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Tim Cook bets on Apple’s mixed-reality headset to secure his legacy

tfandango 4y ago
I think one killer feature would be monitor replacement. For many of us who value screen real-estate and work by ourselves, this would be pretty great. I keep trying to make this work with the Quest 2 but the resolution and lag are just too much to be anything more of an experiment at this point, though I appreciate the continued work on it. I do really enjoy movies in VR, and sometimes movies with other's in BigScreen. But generally, I am watching TV with other people in the room and suddenly VR makes no sense. Metaverse is interesting in some ways, I like Venues which kind of goes back to movies, but otherwise I only spend a few minutes poking around there. There are some cool games though, but they remind me of phone games that you would just play for a few minutes at a time.
unsignedint 4y ago
Apple's VR offering is likely to face challenges, given the limited success of Apple's previous ventures outside its ecosystem. While it may attract a dedicated user base, its potential beyond this remains uncertain. In comparison, the Oculus Quest has seen some success due to its good library of standalone games, as well as its connectivity to PCs. Although the number of users who use the PC connectivity feature exclusively may be small, they remain an important group. It is unclear what Apple's plans for their VR device are, but if they intend to follow the same strategy as they did with the iPhone, they will need to offer something truly innovative and game-changing, particularly considering the high price point. The VR market presents unique challenges when it comes to vertical integration, which Apple will need to overcome to succeed.
techknight 4y ago
I was confused about this line at first: 'When Tim Cook unveils Apple’s new “mixed-reality” headset later this year' If I'm understanding correctly: there's AR glasses that were expected, which are not happening this year, and then separately, there's a mixed-reality headset (ie VR with some exterior cameras) that apparently is happening for sure this year I'm curious if Beat Saber is ever going to come to the device.. Like did Meta acquire it just for the potential to force some concessions from Apple? The Quest can show notifications from your phone, but the integration is overall terrible and I think Apple knows that having that tight integration is a Big Deal (which conversely might mean they'll never accept any terms whatsoever to get Beat Saber on apple mixed reality)
dtft 4y ago
https://archive.is/Ii51W https://archive.is/Ii51W
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
robertlagrant 4y ago
Any other big tech CEOs want to sell some computer screen glasses for legacy purposes? Reed Hoffman? Brian Chesky? Reed Hastings[0]? [0] Ironically, Netflix might actually have the best reason to do this. You can't switch to Amazon Prime if your TV goggles doesn't support it.
- dehrmann 4y ago
  I thought you were going to say you can't share passwords as well when it's tied to a headset.
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    Hah! That would be good.
melling 4y ago
Hopefully, it captures the public’s interest. I think AR sounds more interesting but getting any product that consumers will pay for will accelerate the development of the technology. We’ve been waiting a long time.
- newaccount2023 4y ago
  > Hopefully, it captures the public’s interest. why? it still isn't clear to me so far why I have to be using this
  - buffington 4y ago
    You don't "have to be using" anything. That said, there are a lot of great applications of AR, and surely more to come as people began to see it in use more broadly. One idea that struck me as a great use case was something my son came up with while we were watching something on TV with subtitles on. The subtitles were being rendered in such a way that they blocked the faces of the actors in the scene, making them pretty annoying. His idea: if we had AR glasses, not only could we render the subtitles off screen through the AR glasses, but those in the room who couldn't stand having subtitles on in the first place could just watch without AR glasses. There are lots of tiny little ideas like this that start to make the idea of AR pretty interesting. Whether those ideas work well in reality, I don't know. What I do know is that once it starts becoming more widely used, the potential of the tech will likely become even more obvious as people develop novel ideas that hadn't yet been considered.
    - zamnos 4y ago
      AR glasses that are the same as glasses we've all seen other people wear is one thing. Giant bulky ski goggle like-things which obstructs the user's face is another thing entirely. I'm sure society will find a use for the latter, but let's not let our imaginations get away from ourselves before there's hardware to run our dreams on. That said, not just subtitles for movies, but translations when talking to. someone in a different language.
blitzar 4y ago
Mark Zuckerberg bets on Facebooks’s mixed-reality headset to secure his legacy ...
- dylan604 4y ago
  and then doubled down on the metaverse
zwkrt 4y ago
Another tech CEO realizing that the only way to sustain growth is to reject reality.
- jeron 4y ago
  “We don’t want this” “Not yet but you will” Sounds like the story of every Apple product ever
  - jaywalk 4y ago
    That's a pretty fair summarization of the past, but this is unlike any Apple product ever. IMO, there's nothing Apple can do that will make a significant number of people want to buy and strap on a $3k headset.
  - rootusrootus 4y ago
    And thus Apple became the most valuable company in the world by understanding that the first people to respond weren't their customers.
- dylan604 4y ago
  while you say reject reality, they believe create your own reality
- dymk 4y ago
  A wise man one said, “I reject your reality and substitute my own”
  - dehrmann 4y ago
