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The Vision Pro in its entirety seems like a cog in a much larger strategy. It seems like a platform to test ideas, concepts, and reactions related to “spacial

The Vision Pro in its entirety seems like a cog in a much larger strategy. It seems like a platform to test ideas, concepts, and reactions related to “spacial computing” that will show up in much higher-volume products later on… as opposed to being a high-volume product itself. Essentially like a lot of other people I’m wondering “how many of these clunky ugly things could they sell?” But thinking that maybe they know that too, and they’re working toward something more compelling.

amelius 3y ago
Like what? My guess is they just wait for the market to figure it out, then pull a Sherlock and corner that market.
- crooked-v 3y ago
  For me, it's very obviously step 1 of their long-term plan to have everyone wearing Apple Glasses in 10-15 years.
  - amelius 3y ago
    Well it is somewhat obvious by now that big companies are all after our eyeballs, so you could be right.
  - paul7986 3y ago
    Apple Glasses is something they should already be working on and releasing sooner then later. Meta's most recent released Smart Glasses are solid and work solid especially for taking pictures and videos (just using them to film my ski runs this weekend; use them few times a week as my sunglasses and to snap pics). The smart features on this latest addition aren't terribly reliable though and need user experience work (i.e. audio just starts playing an inopportune times.. annoying).
    - crooked-v 3y ago
      > Apple Glasses is something they should already be working on and releasing sooner then later. My point is that AVP is step 1 of working on and releasing Apple Glasses. Rather than start with whatever minimal features they could fit into wraparound shades, they started with the feature set they wanted, built the minimum hardware that could do that, and from here out will keep iterating and improving until they eventually fit it into a pair of glasses. In other words, it only looks like and functions like a VR headset by accident; the form is a side effect of the current hardware, and the VR functionality is just a nice bonus on top of what they actually wanted to focus on.
    - philistine 3y ago
      Apple does not look at hardware and need to release sooner rather than later. Apple is a software company. When they look at a product category, they think of the software they want running on that. With a computer you wear on your face, they’ve just released their minimal viable product. You’ll get glasses when they can fit visionOS in them. In the meantime you can buy glasses from other companies that only take creepy pictures.
      - paul7986 3y ago
        If enough people discover and buy meta glasses for taking pics n videos which I'm betting 51 percent out of 49 will...Apple will release their similar glasses too that are also only for taking pics & videos. Everyone I show my meta glasses too ..they show some level excitement yet a few think oh no I'm going to be recorded and not know. Well you can be recorded now and not know too.
asimpletune 3y ago
I think this is exactly right. Notice how they actively avoid AR/VR words, preferring spatial computing. I think this is because, to them, AR/VR are going to be much more compelling than spatial computing, and they don't want to sully those efforts by mixing it with this stepping stone we have now.
- Cacti 3y ago
  well, ar is going to be the real money maker by probably several factors.
- MBCook 3y ago
  > AR/VR are going to be much more compelling than spatial computing, and they don't want to sully those efforts by mixing it with this stepping stone we have now. I disagree. I think they don’t want to be compared to a $500 VR headset. VR hasn’t taken off enough to move the needle on Apple financials. It’s not “good enough”. As nice as the Vision Pro is can it justify its extra $3000 cost in comparison if it’s also just VR/AR? Sure it’s more powerful, but it doesn’t even have controllers. On the other hand AR has largely failed so far too. The HoloLens didn’t revolutionize the world. And the level of AR a Quest 3 offers is much lower resolution than Apple had. And, again, $3000 difference there (HoloLens was way more). I think they want to be seen as a new category and not just another AR/VR thing. Sure the Mac was technically a personal computer, it was so different from a PC AT as to be almost a totally different thing. iPod vs Creative Nomad. iPhone vs early Windows CE phones. That’s what they want. They want to be judged on their own. Not “I bought a Quest 4 and it was OK, why should I pay $X more? It wasn’t useful to me.” Will it work? Time will tell. If it does the Vision line will be looked at as a totally different product category from the Quests/etc of today. If it doesn’t they’re in trouble.
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    > iPhone vs early Windows CE phones. These, at least, had legit keyboards.
    - halostatue 3y ago
Someone 3y ago
> Essentially like a lot of other people I’m wondering “how many of these clunky ugly things could they sell?” But thinking that maybe they know that too, and they’re working toward something more compelling. For the ‘clunky’ I think they’re just betting on Moore’s law (in some interpretation) keeping up and batteries getting more powerful in the next few years, so that they can shrink the device and its production costs. IMO, that is a safe bet for batteries, a bit less so for the electronics and even less so for the mechanical parts. And what’s considered ugly can change fairly fast, if the device turns out to be useful/entertaining (which it IMO will be) enough to warrant its sales price (that, I’m not certain of.
