6 ms·

You’re a bit biased if you think Meta is doing anything other than marketing here, just using a different tactic. Meta has never showed off demo-able advanced

by cududa 3y ago

You’re a bit biased if you think Meta is doing anything other than marketing here, just using a different tactic. Meta has never showed off demo-able advanced R&D hardware publicly, even when they’ve had it, until now. This is simply a second degree demo to Wall Street investors. Their analysts will either attend, or read reports from reputable experts. They’ve sunk $40 Billion into this project with nothing to show. Apple has reportedly spent $20 Billion while underpinning it with healthy growth and profits. Facebook shipped Quest 2 dev kits to partners that were physically disguised as clothing irons. The narrative you’re spinning is nonsense. EDIT: You’re either Boz or a lieutenant judging by your comment history. You only comment on topics related to Facebook competition and say things close to “interesting feedback” and occasionally expose yourself with specific phrases like “Thanks for sharing, it's always interesting to hear these kind of anecdotes!” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36351422 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36351422

steveBK123 3y ago
Meta literally changed their name for this space, and Apple is going to beat them to market with a mass market product. This is clearly reactive "we have to show something" vaporware.
- zmmmmm 3y ago
  > Apple is going to beat them to market with a mass market product ??? Meta already shipped 20M headsets. Apple won't get more than 400k of these in the field until 2025, and even then they will be so expensive barely anybody can afford it. Quite literally, whatever mass market there is, Meta owns it now and for the foreseeable future.
  - steveBK123 3y ago
    Oculus is capped at the gamer market size, which is in the 10M units range. Apple is targeting the wider compute market which is capped at Billions. They won't sell billions in 2025, or at the $3500 price point, but this is the market they are building towards capturing. Think of Palm Pilot vs iPhone. It's a decade-scale play. * edit: Let me just add that Apple TV hardware which is largely abandoned and afterthought product line considered unsuccessful, for example is a 13M/year item for Apple. 20M lifetime is not mass market.
    - what_ever 3y ago
      > * edit: Let me just add that Apple TV hardware which is largely abandoned and afterthought product line considered unsuccessful, for example is a 13M/year item for Apple. 20M lifetime is not mass market. Source? https://www.businessofapps.com/data/apple-statistics/#AppleTVactivedevicesinUS https://www.businessofapps.com/data/apple-statistics/#AppleT... says there 31M active Apple TVs in the US. https://9to5mac.com/2020/09/02/apple-tv-market-share-report/ https://9to5mac.com/2020/09/02/apple-tv-market-share-report/ says Apple TV has 2% share of 1.14B global TV platforms. These don't look like 13M/year of sales. Besides it seems like comparing apples to oranges. Apple TV works with existing TVs which are already billions in numbers. VR devices are completely new devices. Meta has sold 20M headsets SO FAR, not in its lifetime.
      - steveBK123 3y ago
        AppleTV sales were estimated at 10M units/year a decade ago - https://www.digitaltrends.com/home-theater/apple-tv-longer-hobby-brings-1-billion-revenue-last-year/ https://www.digitaltrends.com/home-theater/apple-tv-longer-h... Still small numbers for Apple! Weird semantics on so far vs lifetime.. it's the same thing. Meta and Apple are targeting different markets and you can tell by Apple's product videos. To me, Meta is entrenched in the currently gamer centric VR market. I call it this because 100% of the people I know who have been excited by VR over the last 10 years have been young, single, male gamers. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, but the marketing & people excited about the product, to me, seem to align there. Apple doesn't even call it VR because they are trying to target a much wider market.
        xp84 3y ago
        > they are trying to target a much wider market. I agree with this (though trying is the operative word). It seems a strange moment in time to choose to call the game for Apple though, at a grand total of 0 units shipped and a price point of $3500+tax. It is literally not knowable now in 2023 if they will be able to manage to do what Tesla did, in transitioning from “toy for rich jerks” to “reasonable mass market choice, and we can manufacture them in mass quantities too.” I mean, it’s not even clear yet if the rich jerk set will adopt it.
  - cududa 3y ago
    Bro you’re clearly either Boz or a senior lieutenant judging by your comment history. You only comment on topics related to Facebook competition and say things close to “interesting feedback” and occasionally expose yourself with specific phrases like “Thanks for sharing, it's always interesting to hear these kind of anecdotes!” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36351422 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36351422
    - xvector 3y ago
      Or they just really care about VR, or they're an investor that's bullish about the company. A good number of people on HN have literally millions of dollars in stock in various companies. Focus on their argument, not "outing" someone, whatever that means.
