I am really struggling to see how this can succeed. Maybe it will be like Apple Pay, lackluster adoption for a time and then years down the line starts to gain marketshare. Even for me a geek who works in the apple ecosystem with a relatively high paying job who would love to mess with this thing it would be hard for me to justify spending 3k+ on a headset like this. Combine that with the fact that building compelling virtual reality experiences is just difficult, where are the apps going to come from? Maybe I will be totally wrong, I am excited to see it though.
$3k+ is exactly the right price point. A customer cannot be disappointed from a product they don't buy. And the type of enthusiast who spends 3k+ on it, will be satisfied before they even wear it.
At 3k+ it will likely be the unchallenged top headset on the market, and that alone will mean that tech nerds will be raving over it.
> where are the apps going to come from?
Gaming whales exist. Enterprise customers exist. Microsoft got a $2b from the DOD for building the holo-lens 2 at tech demo levels of product quality. IMO, VR is 1 UX breakthrough away from finding a money-generating niche. And UX breakthrough/popularization is Apple's bread and butter.
> $3k+ is exactly the right price point. A customer cannot be disappointed from a product they don't buy. And the type of enthusiast who spends 3k+ on it, will be satisfied before they even wear it.
I think you're absolutely right. I think a similar example of this is the RTX 4090. Everyone complains about the price, the power usage, how it's overkill for 99.99% of the population but it's constantly sold out. I doubt anyone who owns one is really disappointed
> I think a similar example of this is the RTX 4090.
I’m not sure. With video cards those gamer whales can crush all the lesser card owners after they buy some power via MTX. Then they can convince themselves it’s skill based, not money based. With a $3k headset in a closed ecosystem they’ll be playing amongst themselves and they won’t get the same level of reward (aka crushing “noobs”) that they’re able to buy in a more mainstream market.
I don’t know a single person, including friends of friends, that would buy any VR headset let alone one that costs $3k. The price point needs to come down a ton and typically adoption of tech like that comes from younger generations that have exactly zero money these days, so I predict massive flops from everyone because I don’t think the economics are going to work.
>Are there a lot games where a 4090 owner would have a meaningful advantage over an 3060 owner in a competitive environment?
Yes, all of them benefit from being able to push high framerates at resolutions the 3060 (and 2070 and 1080) can't get to. A high framerate is a meaningful advantage for a bunch of reasons, but so's a higher resolution- doesn't matter if an enemy's movement is smooth if your screen is too blurry to positively identify them.
Sure, the 1080/2070/3060 can run 4K at 30Hz, or 1440p at 90-100Hz (this is why that whole G-sync thing exists- it's designed to help hide framerate drops from those cards), but the 4090 is significantly more powerful than those are and can push 4K at 144Hz.
> Yes, all of them benefit from being able to push high framerates at resolutions the 3060 (and 2070 and 1080) can't get to. A high framerate is a meaningful advantage for a bunch of reasons, but so's a higher resolution- doesn't matter if an enemy's movement is smooth if your screen is too blurry to positively identify them.
Which game in particular gives a 4090 owners a meaningful advantage over 3060 owners? I understand the importance of high & stable FPS.
If there are so many can you please name a competitive game where a 4090 give a meaningful advantage over a 3060. And consider that 1080p at 120FPS on low settings is essentially the max that any competitive gamer could ask for. Running games higher then 1080p is eye candy, nothing more. Anything over 120FPS does give a tiny, tiny, tiny advantage.
Agree, and would add that “apps” is likely the wrong mindset: This thing is going to be all about experiences. Yoga on the beach. Standing on the pitch during Ted Lasso. Watching the Apollo moon landing from the surface of Tranquility Base.
Either they have the immersion and UI model that makes this kind of content viscerally “wow”, or they don’t have a product. I’m guessing they have a product.
These "experiences" are visceral but also very short lived and weirdly frustrating for many (most ?) people.
I look at it the same we look at paintings. Some pieces are truely mindblowing, speak to your soul and you could look at them everyday for next decades without getting bored...or not. I think for most people even the most impacting piece becomes a wallpaper pattern after the fifth time they stared at it for 5 min. They might revisit it once in a while, at most.
For a headset, that mostly means it's played with for 30 min the first time and stays in a closet for the rest of its life. You forget about it and don't get a chance to get revisited.
So yes, experiences could be wonderful, but it also needs apps that bring you back to the device on a regular basis to help the ecosystem stay alive.
(the other weird part: the more realistic and visceral the experience is, the more you get greedy and ask for more. Except there's nothing beyond. You'll be looking at that moon landing, wishing to move forward to look closer, except it will be clunky if even possible. And you're reminded that yes, it's "just" virtual, and technology and content is not ready yet)
I had that visceral “wow” while reading your post. I’m not saying that’s what they’ll do. But that _is_ one way of leveraging the content/IP from TV+ and could serve as an impressive demonstration which is fun to work on.
