4 ms·

I just don't think the watch market is really there. I feel like its shrinking steadily among younger people as the need for a time teller is replaced by the mo

I just don't think the watch market is really there. I feel like its shrinking steadily among younger people as the need for a time teller is replaced by the modern cell phone. I believe people have convinced themselves into convincing companies that they actually want a high tech wrist watch when, in reality, the market isn't that big and it is shrinking. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8291898 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8291898 To me these seem pretty stupid. Major features (to me) of ear-buds with wires and 3.5" jack are: 1) being attached with wires means I don't easily lose them when they slip out of my ear/hand/pocket. 2) the 3.5" jack actually keeps them pretty solidly attached to my phone (again, less risk of losing them). Walking around with two loose tiny objects seems less than ideal - at least to me; I'd lose them within days. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13169937 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13169937 $350 and not out until "early 2015" Dead in the water. That's insanely expensive and too late in the smartwatch market in my mind. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8291889 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8291889

graypegg 3y ago
I’ve seen this reposted a bunch. Is it really adding anything to the conversation being repeated verbatim? Yes. People have been wrong in the past.
- granzymes 3y ago
  Hey, I went into HN search myself to pull these quotes! It was actually quite fun, I recommend scrolling the old threads. In all seriousness, I think it is helpful context that people have ridiculed every Apple product launch since the iPhone.
  - rospaya 3y ago
    So you are suggesting that Apple can do no wrong and therefore we shouldn't criticize any of their products? And you believe you are positively contributing to this thread?
    - alimov 3y ago
      Doesn’t seem like they are suggesting that apple can do no wrong. Just pointing out that this is similar to other major Apple announcements. I found their contribution interesting, I’m not sure why you feel the need to be hostile about it.
      - rospaya 3y ago
        Because I see the same comment on every single criticism of Apple product announcements, basically implying that Apple isn't capable of doing wrong and that any criticism will just be in vain. The passive aggression is ugly, it's not a healthy environment for discussion and (as the kids say) simping for a massive company is just plain disgusting.
      - toyg 3y ago
        Similar to the Newton launch too. And quite a few of their "revolutionary" laptops that ended up being expensive duds.
    - Isamu 3y ago
      Of course, Apple have had some bombs. And it is instructive to look at them and assess where they went wrong versus the the times they were right. But the commentary that happens every time they launch a new product is not very predictive of success.
    - khazhoux 3y ago
      It's a perfectly valid counter to all the people who posted today, on day zero and months from getting any hands-on time with the Vision Pro, that it must surely be destined to failure, and even worthy of ridicule. I feel like the people at Apple (and similar companies) are pushing their imaginations and very obviously taking a huge risk, whereas all the nay-sayers are just sitting comfortably in the boundaries of the world as they understand it, and passing judgement accordingly. I have no idea if Vision Pro will succeed, but as a technologist, I'll spend today thinking of ways it might surprise me for the better, rather than the ways in which it may fall short.
  - wfleming 3y ago
    It dates to at least the iPod! https://m.slashdot.org/story/21026 https://m.slashdot.org/story/21026 Probably earlier: I remember people mocking the colorful iMacs. I’m sure you could dig up some pc magazine articles from the 90s dunking on the iMacs and iBooks :).
  - mckirk 3y ago
    You might want to make it clearer that these are quotes by prepending '>'s. At least to me, this wasn't clear at first. That being said, I think it is interesting context to remind people of the immediate reactions to the other Apple launches of the recent past. Especially the headphone jack hits home for me, because I'm still a huge fan of the 3,5mn connector, but it fairly quickly became clear that the early widespread stance of 'I'll never buy a phone without a headphone jack!' soon turned into a somewhat lonely fight.
    - granzymes 3y ago
      >You might want to make it clearer that these are quotes by prepending '>'s. At least to me, this wasn't clear at first. That's actually exactly the reaction I was going for.
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      I've still never owned a phone without a headphone jack, and I never will. I do also use bluetooth in some situations, but wired earphones work much better, with greater reliability.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- tazjin 3y ago