- tomaskafka 3y ago
  But mainly, if you know the use case, you can ship iphone-equivalent device with the sensors needed, not an expensive miniaturized laptop. Vision Pro is an user research platform.
- Cacti 3y ago
  yeah. people really have a hang up on VR and AR, but it’s almost entirely simply because the electronics and power aren’t there yet. once it is, it will almost already be game over, because… i mean literally everyone eventually will have one. it will be the most significant compute platform in history. you can see this immediately btw if you book some time on the expensive industry AR and VR devices. but even those aren’t any smaller than the Apple device, for reasons of physics.
mschuster91 3y ago
> Essentially like a lot of other people I’m wondering “how many of these clunky ugly things could they sell?” But thinking that maybe they know that too, and they’re working toward something more compelling. Apple is a master at having the users pay for R&D. They didn't go and raise millions to billions of dollars in venture capital... they started with phones using cheap Samsung SoCs and from there on, they evolved rapidly, with their M-series SoCs now being on par with Intel performance-wise. The hipsters pay outrageous amounts of money for Apple hardware - me being amongst them - and Apple doesn't go and waste all their income on stock buybacks or luxurious dividends, but invests it into developing technology to legitimately drive the state of the art forward.
Retric 3y ago
The Vision Pro’s existing sales have already justified the project. They have sold 560+ million dollars worth of them at presumably insane profit margins. I think Apple’s strategy is to just execute whatever the next tech thing is better than existing participants. MP3 players weren’t a forever thing, but they were a very profitable thing for Apple. Watch, tablet, 3D glasses etc timed after someone else proved the market and just in time for Apple to slurp up the most profitable slice of the pie. They don’t want to be the first self driving car company, they want to be the most profitable self driving car company.
- sandover 3y ago
  Untold R&D billions went into this; we have no idea what the breakeven would be. If we were to treat Apple and Meta equivalently, we would have spent a decade tallying Apple’s R&D investments as “losses”.
- danpalmer 3y ago
  I'm not saying Vision Pro won't eventually justify itself, but $560m revenue is likely nowhere near the cost for this programme so far. This project has been rumoured to have hundreds of engineers for 5+ years, that's that revenue already (let alone profit), then the manufacturing setup, new chip development, etc. Even if this product makes $2bn revenue, which could be unlikely just based on the rumoured manufacturing limitations and number they expect to manufacture this year, it probably wouldn't be justified once you figure out the profit margins. This is clearly all about the next product, or the one after. It's about the iPhone 4 launch, for this product, not the first, 3G, or 3GS practice runs. Apple have a history of healthy margins, but huge production costs on their high end stuff, so while this is $3500, I wouldn't be surprised if it's still only 50% margin. That's great, but it's not the 70% one might expect from such a high price, and it will be because of things like maybe the body costs $200 rather than $50 because of some silly uncompromising design choices that don't make sense for high volume consumer hardware.
  - Retric 3y ago
    I doubt they’re into the billions on R&D. The project could be 7-10 years old but they didn’t start on day one with hundreds of people. Let’s say a core of ~50 people for 5 years as proof of concept then ~350 people for another 5 years at 300k per person on average, that’s a 600 million dollar investment. Sure they could have a larger team, but they also don’t pay testers anything close to 150k year.
JKCalhoun 3y ago
I imagine the Vision Pro is more like the Newton of the 21st Century. (Or perhaps the Pippin?) I feel like Apple was double-dared into developing Vision Pro. Back when there was a weird collective craze for VR: Oculus Rift, Ready Player One, Nintendo, Facebook paying $2B... "WTF is going on?" asks Apple. Imagine then having spent years and billions of your R&D budget only to watch the whole VR craze go the way of the Pet Rock. Still, you kinda have to show something for all that R&D. iPod was the Next Big Thing, iPhone was the Next Big Thing. This VR headset is not.
- Tagbert 3y ago
  The better analogy would be the Lisa. It’s reasonably powerful but more expensive than they want it to be. The next version will probably lose some features but be less expensive. The Macintosh to the AVP’s Lisa.
- SirHound 3y ago
  This VR headset isn’t but I think spatial computing will be. IMO this Vision Pro wasn’t meant to be a big seller but a way of taking a research project into an iterative production process. The first iPhone was shit too, same with Apple Watch, and this is far more complex than either. Now it’s time to crank the price/performance/manufacturing.
  - JKCalhoun 3y ago
    I guess I don't believe VR-anything will ever be popular.