I am guessing they don't, if we use your metrics. I do get that discussing here are mostly US fanboys, so facts are hard to actually discuss rationally, but Apple made flops in the past, and underwhelming hardware and software they initially presented as second coming of Jesus.
VR is hard, sorry hard even for companies that had decade headstart and similar budgets and talents available to Apple.
It may actually help them if people have more realistic expectations than presented here, since its not possible it will be a perfect product from gen 1, day 1. Not even Apple ever achieved any of that on any sophisticated product. Since there are so many sub-categories in VR to compete in (home cinema, overall immersion, raw resolution, couch/room experience, controllers, comfort, virtual huge desktop, sound quality and so on and on) people should be realistic. And also expect to wait few years to have 3rd party software fully utilizing HW.
Price point should not drive expectations, Apple often gives upmark on its products compared to competition. We shall see soon.
Honestly the tech has stagnated for the last few years, with VR headsets actually getting crappier, (Meta Quest Pro is slightly better than 1080p?) I hope Apple lights a fire under them, it's 2023 the technology could be a LOT better. VR is one of those things where it either works perfectly or it's a failure, you need super high refresh rates, high resolution, and software to get a certain level of immersion that tricks your brain into believing it's real.
The Pro is sort of an aberration. Pixels per degree are actually higher than the Quest 2, but the panel resolution itself is slightly less (and the MiniLED tech is far superior to the regular LCD panel). The big upgrade was with the pancake optics, which are actually quite a leap forward.
Meta should have put the product on ice until Qualcomm had XR2 Gen 2 SoCs available. They couldn’t bump the panel resolution because of the SoC. Hell, even the extremely overengineered Touch Pro controllers only exist as an artifact of the XR2 not supporting enough cameras to do face/eye tracking while still having cameras available for SLAM tracking.
Have you ever been to a live action theater and dinner thing? Like Tony and Tina’s wedding and the lion king - it’s corny as hell and meant to be consumed in small doses.
Apple Pay was great from day one - depending on where you lived. In the UK contactless payments are the standard and already were when Apple Pay was released meaning I could use it in 99% of retailers, even small ones.
As I understand it, the US didn’t really have contactless payment pre-apple/google pay _at all_, so it’d naturally be a harder transition than in places where it was already rolled out.
Even today, you’ll occasionally see terminals in Europe which don’t actually support Apple Pay as such; it’ll work, because it acts like a normal contactless card, but only up to 50 euro, because the terminal doesn’t know it’s authenticated.
Sounds like you're aware of why it's a uniquely American thing.
You forgot to mention companies that did accept it but stopped after they implemented their own payment system (which again only applies to American branches of their stores).
If they can execute well on a simple use case - virtual desktop for professionals -this will be justifiable to me. I spent >1000€ on my last 5k ultra wide five years ago.
This promises to be a portable unlimited screen space - if I can use it 8h+, OS integration is there - I could see myself spending that kind of money.
Having a portable workspace anywhere with a chair and desk is big - especially when desk/chair dimensions now don't play a factor.
>This promises to be a portable unlimited screen space
Well, if the resolution is up to par and the software is set up to mitigate the problems even middling resolution would cause.
No headset, except maybe the 8K (and possibly the 4K) PiMax designs, are capable of displaying text in a way that isn't a blurry mess; the problem is both the lack of resolution and the fact that anti-aliasing can only do so much (move your head ever so slightly off axis so the text no longer lines up with the pixel boundaries and fine details become completely distorted by insufficient resolution- software could help fix this if anyone bothered to write any but that hasn't happened yet).
“Portable workspace “ is an interesting concept to me. Something more than a laptop screen. It would be hard to get input devices right when you’re wearing a headset though.
Lots of VR headsets have a small webcam, and can show its viewpoint as a HUD element in the headset. That's enough to keep track of your bearings, then you just need a normal mouse and keyboard (e.g. the laptop you already own). No need to revolutionize on the input front if all you want is lots of private screen real-estate.
You can have this right now from multiple VR headsets (Lenovo comes to mind as a company that puts a lot of emphasis on this use-case). The issue is the resolution of most headsets is pretty low for this usecase, so you end up with pretty low-resolution virtual "screens".
With supported keyboards (basically Apple and Logitech’s offerings atm), they load up a tracked 3D model of the keyboard and then pull in an overlaid video feed of your real hands. With non-supported keyboards, the video feed is more of a small “window” that also captures the keyboard.
And when it works, it’s honestly very impressive (especially with color passthrough).