    I was gonna say I remember this from Mythbusters promos. Now, Adam was the Steve-O of the show, so take that quote with a grain of salt.
- dehrmann 4y ago
  There's also a charitable way to read that. You won't change the world by resigning yourself to its current state; you have to reject its current state. Which isn't to say this is the next big thing, just that big ideas start by rejecting reality.
coldpie 4y ago
I think this is the make-or-break moment for consumer VR/AR. Valve's attempt flopped, Facebook's attempt is flopping, Sony's attempt is about to flop (see their recently cut projections for PSVR2). If even Apple can't do it, I think it's headed for the dustbin, at least for the next decade or three. I'm not ready to make a guess either way at whether they'll be successful. Apple does have a history of pulling these kinds of things off after others' failures, but a $3k price tag and the article saying execs are rushing the product to market over internal objections points to another story. We'll see.
- karmakaze 4y ago
  I don't think there is a make or break moment for VR/AR. If it's not now, it can be later. It could be the moment for Meta. There were many popular PDAs before the iPhone that wouldn't have gone away until it was displaced by something more successful. That said, Apple has never been a games company so I'll bet they miss the mark. Sony seems to be doing fine releasing new stuff whenever it's ready. PSVR2 and Gran Turismo with foveated rendering is reported to be the killer app for PSVR2, and I'm thinking about buying all of it to play.
- the_third_wave 4y ago
  I don't think so given that any Apple device will try to pull the user into the whole Apple world which has turned a sizeable portion of the potential market off from buying (nearly) anything Apple. The same is true for Facebook (by whatever name they think they can whitewash their reputation now), some - me among them - will not touch anything tied to their 'services' with a barge pole. Google's reputation as a data parasite also turns off a significant portion of the population, as does Microsoft's less than stellar reputation. In the end there will be several competing VR/AR systems which each target their own section of the market while more or less being off-limits to others. Those who have bought in to the Church of Apple will naturally flock to anything Apple since not doing so means they are cut off from a sizeable part of their co-religionists. Those who swallowed the Facebook Kool-Aid will blithely walk the path directed by The Company. Those who follow the "If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear" mantra will have no problems opening up their lives and those of their peers to the Google-alphabet. Those who think that Microsoft really means it this time when they claim to have changed their ways will fall into the same trap as all the others who believed Microsoft all those previous times they made this claim did. Me? I'll just look from the side, on the lookout for hardware to hack so it does my bidding.
carlycue 4y ago
The Apple Watch wasn’t quite ready for launch either. Apple didn’t know how to market it or what the hell to do with it. It took them a few generations to zone in on health and fitness and the rest is history. The Apple VR headset has been in development for 7 years. They need to release it now and see how the world is using it and tweak it accordingly. It’s going to drastically improve the product.
- MBCook 4y ago
  > They need to release it now and see how the word is using it and tweak it accordingly. I don’t know. If you release something before it’s really ready you can shoot a whole category in the foot. A 2005 iPhone would have been terrible. The 2007 iPhone was right on the edge of what was possible. A 2005 iPhone would have flopped because the tech would have held it back so bad. Then there is the problem of why I’d want to use it. There was a conversation on Dithering (I think) about this recently. The Apple Watch was still a watch and provided notifications. The iPhone was a phone and an iPod, plus the real internet. The iPad was a big iPhone. They all had predecessors so you sort of knew why you would want it. The value proposition was at least somewhat clear. A VR/AR/MR headset is a totally new thing. For the vast number of people it doesn’t do what their X did but better. You have to convince/teach people why they need this and that’s a MUCH higher barrier than the iPhone/iPod/iPad/Apple Watch/Air Pods had. The only thing that has shown some success is games. Apple is not good at games. They (as a company) just don’t ‘get it’. And if games was enough we’d see existing solutions be way more popular. Plus the nausea issue is very real for a non-trivial portion of the population. Maybe things have passed that magic threshold where, like the iPhone, little additions have added together enough to make Apple’s thing feel way more necessary that what existed before. But I’m skeptical. They need Mario, VisiCalc, Word Perfect, Sonic, Page Maker, something to be their killer app.
- jmyeet 4y ago
  This is a fun little story. At the time, Angela Ahrendts, formerly the Burberry CEO, had been hired as the SVP of Retail to replace the guy who left to go flop at JC Penny. What you noticed at the time is that Ahrendts tried to position things as luxury fashion items. This was the era when you had the ridiculous $10,000 Apple Watch Edition, Hermes straps and the like. This completely flopped. They sort of scrambled after this inevitable failure and settled on it being a device for health and fitness. I think health monitoring in particular is a huge untapped market. A later version added an ECG. If they can figure out how to do blood sugar testing without a needle that will be absolutely huge for so many people. Preventative care and passive monitoring I expect to become huge industries, particularly with aging populations. It won't be too many years before you see such devices giving you early warnings of a heart attack, for example. From the outside it looked like Apple never had a clear goal for the Apple Watch on launch and just stumbled into it.
