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All those dumb videos and articles remind me of the iPhone Launch (Steve Ballmer had something to say about the phone back then), then the iPad and afterwards the Watch. And in all segments Apple now has one of if not the best product available.
I don’t think people have a clue what the vision pro is. The price isn’t huge for what it does, considering I can buy a Magic Leap 2 for the same price. This is not a 500$ toy Headset to play games.
So what does it do? Right now it's just a very expensive solution looking for a problem.
Agreed, I want to understand the purpose of this but it just does not make any sense given the pretty wild asking price. What exactly is the purpose? Is it the integration with other Apple products that is supposed to be the big selling point?
It just strikes me as a very expensive way to do things you can already do on other devices, though maybe I am just missing something here.
Being charitable, I still consider it to be a dev kit for a device that Apple are still working out. They recognise that AR is a future, but they can only stake their claim in that future if they do the rn'd right now.
And that's what Vision Pro is.
Apple don't really know what it is in the same way that they never could have predicted the popularity of the iPhone. They've put the hardware out there in the world, and are waiting for the devs to show them what it can do, and the early adopting customers to show them what they want it to do.
One thing that does seem clear to me though is that they're banking on it being the Mac replacement that's running an OS that's as locked down as iOS. It seems that to Apple people haven't taken the iPad in the same way they have Mac because the screen is smaller, therefore, offer a functionally unlimited screen and that's a winner, right? Except the screen size is only one factor. The major factor (certainly to me) is how relatively locked down iPadOS is compared to macOS, and how you have to jump through hoops to do things on an iPad that are incredibly simple on a Mac. There's no way that VisionOS is going to be as open as macOS, so it'll only ever be a companion to a Mac.
Apple will have hard time repeating success of iPhone or iPad. Why? Because they have shown to their partners and developers how much of a bully they are. General computing device needs software support and nobody is going to help Apple create another ecosystem where they can be abused. Notice that there's not even an official YouTube app for AVP and Apple responded to this by allowing third party one while those are still big no-no on iPhone. This is why the only success they can achieve these days are accessories to their walled garden - Apple Watch and AirPods.
The other issue with Apple Vision Pro is that Apple has relied on bringing high-end features in already established space to a bigger market by convincing people they need them. This lets them get into a pricing sweet spot where economy of scale makes manufacturing cheaper but is not that out of reach for relatively wealthy customers (see size of Apple SoCs compared to Qualcomm). With VR there is neither an established space nor did they drive the price low enough. This makes AVP dead on arrival when considering the previous point I made.