I fully expect Apple to have a more robust and less buggy version ready to go - and with the much higher specs they’ll probably be able to get a lot of “wows” from the demos.
I've never been convinced by an AR keyboard-like interface. You need tactical, physical feedback. I really can't imagine anything short of direct brain interface being a good replacement for physical input devices, specifically the keyboard, though LLMs will maybe make voice interfaces tolerable for certain creative tasks.
It feels a lot like it’s been pursued all the way to a releasable product and there’s just too many wheels in motion to stop and think if it’s really a worthwhile idea.
We could be wrong and people are happy to hand over 3k for this, but it’s just hard to understand how for a whole bunch of reasons.
Are they going to get third parties to build software for this? Where is the volume to support that going to come from? Who’s going to want to go first and risk 3k on something that might flop and be on eBay for a fraction of the price in a year?
Just to point out this sounds like the exact criticisms you might have levied at Apple for the original iPhone. Not that this will go the same way, but they've done it once the dramatic world changing effect.
Did people really say that about the original iphone? I don't remember that.
I remember the iPhone announcement as being a product that basically everybody had been asking for and immediately saw the value in. And the rumour cycle leading up to the announcement was insane - people were so hyped for apple to announce a proper smartphone, it was already a product category. Things like the Palm Treo and the Nokia N95 existed and were relatively popular - handheld computers with phone capabilities as well as full web browsers, email clients, maps, video playback, etc. The iPhone was taking a product concept that had already been proven, and hugely improving the form factor and user experience. Nobody saw the iPhone announcement and said "nah, i just don't see the value there".
Gizmodo loved it, but "The real elephant in the room is the fact that I just spent $600 on my iPhone and it can’t do some crucial functions that even $50 handsets can. I’m talking about MMS. Video recording. Custom ringtones. Mass storage. Fully functioning Bluetooth with stereo audio streaming..."
TechCrunch: "That virtual keyboard will be about as useful for tapping out emails and text messages as a rotary phone. Don’t be surprised if a sizable contingent of iPhone buyers express some remorse at ditching their BlackBerry when they spend an extra hour each day pumping out emails on the road."
A ton of people loved it, but it came under heavy criticism for the lack of physical keyboard and the AT&T dependency.
Not enough emphasis can be placed on the existence of a usable web browser on a phone. It did not exist before. Blackberry was great for emails, and Windows mobile was great for propping your door open, but when Safari on iOS came out, even with it being slow 2G and with a buggy keyboard and no copy/paste -- you could use websites on a mobile device -- anywhere. Being able to pull up amazon and check reviews for products while browsing in a BestBuy or whatever was something that just was not practical before and it was a game changer, instantly.
Lots of people criticized it for not being able to do basic tasks like copy and paste or the lack of 3G after they bought it. The iPhone didn't suffer at all from the criticism because people saw it as a work in progress -- the AT&T attachment was actually brilliant because it allowed them to make AT&T build their network and offer decent data plans. Before iPhone the data rate was something ridiculous as an add-on to a regular phone plan, and everyone using 2G data all at once brought the network to its knees in dense areas and forced upgrades.
Yeah my point wasn't that it was universally loved - there was plenty of criticism. but the criticism was because other things in the same product category were better than iPhone at some things. and that's because the product category already existed, and people were used to using those products and had already formed opinions about how they should work.
an augmented-reality headset is a fundamentally different sell, because that's not a product that currently exists in any meaningful way. Apple doesn't have to convince me that their AR headset is better than any other one that i've tried, because i've never tried one. They will have to convince me that this is a thing i need to own.
The iPhone cost roughly the same as 2007’s competing smartphones that were already selling millions of units (e.g. the Nokia N95), and it offered completely unique capabilities.
Today there is a high-volume VR headset in the market, the Quest 2, but the new Apple device is projected to be nearly ten times more expensive and it seems to be more of an incremental advancement of the state of the art.
But we’ll see… I hope Apple pulls a rabbit out of the hat.
In 2007, cellphones were mostly “free” (the cost was hidden in the service contract). Plus however much they made by putting crapware on the phones.
Similarly the Facebook devices have their cost hidden in the privacy violations that come built in. It is a “better” business model than the cellphone contracts because it is even harder to figure out how much they are making off you, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the Apple model wins again.
> The iPhone cost roughly the same as 2007’s competing smartphones that were already selling millions of units (e.g. the Nokia N95), and it offered completely unique capabilities.
At the time of launch the iPhone was one of the highest priced (including carrier subsidies) phones on the market.[1]
> Today there is a high-volume VR headset in the market, the Quest 2, but the new Apple device is projected to be nearly ten times more expensive and it seems to be more of an incremental advancement of the state of the art.