  They're not even wrong about the headphone thing.
- brookst 3y ago
  So why are people still writing “Apple’s entry into this new product category is doomed because it does not meet my personal expectations for the category” articles without discussing the outcomes of previous doomsayings? Perhaps the headset deserves ridicule and will fail. Given Apple’s track record, perhaps it would make sense to acknowledge their many successes with products people dismissed, and explain why this one is more similar to their failures that people dismissed (Ping, anyone?)
MuffinFlavored 3y ago
> I feel like its shrinking steadily among younger people as the need for a time teller is replaced by the modern cell phone. https://www.apple.com/healthcare/apple-watch/ https://www.apple.com/healthcare/apple-watch/ https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207934 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207934
- graypegg 3y ago
  They’re not making those arguments now, they’re quoting other HN comments from years ago as contrast to the negativity today. There’s a few comments like these that people are posting in the big apple vision post as well.
WastingMyTime89 3y ago
Don’t seem entirely comparable in that both watches and iem were legitimate markets to which Apple brought an innovative products while AR and VR headsets are a notoriously difficult market where plenty of products have already tried and failed to make money. If this succeed, to me it will be more akin to what the iPad did than to what the watch did. It’s also extremely expensive. I’m curious to see how Apple will market it. We will see.
- qwytw 3y ago
  > It’s also extremely expensive I assume it's more of a prototype targeted mainly at developers and enthusiasts at this point. They're probably betting that by the time they can decrease the price significantly somebody would've figured out what can you actually do with this thing.
- dmarcos 3y ago
  Yeah. Apple enters categories that already have product-market fit. It outsources market research to first movers. VR has only significant traction for a handful of games. iPad is indeed an exception while watches and fitness trackers were popular and a growing market before Apple entered.
- storkhm 3y ago
  I think this will be quite successfully marketed as a status symbol. Obviously, it was intentional to create a scenario that there are viral videos of people gasping at the price reveal. I do think this is a revolutionary day but in a totally dystopian way. I suspect this is the start of where the tech innovations are more and more not going to be targeted at the mass market. The mass market is financially tapped out. The future is what Bernard Arnault and his 200 billion dollars figured out a long time ago. As AI starts to make society more and more unequal the money will be more and more in the high end luxury products. Everyone else can eat cake.
bluejekyll 3y ago
Ok, but $3,499 is a steep price tag. Granted, the pixel density and design look amazing. They are probably the absolute best VR/AR goggles on the consumer market to date, but to try something out and totally shift your computing habits at that steep of a tag is going to be a stretch for a lot of people. Like it might be worth it if you really are able to replace your standard monitor setup and use these for long stretches with out neck or eye strain. But how will you know until you try? I saw someone say elsewhere, these are not for consumers in general. They are for developers to work with, build software for, come up with new things… then, if and when a niche is found, they’ll probably make a much less expensive consumer model that focuses on that use case. That being said, I would love to try these, but I’m more interested in an upgraded laptop at the moment, and that money would buy a nice one.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- basisword 3y ago
  The original iPhone cost so much people mocked it. It costs twice as much now and people buy them for their 8 year olds. If the device provides enough utility (and I imagine down the line these will replace laptops, tablets and TV’s for a lot of people), the price won’t matter.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - adoxyz 3y ago
    Exactly this. I know Apple didn't invent VR/AR. But they also didn't invent the phone. What they did do though is provide an amazing user experience for the vast majority of people. I've been on the AR/VR hype train for a long time and have had many different headsets over the years. Apple Vision Pro seems like it puts all of them to shame. And if Apple can execute on this, no doubt, it'll become a household staple. And this is Gen 1. Price will come down. Apple has to get the experience right though. And so far it looks promising.
  - 3y ago
seydor 3y ago
