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> "Comments here" will tell you the Quest is a failed product after 20 million units sold. The people on this website have never been representative of the mark

> "Comments here" will tell you the Quest is a failed product after 20 million units sold. The people on this website have never been representative of the market at-large. It's amazing how many people miss this crucial point. Apple and Meta share a high level ambition – to dominate the next wave of computing platform -- but that's pretty much the only similarity between them. If you look at Quest and Vision Pro and think about the constraints placed on the teams building them it seems like: 1. Apple's teams are given the constraint of producing an amazing user experience in terms of screens, gesture control, etc. Price flexes upwards to deliver this. 2. Meta's teams are given the constraint of achieving a mass market price, and the quality of the product flexes down to achieve this. Apple's position makes sense to me. They are no longer an underdog[^1] and can fast follow anyone who has a more compelling vision for AR/VR which launches before they get theirs out the door. Meta needed to get this going before Apple for obvious reasons. That's why, for example, of the 20 million units you referred to as being sold, 5 million of them (!) had safety recall notices because the fabric of one of the components caused such serious skin irritation that some number of users were hospitalised. Meta can move fast and break things (& people), but Apple can't do that any more. (No judgement of either company.) That all makes sense… but the bit I can't fathom is why Facebook didn't take the approach of building from the high end down? I don't know of any complex consumer electronics or hardware companies which don't take the approach of launching massively expensive "pro" hardware which is the beachhead for driving down price over time. E.g. autofocus in cameras began life on the giant cameras which sports photographers used to use, but over time it became cheap enough to manufacture that all cameras shipped with it. Do you think Meta genuinely thought they were just a few years away from delivering a mass market-ready device (for playing BeatSabre and talking to cartoon versions of your friends)? My guess is that Meta saw themselves as being curators of the best bits of the existing AR/VR proposition: tie all the best bits of the existing field of hardware and software companies and put them into a package at a $400 price point. Just iterate on the existing ideas a bit and focus on getting the price down. Apple seems to have looked at the existing ideas around UX (input and screen quality especially) and scope (what do I use this for?) and decided that there needed to be dramatically different (better, in Apple's view) solutions. Given Meta's internal rhetoric about Quest not retaining users, I'd say Apple was wise to approach this from first principles. But I really don't know what Meta has been working on for so long? If I think back to the original iPhone launch, it made literally every other phone on the market look preposterously antiquated (to the point that RIM execs famously believed it was "impossible" for Apple to actually be delivering the phone they demoed). Vision Pro does that to the Vive Pro gathering dust in my cupboard, but I'll need to use one to say for sure whether it does the same to the Quest 3. My hunch is that the disparity isn't as huge as it was with cell phones, but it doesn't seem like Facebook can simply ignore Vision Pro and continue with their current product roadmap: I would bet on Apple (a hardware company with a lot of scale advantages) figuring out how to make the baseline experience achieved with Vision Pro cheaper for a consumer device much faster and more easily than Facebook will figure out how to achieve that same baseline experience starting from their $400 price point. Wdyt? [^1]: Inside Apple around the time iTV / Apple TV was introduced, it was characterised as a "foot in the door": Steve Jobs kept calling it a "hobby" in public, and the strategy changed around a lot. Since then they've introduced several products which have either seen strategy shift over time (iPadOS multi tasking…) or which were known to be a "foot in the door" (Apple Watch), but they don't acknowledge them as such, they just pretend that the plan all along was for Apple Watch to be a fitness tracker, and that they did not in fact spend 30 minutes of the keynote talking about sending digital heartbeats to each other as if it was the most meaningful thing ever.