As Ballmer mentions later there were high-volume Windows Mobile phones available at that time too.[1]
What were those "completely unique capabilities" at launch? There was no App Store. It didn't record video. It didn't have 3G. It was actually a fairly ho-hum phone.
The real web available in your pocket. If you weren’t using the mobile web before then, it was a decidedly second-class experience until mobile Safari launched. It took Google 2-3 years after the iPhone to get Android to be comparable and by then the App Store was booming, which basically doomed all of the old phones. Previously selling apps required paying off each carrier and giving huge percentages of the sales, so there were almost no apps of decent quality available. At WWDC 2008, there was spontaneous applause when it launched with much better terms, hard as that may be to believe now.
It was a ho-hum phone by the existing standard of mobile phones. But it offered a full-size capacitive touchscreen and a desktop-level operating system. These were both unique in the market, and importantly they were designed together for a cohesive experience that nobody else could match. The iPhone introduced UI affordances like inertial touch scrolling which we take for granted today, and that UI enabled things like mobile web browsing that didn’t suck.
The iPod touch was an important pillar of this new platform’s introduction. It’s often forgotten today, but a lot of people around the world got introduced to iOS on the iPod rather than the iPhone.
Can you elaborate further on what you mean by a "desktop-level operating system"? By what metric(s)/feature-set? Because Windows Mobile out-did it every way in terms of multitasking, file system et al. You couldn't even multitask on an iPhone until iOS 4 in 2010.
The capacitive touchscreen wasn't unique, the LG Prada was announced prior to the original iPhone, and launched before the original iPhone too. Perhaps "unusual" would be a better term.
I had an iPhone at launch, and perhaps it's down to what websites you used (I'm a Brit), but the browsing experience was pretty terrible until people started developing responsive websites, and it really wasn't until ~2009-2010 that this took off in any appreciable or meaningful capacity in the UK, and even then, it was still common to have a separate mobile version of a website up until 2013. Prior to that, an app for larger websites became much more common, and offered a much better experience than the mobile website or responsive website ever did. Browsing the web over 2G sucked. Websites having buttons too small to press with your fingers also sucked.
Websites that were 100% Flash were super common, as were Flash elements. Even the PlayStation Portable could display Flash in the browser by 2005 after an official firmware update from Sony.
I also had Windows Mobile, BlackBerry et al in the years prior to that.
Sure, pinch-to-zoom, that was serviceable in lieu of a responsive website or mobile site, but it still sucked versus just using the app for the site when the App Store eventually launched. Furthermore, most of the software innovation was happening in Cydia via jailbreaks prior to the App Store launch. Even then, for a considerable number of years following it. Apple would frequently incorporate whatever was hot on Cydia as a concept on the next major version of iOS.
You didn't seem to like your original iPhone. That's ok. I, for one, loved my iPod Touch. It had a full-fledged iPod music app that really worked flawlessly with podcasts and my large music library. I even paid for the update that gave me calendar, mail, and contacts because I wanted to read my emails on the go. Maps was wonderful, there was great YouTube app to watch videos in bed, and Safari worked ok while we were all waiting for responsive websites.
Of course the App Store was an explosion of functionality, but there was a lot to love about iOS before third-party apps appeared.
I liked my original iPhone prior to the launch of the App Store—but it was only jailbreaking and adding a lot of features via Cydia that made it a keeper, even after the launch of the App Store.
iOS was largely lacking for many years. No copy-paste until 2009, no multi-tasking until 2010. It was rough, even as a diehard Apple fan at the time.
There were countless times that I had phone envy—paying more to get considerably less functionality didn't sit well with me at the time. It definitely felt like a toy at times. Everybody wanted to play with the gimmicks like drinking a virtual beer or swooshing a lightsabre, or playing Tap Tap Revenge or Angry Birds, but as a daily-driver phone for productivity and not screwing around, it was pretty lacking.
This was the era when you bought a "smartphone" to do productive things, not screw around. I also liked my PSP, but it wasn't a productivity device, despite having a pretty kick-ass web browser with Flash support and a decent-sized screen.
Windows Mobile in 2007 was based on Windows CE, a completely different and much more limited kernel compared to desktop Windows. Symbian and BlackBerry had the same limitations: these were operating systems designed for embedded devices, not desktop-level computing. They were memory efficient but their growth path was nonexistent.
The original iPhone OS used the underpinnings of Mac OS X: the Mach kernel, CoreGraphics, the Cocoa Foundation APIs… At the iPhone launch, Apple even called the phone operating system “OS X” to highlight that it’s the same.
The combination of screen size, resolution, and non-broken browser to render non-mobile-specific websites tolerably.
That's how it broke the “smartphones are niche because the mobile web sucks, and the mobile web sucks because there are so few users that its not worth improving” barrier.
