It's unclear whether you are misusing Vision Pro to mean the entire category of AR/VR headsets, or the specific model Apple launched this year.
> unlikely to succeed or at least succeed culturally
I think by success you mean "be a $10bn business" (a quarter as big as Apple's wearables business today), and for Apple, success might mean something very different.
> The reality is, this is a covid product and covid is over.
What do you mean by this? Certainly you can't mean that Apple mistakenly designed this product for the COVID era, given its history?
Apple acquired Peter Meier's AR company in 2015, and recruited Mike Rockwell from Dolby in the same year to lead the group working on the headset.[^1] In 2017 they recruited the head of AR from NASA's Jet Propulsion lab.[^2]
Apple in fact appears to have delayed the project in 2019[^3] because Jony Ive pushed Rockwell and his team to build a standalone device, not one with compute offloaded to an external processing unit.
This product had been under active development for nearly three years by the time COVID hit (Fletcher Rothkopf appears to have started on the project in January 2016 according to his LinkedIn), so what functionality do you think is linked to COVID? Literally everything shipping in VisionOS is standard ecosystem stuff for Apple.
> Regardless of price (outside being extremely cheap) I don't see people even dropping $1500 on this thing.
You mean this specific device? Or the category in general?
> I don't have a single person in my life that has used a VR headset for anything more than beatsaber and the occasional movie.
Laaaadiesssss annddddd gentleeeeeemennnnnnnn
In the red corner, doing what they do best… Apple Inc.! Hits selected from their homepage's top-level navigation… Macintosh ($bn business)! iPad ($bn business)! iPhone ($bn business)! Watch ($bn business)! AirPods ($bn business)! TV & Home ($bn business)!
And in the blue corner, enabling a hasty generalization about the future of a product category based on usage of present day technology … "everyone cglan knows!" Track record of predicting $bn businesses through word or deed… [TBD]!
> They're sweaty, heavy, and they're just isolating to wear for long periods of time, along with various other edge cases like glasses and eye strain.
Literally none of this is grounds to dismiss an entire product category (especially given that Apple has largely solved the "glasses" edge case).
> There's already a pretty big movement to limit screen time and cut down on technology
I must not have noticed that trend in the quarterly results of any consumer electronics company I track. (I did, however, notice the screenless Humane Pin thing self-destruct.) Do you believe that this trend you have noticed is a) likely to constrain the sales of a $3,500 "Pro" device, b) likely to overall dampen enthusiasm for the category over the course of the next decade, and finally c) any more worthwhile to talk about than the inane claptrap about your friends and family being oracles of a new market?
> I could see something like the ray ban meta glasses taking off, especially with an enhanced siri and some AR.
Wait so you are dismissing the entire category based on your friends not using AR/VR? Christ. Good thing Apple, Meta, Sony, and the other manufacturers shipping millions of a nascent product category can just copy your winning combination of "something like the ray ban meta glasses" with "an enhanced siri" (?) and "some AR" (???). Coming right up!
> But the vision pro and VR in general feels like a form of nerd sniping that the general public literally doesn't care about other than randomly using it at parties.
I have used a lot of AR and VR devices, including Vision Pro. I do not use any devices regularly (more than once per month), but it is completely self-evident that such devices have the potential to be UX breakthroughs of similar ilk to modern smartphone / tablets.
I would be betting on Apple, Meta, and all the other hardware manufacturers here – not your friends.
I know if I like the taste of a new dish without being a great chef. And so can people know if they (and their friends) will buy and use a $3k - or $1.5k - VR headset.
> And so can people know if they (and their friends) will buy and use a $3k - or $1.5k - VR headset.
This is not the claim being made by the parent I responded to. Right out of the gate, OP said:
> I told my friends that the vision pro was unlikely to succeed or at least succeed culturally.
I.e. OP is specifically making a general claim about this product category, based on the usage habits of friends who are all - I would wager - using hokey Oculus/Vive-type hardware, and not Vision Pro.
