>underscoring the narrative that the company’s biggest victories were initiated under his predecessor, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs
What does the author consider to be a victory?
Tim Cook was elevated because he had the operational capability to grow Apple. Jobs did not consider Cook to be a product design person. But Jobs trusted Cook to find and keep people who could design products.
By any stretch of the imagination, the company's biggest victories have been in growing and holding together the vast ecosystem of HW / SW and services that continuously deliver the highest customer satisfaction ratings. The reward for that has been becoming the biggest company in the world. (Some might consider this a victory.)
If introducing new hit products is the only kind of victory that can exist, then Apple Silicon and AirPods victories also go to Cook.
Absolutely. Between Apple Silicon, Apple Watch, AirPods, and scaling operations to be able to sell the amount of products they do in a year, that is hard to argue against being an overwhelming success for Tim Cook as CEO.
Is it equal to the legacy of Apple under Jobs? Definitely not. But how many other companies/people released 3 revolutionary products?
It is hard to not compare the breakthrough product release count between Jobs and Cook.
If that is the measure, then we have to bring in Jobs' tenure as not only CEO but company founder that stretched 25 years as CEO, 1976 to 1985 and 1997 to 2011.
Cook only took the reins in 2011, and at that time arguably the company should not have focused on releasing yet more revolutionary products.
iPhone is the most successful consumer product in history, focus was correctly placed in supporting that, building moats around it and positioning the ecosystem to support the next big thing.
One product often left out, which may have started with Jobs, but delivery should be attributed to Cook is the new Apple HQ. The initial impact has crumbled due to Covid WFH.
However, this campus may turn out to be a force multiplier going forward. If so, it is a victory, but not in the minds of consumers.
> One product often left out, which may have started with Jobs, but delivery should be attributed to Cook is the new Apple HQ. The initial impact has crumbled due to Covid WFH.
> However, this campus may turn out to be a force multiplier going forward. If so, it is a victory, but not in the minds of consumers.
Curious, have you ever actually talked to anyone that worked there? While I have admittedly only talked to a couple folks, they either hated it or were at best indifferent. There reasons ranged from "my commute is now twice as long" to "it's still just a giant suburban office park".
Again, in no way arguing this is some sort of representative sample, so I am curious what Apple employees who work there actually think about it.
I only worked there briefly (I never officially had an office there — Covid times and all that). I don't see it as any different than any of the other Apple campus buildings I worked in (like Infinite Loop) with regard to productivity.
(I've always compared it to some beautiful, modern art gallery — but without any art.)
But to the above degree, I have to say I enjoyed all large Apple work environments (even some of the more far flung ones I worked at like Results Way).
It's because I have enjoyed being able to walk down a hall, up a floor, and chat with The Guy That Works on IOKit Display-support. I am a "social engineer" (not one to socially engineer though if you know what I mean). I truly disliked working from home for extended periods.
I don't think devs talking directly across teams is unique to Apple, though. Or do you mean that finding "the guy" is much easier because there's an official registry, and you don't have to guess from commit logs etc?
I work at Apple Park and it’s awesome. I love it! Been here 4ish years.
On my current team we share a hall-wide office that seats 4. On my old team I shared a half-hall wide room with another person.
Most people have this 2 person arrangement. Some teams sit in groups of 6-8 together. All of this is Siri.
Teams in other orgs are wildly different. I had a friend in iCloud that was in one of those open office style arrangements. She hated it. She left to Netflix eventually.
Apple Campus 2 is about a superblock away from Apple Campus 1, so unless we’re talking about someone whose 5-minute commute doubled to 10 minutes, no one’s commute doubled in any sense where the comparison is meaningful.
I don't know all the details but I'm pretty sure they consolidated a bunch of offices to Apple HQ when it first opened - for this person it was definitely not a 5 to 10 minute change.
I strongly doubt that the campus is any more of a force multiplier than a collection of far cheaper class A office buildings of similar capacity, with similarly serene grass and vegetation connecting them.
And that, dear reader, is how we ended up with hundreds of bland copy-cat Android phones to the iPhone. There's something to be said, mentally, for working somewhere that's inspiring. A shitty office in yet a clone of all the other office parks, buried in office-park-landia of San Jose, is not it. Even a stroll through the secret underground parking lot at Apple is inspiring with all the exotic cars that are owned by early Apple employees, instead of Honda Civics and Toyota Camrys. Not that there's anything wrong with that, I drive a Honda, but they just don't have the same emotional pull.
This is nonsense. The place where the iPhone was invented, and iterated upon for many successful years, was the Infinite Loop campus, which is pretty much a clone of all the other office parks. Initially, when the iPhone was invented, developers had their own individual offices there, with closeable doors, which was nice.
Apple Park: it kinda sucks to actually work at Apple Park. It’s a goldfish bowl. It’s impossible to focus. But, yes, it looks really nice. It’s very pretty, that is undeniable.
Also, Teslas and Mercedes aren’t exotic or rare. They just cost a bit more than most Hondas. And the rare, occasional actual exotic doesn’t inspire new features, better design, or QA polish, they just indicate someone’s a pretentious ass with more money than sense. Remember that Steve drove a fairly pedestrian Mercedes.
Really not a "pedestrian" Mercedes, at the time it would have been in the upper tier of their price range. The current-day SL AMG model starts at $178k.
> This is nonsense. ... Apple Park: it kinda sucks to actually work at Apple Park. It’s a goldfish bowl. It’s impossible to focus. But, yes, it looks really nice. It’s very pretty, that is undeniable.
Sometimes what people think they want isn't what they actually want once they experience it. People unhappy and surrounded by drab office space might pine for a beautiful setting to work in, but I suspect most of them will find that it wasn't the lack of beauty making them unhappy and that a change of scenery doesn't do nearly enough to rectify the problem.
I feel like engineers and all the math-y sciences, especially male, tend to dismiss very easily aesthetics over functionality.
I was once like that. Until I get over my anxiety and started to hang out more with girls. Especially from the arts and languages side.
The way they choose their environments… where they go to eat out or have a coffee, the clothing they wear, buying flowers, how they setup their home…
Even when I was down, being in their environments just made me feel more cozy. It was heartwarming.
In contrast, most of my engineer friends have either literally a mattress and a desk. Or, they just buy for their house whatever, without any thought in regards to color pallete, textures, shape, etc
>In contrast, most of my engineer friends have either literally a mattress and a desk.
You’re describing my first two apartments. I only wound up buying a couch and a coffee table because I wanted to appear somewhat normal in case a woman came by my apartment.
The combination of design work, history of buildings/art/cities, and socialization with people hyperfocused on their surroundings gives you superpower awareness of great environments at every scale, from silverware to regional planning. It makes travel a joy, no matter where, Paris or Poughkeepsie, it’s all fascinating.
On the downside, there are impossible odds you’ll ever get to actually create any of what you imagine, and the horrors of miserable design, a world full of McMansions and cheap junk, will crap all over your visions of paradise.
I've always found that after a while the wonder at the flash and pomp of some place that seems new and wonderful like that dies down and it's just another place that you do work in.
Much more important is the people you interact with every day, both in person and at a distance. If I had to choose between jobs doing the same work but one was in a closet but interacting with people I like or the apple campus and interacting with people I felt no connection to, I would take the former in a heartbeat.
I don't think I'm an outlier. If indeed I'm not, what does that say for how important and special Apple HQ will end up being in the long run?
What you are referring to is the culture. Obviously people are big part of it but the office is a big driving force of shaping the culture.
Even in an online office! When I had Slack, I felt much more involved with people and the company (500+ employees) culture overall.
Ever since they transitioned to Teams, I feel like I only exist within my own team.
A pleasant and aesthetic office, surround by nature, built with sustainability in mind, etc is already a driving force for the type of culture you want instilled in your company.
It will certainly attract a type of people that want to work surrounded by beauty, it’s already paving the way for a common ground of understanding.
It goes much further than just wonder. It’s a feeling that persists. A nice feeling.
No, culture is different. Enjoying the people you work around is not culture, it's having good coworkers. You can have coworkers you don't like but a good culture, and coworkers you do like and a bad culture. Culture is distinct from enjoying who you deal with on a day to day basis. People mistake that all the time though.
Culture does matter for this as well though, as enjoying your coworkers but not the culture may still make the job somewhere you don't want to stick around.
I think physical surroundings may help with the culture some, but they'll always be a much lesser influence than the people and policies in place. What's worse, sometimes companies will think the physical surroundings are much more important than they are, and focus on those instead of fixing the policies destroying their actual work culture. I think most people past their early twenties would much rather have a better set of work policies than a really good view out of an office window. Sometimes that's doubly true because those policies might allow you to spend less time in the office and more time at home, around your real family.
Early 20s engineer here. It’s nice to have a cool view out your window. I can and will trade it for better culture in a heartbeat. I can generally get better views than my employer can provide myself anyways.
Yes, I wasn't trying to say that someone at your age and position can't appreciate it, but that people learn more about themselves and what they actually value as they age and gain experience, so on average younger people will know themselves less than older people, so younger people are more likely (in my opinion) to think some things matter more to them than they actually do.
I hope you got paid to write that. I switched from an Android to an iPhone recently and it is precisely 0% cooler or "more inspiring" than my old phone. I did it purely because password auto-fill appears to be marginally more reliable.
Not that Apple is a bad company or place to work or anything, but it also isn't some magic zen garden that will imbue all who work there with the power to change the world.
For 90%+ of the people who go to work there, it's a job, and the scenery changing that equation meaningfully seems like wishful thinking. It might be nice, but it's not going to radically alter your output.
That doesn't really ring true. iPhones are the baseline and Android has that plus the cheap models plus all the whacky weird and wonderful. iPhone has good build quality and reliability - it's the Toyota Corolla. But if there had been no Android then there would be no large screen iPhones, maybe no push on the camera specs. If Apple make a foldable it'll be because they saw Android do it and waited until they could do it better.
No one can build a generic human chicken coop that’s more inspiring than a space you create for yourself. Office space is soul crushing because it has nothing of your soul in it. It’s just human chattel storage.
I worked in Apple Park. I now work on Android from a suburban office park. Believe me, the cars are the same, and completely irrelevant to anything you’re talking about.
It’s definitely an interesting jump. Also probably worth noting I do completely different things now than I did there. I can’t say I have super deep insight into either because it hasn’t been too long but IMO a lot is similar (particularly around yearly release cycles, working on an OS, etc.) and some parts are different. A lot of Android stuff gets built on well in advance in public, there are OEMs and update cycles to deal with, etc. There are some places iOS really shines (performance tooling, internal direction, concern for quality on certain things) and others where Android does (excellent CI and build system, better documentation).
This sounds like fan fiction. I do my best work distraction free. Seeing expensive cars... have you met engineers? We are the biggest collection of cheapasses on the planet!
That was one of my favorite parts of Stargate. Every so often you got to see what the team drove when episodes took place on Earth. Most went for generic trucks or SUVs. Carter (engineer, scientist, colonel, destroyer of worlds) would always show up in some fancy ride from Amanda Tapping's collection.
I'm sure other phone companies have plenty of highly creative people who could out-do the iPhone if management decided to make it happen. Do you think Microsoft just spontaneously developed the people who worked on the Surface once Microsoft decided to show OEMs how it was done? Even the manager behind it was already there in 2004.
Lack of environmental enrichment is not what gets in the way of innovation.
I think even if Apple went bankrupt in 5 years, what Tim Cook has achieved is extremely good. It was not sure at all that Apple would grow this much over 12 years. It is not clear Steve Jobs himself could have had this success.
Apple's total comprehensive income was $24B in Q2. Their total assets were $332B, and total liabilities $270B. Assuming all product sales dropped to 0, they could make the best effort to liquidate assets, after which they'd only have $62B - which would last them a little over a year at $13.6B in quarterly operating expenses.
The link shows ~ < 50% of Apple's liabilities are current; assuming revenue dropped overnight to $0, I doubt they'd need to liquidate any assets, likely for multiple years.
It's an unrealistic & impractical scenario, obviously, but IMO it's more likely they'd want to increase their liabilities (and likely WOULD be able to - lol!) without touching their assets. It's actually an interesting & somewhat comical mind game, even if nothing else.
A fair portion of that quarterly operating expense results in $20 billion a quarter in services revenue. I don't think those numbers intuitively reveal a plausible scenario where they are under in five years.
China going to war would destroy most of Apple's production bases and this would force people to use Android due to Samsung being the best fabs not involved.
No iPhone no success. Cook is a good operations man and he's helped to maintain the success, but he did it by relying totally on China. Not a good long term move at all. He hasn't come up with a revolutionary new product, just improvements on the current iPhone.
AirPods where and are loathed by some, but ultimately they present a well designed product that made the underlying product category more seamless and consumer friendly and accessible.
Their winning traits may seem banal, but in everyday carry objects small utility improvements play a huge role. Not having to deal with cables and increased range of movement are enough - what elevated AirPods though is that a visible, wearable product is an implicit fashion statement. Apples product designers succeeded in making st thing that is clearly recognisable and stands out against similar products already on the market, but is subtle enough not to disturb anything or polarise by totally overthrowing stylistic and societal convention. Perfect mix of identity and brand that is easy to integrate with your personal image.
Apple silicon is another kind of thing: it's just the same thing as before but cheaper and more powerful, without compromising any trait that made the predecessor products appealing.
Apple "reality" or whatever - I don't see carrying any of those same traits. It's much too visually disruptive to become an AirPod, it's much too close to similar products to be an M1, and on top of this it's success fully depends on expensive-to-produce software content within a technically complicated ecosystem, while Apple has long lost it's profile as a developer centric and welcoming brand and rather capitalized on it's ubiquity and alienated many developers who only still contribute to the platform it because they have too by sheer numbers.
Apple might be able to not totally fail spinning up the platform, because of buying power, image and again numbers.
But those just slightly more practical, still bulky and odd looking VR glasses are nowhere near replicating the seamless product fit of iPods, IPhones, AirPods or CPUs.
> Not having to deal with cables and increased range of movement are enough
I don't think that's enough. AirPods "just work" in a way that no prior Bluetooth headset ever did. Everything else was a kludge, particularly when it came to switching between multiple devices.
Not only does it “just work”. The sound and noise canceling quality is fantastic. On par or even beating many larger over-ear headsets in same price range. (Talking about the gen 2 pro)
I haven’t heard anything in-ear that comes close, disclaimer though I honestly haven’t tried many other in-ears in that price category.
The AirPods Pro were a game-changer for me: I could always have headphones in my pocket, and isolate myself from the world whenever I wanted. The 2nd generation surprised me with much better sound and noise cancelation.
Don't get me wrong: over-ear Sonys (I have those) will still sound better and remove more noise. And my B&O H6 gen2 sound much better still if there is no noise around. But I can't have any of those with me at all times, I can't wear them when it's really hot outside or when it's really cold (because of head coverings).
AirPods I just always throw in my jeans pocket and they work anytime, anywhere.
It's not about a "fashion statement" as some say, it's about a really good product that changes your life patterns because it works so well.
You can get way higher audio quality at half the price with the Truthear Hexas. There are a ton of good wired IEMd that are cheaper than Airpod Pros and knock them out of the park
Yeah. They're not perfect, and I've had problems with them a couple times, but they mostly just work. The audio latency is also better than anything else I've used.
I would argue that the move the Apple Silicon was in the pipeline long before Cook took over. I mean PA semi was purchased in 2008 and the first A4 processor was 2010, the writing was already on the wall a good decade out.
But Air-pods, Apple Watch and Apple TV streaming were all under cooks watch. Maybe not as ground breaking but still very important. Mind you, who else has been doing ground breaking stuff like under Steve? I cannot think of anything other than the recent AI stuff. It kind of feels like Steve picked the last of the low hanging fruit and then bowed out before it came to stagnation.