Don’t forget Apply also got the soft keyboard right which was no small feat. People were dead set against it but here we are no physical keyboards anywhere on smartphones.
Sure. Not sure that was indepedently important (for adoption, it clearly had a big impact on the course of mobile interaction) but even if it wasn’t it was essential to the web thing, because otherwise you couldn’t have a usable keyboard and a sufficiently large screen.
It had the first phone web browser, and indeed the first web browser on any device smaller than a laptop, which didn't make you want to immediately throw it out the window. That was a big deal.
The blackberry message thread context was terrible, iPhone was better - come on, don't lie. The idea you could get full screen visual context was the kicker - blackberry screens were 'decent' but when it was a ~2.5 inch height, compared to the iPhone - it was unreadable.
The original iPhone was pretty bad actually. It didn't have many of the unique capabilities compared to what we know.
In terms of competitive pricing, I mean yeah if this is just a Quest 2 with better screens its DOA, but I would hope not, though I am keeping expectations low. My only point was Apple does have the capability to pull rabbits out of their hat, not that they will.
> We could be wrong and people are happy to hand over 3k for this
There'll be _some_; remember Google Glass? I'm not convinced there'll be enough to make it any more than a niche oddity, though (even the numbers quoted in the post imply that; Apple doesn't launch that many products where they only expect to produce 500k in six months...)
> I am really struggling to see how this can succeed.
People seem to forget this every time, but this version of the tech is aimed at developers and early adopters, just like version one of Hololens was. It's also priced like Hololens was.
The consumer focused version in a thick sunglasses form factor comes later.
Or, not at all - we’re on year, what, 8 of that? There isn’t anyone reputable who thinks there’s a short term breakthrough coming, especially after Metas $$$$ swings at it and Apple failed to.
c.f. Bloomberg recent piece on this; tldr lot of internal strife at Apple because that’s what they were supposed to do and simply couldn’t. Now it’s limping out the door because they might as well ship something. Lead was saying as recently as a year ago that glasses were 3 years out, but they were shelved because there’s no path to it
> Or, not at all - we’re on year, what, 8 of that? There isn’t anyone reputable who thinks there’s a short term breakthrough coming, especially after Metas $$$$ swings at it and Apple failed to.
Pancake optics just recently became a thing and they really are transformative compared to fresnel lenses of the past. You have edge to edge clarity instead of the massive blurry mess of earlier HMDs. They’re also typically thinner and don’t need compute power to compensate for pincushion distortion.
If this Apple headset takes off, I’ll almost feel sorry for Meta. The Quest Pro was their “business prosumer” device that needed another 6-12 months in the oven before it would be usable for that purpose. Great PCVR headset, but nobody makes money on those.
If anything, Meta has shown that VR CAN be sold to the masses as a video game console (Quest 2 sales numbers are honestly impressive in that context), but the console model doesn’t bring in the billions in revenue promised to investors. And nobody wants Metaverse garbage. It’s make or break on the prosumer market, and if Apple bombs I wouldn’t be surprised to see the Zuck pack it up soon after.
Great for VR, horrible for AR, unfortunately: the trick that makes the optics thinner is bouncing the light a ton in the lens, dimming the display.
I am hopeful with recent increases in nits from OLED and luck from uleds / smol oled, we'll get "glass but 4x the size and more contrast" by 2025 from someone.
Yeah, the power consumption on panels bright enough for pancake optics aren’t good news for AR form factors.
Even in a dedicated HMD like the Pro, they had to redesign the SoC to move the memory so they could fit a chonkier active cooling system (that mysteriously is on full throttle constantly in recent firmware, which makes me wonder if they were seeing thermal failures). Bosworth admitted in one of those Facebook livestreams that the reason the Pro tops out at 90hz isn’t because the panels don’t support 120 - it’s because you’d cook your face from the heat of running those high nit panels at 120hz.
> There isn’t anyone reputable who thinks there’s a short term breakthrough coming
One big thing Apple has going for it is that they will iterate on a product year after year instead of doing one hardware update and giving up like Microsoft did.
Regardless, developers need hardware in their hands if you want third party apps for the new platform.
I've built too many experiments to attempt to make this visual wearable plane worth it, and if these devices try to do anything more than hands free reading, they are a worse experience to achieve the same task.
Think about its 'most compelling' consumer use case - Lifelike Avatars in FaceTime. Which one do you think is preferred, cooking in the kitchen and wearing a headset, or propping your iPhone up and FaceTiming while cooking? Where on earth does it 'change the experience' to have a real-life like avatar? We have the 'life like' avatar right now with Zooms - and the reason Zooms suck is innately the human part, not the rendering part - most meetings could be emails or 5 min phone calls.
