the ipod filled a hole in the market. wtf is this solving for?
this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2024
196 points (93.8% liked)
Technology
59441 readers
3911 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
To be fair, a lot of people were wondering the same thing when the iPad was announced. Now there's like a billion of them out there.
They were wondering that for the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad, the Apple Watch, and AirPods. I’d bet that in 10 years a decent portion of the population will have some sort of headset, Apple or otherwise.
None of those had a point nearly as questionable as this headset thing. The ipod was an advanced mp3 player, which was very popular and common tech at the time. The iPhone was an advanced phone with a large touchscreen, which was rapidly becoming very common at the time. The iPad was an advanced tablet, which was a concept that had already been tried many times by many other companies by then. The air pods are just advanced wireless earbuds, which nobody could ever deny were rapidly becoming more popular.
VR headsets are fundamentally different from all of those, in that there's no technological and social precedence quite like it. People used mp3 players and watches and phones before Apple did something new. Nobody was wondering the point of a better mp3 player that could hold massive amounts of songs. But the history of humankind says nothing about the masses' willingness to walk around in public with big ass high tech ski goggles strapped to their faces. VR is much, much more unknown compared to those.
I get what you’re saying, and regarding people walking around in public wearing a headset, I completely agree. It’ll be a very long time before that happens, if ever.
I disagree that AR won’t become more ubiquitous in people’s lives. Right now, the biggest gripe I see when people talk about Vision Pro is the price. Which was also the case with all the other Apple products I mentioned. The price will come down, it’ll get more features, and it will become more attractive to consumers.
Only time will tell which of us will be right.
load more comments
(1 replies)
If you have a computer space with multiple monitors with various equipment interfacing with it cluttering up a desk at your home, imagine all of that just completely gone, cleaned up, with nothing there but a recliner and a headset that can even go with you.
I think this is the value proposition. The price is too high for me, but I don’t think there’s anything to be confused about. The smart watch and iPad took more for me to wrap my head around than this.
When they get it down to rad sunglasses I’ll wear them everywhere.
I love my Quest headset, but I haven’t turned it on in 6 months. I don’t have time to be isolated like that without asking other people to make sacrifices for me so I can have that time.
I think the tech will be important in the future. I could be wrong, but when it shrinks down and becomes easy to remove isolation, I think people will want it.
People understood what the iPhone was about immediately. Heck, they knew before it was even announced.
Same for the Apple Watch…ish. People didn't know exactly what area it would end up focusing on, but the idea of getting and responding briefly to notifications without getting your phone out has always been appealing.
AirPods people have, again, always understood the appeal of. People are/were just angry at the option of using wired headphones being taken away.
I mean, yeah, you can find people who believed in them. But the general consensus around all those products was they are too expensive, don’t offer any meaningful upgrades over current tech, or are just useless and no one will want them.
I’ve been reading MacRumours forums since before the iPhone launch and it’s always the same thing regarding new products. Without using them, people can have an hard time seeing the positives. I think that issue is even bigger now with the Vision Pro.
Your confusion probably relates to your idea that people dislike the cost of Vision Pro, as opposed to any actual problems with the product. All those other products were expensive versions of things that existed already that people used.
VR has existed for 40 years (remember Tron?). The reason it never took off is because the headset sucks and gives you a headache after an hour. That's basically it. People will buy most anything, but a headache is pushing it.
load more comments
(6 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
no, they werent. the ipad replaced the netbooks everyone wsa using until tablets became viable. again, an actual use case for a product.
theyve been pushing these headsets for years now, and theyve gained little traction and not solved any of the common problems.
anyone who thinks this is will some popular thing everyone will be doing is smokin the reefer, or just not paying attention
do you seriously think retail consumers are the demographic Apple is trying to capture right now?
talk to some creative professionals & craftsmen. my company used to work with hololens on a regular basis but there way too much jank in how it performed in a live setting. If the Vision Pro provides even the same level of utility but manages to make live object rendering & tracking consistent and reliable, they’re going to sell truckloads. Hollywood alone has probably 100 different ways to use this tech on set to slim creative workflows and save time (and therefore money). a $5000 headset is practically a rounding error when your principals cost 10x that per hour.
How is retail not their demographic? All the marketing for this thing has people sitting on the couch, watching movies, viewing their children's photos in 3D, relaxation and meditation, taking photos with the headset on at a kids birthday, playing NBA 2K24, browsing news, spacial audio. Even the work stuff is pushing things like FaceTime and virtual screens. If retail consumers aren't their demographic someone should let the marketing department know
load more comments
(1 replies)
nope, i think this will sellout to their core audience, the 1%s. its just funny many people think they are part of that number.
but my point is, this isnt a mass market device. its not a new ipad or iphone... this is an imac. a niche product for their niche audience.
even your example is hardcore niche and no where near an actual, large scale adoption
why would it need to be a massive immediate retail success?
moreover, why do you seem so irritated that you might not be the target audience here?