smoldesu 3y ago
> That all makes sense… but the bit I can't fathom is why Facebook didn't take the approach of building from the high end down? High end VR already existed. There were dozens of Windows headsets that lifted the performance ceiling far beyond what the Quest or even the Reality Pro will ever be capable of. The harder challenge is pushing in the other direction - building a minimum viable product that doesn't suck and can make it to mass market. Meta has proven they can do that, Apple cannot. You're right to highlight that the pressure is on them to do better, but maybe they should have considered that before announcing a headset this early. Apple's history is rife with visionary products that were too early and too expensive: the Lisa, the Newton, the 12" Macbook, the list goes on. I won't chide them for their ambition, but that won't save them from their fated failure. Imagine if Steve Jobs' "phone, iPod, and internet communicator" moment culminated in a product that cost more than all 3 of those things combined. That's what the Vision Pro's announcement felt like. > but it doesn't seem like Facebook can simply ignore Vision Pro and continue with their current product roadmap: I would bet on Apple (a hardware company with a lot of scale advantages) figuring out how to make the baseline experience achieved with Vision Pro cheaper for a consumer device much faster and more easily than Facebook will figure out how to achieve that same baseline experience starting from their $400 price point. I guess I just fundamentally disagree. The high-end market for VR is not desirable yet, and there's no indication it ever will be. Low-end VR sells like hotcakes though, and Apple will struggle with that more than Meta will with retina graphics or eye tracking. If the leaked BOM for Reality Pro is real, Apple would need to cut costs by 8x to maintain their current margins and beat Meta in pricing. That's ludicrous; meeting Apple at their price point is comparatively trivial. It will ultimately depend on where market forces lie. I think most people will see the Vision Pro as redundant if they already own an iPhone though.
- georgespencer 3y ago
  > There were dozens of Windows headsets that lifted the performance ceiling […] Wow, I didn't know that! I thought there were probably some super high end ones (I used one a few years ago which basically required that I strap a tower PC to my back to experience a Star Wars VR thing in a shopping mall…), but didn't know there was stuff in-market which is meaningfully better than the Vision Pro (assuming you mean screens, tracking, pass through)? > Imagine if Steve Jobs' "phone, iPod, and internet communicator" moment culminated in a product that cost more than all 3 of those things combined. That's what the Vision Pro's announcement felt like. The original iPhone was $600 on a 2-year contract at a time when nearly everyone got a free phone on renewal. The ROKR E1 (2005's attempt at a Motorola & Apple iPod phone collaboration) was $250 on a 2yr contract.[^1] Remember Steve Ballmer's reaction to iPhone? "Five hundred dollars! Fully subsidized with a plan! I said that is the most expensive phone in the world and it doesn't appeal to business guys […]" Vision Pro might be more disproportionately expensive, but iPhone was absolutely a lot more expensive than a combined phone and iPod (I think Jobs even referred to this in the keynote to soften the $599 price point: "So what would it cost to buy all of these devices separately?"). I think the critical difference between then and now is that the sheer utility of cell phones meant that unit shipments were rocketing year after year despite the crappy experience. Here there's a crappy experience in the market but not the kind of hyper growth we saw with cell phones in the mid-00s. > Low-end VR sells like hotcakes though, and Apple will struggle with that more than Meta with retina graphics or eye tracking. They do sell a lot of Quest units, but that seems to be a function of the price point ($400-ish) rather than the experience. E.g. did you see the comments[^2] from Meta on user retention? Valve's former head of VR put MAUs at <10% of the install base. People have, to date, bought it, tried it, and stopped using it. To me that sounds like Meta has a price point which is not a barrier to entry (because people are buying the device), but not the much, much harder consideration of "actually build a product people love". So my bet would be that Apple -- a company which is preoccupied with trying to build products consumers genuinely love (or which builds products which people are brainwashed into loving, if you believe the HN conspiracy theorists) -- can figure out how to reduce the ASP of a Vision headset to $999 faster than Meta can figure out how to create a resonant user experience at their existing price point. Is there anything about the task of creating a compelling user experience with hardware/software and combining huge scale efficiencies and expertise in manufacturing and supply chain to lower cost over time which makes you think Meta has an advantage over Apple? I guess you could argue that Meta's apps are compelling user experiences, but they aren't a general purpose computing platform, which is what Zuck seems to want to create (?). [^1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/08/technology/circuits/ipod-phone-isnt-perfect-but-its-a-start.html https://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/08/technology/circuits/ipod-... [^2]: https://www.roadtovr.com/quest-sales-20-million-retention-struggles/ https://www.roadtovr.com/quest-sales-20-million-retention-st...