Everyone had spreadsheets and publishing needs (Mac), portable music players (iPods), cellular phones (iPhone), headphones (AirPods), home wireless music speakers (HomePods)... think of fitbit / pebble, 1980s VR and then todays VR ?
Yeah I was there for those (edit: similar I mean, different context) conversations with H1 - the goal is better human contextual awareness on the factory floor - the amount of things that need to be 'newly explained' on the floor should be 0. This negates this whole AR/VR 'support staff / training' spatial context. It's like cycling with training wheels after you've been riding for 20 years... it makes no sense.
(we this found out with GM doing a pilot)
[Edit] to keep it going, external cameras are how you verify parts are picked correctly and put in the right place - you don't need FPV for that to be verified either.
[Edit 2] Until a flight simulator uses VR and AR headsets as primary training, this stuff just doesn’t make sense. CAE has definitely explored with this but it’s not what they reach for
About as well as any recent Microsoft or Google product that was abandoned when it didn't prove to be an instant success instead of continuously iterating on it and improving it year after year?
For one thing, the first iPhone model wasn't missing that many elementary functions. GPS and 3G were obvious ones, and both were remedied quickly in subsequent models.
For another, the competitors were also all missing at least one vital elementary function: Internet support that didn't suck.
So I don't think there are a lot of comparisons to be drawn between a yet-to-be-released VR platform that, ultimately, nobody is really asking for, and a phone that almost everybody who wasn't named Steve Ballmer, Mike Lazaridis, or Ned Ludd desperately wanted.
(Admittedly I said the same thing about the watch -- who in the world wants a watch? -- and that was way off-base given how much demand there turned out to be.)
The iPhone's a pretty crappy apples:apples example, because a huge part of its functionality was outside Apple's control -- a usable cellular data plan.
And, from memory, only came about because Apple was Apple and could say "We don't care that you're AT&T. Create this plan for us or your customers won't be able to get an iPhone."
It was missing 3rd party apps of any form, copy/paste, video recording, any sort of office suite, email IIRC had no push support at all. Palm/Windows Mobile/Blackberry devices of the time could do a lot more.
> Palm/Windows Mobile/Blackberry devices of the time could do a lot more.
Blackberry for email, Windows Mobile for doorstops, and Palm for 'jack-of-all-trades, master of none'. None of them got mobile web right, none of them had iTunes, and none of them had Steve Jobs hyping them.
> not sure what you mean by "people seem to forget this every time"
People seem to forget that this wasn't ever intended to be the mass market consumer version of the tech.
They've been iterating internally on a consumer version for years now, and they'll keep at it until they have something for the mass market that they think is worth shipping.
A headset having 4Kx4K panels for each eye doesn't make it a substitute for a 4K monitor, the distortion through the optics means a virtual display will appear much lower resolution than that. The rule of thumb for headsets with 2Kx2K panels is that a virtual theatre covering most of your field of view has a perceived resolution of about 720p, so you can maybe expect about 1440p from the Apple headset in the best case where the virtual display dominates your field of view, and less than that if the display is smaller.
1440p is good enough for 27in monitor. If I can have an array of those where it can track my focus between then and it was seamlessly integrated to OS I could see the value.
My God, me; too. Never - ever - could understand why Apple wouldn’t just sell the watch as a potentially standalone device.
I know, it’s Apple; but at the same time, you’re easily going to sell 2-3 times more of them, and; like the iPod, it can easily introduce them to the Apple ecosystem and when it comes time to buy a new phone; they’ll maybe say ‘well, I’ve already got an Apple Watch and really like it…maybe I’ll get an iPhone this time my contract expires.’
But it’s Apple business logic. I’ve used their products pretty much exclusively for nearly 20 years (I’m an iOS/WatchOS dev and have used Logic to make music for 15 years) but I’ll never understand many of their decisions.
it can easily introduce them to the Apple ecosystem
I argue that it would be a horrible introduction to Apple products. For input, you either talk to it or type on a tiny keyboard. There’s no web browser. The screen is so small, it’s measured in millimeters (whereas in the U. S., the phone is measured in inches).
Were I running Apple, there’s no way I’d let the watch be the introduction to Apple products without some improved means of interaction.
Yes, and not everyone has an iPhone for the first step. There are lots of iPhone users, but lets not pretend Android users are an insignificant userbase.
where did I imply that they were insignificant? I specifically mentioned a well known android user. I used to be a dyed in the wool android user myself and a day one adopter of the Moto 360.
Like, yeah, it’s not ideal but you just ask a friend with an iPhone to help out. Unless you’re in an android only circle of course.
Either way, not ideal, but not as dire as the people above make it out to be either
Well Apple Pay, running/tracking apps and listening to music via Bluetooth all work without phone. And I don’t have the model with internal sim, maybe more stuff works with that version.