Are Air-pods, Apple Watch and Apple TV actually VERY important? The whole Wearables, Home and Accessories category is 10% of Apple's revenue and that includes Beats and what not.
While I wouldn't put so much weight on Apple TV+, air-pods and Apple watch do pretty much launch wireless headphones out of a niche into the mainstream and absolutely kick started the smart watch market across all vendors.
I say this as someone that uses none of these type of devices from any vendor.
In the last quarter, that equates to $9.48B, which by anyone’s standards is a pretty good business. The company I work for arguably makes more “important” products, but we’d be incredibly happy with that revenue!
> I mean PA semi was purchased in 2008 and the first A4 processor was 2010, the writing was already on the wall a good decade out.
Is this similar to how AMD's Bulldozer architecture back around that timeframe was the writing was on the wall for their current competitive dominance over Intel?
PA Semi was a great talent accu-hire, but AFAIK at the time of acquisition they only had Power-based designs ready for market.
> It kind of feels like Steve picked the last of the low hanging fruit and then bowed out before it came to stagnation.
PT Barnum was a renowned showman as well, but that doesn't mean he trained all the elephants.
For instance, I would hardly say the release of a market-dominating phone was a foregone conclusion based on the success of the iPod, and an Apple without the iPhone would look incredibly different.
Sure, people wanted to take their music with them, but the nearly purely multitouch interface was a fresh invention - the iPod did not have a touch interface AFAIK until three years later.
I just don't see something which was such a fresh take and new engineering - to the point that other smartphone vendors thought the original keynote demos were staged - was low-hanging fruit.
PA Semi while an accu-hire was entirely done so that they could build processor tech internally.
By low hanging fruit, I mean the concept of a portable computer in your pocket. I'm not undermining the astounding work that went into things like the iPhone - The execution was fifth steps above everyone else. I just mean after the iPhone and iPad, ideas that had been around for a long while but had not been executed well, we have been waiting to see what the next step will be. I feel this is why things like VR got so much traction.
Well, there's the Apple II, the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone...
Apple has had a long history of products that redefined the future of entire categories, and almost all of them up to this point except the Apple Watch included deep involvement by Jobs.
Apple watch? Airpods maybe? Apple silicon for sure.
Other than that not much, but to be clear there has not really been any other inventions in this time span like those you mention. The market is more mature.
When the device has a user experience, it gradually turns into a convergence platform.
This is what makes coming out with new products harder - Apple doesn't have a market for a mid-range camera, or a GPS, or a music player, or a PDA - because those are all things the iPhone does. They add capabilities to the phone to usurp other device markets (most recently, emergency satellite communicators and OnStar-style crash detection). Apple releases new devices most often by releasing them inside the iPhone.
Which is why now, with a saturated cellphone market which is slowing down the upgrade frequency, they are so interested in wearables (separate hardware that augments your phone) and services (software that augments your phone).
The sad thing is that there are areas they could make a lot of innovations, such as smart home accessories. They killed off the AirPort line, and license out HomeKit with almost no first-party hardware, because those just don't move the needle for a company of Apple's size.
> Apple releases new devices most often by releasing them inside the iPhone.
Another example is Lidar 3d scanning in iPhone.
>Which is why now, with a saturated cellphone market which is slowing down the upgrade frequency, they are so interested in wearables (separate hardware that augments your phone) and services (software that augments your phone).
I suspect that annual upgrades to Watch, the maturation of Fitness and Music services and the mix of HW "devices" released in iPhone have strategic goal of supporting the new headset device.
RE: HomeKit, even if it couldn't deliver the revenue opportunity of other businesses of the company, I think it had potential to be far more than it is now.
The head of home services, Sam Jadallah left before his third year during a critical push into the home with Homepod and Homepod Mini.
It could be his efforts were blocked--perhaps to starve advancement of Smarthome while Amazon was bleeding cash on Alexa. But regardless his team failed to push the category forward and Home languished.
HomeKit and Siri are perhaps the most high profile weak products from Apple that, had they been handled differently, people would have greatly benefited from for several years now.
That said, neither seemed to have that much revenue opportunity and it is clear looking backward that their weakness has not (yet) obviously held the company back in any way.
Regarding HomeKit, I think Apple demands a kind of quality from third party manufacturers, along with royalties, that the market just doesn’t want to pay for.
Isn't Time Cook ultimately like Steve Ballmer?
He has continued and consolidated to build a golden prison with the construction of a monopoly and increase the money generated incredibly.
In the sense that it has become hostile to use.
I remember when iTune and safari were user friendly on Windows.
Or the iphone wouldn't be limited to a usb 2.0 port.
Forstall’s first big unguided product delivery was Maps. He royally screwed the pooch with the release. By all accounts, he was fairly toxic in the executive group, he had to go.
That’s a whole lot of salt for something that actually exists and wasn’t a load of hot air. AirPod max headphones are brilliant devices. M1 chips have made laptops fast, quiet and cool while maintaining a very impressive speed (there’s nothing gimped about the MacBook). Iphones continue to be market leaders for a reason, they unite classical consumers You can not like it, but you can’t deny it.
Maybe part of the reason they did so well is that competition sucked. Windows is a blob of cruft on top of cruft, isolating Microsoft into its own developer bubble. Android OS has been a very mixed platter, known for relying on carriers and manufacturers to keep the phones up to date (which they provably suck at)
The M1 chip can't run most software w/o virtualizing x86. I can't run about 90% of my work apps on it. It can't run any games kids play. Even the major vendors that run on Apple now had to rewrite their apps. In what world is this any kind of brilliance or win? Here, I built you a car with TVs for bumpers. It's brilliant! No, you're supposed to only drive it on side streets so there's no traffic behind you. You're driving it wrong. If it rains, don't forget to tape an umbrella on your hood. Oh you can't see? You're supposed to see through the camera, not the window.
There are many ARM CPUs out there, Apple made another one with some minor tweaks. For the home, I can get a 64 core Intel with a terabyte of RAM. For work, I get an 8-core xeon laptop w/ 128GB of ECC RAM, that runs cool, quiet, and just as fast as Apple. Difference is, when I want it to run much, much faster than Apple, I can plug in a 200W power brick, spin up the fans to max, and have my script done when I'm back from lunch.
Iphones aren't market leaders, with 20% market share vs Android. They're overpriced toys to which you don't have full access and can't run your apps of your own choosing on. I'm browsing this site by chromecasting my phone screen to my 65" TV, and I've reprogrammed my buttons to pick up calls when the phone is locked if I press power+volDown. When I go to a customer site, I can plug in my phone into an ESX farm, copy a VMDK onto the host, and start the demo VM. All the guys with a terabyte of storage on their expensive iphones are searching for that USB stick in their bag.
AirPod Max? Who cares. It's just a bluetooth headset the price of a laptop, and sounds like garbage compared to my $100 Sennheiser bluetooth.
Apple products are toys.
Android OS? The latest version of which one I'm running on the 12yo phone I'm using to browse this site on my TV, in firefox, which has no trace of google services and is lightning fast?
The 'classical consumer' you're talking about here is my wife. I get her an iphone because if she had something better, she'd screw it up and waste my time. It's the same reason you get your kid a chevy cavalier instead of an audi S8. That doesn't make the chevy the better car. When she dropped it, because the back was slippery glass (brilliant, as you put it), the $1200 phone had to go to the trash. Because you know, let's make things people hold and drop a lot slippery and fragile. Fanboy comment? Why didn't she goop on a screen protector and a thick rubber case? Same reason I don't wrap my car in bubblewrap. Because not having your device destroyed when you drop it 4ft on wood floors is a basic function of the device, and Apple seems to be the only one struggling with basic functionality. Bad reception? You're holding it wrong. Destroyed by tiny falls? You should have wrapped it in bubblewrap. Keyboard breaks from typing? You shouldn't be typing on macs, that's what siri is for.
Part of the reason they did so well, is because Apple products are shiny and cute, and they're dumbed-down forget-it devices for the lowest common denominator. I wouldn't necessarily call 20% market share well, but because they're all margin, Apple makes a lot.
I'm here saying I'm absolutely willing to pay the iPhone price so I don't get bugged by my wife - my time is worth more. But that doesn't make the iPhone any more brilliant than a car that only goes 65 that you buy for your teen.
I have a lot of docker. I have a lot of ESX images. I have a lot of vendor tools. There is not a single professional application I use for work, that runs on ARM, outside of office/email. On an M1, I'd have to use a gimped web interface, which on the vendor side isn't even available for a lot of tools. For the gamers out there (not me), almost no games my little brothers want to play run on ARM.
>If 2x single threaded performance
the M1 is just an iphone chip on steroids, and the M1 design is indeed a minor tweak of the design by ARM. 2x compared to what? The cortex X3 or a bunch of cell phone CPUs? The M1 is indeed a minor tweak of a Phone processor, with bigger hardware to accommodate laptop/desktop use cases.
Other companies make CPUs that run what people want to run. Apple makes CPUs that don't run what people want to run, and expect the world to rewrite everything for their new toy. That's why MACs have almost no footprint in the real world compared to x86/64. Because my computer is a tool. I have some nails and need to buy a hammer. Apple gives me a screw driver and tells me I'm doing it wrong. It's a tool that can't do the job, so it's the wrong tool. Yes, there is a small niche where Apple is a good fit. That niche, is 7% of the market for laptops for example. Surprise - people don't want an expensive paperweight. They buy tools to solve their problems, not create new ones.
Airpods were handed to Cook on a platter, honestly. It doesn't take a market savant to realize apple can make a killing selling the ever popular and sexy earpod in bluetooth form. Once the battery technology was available to resell the same earpod but with bluetooth it would have been made no matter who was CEO.
In retrospect, every invention is obvious. I think it's fair to say that Apple went a bit beyond just slapping bluetooth onto their existing headphones. The instant pairing experience alone makes them stand out against the standard competition.
I remember the release and all of the reddit and HN comments were to the tune of “this is stupid” “you’ll lose them” “they look dumb” “now I have to buy a cable to connect the two”
The idea that you could have two, disconnected pods seems to have been quite bold.
iPhone was handed to Jobs on a platter, honestly. It doesn't take a market savant to realize apple can make a killing selling the ever popular and sexy iPod in touchscreen form. Once the battery technology was available to resell the same iPod but with cellular it would have been made no matter who was CEO.
If you have a case that Tim Cook in particular made the unilateral call on the airpod and not market pressure from samsung and others in this product segment, then lets hear it out.
It looks like so obvious in retrospect, but it wasn't sure. Bluetooth audio was somewhat a niche until Apple removed 3.5mm.
Maybe noise cancelling boom is another reason. NC also requires battery and amp so why don't make it wireless? IIRC until Sony MDR-1000X sold well (that's sold in 2016, same year as iPhone 7!), noise cancelling market was minor Bose's market for airplane user.
“When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while.”
I don't think there is a consumer market for head mounted AR anymore - if there ever really was. That makes me sad having been in AR since 2010 - and knowing what we could do with it if done right.
I just don't think society currently has an appetite for a $3000 product that gives the wearer visual superpowers (that is the promise after all) and is an impossible to ignore distinction between classes. I honestly think we're at the point where I wouldn't be surprised if it's google glass all over again x 100, where unhinged people are attacking and pulling these expensive devices off of people's heads [1][2].
Maybe in 2017 when AR was really hot could it have gotten adoption, but as it stands in 2023 the average consumer is starting to reject this level of tech and fewer and fewer people have the wallet that could support this.
I also suggest avoiding a comparison with the VR market - the only thing they have in common is that it's a thing you put on your face. The infrastructure, deployment, product features, economics, user interfaces, battery, environmental use, UX, legal etc... are all doubly complex with HMD AR over HMD VR
I think it's going to continue to be a long time before persistent everywhere HMD AR is going to be a reality
> I don't think there is a consumer market for head mounted AR anymore - if there ever really was
I suspect there's a market there, but only if the device can be made to look like a pair of fashionable sunglasses, and was driven by the phone in your pocket, adding a customizable HUD to the real world, doing all sorts of things, from translating foreign-language text to overlaying directions or providing real-time info about the bus or train you're trying to catch.
But for now, that's science fiction. Even if we could make the screens/optics work, the glasses still need power, and batteries are still relatively bulky. It wouldn't be much use if it had a short battery life, or drained your phone battery too fast.
Google Translate in Lens mode is pretty much the killer app for this type of device. Having the in-place translation working feels like damn magic, and if you could do that while in a foreign country then it would be amazing.
I'm surprised more people don't use the Lens feature, it's one of the main reasons I still use Android. I use it to find where to buy clothes and shoes I see in photos, I can just hold my phone up to it and it returns shockingly similar looking products (usually the exact item).
> I don't think there is a consumer market for head mounted AR anymore
anymore, or yet? I think the biggest barriers are form factor and price. History suggests that price of such devices will increase over time. Whether the tech can be squeezed into a form factor that will be desirable to the masses is another problem altogether. The fact that apple (according to this article) have not managed to do it suggests to me that it might be some time off.
Right. $3,000 is obviously a luxury/niche product, but $450 Nreal Air (which is a product you can buy today off Amazon) much less so. It's like 3D TVs, the idea will never die. Even if it's doesn't work out time around (which I doubt, having spent a tiny bit of time with an Nreal Air), expect to see it again in 10 years or so.
The good:
- Great form factor
- Image quality for screen mirroring is great
- Display has good brightness
- Decent speakers
The bad:
- Nebula (AR software that allows projecting multiple screens) has a worse image quality (I see some flickering). It's also buggy (e.g. it doesn't work on latest MacOS)
- Slightly heavy. You would start feeling the weight on your ears after wearing it for an hour or so.
- When screen mirroring an M1 Mac, the display settings on Mac doesn't allow you to resize the screen. It works on an Intel Mac though.
Eventually I decided to return it as I want to wait for the device to mature and I don't really have a strong need for AR glasses at this time. I'd be looking forward to their next version.
I think the current AR glasses (Nreal, Rokid, etc) are probably at the same level of maturity as smart watches when they first came out in the early to mid 2010s.
I think there is a much more important question, which is: what can you do with the tech that makes it valuable at any price point? Like cool, I can augment my vision. Now what? Now much... at least from what I've seen.
> I just don't think society currently has an appetite for a $3000 product that gives the wearer visual superpowers (that is the promise after all) and is an impossible to ignore distinction between classes.
Entire industries are built upon impossible to ignore distinction between classes - 100 thousand dollar watches, 10 million dollar cars, designer clothing, and a thousand other examples that come under the category of "bling".
While I have similar doubts about the short to medium term AR/XR future, I don't think it's based on people not wanting to be seen as better than everyone else. As a society we basically encourage that behaviour.
People aren't in their EV while sitting in a restaurant, talking to you at a party or standing in a checkout line. It's literally in their face while talking to you.
That said, usually people tend to seek out status symbols. People obviously wear Gucci sunglasses in their faces because they are Gucci and expensive. However, I also wonder if this case would be different because of the growing anti-tech resentment and the wearer now being associated with issues liked gentrification, disliked mega corps etc.
I assume that it means you'll have people walking around wearing glasses that basically plug them transparently into all sorts of information. However, we've had an uneven rollout of mobile technology for the last 25+ years and that factor hasn't slowed anything down. If (and I agree it's a significant if over the next x years) AR is a genuinely useful mainstream technology people will adopt it even if others don't like it.
I agree that getting to a genuinely useful/comfortable/fashionable AR device is a pretty heavy lift. (And that it's arguably unrelated to VR except maybe to some degree at the tech level.)
