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I think it's very important for people to get out of the HN bubble when discussing this. $3500 is just way too expensive for mass customer adoption. Meta is str

I think it's very important for people to get out of the HN bubble when discussing this. $3500 is just way too expensive for mass customer adoption. Meta is struggling to get customers to adopt the Oculus hardware when its an order of magnitude less expensive. I can't see why _any_ developer would sink tons of money into building custom apps on this platform when there will be less than a few hundred thousand users next year.

EwanG 3y ago
The presumption, from an investing standpoint anyway, is that working on this version will give you a first mover advantage for a V2 in two years that will have slightly upgraded chips, similar display, and cost half as much.
- woeirua 3y ago
  Half as much is still no where close to where they need to be to get mass market adoption.
  - katbyte 3y ago
    Apple is selling iPhones for what, 1500? That’s nearly half 3500
    - BizarreByte 3y ago
      The average person is buying an iPhone under a 2-3 year contract. Most aren't being bought outright.
  - SirSourdough 3y ago
    I don't really understand this assessment. Half as much is $1,750. That's really not much compared to what people are willing to pay for Apple devices. Basically the price point of an iPad Pro, and I think the potential of the Vision Pros is much higher than the potential of the iPad. It's just a matter of whether they can realize some commercial use-cases like with the iPad. The Vision Pro is marketed as a device with the potential to replace or significantly augment a laptop and/or TV for a lot of users (I understand there are presently some asterisks needed there). And that's assuming no other novel, high value uses emerge. Apple sells something like 7 million MacBooks per quarter. Many of them are well more than $2000. I don't think a $2,000 price point is a crazy barrier if the device is able to live up to what it could be.
- o1y32 3y ago
  It's NOT going to cost $1,750 in 2026. Not going to happen before a Macbook Air is sold for $600.
etchalon 3y ago
It's also possible that Meta is struggling because a $500 dollar VR headset isn't a broadly compelling experience given all the compromises they had to make to get it to $500 bucks. "Smartphones" weren't the most dominant phone category until after the iPhone. It's really hard to know until units start shipping though.
lnrd 3y ago
Because this is a first iteration specifically made for developer to start to get their app running, so that when the consumer less expensive model will be released a couple of years down the line there's already an app ecosystem ready. It's a strategic release aimed at devs and early adopters, the consumer level device will come in the future at a complete different price point. That's when mass customer adoption might happen. Also Meta is struggling also because their device is a novelty without many great software. See a pattern?
- woeirua 3y ago
  Just saying, Microsoft already tried this with the HoloLens, and pivoted hard and fast into B2B only.
  - pfych 3y ago
    As a developer who's worked with the HoloLens, it's not very good & is extremely underwhelming. The tech is cool but the viewport is so small and the hand tracking is extremely tiring. It could never work as a consumer product in it's current state. The Vision Pro seems to be more focused on the end user experience, so hopefully that will help Apple get their foot in the door with consumers. However, I've never used it so I cant say for sure. The company I work at will most definitely be purchasing them as soon as we can though, very excited to either be extremely underwhelmed or extremely impressed.
  - lotsofpulp 3y ago
    Microsoft’s ability to execute at anything hardware other than Xbox is very questionable. I don’t even know if it is ability, rather than unwillingness to invest the billions of dollars and 10+ years it would take to get something like this off the ground.
- throwaway675309 3y ago
  "so that when the consumer less expensive model will be released a couple of years down the line there's already an app ecosystem ready." .... You think that developers are going to create a thriving ecosystem of apps when there's no market until several years down the line? Bit of a Chicken or the egg problem isn't it?
kitsunesoba 3y ago
You don’t need a new codebase to have a visionOS app, you just need to tick a checkbox on an existing iOS project. Deeper integration will take longer but that checkbox will get you 90% of the way there as long as the project was built using UIKit or SwiftUI.
chazhaz 3y ago
This isn’t a mass consumer device. $3500 is what Apple’s charging to folks with great ideas who want to dictate what the future of “special computing” looks like. This is for early adopters pretty much exclusively. The rest of us will get the apple vision se in 2028 when the territory’s been mapped out
zimpenfish 3y ago
> Meta is struggling to get customers to adopt the Oculus hardware when its an order of magnitude less expensive I rarely use my Rift S these days - not because the hardware isn't good - but because the software experience is an absolute dog's anus. Wanted to play Beat Saber the other day. Turned on the PC. 25 minutes later, ready to open Steam. Whoops, now the Oculus app says its out of date. Another 10 minutes faff because what it actually meant was "you need to migrate to a Meta account". Then I had to sit through the tutorials again. Then Steam decided Beat Saber needed updating and took 45 minutes to download 800MB on gigabit fibre. Finally, after just about 90 minutes, I could play Beat Saber. $3500 to not sit through that absolute omnishambles of a torture ever again? Sign me up.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- Closi 3y ago
  That’s not exactly the modern oculus experience - the Quest is “strap and go”.
  - dmix 3y ago