Reddit clowned soooo hard on the iPad when it was launched.
load more comments
(3 replies)
Monitors. It's not there yet but imagine a world where you have like 8, 30-inch, 4k monitors in a giant grid and it costs like $600. That's the endgame here. Get VR tech to the point where it's better than buying physical displays for general productivity.
the use cases ive seen would never use this, like 911. having run a 911 center, this product would never be implemented despite the 8 giant monitors at each station.
this is just an incredibly niche product, with very niche uses.. and realistically its a toy that might be also used by some very specific industries.
Why not? it's a lot more space efficient; it's a lot more power efficient. The only thing holding it back is cost and comfort. I'm a developer rocking 4 monitors standard for work and I can absolutely imagine a world where I just have a desk, a keyboard, and a headset.
its about use case. in a 911 center, for example, all people need immediate access to all information in the room... often personnel not sitting at that station it is a non-static environment for a plural audience.
and cost is not really an issue anymore. giant, flat screens are Dirt cheap. this will never, ever be cheaper than the equivalent. they have new monitor tech rolling out that is literally like wallpaper.
i just cannot envision a generic use case that would make it popular
In 911 centers does anyone use a headset for answering calls or are all calls only on loud speakers?
AR/VR could work the same. You have your private view screen just like you have your headset. When you press a button, your view becomes public on a large standard display that anyone can see just like when you press a button to switch from headset to loud speaker.
load more comments
(5 replies)
I don’t understand this. Using something like this would give people more immediate access to all the information in the room and increase the amount of information they have access to. Your vision isn’t obscured with this. That’s why they’re calling it a “spatial computer”.
load more comments
(4 replies)
Though in that case, I'd rather have these virtual displays driven by my PC, not some bs apple ecosystem.
And their resolution and size are arbitrary. Those have meaning in the physical world because they are physical objects that need to have dimensions and must fit those pixels within that space. For virtual displays, it's only limited by how much of your field of view would you like to dedicate to each display and how high is the resolution of your headset.
And this is only really scratching at the surface of what AR might be capable of. Why use virtual displays when windows could be displayed floating without a display? Why use windows when UI elements could be floating on their own? Why show a screen playing a video when you could render the video as a semi-transparent 3d scene happening around the viewer (other than the obvious "because it's in video format, not 3d)?
That said, I'll wait for someone else to do it since apple likes to take good ideas and simplify them down to the point of frustration.
load more comments
(2 replies)
From what randos on the net have said the next closest headset that doesn't require a computer to operate costs $5k+ so from an enterprise standpoint they could more cost efficient there. So apparently it might appeal to the enterprise market.
I have seen much dumber, much more expensive tech in the wild in offices.
If it lives up to the hype, it could replace 2-3 desktop monitors (or convince some executives it can, anyway). It's about the same price as two Apple Studio Displays. I've seen offices with very expensive standard equipment. $3500 per employee isn't all that much to begin with if it's legitimately useful.
load more comments
(5 replies)
The best explanation I've seen is it would be nice on airplanes so you can watch movies and not have to awkwardly scrub past everything that might offend the toddlers behind you.
load more comments
(3 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
Okey, so Apple would have to make client apps to those services by themselfs... Oops! All proprietary.
Or, a web browser....
Or iOS compatibility. But every layer of software stack is making every app less capable for hardware specific functions.
I wonder if Apple's continued 30% crusade is a factor.
This is just businesses slowly shrinking back to their actual valuation. No one's shelling out a thirty percent gratituity just to be involved with very expensive vr.
I’d guess it’s mostly just a low volume set of use cases. So few people are on iVision (my new name for this) that it doesn’t make sense to devote development time to it.
Same problem the windows phones had
load more comments
(4 replies)
Pretty much every other platform charges 30% too. Steam? 30% Xbox? 30% PlayStation? 30% Google Play? 30% Samsung Galaxy Store? 30% YouTube Ad Revenue? 45%!
The only one that doesn’t is Epic, which charges 12% and recently it came out that they were struggling to make the store profitable.
So, not sure why Apple gets singled out here.
Why bother with making any apps these days when you can just build a web app and have it work across platforms.
Because they almost always universally suck across platforms. Only exception I've seen thus far is Figma.
~~Figma balls~~
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(2 replies)
You could just load them in The web app anyways. It wouldn't make sense for them to put dev resources on building an app for an unproven platform.
Why bother putting in the effort of developing and testing an app for a totally new platform that Tim Apple and 3 other people will use?
As a practical matter all they have to do is not proactively block their iPad apps from being available, which is the default.
Literally zero effort: Their iPad app is available for the Vision Pro and works perfectly fine.
Minor effort: Block the iPad app from being available.
Extra effort: make a specialized visionOS app that takes advantage of additional hardware features.
makes plenty of business sense to wait until millions have shipped and yet before competition eats their lunch. what about steam? open brush? what killer app would you wait for?
For now
We’ll see how it goes if the device sell well.
"Meta may also be unavailable"
That's soooooo shocking /s
Nice of Google to let us know we can just use Safari with Adblock, SponsorBlock, DeArrow and Vinegar to have a better experience than with their app.
Is that Dave2D out of focus?
Big whoop
view more: next ›