d love to have a 3D design app which would allow working in the round and moving around a piece of furniture while designing it — think the 3D interfaces which one sees in movies.
I agree with some of the tech sites arguing that Apple got on the wrong train. Two years ago the Vision Pro might have had more impact, but AR/VR has pretty much been dumped as the 'tech darling" in favor of the onslaught of AI, and I don’t think Apple’s counteroffensive of protecting us from AI will give them more of a market foothold.
Simple as that. It’s just too much for most people for something they definitely don’t even verge on ‘needing’.
People ‘need’ motor vehicles. People ‘need’ phones/smartphones. So they are prepared to pay substantial amounts of money for them.
This is at best more like those high end TVs. A sustainable market? Sure, probably. One of the size and profit Apple are used to? Lol, no.
And they don’t even have any official controllers for it. Sure, of all companies, Apple is the one that third parties will support. But most of those products are poor quality, and even the good ones are often a bit… off.
I admit, I don’t see the value of this at all. I would never spend the money on this. Maybe expensive institutions? Like for remote technical work, like a surgery or something?
Price is a big deal, but even more important is function. It feels like a product answering a question no one asked. ??
Eg. When cell phones were introduced they were about the same price bracket of around $3-4K. When Apple introduced the iPhone at $600-700 (infamously declared as having “no chance”), it was price approximately 1.5-2x the cost of next highest end Blackberry Pearl.
For comparison, the most expensive current VR headset is the HTC Vive Pro 2 at $1400 MSRP. So the Vision Pro is priced at ~2.5x—very high indeed—but just on the cusp of ‘stomach-able’ for early adopters, if Apple can deliver a next-gen AR experience.
Assuming the market for VR/AR grows steadily, we could see the price of an entry model drop to ~$1K over the next 5 years (mirroring the '89–93 era), which is where I think mass-adoption could start taking off (mirroring the post '93 rise).
A 77" 4K QD-OLED display costs $4500. Assuming high visual fidelity of a projected 4K screen with the 4000ppi micro-OLED on the Vision Pro, I could have a 100" (arbitrarily large) OLED screen, with custom curvature, 3D-projection, ie. anything I want.
It would be equivalent to even a $10k display, with the best consumer tech in the field.
So while I initially balked at the price, I think I may have just ‘rationalized’ my way around the sticker-shock.
And yet AR and VR had stagnated. And 3D went, briefly came back, then went again.
I don’t think smartphones are a good comparison. They are almost an essential tool. I can’t see this becoming one.
Anyway, tech becoming cheaper doesn’t change that this is expensive. And as it does, others will join in. There already are plenty of alternatives and Sony and Vuvix have been on the HMD market for years.
Just want correct a misconception: it has stagnated in popular conversation. (But with Apple bringing back the spotlight, the popular conversation could easily change.)
However, in terms of revenue, the market has continued at a roughly exponential rate:
Another thing I noticed relative to the cellphone market. The '89–93 era massive drop in average price wasn’t dependant on mass adoption, which actually started c. 1996 onwards.
In other words, it was a two-step process of hardware advancement bringing the cost to <$1K, which then spurred consumer adoption (green fill). The takeaway being VR/AR may still be in the ‘pre-1993’ phase, and could still see significant drops in price, even with single-digit consumer adoption.
Was waiting to see Marques’ review - I know he is generally pro-Apple but he is a good reviewer and much more detailed than just the usual “blew my mind” response. He focuses on the importance of the eye tracking in the interface.
Still, I just don’t get it, but I am an old fart that isn’t meant to get it…
I believe this market will bear the high price, at least initially — consider the likelihood of First Class being full of folks wearing these so as to be better able to shut out the hoi polloi.
With a reasonable number of them sold, then you have a market for other usages.
The big thing is, the Shapr3D folks are managing to get monthly subscription fees out of folks for 3D modeling for a quite simplistic tool which doesn’t really add new features beyond existing tools, just a nice UI — for industrial design, pockets are quite deep — even if the only usage is for product visualization in the boardroom there’s a lot of potential.
It’s good and fair and I pretty much agree with it.
About that price (this version 1 is probably not for you):
As it stands, a $3,499 Vision Pro is a product mainly for developers chasing the bleeding edge, Apple die-hards who will buy anything the company puts out, and the small group of people who can spend that kind of money without even thinking about it.
There’s a chance we’ll look back at the first Vision Pro with bemusement when a cheaper, better Vision Pro 4 is selling like hotcakes in a few years. For that to happen, though, Apple must be willing to plow a lot of money into what could be an expensive, niche product for quite a long time.
So is the disconnect with the tech itself or just the current implementation of it?
For the purpose of discussion, let’s the remove the form-factor limitation: ie. say the AR was achievable within a contact lens. Would that still not present legit usecases to you?
To me, it seems like a natural evolution of wearable tools: ie. prescription glasses are technically a body augment, but nobody thinks of them as such. Fishing your phone out of your pocket for every little action is actually unnatural, but has become normalized. Though I think in the future, it will be seen as cumbersome.
You can’t do that even for the purposes of discussion - the current design, even with the fake eyes, is still a “loneliness generator” - OMG - filming your kids birthday with the headset on? It’s already bad enough that we have barely evolved from huge video cameras resting on our shoulders to our smartphones out in front of our faces all the time. I would LOVE to experience the event but often forced to be the family videographer/documentarian…
The FaceTime experience is even worse - we get to experience your more human-like memoji instead of at least SEEING the real person.
At the insistence of Jony Ive. I agree with those who think it’s a mistake. No matter how real they look, everyone will know that they’re fake eyes looking at them which is creepy as heck. And it’s bad enough that everyone everywhere is staring at their smartphones in public all the time, ignoring their surroundings and other people. Now we’ll have them look like they’re paying attention to the real world with their fake eyes while actually being off in their own world or at least being inattentive to a smartphone level, focused on AR things placed over their view of reality.
I’ll take the honest smartphone focus over the fake eyes presenting a false impression of paying attention to reality. Better to have total blackout goggles.
If someone turned up to my event with one of those things on and insisted on wearing it, I’d kick them out straight away.
As you said, it’s bad enough with phones these days (and I can be guilty of that too).
Google glass wearers rightly got ostracised, and that left most of your face open. I did meet someone who wore one to a graduation. He was indeed a glasshole.
I could imagine there might be professional applications that would make it worth it, though I wouldn’t care to wear it. And I could imagine it might be fun to play a game with someone else wearing it too.
But stuff like this is all about separating you from others, rather than engaging, and it saddens me to no end. It’s already hard enough listening to music, as an example. For teens, it is 100% a private affair with earbuds in. Remember playing music outloud to share with others? I do too. A thing of the past for most younger people. Now they share earbuds. Remember watching TV together and laughing together? Also largely a thing of the past. Now everyone watches their own private screen in the living room, unless I make a strong effort to deliberately create a shared-screen activity.
So, no. I have zero interest in the headset, honestly. It’s impressive on a certain level, and perhaps eventually it will get cheap enough (with applications that make sense) that folks will adopt it. But I’ve actually been pushing more towards digital minimalism, to more fully connect with my actual lived environment and others around me. Dstrauss’s description of it as a “loneliness generator” is exactly on point for me.