iambateman 4y ago
TBH…I think Tim Cook’s legacy is pretty secure at this point.
- zer0zzz 4y ago
  Secure as a finance, supply chain and operations guy. Not a lot of truly new stuff developed from inception to production the last 12 years.
- dehrmann 4y ago
  He doesn't have his product win. He kept the ship on course and found ways to squeeze out more revenue.
Invictus0 4y ago
No one is bringing ski goggles around with them, especially not ski goggles with a wire running down to your pants.
- wellthisisgreat 4y ago
  Is that what they are doing? Wires? They can reuse the iPod imagery with white wires running along a silhouette
- kilroy123 4y ago
  Agreed. I predict this one is going to be a big flop.
- wilsonnb3 4y ago
  I think this is going to age about as well as everyone who predicted that nobody would wear AirPods because they were ugly. Even if you are correct, Apple makes products that are not designed to be taken out of the house (iMac/Mini/Studio, HomePod). It is entirely possible that this first generation device is not intended to be "outside of the house" mobile.
  - Invictus0 4y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13169831 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13169831 Most people at the time were complaining that they could fall out of their ears, which turned out to be pretty correct. (I own airpods and no longer use them.)
antomeie 4y ago
Imo, seems like a bad thing to bet your legacy on. Haven't most people gotten over the VR headset hype by now? Kind of like 3D TV's from a decade ago. It also feels like such an anti-social technology. + the fact that a certain % of the population just get motion sickness from it. But who knows, if anyone can succeed with it, Apple probably can!
- wellthisisgreat 4y ago
  3DTVs were way more fun for games
  - TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
    As VR is. Yet 3DTV flopped anyway.
simonh 4y ago
It wouldn't be the first major product steered entirely by Cook, as the sub-heading states, that would be the watch. Within a year or two of the launch of the iPhone the tech industry went into "what have you done for me lately?" mode, on the edge of their seats for the next major iPhone level change-the-world platform from Apple. That's died down over the years. The fact that the watch merely defined the segment and was so dominant it re-shaped the watch industry is still seen in some quarters as a failure because it didn't replace the phone. If the AR headset does launch and it just does as well and it's leading competitors that's fine. Not everything has to change the world. Maybe just having it as a really solid option for those who want one is enough.
will_walker 4y ago
Physics is working against everyone here, it’s just too hard to get a bright, sharp screen in the form factor, weight & style that can literally appeal to everyone. The processing power to obtain world lock is not trivial either. In contrast, a watch is just a scaled down phone with skin sensors. Most of the building blocks already exist. Sociology is another blocker. Our species has evolved to read each other’s eyes to identify attention and emotion. As soon as you block the eyes with a pair of darkened screens, you lose that ability to directly connect human to human in person. Sure there are individual used cases like biking they could be compelling, but they are niche applications.
- billiam 4y ago
  This is a good salad of truth, but I think it misses the point. VR is not going to happen for a long time, but this high status product is mostly about demonstrating the possibilities of AR, which is happening all around us with existing technologies. Apple has concluded that it will be worth it to demonstrate how information superiority and affordance will work in a $3k headset before the lightweight glasses become feasible. The applications for this product (sports, research, conferencing, gaming, etc) won't depend on real world interaction.
  - will_walker 4y ago
    Yes, but the basics of computing (text input, pointing, selecting) haven't been worked out for the new paradigm. Like you point out, how information superiority and affordance work even in standalone applications hasn't really been solved. Without tactile touch components, it's very hard to interact with spatial data (one of the reasons CAD is so hard to learn). I'd suggest that we'll need another 'mother of all demos' that solve some of these HCI problems, not just the fit and finish upgrade that Apple typically offers.
newaccount2023 4y ago
weird, there is so much else low-hanging fruit for Cook to easily pluck without having to risk a disaster launch of AR - keep pushing into financial products with Apple Pay, BNPL, etc - keep expanding Apple TV into a real HBO competitor etc etc these are efforts they already have some traction with with so much opportunity in half-explored markets, I wonder why they keep teasing AR, cars etc
- wilsonnb3 4y ago
  Apple is capable of doing more than one thing at once. There is no indication that their financial products or Apple TV are slowing down anytime soon.
AstixAndBelix 4y ago
Maybe it's unrelated, but I'm finishing college and in a couple of years we've gone from almost nobody using tablets to take notes to almost everyone having a pen-enabled device to take notes with. This is because we finally got cheap enough devices that were mildly pleasureable to write with and had mildly functional note taking suites. I think the same is going to happen starting next year. Sure, AR is a bit behind VR in the public conscience, but the moment $200 AR goggles will prove to be marginally useful people will adopt them in an instant.
ak_111 4y ago
The timing can work out nicely for Apple since Tim Cook is on his way out in a year or two anyway, so if it flops or the initial launch goes real bad, they can blame it him and communicate his exit as a "reset" for the product and company. It would have been risky to leave it for the new CEO to launch. Sort of like you never fire a football manager before a major clash even if it was clear to everybody that he will be sacked soon.