    Yeah my Quest 2 never had that issue. Updates were always super fast or non intrusive too. Best $300 I’ve spent in the last 5 years.
    - Aeolun 3y ago
      But google earth is gone. That was seriously one of the best apps on the device :(
      - throwawaymobule 3y ago
        i thought that was desktop only. is it completely gone now? wander works on the quest 2, but doesn't have 3d features in streetview.
gehsty 3y ago
Meta are struggling to make a worse device popular. Maybe $3.5k is the cheapest a truely compelling headset product can be made for at the moment.
ericd 3y ago
To get a head start on other developers for when there are tens or hundreds of millions of users.
dorkwood 3y ago
To be fair, the Oculus experience is pretty bad. Mine only has three eye-width settings, none of which match my face, so my vision is always blurry. And whenever I use hand tracking, it only picks up my “clicks” about 20% of the time. It’s not surprising to me that no one wants to use it.
- andybak 3y ago
  I've used multiple VR headsets with wildly incorrect IPD settings and it's not really what I would describe as "blurry"- it's more subtle than that. Are you sure it's not something else in your case?
  - dorkwood 3y ago
    I mean, it's not exactly a gaussian blur. It's more like an RBG shift, mixed with the kind of effect you get when you defocus your eyes ever so slightly.
basisword 3y ago
Occulus may be an order of magnitude cheaper but I bet it’s an order of magnitude shitter too. Maybe this is the price/quality required to actually get people interested in mixed reality. It was a similar thing with the iPhone. Most people were happy with $100 dumbphones. Eventually the utility became worth the investment.
- Aeolun 3y ago
  I think there’s a sort of Apple guarantee too. If I’m going to buy a $3500 headset I want it to be made by Apple. Kinda happy they released the iPhone when I was capable of buying that, and this one now that I’m (potentially) capable of buying this.
dmarcos 3y ago
Palmer's article "Free isn't cheap enough" seems relevant: https://palmerluckey.com/free-isnt-cheap-enough/ https://palmerluckey.com/free-isnt-cheap-enough/ Quest headsets are indeed cheap but but perhaps sacrifice too much on the experience quality. People gotta want something before it can get cheap (not my words).
- dmix 3y ago
  Every time Quest 2 comes up on HN people whine about it basically playing PS3 games or glorified mobile arcade system. I personally love it, RE4 VR and the month I spent VR boxing every night was some of the most fun I’ve had gaming recently. But there’s limits to that sort of thing, especially which games get ported and VR’d. Apple doesn’t even need a suite of A+ games to get people to buy it, I don’t remember them showing any games in the launch. I get why Apple pushed it up higher in the market. The first two years will be for developers and very early adopters. This is like buying an expensive monitor/TV/casual gaming device baked into one. Hell there’s people who buy $2000 TVs, even though most people buy the $500 ones. This is way more capable than just a new TV.
- zmmmmm 3y ago
  Wow that's a really prophetic take on things - I've mostly written off Palmer Lucky these days but he was bang on the money there. It's interesting though how counter it runs to John Carmack's philosophy where mass market accessibility is everything. I wonder if looking back people will rethink his contribution as actually holding things back. It certainly seems like Meta is switching gears a bit with the Quest 3 going out to market at $500. It's going to be phenomenal value for what it is at that price still. But it's going to leave behind a significant segment of people for whom $299 was a palatable indulgence buy or gift for their children etc while $500 is not.
Aeolun 3y ago
> there will be less than a few hundred thousand users next year A few hundred thousand users with a massive amount of disposable income.
- PoorlyNamed 3y ago
  Agreed, and any app that's genuinely good will be purchased by a high percentage of early adopters.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
lolinder 3y ago
I'm an AR skeptic but I appreciated Benedict Evans's take on Apple's strategy here: > Meta, today, has roughly the right price and is working forward to the right device: Apple has started with the right device and will work back to the right price. Meta is trying to catalyse an ecosystem while we wait for the right hardware — Apple is trying to catalyse an ecosystem while we wait for the right price. So the Vision is a device pulled forward from years into the future, at a price that reflects that. It’s as though Apple had decided to sell the 2007 iPhone in 2002 — what would the price have been? https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2023/6/15/vision-pro https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2023/6/15/vision-pro
- theptip 3y ago
  Yeah this is clearly the right take. One proven strategy for creating a new category is to start with the price-insensitive high end consumers with a luxury product, and lower the price as you gain economy of scale. Same reason Tesla started with the Roadster instead of trying to build a mass-market sedan first.
- brandall10 3y ago
  To be fair, the original iPhone was like this as well - expensive and unsubsidized, locked to a specific carrier, small production, took many years to develop, was very much a future shock device upon its unveiling, etc. The 3g was the one for the masses.
wakeupcall 3y ago
I don't see this as a big problem. This is clearly aimed for development/investors in tech right now, and in this market the 3.5k price tag is actually pretty low consider this is actually a product, and not even a prototype. The potential thanks to the higher resolution is huge. If you ever tried to do any non-gaming task on an oculus, you realize how important resolution is for text. Forget games, this is an enabler for a disruption in user interface. My biggest gripe to me, let it be either meta or apple, is the vendor lock-in. I'm not going to touch anything made by meta. But apple is not far.

