the ipod filled a hole in the market. wtf is this solving for?
this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2024
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To be fair, a lot of people were wondering the same thing when the iPad was announced. Now there's like a billion of them out there.
They were wondering that for the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad, the Apple Watch, and AirPods. I’d bet that in 10 years a decent portion of the population will have some sort of headset, Apple or otherwise.
None of those had a point nearly as questionable as this headset thing. The ipod was an advanced mp3 player, which was very popular and common tech at the time. The iPhone was an advanced phone with a large touchscreen, which was rapidly becoming very common at the time. The iPad was an advanced tablet, which was a concept that had already been tried many times by many other companies by then. The air pods are just advanced wireless earbuds, which nobody could ever deny were rapidly becoming more popular.
VR headsets are fundamentally different from all of those, in that there's no technological and social precedence quite like it. People used mp3 players and watches and phones before Apple did something new. Nobody was wondering the point of a better mp3 player that could hold massive amounts of songs. But the history of humankind says nothing about the masses' willingness to walk around in public with big ass high tech ski goggles strapped to their faces. VR is much, much more unknown compared to those.
I get what you’re saying, and regarding people walking around in public wearing a headset, I completely agree. It’ll be a very long time before that happens, if ever.
I disagree that AR won’t become more ubiquitous in people’s lives. Right now, the biggest gripe I see when people talk about Vision Pro is the price. Which was also the case with all the other Apple products I mentioned. The price will come down, it’ll get more features, and it will become more attractive to consumers.
Only time will tell which of us will be right.
The iPhone had 2 interesting things going for it. Everyone had been begging for an iPod phone for years before this happened. Apple had been working on the iPad since the Newton failed and the iPhone was a combination between iPod phone and iPad.
All glass all touch screens were not a thing people thought they wanted before Apple made a really compelling (and pleasing) device.
AR has been a thing for years, but hasn’t garnered the popularity or utility that MP3s and phones ever had. QR codes being the possible exception and only since most phones handle them natively at this stage.
It’s possible that AR just hasn’t had a good enough UX to break the “cool experiment bro” uses imagined so far (because of screen/camera/movement limitations). It’ll be interesting to see if Apple has managed to revolutionize the experience enough to imagine new and more widely needed AR uses or not.
We can argue that this product has no continuity with anything anyone has ever used, or we can admit that it is a new kind of immersive screen for a world where people are absolutely hooked to screens. It’s pretty simple.
And the very concept of virtual reality has been an inevitability for decades. This is something people have been fantasizing about for a long time, thought they underestimated the technical challenges and limitations of it all. We’re getting close to overcoming most of them now.
While the whole world laughs at Mark Zuckerburg, Occulus headsets are selling in rapidly increasing numbers. They sold more headsets in 2021 than Microsoft sold Xboxes. So to use your own words, yes, this product is a foray into a space that is rapidly growing in popularity.
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People understood what the iPhone was about immediately. Heck, they knew before it was even announced.
Same for the Apple Watch…ish. People didn't know exactly what area it would end up focusing on, but the idea of getting and responding briefly to notifications without getting your phone out has always been appealing.
AirPods people have, again, always understood the appeal of. People are/were just angry at the option of using wired headphones being taken away.
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Occulus sold more headsets than Microsoft sold Xboxes. And that’s 2021. https://x.com/JackSoslow/status/1471549480595955716?s=20
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no, they werent. the ipad replaced the netbooks everyone wsa using until tablets became viable. again, an actual use case for a product.
theyve been pushing these headsets for years now, and theyve gained little traction and not solved any of the common problems.
anyone who thinks this is will some popular thing everyone will be doing is smokin the reefer, or just not paying attention
do you seriously think retail consumers are the demographic Apple is trying to capture right now?
talk to some creative professionals & craftsmen. my company used to work with hololens on a regular basis but there way too much jank in how it performed in a live setting. If the Vision Pro provides even the same level of utility but manages to make live object rendering & tracking consistent and reliable, they’re going to sell truckloads. Hollywood alone has probably 100 different ways to use this tech on set to slim creative workflows and save time (and therefore money). a $5000 headset is practically a rounding error when your principals cost 10x that per hour.
How is retail not their demographic? All the marketing for this thing has people sitting on the couch, watching movies, viewing their children's photos in 3D, relaxation and meditation, taking photos with the headset on at a kids birthday, playing NBA 2K24, browsing news, spacial audio. Even the work stuff is pushing things like FaceTime and virtual screens. If retail consumers aren't their demographic someone should let the marketing department know
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Reddit clowned soooo hard on the iPad when it was launched.
