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Remind me if AVP is proof that they have no creative spark or proof that they only do boring stuff that will sell 20m units?
by brookst 7d ago
Remind me if AVP is proof that they have no creative spark or proof that they only do boring stuff that will sell 20m units?
- Melatonic 7d agoThe AVP I thought looked like amazing hardware. It was just bizarre they didn't also go all in on making it useable for gaming.
- lbourdages 7d agoThey failed to come up with a strong selling point. Health is the big seller for Apple Watch. But AVP, at its price point, needs something better than "well you can watch movies on a big screen or work in a café while looking silly".
- jandrese 7d agoIt absolutely failed to justify its price point IMHO. If it were affordable people would be finding uses for it, but when it is that expensive you basically need a business justification for buying one. That means you won't have a hobbyist community finding new and interesting things to do with it. This leaves Apple and maybe a handful of subsidized third parties as the only people making applications for it, which is pretty much a guarantee that it will remain a tiny niche industry.
- brookst 7d agoAgree, it’s basically the Apple Lisa all over again. Innovative, but not mass market. But I think Apple learned some things from the Lisa, even though it barely sold.
- grensley 7d agoThe Apple Vision Pro is basically a developer kit.
- ToucanLoucan 6d agoThis, 100%. The only other headset I was aware of even remotely in AVP's price zip code was the Valve Index, priced at $999 and the AVP was three times that. And even then I proooobably would've been able to justify it? But no external connectivity at all just sank it for me. Like if it had a DP port on it so I could hook it up to a gaming PC, I would've probably at least picked one up second-hand, possibly even new when my bonus hit but 3 large for... what? Email in my house? Movies shown in a way that makes it damn hard to eat popcorn?
- brookst 6d agoAs someone else said, it’s a developer kit. It was supply constrained and priced accordingly. IMO it was a mistake to not just call it a developer’s kit, abd promoting it as a consumer product was just weird. But I guess the downside of the DK approach is it means telling developers when the “real” device will ship, which I’m not sure anyone knows.
- jandrese 6d agoAs you note, the concept of a developer kit for a product that doesn't exist makes little sense. Why would I as a company spend the time and money developing for a product that isn't even on the roadmap?
- jimbokun 7d agoTrue. Seems like none of the VR devices have found their killer app.
- victorbjorklund 7d agoBut remember health was a small thing when the watch was launched. Then the focus was on notifications, communications etc. Fitness was more of a ”oh and it also tracks your heart rate”
- user43928 6d agoI have no interest in using a headset in public or doing work on one. Watching movies on a big screen would be interesting, but they still do not sell the device in my country in Europe, so I had no way to demo it and judge whether the quality is adequate for a home theater experience.
- pseingatl 6d agoYou might use such a device if you were vision-impaired and it helped you see.
- pseingatl 6d agoAs a medical device for the vision impaired, AVP has a built-in audience that is used to paying top dollar, especially if paying means just a co-pay. It also eliminates popular disquiet about improper recording--no one will complain about a device that helps the vision impaired get around. Why neither Apple nor Meta went down this path is inexplicable.
- deleted 6d ago[deleted]
- the_other 6d agoI'm partially sighted. I've yet to see an AVP demo that made me want to try one out as an access tool. In fact, everything I've seen so far suggested it would be a hinderance. Can you suggest how it could help? What am I missing? (I accept, I could book a demo at an Apple Store...)
- BobaFloutist 6d agoI think they're kind of saying that's the problem, that intuitively having a screen inches from your face displaying things that are further away in decent detail, with things like contrast and saturation and brightness color palettes being modifiable should have some obvious possibilities for people with limited vision - but Apple wasn't interested in developing for and demonstrating these options. I'm near-sighted, so I can see how magic glasses that let me focus on everything as if it's six inches away could be nice. That being said, normal prescription glasses work very well for my particular vision impairment, and "You only have to buy glasses once more ever, but they're $3000, weigh over a pound, and need to be recharged" isn't a great value proposition for my needs, but it doesn't take much imagination to figure that being able to toggle even just dark, high contrast, or colorblind modes irl would be nice for some people. Not worth it for me, but possibly for others.
- alex43578 7d agoI think the lack of a AppleVision non-pro that was just some really good screens and a battery, hooked up to your iPhone/MBA/MBP for use as an immersive display was a miss. I tried the AVP but realized I didn't want/need to strap a Macbook to my face: I have a computing device, I just wanted the display. Scrap the passthrough cameras, the LCD eyes, and all that complexity.
