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> 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

> 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
> but didn't know there was stuff in-market which is meaningfully better than the Vision Pro (assuming you mean screens, tracking, pass through)? I know you're being facetious, but you owe yourself an investigation into how far they've come. Pimax 8k, PSVR, Quest Pro... Apple's headset isn't exactly pushing anything we haven't seen before. I was talking about the literal performance ceiling, a-la available compute. > 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. That's a bet I would take you on, but it's full of moving goalposts (eg. "resonant user experience"). If the Vision Pro is Apple's new rough baseline for VR user experiences, it will take time and iteration to lower it to the sub-$1000 price point. Time for the processes to mature and yield better with cheaper costs, but also iteration on an already-expensive concept that needs enormous re-engineering efforts to have the same margins at $3500 as it does at $999. At Vision Pro margins this hypothetical headset would have a ~$400 BOM and likely diminished specs from Vision Pro. From the offset, M1/M2 is off the table - they're too expensive and unnecessary for the majority of baseline uses. They would need another SOC, more like a reworked iPhone/iPad chip with doubled GPU resources. The glass and aluminum design would need to get downgraded to cheaper materials, and the displays would need to be lower resolution to both accommodate a lower price point and a lower performance target. It's possible. It will just take a long time for suppliers to develop and for Apple to improve their own processes. In that time, Meta's goal is just to improve eye tracking, push higher resolutions and expand the current multitasking options. It doesn't seem that unrealistic to me, given the current state of Oculus software and how far the Quest Pro got as a $1500 headset. > 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? Apparently none of that stuff has been a roadblock to producing 10 million+ of them at an affordable price. The software experience has been pretty great for me, almost "Switch-like" for the price. I think that has the potential to keep selling - I think Apple's idea will really only be popular among a smaller group of users. If they surpass Meta's install base before 2030, it will be a bona-fide miracle.

smoldesu 3y ago

> but didn't know there was stuff in-market which is meaningfully better than the Vision Pro (assuming you mean screens, tracking, pass through)? I know you're being facetious, but you owe yourself an investigation into how far they've come. Pimax 8k, PSVR, Quest Pro... Apple's headset isn't exactly pushing anything we haven't seen before. I was talking about the literal performance ceiling, a-la available compute. > 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. That's a bet I would take you on, but it's full of moving goalposts (eg. "resonant user experience"). If the Vision Pro is Apple's new rough baseline for VR user experiences, it will take time and iteration to lower it to the sub-$1000 price point. Time for the processes to mature and yield better with cheaper costs, but also iteration on an already-expensive concept that needs enormous re-engineering efforts to have the same margins at $3500 as it does at $999. At Vision Pro margins this hypothetical headset would have a ~$400 BOM and likely diminished specs from Vision Pro. From the offset, M1/M2 is off the table - they're too expensive and unnecessary for the majority of baseline uses. They would need another SOC, more like a reworked iPhone/iPad chip with doubled GPU resources. The glass and aluminum design would need to get downgraded to cheaper materials, and the displays would need to be lower resolution to both accommodate a lower price point and a lower performance target. It's possible. It will just take a long time for suppliers to develop and for Apple to improve their own processes. In that time, Meta's goal is just to improve eye tracking, push higher resolutions and expand the current multitasking options. It doesn't seem that unrealistic to me, given the current state of Oculus software and how far the Quest Pro got as a $1500 headset. > 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? Apparently none of that stuff has been a roadblock to producing 10 million+ of them at an affordable price. The software experience has been pretty great for me, almost "Switch-like" for the price. I think that has the potential to keep selling - I think Apple's idea will really only be popular among a smaller group of users. If they surpass Meta's install base before 2030, it will be a bona-fide miracle.