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Monitors. It's not there yet but imagine a world where you have like 8, 30-inch, 4k monitors in a giant grid and it costs like $600. That's the endgame here. Get VR tech to the point where it's better than buying physical displays for general productivity.
Though in that case, I'd rather have these virtual displays driven by my PC, not some bs apple ecosystem.
And their resolution and size are arbitrary. Those have meaning in the physical world because they are physical objects that need to have dimensions and must fit those pixels within that space. For virtual displays, it's only limited by how much of your field of view would you like to dedicate to each display and how high is the resolution of your headset.
And this is only really scratching at the surface of what AR might be capable of. Why use virtual displays when windows could be displayed floating without a display? Why use windows when UI elements could be floating on their own? Why show a screen playing a video when you could render the video as a semi-transparent 3d scene happening around the viewer (other than the obvious "because it's in video format, not 3d)?
That said, I'll wait for someone else to do it since apple likes to take good ideas and simplify them down to the point of frustration.
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From what randos on the net have said the next closest headset that doesn't require a computer to operate costs $5k+ so from an enterprise standpoint they could more cost efficient there. So apparently it might appeal to the enterprise market.
I have seen much dumber, much more expensive tech in the wild in offices.
If it lives up to the hype, it could replace 2-3 desktop monitors (or convince some executives it can, anyway). It's about the same price as two Apple Studio Displays. I've seen offices with very expensive standard equipment. $3500 per employee isn't all that much to begin with if it's legitimately useful.
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The best explanation I've seen is it would be nice on airplanes so you can watch movies and not have to awkwardly scrub past everything that might offend the toddlers behind you.
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Okey, so Apple would have to make client apps to those services by themselfs... Oops! All proprietary.
Yeah MS tried this with youtube. But got shut down fast
What was it called ? Sounds interesting
Windows phone. Originally Microsoft put out a number of apps as web wrappers, but the mobile YouTube site kind of awful. So Microsoft wrote a YouTube app of their own that was actually kind of great and allowed you to download videos and play audio in the background and basically actually work right. Google threw a fit and basically made Microsoft delete the app.
Windows central still has a bunch of articles from the time up.
https://www.windowscentral.com/search?searchTerm=Phone+YouTube
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Or, a web browser....
Or iOS compatibility. But every layer of software stack is making every app less capable for hardware specific functions.
I wonder if Apple's continued 30% crusade is a factor.
I’d guess it’s mostly just a low volume set of use cases. So few people are on iVision (my new name for this) that it doesn’t make sense to devote development time to it.
Same problem the windows phones had
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This is just businesses slowly shrinking back to their actual valuation. No one's shelling out a thirty percent gratituity just to be involved with very expensive vr.
Pretty much every other platform charges 30% too. Steam? 30% Xbox? 30% PlayStation? 30% Google Play? 30% Samsung Galaxy Store? 30% YouTube Ad Revenue? 45%!
The only one that doesn’t is Epic, which charges 12% and recently it came out that they were struggling to make the store profitable.
So, not sure why Apple gets singled out here.
Why bother with making any apps these days when you can just build a web app and have it work across platforms.
Because they almost always universally suck across platforms. Only exception I've seen thus far is Figma.
~~Figma balls~~
Literally every time someone says Figma that’s what I hear in my head.
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Thats a big oof. Imagine buying this thing, going into the Appstore and not even finding YouTube and Spotify! Would immediately dampen my mood.
This feels a bit like Smartwatches (Android Wear and Apple Watch) all over again for me. Where already at launch the third party "App" selection was really underwhelming with Major Apps like Youtube, Spotify, ... absent and it never getting much better.
But I get it. Apple always talks a big game about how much they love developers and how awesome they are but in reality they treat them like shit. Now Apple needs them and they give Apple this middle finger. Rightfully so!
You could just load them in The web app anyways. It wouldn't make sense for them to put dev resources on building an app for an unproven platform.
For now
We’ll see how it goes if the device sell well.
It's a super expensive VR device, no way it sells well at that price. --we'll see how this comment ages
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Why bother putting in the effort of developing and testing an app for a totally new platform that Tim Apple and 3 other people will use?
As a practical matter all they have to do is not proactively block their iPad apps from being available, which is the default.
Literally zero effort: Their iPad app is available for the Vision Pro and works perfectly fine.
Minor effort: Block the iPad app from being available.
Extra effort: make a specialized visionOS app that takes advantage of additional hardware features.
makes plenty of business sense to wait until millions have shipped and yet before competition eats their lunch. what about steam? open brush? what killer app would you wait for?
"Meta may also be unavailable"
That's soooooo shocking /s
Nice of Google to let us know we can just use Safari with Adblock, SponsorBlock, DeArrow and Vinegar to have a better experience than with their app.
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