I hate when people do this, but I have to wonder how Steve Jobs would handle VR. In Jobs-ian fashion, Apple didn’t rush into a market and built a premium product that for all intents and purposes was well executed.
However, the VR market just isn’t there and I don’t foresee it ever being there. The Vision is likely going to go down as one of Apple’s biggest “busts”, but more due to the market than Apple making a bad product. I wonder if Jobs would have foreseen this and never released it.
> I have to wonder how Steve Jobs would handle VR. In Jobs-ian fashion, Apple didn’t rush into a market and built a premium product that for all intents and purposes was well executed.
Jobs was at Apple when the Lisa was introduced at a premium/eye-watering $10K (>$30K today). As I understand it, he wanted to run the Lisa group but ended up heading the Mac group instead, and competing against the Lisa. Kind of a shame for Lisa users that the Mac wasn't compatible, but the Mac ultimately ended up delivering most of the benefit at a fraction of the price.
As you note, the challenge now is that there doesn't yet seem to be much of a VR headset market outside of games and vertical apps. But that might be enough for a successor to build on.
Apple doesn't want the VR market. Apple wants the 'cell phone but in your hands-free glasses' market. They're just stuck with a headset for now because the hardware isn't good enough.
With Jobs, I think it goes even further. They went after things he was personally interested in and so he knew how to shape that product because he was scratching an itch.
VR has an obvious market in games and possibly others but it doesn't feel like anyone at Apple uses this thing at all. Until they figure out why the AVP should exist it'll just be an also-ran headset without a real identity.
In 2006 Jobs introduced the iPod Hi-Fi, which wasn't much of a success either.
It was either behind the times (tin[n]y smartphones, including the iPhone that was already in development, killed powerful boom boxes as well as home hi-fi systems) or ahead of its time (medium and large sized bluetooth speakers were ultimately a successful product category.) HomePod was ultimately semi-successful, though more in its mini size I believe.
Jobs was ultimately right about the iPad (which currently outsells the Mac in terms of unit sales) but it took a while to catch on.
I understand where you’re coming from - have you considered how advances in AI Video generation might pair with a premium headset?
The output from Sora (OpenAI) looks pretty compelling already. I also recently read that Apple is already using AI image generation to create stereoscopic images from any plain old 2D image.
Combine all this together and it’s not impossible to envision (pun intended?) a halfway decent on demand interactive experience.
Kind of amazing to think a holodeck-like experience is in the not too distant future.
VR is older than that. My first experience was an Amiga-based system. I played a game called Dactyl Nightmare and I thought for sure this was going to be huge in a year or two.
I check in on VR every few years and technically things keep getting better, but that first blocky experience was the most compelling.
VR hasn’t failed, it’s just a niche thing. The VR market is here and it’s mature. Every day something like thirty or forty thousand headsets are sold. That’s great!
Today's apple is not 2005 Apple. They have infinite cash reserves and talent pool. The market allocated them all of this capital because we trust them to make these big bets that no other hardware company can make, to move technology forward.
Vision pro is a leap forward in dispays, tracking, input gestures. It has not solved the weight/size issue, but if history is a predictor this is an area that apple will excel at with iterative improvements.
You haven’t really countered anything the OP said.
Yes, the Vision Pro is a leap forward technologically. So was the iPhone. But how many products on the way to the iPhone didn’t get released because Jobs (or someone else) realised it wasn’t a compelling offering to customers?
The Vision Pro feels like a tech demo. I can absolutely imagine Jobs being impressed by the tech and canning it nevertheless, waiting for a better application.
"The market allocated them all of this capital because we trust them to make these big bets that no other hardware company can make, to move technology forward"
You might, I certainly don't. Corporations aren't your friends and aren't something to mythologize
They make money because they sell popular products and collect 30% of a lot of other companies operating on the things they sell
Learn about "open market operations" i.e. central planning, and realize the market hasn't been making the decisions for 20 years. LIRP/ZIRP tipped the scale for tech companies.