EwanG 3y ago

The presumption, from an investing standpoint anyway, is that working on this version will give you a first mover advantage for a V2 in two years that will have slightly upgraded chips, similar display, and cost half as much.

woeirua 3y ago
Half as much is still no where close to where they need to be to get mass market adoption.
- katbyte 3y ago
  Apple is selling iPhones for what, 1500? That’s nearly half 3500
  - BizarreByte 3y ago
    The average person is buying an iPhone under a 2-3 year contract. Most aren't being bought outright.
- SirSourdough 3y ago
  I don't really understand this assessment. Half as much is $1,750. That's really not much compared to what people are willing to pay for Apple devices. Basically the price point of an iPad Pro, and I think the potential of the Vision Pros is much higher than the potential of the iPad. It's just a matter of whether they can realize some commercial use-cases like with the iPad. The Vision Pro is marketed as a device with the potential to replace or significantly augment a laptop and/or TV for a lot of users (I understand there are presently some asterisks needed there). And that's assuming no other novel, high value uses emerge. Apple sells something like 7 million MacBooks per quarter. Many of them are well more than $2000. I don't think a $2,000 price point is a crazy barrier if the device is able to live up to what it could be.
o1y32 3y ago
It's NOT going to cost $1,750 in 2026. Not going to happen before a Macbook Air is sold for $600.

etchalon 3y ago

It's also possible that Meta is struggling because a $500 dollar VR headset isn't a broadly compelling experience given all the compromises they had to make to get it to $500 bucks. "Smartphones" weren't the most dominant phone category until after the iPhone. It's really hard to know until units start shipping though.