I agree you need the phone too, but at least I’ve been able to track a run while listening to music on my headphones and pay for water after my flask broke all without a phone present.
I think we’re close to just the watch but I’d be damned if I want to dictate messages etc. The screen size and lack of input devices definitely holds it back from being genuinely standalone.
I am blown away by how bad using other music apps on the Apple Watch can be for listening without a phone (and no sim).
I haven’t tried in some time but about a year ago YouTube Music wouldn’t work at all and Spotify was janky. I started my run and after the buffer was exhausted my music stopped playing even though I thought I had downloaded it onto the watch.
Probably the solution is Apple Music but that is annoying.
The announcement coming from WWDC makes me think that the first wave is mostly for developers to build on, and then the cheaper/more advanced headsets coming later will be the ones marketed to regular users. I was on the fence until Palmer Luckey gave it a thumbs up, now I am cautiously optimistic.
The rumor mill has been consistent for over a year that the “mass market” iteration is coming in 12–18 months (I’d guess they’re targeting holiday season 2024).
I think people are underestimating how effective a “cost-almost-no-object” version is going to be at generating interest. There will be lines at Apple Stores as soon as it’s available to try.
The model is iPod / iPod mini|nano. Everyone wanted the former, everyone bought the latter.
> I think people are underestimating how effective a “cost-almost-no-object” version is going to be at generating interest. There will be lines at Apple Stores as soon as it’s available to try.
Not to mention all the developers who want to build something for the mass-market iteration. This is going to be like the original launch of the App Store, where even small gimmick apps get a lot of attention. If you want in on the gold rush, you’ll have to buy the first version.
I think Apple just needs to get this out. If it’s somewhat decent it may spur development in 3D and vr/ar tooling on the mac platform again, something which is sorely lacking after Apple’s disinterest and inability to have good GPU’s.
Having this in the hands of developers could be great, Apple can followup with an affordable hardware product a few years later. It’s basically Apple’s hololens, with hopefully a different fate.
High quality head mounted screen could be a huge breakthrough for ergonomic work. Staring at a fixed plane and orienting your body with respect to the plane is pretty mechanically unnatural for the human system and it causes a lot of problems.
I tend to agree with this take. It's interesting to think about what you could do with an "infinite" screen, especially if it's socially acceptable to wear in a cafe, on a plane, etc.
who in their right mind would like a huge screen like a phone, without a good way to input information like a keyboard or a mouse. what would be the use case for a product like that? watch youtube?
My watch mostly replaced my phone. It’s a game changer. I thought they were fairly superfluous and unnecessary and expected they’d actually phase it out within 5 years.
I don't find anything compelling about it either. I don't even like my iPhone that much. Half the time I pull it out of my pocket to find that the camera is on (no way to disable that) or I've made some other gesture that has opened up a dialog with no obvious means to dismiss it.
I think problem with Apple Pay you experienced was due to US not being up to speed with contactless payments (or chip one for that matter as well)? In Poland you coild use contactless cards for a veeeeery long time, so when mobile payments came it was just swapping card for a phone. What's mote, before Google / Apple pay, banking apps offered mobile payments, first Via dedicated sim card and then via app
People literally switched banks to get Apple Pay here.
I think the whole "chip-and-pay" thing in the US is so very laughable - everyone else has been with it for at last a decade.
It's a shame it took forcing merchants to wear the cost instead of banks making the terminals more affordable - then again, I am talking about the banks here.
I remember the original Macintosh launch, and just prior to that the failure of Lisa, both were very expensive for their time. I’m also skeptical but Apple has managed to pull it off even if like you point out it might not be an instant success, the main question will be can they take an idea that everyone has been excited about for a while but couldn’t get quite right and hit a home run. Also excited to see what they come up with.
Your perspective here is invaluable: do you think pulling over all the other apps from Mac, iPad and iPhone is enough to make this device compelling at day 0?
There’s no huge productivity shift like there was for spreadsheets to visicalc that pushes our perception for what’s possible - so something has to make this device compelling in a different way.
Not really. Sales collapsed after an initial rush of excitement. By the end of 1984, Apple was selling only 10,000 Macs per month, much less than they had projected. Jobs was ousted a couple of months later.
The success of the Mac was to show what a pc could be. This headset is the same. Both Apple Watch and iPhone sucked when they came out, but they were good enough at showing what the future could be; enough for people to buy them. Both have improved dramatically around 5-10 years after release.
This headset should be thought of as a dev unit, except substitute dev with early adopters.
If it’s good then there will definitely be a value add in maybe 5-10 years. If it sucks then they’ll just have failed at creating a compelling headset experience that has broad appeal, just like everyone before them.
