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Adjusted for inflation, the Mac 128K cost as much as two Vision Pros. $2495 in 1984 dollars, equivalent to $7300 in 2023. It came with only 128k of RAM, as much
by bitwize 3y ago
Adjusted for inflation, the Mac 128K cost as much as two Vision Pros. $2495 in 1984 dollars, equivalent to $7300 in 2023. It came with only 128k of RAM, as much as the Commodore 128, but with a fully bitmapped, high-resolution display and a much more sophisticated OS, leaving less room for applications. It did not come with a programming language; you had to buy third-party software to do anything with it and it could run only one, relatively simple, application at a time. It was the nearest thing to useless. Tech weenies dismissed it as the "Macintoy" and wondered how it would compete against far less expensive, but more programmable, machines like the PC and even the Commodore 128.
And yet, it completely changed how the world computed.
I do not see why the Vision Pro will not follow a similar trajectory, not least simply because it's an Apple product. Even if you sniffed at the first model, subsequent models will sport more powerful CPUs, more memory, better displays, and they will get the APIs and development model right to enable more kinds of applications. Apple is just dipping their toes into the water with this initial product much like they did with the Mac. Once they roll out more refined products, the difference with the Quest will be as night and day and it will be obvious that once again, Apple has changed how we compute.
- andrewmcwatters 3y agoExcept it’s not 1984 anymore.
- dartos 3y agoIt’s always been 1984
- moomin 3y agoThe thing is, there were people who used the Mac 128K and loved it. They had a use case, and it fit that use case perfectly. The Vision Pro, on the other hand, has a serious returns problem. People are finding that it isn't the usability slam-dunk the iPhone and the Mac were.
- willis936 3y ago>I do not see why the Vision Pro will not follow a similar trajectory Because there wasn't a $350 competitor that had been around for years that did much the same and excelled in some areas. It's an incremental product charging revolutionary prices: sub-orbital trajectory.
- flohofwoe 3y ago> And yet, it completely changed how the world computed. This is really debatable. There have been computers before and after the Mac that were just as influential but much cheaper. Anecdotal of course, but back in the 80s and early 90s a Mac wasn't on my "must have list" at all. Macs were always overpriced and underpowered, and back then only useful for one thing: "desktop publishing". Amigas provided much more bang-for-the-buck, and technology-wise Silicon Graphics workstations were far ahead (at 10x the price of course). The Mac's real influence on mainstream computing might have been that it was an intermediate step to transfer the graphical UI research done at Xerox PARC into MS Windows ;)
- richgreeko222 3y ago[dead]