And yet it is possible that in the alternate history where apple had not done those things, tech might be better. Note that they all came out during the booming times of the 2010s with cheap money for consumption. For example, the Samsung S10 had a headphone jack, an SpO2 meter (who knew we wwould need this in the pandemic!), an FM radio, great screen, lightweight. Their newer models have no jack (to sell more wireless earphnes), no spo2 (to sell more watches), no fm radio (unknown reason), and its heavier. The perceptible difference in performance is miniscule despite all these years. So , some changes do need to be ridiculed That said, i dont see this headset in a similar league, this seems an experimental prototype because none of the use cases mentioned have been proved.
- betamaxthetape 3y ago
  Nitpick: the lack of the FM radio stems directly from the lack of headphone jack - the radio relied on wired earphones to work as they were used as an antenna. So losing the FM radio is more a consequence of the decision to remove the headphone jack, rather than an active decision to remove it. Still sucks, though. The FM radio was one of the most useful features of my previous phone. By the time I upgraded to a newer phone, its battery lasted for an hour at most during normal tasks, but I could get 12+ hours from the FM radio. There are now very few phones that have my personal "wishlist" of removable battery + headphone jack + FM radio. And these are all budget phones so if you value a decent camera, you may be out of luck. Add 5G and I'm not sure there are any options.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    > Add 5G and I'm not sure there are any options. Yep. And I literally couldn't care less about the camera. All of that (plus my #1 issue of security concerns) are why my current smartphone will be my last smartphone.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > it is possible that in the alternate history where apple had not done those things, tech might be better This. I think Apple has actively made the cellphone space worse in a number of ways, from removing the headphone jack through eliminating user-replaceable batteries. When Apple does a thing, everyone else takes it as permission to do the same thing.
JohnFen 3y ago
That people have been wrong before for other products in no way comments on or invalidates what they're saying now about this one. All it says is predicting the future is incredibly hard and all predictions (the ones predicting success as well as failure) are without much weight.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- thomk 3y ago
  I don't think Apple predicts the future as much as it drives the future. Just my opinion.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    Every product a company makes is a prediction that the product will succeed (if they didn't think it would succeed, they wouldn't make it). This applies to Apple just as to every other company. It's not like Apple hasn't had product failures, after all.
- npunt 3y ago
  tbh the real question is not the output (whether this succeeds or fails), it's whether Apple followed the same inputs that made prior products category-defining like Apple II, Mac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, Watch, and Airpods. All of those took niche computing ideas and made them mainstream, creating a new market and new way of life, and did so by following a playbook of timing the tech right, scoping narrowly, and understanding which use cases were worth targeting. I wrote about some of these input factors in my post on category defining products a few years back: https://nickpunt.com/blog/category-defining-products/ https://nickpunt.com/blog/category-defining-products/ Personally, I feel Vision is a bit too broadly scoped for a v1. 3d photos really didn't need to be in there. The consumer use cases that Apple loves really aren't where Vision is providing next level value add, whereas the remote workplace ones are. But I understand those alone are not enough to drive adoption so I can see why they wanted to make it more consumer oriented. My hunch is they pivot slightly toward workplace in subsequent versions, much like they did with Apple Watch pivoting toward health and away from luxury.
ohgoodgod 3y ago
[flagged]
tengbretson 3y ago
Is the Apple Watch a success?
- Toutouxc 3y ago
  43% of all smartwatch shipments in Q4 2022, so I'd say yes. https://www.counterpointresearch.com/global-smartwatch-shipments-market-share/ https://www.counterpointresearch.com/global-smartwatch-shipm...
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
zizee 3y ago
At first when I read this I didn't understand that they were examples of people predicting the failure of newly launched apple products. I was nodding along agreeing with each point. I have used "smart watches" and "ear buds" (admittedly not apple) and got bored with the watch after I learnt nothing that suprisingly or actionable, and continually lose ear buds, or have them go through the wash. But perhaps I am turning I to an old man?