- mcphage 4y ago
  > since Tim Cook is on his way out in a year or two anyway What's the source for this?
  - ak_111 4y ago
    Just a guess he is already a few standard deviations above the average tenure of a tech ceo in this era.
- ask_b123 4y ago
  > Sort of like you never fire a football manager before a major clash even if it was clear to everybody that he will be sacked soon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Mourinho#2020%E2%80%9321_season https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Mourinho#2020%E2%80%... > On 19 April 2021, Mourinho was sacked by Tottenham Hotspur after 17 months in charge of the club, days before the EFL Cup Final against Manchester City.
whalesalad 4y ago
"The early bird catches the worm - but the second mouse gets the cheese. " comes to mind re Meta/Apple... but honestly I am very bearish on AR/VR in general. Meta learned their lesson the hard way, I hope Apple doesn't do the same.
dom96 4y ago
> But Apple’s famed industrial design team had cautioned patience, wanting to delay until a more lightweight version of AR glasses became technically feasible. Most in the tech industry expect that to take several more years. They are absolutely right on this. I guess we won't get this and it will be a rushed bulky device instead. This would be a massive mistake.
bilsbie 4y ago
I’m going to say that the current VR options today are uncanny reality and that’s why they’re not popular. You get depth vision and can look around but it just doesn’t feel real and it’s a little disturbing. I can’t place what’s not real about it though.
sublinear 4y ago
> Apple’s famed industrial design team had cautioned patience, wanting to delay until a more lightweight version of AR glasses became technically feasible. This is the actual problem. A well executed AR "headset" has the potential to replace all consumer devices except high end desktop. I wonder if that scares manufacturers.
- buffington 4y ago
  > except high end desktop Could you share why you think this is true? I'm not disputing it, but I'm also not as certain as you are. I have a hunch that manufacturers don't care one way or another. Manufacturers are going to manufacturer things as long as consumers are buying things. Perhaps by manufacturers you meant "competitors" or "other hardware companies" - if so, I suspect they're less worried about AR in general disrupting traditional "computing hardware" models, and more concerned that it's Apple doing it. Apple has flops, and Apple has wins, and Apple's competitors have frequently underestimated as much as they've overestimated Apple's ability to pull something off. Personally: I don't have high expectations, as much as I'd love to see the idea itself succeed. $3K is just too much money for your typical consumer, even if the tech is some "whole new level" sort of experience for end users. Perhaps if there are obvious "non-mainstream" uses (imagine industrial applications where an information rich, contextual OSD helps speed up processes or improve quality/yield, or medical uses that can overlay valuable info, etc), then maybe $3k makes sense. The high price is only one issue. There's all the other stuff (well described in other comments) as well.
  - sublinear 4y ago
    For small businesses and hobbyists it probably makes more sense to compute locally on a real workstation that can run the latest and greatest software without compromises. For your typical consumer, or even remote worker, they can replace their phone and laptop with an AR device. Wearable computing that merges seamlessly with everyday "real world" experiences just seems to be so obviously the next step. It would be a dream if all I had to ever carry around was a folding keyboard for "serious" work (in the pocket where the phone used to be), but otherwise hardly ever need to do so and interact with a lightweight pair of unfussy glasses using eye tracking, touch surfaces, motion sensors, etc. For many people this means no more screens of any kind anywhere cluttering up their life except for the ones continuously and unobtrusively projecting onto their eyeballs.
ngrilly 4y ago
I don't like that title. I perceive Tim Cook has a CEO caring a lot for Apple and not as someone obsessed with "securing his legacy".
- buffington 4y ago
  That's fair, though "caring a lot for Apple" and "securing his legacy" aren't mutually exclusive.
nmcela 4y ago
"But Apple’s famed industrial design team had cautioned patience, wanting to delay until a more lightweight version of AR glasses became technically feasible. Most in the tech industry expect that to take several more years. " "Just a few years ago, going against the wishes of Apple’s all-powerful design team would have been unthinkable. But since the departure of its longtime leader Jony Ive in 2019, Apple’s structure has been reshuffled, with design now reporting to Williams. " "Ive’s former role as chief design officer was split in two, with Evans Hankey on hardware and Alan Dye on software. However, Hankey announced last October that she would be leaving within six months, contributing to significant staff turnover in the division over recent years." "Apple’s 12-person executive team reflects how the company’s focus has shifted under Cook, himself a former operations chief." Wow, sounds like the 80's storyline is repeating itself. The greedy business guys took over again, drove out the best creators, and are now driving off a cliff 200km/h.
- Runways 4y ago
  Ehh, maybe. I bought an M1 MacBook because it supported other OSs, reverted back to a reasonable keyboard, had reasonable ports, and soft feel. The problem with successful artists like Ives is sometimes they become a cult of personality within an org, domineering and protective of their vision. I feel like Ives wanted you to cut yourself on the edge of your laptop and carry 20 dongles. I feel like they dialed back the ridiculousness.