- brookst 7d agoYikes. I can’t imagine it without passthrough. You have to take it off to move around at all?
- alex43578 7d agoYeah? It's just a display for sitting on the couch or in an airplane, watching videos or viewing a huge virtual desktop. Scrapping the cameras would save a ton on size, BOM, and complexity. Basically a "Pimax Dream Air" formfactor. I'd love the ability to have AVP immersion with my MBP on a flight, and combined with Airpods, you'd be able to block out everything. I don't need to walk around and wouldn't need to interact through it. It's like transparency for Airpods: an overengineered alternative to just taking an airpod out (or in this case, lifting the headset up).
- wooger 6d agoI can't imagine wanting to walk anywhere with massive clownish goggles on, and while tethered to the power box & various peripherals. Still, a small camera is an odd thing to cut.
- whywhywhywhy 6d agoFor “just a display” you need a computer in there anyway.
- alex43578 6d agoNot if you’re driving it from your iPhone or MacBook. You’ll still need chips, but certainly not a M series processor, coprocessor, tons of storage, etc.
- johnnyanmac 6d agoApple never goes all in for gaming. They are more than happy to base most of its software revrnue on Skinner boxes, but otherwise it feels like it wants little to do with games. Every 4-5 years they need something to show off their tech and they begrudgingly look to gaming studios to provide some demos for them. They get the demos, get some hype, then put it straight back into the box. Devs move on because they know their audience isn't there anyway. Rinse and repeat. This last time was to help show off their unified architecture with AAA games running on an IPad.
- wooger 6d agoSeriously, this (and pron) is the only use case that will appeal to the mass market for a single user, un-shareable, stupid looking, immersive thing like this. For nice hardware with hardly any content, not making huge strides to get existing VR content on it was a terrible strategy. And Apple can afford to just buy one of the bigger players to get content too.
- comfysocks 7d agoHere’s my theory about AVP. Apple’s strategic position is to be the main device by which apps and AI can gain access to end users. This puts them in a nice position to charge a toll on everything that passes through their device. Now if someone were to come out with a new type of device and a new paradigm that could disrupt iPhone as the main device, Apple would be in trouble. Not long ago, Zuck seemed really confident about metaverse/AR/VR. Apple took the disruption threat seriously and countered with AVP. Now it looks like metaverse flopped. I suspect the priority of AVP has gone down inside Apple accordingly.
- theodric 7d agoHadn't the Metaverse already well and truly flopped before the AVP came out? It's a cool device, but when it was released I felt like Apple was a couple years late and 3499 dollars short.
- gorgoiler 6d agoAre smart glasses not the modern, practical implementation of the metaverse. I don’t think Meta were banking on games and low-poly avatars for their next generation of revenue, it was more about building (and then — hold onto your lunch please — monetizing) new forms of social connectivity. The only difference is that your permanent social camera went from being in-game to in-reality.
- TheOtherHobbes 6d agoInteresting view, but not quite. The Big Changes in computing happen when both the mode of access, the demographic, and the primary use case change. So historically computing evolved from corporate server + batch -> real time "personal" scientific and technical -> mass market commodified PC for business and gaming -> social media, entertainment, and 'personal bureaucracy' (tickets, bank statements, and such) on mobile. At each step the tech gets smaller and more physically accessible, the use case gets more interactive and less demanding and serious, and the demographic gets wider and less technically educated. Apple owned a huge part of the last change with the iPhone. What's the next step in the series? Clearly it's not a huge device you strap to your face. But it's also not an easy question to answer. What is the next step after social media? From a software POV it's AI, but where's the matching hardware? The next gen has to be even smaller, multimodal, but still physically interactive, likely always on. Glasses are the closest, but not there yet. So I think we're still in the early Nokia mobile stage. The concept exists and the current tech is beginning to be workable, but the gamechanger refinement and perfection of the concept is still a way off.
- jorisw 7d agoApple Vision Pro Abbreviations waste people’s time
- swiftcoder 7d agoHere I thought we were discussing a return of the Aliens vs Predator franchise
- port11 6d agoI’d rather have that than a really wide phone. Do a whole series on the Predators, please.
- vr46 6d agoAnd some of them take even longer to say than the original words, e.g. WWW
- swiftcoder 6d agoFB's main monorepo was named WWW, and you needed to refer to it every 5 minutes, so everyone pronounced it "dub-dub-dub". A surprisingly hard habit to break once you leave their employment
- jorisw 6d agoFacebook.