lnrd 3y ago

Because this is a first iteration specifically made for developer to start to get their app running, so that when the consumer less expensive model will be released a couple of years down the line there's already an app ecosystem ready. It's a strategic release aimed at devs and early adopters, the consumer level device will come in the future at a complete different price point. That's when mass customer adoption might happen. Also Meta is struggling also because their device is a novelty without many great software. See a pattern?

woeirua 3y ago
Just saying, Microsoft already tried this with the HoloLens, and pivoted hard and fast into B2B only.
- pfych 3y ago
  As a developer who's worked with the HoloLens, it's not very good & is extremely underwhelming. The tech is cool but the viewport is so small and the hand tracking is extremely tiring. It could never work as a consumer product in it's current state. The Vision Pro seems to be more focused on the end user experience, so hopefully that will help Apple get their foot in the door with consumers. However, I've never used it so I cant say for sure. The company I work at will most definitely be purchasing them as soon as we can though, very excited to either be extremely underwhelmed or extremely impressed.
- lotsofpulp 3y ago
  Microsoft’s ability to execute at anything hardware other than Xbox is very questionable. I don’t even know if it is ability, rather than unwillingness to invest the billions of dollars and 10+ years it would take to get something like this off the ground.
throwaway675309 3y ago
"so that when the consumer less expensive model will be released a couple of years down the line there's already an app ecosystem ready." .... You think that developers are going to create a thriving ecosystem of apps when there's no market until several years down the line? Bit of a Chicken or the egg problem isn't it?

kitsunesoba 3y ago

You don’t need a new codebase to have a visionOS app, you just need to tick a checkbox on an existing iOS project. Deeper integration will take longer but that checkbox will get you 90% of the way there as long as the project was built using UIKit or SwiftUI.

chazhaz 3y ago

This isn’t a mass consumer device. $3500 is what Apple’s charging to folks with great ideas who want to dictate what the future of “special computing” looks like. This is for early adopters pretty much exclusively. The rest of us will get the apple vision se in 2028 when the territory’s been mapped out

zimpenfish 3y ago

> Meta is struggling to get customers to adopt the Oculus hardware when its an order of magnitude less expensive I rarely use my Rift S these days - not because the hardware isn't good - but because the software experience is an absolute dog's anus. Wanted to play Beat Saber the other day. Turned on the PC. 25 minutes later, ready to open Steam. Whoops, now the Oculus app says its out of date. Another 10 minutes faff because what it actually meant was "you need to migrate to a Meta account". Then I had to sit through the tutorials again. Then Steam decided Beat Saber needed updating and took 45 minutes to download 800MB on gigabit fibre. Finally, after just about 90 minutes, I could play Beat Saber. $3500 to not sit through that absolute omnishambles of a torture ever again? Sign me up.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Closi 3y ago
That’s not exactly the modern oculus experience - the Quest is “strap and go”.
- dmix 3y ago
  Yeah my Quest 2 never had that issue. Updates were always super fast or non intrusive too. Best $300 I’ve spent in the last 5 years.
  - Aeolun 3y ago
    But google earth is gone. That was seriously one of the best apps on the device :(
    - throwawaymobule 3y ago
      i thought that was desktop only. is it completely gone now? wander works on the quest 2, but doesn't have 3d features in streetview.

gehsty 3y ago

Meta are struggling to make a worse device popular. Maybe $3.5k is the cheapest a truely compelling headset product can be made for at the moment.

ericd 3y ago

To get a head start on other developers for when there are tens or hundreds of millions of users.

dorkwood 3y ago

To be fair, the Oculus experience is pretty bad. Mine only has three eye-width settings, none of which match my face, so my vision is always blurry. And whenever I use hand tracking, it only picks up my “clicks” about 20% of the time. It’s not surprising to me that no one wants to use it.

andybak 3y ago
I've used multiple VR headsets with wildly incorrect IPD settings and it's not really what I would describe as "blurry"- it's more subtle than that. Are you sure it's not something else in your case?
- dorkwood 3y ago
  I mean, it's not exactly a gaussian blur. It's more like an RBG shift, mixed with the kind of effect you get when you defocus your eyes ever so slightly.

basisword 3y ago

Occulus may be an order of magnitude cheaper but I bet it’s an order of magnitude shitter too. Maybe this is the price/quality required to actually get people interested in mixed reality. It was a similar thing with the iPhone. Most people were happy with $100 dumbphones. Eventually the utility became worth the investment.