I think one killer feature would be monitor replacement. For many of us who value screen real-estate and work by ourselves, this would be pretty great. I keep trying to make this work with the Quest 2 but the resolution and lag are just too much to be anything more of an experiment at this point, though I appreciate the continued work on it. I do really enjoy movies in VR, and sometimes movies with other's in BigScreen. But generally, I am watching TV with other people in the room and suddenly VR makes no sense. Metaverse is interesting in some ways, I like Venues which kind of goes back to movies, but otherwise I only spend a few minutes poking around there. There are some cool games though, but they remind me of phone games that you would just play for a few minutes at a time.

unsignedint 4y ago

Apple's VR offering is likely to face challenges, given the limited success of Apple's previous ventures outside its ecosystem. While it may attract a dedicated user base, its potential beyond this remains uncertain. In comparison, the Oculus Quest has seen some success due to its good library of standalone games, as well as its connectivity to PCs. Although the number of users who use the PC connectivity feature exclusively may be small, they remain an important group. It is unclear what Apple's plans for their VR device are, but if they intend to follow the same strategy as they did with the iPhone, they will need to offer something truly innovative and game-changing, particularly considering the high price point. The VR market presents unique challenges when it comes to vertical integration, which Apple will need to overcome to succeed.

techknight 4y ago

I was confused about this line at first: 'When Tim Cook unveils Apple’s new “mixed-reality” headset later this year' If I'm understanding correctly: there's AR glasses that were expected, which are not happening this year, and then separately, there's a mixed-reality headset (ie VR with some exterior cameras) that apparently is happening for sure this year I'm curious if Beat Saber is ever going to come to the device.. Like did Meta acquire it just for the potential to force some concessions from Apple? The Quest can show notifications from your phone, but the integration is overall terrible and I think Apple knows that having that tight integration is a Big Deal (which conversely might mean they'll never accept any terms whatsoever to get Beat Saber on apple mixed reality)

dtft 4y ago

https://archive.is/Ii51W https://archive.is/Ii51W

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

robertlagrant 4y ago

Any other big tech CEOs want to sell some computer screen glasses for legacy purposes? Reed Hoffman? Brian Chesky? Reed Hastings[0]? [0] Ironically, Netflix might actually have the best reason to do this. You can't switch to Amazon Prime if your TV goggles doesn't support it.

dehrmann 4y ago
I thought you were going to say you can't share passwords as well when it's tied to a headset.
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  Hah! That would be good.

melling 4y ago

Hopefully, it captures the public’s interest. I think AR sounds more interesting but getting any product that consumers will pay for will accelerate the development of the technology. We’ve been waiting a long time.

newaccount2023 4y ago
> Hopefully, it captures the public’s interest. why? it still isn't clear to me so far why I have to be using this
- buffington 4y ago
  You don't "have to be using" anything. That said, there are a lot of great applications of AR, and surely more to come as people began to see it in use more broadly. One idea that struck me as a great use case was something my son came up with while we were watching something on TV with subtitles on. The subtitles were being rendered in such a way that they blocked the faces of the actors in the scene, making them pretty annoying. His idea: if we had AR glasses, not only could we render the subtitles off screen through the AR glasses, but those in the room who couldn't stand having subtitles on in the first place could just watch without AR glasses. There are lots of tiny little ideas like this that start to make the idea of AR pretty interesting. Whether those ideas work well in reality, I don't know. What I do know is that once it starts becoming more widely used, the potential of the tech will likely become even more obvious as people develop novel ideas that hadn't yet been considered.
  - zamnos 4y ago
    AR glasses that are the same as glasses we've all seen other people wear is one thing. Giant bulky ski goggle like-things which obstructs the user's face is another thing entirely. I'm sure society will find a use for the latter, but let's not let our imaginations get away from ourselves before there's hardware to run our dreams on. That said, not just subtitles for movies, but translations when talking to. someone in a different language.

blitzar 4y ago

Mark Zuckerberg bets on Facebooks’s mixed-reality headset to secure his legacy ...

dylan604 4y ago
and then doubled down on the metaverse

zwkrt 4y ago

Another tech CEO realizing that the only way to sustain growth is to reject reality.

jeron 4y ago
“We don’t want this” “Not yet but you will” Sounds like the story of every Apple product ever
- jaywalk 4y ago
  That's a pretty fair summarization of the past, but this is unlike any Apple product ever. IMO, there's nothing Apple can do that will make a significant number of people want to buy and strap on a $3k headset.
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  And thus Apple became the most valuable company in the world by understanding that the first people to respond weren't their customers.
dylan604 4y ago
while you say reject reality, they believe create your own reality
dymk 4y ago
A wise man one said, “I reject your reality and substitute my own”
- dehrmann 4y ago
  I was gonna say I remember this from Mythbusters promos. Now, Adam was the Steve-O of the show, so take that quote with a grain of salt.
dehrmann 4y ago
There's also a charitable way to read that. You won't change the world by resigning yourself to its current state; you have to reject its current state. Which isn't to say this is the next big thing, just that big ideas start by rejecting reality.