amelius 3y ago

Like what? My guess is they just wait for the market to figure it out, then pull a Sherlock and corner that market.

crooked-v 3y ago
For me, it's very obviously step 1 of their long-term plan to have everyone wearing Apple Glasses in 10-15 years.
- amelius 3y ago
  Well it is somewhat obvious by now that big companies are all after our eyeballs, so you could be right.
- paul7986 3y ago
  Apple Glasses is something they should already be working on and releasing sooner then later. Meta's most recent released Smart Glasses are solid and work solid especially for taking pictures and videos (just using them to film my ski runs this weekend; use them few times a week as my sunglasses and to snap pics). The smart features on this latest addition aren't terribly reliable though and need user experience work (i.e. audio just starts playing an inopportune times.. annoying).
  - crooked-v 3y ago
    > Apple Glasses is something they should already be working on and releasing sooner then later. My point is that AVP is step 1 of working on and releasing Apple Glasses. Rather than start with whatever minimal features they could fit into wraparound shades, they started with the feature set they wanted, built the minimum hardware that could do that, and from here out will keep iterating and improving until they eventually fit it into a pair of glasses. In other words, it only looks like and functions like a VR headset by accident; the form is a side effect of the current hardware, and the VR functionality is just a nice bonus on top of what they actually wanted to focus on.
  - philistine 3y ago
    Apple does not look at hardware and need to release sooner rather than later. Apple is a software company. When they look at a product category, they think of the software they want running on that. With a computer you wear on your face, they’ve just released their minimal viable product. You’ll get glasses when they can fit visionOS in them. In the meantime you can buy glasses from other companies that only take creepy pictures.
    - paul7986 3y ago
      If enough people discover and buy meta glasses for taking pics n videos which I'm betting 51 percent out of 49 will...Apple will release their similar glasses too that are also only for taking pics & videos. Everyone I show my meta glasses too ..they show some level excitement yet a few think oh no I'm going to be recorded and not know. Well you can be recorded now and not know too.

asimpletune 3y ago

I think this is exactly right. Notice how they actively avoid AR/VR words, preferring spatial computing. I think this is because, to them, AR/VR are going to be much more compelling than spatial computing, and they don't want to sully those efforts by mixing it with this stepping stone we have now.

Cacti 3y ago
well, ar is going to be the real money maker by probably several factors.
MBCook 3y ago
> AR/VR are going to be much more compelling than spatial computing, and they don't want to sully those efforts by mixing it with this stepping stone we have now. I disagree. I think they don’t want to be compared to a $500 VR headset. VR hasn’t taken off enough to move the needle on Apple financials. It’s not “good enough”. As nice as the Vision Pro is can it justify its extra $3000 cost in comparison if it’s also just VR/AR? Sure it’s more powerful, but it doesn’t even have controllers. On the other hand AR has largely failed so far too. The HoloLens didn’t revolutionize the world. And the level of AR a Quest 3 offers is much lower resolution than Apple had. And, again, $3000 difference there (HoloLens was way more). I think they want to be seen as a new category and not just another AR/VR thing. Sure the Mac was technically a personal computer, it was so different from a PC AT as to be almost a totally different thing. iPod vs Creative Nomad. iPhone vs early Windows CE phones. That’s what they want. They want to be judged on their own. Not “I bought a Quest 4 and it was OK, why should I pay $X more? It wasn’t useful to me.” Will it work? Time will tell. If it does the Vision line will be looked at as a totally different product category from the Quests/etc of today. If it doesn’t they’re in trouble.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  > iPhone vs early Windows CE phones. These, at least, had legit keyboards.
  - halostatue 3y ago

Someone 3y ago

> Essentially like a lot of other people I’m wondering “how many of these clunky ugly things could they sell?” But thinking that maybe they know that too, and they’re working toward something more compelling. For the ‘clunky’ I think they’re just betting on Moore’s law (in some interpretation) keeping up and batteries getting more powerful in the next few years, so that they can shrink the device and its production costs. IMO, that is a safe bet for batteries, a bit less so for the electronics and even less so for the mechanical parts. And what’s considered ugly can change fairly fast, if the device turns out to be useful/entertaining (which it IMO will be) enough to warrant its sales price (that, I’m not certain of.