Ever since the Vision Pro was announced (months before it shipped), people were saying "this is a dev kit". And it clearly is.
It's just not a "product" in any typical sense. It's a moderately large bet placed on a possible future which might be here in 5-10 years. I think it's a lot more interesting and productive to run this experiment in public rather than keeping it as an internal lab project.
I do agree. People believe VR has failed again and again, but actually it's quite successful in various niches and the experience it provides in those niches is irreplaceable by other technology.
The needs and desires of those niches are pretty well understood, but what I think the market considers a failure is actually the local optima of the current state of the technology.
What Apple wants to discover is what everyday people, their customers, your typical iPhone holder, what do they tolerate and what will they do with VR?
The mass market is not sim racing, working on helicopters with AR assistance, or designing products in 3D space. They are chatting with mates, watching TV, using various life admin apps etc, none of which are improved by VR. So what does it take to get a mass market VR device popular? It's probably improving the way people achieve their daily tasks they currently use their phone for.
But is that even worthwhile? Do I actually need my banking app or chats in AR/VR? Probably not, so outside of niche entertainment I don't ever see VR being a mass market device. AR in a trendy pair of glasses maybe, people strapped into headsets all day I just don't see.
I feel like Jobs would be wielding the axe over this, and Tim Cook's head would likely be the one rolling for flubbing the release of the Vision Pro. He's meant to be an expert in logistics and it seems to have been a logistics fail from top to bottom. Say if Cook was CEO and a mildly-incapacitated Jobs was President, Cook would be gone by now.
I think Apple were already working on VR at the time of Jobs' death – seriously it almost talks about it if you read between the lines in Isaacson's book. So I think Jobs would have hyped this to the maximum level of hyperbole like he was good at. But I think the actual product getting screwed up, released yet be totally unavailable, and now this – it's simply not usual Apple behaviour. And the car idea got canned and now this has been screwed up... and they're over two years late to the AI party and a mildly improved Siri is not worthy of a 20% jump in the stock price. I think Tim Cook really needs to go. Ok, doing a good job of keeping the iPhone goose laying the golden eggs has been fine, but that isn't the Apple we really need if the company is really going to ever do anything "insanely great" going forward.
> I feel like Jobs would be wielding the axe over this, … for flubbing the release of the Vision Pro.
Every time someone brings him up I remember the time he staged a press event in the flint auditorium and god up on stage to announce…an iPod dock with a speaker in it. I hear they sold hundreds of them!
And plenty of other misfires in his tenure, though that was by far my favorite.
I'm not doubting that he was beyond misfires on a personal level, but that would be accounted for as part of his reality distortion field. He enjoyed firing mortals that weren't him though, and was fairly ruthless about doing it.
IMO the fact that it's not available around the world (although apparently this is soon about to happen) alongside the high price for a device that still needs to prove that its not a novelty, along with what must be a whopping Bill of Materials which means that even at $3500 the economics of it aren't working out that well, nor does it have the insanely great wow factor in terms of it having that lacklustre front screen show the logistics of manufacturing the thing haven't been appropriately resolved. Ok it's a first generation device, but its sheer non-appearance in the real world shows that its release wasn't properly thought out and implemented. And Apple were really in no major rush to release it, because it's not like they were in a fight with Meta even if they were perhaps quietly freaking out about the Quest.
But ultimately it's a logistics failure because what is Apple's main USPs? The Apple Stores across the bloody globe – none of which outside the USA have Vision Pros to play with. Ok they're keeping it in the US for now (due to logistics reasons) but Apple is sitting on a cash mountain of how many tens of billions and it can't arrange to put a few Vision Pros in every Store in the world for kids to go in and play with?? Even if the device is "a few months away" that would be one major logistics fail. Build the hype of a device that people really need to try to understand. Get kids playing games on it and interacting with AR Pokemon (or whatever) while their parents are buying new iPhones. Apple could spend two billion dollars on manufacturing a million of these to throw everywhere and not even blink – pocket change for them, and for launching a wholly new class of product. Me saying they've flubbed it is actually being polite, as a shareholder and long term Mac luser, I think they've completely fucked it up. Do you know what I mean?