coldpie 4y ago

I think this is the make-or-break moment for consumer VR/AR. Valve's attempt flopped, Facebook's attempt is flopping, Sony's attempt is about to flop (see their recently cut projections for PSVR2). If even Apple can't do it, I think it's headed for the dustbin, at least for the next decade or three. I'm not ready to make a guess either way at whether they'll be successful. Apple does have a history of pulling these kinds of things off after others' failures, but a $3k price tag and the article saying execs are rushing the product to market over internal objections points to another story. We'll see.

karmakaze 4y ago
I don't think there is a make or break moment for VR/AR. If it's not now, it can be later. It could be the moment for Meta. There were many popular PDAs before the iPhone that wouldn't have gone away until it was displaced by something more successful. That said, Apple has never been a games company so I'll bet they miss the mark. Sony seems to be doing fine releasing new stuff whenever it's ready. PSVR2 and Gran Turismo with foveated rendering is reported to be the killer app for PSVR2, and I'm thinking about buying all of it to play.
the_third_wave 4y ago
I don't think so given that any Apple device will try to pull the user into the whole Apple world which has turned a sizeable portion of the potential market off from buying (nearly) anything Apple. The same is true for Facebook (by whatever name they think they can whitewash their reputation now), some - me among them - will not touch anything tied to their 'services' with a barge pole. Google's reputation as a data parasite also turns off a significant portion of the population, as does Microsoft's less than stellar reputation. In the end there will be several competing VR/AR systems which each target their own section of the market while more or less being off-limits to others. Those who have bought in to the Church of Apple will naturally flock to anything Apple since not doing so means they are cut off from a sizeable part of their co-religionists. Those who swallowed the Facebook Kool-Aid will blithely walk the path directed by The Company. Those who follow the "If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear" mantra will have no problems opening up their lives and those of their peers to the Google-alphabet. Those who think that Microsoft really means it this time when they claim to have changed their ways will fall into the same trap as all the others who believed Microsoft all those previous times they made this claim did. Me? I'll just look from the side, on the lookout for hardware to hack so it does my bidding.

carlycue 4y ago

The Apple Watch wasn’t quite ready for launch either. Apple didn’t know how to market it or what the hell to do with it. It took them a few generations to zone in on health and fitness and the rest is history. The Apple VR headset has been in development for 7 years. They need to release it now and see how the world is using it and tweak it accordingly. It’s going to drastically improve the product.

MBCook 4y ago
> They need to release it now and see how the word is using it and tweak it accordingly. I don’t know. If you release something before it’s really ready you can shoot a whole category in the foot. A 2005 iPhone would have been terrible. The 2007 iPhone was right on the edge of what was possible. A 2005 iPhone would have flopped because the tech would have held it back so bad. Then there is the problem of why I’d want to use it. There was a conversation on Dithering (I think) about this recently. The Apple Watch was still a watch and provided notifications. The iPhone was a phone and an iPod, plus the real internet. The iPad was a big iPhone. They all had predecessors so you sort of knew why you would want it. The value proposition was at least somewhat clear. A VR/AR/MR headset is a totally new thing. For the vast number of people it doesn’t do what their X did but better. You have to convince/teach people why they need this and that’s a MUCH higher barrier than the iPhone/iPod/iPad/Apple Watch/Air Pods had. The only thing that has shown some success is games. Apple is not good at games. They (as a company) just don’t ‘get it’. And if games was enough we’d see existing solutions be way more popular. Plus the nausea issue is very real for a non-trivial portion of the population. Maybe things have passed that magic threshold where, like the iPhone, little additions have added together enough to make Apple’s thing feel way more necessary that what existed before. But I’m skeptical. They need Mario, VisiCalc, Word Perfect, Sonic, Page Maker, something to be their killer app.
jmyeet 4y ago
This is a fun little story. At the time, Angela Ahrendts, formerly the Burberry CEO, had been hired as the SVP of Retail to replace the guy who left to go flop at JC Penny. What you noticed at the time is that Ahrendts tried to position things as luxury fashion items. This was the era when you had the ridiculous $10,000 Apple Watch Edition, Hermes straps and the like. This completely flopped. They sort of scrambled after this inevitable failure and settled on it being a device for health and fitness. I think health monitoring in particular is a huge untapped market. A later version added an ECG. If they can figure out how to do blood sugar testing without a needle that will be absolutely huge for so many people. Preventative care and passive monitoring I expect to become huge industries, particularly with aging populations. It won't be too many years before you see such devices giving you early warnings of a heart attack, for example. From the outside it looked like Apple never had a clear goal for the Apple Watch on launch and just stumbled into it.

iambateman 4y ago

TBH…I think Tim Cook’s legacy is pretty secure at this point.

zer0zzz 4y ago
Secure as a finance, supply chain and operations guy. Not a lot of truly new stuff developed from inception to production the last 12 years.
dehrmann 4y ago
He doesn't have his product win. He kept the ship on course and found ways to squeeze out more revenue.