It's the same rhetoric people were probably saying on alt.hackers in 1995 about paper film vs. digital cameras, and it's specious reasoning.
Happy to skinny my reply down to simpler words for you, just in case you're genuinely here to join substantive discussion of technical topics, and simply suck at it:
1. Why do you think Vision Pro is a COVID product?
2. Why do you think your friends' usage patterns for legacy AR/VR devices is a useful indicator of the eventual popularity of this product category?
3. Do you have any data to substantiate your claim that people are cutting down on screen time to the detriment of shipping hardware SKUs?
> unlikely to succeed or at least succeed culturally
I think by success you mean "be a $10bn business" (a quarter as big as Apple's wearables business today), and for Apple, success might mean something very different.
> The reality is, this is a covid product and covid is over.
What do you mean by this? Certainly you can't mean that Apple mistakenly designed this product for the COVID era, given its history?
Apple acquired Peter Meier's AR company in 2015, and recruited Mike Rockwell from Dolby in the same year to lead the group working on the headset.[^1] In 2017 they recruited the head of AR from NASA's Jet Propulsion lab.[^2]
Apple in fact appears to have delayed the project in 2019[^3] because Jony Ive pushed Rockwell and his team to build a standalone device, not one with compute offloaded to an external processing unit.
This product had been under active development for nearly three years by the time COVID hit (Fletcher Rothkopf appears to have started on the project in January 2016 according to his LinkedIn), so what functionality do you think is linked to COVID? Literally everything shipping in VisionOS is standard ecosystem stuff for Apple.
> Regardless of price (outside being extremely cheap) I don't see people even dropping $1500 on this thing.
You mean this specific device? Or the category in general?
> I don't have a single person in my life that has used a VR headset for anything more than beatsaber and the occasional movie.
Laaaadiesssss annddddd gentleeeeeemennnnnnnn
In the red corner, doing what they do best… Apple Inc.! Hits selected from their homepage's top-level navigation… Macintosh ($bn business)! iPad ($bn business)! iPhone ($bn business)! Watch ($bn business)! AirPods ($bn business)! TV & Home ($bn business)!
And in the blue corner, enabling a hasty generalization about the future of a product category based on usage of present day technology … "everyone cglan knows!" Track record of predicting $bn businesses through word or deed… [TBD]!
> They're sweaty, heavy, and they're just isolating to wear for long periods of time, along with various other edge cases like glasses and eye strain.
Literally none of this is grounds to dismiss an entire product category (especially given that Apple has largely solved the "glasses" edge case).
> There's already a pretty big movement to limit screen time and cut down on technology
I must not have noticed that trend in the quarterly results of any consumer electronics company I track. (I did, however, notice the screenless Humane Pin thing self-destruct.) Do you believe that this trend you have noticed is a) likely to constrain the sales of a $3,500 "Pro" device, b) likely to overall dampen enthusiasm for the category over the course of the next decade, and finally c) any more worthwhile to talk about than the inane claptrap about your friends and family being oracles of a new market?
> I could see something like the ray ban meta glasses taking off, especially with an enhanced siri and some AR.
Wait so you are dismissing the entire category based on your friends not using AR/VR? Christ. Good thing Apple, Meta, Sony, and the other manufacturers shipping millions of a nascent product category can just copy your winning combination of "something like the ray ban meta glasses" with "an enhanced siri" (?) and "some AR" (???). Coming right up!
> But the vision pro and VR in general feels like a form of nerd sniping that the general public literally doesn't care about other than randomly using it at parties.
I have used a lot of AR and VR devices, including Vision Pro. I do not use any devices regularly (more than once per month), but it is completely self-evident that such devices have the potential to be UX breakthroughs of similar ilk to modern smartphone / tablets.
I would be betting on Apple, Meta, and all the other hardware manufacturers here – not your friends.
[^1]: https://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/dolby-vp-mike-rockwe...
[^2]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-04-24/apple-hir...
[^3]: https://web.archive.org/web/20230509141145/https://www.thein...