But, if you get there, I'm pretty convinced that you will have a population of adopters whether it creates a class divide or not. Certainly cell phone adoption wasn't held back by this factor.
There is a market for AR glasses, it's just not wireless or tethered to a smartphone, on your face, walking around and using them like that, at least right now.
I think the SpaceTop laptop[0] shows an excellent use case for a realistic AR device.
Right now, the kind of AR headsets that companies seem to think they can produce are all fantasy/sci-fi, not much different than the whole Dream of Self-Driving Cars. Sure, it's probably possible eventually, but not anytime soon, or at a price point most can afford in the case of self-contained AR headset that look like normal glasses
“ I just don't think society currently has an appetite for a $3000”
Yep, that’s an easy one. Guess what. It’s not for general use.
I have no idea where AR/VR is going. However, I’m all for Apple spending part of its large cash reserve in R&D. I guarantee something useful will come out of it.
Hopefully, someone with a little vision comes along and says “you know what we could do with this technology…”
>I don't think there is a consumer market for head mounted AR anymore - if there ever really was.
All it takes is a killer app to come along. AR music instrument instruction is my bet. If Apple released this one app along with the glasses it would become a massive hit.
I really hope it's not legal to drive while wearing a consumer AR headset. You would need to guarantee the device can't fail in ways that block important parts of your vision, and also prove that it is not a distraction hazard (which seems impossible)
Even for a HoloLens type device, if the device fails in such a way that it’s projecting white across the entire field of view, you may not be able to see through it.
> and knowing what we could do with it if done right
The implication here is that you know a compelling case for "what we could do with it" and how to "do it right", so what are the answers (because I'm stumped)?
For military or police use I can imagine superimposing models of hidden targets derived from aerial imagery. Granted the derivation part is presently missing.
Interior design is another subject that comes to mind.
> don't think society currently has an appetite for a $3000 product
Apple currently sells a pair of 500$ headphones and a 5000$ monitor. High margin products that are sold as fashion to their top fans is Apple's thing.
They will need one killer app and a sleek enough package, and those are the main bottle necks. The money is hardly an issue.
Technologically, Apple has the distinct advantage of having the best power efficient mobile chips which Facebook did not. Other than that, I don't see how they can solve all the other open problems in VR/AR right now.
Apple doesn't make money by selling to their target demographic. They make money by convincing buyers that they need a $5,000 monitor to do work that certainly does not require it.
I can bet that most people and companies buying the pro-display XDR don't need that level of color calibration to do their job well. But as long as Apple is the most fashionable brand, they can convince people into thinking that's exactly what they need.
The whole concept of AR/VR rises dystopian red flags, everything Mark Zuckerberg did with their attempt looked somewhere between scary and dumb.
I think this is because these companies are preoccupied with controlling the content, they envision doing the same things we do IRL but on their platforms. This is problematic because it means people instead of improving their lives and actually doing things are expected to be pretending doing it and spent their precious lives and money away on this BS.
VR and AR becomes exciting only when you can explore yourself and the world by doing things you can't do in real life. Maybe you want to try being assassin? Maybe you you want to try being from another gender or species? Maybe you want to try being in an actual war zone? Maybe you want to try to create a society with completely different rules from we have now? But no, these are too dangerous because someone might be offended, so in VR you are supposed to go to Paris and spend real money throwing virtual darts or something. They also can't distance themselves from the moral panic because they must milk the platform by controlling the content.
It is outright dystopian and dumb. The core promise of the platforms is "do the same things you do when you don't already do on our platforms so we can monetise that too" and this doesn't converge with the core promise of the tech which is to do things you can't do in real life.
From the information available so far, the Apple headset will be fairly close to Meta's Oculus Quest in terms of hardware: Portable and with external cameras to allow for orientation and "mixed reality".
Maybe Apple is on the right track here, since the Oculus Quest has sold more units than all the other VR headsets combined. But there is one big difference: Apple's headset will be a very expensive premium product (apparently around 3000 USD), while the Oculus Quest costs just 400 USD.
I think consumers just don't want to spend a lot of money on VR. Except for the Quest, they are all far too expensive, and that's why they didn't sell. Apple just makes the problem worse by increasing the price even more.
John Carmack has made the same point repeatedly: VR is not a high price product category. If he is right, the Apple headset will fail. It may be more feasible to sell $3000 smartphones than to sell VR headsets at this price.
> From the information available so far, the Apple headset will be fairly close to Meta's Oculus Quest in terms of hardware
That's not really accurate. The rumours suggest optics at least as good as the Meta Quest Pro ($1k), possibly with a substantial move forward from there. They suggest resolution of 3k per eye, significantly above the Meta Quest Pro, and using Micro LED for a big improvement on the screen door effect, brightness, quality. Then there's the compute, with 2x M2s, this is quite possibly going to be able to run AAA VR games (if they're compatible with iOS) – the M2 is running some AAA games on things like the MBA, and this one has an M2 per eye.
These rumours might turn out to be rubbish, but they seem to be credible rather than speculation, and they would suggest a high price tag. If this was a Meta Quest Pro "Ultra" it might be >$2k based on Meta's pricing, so Apple charging $3k for it given their "tax" (and high production quality) feels about right.
You are misunderstanding what I said. Of course the Apple headset would have much higher quality components. But it is similar to the Oculus Quest in that it is a standalone device which uses external cameras to track the environment. It's easy to use.
My point was that it seems consumers don't care about expensive high performance VR headsets. They want something that is both easy to use and inexpensive: The unusually early Quest Pro price drop suggests as much.
It's like the Nintendo Switch: If it had cost substantially more, much better graphics, screen resolution etc would have been possible, but it almost certainly would have been a flop. The same thing seems to be true for VR headsets.
Do think that it is a valid point. But I have the feeling Apple is aiming at productivity rather than gaming since it is running rxOS with M2’s and doesn’t seem to include controllers of any kind (does have hand-eye control) which some games require for immersion (I.m.o.), but I may be reading your comment wrong.
May be far fetched but, it could be a monitor replacement for offices; got supplied with a mbp and 4 monitors, 2 for at home and on desk on location, some coworkers 6 in total; that monitors alone add up from € 2-3 K fairly quick (fairly nice 27” 4K displays). I’d gladly take the headset over the monitors if it’s not to heavy; The ‘AR’ mode could mean I would be able to see my laptop screen and keyboard and display the other screens using the overlay and switch between them (& other operations) using hand gestures/ moving my head/ looking somewhere. Would also save me a ton of space.
Edit: rxOS instead of iOS, the marketing material seems to mention day to day usage mostly
There's a new OS (xrOS) [1] listed in the article in addition to talk about Apple's full hardware team working on a new chip for the headset.
I'm not sure what value there is on speculating at this level.
We have no idea what sort of gaming content they are planning for it in addition to the AR stuff. At that price point it's hard to tell what the market or usecases with be.
A single M2 chip is able to play a recent-ish AAA game and decent-ish settings, on ~2k at >30fps, while also running the whole game itself and macOS.
So for VR, foveated rendering could mean the difference between ~2k and 3k is a wash. And AAA games designed for VR tend to be a little more conservative on the graphics. And the chip will only theoretically have to handle half the other game work and no full macOS.
Combine that with Apple's continued Metal development, which is very capable if you're willing to do the leg work to take advantage of it, and yeah I think it'll get close.
> A single M2 chip is able to play a recent-ish AAA game and decent-ish settings, on ~2k at >30fps, while also running the whole game itself and macOS.
Doing the math to the OPs numbers. 6k vs 2k = 3x. 90 fps vs 30 fps = 3x.
That an extra 900% performance difference right there.
3k (there's supposedly an M2 per eye). 2k->3k = +125%. If foveated rendering can half the necessary pixel count, that's pretty much a wash.
FPS alone is +200%, but games are running above 30fps already so it's less than that. Add a reduction in system load due to not running the full OS, potentially framework improvements as we usually see at WWDC, and slightly reduced graphical fidelity that is typical for VR games, and we're back to the same ballpark.
The M2 doesn't even hit 30fps at 1080p. You also have to consider the power draw limits they set on these 2 chips placed near your eyes compared to a M2 running in a laptop with lots of heat dissipation.
If we ignore the biggest problem that VR has (power) then the second biggest problem VR has to deal with is heat dissipation.
> an M2 chip per eye
first, the definition on an M2 chip is very murky. There is a massive difference between an M2 targeted for small mobile, compared to a M2 found in a laptop.
A mobile can't sustain power draw of 5 watts for very long.
A headset can't sustain power draw of 10 watts for that long.
AAA graphics needs >40 watts of power. You can't have that next to your face without large amounts of cooling. Now, I'm assuming that Apple will offload graphics to phones/tablets/laptops in the style of oculus link. This solves a bunch of other problems like weight, size and battery life.
This is where Apple has the great advantage of course, not only does it control the entire vertical there, but they actually have a QA team, product metrics and leadership to make sure that the link will be seamless, easy and reliable. Meta will devote a team to it for a year, who will build a totally new system, sling it over the fence and move on to make sure that they get promotions. It never really worked of course, but it pushed the promotions metrics, and the leadership don't care about users, only moving a synthetic metric so they can be made VP of cables.
I digress.
However, for remote rendering to work reliably, you'll either need decent wifi(new time machine anyone?) or a decent quality cable. Wifi is a right shit to make work reliably at full throughput, if not impossible. so I'd assume cables would be the way forward (or some fancy 60gig networking stuff, but that seems unlikely)
> Micro LED for a big improvement on the screen door effect, brightness, quality
Nope. The screen is not actually the limiting factor, its the optics. The "barn door" and brightness is almost entirely down to the style of lenses.
I'm willing to spend a lot on VR, but Apple would have to absolutely blow everything else out of the water at that price point. I have no doubt that a lot of Apple enthusiasts will buy them, but they've certainly chosen a specific market.
You could buy a full Index kit, get the wireless upgrade for it, and then a full Vive Pro kit and its wireless upgrade, and have spent about the same amount of money.
Just with the rumor that the new Apple headset is sporting an M chip, it will likely blow everything else away in terms of potential. Apple will also be focusing on everything that isn’t gaming, meaning that XR people can finally get some work done in mixed reality. Compared to other companies, they don’t like gaming. They just put up with it because of the massive revenue.
Sure PCVR still might have better specs, but they’re primarily wired and that’s a huge con if you want to use VR for fitness and it kills immersion when you have to turn a lot. I’ve tried to mitigate this problem with hooks and pulleys on the ceiling. It didn’t help much and it caused additional issues.
You also still can’t do serious work with most of the existing standalone or PCVR headsets. Why? Because you need a minimum PPD of 35 (where 50 PPD is retina quality). To date, HP Reverb G2 and the meta Quest Pro are around 25 PPD. Only the PCVR varjo aero is at 35 PPD, but it’s wired, costs $2000, and doesn’t come with either the $600 base station / controller combo or the $3000-$4000 PC needed to power it
> You could buy a full Index kit, get the wireless upgrade for it, and then a full Vive Pro kit and its wireless upgrade, and have spent about the same amount of money.
You’re not accounting for the $2000-$3000 PC needed to run an Index or Vive Pro 2. Also both headsets are wired, and both rely on base stations. While they have the best tracking accuracy, they’re a pain to set up right and they’re one more thing you have to worry about. It’s not for normal people or even the average PC gamer. If it wasn’t for the lockdowns, I wouldn’t even have had the motivation to finish setting up my base stations. Until the pandemic hit, my PCVR sets where just languishing in their boxes. Self contained tracking is the way to go for normal people and most techies
The form factor for PCVR headsets is also terrible. It’s too intimidating for normal people to put a giant bucket on their faces. Even meta’s quest 2 suffers from this problem. This is yet another reason most people won’t even try modern 4th gen VR.
There are more downsides I can list. I'm very familiar with them because I still own both headsets including the wireless kit for the Vive. I also own the HP Reverb, the Quest 2 and Quest Pro.
As imperfect as they may be, my go to headsets are still from meta for now, mainly because of wireless which is why I’m excited for the new Apple headset
I'm willing to spend $3,000 on a device that I would want to use every day. The reason I don't spend that much on existing VR tech is that I don't want to use it.
I use my quest every day and if there is a better experience to be had for $3k, I would pay it. I was put off by the quest pro, it wasn’t really better (for my use case) and $1k?
In some ways, the quest pro is better. The headset is thinner and lighter. It’s much easier to mod for comfort. It has more RAM and a faster chip. Hand tracking is noticeably better. I didn’t think I would enjoy an open headset, but I like it much better than the enclosed quest 2, but that’s personal preference since I primarily use it to workout and I like having awareness of my surroundings like when I play normal flat games. I believe it’s new PCVR features like foveated rendering and desktop mirroring are also advantages over the quest 2
Surprisingly, what’s worse are the pro controllers. If you have hand tracking turned on, you will constantly lose controller tracking. Even if you turn off hand tracking, you will still lose some controller tracking in fast paced games like beat saber. I am constantly also losing haptic feedback. The original controllers are superior for gaming.
You can pick up the pro from scalpers on eBay for -$800 if you don’t want to pay $1000 for retail. at $800, it feels more like a fair price.
Next thing, you’ll tell me Apple wanted to charge $5k (inflation adjusted) for their new products in the 70s, and we know how that went. People simply don’t pay for new, powerful technology.
Weeks before the original iPad was released, the very same people were speculating a starting price of $1000, this site, amongst others, collectively lost their shit. Release price? $500.
I’m not saying that it will be the same this time, but equally won’t be making statements based on what at the moment is a guess, educated or not.
> I think consumers just don’t want to spend a lot of money on VR
And I don’t think Apple wants those people as customers, at least not initially.
$3000 for a headset from a company that sells $1000 monitor stands for $5000 monitors and $500 wheels for the computers doesn’t seem about right to me. In a year or two, the next generation of VR headset will be much better and still $3000 and you will be able to buy this one for, maybe, $2000.
There’s an awful lot of people who can afford $2k for a piece of hardware if it’s good enough.
All that said, I suspect the headset will be priced well under $3000.
The current best uses for VR are engineering and gaming. Given this is a consumer product, it won't be used for engineering, and given it's Apple, it won't have a big gaming library.
Apple will have to come up with something new for users to do for this product to justify a $X,000 price, almost regardless of how good the hardware is.
All the expensive VR headsets sold terribly, except for the cheap Oculus Quest. The lesson seems clear: When it comes to VR, people strongly favor price over quality. Which in turn suggests the Apple headset will fail.
VR is perhaps like the original Game Boy: Not very powerful, no color screen, but low price and long battery life. It sold a lot, unlike the competition.
Have people ever really had a quality vs. price choice? With all the computing power being discussed, the quality may be well beyond what has been available in any previous headset. Much lower latency with much higher resolution graphics. If that is the case, there is no existing applicable lesson concerning price vs. quality. You may still be right, but my point is that if the quality is pushed enough, the price/quality tradeoff may be much different.
I would say the current choice for high-end quality in the VR space would be a Pimax 8K ($1,387), a tracking setup and controllers (another $577 if you get the de facto standard equipment from Valve), at least a NVIDIA RTX 2080 with 10+ GB ($900, but you'll want something significantly more powerful to run anything beyond the bare minimum), plus of course the rest of the computer to keep up with that and extra-long cables and everything (add at least another $500-$1,000).
For comparison, the various leaks and analyst claims say that the Apple headset is going to have 3x or more the effective resolution of the Pimax 8K, with no dedicated space or desktop computer needed to drive it. That's a gigantic leap past anything that exists on the market right now, and at $3,000 it would be a significantly cheaper buy-in for anyone who doesn't already own a thousand-dollar GPU.