graypegg 3y ago

I’ve seen this reposted a bunch. Is it really adding anything to the conversation being repeated verbatim? Yes. People have been wrong in the past.

granzymes 3y ago
Hey, I went into HN search myself to pull these quotes! It was actually quite fun, I recommend scrolling the old threads. In all seriousness, I think it is helpful context that people have ridiculed every Apple product launch since the iPhone.
- rospaya 3y ago
  So you are suggesting that Apple can do no wrong and therefore we shouldn't criticize any of their products? And you believe you are positively contributing to this thread?
  - alimov 3y ago
    Doesn’t seem like they are suggesting that apple can do no wrong. Just pointing out that this is similar to other major Apple announcements. I found their contribution interesting, I’m not sure why you feel the need to be hostile about it.
    - rospaya 3y ago
      Because I see the same comment on every single criticism of Apple product announcements, basically implying that Apple isn't capable of doing wrong and that any criticism will just be in vain. The passive aggression is ugly, it's not a healthy environment for discussion and (as the kids say) simping for a massive company is just plain disgusting.
    - toyg 3y ago
      Similar to the Newton launch too. And quite a few of their "revolutionary" laptops that ended up being expensive duds.
  - Isamu 3y ago
    Of course, Apple have had some bombs. And it is instructive to look at them and assess where they went wrong versus the the times they were right. But the commentary that happens every time they launch a new product is not very predictive of success.
  - khazhoux 3y ago
    It's a perfectly valid counter to all the people who posted today, on day zero and months from getting any hands-on time with the Vision Pro, that it must surely be destined to failure, and even worthy of ridicule. I feel like the people at Apple (and similar companies) are pushing their imaginations and very obviously taking a huge risk, whereas all the nay-sayers are just sitting comfortably in the boundaries of the world as they understand it, and passing judgement accordingly. I have no idea if Vision Pro will succeed, but as a technologist, I'll spend today thinking of ways it might surprise me for the better, rather than the ways in which it may fall short.
- wfleming 3y ago
  It dates to at least the iPod! https://m.slashdot.org/story/21026 https://m.slashdot.org/story/21026 Probably earlier: I remember people mocking the colorful iMacs. I’m sure you could dig up some pc magazine articles from the 90s dunking on the iMacs and iBooks :).
- mckirk 3y ago
  You might want to make it clearer that these are quotes by prepending '>'s. At least to me, this wasn't clear at first. That being said, I think it is interesting context to remind people of the immediate reactions to the other Apple launches of the recent past. Especially the headphone jack hits home for me, because I'm still a huge fan of the 3,5mn connector, but it fairly quickly became clear that the early widespread stance of 'I'll never buy a phone without a headphone jack!' soon turned into a somewhat lonely fight.
  - granzymes 3y ago
    >You might want to make it clearer that these are quotes by prepending '>'s. At least to me, this wasn't clear at first. That's actually exactly the reaction I was going for.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    I've still never owned a phone without a headphone jack, and I never will. I do also use bluetooth in some situations, but wired earphones work much better, with greater reliability.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
tazjin 3y ago
They're not even wrong about the headphone thing.
brookst 3y ago
So why are people still writing “Apple’s entry into this new product category is doomed because it does not meet my personal expectations for the category” articles without discussing the outcomes of previous doomsayings? Perhaps the headset deserves ridicule and will fail. Given Apple’s track record, perhaps it would make sense to acknowledge their many successes with products people dismissed, and explain why this one is more similar to their failures that people dismissed (Ping, anyone?)

MuffinFlavored 3y ago

> I feel like its shrinking steadily among younger people as the need for a time teller is replaced by the modern cell phone. https://www.apple.com/healthcare/apple-watch/ https://www.apple.com/healthcare/apple-watch/ https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207934 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207934

graypegg 3y ago
They’re not making those arguments now, they’re quoting other HN comments from years ago as contrast to the negativity today. There’s a few comments like these that people are posting in the big apple vision post as well.

WastingMyTime89 3y ago

Don’t seem entirely comparable in that both watches and iem were legitimate markets to which Apple brought an innovative products while AR and VR headsets are a notoriously difficult market where plenty of products have already tried and failed to make money. If this succeed, to me it will be more akin to what the iPad did than to what the watch did. It’s also extremely expensive. I’m curious to see how Apple will market it. We will see.

qwytw 3y ago
> It’s also extremely expensive I assume it's more of a prototype targeted mainly at developers and enthusiasts at this point. They're probably betting that by the time they can decrease the price significantly somebody would've figured out what can you actually do with this thing.
dmarcos 3y ago
Yeah. Apple enters categories that already have product-market fit. It outsources market research to first movers. VR has only significant traction for a handful of games. iPad is indeed an exception while watches and fitness trackers were popular and a growing market before Apple entered.
storkhm 3y ago
I think this will be quite successfully marketed as a status symbol. Obviously, it was intentional to create a scenario that there are viral videos of people gasping at the price reveal. I do think this is a revolutionary day but in a totally dystopian way. I suspect this is the start of where the tech innovations are more and more not going to be targeted at the mass market. The mass market is financially tapped out. The future is what Bernard Arnault and his 200 billion dollars figured out a long time ago. As AI starts to make society more and more unequal the money will be more and more in the high end luxury products. Everyone else can eat cake.

bluejekyll 3y ago

Ok, but $3,499 is a steep price tag. Granted, the pixel density and design look amazing. They are probably the absolute best VR/AR goggles on the consumer market to date, but to try something out and totally shift your computing habits at that steep of a tag is going to be a stretch for a lot of people. Like it might be worth it if you really are able to replace your standard monitor setup and use these for long stretches with out neck or eye strain. But how will you know until you try? I saw someone say elsewhere, these are not for consumers in general. They are for developers to work with, build software for, come up with new things… then, if and when a niche is found, they’ll probably make a much less expensive consumer model that focuses on that use case. That being said, I would love to try these, but I’m more interested in an upgraded laptop at the moment, and that money would buy a nice one.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
basisword 3y ago
The original iPhone cost so much people mocked it. It costs twice as much now and people buy them for their 8 year olds. If the device provides enough utility (and I imagine down the line these will replace laptops, tablets and TV’s for a lot of people), the price won’t matter.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- adoxyz 3y ago
  Exactly this. I know Apple didn't invent VR/AR. But they also didn't invent the phone. What they did do though is provide an amazing user experience for the vast majority of people. I've been on the AR/VR hype train for a long time and have had many different headsets over the years. Apple Vision Pro seems like it puts all of them to shame. And if Apple can execute on this, no doubt, it'll become a household staple. And this is Gen 1. Price will come down. Apple has to get the experience right though. And so far it looks promising.
- 3y ago