Invictus0 4y ago

No one is bringing ski goggles around with them, especially not ski goggles with a wire running down to your pants.

wellthisisgreat 4y ago
Is that what they are doing? Wires? They can reuse the iPod imagery with white wires running along a silhouette
kilroy123 4y ago
Agreed. I predict this one is going to be a big flop.
wilsonnb3 4y ago
I think this is going to age about as well as everyone who predicted that nobody would wear AirPods because they were ugly. Even if you are correct, Apple makes products that are not designed to be taken out of the house (iMac/Mini/Studio, HomePod). It is entirely possible that this first generation device is not intended to be "outside of the house" mobile.
- Invictus0 4y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13169831 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13169831 Most people at the time were complaining that they could fall out of their ears, which turned out to be pretty correct. (I own airpods and no longer use them.)

antomeie 4y ago

Imo, seems like a bad thing to bet your legacy on. Haven't most people gotten over the VR headset hype by now? Kind of like 3D TV's from a decade ago. It also feels like such an anti-social technology. + the fact that a certain % of the population just get motion sickness from it. But who knows, if anyone can succeed with it, Apple probably can!

wellthisisgreat 4y ago
3DTVs were way more fun for games
- TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
  As VR is. Yet 3DTV flopped anyway.

simonh 4y ago

It wouldn't be the first major product steered entirely by Cook, as the sub-heading states, that would be the watch. Within a year or two of the launch of the iPhone the tech industry went into "what have you done for me lately?" mode, on the edge of their seats for the next major iPhone level change-the-world platform from Apple. That's died down over the years. The fact that the watch merely defined the segment and was so dominant it re-shaped the watch industry is still seen in some quarters as a failure because it didn't replace the phone. If the AR headset does launch and it just does as well and it's leading competitors that's fine. Not everything has to change the world. Maybe just having it as a really solid option for those who want one is enough.

will_walker 4y ago

Physics is working against everyone here, it’s just too hard to get a bright, sharp screen in the form factor, weight & style that can literally appeal to everyone. The processing power to obtain world lock is not trivial either. In contrast, a watch is just a scaled down phone with skin sensors. Most of the building blocks already exist. Sociology is another blocker. Our species has evolved to read each other’s eyes to identify attention and emotion. As soon as you block the eyes with a pair of darkened screens, you lose that ability to directly connect human to human in person. Sure there are individual used cases like biking they could be compelling, but they are niche applications.

billiam 4y ago
This is a good salad of truth, but I think it misses the point. VR is not going to happen for a long time, but this high status product is mostly about demonstrating the possibilities of AR, which is happening all around us with existing technologies. Apple has concluded that it will be worth it to demonstrate how information superiority and affordance will work in a $3k headset before the lightweight glasses become feasible. The applications for this product (sports, research, conferencing, gaming, etc) won't depend on real world interaction.
- will_walker 4y ago
  Yes, but the basics of computing (text input, pointing, selecting) haven't been worked out for the new paradigm. Like you point out, how information superiority and affordance work even in standalone applications hasn't really been solved. Without tactile touch components, it's very hard to interact with spatial data (one of the reasons CAD is so hard to learn). I'd suggest that we'll need another 'mother of all demos' that solve some of these HCI problems, not just the fit and finish upgrade that Apple typically offers.

newaccount2023 4y ago

weird, there is so much else low-hanging fruit for Cook to easily pluck without having to risk a disaster launch of AR - keep pushing into financial products with Apple Pay, BNPL, etc - keep expanding Apple TV into a real HBO competitor etc etc these are efforts they already have some traction with with so much opportunity in half-explored markets, I wonder why they keep teasing AR, cars etc

wilsonnb3 4y ago
Apple is capable of doing more than one thing at once. There is no indication that their financial products or Apple TV are slowing down anytime soon.

AstixAndBelix 4y ago

Maybe it's unrelated, but I'm finishing college and in a couple of years we've gone from almost nobody using tablets to take notes to almost everyone having a pen-enabled device to take notes with. This is because we finally got cheap enough devices that were mildly pleasureable to write with and had mildly functional note taking suites. I think the same is going to happen starting next year. Sure, AR is a bit behind VR in the public conscience, but the moment $200 AR goggles will prove to be marginally useful people will adopt them in an instant.

ak_111 4y ago

The timing can work out nicely for Apple since Tim Cook is on his way out in a year or two anyway, so if it flops or the initial launch goes real bad, they can blame it him and communicate his exit as a "reset" for the product and company. It would have been risky to leave it for the new CEO to launch. Sort of like you never fire a football manager before a major clash even if it was clear to everybody that he will be sacked soon.