The Quest Pro seems a better comparison: It sits between the normal Quest and the Apple headset in terms of specs and price. But apparently it didn't sell well (there was an early price drop), suggesting that an even more powerful even more expensive headset won't sell either.
> The lesson seems clear: When it comes to VR, people strongly favor price over quality. Which in turn suggests the Apple headset will fail.
That doesn't seem like the lesson to me. I think the lesson here is: VR is not good enough yet to demand a high price tag. And that's certainly my experience with it as well. It's a fun novelty right now, but not worth dropping a couple grand on. But if someone could push it, and make it, I dunno, twice as good, then I could be willing to spend a whole lot more on it.
+1 the tech isn't there yet. It needs to be able to replace my monitors and the visual quality has not been there yet. TBD on comfort and battery life. But I'd gladly drop $3K if it ticked all the boxes but not for a gimmick that I can only use for a handful of games.
Yeah, but it seems that wasn't decisive. The Quest Pro is also standalone, but fairly high in price, and it seems it didn't sell well. There are no official figures for the Quest Pro alone, but it received a strong price cut shortly after release.
The bottom line seems clear: People want a standalone system at low price. That's what the Quest 2 is offering, mostly. I think it could really take off if it was still somewhat cheaper and if it had a lot of exclusive "AAA" games. Say, like the Nintendo Switch.
There is an absolutely gigantic market for computers (and the monitors to go with them), it's almost impossible to do any kind of business without them.
I think that’s probably the ultimate truth at least as long as it requires glasses or goggles.
VR won’t be there, but VR may be here. Tens of millions of units are sold each year. That might be the right size of the market. It’s been around for 30 years now. In some ways it’s a mature market.
That reasoning feels a bit like saying only tens of millions of smart phones will sell because rotary dial telephones have been around since the 1890s. I think its very fair to say the Quest and PSVR and all their friends are a big leap from Nintendo's Virtual Boy or something. Enough we should consider it a different market for sure. The real issue is software still to this day utterly sucks. There is zero incentive for existing games companies to make content until the market is as large and easy to port to as the existing status quo. The difference with 3D accelerated screen base 3D games was the entire form of entertainment was new and clearly valuable. Too many business people think VR is just another medium for existing 3D games, which also means its being treated like a new console or something with respect to investment. The barriers to entry for plucky homebrew creating something of super high quality is also much much higher than the start of 3D games. Valve already demonstrated what the good end of experiences can look like, even on older gen of VR hardware, but also demonstrated it takes a seriously talented team given total freedom to produce the best with investment behind them. Augmented reality who knows, metaverse type VR who knows. But we haven't even seen the basic uptake of high quality AAA VR software because it doesn't exist regardless of how good a headset is. It's like if a smartphone could only act like an analogue mobile phone and everyone questions the hardware being important.
I wasn’t thinking of Nintendo’s Virtual Boy. I was thinking of the stuff from Virtuality. It was a visor with an LCD for each eye, 3d head tracking, stereo sound and it connected to an Amiga. It’s very much like modern devices in the same way that a PS5 is similar to the original PlayStation and other consoles from that era.
We got to where we are today by incremental changes to shipping products over more than 30 years. What VR people hope Apple can do is take the technology we have and make it work for people just like they did with smartphones.
Do people even buy those $1000 monitor stands, like really? Or is it just a highball so Apple can get better deals negotiating enterprise-size deals with larger companies buying in bulk?
Sure. But the XDR is meant to be a professional reference model - those stands are among other things built with magnetic latches so you can detach and pack up the screen and take it with you site-to-site.
To compare, Home Depot sells a $32 cordless drill and a $300 cordless drill (and more expensive rotary hammers and the like). They are not the same product and are not necessarily meant for the same people or the same uses.
Enterprises who are getting XDR monitors for employees when the Studio Display exists do so as a perk.
I think with respect to compute/GPU capability the Apple headset will be vastly superior. One of the major issues with the Quest is the lack of graphics quality that can be brought to the virtual environments. Unless you run it via Link to a PC with a top end GPU it is just a toy. Having VR experiences like the recent Unreal Engine provides is simply orders of magnitude away for Quest in the current state... Thats one major reason that this thing does not take off for FB
I don't think casual users care at all about graphic quality. Just look at how the Switch or Wii exploded over every other game console. Same thing for games like Roblox. Graphic quality is purely an enthusiast niche target. If you want mass adoption you need to fix comfort and nausea.
it is something different if your screen is only a few square centimeters or if you are in a virtual environment. At least I do not agree to your point of view. For example running something like MS Flight Sim with decent realistic visuals is absolutely impossible, forget any other sims that require high quality characters, nature or anything else with a high polygon count or AI rendering
The far bigger problem for VR is simply crispness of text and objects at a distance. High poly counts are relatively unimportant, there's a new Zelda game out with graphics that wouldn't have been amazing ten years ago doing pretty well that would probably run just fine on a quest.
You need a PPD of about 35 - 40 for reading comfortably. 50 is retina quality.
Even with the Meta Quest Pro, it only gets to about 24. The same goes for the HP reverb g2. For $1999, the Varjo Aero PCVR headset comes at 35 PPD, but at that price it doesn’t include the $3000 -$4000 PC to run it or the $600 base stations and controllers. It’s also wired to the PC
At $3000, i am guessing that the Apple headset will be 35 or higher PPD
Something must be off here. My 4k 40″ screen at 30 inches distance gives 70 ppd. It works well for reading, but I don't think it fits "retina quality". Retina would be above 100.
BTW, half of that (35ppd) would be an uncomfortable 1080p on 40″. Which makes Quest Pro even worse.
The only thing I think might make it better is that unlike on static screens head motion could add a nice smoothing effect to the picture, which might potentially lower the required PPD.
The original Game Boy did sell quite well despite low resolution and ghosting. There were other devices with better screens and higher price. People chose the lower price and the worse screen. Is this also plausible for VR? The success of the Quest suggests: yes.
but at the time the market was different and the product at the time was an improvement over single purpose game toys by allowing changing games. Totally different story. Of course there is a low price market for lower resolution and compute... But there is a reason that retina displays on all device types are a thing too, usually at higher price points, at least initially. And economies of scale, manufacturing hardware depreciation etc. will bring these devices also to lower price points sooner or later.
Microsoft Flight Simulator is 40 years old by now. Despite massive improvements in computer graphics, it still seems to essentially be the niche product it always was. Which is consistent with the "graphics don't matter much" theory.
Problem is: Apple mostly ruined their relationship with Epic, Meta and even Valve. Whatever excellent VR tech they come up with will be mostly ignored by the game industry. Good part of iPhone / iPad success was due to the excellent apps ecosystem. Who gonna make VR experiences for Apple new VR ecosystem?
F2P game companies? I guess they won't be interested either because Apple will try to bite off a lot of profits from their ads by not letting anyone but themself to run targeted ads.
Let's see. Unreal Engine can build for Apple Silicon. So any game dev can make his choice himself. Unity and others are also there as good frameworks.
More importantly, Apple did not ruin relationsships with Media companies. I'd love to see some more VR concerts or other events. Meta totally failed at scaling this.
Majority of game development companies don't build their own tooling. Option to build a binary for ARM Mac is not sufficient to bring high quality experience to whatever proprietary tech Apple will put out there. And it's quite certain it's gonna be incompatible with Meta's offerings, wont integrate with other platforms, etc.
I not saying like Apple have no chances at all here, but building own gaming ecosystem is extremely prohibitive expensive even for large corporations. Both Microsoft and Sony spent a decades on building their console ecosystems as well as tens of billions of dollars.
Google and Meta both tried an failed miserably. Both Microsoft and Epic tried to compete with Valve on PC, spent billions and 5 years later their store is still dont have any real marketshare.
Most importantly Apple just can't really go out and buy some companies simply because Microsoft, Tencent and few other giants already own half of big players out there. So it's gonna be really really hard for them to create mass market product that can compete.
PS: I won't even start on fact that it's gonna be impossible to do it "in secret" for them this time. Competitors will be on them immediately.
The only way they could have convinced me it actually might be around 18 months after launch is if Alphabet spun out an entirely new company for it.
Launching it as Google Stadia was basically a self-fulfilling prophecy of cancellation. Few wanted to pay good money for product that was going to dissolve in a year or two.
The most important thing is frameworks. No joke, nothing is currently stopping Apple from making a headset that ships with support for Half Life: Alyx. If they support DXVK at a protocol level and ship a Wine runtime like the Steam Deck does, they could support Beat Saber, Tabletop Sim and VRChat without their developers even knowing.
But they won't. As-is, Apple's insistence on iron-fisting their ecosystem is hurting them greatly. It's the reason gaming on Mac died, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was the reason inferior headsets outsell the Apple one 10:1.
They still would have to _license_ Half Life: Alyx (a Steam exclusive designed for the Valve Index) or Beat Saber (by Meta-owned Beat Games).
> It's the reason gaming on Mac died
Some gaming on Mac died because they are pinched by consoles on one side and custom-built gaming rigs on the other. The majority of their sold systems are battery-powered, and your first chance at a GPU power envelope of even 150W is the Mac Pro. Which, coincidentally, is also the only Mac left that has a dGPU option.
The real question is why so few developers take the effort to build and support their iOS games for iPadOS and macOS.
> They still would have to _license_ Half Life: Alyx
Nope. The user can license it, as long as the client is supported. And good news too, recent Steam updates have added support for ARM64 clients on Unix systems.
> Some gaming on Mac died because they are pinched by consoles
I mean, most gaming on Mac died because of inconvenient 32-bit lib depreciation and Apple's coincidentally unfortunate refusal to support a standardized graphics API. With Proton, Macs are a Steam Deck. Without them, they're a Steam Machine. They're not mega-powerful machines in the first place, but neither is my Thinkpad and it still plays nice with Wine.
> why so few developers take the effort to build and support their iOS games for iPadOS and macOS.
Now that is a head-scratcher. My best guess is that the market is thin, and the carrot at the end of the stick isn't big. It's much easier than porting a DirectX or Vulkan title from scratch though, that's for certain.
Meta doesn’t make new games for other platforms even now. They’ve culled many od their own game studios. The only issue would be Beat Saber. Imo it’s still VR’s killer app. Still, there are plenty of passable clones and similar games that are good enough
The bigger issue is that Apple doesn’t like games. They never did. They only tolerate games now because of the revenue it brings in. Apple Arcade is a good start, but it still doesn’t convince me that they’re serious about catering to anyone beyond casual gamers
The other big issue is that market for VR and AR pre-Apple remains small. Because of that, there are barely any AAA games. I can count them on one hand. It’s also arguable if they’re actually AAA games when many of them are really dated games.
> Apple Arcade is a good start, but it still doesn’t convince me that they’re serious about catering to anyone beyond casual gamers
To be fair, a huge portion of the gaming market is casual gamers, and Apple does incredibly well there on iPhone.
Apple isn't going to make a huge dent in the console market because games have to be restructured to deal with touch controls vs controllers, and to have a revenue model that doesn't start out with a $60 purchase. For all the power of an iPhone, it also still lags a generation behind in graphics performance (because batteries, size, and heat)
There isn't a PC gaming rig market that Apple would make a dent in either. The baseline price of a modular Mac that could have a top-of-line dGPU is too high, and they won't sell enough of them to convince developers to port and support their titles.
There was never a big chance that Valve would port Alyx, or Meta would allow Beat Saber to be on another platform.
It would take an epically _good_ relationship to convince hardware platforms to port their platform exclusive titles over - just count all the Mario and Zelda games that have shipped for Xbox and Playstation.
Alyx works well on Meta Quest 2 and other non-Valve headsets.
Beat Saber is available on Steam and any standartized VR headset.
Even if not officially Nintendo games work on PC / SteamDeck and even Xbox via emulation. But that will never ever happen on Apple platform because it's gonna be proprietary, incompatible with anything and locked.
> I think with respect to compute/GPU capability the Apple headset will be vastly superior.
They still have the same issues that everyone else has: compute/heat/battery. Sure they have the vertical and are able to offload rendering onto ipads or laptops, but then you're basically tethered like the quest/vive/etc.
Running unreal requires a 300watt graphics card, plus ~60watt CPU. even assuming apple can quarter that, its still 90 watts. and not 90 watts of 37 degrees, its 90 watts at 65c. you can't keep that kind of heat next to your face.
> I think with respect to compute/GPU capability the Apple headset will be vastly superior.
They still have the same issues that everyone else has: compute/heat/battery. Sure they have the vertical and are able to offload rendering onto ipads or laptops, but then you're basically tethered like the quest/vive/etc.
many little niceties you hardly notice but would immediately notice the loss of.
with vr and ar you are placing yourself directly within the ecosystem. (the os becomes your reality, if you will, extended… xr… wasn’t that clever of them…)
the iPhone long game shows apple’s willingness to creep slowly into lower cost tiers to preserve the brand value.
carmack doesn’t need to be wrong for apple to succeed. apple just needs to be patient. (and maybe get back to some fundamentals on the software, the operating systems fee like they are beginning to rot a bit.)
That is, if they develop and produce something nearly impossible - a wearable glasses-like (in terms of size and weight) headset that can project color images non-multiplicatively overlaying the reality in user's eyes. If they had somehow figured that out (I'm no expert, but I don't think anyone did - at least I haven't heard anything) and if there's a decent SDK then 3 grands is a discount price for such a device.
But if it's yet another VR headset, it won't work. Camera passthrough is a gimmick that even with most advanced eye tracking and fanciest foveated rendering provides merely a limited approximation of AR that only leads to headaches and eye strain. Despite the article's claims such devices won't be worn all-day on a regular basis.
Apple is also all about being a closed ecosystem, and if the open VR/AR/XR community struggles with content, then Apple is not magically pulling out ton of quality apps (of any kind) out of some hat. I assume its "killer" app would be some AR assistant that would provide various additional contextual information at a literal glance. And then maybe some AR/XR game, maybe something like Ingress/Pokemon Go on steroids. But for an assistant, it has to be smart, and Siri's intelligence is a joke... so I'm skeptical it will be worth the money at launch.
Except that I'm pretty sure it won't work with anything but Apple ecosystem. No chance in hell it would work with existing SteamVR libraries or Oculus Stores.
And Apple's domain is currently entirely empty of any VR/AR/XR applications. While I expect Safari to get OpenXR^W WebXR support (IIRC it's still not there, right?), even if the hardware specs will be suporior, it is hard to call it an advancement (something that beats the existing user experience), when there's maybe only a few applications.
Similar story with all of their products. Apple has a history of releasing new product lines with the "top end" expensive models (remember in 2017 when they released both the iPhone X and iPhone 8). Early adopters will be early adopters. It should also speak volumes that this is likely to be introduced at WWDC; the first iteration may be extremely developer focused, to help build the platform, with more consumer-oriented and priced devices next year.
Historically: It has practically never been a good bet to bet against Apple, even if all the logic says to [1]. This time could be different. I would not bet on it.
The flip side of that as a consumer is all of those first generation devices we’re also quickly iterated in to the point where the second or third generations were markedly improved. I don’t think I want to spend $3,000 just to have the version that comes out the next year be significantly better.
> Historically: It has practically never been a good bet to bet against Apple, even if all the logic says to [1]. This time could be different. I would not bet on it.
Historically? What?! Apple had about 15 years of lukewarm products. Even during their initial phase many products were commercial flops.
They’ve had plenty of lukewarm products in their post iPhone era as well.
And it’s not as if the original iPhone didn’t have its own issues that Apple had to quickly pivot from.
Plus there’s a lot of talk about gaming here but Apple don’t have a good track record for gaming: their games console was a massive flop. macOS isn’t seen as a gaming OS (I see more talk of Linux than is do of macOS) and Apple Arcade is yet another one of those lukewarm products. So I’m questioning whether this headset is targeting that market…and if it is, whether gamers would even take it seriously.