tomaskafka 3y ago
But mainly, if you know the use case, you can ship iphone-equivalent device with the sensors needed, not an expensive miniaturized laptop. Vision Pro is an user research platform.
Cacti 3y ago
yeah. people really have a hang up on VR and AR, but it’s almost entirely simply because the electronics and power aren’t there yet. once it is, it will almost already be game over, because… i mean literally everyone eventually will have one. it will be the most significant compute platform in history. you can see this immediately btw if you book some time on the expensive industry AR and VR devices. but even those aren’t any smaller than the Apple device, for reasons of physics.

mschuster91 3y ago

> Essentially like a lot of other people I’m wondering “how many of these clunky ugly things could they sell?” But thinking that maybe they know that too, and they’re working toward something more compelling. Apple is a master at having the users pay for R&D. They didn't go and raise millions to billions of dollars in venture capital... they started with phones using cheap Samsung SoCs and from there on, they evolved rapidly, with their M-series SoCs now being on par with Intel performance-wise. The hipsters pay outrageous amounts of money for Apple hardware - me being amongst them - and Apple doesn't go and waste all their income on stock buybacks or luxurious dividends, but invests it into developing technology to legitimately drive the state of the art forward.

Retric 3y ago

The Vision Pro’s existing sales have already justified the project. They have sold 560+ million dollars worth of them at presumably insane profit margins. I think Apple’s strategy is to just execute whatever the next tech thing is better than existing participants. MP3 players weren’t a forever thing, but they were a very profitable thing for Apple. Watch, tablet, 3D glasses etc timed after someone else proved the market and just in time for Apple to slurp up the most profitable slice of the pie. They don’t want to be the first self driving car company, they want to be the most profitable self driving car company.

sandover 3y ago
Untold R&D billions went into this; we have no idea what the breakeven would be. If we were to treat Apple and Meta equivalently, we would have spent a decade tallying Apple’s R&D investments as “losses”.
danpalmer 3y ago
I'm not saying Vision Pro won't eventually justify itself, but $560m revenue is likely nowhere near the cost for this programme so far. This project has been rumoured to have hundreds of engineers for 5+ years, that's that revenue already (let alone profit), then the manufacturing setup, new chip development, etc. Even if this product makes $2bn revenue, which could be unlikely just based on the rumoured manufacturing limitations and number they expect to manufacture this year, it probably wouldn't be justified once you figure out the profit margins. This is clearly all about the next product, or the one after. It's about the iPhone 4 launch, for this product, not the first, 3G, or 3GS practice runs. Apple have a history of healthy margins, but huge production costs on their high end stuff, so while this is $3500, I wouldn't be surprised if it's still only 50% margin. That's great, but it's not the 70% one might expect from such a high price, and it will be because of things like maybe the body costs $200 rather than $50 because of some silly uncompromising design choices that don't make sense for high volume consumer hardware.
- Retric 3y ago
  I doubt they’re into the billions on R&D. The project could be 7-10 years old but they didn’t start on day one with hundreds of people. Let’s say a core of ~50 people for 5 years as proof of concept then ~350 people for another 5 years at 300k per person on average, that’s a 600 million dollar investment. Sure they could have a larger team, but they also don’t pay testers anything close to 150k year.

JKCalhoun 3y ago

I imagine the Vision Pro is more like the Newton of the 21st Century. (Or perhaps the Pippin?) I feel like Apple was double-dared into developing Vision Pro. Back when there was a weird collective craze for VR: Oculus Rift, Ready Player One, Nintendo, Facebook paying $2B... "WTF is going on?" asks Apple. Imagine then having spent years and billions of your R&D budget only to watch the whole VR craze go the way of the Pet Rock. Still, you kinda have to show something for all that R&D. iPod was the Next Big Thing, iPhone was the Next Big Thing. This VR headset is not.

Tagbert 3y ago
The better analogy would be the Lisa. It’s reasonably powerful but more expensive than they want it to be. The next version will probably lose some features but be less expensive. The Macintosh to the AVP’s Lisa.
SirHound 3y ago
This VR headset isn’t but I think spatial computing will be. IMO this Vision Pro wasn’t meant to be a big seller but a way of taking a research project into an iterative production process. The first iPhone was shit too, same with Apple Watch, and this is far more complex than either. Now it’s time to crank the price/performance/manufacturing.
- JKCalhoun 3y ago
  I guess I don't believe VR-anything will ever be popular.