The first iphone was initially only available in the US, and was relatively expensive compared to the competition, however it succeeded because it was a compelling product.
People lined up for hours to get an iPhone, they were in short supply.
I haven’t really heard about any supply issues for the vision pro, anyone that wants one can get one.
Maybe not from a local shop in certain countries, but there aren’t any big scalping margins online.
The vision pro, despite being impressive from an engineering perspective, isn't a compelling product.
I don't think the logistic issues will have much to do with it's overall success.
"The first iphone was initially only available in the US, and was relatively expensive compared to the competition" - totally, its a useful point, but Apple today and Apple then tentatively entering that mobile phone market... they're entirely different companies with drastically different resources at their disposal to bring to bear.
"The vision pro, despite being technically impressive, isn't a compelling product." - yeah but I'd at least like to know whether it's a compelling product or not, which is currently impossible for me to do. There are a good ten million people in the world for whom dropping $3500 on one to play with is not going to be a big deal. That's $35billion to kickstart this non-compelling product that they don't even need the revenue to fund.
"I don't think the logistic issues will have much to do with it's overall success." – yeah, correct, but I made that point because Tim Cook's whole MO is that he's the guy who can bring all the logistics issues together, and the entire success of this product right now is dependent on logistics issues that have not been solved.
Disagree. AVP is analogous to the Lisa: too early, too unrefined, but still a glimpse of the future. The basic idea of a computing environment sharing our 3D world is real and is the next GUI. The rendering hardware and form factor are implementation details.
I don't think it will be the next GUI. I think it will be an alternative with some advantages for selected use cases and big disadvantages for many others. I don't expect it to be an iPhone-sized market ever.
It's absolutely not a GUI. It's a conceptual space to build in. It's the difference between the Web and the browser. We'll have a few different types of GUIs layered on top of the conceptual space, including flat GUIs and 3D GUIs.
The content of the space in question will overwhelmingly be constructed by generative AI, not raw human labor.
Until we find out how large, interesting, freaky, weird, enticing that world will or can be, it'll be nigh impossible to pin down how many people might use it.
Prediction: it's going to be extraordinarily massive in scale ~30 years out. It'll be regularly used by billions of people if you look out three or four decades. Large enough that an individual person could never explore even a tiny fraction of it in a lifetime. Eventually generative AI will build so quickly it'll put YouTube content addition to shame in terms of expansion rate.
We need to master generative AI (image, video, audio). Then we need to define what people want built in virtual space and create the guide posts for the AI to follow. That will involve a lot of experimentation. We're going to need dramatically greater amounts of storage.
Nah, it was about 12-18 months tops. "Never buy the first generation of any Apple product" is a maxim I live by... but they purposefully hamstring the first gen of every product on purpose in order to up the wow on the second gen with little extra work.
In that instance the M1 / M2 Macs aren't exactly a wholly new category of product, just MacBooks in basically the same form as they've been since the Powerbook, but now with an M1 chip. I meant the actual first release of a novel product – iPhone / iPad / Watch, all of which were good enough but became brilliantly usable after a couple of iterations.
Also, I'm writing this on an M3 Pro MacBook. Totally awesome machine, like Platonically good laptop, and doubly so now they ditched that "hat on a pig" Touch Bar and returned to actual function keys...BUT...I have so many cores I can barely even count them in htop and doing things like rendering in iMovie or adjusting the size of 100Mb RAW photos in Preview is STILL SINGLE THREADED. Preview even threw up a rotating beachball of doom and froze the other day when adjusting the size of a single large photo. Totally totally amazed a division of software engineers haven't been laid on to at least rewrite the utterly-parallelizable parts of the native apps on Mac OS. FFS.
However, the VR market just isn’t there and I don’t foresee it ever being there. The Vision is likely going to go down as one of Apple’s biggest “busts”, but more due to the market than Apple making a bad product. I wonder if Jobs would have foreseen this and never released it.