I’ll definitely be watching this piece of hardware to see what happens but I don’t feel confident that this will be “another iPhone”.
The price drop would have to be a lot stronger than that for their VR headset, considering that apparently people even find $1000 way too much, let alone $3000. The Quest is the only headset that sold substantial numbers (20 million) and it costs $400.
This is effectively a reasonable graphics card per eye. Sure it's no Nvidia 4090, but the M2 is running recent games with very good graphics on Macs.
Combine that with foveated rendering, possibly implemented deep in Metal, and being careful about graphically intensive applications, and this could be high FPS on 3K resolution, and be a significant step up in immersion.
The current leaks and analyst claims are saying an 8K screen per eye [1], with some kind of advanced eye tracking and foveated rendering to keep the GPU processing requirements under control. PSVR2 has already shown that at least the foveated rendering part is totally practical even at a much lower price point.
Foveated rendering doesn't seem to have a big impact, as it is only capable of momentarily reducing the resolution of half of the screen. It's very coarse.
eye tracking isn't really reliable enough to make foveated work well enough for users.
most hardware support foveation, its not that challenging to do in software. its not the magic bullet until you get low latency accurate universal eye tracking.
now that is an interesting thought, they would be more powerful than current MBPs... Screen Mirroring can already be done from MacOS to iPadOS for example. It would be super awesome if one could connect the headset to another Mac and use the screens / keyboard / touchpad of that device. Ideally it would allow virtual desktops to have quick access to both devices by simply swiping on the touchpad.
If you use it for a high value application then a high price isn't a barrier. The fundamentals that are shifting here are: (a) Apple is going to push a massive increase in quality (b) Apple is accessing a different market - cashed up professionals
So the real question here is, does the increase in quality get it into a space where new high value applications become viable.
For me, it would only have to be equal or better than using a physical monitor and that would probably justify its value. The fact I could just go anywhere and a full multi-monitor setup with me would be enough.
It's a wild thing to go for, the demonstrated usefulness of VR/AR in business is still very niche. The vast majority of businesses will simply have no use for them, and those that do have a use for them will likely buy them in single digit volumes.
> The vast majority of businesses will simply have no use for them
That type of ultra confident assertion is the sort of thing that usually turns out to be the faulty assumption when breakthrough technologies happen. People struggle to imagine the future reality where something's value add is far outside their experience.
How many businesses have computer monitors? I'd say that's the number that have a use for an ultra high resolution headset that does the same thing. Is it better? I don't know. It has advantages and disadvantages. Is it worth the cost? I don't know. But if you are going to tell me they have no use for it then I'm going to strongly disagree.
It seems like consumers just don't want VR/AR. We've had compelling experiences for a decade. But it seems like only a subset of console gamers, already a small population, care to buy a VR headset.
Part of it is that the cost to play VR - which is primarily the time cost - is too high for the experience you get out of it. For example, the only games that provides a true VR-only experience you can boot up on a dime are Beat Saber and VR Chat - other VR titles tend to follow the pattern of "<existing genre> but in VR". To add, you need 2x the processing power since you need to render the game twice, so you are going to take a hit in visual fidelity, AND you typically want 90fps or higher to avoid motion blur, which raises the bar for playing any high-fidelity VR game (at least until generalized foveated rendering APIs become available and headsets implement it).
This is a very uncharitable take. What about games like Holopoint or Pistol Whip?
Besides, in some genres, "X but in VR" can make for a very big difference. Space and flight sims - even very arcade ones - are a prominent example. The ability to actually look around and track enemy craft easily is huge - I wouldn't even consider playing something like Project Wingman without VR anymore, even though it is available.
There hasn't been any compelling reason that makes it necessary for me to use VR/AR. It's still at the "fun" category, which make it hard to justify spending much money for "fun". Especially when the low-end headsets is about the price of a phone or a (low-end) GPU, which undoubtedly can have more uses And play more games.
Consumers don't want VR/AR that requires wearing a deeply uncomfortable bulky headset, that means facing a significant chance of framerate- and tracking-induced nausea, and that isn't good enough resolution to use for even basic stuff like web surfing.
I would be very surprised if Apple releases a device that has those problems.
I don’t think it’s wise to trust the rumored prices much. Even if the rumors are overall right because of multiple points of leakage in the supply chain, price would be one of the easiest information for Apple to keep secret.
In fact the rumored price may even be planted by Apple to create an anchor and make the product look cheaper once released.
Yeah. I think Carmack said even the Quest was still too expensive.
The PSVR2 has the additional problem that it requires a PS5. It's not a standalone system. That's like a Game Boy for which you need to own an NES. Or like a Wii U console, where the tablet controller wasn't a standalone system, and which flopped, in contrast to the Switch.
The Wii U had the bigger issue that Nintendo never actually made it clear to a lot of people that it was even a new console rather than some kind of weird tablet add-on to an existing Wii.
It really was poor marketing. A simple "Wii 2" would have done better. I'm also confused about "switch OLED". Is it just a nicer screen or more than that?
I'd pay $200 tops for a VR headset (not that I'd buy one even then...), given how jank the experience is, how much money I would spend to power and use the bloody thing anyway, and how quickly it will become antiquated.
Anything more for something that is essentially a short-lived toy is a fool's errand. Fool in this case meaning someone with more money than they know what to do with. I'd get better value from a Louis Vuitton handbag.
I wouldn't say that. A
For example, I think a 300 USD standalone gaming console could be the next Game Boy, or the next Switch, in terms of sales numbers. The benfit/price ratio just has to be good enough and it could really take off. Even with fairly primitive graphics.
$300~500 bucks for a game console sounds reasonable to me, downright cheap even since a gaming desktop or laptop would easily go into the 4 digits.
But with regards to VR headsets? Even $200 sounds too expensive if I were to be brutally honest, but I surmise going even lower would mean whoever makes the bloody thing won't even be able to cover the cost of materials so I'll compromise.
There is the Quest 2 at that price. The problem is that it’s at least right now just not a great gaming platform. I played the crown jewel - half life alyx (by connecting to a gaming pc that can run it), and it was fine but quite awkward. The default movement scheme is one where you teleport around the room because walking is too nauseating I guess.
The thing with locomotion is that you don't actually have infinite space to walk - if you did, or if a 99.9% perfect multi-directional treadmill was available, then it wouldn't be that big of a deal to just walk throughout the entire level. So developers have to offer some other way to navigate levels and mostly-open environments, that either being smooth locomotion (hold a joystick in the direction you want to walk/are facing) or teleportation.
The better option, though it's very rarely offered, would be arm-swinging that moves you along in the direction you're looking like a cartoon character in an animation loop. Completely serious about that - you can look at the success of Gorilla Tag, where all motion is based on you pulling and pushing yourself around with your arms, and despite being a frenetic game with constant motion, motion-sickness issues are nigh nonexistent.
You can do this with the new PSVR2 Horizon game but I just use the sticks after I got used to the motion and don’t get sick now. That game already requires lots of arm motion for climbing though, so the arm wiggling animation stuff tired me out.
> It may be more feasible to sell $3000 smartphones than to sell VR headsets at this price.
Sure, now it is. But what about when the iPhone was first introduced? It didn't cost anywhere near this much money. For a new product category such as this it makes sense to start out with a cheap product so that as many people adopt it as possible, then you can begin introducing more expensive versions when you have the apps ecosystem to support it.
The original iPhone was cheaper than iPhones are today, but it was ridiculously expensive compared to every other phone on the market including smartphones. It was $800 after the carrier subsidy with a two-year contract. Most windows phones and blackberries and trios and comparable devices that had substantially more functionality at the time were between free and $200 with the carrier subsidy. The iPhone had a superior user experience, but very limited functionality and an extremely high price point. Obviously the functionality improved pretty quickly and the price point came down a bit, although it never really came down much, mostly everything else just got more expensive.
Apple has almost never started out with a cheap product. The only notable exception would be the original iMac G3, and even then it was significantly weaker than every competitor in its price range [1].
I’m a pretty big fan of VR, and am currently developing a VR game in what little free time I have. I don’t think I want to spend that much. It would have to be such a huge, amazing leap forward and I don’t understand how it possibly could be right now.
It's just as well. Apple knows that this is not going to be a blockbuster product, but probably a lot of architects, engineers, doctors etc will buy the unit for work. I wouldn't be surpised if they don't focus on games at all.
If they don't use Bosch retinal projection, its going to bomb because no one with the money to buy it will want to wear that stupid shit on their head because they live the rest of their lives in comfort and luxury.
Quoting wikipedia: "Positional goods are goods for which the satisfaction derives (at least in part) from higher pricing."
High price is just part of the appeal of Apple products for many.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out, and if there really is a viable Apple-scale device here.
The overarching XR vision makes sense to me -- that you could instantly drop into any kind of environment you might want to, whether for work or entertainment or socializing.
But who creates these environments, and for what purpose? They seem like they'd be quite expensive if done well, and if not done well, you wouldn't want to go there unless you had to. If there aren't great places to go, what justifies a $3K headset?
Meanwhile, with the reality of technical limitations, how good is the experience really going to be?
I suspect you're going to be able to pay $3K to buy into some games and productivity software that, once the novelty wears off, are going to feel pretty mediocre and may never really get past the tech demo stage. And your hardware is going to be dreadfully obsolete in about 2-3 years too.
IDK, maybe I just have a lack of vision and I'm too down on this stuff.
For me it comes down to optics. I've tried damn near every VR headset ever made, including many that never made it to production, and they all suffer from the same core issue: poor optics. Even industrial headsets that costs thousands are still using flat screen and lenses with fixed focal points (with few exceptions, but even then nothing truly extraordinary).
Current optical designs mean that there is a large out of focus area when you look anywhere that isn't forward. That's just never going to fly for the general consumer. For VR to truly go mainstream you needs an optical system that is truly sharp, edge to edge. That probably means some kind of active optical system (like reverse OIS) or some kind of magic lens that currently only exists in theory. Instead what manufactures keep doing is trading off FOV for sharpness.
If Apple has implemented a new optics system here I think they have winner and the industry will change overnight. If it's the same as current designs just a little better it feels DOA to me.
I'm optimistic because I can't imagine Apple, of all companies, putting out a headset that's blurry at the edges.
> Current optical designs mean that there is a large out of focus area when you look anywhere that isn't forward
You sound like you are a year or two out of date with your "current" understanding. The industry has moved to pancake lenses which make the view clear edge to edge. There's no more out of focus peripheral view, in recent headsets you read and look around using your eyeballs and not your head just like you would naturally.
It is already known that the Apple headset uses this updated optical system, along with micro OLED displays at super high resolution (approx double current industry standards). The clarity and focus are going to be absolutely amazing.
You mean like the pancake lenses in the Quest Pro? Those are still what I'd consider garbage tier old tech. Probably the best we are going to get down the path of fixed focal point acrylic lenses, but definitely not what I'd call sharp edge to edge. The edges might qualify as "very soft" instead of "totally out of focus" but that's about the best you can say.
Quest Pro is probably the leading example yes. If you're calling that garbage, then I think you're (a) setting impossibly high standards and (b) out of sync with most people's perception, as most people perceive these has having "edge to edge clarity".
Oddly enough, the reason I have so many VR headsets is because I mostly give demos to non-tech people. Quest Pro still gets the, "Pretty cool, but why is it so blurry," comments. Not as much as other headsets, but still enough that it will never fly for general use. Meta, to their credit, does a good job of masking the poor optics by keeping texture detail to a minimum in their own software and encouraging developers to do the same.
I think people really into VR get so used to looking around with their head and having low expectations that they don't notice just how poor it is. By comparison it's good. In isolation, not so much.
One of the perplexing things about Quest Pro is that Meta keeps the default UI rendering at the same scale for the Pro as for the Quest 2. The result is that all the home environments look blurry and poorly antialiased. It's hard to judge the lenses themselves properly actually without connecting it to PCVR mode and looking at some ultra high resolution content there. It really is very impressive when you do that.
It’s not. That’s the fanboy “Maybe you got a bad sample,” or “You’re just using it wrong,” angle. Every VR headset has one. Apple will no doubt adopt this strategy if their headset is garbage. I mean, they’ve done it before.
What do you mean by blurry? Like screen door effect? If it's actually blurry, likely the IPD is wrong or you haven't positioned the headset correctly. Although, I suppose it would be great for the lenses to auto position themselves based on pupil location.
It is easy to miss the forrest for the trees, which I think is what is happening if your users can't get into immersion because it's not instant Retina focus. Good enough does not need to be perfect once the experience kicks in and you are actively engaged in doing something you otherwise could not do in the real world. If I'm at the theater; yes, if asked, I might tell you the seat could be more comfortable this way or that way, but it should not matter so much once the show starts.
If 50% of the screen at the theater was out of focus it would probably give people headaches and they'd walk out. But with VR some people expect users to just "deal with it" and then wonder why VR isn't taking off.
"Setting impossibly high standards" in very particular areas is something Apple excels at. When Jobs first announced the iphone, engineers at other phone companies thought the smooth scrolling / touch responsiveness was impossible. They actually thought Apple was faking it.
The "retina" display was a great example of that. People argued about whether it was true and whether Apple was really the first, but it didn't matter in the end. I expect the same here.
It’s interesting to dismiss this criticism as “impossibly high standards” when VR as a market is clearly a disaster. The person you replied to is of the same opinion as the vast majority of consumers, who have either not purchased a headset or did, but now leave it in a closet gathering dust. VR clearly will not be viable on a massive scale until it takes a major leap forward.
When those major leaps occur, Apple should be well-positioned. Remember they play the long game. My office mate had Apple's first tablet 30 years ago - the Newton. And even further back - 40 years ago - Jobs said he didn't want the Mac to have a keyboard and mouse. He rightfully considered those to be a very artificial means of human-machine interface. His engineers made him understand that current tech didn't yet fulfill his dream. But that dream was eventually realized.
Those major leaps will occur. Apple has the wherewithal the stay the course. I'll look at the first generation VR headset the way I looked at their first tablet 30 years ago. Or their first computer 40 years ago.
What if it only seems like impossibly high standards? Many companies might not be directly tackling that because they're prioritizing other problems too highly.
It sometimes takes courage to challenge the status quo, to take the risk to establish a new standard. To identify and pursue the "right" standards.
This is true - but let me say this, you couldn’t pay me to wear an Apple Watch all day and you won’t be able to pay me to wear a headset.
There’s just no dang reason to use these things like their creators want. Someone needs to be brave in these organizations and say “hey look, we tried pushing Siri for years and never gained the loved adoption that chatGPT has, why are we trying the same strategy here?”
If the compute offering is not excellent, it does not deserve to be in a new context. Period.
> you couldn’t pay me to wear an Apple Watch all day
That's your preference, but it's clear that lots of people not just willingly, but enthusiastically do this; makes this an odd example. Likewise Siri/Alexa I guess - I would never use them but some people do dozens of times a day and love it.
Not really a useful analogy, I think. Most people do, or don't do, something that empirically is not optimal for their health. If your suggesting there is an objective downside - I think you have an uphill battle there.
No, just engaging with the ‘everyone else does it’ part which felt emphasized. Proving lost potential is hard without an example of something better - which I would argue is the Oura ring, but less popular for different reasons.
And for Siri and Alexa, you probably use ChatGPT, so you know the difference when you see it
I'm having trouble making sense of your point, I guess.