seydor 3y ago

And yet it is possible that in the alternate history where apple had not done those things, tech might be better. Note that they all came out during the booming times of the 2010s with cheap money for consumption. For example, the Samsung S10 had a headphone jack, an SpO2 meter (who knew we wwould need this in the pandemic!), an FM radio, great screen, lightweight. Their newer models have no jack (to sell more wireless earphnes), no spo2 (to sell more watches), no fm radio (unknown reason), and its heavier. The perceptible difference in performance is miniscule despite all these years. So , some changes do need to be ridiculed That said, i dont see this headset in a similar league, this seems an experimental prototype because none of the use cases mentioned have been proved.

betamaxthetape 3y ago
Nitpick: the lack of the FM radio stems directly from the lack of headphone jack - the radio relied on wired earphones to work as they were used as an antenna. So losing the FM radio is more a consequence of the decision to remove the headphone jack, rather than an active decision to remove it. Still sucks, though. The FM radio was one of the most useful features of my previous phone. By the time I upgraded to a newer phone, its battery lasted for an hour at most during normal tasks, but I could get 12+ hours from the FM radio. There are now very few phones that have my personal "wishlist" of removable battery + headphone jack + FM radio. And these are all budget phones so if you value a decent camera, you may be out of luck. Add 5G and I'm not sure there are any options.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > Add 5G and I'm not sure there are any options. Yep. And I literally couldn't care less about the camera. All of that (plus my #1 issue of security concerns) are why my current smartphone will be my last smartphone.
JohnFen 3y ago
> it is possible that in the alternate history where apple had not done those things, tech might be better This. I think Apple has actively made the cellphone space worse in a number of ways, from removing the headphone jack through eliminating user-replaceable batteries. When Apple does a thing, everyone else takes it as permission to do the same thing.

JohnFen 3y ago

That people have been wrong before for other products in no way comments on or invalidates what they're saying now about this one. All it says is predicting the future is incredibly hard and all predictions (the ones predicting success as well as failure) are without much weight.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
thomk 3y ago
I don't think Apple predicts the future as much as it drives the future. Just my opinion.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  Every product a company makes is a prediction that the product will succeed (if they didn't think it would succeed, they wouldn't make it). This applies to Apple just as to every other company. It's not like Apple hasn't had product failures, after all.
npunt 3y ago
tbh the real question is not the output (whether this succeeds or fails), it's whether Apple followed the same inputs that made prior products category-defining like Apple II, Mac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, Watch, and Airpods. All of those took niche computing ideas and made them mainstream, creating a new market and new way of life, and did so by following a playbook of timing the tech right, scoping narrowly, and understanding which use cases were worth targeting. I wrote about some of these input factors in my post on category defining products a few years back: https://nickpunt.com/blog/category-defining-products/ https://nickpunt.com/blog/category-defining-products/ Personally, I feel Vision is a bit too broadly scoped for a v1. 3d photos really didn't need to be in there. The consumer use cases that Apple loves really aren't where Vision is providing next level value add, whereas the remote workplace ones are. But I understand those alone are not enough to drive adoption so I can see why they wanted to make it more consumer oriented. My hunch is they pivot slightly toward workplace in subsequent versions, much like they did with Apple Watch pivoting toward health and away from luxury.

ohgoodgod 3y ago

[flagged]

tengbretson 3y ago

Is the Apple Watch a success?

Toutouxc 3y ago
43% of all smartwatch shipments in Q4 2022, so I'd say yes. https://www.counterpointresearch.com/global-smartwatch-shipments-market-share/ https://www.counterpointresearch.com/global-smartwatch-shipm...

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

zizee 3y ago

At first when I read this I didn't understand that they were examples of people predicting the failure of newly launched apple products. I was nodding along agreeing with each point. I have used "smart watches" and "ear buds" (admittedly not apple) and got bored with the watch after I learnt nothing that suprisingly or actionable, and continually lose ear buds, or have them go through the wash. But perhaps I am turning I to an old man?