smoldesu 3y ago

> That all makes sense… but the bit I can't fathom is why Facebook didn't take the approach of building from the high end down? High end VR already existed. There were dozens of Windows headsets that lifted the performance ceiling far beyond what the Quest or even the Reality Pro will ever be capable of. The harder challenge is pushing in the other direction - building a minimum viable product that doesn't suck and can make it to mass market. Meta has proven they can do that, Apple cannot. You're right to highlight that the pressure is on them to do better, but maybe they should have considered that before announcing a headset this early. Apple's history is rife with visionary products that were too early and too expensive: the Lisa, the Newton, the 12" Macbook, the list goes on. I won't chide them for their ambition, but that won't save them from their fated failure. Imagine if Steve Jobs' "phone, iPod, and internet communicator" moment culminated in a product that cost more than all 3 of those things combined. That's what the Vision Pro's announcement felt like. > but it doesn't seem like Facebook can simply ignore Vision Pro and continue with their current product roadmap: I would bet on Apple (a hardware company with a lot of scale advantages) figuring out how to make the baseline experience achieved with Vision Pro cheaper for a consumer device much faster and more easily than Facebook will figure out how to achieve that same baseline experience starting from their $400 price point. I guess I just fundamentally disagree. The high-end market for VR is not desirable yet, and there's no indication it ever will be. Low-end VR sells like hotcakes though, and Apple will struggle with that more than Meta will with retina graphics or eye tracking. If the leaked BOM for Reality Pro is real, Apple would need to cut costs by 8x to maintain their current margins and beat Meta in pricing. That's ludicrous; meeting Apple at their price point is comparatively trivial. It will ultimately depend on where market forces lie. I think most people will see the Vision Pro as redundant if they already own an iPhone though.

georgespencer 3y ago
> There were dozens of Windows headsets that lifted the performance ceiling […] Wow, I didn't know that! I thought there were probably some super high end ones (I used one a few years ago which basically required that I strap a tower PC to my back to experience a Star Wars VR thing in a shopping mall…), but didn't know there was stuff in-market which is meaningfully better than the Vision Pro (assuming you mean screens, tracking, pass through)? > Imagine if Steve Jobs' "phone, iPod, and internet communicator" moment culminated in a product that cost more than all 3 of those things combined. That's what the Vision Pro's announcement felt like. The original iPhone was $600 on a 2-year contract at a time when nearly everyone got a free phone on renewal. The ROKR E1 (2005's attempt at a Motorola & Apple iPod phone collaboration) was $250 on a 2yr contract.[^1] Remember Steve Ballmer's reaction to iPhone? "Five hundred dollars! Fully subsidized with a plan! I said that is the most expensive phone in the world and it doesn't appeal to business guys […]" Vision Pro might be more disproportionately expensive, but iPhone was absolutely a lot more expensive than a combined phone and iPod (I think Jobs even referred to this in the keynote to soften the $599 price point: "So what would it cost to buy all of these devices separately?"). I think the critical difference between then and now is that the sheer utility of cell phones meant that unit shipments were rocketing year after year despite the crappy experience. Here there's a crappy experience in the market but not the kind of hyper growth we saw with cell phones in the mid-00s. > Low-end VR sells like hotcakes though, and Apple will struggle with that more than Meta with retina graphics or eye tracking. They do sell a lot of Quest units, but that seems to be a function of the price point ($400-ish) rather than the experience. E.g. did you see the comments[^2] from Meta on user retention? Valve's former head of VR put MAUs at <10% of the install base. People have, to date, bought it, tried it, and stopped using it. To me that sounds like Meta has a price point which is not a barrier to entry (because people are buying the device), but not the much, much harder consideration of "actually build a product people love". So my bet would be that Apple -- a company which is preoccupied with trying to build products consumers genuinely love (or which builds products which people are brainwashed into loving, if you believe the HN conspiracy theorists) -- can figure out how to reduce the ASP of a Vision headset to $999 faster than Meta can figure out how to create a resonant user experience at their existing price point. Is there anything about the task of creating a compelling user experience with hardware/software and combining huge scale efficiencies and expertise in manufacturing and supply chain to lower cost over time which makes you think Meta has an advantage over Apple? I guess you could argue that Meta's apps are compelling user experiences, but they aren't a general purpose computing platform, which is what Zuck seems to want to create (?). [^1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/08/technology/circuits/ipod-phone-isnt-perfect-but-its-a-start.html https://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/08/technology/circuits/ipod-... [^2]: https://www.roadtovr.com/quest-sales-20-million-retention-struggles/ https://www.roadtovr.com/quest-sales-20-million-retention-st...