You seem to try to draw a parallel between largely failed tech (VR) and largely successful tech (apple watches, etc), and then to massively popular consumer product (coke); then suggest there is 'bravery' in rejecting the 'way these creators want you to use their products'
I sort of get the idea applied to VR as it has never really clicked for anything. But the analogies are all to things that are unambiguously successful with consumers. They are all very much "pull" not "push" at this point. Well, maybe less so with voice apps, that's more "bundle".
I guess you lost me early in your argument, and I was trying to point out why (and figure out what you were actually trying to say)
My premise is that watches failed (even though they sell millions of units) as the bar for success is higher for Apple, and they left a lot on the table by just putting a mini phone on your wrist.
So I think screens on wrists is a dumb use of compute. Then I went in a roundabout way to say, a dumb use of calories / sugar is Coke. Sugar and Compute have better uses, so their lost potential is taking issue with how their creators made the goods to be consumed.
The watch is the coke of computing - completely unnecessary for 9/10ths of the use cases and leads to bad habits. Just as a beverage can be crafted to be like Athletic Greens, so could the watch be crafted to use the wrist compute context better.
To provide some example, watch should have gone screenless and used haptics to communicate with us in new ways; and explain when it was important to move to a screen context (which is technically all it does now too) - with this view, it becomes one strata closer to excellence.
I can imagine a headset that allows me to have the equivalent desktop space of quad HiDPI displays for the price of one display, and the ability to bring that anywhere. The ability to edit video on a display that is absolutely massive would be a win for me.
Yes, this can definitely be true, but is the context really so that you can be social with someone else - or is it for you to have the creative space to work on an idea?
I feel there's no idea of what the context is anymore - and that's what's killing all of these devices. No one can say 'this is the emphasis we gave these products for this reason' - because they all want the success of the iPhone, everyday use and wear.
We have to allow the pendulum to swing back to specialized devices - that's why Teenage Engineering is so captivating.
> you couldn’t pay me to wear an Apple Watch all day
> pushing Siri for years and never gained the loved adoption that chatGPT has,
I say this politely, maybe you have bad taste?
Lots of people voluntarily pay for an Apple Watch for the privilege of wearing it all day. When Apple released the HomePod mini it quickly grabbed market share against Alexa et al. Siri has been available on apple devices for years, and a huge chunk of consumers use it regularly.
The nice thing about a lot of tech, is that you don’t have to use it how the creators want. The first gen Apple Watch didn’t focus on fitness and health, but the latest ones do became that’s how people used it. I’m not sure how you think the “Siri” strategy is repeated here, but Siri is a success.
I’m very skeptical that apple will find a winner with a VR headset but you’re not exactly providing an argument that you understand consumers. A much simpler argument is that it’s too expensive and does too little - the original HomePod is a good example. Apple of all companies can make the hardware good, but ultimately it’s still very expensive to generate VR content.
Just because there are sales, doesn’t make it good business.
And I guess you’re right; the simplest argument with my taste is: VR/AR are technologies looking for solutions
* meaningful solutions. And maybe SOL and others are right that hands free readers are the most meaningful solution for these head worn devices.
[Apple Watch was always going to be fitness (everything before it was fitness). HomePod is amazing but not communicated correctly for people to know it’s there. Siri is horrid to deal with as a developer, tho dictation is amazing as an interface. There’s too much to talk about - basically Apple achieved the center of the digital life for all the devices Jobs put up on the screen in the 90s and now they need the new devices / activities and nothings been as universal as the past]
Had this Twilight Zone-like dream that all our visions of the future which include a screen are utterly wrong, Sci-Fi included.
It's somewhat hard to argue that the Command-Line Interface is better overall than the Graphical User Interface, look at Apple, they made $2.75 trillion for themselves from the GUI. But with large language models now the easiness and even the beauty falls back into the CLI, a simple blank screen with a blinking prompt awaiting your commands, and maybe we could remove the screens altogether. Why do I have to write this message while staring into, funnily, an Apple screen, when I could be drinking my coffee admiring the city skyline and the mountains nearby while whispering gently the words into the wind. Why must I know that for whatever need that I have from a software product, I must press some menu button, then 3 drop downs down, select some weirdly named options, and then go back and drag and drop some asset into the window: just do the thing already, I don't care about your software-y details. The GUI might be dying, perhaps we should strive to kill it.
I continue to believe that IF (and that is a big if) anyone can make AR/VR a mainstream market it would be Apple.
Just for the simple fact that Apple has in multiple occasions done 2 things:
1. Come out with something that shapes the rest of the industry. I mean how many times has Apple done something and within a year or 2 basically the entire industry follows.
2. Not captured a large (or majority) percent but continued to invest in a platform. I don't think anything they are in (except maybe the smart watch) do they actually have a majority marketshare but they continue to work on those platforms.
So there is a part of me that hopes that Apple realizes that this platform will be the same way. It will be a very niche product that will take years of iterating on (like the Apple Watch) with it in consumers hands to turn it into a mainstream product.
We have had too many failed attempts (Google Glasses and Microsoft HoloLens) just fail since they were not major successes right out the gate.
They also have the developer buy in on their other platforms that they may be able to transition that to this if they handle that properly.
That isn't saying that this is anywhere near a guarantee and obviously the hardware has to be there, the societal acceptance, etc. But I just don't currently see another company that is in the position to possibly pull this off.
- Smart phones were already growing in popularity.
- Bluetooth headphones were already growing in popularity.
- Home automation was already growing in popularity.
Apple usually takes a look at a growing trend and decides that it can provide a far better experience.
... with the exception of: Apple Watch.
- Apple Watch defined the smartwatch category. Smart watches weren't that popular before the Apple watch. But, watches and luxury watches have been fashionable for a long time.
As awesome as AR / VR headsets are, they are practically dead on arrival. This will be the most challenging product launch in Apple's history.
From a marketing perspective, an Apple Car makes more sense.
And then Apple introduce the Macintosh and changed the industry forever.
- Mp3 players were already growing in popularity.
And then Apple introduce the iPod and iTunes and changed the industry forever. The ability to purchase and download music sealed the deal.
- Smart phones were already growing in popularity.
LOL. Blackberry? Windows Phone? And then Apple introduce the iPhone and changed society.
- Bluetooth headphones were already growing in popularity.
Meh. I'm not sure these are game changing, but that said my technophobic wife loves her AirPods Pro and has somehow not lost them, so shit, actually that's pretty game changing.
- Home automation was already growing in popularity.
Well, Siri kinda sucks TBH, and Alexa works just fine, so maybe not this one
Let's hope this is a Windows Phone situation, and Apple's headset is night-and-day compared to previous headsets. If it's a me-too like home automation, then it can only be a flop.
Yeah. Apple enters when there’s clear product-market and out-executes everybody. For the watch, notice that fitness trackers (Fitbit) were already getting popular.
A study of futurism I read made the insightful observation that things which explode in popularity don't just do things differently -- they let you do new things.
Apple II - graphical OS
iPod - music in your pocket
iPhone - smartphone with cellular data
iPad - large screen low cost
iWatch - phone functionality on wrist
These are all different in kind, not different in amount products.
What does AR allow you to do, that you can't already do on a screen?
It's different... but different in amount. It's a better screen.
That might be enough to ship units, but it's not enough to explode in popularity.
Hell, even mystical eyeglass AR that was actually just a pair of eyeglasses would struggle. "Why don't I just do the same thing on my screen?" or "But I'm already constantly connected when I'm mobile."
The Apple II OS wasn't graphical. The hardware had very simple colour, which made it stand out.
Mac was graphical, but it was a productised/commodified version of someone else's R&D.
Nokia's Communicator range had cellular data long before the iPhone was a thing. What iPhone did differently was - again - productise and commodify existing technologies to create something that was more than the sum of its components. Touch was the biggest part of that, but the App Store really killed the competition.
iPads were never particularly low cost. There were numerous tablets before the iPad. The iPad difference was - again - touch. And the App Store.
iWatch wrist phone may be true, but I suspect it's not the main use case. (I've yet to see anyone talking into an iWatch. I'm sure it happens, but not nearly as often as phone conversations do.)
The common factor - apart from iWatch - is taking/blending existing tech and packaging it into an accessible non-nerdy form with obvious and instant mass market appeal. And creating a vibrant developer ecosystem around it. And adding design stylings that make the product cool.
That's exactly what this display project doesn't have. Even if it does its job well it has no obvious instant applications.
And clamping a rubber facehugger to your head is the opposite of cool.
It may have mass appeal after version 4 or 5 when it's closer to the ideal of stylish glasses with a supporting ecosystem. But I suspect version 1 is going to have a very limited market.
If "phone functionality on wrist" counts as a "different in kind" product, why on earth wouldn't "smartphone functionality without looking down at a smartphone, watch, or other device" qualify?
For that matter, if "smartphone with cellular data" counts, why not "smart glasses with cellular data and apps"?
As you can tell, I'm a skeptic of this difference in kind v. difference in quantity construct.
> Or, to put it another way, how many people do you know who complain about the difficulty in looking at their wrist or cell phone?
Everyone who tries to speak a text message with Siri. Apple should have been brave and not reshaped messages - that screen is not meant to consume text messages at any length - they should have changed the communication to match the context.
I mean the fatigue and awkwardness of holding a wrist up to speak to it. Think of twiddling your thumbs but productively for phones (how natural)… But yes, voice to text is a great solution to their problem - there’s just a lot left on the table
I think that is shortsighted. If you could realize a futurists dream of AR, i.e. smooth overly interacting properly with anything in your view, with context aware detail etc, it would pretty clearly be a game changer (I think).
On the other hand, existing AR, like existing VR, just doesn't deliver on that promise, not even approximately.
With current tech, it's more an issue that the juice isn't worth the squeeze. That can change when either (or both) side of the equation changes.
I'm utterly unconvinced that AR/VR is a large market or is going to be game changing in every day life. I can see why Apple feel that they need to have a product in the market, but I wouldn't be surprised if its presented as “Just a Hobby” the same way that Steve Jobs presented Apple TV back when it launched (and for a good few years later).
I really do think that Apple are much more likely to present some interesting AI products that run locally on Apple Silicone, thats where they truly can do something different and new that will impact all their customers. It will help them sell the next generation of iPhone and Macs.
I want my AI to be local and privet.
In some ways I think Humain have a better idea where this market is going to go. I'm not convinced by their product, I think it should be built into a phone, and I would be suppressed to see Apple do some stuff similar.
To copy what I put in a comment the other day, a next gen Siri with chatGPT like functionality, trained on all your docs, email, calendar, movements, browser history, video calls. All local and not in the cloud:
"Hey Siri, I had a meeting last summer in New York about project X, could you bring up all relevant documents and give me a brief summary of what we discussed and decisions we made. Oh and while you're at it, we ate at an awesome restaurant that evening, can you book a table for me for our meeting next week."
Seems pretty simple. If you could have UI overlayed on the world around you, it would be huge, and would change how people use computers, like the smartphone did.
The current stumbling block is that the tech sucks and the headsets are enormous. If someone got it into a lightweight pair of glasses or contact lenses, the use case is obvious, and it would be a big of a shift as the smartphone.
Denying this is like being the guy in 1993 saying “why would I want a computer in my pocket? Am I going to work on spreadsheets on a tiny screen in the bathrooom? And where would I plug it in?”
> If you could have UI overlayed on the world around you, it would be huge, and would change how people use computers, like the smartphone did.
Is this really a game-changer? Technology adoption is all about tradeoffs. We already have location-based services and applications that are granular enough for most purposes. AR applications add sensory awareness and localized interaction at the cost of distraction and intrusiveness.
History is littered with inventions that were supposed to be the next telephone, computer, smartphone, etc., but most of them never materialize because they don't meet people's practical needs. And if AR/VR isn't the quintessential solution in search of a problem, I don't know what is.
It's absolutely a game-changer. Imagine having driving or walking directions laid out on the street in front of you. Imagine using AI to help you identify things like engine parts in your car, plants, birds, other people (never forget a name again). Looking at a package and scanning the barcode to get price comparisons. Recipe directions on the counter in front of you, even labeling the next ingredient and how much of it to measure. Walk into a museum and see highlighted details of every painting or information about a particular element in a sculpture. First aid details right in front of you, keeping both hands free to offer assistance in a roadside accident. Live AR-driven instructions for changing a tire or locating an oilpan plug.
Currently any time you need information you have to pull yourself away from your present moment to dive into your phone. AR will make it so the information you need is just integrated into the world around you.
There's plenty of neat ideas for what AR could do - but how often are you changing tires or having to find an oilpan plug on an unfamiliar car? Some great professional use cases, potentially, but for a consumer? A lot of this sounds like an open-world video game with no design restraint, where your map gets littered with dozens and dozens of points of interest all at once and it just makes it that much harder to focus on what you actually wanted to be doing in the first place.
And with people's resistance to paying for software services, you'll have exactly the same problem with looking at something on your phone of half the crap being ads intentionally trying to sidetrack you.
I think there's certainly a risk of information overload, but I'd say that's a risk of our modern lives in general, whether we have AR glasses or not. Well-designed AR would, in my opinion, be vastly less intrusive than having to stare into a handheld device for hours a day. I would trust Apple to make a well-designed UI for the thing if and when they manage to release them. 3rd party apps not so much (although certainly there will be a handful of great ones). That's more on users making informed choices about the apps they download than a downside of AR, though.
I hear your killer features and don't care for them at all in any way to carry a tiny computer for them.
I only need real navigation on holiday and I'm pretty sure not taking some expensive pocket computer on travel. Neither when hiking nor in a foreign country. I just print out the directions from MapQuest. K.I.S.S.
And all the other Infos? I don't even use my desktop PC for them. Why would I carry an expensive handheld computer to compare a 3€ product?
>I only need real navigation on holiday and I'm pretty sure not taking some expensive pocket computer on travel. Neither when hiking nor in a foreign country. I just print out the directions from MapQuest. K.I.S.S.
This is actually what happened historically. Various pocket devices existed for navigation (e.g. by Garmin), but they never got too popular until the smartphone became popular for entirely different reasons. Only after the smartphone become really common, then it was reused for existing applications where the benefit existed but was not that big compared to alternatives. AR/VR will need a killer application first, only then it might be reused for navigation.
Whether or not we're way off-base or not, it's certainly possible to envision a HUD in a fairly ordinary looking pair of glasses. It's certainly SF today but it's possible to imagine. There are of course various creepy aspects as well but, honestly, if the technology can be made to work well, most people will just get over that.
What you've described would be a game changer because of incredible AI, not so much because of a UI overlay. It would be just about as good to leave one of my headphones in and just ask an ultra-AI assistant my questions. Maybe have a set of glasses (not capable of UI overlay) but just having a camera so the AI assistant can see what I see.
To add on, having a phone being your heavy computing device is a little silly if you think about it. It's essentially the smallest portable form factor people can conveniently carry around, connect to the internet, consume and send information.
A pair of glasses or monocle/power reader, wrist device with holo display or some other format makes much more sense as a way to interact with a portable computing device conveniently. The main bottleneck is hardware.
But yeah, so many things are obnoxious and clunky about smartphones. Glancing down is never a good look, let alone glancing down and then walking into a wall. The moment that minimum viable AR tech happens, people will suddenly remember how many compromises we have to make for smartphones.
I’m not sure that focusing on something no one else can see when you appear to be looking elsewhere is a good look either. At least other people can tell you are distracted when you’re looking down at your phone.
VR and AR are a solution looking for a problem. It's admittedly a cool tech demo. I enjoyed my time playing Half Life: Alyx and The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners on my Valve Index before I decided to sell it out of disuse.
The article says that Apple has a glasses product and a VR/AR product that sounds similar to a Quest Pro.
So if we look at the glasses product it immediately runs into a lot of issues. Do I want to be wearing glasses? Do I already own glasses? Do I like how glasses look on my face? Wearable tech is very personal especially when it's sitting on your face. At best this is a product for industrial environments.