  - smohare 3y ago
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- mensetmanusman 3y ago
  $4k may not be mass market. $0.4k may not be mass market as well, but it’s closer :)
  - steveBK123 3y ago
    My point is Apple is taking their typical approach which is more Tesla - start at the high price point option to define a space and then work your way down. I don't think we're going to stumble into good immersive AR/VR by cobbling together OEM parts bin specials to hit a $400 price point day 1. It seems obvious that the displays & optics need to be as good or better than top of the line phone/computer displays, not worse. So I don't see how a remotely immersive experience can happen even at the $1k price point.
    - chaostheory 3y ago
      > So I don't see how a remotely immersive experience can happen even at the $1k price point. I strongly feel that you need to actually try modern VR for more than a few minutes. Is it perfect? Far from it. There are many problems, specifically that VR’s main form factors are too intimidating for most adults to even try. Is it immersive? Yes, a lot of apps and games are I’m just glad Tim forced Apple to finally join the market. Otherwise, there would be VR winter for about a decade due to the mass public perception of VR and the fact that the most engaged VR users can’t even drive yet.
    - simondotau 3y ago
      It's also likely to mirror Apple's approach with all-new product families, where a first generation product is released as soon as they have the core technology working but before it's at an "Apple" level of maturity and/or have a true grip on the product's raison d'être. Subsequent generations reveal the first generation to be the experimental beta/market test product it really was all along. This was definitely the case with the iPhone, iPad and the Watch. It's arguably also true with the first generation MacBook Air. (This definitely doesn't apply to the M1 transition as this wasn't a new product family. It was a fork of an extremely mature product, combined into another extremely mature product, resulting in a product revision which was very cool but did absolutely nothing new.)
- chaostheory 3y ago
  Apple is in the luxury fashion business. I doubt Apple will beat meta (and vice versa) because Apple tends to stay away from the low end.
  - simondotau 3y ago
    Apple does employ some tropes of luxury and fashion in marketing strategy, but they are absolutely not a "luxury fashion business". A large number of their products are utterly mainstream and often price competitive. What they tend to shy away from are ultra-low margin sectors with little opportunity for differentiation and flooded with amoral competition. Sure, the cheapest iPhone is nowhere near the cost of the cheapest Android phones. But that's because most cheap Android phones are also abandonware, and/or manufactured e-waste, and/or using all of the conflict minerals/abusive labour practices/environmental hazards which Apple has to remain unambiguously distanced from.
    - chaostheory 3y ago
      > A large number of their products are utterly mainstream and often price competitive. I agree with everything you wrote but this. Just because Apple products are within reach of a lot of people, it doesn’t mean that they’re not a luxury brand.
      - simondotau 3y ago
        Apple is absolutely a premium brand, but they're not a luxury brand. The key distinction is that a luxury brand revels in real or perceived exclusivity; with prices set for the primary purpose of gatekeeping the brand to a select audience. While not cheap, Apple products are obtainable and utterly mainstream. In fact in the rare instances where Apple has experimented with luxury it has been a dismal failure — Apple Watch Edition being a noteworthy example.
murderfs 3y ago
> Meta has never showed off demo-able advanced R&D hardware publicly, even when they’ve had it, until now. What are you talking about? They've done this continually: 2018: https://www.meta.com/blog/quest/introducing-the-team-behind-half-dome-facebook-reality-labs-varifocal-prototype/ https://www.meta.com/blog/quest/introducing-the-team-behind-... 2019: https://www.meta.com/blog/quest/half-dome-updates-frl-explores-more-comfortable-compact-vr-prototypes-for-work/ https://www.meta.com/blog/quest/half-dome-updates-frl-explor... 2020: https://tech.facebook.com/reality-labs/2020/9/announcing-project-aria-a-research-project-on-the-future-of-wearable-ar/ https://tech.facebook.com/reality-labs/2020/9/announcing-pro... 2021: https://tech.facebook.com/reality-labs/2021/3/inside-facebook-reality-labs-wrist-based-interaction-for-the-next-computing-platform/ https://tech.facebook.com/reality-labs/2021/3/inside-faceboo...
- bonestamp2 3y ago
  I can't find it on meta's site, but Zuck also showed a couple of prototypes in 2022. Here's one of them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLqEBCCV2SQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLqEBCCV2SQ
tracerbulletx 3y ago
Yes they have. Unless I dreamed watching a bunch of YouTube videos of people trying on different prototypes at their office last year and talking about different tradeoffs they're considering.
smohare 3y ago
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by cududa 3y ago