It’s important to realize just still how early we are in the computing revolution, and how much of the growth curve there’s left.
[This is not here for you, it's here for me as a record that I said this, and I was either very right or very wrong, but at least I said something - and put words down to clarify my thinking]
I feel like the 'how many times do we have to tell you old man' character - hearing that the iPhone and the Watch sucked coming out and both eventually became successful.
The iPhone did not suck in any way shape or form. It was everything anyone who touched a PDA or Blackberry before that wanted - text messages in a gorgeous swipe-able full view context, visual voicemail, a phone that had contacts as a first class citizen, you could actually read the screen and not feel claustrophobic, and a frickin' full web browser! And it was your iPod too!? Dude... we all need to sit back, stop playing revisionist history, and realize how in awe we were waiting for this stupid phone to activate - it took me over a week to activate my iPhone because we all overloaded Cingular. But the swipe gesture just to unlock it, and it's beautiful screen just had me staring at the thing for the full week - so damn excited. Simple things like the highlight 'Swipe to unlock' was a designers wet dream for a few years - come on man! This was flippin' insane.
The same thing happened to me with mp3 players and the iPod. I won't bore you with a similar story - but come on! We all bought mp3 players, the experience sucked but the end goal was worth it - and when the iPod made the thing we wanted to do easy - it was a natural success. The same thing happened with Desktop Publishers and people who used spreadsheets on a daily basis for the GUI based computers.
To spell this out again, the world already had and used on a daily basis the product class Apple made great. Most people did not care for fitness trackers/watchers when they came out [see Pebble's fall from grace, fitbit's early IPO failure, etc.], nor do most care for VR and AR headsets.
Here's the kicker, I've bought almost every generation VR and AR headset trying to make these devices compelling - but every experiment just shows these 'take over a human field of view' sucks. They do nothing for us like the music player or PDA did - maybe it's an Alto issue (we need the GUI break through for these) - but I've worked on this problem from every angle for 7 years and it sucks. Even the dang architects and mechanical engineers think it sucks - and they are in the spatial computing context! I was there with the DK1 met with HTC in Taiwan and other people I can't say, and did all the BS - this tech strata sucks for what it wants to achieve. It just needs to be a beautiful hands free reader accessory - that's where it's compelling - this whole ambient computing will not be head worn, it just won't.
Hey future you, I just also just want to clarify that I don't really think the iPhone sucked!
Obviously it was amazing. I just meant on day 1, which many of us forget about, it wasn't there for most people. It has conceptually stayed more or less the same product but it really has gotten so much better that we take for granted how much it's improved.
In my opinion, for example, the iPhone 4s was the first that was good enough for most people, but even then for many people it wasn't until the screen became giant that it became usable.
Anyways, I was too poor to own the first iPhone, but I had the first Apple Watch. It was weird for me because I simultaneously felt like it was amazing and a huge let down. I kept telling myself, "Well, at least it's a nice watch", but the truth was that it was just too limited.
I think conceptually the watch has stayed the same but is so much better now.
I'm excited to see the non-head-work ambient computing future, and I think Apple will be successful.
Thank you. One of the more frustrating aspects of the Apple Watch and now VR headset is the bizarre tarnishing of the launch of the iPhone and iPod. It’s a strange cognitive dissonance too, since people do still point to that Keynote as earth shattering. No one goes back and watches the Apple Watch announcement.
I used to say Apple wasn't good at games but they have a lot of experience making content and publishing games these days. They have continued to let mac gaming flounder but its a different story on mobile. This headset will almost certainly feel closer to mobile than anything else.
> I am really struggling to see how this can succeed.
It could work if they allowed pr0n on it. They already offer the privacy which makes it a much better proposition than a Quest where Zuck is always watching over your shoulder.
Nothing stops you from watching porn in the Quest web browser. It has private browsing mode like every other browser.
I don’t think this is the killer app for headsets though, unless maybe someone comes up with a volumetric production pipeline for truly immersive participatory experiences…
How do I know if activating private mode in the Quest web browser is not equivalent to sending a signal to Meta that "now extra juicy information is coming in"?
What if the headset has a 4G modem built-in and sends telemetry that way? What if the next-gen Quest has a Starlink receiver in the SOC?
Ostensibly it doesn't matter. Apple's headset won't be any different, both companies will encrypt their traffic and insist it's meaningless telemetry. If these companies want to spy on you, they will - they own your hardware more than you do. Without a verifiable, open boot process you're basically just throwing stones from a glass house. If you want paranoia-tier VR computing, get a Valve Index and an airgapped Nvidia/Linux workstation. It would probably still be cheaper than Apple's complete product (somehow).
Whatever the case, I'd bet the farm on Apple's new headset shipping with OCSP telemetry out-of-box.