Then the Quest Pro-like VR/AR product...separate battery pack in your pocket, need I say more? Now compare that experience to an Oculus Quest for $300. It doesn't really matter that the Quest is a less capable product, it's at the right price point and form factor and its strong sales show it.
I don't think it's a solution looking for a problem. I'd be willing to put them on at work and see which pins on a piece of hardware do what instead of looking back and forth between a datasheet. Lots of examples exactly like that, especially if the glasses are fed sensor data so the temperature/pressure appears right beside the area it is measuring.
Like I said, industrial environments. A small niche group of people and businesses who could use some information in front of their face as they do hands-on work.
How is this feasible at all? Not only all the tech for the AR device to be light and have decent battery life, but the software you describe would need optical recognition of what you're looking at, then match that to the manual of the object to tell you what the pins do. All on a device with significant size and heat constraints.
For early generations I'd imagine you'd have to plug them in via usb (which would still be fine for my use case I was describing). Processing done on a different device, get some type of AI to summarize datasheets and match it to pins. All of which probably doesn't sound good to you but I'd still prefer it over turning my neck and scrolling back and forth.
But like the parent poster pointed out, I'm now talking about niche industrial uses, not widescale adoption.
Agreed. The technologies will have their uses, like entertainment, training, education, and therapy, but it will never meet mass adoption for practical reasons like price, safety, and power consumption. I'd be curious to know why so many people think otherwise.
With Apple Silicone, I think Apple is in the perfect place to take advantage of the AI craze to sell hardware with something like "Neural Engine V2". If they can figure out how to run AI workloads at fraction of the cost of what is costs on current hardware, I can see there being a huge market for their Mac's and they could even bring back XServe and become the predominant player in the "Server Hardware for AI" space.
It's discussed quite a bit on this site, but I wouldn't expect Apple to pull ahead in the GPU department. They really lit a fire under Intel and AMD's ass with the M1's IPC, but Nvidia laughed their way to the bank with every M1 upgrade. Even the 5nm M1 Ultra struggled to keep up with Nvidia's 10nm, bog-cheap 30-series cards. In the datacenter it's even more of a blowout, Apple would have to invest in something competitive with CUDA to turn heads. That's no small feat, and I don't think it's possible with an overnight API launch. It takes time and integration into the industry, something Apple wasn't patient enough for (see: Xserve).
It's still not favorable, even compared to last-gen (30XX series) hardware. Here's the OpenCL scores for multiple different GPUs, including the Ultra: https://browser.geekbench.com/opencl-benchmarks
The M1 Ultra is a 200w chip, fabricated with 5nm silicon. It's being outclassed by the RTX 3060, a cheap 10nm card that draws ~170w max. In Nvidia's 40-series cards (on 4nm), the M1 Ultra's performance profile is most comparable to a laptop-class RTX 4060 that draws less than 115 watts.
There's a story in the total package draw to be made here, and it does weigh slightly in Apple's favor. Overall though, even with last-gen cards it's clear that there's a massive performance-per-watt lead in Nvidia's favor right now. Which is impressive, considering how they've been stuck with second-class silicon when the M1 Ultra debuted.
> I'm utterly unconvinced that AR/VR is a large market
Gorilla Tag, an indie VR game where you're an ape and run around with your hands and tag people (seriously, that's the whole thing) has made $26 million selling virtual hats and has peaks of 90,000 concurrent users.
Wow, I had no idea it made that much money. My kids love it.
I think what makes it stick is that it's more than just a game. It's a social space where my kids jump in to sometimes just to chat with their friends from school. Reminds me of hanging out in Team Fortress 2 game servers and just chatting while casually screwing around in the game.
Here's the interview where those stats came from for those curious.
Biggest red flag is the part about Tim Cook being disengaged.
But I'm much more bullish than most of the commenters here. Many seem to not have shifted their understanding of progress in VR/AR in the last 5 years, when there have been fundamental tech advances. Then, others don't seem to understand how much Apple is planning to push the state of the art here. Their headset will have roughly double the resolution of existing devices, and contain not one but two, laptop level mobile chips. The lenses / optics are going to solve a lot of issues people have had, the pass through quality is going to be near photo-realistic - you won't feel you need to take these off at all. Some of the apps we know about include photo-realistic video conferencing with quality that is unheard of outside of laboratory conditions before.
One thing which I don't get why people don't seem to get is long term (and perhaps with this release from Apple) headsets should be replacing tv's for at least a substantial amount of viewing. For example I have a fairly high end 4k projector setup but in an apartment with limits on light control. Even with a dedicated room and $3k allocated to a projector and a screen and high enough resolution (which i'm expecting this headset will be) headset should be able to blow away in terms of perfect light control and thus black levels (assuming OLED) and resolution. And then the ability to not just render a normal home scale theater but trivially an IMAX style if you so choose. Further in a home environment I can see still having a small theater room literally just for the audio equipment which will beat out headphones obviously for a theatre experience but replacing the projector and screen and not requiring as large of a room.
Really I think social home sports viewing is the only situation for an argument of physical tv viewing and the comfort level (which i'm expecting apple to have improved on here similar to what Bigscreen is doing).
People talk about killer apps for VR and i'm like this is clearly it, we have just been hardware limited so far. People very comfortably spend $1-3k+ on decent TV's and that is just a tiny aspect of what VR can do.
I can't see VR being a better home video experience for most people. For one thing, watching is often a group experience with friends, spouse, kids, etc regardless of content. But even alone I don't think most people want to feel so completely disconnected from their environment just for regular casual viewing. I think most people just won't see the appeal beyond the initial novelty. It's already only a subset of people who care much at all about video quality. There could be niche for enthusiasts of course.
On a personal level I also dislike the idea of being home in the evening and myself or my spouse decide to watch something and put on some goggles and completely shut off to the outside world and the other person. Or going in the living room and seeing 3 kids with goggles locked away in different worlds. If we actually did start using VR as the main way to consume media I think it would do us a lot more harm than good. Just my opinion.
How about watching with friend and family? I would hate to watch a tv show with my wife and both have face masks on…. Or hockey game with friends and all with masks
Right that is why i mentioned sports viewing as probably the main exception. I would be very curious to see the stats on percentage of media viewing alone vs couples vs groups. My bet would be the majority is solo even for families and couples in terms of all total viewing but maybe I am off.
As an opposing anecdote, my husband's not all that interested in sci-fi and almost all the shows & movies I watch are sci-fi, so we don't end up really watching anything together.
I just don’t care that much about fidelity on my TVs. By far the majority on content we watch on TV is YouTube and news, where immersiveness is actually undesirable. And nobody in my house can tell the difference between 4k and HD, so I’ve always opted for the cheaper HD Netflix plan.
So for me, a more immersive viewing experience isn’t worth the hassle of needing to strap a device to my head.
I don't really watch cable news so hadn't considered it but yeah makes sense as similar to sports in a lot of situations and more passive viewing. If you aren't the kind of person who watches films and scripted shows like me where all the lights are off and I want no other external sound and a total immersive experience than sure it invalidates my points. Obviously not for all but an option for a lot.
A 'great' NFL/NBA game experience indeed would be the 'killer app' to make the platform, but I don't see how Apple will have something that crosses the threshold. But they probably have at least a surprise or two up their sleeves.
This will be interesting because clearly there's a high risk of failure, and Jobs was known to kill stuff that didn't full fly, I wonder if this is one of those 'momentum' projects that Execs just can't look back from?
Meta spent $25B and failed, man, that is a lot of good money after bad.
We'll have to wait to see what they announce though.
This is so true. I have used a quest pro to watch YouTube and Netflix, and it's a great experience. My house weirdly has no good place for a TV, but with VR it's a much more immersive experience. Just need to get comfort and battery life improved.
At this point, with the boom in AI, I would settle for very simple AR glasses. Not trying to make 3D objects meld with the the real world view, but just superimposed graphics, kinda like Google Glass, but better. Imagine if it could automatically subtitle foreign languages, or translate Japanese street signs and advertising in real-time. Join that with a conversational AI so you could point your eyes at something and just say “What is that?” and then get whatever level of detail response you want, from a subtitle, to a voice description, to a full dive into the historical details. This is the market space for a fashionable device, but it needs to be a real view of reality, not video pass-through. Imagine renting one (if they’re expensive) when traveling to a foreign country, or at a museum. The cool think about AI integration is that you wouldn’t have to create the content like an audio-guide does. In a museum, you could learn about the artist, the time period, critical analysis, the school of art, etc. dynamically and organically. As a tourist, you could look at an attraction across the street, read (or hear) reviews, check hours and prices, book tickets, etc. Would also be great for directions.
Everything you said I can do with my iPhone, and all of those are rare things. Meanwhile my iPhone does things I want to do everyday all day, is unobtrusive, makes it clear when I’m interacting with it vs the world around me, allows me to touch things which feels good as an embodied human, and isn’t vaporware.
I don't like that you took the augmentation out of AR but "Translator glasses" are a great idea. Also a huge quality of life improvement for deaf people.
I once demoed the VR goggles at Facebook HQ on a tour, my boss and I put on the glasses and were immersed in a world where there was a large dragon. We really roared with excitement and kept saying “wow, amazing” and shaking our head in astonishment as we took the headset off. Then, later we said our goodbyes and left. In the parking lot my boss and I turned to each other both agreed, that VR headset wasn’t that impressive at all, we just acted impressed to be polite.
I think these VR headsets are built for the demo. How much daily demand they have is probably much more limited than the builders think it is.
Also, prolonged use causes nausea in a large percentage of people.
> Also, prolonged use causes Nausea in large percentage of people.
Supposedly Apple has been working off a patent that fights this specifically. Not arguing for or against whether this headset will slap (personally, I don't care for VR and think it's overrated) but just relaying some info.
"Execs distance themselves" - Good, that means the company can still push through risky projects without getting caught up in bureaucracy.
"Selling at-cost" - Also good, because they need to get the device into the hands of developers to seed the ecosystem before it becomes more mainstream.
Why not a lightweight, unobtrusive AR glass that uses the iPhone as the main compute engine and delivers notifications, navigation, speech recognition & translation to the glass in a clear way.
None of this has to be super high-quality or super low-latency, and I’d still pay 500 too buy it.
I don’t care for VR, games or metaverse. Tell me what plant/insect I’m looking at, what’s that star/satellite in the sky, help with measurements. Simple useful stuff that doesn’t need me to wear a supercomputer on my head.
I’m still wondering if there will be a last minute bail on this product. It seems unlikely given the recent news that suggests they didn’t want to crowd WWDC with other items, but the more we hear about the internal conflict, and the more we’ve seen regarding how XR’s been received by the public, this seems like a really challenging product regardless of how really good it is.
I find VR fascinating, but I kind of don’t want this product to happen.
If it's a gamechanger for remote working, then I'll buy them for my company and have my remote employees use them
If it's a gamechanger for communicating with family overseas, then I might see if I can convince one of my relatives to get one (though the price will be harder to justify for personal use - but not impossible if it's a gamechanger)
Both of those are contingent on how good it is. If it's something where I do a shared presence FaceTime call using it, and I feel like I can't go back to not having it, then I'll buy them and I expect it'll be a huge success. If I/people try it and it's not much of an improvement over regular FaceTime, then it won't be a big success.
The rumors that have come out say that Apple has achieved 1:1 3d video chat where there avatars are almost completely photo realistic. I'm very interested to see this especially. Apparently this is a big reason why the device has to bundle 2 X M2 processors and also limits it to one on one calls. I think it's going to be amazing and significantly shift people's perceptions here with how good it is. They should be able to demonstrate hyper realistic pass through as well so essentially you are looking at an almost completely realistic image of the other person teleported into your own surroundings.
This isn't particularly surprising if true, as I've seen several demos of similar on Two Minute Papers, and even before them considered a 3D video chat system which just sent depth info from the depth sensor along with the normal RGB info.
I even made a proof-of-concept of my own at some point in… I think 2018?… which was just recording locally and playing back with Apple's own AR libraries.
Honestly, it was so easy I'm surprised it isn't already standard the same way custom backgrounds and 3D overlays (hats, face-paint, etc.) already are.
The original iPhone was an iPod, a phone and an internet communicator. It was a hard sell at $599, and didn't take off until the price was lowered and the App Store started proliferating. If it had an external battery pack or cost $3,000, nobody would have bought it.
If the big killer app for this headset is "calling people", then Mark Zuckerberg is probably doubled-over in hysterics right now.
I like the idea of the shared presence, but don't see how that doesn't come at the cost of losing the actual video off the person you are talking to. I want to see my family in higher fidelity, not their Mii version or have them look like Zuckerberg in the Meta demos.
The will have to make presence _really_ good for this to be worthwhile. The closest thing I have seen to next level is Google's Project Starline [1]. I would spend so much money to get one of these for my home and one for my parent's home halfway across the country.
Videocalling barely works at 1080p because of network issues. I don't know how much bandwidth FaceTime++ would need but I am not optimistic on this usecase at all.
Motion capture processed data and pre-processed 3D models are far less bandwidth-intensive than a video feed. The only problems that can't be really solved by super realistic 3D is latency.
AR is impossible to do well enough with todays technology. This is also the reality for Apple sadly.
VR works very well today. But it's a niche business sort of like racing wheels and joysticks. So not very interesting to go VR only for the big players.
AR and VR are separate things, and it's sort of a delusion that has been pushed by Meta and others that one leads to the other. Or that they can be combined even.
At this point, while I would be interested if Apple do actually announce a headset, I've heard this hype cycle so many times already I don't really believe it.
Also, so many previous pre-announcement visualisations of Apple products were so way off-base that even if a headset does get announced, it's got an equal chance of being a $400 Siri version of the Amazon Echo Frames as it does of being what's in this article.
It's interesting reading the comments here. When mobile (cell) phones first arrived in the US, they were a status symbol for rich people.
When they arrived in Australia, the first adopters were trades people. They could be contacted anywhere at anytime.
I can see huge markets for a good industrial AR/VR at building sites and industrial plants for plans, inspections, wiring, plumbing etc etc.
Markets for warehouse and logistics, shelf stocking, inventory, etc etc.
People already get provided with ruggedized tablets that have replaced ruggedized laptops.
If it's really good (Magic Leap fake demo good) AR, then that's the equivalent of an F35 pilot's helmet in terms of situational awareness, so can be used when managing construction equipment, cranes, diggers, etc etc.
Lots of different possibilities here that the new Apple Silicon and other potential (who knows for real yet outside Apple) technology advances could introduce.
I absolutely see the use case, and I believe AR is already being tested in some heavy industry sectors (eg oilfield services). That said, it’s not really in Apple’s wheelhouse as a primarily consumer tech company.
Not directly relevant, but I’m realizing the relative ubiquity of Apple Stores are a competitive advantage. I assume you can test an Oculus headset at the occasional Best Buy, but I suspect the experience isn’t as polished
I used FitXR througout this winter. Fantastic experience, I just wish I had a dedicated room for sweat-inducing activities. I especially liked HIIT training, where you hit glowing spheres and glass that appear in the air. Level and quality of multisensory stimulation (visual/audio/haptic) during those hits are just mindblowing. Reality can't offer that.
One particular thing that I believe is underexplored is using visual/haptic cues for movement learning (motor skills acquision). For example in FitXR there is a glowing semi-transparent path showing how your hand is supposed to move. If you deviate from it, it gives a light haptic feedback. There is no substitute for that in reality – we learn hand movements (like in dance or martial arts) either by proprioreception, visual feedback through mirrors or verbal feedback from teacher. All three ways are inferior to what VR can offer.
