this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2023
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Apple
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All it takes is one killer app.
I think you're under estimating their partnership with Disney. They have an obscene amount of entertainment IP and millions of people willing to spend thousands on experiences on their own. Add in Apple's expansion into sports and ESPN's massive amount of sports coverage and that's another big potential audience. They're making a push into 3D capture, which is very different than just putting a TV in a wall.
I think you're underestimating the appeal of floating iPad apps, too, though. Hearing it won't sell systems, but demoing it will. This is the device the entire market has been waiting for. Everything else has serious compromises that the Vision pro doesn't. The resolution and passthrough latency are game changers.
I think you're overestimating the tech. We've had these features in VR already for the better part of a decade; sports, tv, games, floating apps.
The problem is two-fold:
The tech apple is developing is way too expensive for their target demographic.
VR is a novelty like 3D movies.
I say this as someone who owned the original HTC Vive and subsequently a Oculus Rift (and 3D tv and projectors).
If VR is going to be mainstream, it's going to be because Sony or Microsoft push it through their console market.
TL;DR
It's going to take a lot more than a great App to sell their multi-thousand-dollar VR experience.
VR and AR are not the same thing.
We haven't had sports. We've recently had a very small handful of bad options from a company that has no production capability or experience in Facebook, which also had the flaw that most enthusiasts avoid them like the plague because of how repulsive their spyware is.
Floating screens don't work without sufficient resolution. The text must be clean to function. This is the first genuine option with resolution that's functional.
Games have been massively limited by either being tethered or being on laughably bad hardware. An untethered headset with actual rendering capacity is an entirely new ball game.
The vision pro is not the mass market version. It's an enthusiast device and dev kit. But expecting it to fail because Apple waited until it was possible to make a product that doesn't suck doesn't make sense. It's far and away more than anything that currently exists, with many features nothing else has come close to. There's nothing else out there with full quality passthrough, let alone with almost no latency. There's nothing else out there with the resolution. There's nothing else out there with the untethered performance capacity. There's nothing else out there for content with anything near the expertise or range of content Disney has behind it. And there's no one else out there capable of popularizing tech like Apple. Do you know how many more iPhones Apple sells than any console manufacturer does consoles? How many more iPads? How many more MacBooks? How many more Apple Watches? Apple doing something makes it mainstream.
I love your enthusiasm and optimism, but I think it may be overwhelming your objectivity.
You seem to think this new Apple device is going to be a smash success. What's your timeline for Apple to develop it sufficiently to be a success like you're expecting it to be? 1 year? 3 years? 5-10? What is your yard stick for it to be considered successful?
I appreciate that you believe that because Apple sells a lot of devices that their devices are mainstream. You may not have heard but Linux has just surpassed MacOS in terms of the number of people gaming on the platform, largely attributed to Steam/Valve and their Steam Deck/Proton software.
Valve has been heavily involved in the development of VR headset technology from the beginning. We're not there yet. I applaud Apple's efforts and their development of VR/AR is only going to benefit the market.
Don't misunderstand; I want them to succeed in this new endeavor, I just don't think they will.
It won't be 1 year. I've said repeatedly that this is a devkit. In 5 years, when they've had time to get the mass market version out there, there will be at least 10s of millions of apple headsets in the wild.
Apple makes as much money on gaming as Valve does. They're also not new to AR. They launched ARKit in 2017 and it's both powerful and easy to use; it's just not massive due to the limited value of AR on a phone.
The fact that it's Apple is a big part of the fact that it's going to be successful. Except Facebook's obscenely incompetent attempts after the entire planet already knew that they were cancer, nobody has seriously invested in popularizing VR, let alone AR. Valve made it viable, but they haven't marketed it.
The bigger part is that the hardware, up until today, is fucking awful. It's possible to get past that and still have an enjoyable experience, but the displays are shit and the lack of resolution is extremely high strain on your eyes over time. Vision Pro is the first hardware out there that is actually good. I named a whole stack of features that you can't get anywhere else, and probably won't be able to for a couple years. It's a genuine giant leap forward in hardware.
I appreciate the debate and I think we'll have to agree to disagree and see how things progress.
Apple haven't been known for their hardware but rather their software and design, and I think this will be another of their very cool, but ultimately misdirected attempts at pushing the envelope.
They basically created the entire modern smartphone market and even today are effectively the only reasonable option across the tablet space until you get down to the $100 ad machines from Amazon. You can argue that they're the driving force behind truly wireless earbuds too. They're absolutely known for their hardware.
I can definitely see the merit in your position. I'll be interested to see how it develops. It also isn't out of character for Apple to attempt something overly ambitious and scrap it either.
“Apple haven’t been known for their hardware” negates absolutely any credibility to your arguments. This shows a fundamental misunderstanding of Apple’s industry and cultural influence.
This statement was true in the late 80s and early 90s before Jobs came back, but since literally the iMac, Apple is absolutely “known for their hardware” first and their also-worthy-of-switching-costs software second.
As a company, they value and pursue these equally, or at least intend to, but from the outside, putting software first, especially for mainstream appeal is just…false.
I understand that there are hits and misses (the last little while of Intel MacBooks started to run into conflict between Apple's design goals and Intel's power-hungriness, which is why they ended up getting M1 to the point they could do it), that they mostly don't make budget friendly options, that they focus heavily on specific use cases to some detriment to others, etc., but if you're doing what they're designed for and are willing to pay for premium construction they make a lot of good stuff.
VR is only a novelty in the context that the current tech isn't fully mature. They're presently too big, not comfortable enough, and the image quality/graphics isn't there yet. Further, the AR/MR side of the equation is even less mature than VR itself.
Whenever the above issues are properly resolved, these devices will 100% not be a novelty. And they will be resolved in time.
I absolutely agree that AR/VR are still in their infancy. And every effort at further developing the technology is fantastic, if we want it to become widely adopted. Unfortunately I don't see multi-thousand-dollar headsets becoming mainstream.
Yeah I'll agree there. And I think that's presently a function of how immature the tech is and how expensive it is to make anything that feels like it's even approaching what a mature product could be.
If they can solve for this stuff and then get the price down on the tech, things will change a lot and this stuff definitely will not be a novelty. Home desktop computers were a novelty and quite expensive when they came out too but over time that's changed.
I just don't think the comparison to something like 3D TV is fair in this case.
I think it still takes more than that. Half Life Alyx was that "one killer app" for VR gaming, and yeah it made waves, but there was no staying power. VR is still a very niche market in gaming.
One killer app can pull enthusiasts in, but it will need strong followthrough to keep interest strong.
I don't really think it was. It's something compelling to a small niche of Valve fans, but it isn't something to draw a casual audience. And the hardware has to be sufficient and wasn't close.
They're partnering with Disney. If they have a Star Wars ship and an Encanto house (or whatever recent one) for people to explore, in actual high quality (because the main limitation for VR so far is that the hardware wasn't close to good enough for anyone who's not an enthusiast), plus support for floating your MacBook screen and phone/tablet apps, that's going to move a lot of units. If they do it with Apple's huge marketing behind it, it's going to move more.
Not this version. The second cheaper version after they've been hearing about it from early adopters and can walk into an Apple Store and demo it, though. Apple is very good at getting people to see their stuff how they do.