steveBK123 3y ago

Meta literally changed their name for this space, and Apple is going to beat them to market with a mass market product. This is clearly reactive "we have to show something" vaporware.

zmmmmm 3y ago
> Apple is going to beat them to market with a mass market product ??? Meta already shipped 20M headsets. Apple won't get more than 400k of these in the field until 2025, and even then they will be so expensive barely anybody can afford it. Quite literally, whatever mass market there is, Meta owns it now and for the foreseeable future.
- steveBK123 3y ago
  Oculus is capped at the gamer market size, which is in the 10M units range. Apple is targeting the wider compute market which is capped at Billions. They won't sell billions in 2025, or at the $3500 price point, but this is the market they are building towards capturing. Think of Palm Pilot vs iPhone. It's a decade-scale play. * edit: Let me just add that Apple TV hardware which is largely abandoned and afterthought product line considered unsuccessful, for example is a 13M/year item for Apple. 20M lifetime is not mass market.
  - what_ever 3y ago
    > * edit: Let me just add that Apple TV hardware which is largely abandoned and afterthought product line considered unsuccessful, for example is a 13M/year item for Apple. 20M lifetime is not mass market. Source? https://www.businessofapps.com/data/apple-statistics/#AppleTVactivedevicesinUS https://www.businessofapps.com/data/apple-statistics/#AppleT... says there 31M active Apple TVs in the US. https://9to5mac.com/2020/09/02/apple-tv-market-share-report/ https://9to5mac.com/2020/09/02/apple-tv-market-share-report/ says Apple TV has 2% share of 1.14B global TV platforms. These don't look like 13M/year of sales. Besides it seems like comparing apples to oranges. Apple TV works with existing TVs which are already billions in numbers. VR devices are completely new devices. Meta has sold 20M headsets SO FAR, not in its lifetime.
    - steveBK123 3y ago
      AppleTV sales were estimated at 10M units/year a decade ago - https://www.digitaltrends.com/home-theater/apple-tv-longer-hobby-brings-1-billion-revenue-last-year/ https://www.digitaltrends.com/home-theater/apple-tv-longer-h... Still small numbers for Apple! Weird semantics on so far vs lifetime.. it's the same thing. Meta and Apple are targeting different markets and you can tell by Apple's product videos. To me, Meta is entrenched in the currently gamer centric VR market. I call it this because 100% of the people I know who have been excited by VR over the last 10 years have been young, single, male gamers. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, but the marketing & people excited about the product, to me, seem to align there. Apple doesn't even call it VR because they are trying to target a much wider market.
      - xp84 3y ago
        > they are trying to target a much wider market. I agree with this (though trying is the operative word). It seems a strange moment in time to choose to call the game for Apple though, at a grand total of 0 units shipped and a price point of $3500+tax. It is literally not knowable now in 2023 if they will be able to manage to do what Tesla did, in transitioning from “toy for rich jerks” to “reasonable mass market choice, and we can manufacture them in mass quantities too.” I mean, it’s not even clear yet if the rich jerk set will adopt it.
- cududa 3y ago
  Bro you’re clearly either Boz or a senior lieutenant judging by your comment history. You only comment on topics related to Facebook competition and say things close to “interesting feedback” and occasionally expose yourself with specific phrases like “Thanks for sharing, it's always interesting to hear these kind of anecdotes!” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36351422 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36351422
  - xvector 3y ago
    Or they just really care about VR, or they're an investor that's bullish about the company. A good number of people on HN have literally millions of dollars in stock in various companies. Focus on their argument, not "outing" someone, whatever that means.
- smohare 3y ago
  [dead]
mensetmanusman 3y ago
$4k may not be mass market. $0.4k may not be mass market as well, but it’s closer :)
- steveBK123 3y ago
  My point is Apple is taking their typical approach which is more Tesla - start at the high price point option to define a space and then work your way down. I don't think we're going to stumble into good immersive AR/VR by cobbling together OEM parts bin specials to hit a $400 price point day 1. It seems obvious that the displays & optics need to be as good or better than top of the line phone/computer displays, not worse. So I don't see how a remotely immersive experience can happen even at the $1k price point.
  - chaostheory 3y ago
    > So I don't see how a remotely immersive experience can happen even at the $1k price point. I strongly feel that you need to actually try modern VR for more than a few minutes. Is it perfect? Far from it. There are many problems, specifically that VR’s main form factors are too intimidating for most adults to even try. Is it immersive? Yes, a lot of apps and games are I’m just glad Tim forced Apple to finally join the market. Otherwise, there would be VR winter for about a decade due to the mass public perception of VR and the fact that the most engaged VR users can’t even drive yet.
  - simondotau 3y ago
    It's also likely to mirror Apple's approach with all-new product families, where a first generation product is released as soon as they have the core technology working but before it's at an "Apple" level of maturity and/or have a true grip on the product's raison d'être. Subsequent generations reveal the first generation to be the experimental beta/market test product it really was all along. This was definitely the case with the iPhone, iPad and the Watch. It's arguably also true with the first generation MacBook Air. (This definitely doesn't apply to the M1 transition as this wasn't a new product family. It was a fork of an extremely mature product, combined into another extremely mature product, resulting in a product revision which was very cool but did absolutely nothing new.)
chaostheory 3y ago
Apple is in the luxury fashion business. I doubt Apple will beat meta (and vice versa) because Apple tends to stay away from the low end.
- simondotau 3y ago
  Apple does employ some tropes of luxury and fashion in marketing strategy, but they are absolutely not a "luxury fashion business". A large number of their products are utterly mainstream and often price competitive. What they tend to shy away from are ultra-low margin sectors with little opportunity for differentiation and flooded with amoral competition. Sure, the cheapest iPhone is nowhere near the cost of the cheapest Android phones. But that's because most cheap Android phones are also abandonware, and/or manufactured e-waste, and/or using all of the conflict minerals/abusive labour practices/environmental hazards which Apple has to remain unambiguously distanced from.
  - chaostheory 3y ago
    > A large number of their products are utterly mainstream and often price competitive. I agree with everything you wrote but this. Just because Apple products are within reach of a lot of people, it doesn’t mean that they’re not a luxury brand.
    - simondotau 3y ago
      Apple is absolutely a premium brand, but they're not a luxury brand. The key distinction is that a luxury brand revels in real or perceived exclusivity; with prices set for the primary purpose of gatekeeping the brand to a select audience. While not cheap, Apple products are obtainable and utterly mainstream. In fact in the rare instances where Apple has experimented with luxury it has been a dismal failure — Apple Watch Edition being a noteworthy example.