Aeolun 3y ago
I think there’s a sort of Apple guarantee too. If I’m going to buy a $3500 headset I want it to be made by Apple. Kinda happy they released the iPhone when I was capable of buying that, and this one now that I’m (potentially) capable of buying this.

dmarcos 3y ago

Palmer's article "Free isn't cheap enough" seems relevant: https://palmerluckey.com/free-isnt-cheap-enough/ https://palmerluckey.com/free-isnt-cheap-enough/ Quest headsets are indeed cheap but but perhaps sacrifice too much on the experience quality. People gotta want something before it can get cheap (not my words).

dmix 3y ago
Every time Quest 2 comes up on HN people whine about it basically playing PS3 games or glorified mobile arcade system. I personally love it, RE4 VR and the month I spent VR boxing every night was some of the most fun I’ve had gaming recently. But there’s limits to that sort of thing, especially which games get ported and VR’d. Apple doesn’t even need a suite of A+ games to get people to buy it, I don’t remember them showing any games in the launch. I get why Apple pushed it up higher in the market. The first two years will be for developers and very early adopters. This is like buying an expensive monitor/TV/casual gaming device baked into one. Hell there’s people who buy $2000 TVs, even though most people buy the $500 ones. This is way more capable than just a new TV.
zmmmmm 3y ago
Wow that's a really prophetic take on things - I've mostly written off Palmer Lucky these days but he was bang on the money there. It's interesting though how counter it runs to John Carmack's philosophy where mass market accessibility is everything. I wonder if looking back people will rethink his contribution as actually holding things back. It certainly seems like Meta is switching gears a bit with the Quest 3 going out to market at $500. It's going to be phenomenal value for what it is at that price still. But it's going to leave behind a significant segment of people for whom $299 was a palatable indulgence buy or gift for their children etc while $500 is not.

Aeolun 3y ago

> there will be less than a few hundred thousand users next year A few hundred thousand users with a massive amount of disposable income.

PoorlyNamed 3y ago
Agreed, and any app that's genuinely good will be purchased by a high percentage of early adopters.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

lolinder 3y ago

I'm an AR skeptic but I appreciated Benedict Evans's take on Apple's strategy here: > Meta, today, has roughly the right price and is working forward to the right device: Apple has started with the right device and will work back to the right price. Meta is trying to catalyse an ecosystem while we wait for the right hardware — Apple is trying to catalyse an ecosystem while we wait for the right price. So the Vision is a device pulled forward from years into the future, at a price that reflects that. It’s as though Apple had decided to sell the 2007 iPhone in 2002 — what would the price have been? https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2023/6/15/vision-pro https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2023/6/15/vision-pro

theptip 3y ago
Yeah this is clearly the right take. One proven strategy for creating a new category is to start with the price-insensitive high end consumers with a luxury product, and lower the price as you gain economy of scale. Same reason Tesla started with the Roadster instead of trying to build a mass-market sedan first.
brandall10 3y ago
To be fair, the original iPhone was like this as well - expensive and unsubsidized, locked to a specific carrier, small production, took many years to develop, was very much a future shock device upon its unveiling, etc. The 3g was the one for the masses.

wakeupcall 3y ago

I don't see this as a big problem. This is clearly aimed for development/investors in tech right now, and in this market the 3.5k price tag is actually pretty low consider this is actually a product, and not even a prototype. The potential thanks to the higher resolution is huge. If you ever tried to do any non-gaming task on an oculus, you realize how important resolution is for text. Forget games, this is an enabler for a disruption in user interface. My biggest gripe to me, let it be either meta or apple, is the vendor lock-in. I'm not going to touch anything made by meta. But apple is not far.