I think some progressive sports researchers are experimenting with VR (especially in Constraint-Led Approach community), but these are just first steps.
PS. I personally want to invest in learning VR programming for years, but waiting until software ecosystem will stabilize and settle on something. So waiting for the Apple announcements in that field.
If I am going to spend $3000 on a VR headset, I don't really want to sweat all over it...
Also, the sort of people who are going to work out consistently don't need a headset to work out. Or any other tech. They just do it.
I know you're not implying this in your comment, but if anyone thinks you are going to take someone who is sedate, strap on a cool headset and give them some sort of virtual experience that will finally motivate them to work out consistently...I'll take the other side of that bet every day...
The key to losing weight with VR for the average person isn't in exercise-specific apps, it's in replacing sitting video game time with something just as engaging but that has you standing, walking in circles, crouching, and waving your arms around for a few hours instead. You're obviously not going to get buff from it, but it can add up fast for an otherwise sedentary person.
You don't lose weight via exercise, you lose it via diet. Exercise is sometimes found counterproductive in empirical studies because it makes you less compliant with your diet, which is much more important.
It seems exceedingly unlikely that Ozempic will compare positively to regular movement and a healthy diet in the longer term. Even our most prized pharmaceuticals seem like hacks compared to behaviour-based solutions.
But I don't think behavior and diet are necessarily the cause; there's some room for gut bacteria (which control your behavior anyway) and environmental pollutants.
I use to with Supernatural on Quest2. It was cool and at the same time a huge pain in the ass. But there is something there for sure, the headset just needs to be like a pair of those lightweight wraparound sunglasses that baseball players wear and I would be shedding pounds.
Its not exactly a workout but Eleven Table Tennis on Quest 2 has been my primary exercise for the last several years. My Quest 2 broke a few months ago. I am getting fatter.
I really want to get a new sleek VR/mixed reality device but I can't actually afford to spend $1000 right now let alone $3000.
"Apple’s ambition is that customers will eventually wear the device continuously all day, replacing daily tasks done on an iPhone or a Mac such as playing games, browsing the web, emailing, doing FaceTime video calls while collaborating in apps, working out and even meditating. It will feature hand and eye control and run many of the kinds of apps found on Apple’s other devices."
This concept has been well-explored in science fiction, and it doesn't look good.
See "Hyperreality"[1] for one of the best visualizations. That's all too realistic.
There's a line in Ready Player One:
"We call this Pure O2.
This is the first of our planned upgrades.
Once we can roll back some of Halliday's ad restrictions,
we estimate we can sell up to 80% of an individual's visual field before inducing seizures."
I was expecting that from Zuckerberg/Meta/Oculus.
Remember Google Glass? People wearing those were called "Glassholes". What to call people who wear this? "iDweebs"?
The hypothetical dystopia you've invented here doesn't follow at all from even the worst behavior of the actual Apple company. Why do you assume that "having an app floating around in your field of vision" is automatically the same thing as "80% of your visual field filled with ads"?
> The hypothetical dystopia you've invented here doesn't follow at all from even the worst behavior of the actual Apple company.
It takes a while to get there. Google started out ad-free. Google Search has now achieved "80% of your visual field filled with ads". Apple used to be ad-free. No longer.[1]
Sounds cool. Especially if it fits nicely in a bag and can be worn in a hotel room as 2x 4K external monitors when plugged into a Macbook Pro USB-C port. Will probably buy one.
A less discussed headwind I see with the AR/VR adoption is the isolated and niche role of 3D more generally.
Its major in games, its important in some technical applications but the 3D metaphor is hard to make as interaction friendly as 2D.
All the hardware, physiological and cultural challenges with headsets come on top of this very peculiar starting point that somehow does not have the versatility of the flat screen UI
Yes - honestly, if a company like Nreal can do it using OTS components, I think Apple could easily have punched out a set of glasses like that and delivered 90% of this functionality just by attaching to a macbook pro in a true glasses format. They could probably have done it years ago and then built from there. What Nreal has made is already super compelling [0]
I think there's a false leak here, because one of the comments on the Bloomberg article mentions them going with a design where the battery is external and connected via a wire to the headset (to prevent heat issues). That seems like such a bizarre design choice for Apple that I can't imagine they'd actually do that. Just... make the chip weaker?
(Like if you don't have pockets, where does the battery go? Or if you're sitting in a chair your back pockets may not be easily accessible, which means the battery is either in front and you're constantly bumping the wire, or it's on the floor or something. I know it's not a completely unsolvable problem because the Vive had that special head strap that draped down the middle of your head which was fine, but I still got tangled up from time to time.)
This device is going to have color passthrough vision. That means it has cameras on the outside, and then an image of the real world is shown on the inside. If you try to just directly display the video from the camera on the screen inside the user will throw up. You need to do a lot of processing to reconstruct what the user’s eyes need to see on the inside display, which probably includes a stack of analytic methods and ML inference that has to run in real-time and produce high-resolution video signal. Trust me that the engineers working on this are absolutely pushing the limits of what their hardware can do. The tradeoff space would include the following factors:
1) low quality passthrough is unpleasant
2) heavy headset is unpleasant
3) headset with weight imbalance is unpleasant
4) sensors, chips, and display all use power
5) battery with more capacity is heavier
6) battery with more power draw is hotter
7) hot headset in your face is unpleasant
8) battery at the end of a cord is ugly and annoying
So it’s easy to say “use a weaker chip”, but what if that means you have to degrade some must-have functionality? Or it means you have to wait 3 years for TSMC to come out with a smaller node before you can release your product? Battery on the end of a wire is a “bold” choice, probably an engineer won a cage match against an executive to make it happen.
Ok, you just gave yourself a different set of hard engineering problems to solve. Turns out that field-of-view, brightness, color reproduction, and resolution are all difficult to achieve on that kind of display. You can try a Magic Leap 2 if you want to experience those constraints.
One thing that Apple’s approach has going for it is that it could also be great at VR content like Beat Saber, Half Life Alyx, Bigscreen movies, or as a monitor for your MacBook. A Magic-Leap-esque device will suck for any of those.
However, the Magic Leap form factor may work better for a Google Glass type use case where you wear the headset as you go about your life and get some augmented features (maybe it can be an iPhone replacement eventually).
Making it not able to do as much is sometimes a winning move, but also sometimes not. The primary utility concerns that people have with headset products come from display resolution and framerate. It takes a lot of pixel density for readable text and a lot of frames per second to prevent display-lag-induced motion sickness. Crapping out on the displays and processing makes that worse, not better.
> Like if you don't have pockets, where does the battery go?
Clips. Straps. Bags. Hooks. People have been successfully carrying things on their person without pockets for millennia. Have you really never seen someone at the gym strap their phone into an armband?
You may as well be asking "Like if you don't have pockets, where does your cellphone go?" And yet billions of people all over the world manage to carry cellphones.
It's all about the content. It won't matter how nice this thing is if there is no content to go with it.
The pricing will ensure this market will be small and niche for some time to come. And Apple being Apple, we can expect locked down SDKs, walled gardens, and all the rest. Why would content creators target that? And with what tools? Which are the launch partners (if any)? Who is already working to produce content? What kind of content?
Is it going to be games or is this being aimed at people wanting to do meetings (which meta seems to insist is the killer use case). Or are they like MS trying to target companies with some fancy AI use cases around people fiddling with complicated 3d models professionally? I don't think anyone has nailed content for AR just yet.
Hope the rumor in this article that Apple will sell the device at cost is true. Oculus understood that they needed to sell cheaply at first. I don't expect Apple to come in at $299, but the rumored $3k is a pretty heavy lift.
At £3K, they're not going after gamers or even enthusiasts.
They're more likely going after creative professionals who're already all-in on the Apple ecosystem. Maybe product designers or architects, who want to show clients their designs in VR, and a slick Apple device will probably make a better impression than a PC VR setup with a bulky headset, cables everywhere, fans whirring, etc.
Bit disingenuous about PC VR. There’s only 1 cable to the headset and if you have a decent rig the fans won’t be blasting. Big Screen’s new headset is going to blow Apple out of the water on weight, size and comfort too.
The Beyond doesn't fit the kind of role mentioned here at all, though, since a major part of how they've made it so small and light is by ditching the idea of being adjustable at all and just assembling each unit to match a specific person's face.
My short list of expected requirements for an Apple HMD to be released, I posted on Twitter a while ago.
- Continual eye contact (reverse passthrough)
- All day wearable (not all day use)
- Rapid toggling of AR (via flip-up, probably)
- Fashnionable to wear when powered off
I believe this article confirms all of these now, and if that's the case I believe they may have cracked the code. All of these need to be there imo for this to be the beginning of the shift to mainstreaming of AR/VR.
The vibe I got reading Tim Cook wasn't involved: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4 (wasn't expecting him to be because he's an ops/logistics guy, but that bit was a bit alarming).
Other than games, I'm not convinced. I do think there's an interesting use case for sports and music. Imagine being able to walk around on the field during the superbowl or on stage at a concert. But then it becomes a how do you capture it so you can walk around a real, live event problem.
I do think there is a use case in work - I can imagine sitting down and doing CAD in a 'real 3D' environment once the resolution and responsiveness are high enough (probably still with a keyboard and mouse).
One thing that VR gives you that a monitor doesn’t is 1:1 scale. It’s so easy to get that wrong when working on a scaled down version of the model. Though you can just place people in your scene for reference.
That said, I thought the same about iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch. I still do think that about Apple Watch, I still don't get why would anyone buy those, but now everyone has them, so what do I know.
If this could add a console or a log floating in my field of vision next to my laptop screen, then that would be great, basically adding an extra screen. I could see myself sitting down at my desk and using that day to day.
I’m curious if they did anything with the eye tracking technology they bought from SMD. We were in the process of buying one of those headsets when they abruptly closed shop and sold out. -$35k at the time per unit.
I think Apple wouldn't ship this if it wasn't a very, very good AR headset. Something you can read in and work in for VR, and see the world around you in for AR.
Maybe $3000 is just the minimum price to get such a thing right now.
There are tremendous downsides to wearing such a thing on your head, it would take a magical feeling device with tremendous upsides to warrant it beyond the niche VR gaming population. I'm willing to bet the thing isn't just an expensive Oculus Quest.
But I also doubt anyone (internal or external) knows how magical it has to be for the upsides to be so much greater than the downsides that it attracts significant adoption.
> I think Apple wouldn't ship this if it wasn't a very, very good AR headset
For heaven’s sake, Apple has a laundry list filled history of releasing half baked and subpar products - both hardware and software - and has been reliably consistent at doing that. I mean it’s just that its “target audience” sets their peak of standard what Apple expects them to, or to just what Apple offers.
I have been using their AirPod Pro 2 and I have also tried one by Jabra and Samsung (along with XM4 and 700 - I own(ed) these two) and my goodness the noise cancellation and call quality, in even slight noise, is atrocious. That’s just one example — don’t even get me started on their software and services suite.
It's not that I think they've never released a half baked or subpar product - they clearly have.
It's just that it would be a spectacular failure to read the room if it's just a better Oculus Quest for a massive multiplier of the price.
If they ship a $3000 headset into what has proven to be a niche market, then at the very least I feel they MUST feel it's a different ballgame than Oculus Quest. It's not $2500 of Apple Tax to capitalize on a small market.
Ability to read and work in VR is a potential category shift, as is the ability to see your real-world surroundings clearly, and these are things plausibly in reach of Apple's technical capabilities. So my speculation is if they ship at $3000 headset it'll be because they think they've achieved this and that it's worth the very obvious problems any strapped-to-your-face headset has.
I would like to see it compared to the Pimax Crystal which starts at $1600. Has the battery pack and very good optics. Not sure how they're going to beat folks that have been in the game for years but I guess we'll see. I think it's another Apple tax but they're going to compare to oculus/meta or Microsoft or Sony instead of the niche but high end headsets.
Time will tell, but I think Tim Cook is the greatest CEO of our generation. Yes, Steve, Musk, Zuck, Gates etc are genius inventors, entrepreneurs and designers; but in terms of executions and day-to-day CEO stuff, I can't think of anyone better than Tim. I hope the headset is a success too.
From a software perspective, I think he'll be remembered as a Ballmer. He's pushed the services shtick to an extent even Steve would blush at, and kinda ruined the Mac and iOS in the process (IMHO).
FWIW I don't hold Musk or Zuck in very high regards either, it's just that neither of them were as successfully insidious as Tim was.
I'm a self proclaimed apple-hater and I'm prepared to see this site do a 180 and sing VR/AR/whatever-they-announce praise. We have been through this cycle multiple times. Money is the answer and Apple has a lot of it. Apple can shovel so much money into this that it takes off by force.
Mac Rumors forums seems to be dominated by people who hate Apple. I have no idea what possesses people to join a forum where they hate everything the company does, but it's very prevalent on all types of content there.
I think number 2 is a really good point. But I think the biggest reason why they could be immensely successful there is, Apple dog foods their own stuff. Apple will generate enough apps for it to be useful. This is where I feel like Oculus/Facebook(Meta)+Oculus kind of messed up where the Google really messed up with Daydream. The expectation for most of the product life cycles was for developers to just jump on board and start developing, turning out the apps. I love DayDream, but there were hardly any decent apps. Google relied too much on indie devs and 3rd party. Most of the daydream apps by google were essentially just demos. Apple will provide at least enough apps to make it useful while also using that knowledge to feed back in to the development cycle.
Apple notoriously hinders it's own potential so it doesn't cannibalize it's own market share. They have no incentive to turn off the iPhone faucet, so why would they make a product that devours smartphones?
> why would they make a product that devours smartphones?
Likely because they expect AR to eventually devour smartphones, and they would rather devour it themselves than let others do so.
Plus, it will be a painful growth with rough edges anyway, so the iPhone faucet isn't turning off anytime soon. In fact, it would be quite a helpful source of revenue, until AR adoption reaches the masses and gets to the stage of actually being polished and commonplace enough to devour smartphones.
See: Apple slowly winding down iPod over the course of many years, as iPhone cannibalized it almost entirely.
"If you don't cannibalize yourself, someone else will," Jobs famously said. It's not just a good quote--it might be the smartest realization he ever had, and the reason the company he founded is now more valuable than any other. It's not often that a company is willing to cannibalize its own product to make a new one.
Why do we think AR will devour smartphones? I just don't see it. I say this as someone that loves Gran Turismo on PS5.
I could see an argument for it growing along side smartphones. But even then, this feels like fantasy. VR only "works" for driving simulation because... you are sitting there. Any dreams of it making Zelda more immersive will have to grasp with the fact that, you know, you can't actually win a fight with most wild animals. Or climb a mountain. Or hike across the entire continent...
(I say "works" for driving, because even that is glossing all of the physicality of driving that fast. Which is intense and would also be beyond most of us.)
"Growing" is probably a better word than "devour".
In a companion essay, I try to make the argument that AR peripherals are likely.
My best guess is that a smartphone-like peripherals will be shipped alongside the flagship AR/VR headsets. I guess the AR headsets might be viewed as the "peripheral" in the beginning, but I think eventually the AR headset will be the main focus, and the thing you hold in your hand will feel more like a keyboard/mouse.
1. What problem with smartphones will AR device solve? So far it seems more bulky and requires you wear shit on your head. It automatically excludes everyone who already wears glasses or doesn't want to wear glasses. Anyone can put a smartphone in their bag or pocket.
2. Not Meta? They're the #1 VR company with 75% marketshare and a years-long head start in the industry. The Reality headset from Apple has no rumored/leaked feature that goes beyond what the Quest Pro already has on the market today.
3. Is distribution difficult? Meta distributes content. Valve distributes content. What's so hard about distributing content?