murderfs 3y ago

> Meta has never showed off demo-able advanced R&D hardware publicly, even when they’ve had it, until now. What are you talking about? They've done this continually: 2018: https://www.meta.com/blog/quest/introducing-the-team-behind-half-dome-facebook-reality-labs-varifocal-prototype/ https://www.meta.com/blog/quest/introducing-the-team-behind-... 2019: https://www.meta.com/blog/quest/half-dome-updates-frl-explores-more-comfortable-compact-vr-prototypes-for-work/ https://www.meta.com/blog/quest/half-dome-updates-frl-explor... 2020: https://tech.facebook.com/reality-labs/2020/9/announcing-project-aria-a-research-project-on-the-future-of-wearable-ar/ https://tech.facebook.com/reality-labs/2020/9/announcing-pro... 2021: https://tech.facebook.com/reality-labs/2021/3/inside-facebook-reality-labs-wrist-based-interaction-for-the-next-computing-platform/ https://tech.facebook.com/reality-labs/2021/3/inside-faceboo...

bonestamp2 3y ago
I can't find it on meta's site, but Zuck also showed a couple of prototypes in 2022. Here's one of them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLqEBCCV2SQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLqEBCCV2SQ

tracerbulletx 3y ago

Yes they have. Unless I dreamed watching a bunch of YouTube videos of people trying on different prototypes at their office last year and talking about different tradeoffs they're considering.

smohare 3y ago

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