mcphage 4y ago
> since Tim Cook is on his way out in a year or two anyway What's the source for this?
- ak_111 4y ago
  Just a guess he is already a few standard deviations above the average tenure of a tech ceo in this era.
ask_b123 4y ago
> Sort of like you never fire a football manager before a major clash even if it was clear to everybody that he will be sacked soon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Mourinho#2020%E2%80%9321_season https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Mourinho#2020%E2%80%... > On 19 April 2021, Mourinho was sacked by Tottenham Hotspur after 17 months in charge of the club, days before the EFL Cup Final against Manchester City.

whalesalad 4y ago

"The early bird catches the worm - but the second mouse gets the cheese. " comes to mind re Meta/Apple... but honestly I am very bearish on AR/VR in general. Meta learned their lesson the hard way, I hope Apple doesn't do the same.

dom96 4y ago

> But Apple’s famed industrial design team had cautioned patience, wanting to delay until a more lightweight version of AR glasses became technically feasible. Most in the tech industry expect that to take several more years. They are absolutely right on this. I guess we won't get this and it will be a rushed bulky device instead. This would be a massive mistake.

bilsbie 4y ago

I’m going to say that the current VR options today are uncanny reality and that’s why they’re not popular. You get depth vision and can look around but it just doesn’t feel real and it’s a little disturbing. I can’t place what’s not real about it though.

sublinear 4y ago

> Apple’s famed industrial design team had cautioned patience, wanting to delay until a more lightweight version of AR glasses became technically feasible. This is the actual problem. A well executed AR "headset" has the potential to replace all consumer devices except high end desktop. I wonder if that scares manufacturers.

buffington 4y ago
> except high end desktop Could you share why you think this is true? I'm not disputing it, but I'm also not as certain as you are. I have a hunch that manufacturers don't care one way or another. Manufacturers are going to manufacturer things as long as consumers are buying things. Perhaps by manufacturers you meant "competitors" or "other hardware companies" - if so, I suspect they're less worried about AR in general disrupting traditional "computing hardware" models, and more concerned that it's Apple doing it. Apple has flops, and Apple has wins, and Apple's competitors have frequently underestimated as much as they've overestimated Apple's ability to pull something off. Personally: I don't have high expectations, as much as I'd love to see the idea itself succeed. $3K is just too much money for your typical consumer, even if the tech is some "whole new level" sort of experience for end users. Perhaps if there are obvious "non-mainstream" uses (imagine industrial applications where an information rich, contextual OSD helps speed up processes or improve quality/yield, or medical uses that can overlay valuable info, etc), then maybe $3k makes sense. The high price is only one issue. There's all the other stuff (well described in other comments) as well.
- sublinear 4y ago
  For small businesses and hobbyists it probably makes more sense to compute locally on a real workstation that can run the latest and greatest software without compromises. For your typical consumer, or even remote worker, they can replace their phone and laptop with an AR device. Wearable computing that merges seamlessly with everyday "real world" experiences just seems to be so obviously the next step. It would be a dream if all I had to ever carry around was a folding keyboard for "serious" work (in the pocket where the phone used to be), but otherwise hardly ever need to do so and interact with a lightweight pair of unfussy glasses using eye tracking, touch surfaces, motion sensors, etc. For many people this means no more screens of any kind anywhere cluttering up their life except for the ones continuously and unobtrusively projecting onto their eyeballs.

ngrilly 4y ago

I don't like that title. I perceive Tim Cook has a CEO caring a lot for Apple and not as someone obsessed with "securing his legacy".

buffington 4y ago
That's fair, though "caring a lot for Apple" and "securing his legacy" aren't mutually exclusive.

nmcela 4y ago

"But Apple’s famed industrial design team had cautioned patience, wanting to delay until a more lightweight version of AR glasses became technically feasible. Most in the tech industry expect that to take several more years. " "Just a few years ago, going against the wishes of Apple’s all-powerful design team would have been unthinkable. But since the departure of its longtime leader Jony Ive in 2019, Apple’s structure has been reshuffled, with design now reporting to Williams. " "Ive’s former role as chief design officer was split in two, with Evans Hankey on hardware and Alan Dye on software. However, Hankey announced last October that she would be leaving within six months, contributing to significant staff turnover in the division over recent years." "Apple’s 12-person executive team reflects how the company’s focus has shifted under Cook, himself a former operations chief." Wow, sounds like the 80's storyline is repeating itself. The greedy business guys took over again, drove out the best creators, and are now driving off a cliff 200km/h.

Runways 4y ago
Ehh, maybe. I bought an M1 MacBook because it supported other OSs, reverted back to a reasonable keyboard, had reasonable ports, and soft feel. The problem with successful artists like Ives is sometimes they become a cult of personality within an org, domineering and protective of their vision. I feel like Ives wanted you to cut yourself on the edge of your laptop and carry 20 dongles. I feel like they dialed back the ridiculousness.