The whole thing feels very ... "original xbox" to me. Hear me out.
It was argued that a big part of the original xbox for Microsoft was making sure they had a toehold in the gaming console market because that market had a change of disrupting the personal computer - and if that happened, they wanted to be there for it and have something ready to go.
They did something similar with phones, and we can see how it spectacularly failed - they have zero say or relevance in the massive smartphone market.
I almost feel the Vision Pro is Apple's attempt to put a toe in the water just in case this VR stuff takes off and destroys the smartphone market.
Part of it too is that Apple feels pressure to do something innovative. They made some big bets in the 2000s that paid off very well but a company that has a hit like the iPhone becomes profoundly conservative. The trouble is that there aren't many market opportunities bigger than smartphones, there's a possible iCar and an iHouse and that's about it.
Apple's worst fear might be being successful as a niche product: what if every seat of Dassault 3Dexperience ends up with an Apple Vision Pro? Apple might be left with the maintenance burden forever but no real prospects for a mainstream product.
I wonder if an iTV would sell. All mondern smart tvs are covered in ads and spying. monitors of similar sizes cost 3x to 4x. so to me there might be a market for a non spying iTV with bultin Apple TV for say 1.5x. Or not, not sure enough people care about those issues.
What I could see Apple doing is some kind of "Made for Apple TV" feature that combines eArc, HDMI, etc, and makes the TV turn into a "dumb TV" for the Apple TV when it is connected and detected.
> And even something similar embedded in some TVs.
I don't believe there is an "tvOS Embedded". "Apple TV+" is just an app within the OS; there isn't really any similarity between the embedded app and tvOS.
That's not the point. That is what I have now and my tv starts up in a big ugly display with an ad for Google TV and an admonition to enable it.
I've read online some smart tvs will complain, often, to please connect them.
I'd like a tv that works for me, not for the tv manufacturer.
It's also got a remote with way too many buttons like "Netflix" "Disney+" etc. Touch them by accident and it immediately goes to "setup your tv account"
to be honest, even AppleTV has per app ads I wish I could turn off. Whatever app is highlighted gets to show ads on the top half of the screen. I'd prefer no ads unless I launch the app
If that’s the case for you, I’d recommend putting other apps in your top row.
I have Plex, Podcasts, Soma FM, VLC, and Settings in my top row. None of them show me ads; I get to see what I’m in the middle of watching or listening to and jump directly to that content if I want.
Settings is the outlier, as I like to check the battery status of my remote somewhat often, but again, no ads for any of the apps I listed.
What I do is buy a smart TV, never connect it to the network (thus making it a dumb TV), and plug an Apple TV (or other devices) into it. So far, this has worked - I haven't seen any ads from the TV itself (the apps running on the Apple TV are another story), and it can't phone home about what I'm watching or otherwise doing with the TV.
> and it can't phone home about what I'm watching or otherwise doing with the TV
Are you sure?
The old idea of giving TVs built-in cellular backup connection is probably still too risky/expensive - dealing with people extracting and repurposing the SIM card with a free (for them) data plan is a hassle. But what about eSIM?
Why bother with an esim, when you can use something like Amazon Sidewalk, just use whatever nearby Echo or other device to send whatever small data packets
Intriguing and possible I suppose; Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you.
However, I imagine the numbers would show it's unnecessary these days. My humble estimation is that most people, at least in the developed world, connect the TV to wifi for the convenience if available.
Mark my words: one of these days, there will be a huge national security scandal involving data stolen from a SCIF, possibly with loss of life as a consequence, and it'll turn out there wasn't any intelligence op or treason involved - just adtech fuckery getting out of hand. Think disposable microphone and eSIM in a popcorn bag, sending telemetry to a publicly-readable S3 bucket, or something, because it's superbowl and they HAVE TO know if you're watching.
10 years ago I thought Apple would fail if they tried it because they'd have a chauvinistic attitude about having HDMI or any other ports that aren't Ethernet. (You can't plug your phonograph into an iPod) For that matter I'd expect them to have a chauvinistic attitude about connecting to my home theater.
Back then you were just going to have to deal with the rubbish cable box but I think Apple wasn't going to stand for it.
Today Blu Ray seems to be on the way out and so is the cable box (now we have the spectacle of seemingly competitive vMVPDs that are all priced the same within a few dollars), it now is going to be a fight over game consoles.
TVs though have a serious race to the bottom and the TV with an Amazon Fire TV built in is going to be attractive to a lot of people.
(Also already Apple makes a "TV" removes the tuner and replaces the HDMI ports w/ something else and calls it a "monitor" and charges 5x. No way are they going to cannibalize that market to sell something that only costs 1.5x)
I think a problem with TVs for Apple is that they’d be under pressure to build them in a zillion different sizes. That’s not in their DNA.
A good beamer might be more fitting for them; they would only have to build them in ‘small’, ‘medium’ and ‘large’.
In either case, like you I’m not sure the market is large enough for a company of Apple’s size and DNA (it’s unlikely that they’ll try to find not one huge next big hit, but lots and lots of smaller ones. They’re not Ikea)
> I wonder if an iTV would sell. All mondern smart tvs are covered in ads and spying.
Probably best to just connect TVs to some box (Apple TV, Roku, etc) via plain HDMI and leave it that. There's no technical reason to connect TVs to an IP directly anymore IMHO: what would that actually provide over and above what you get with some box/stick?
I like wall-mounting TVs but it sure is a mess to have a power cable and two or three HDMI cables and a composite cable (got a VCR, rubbish Denon receiver won't convert composite to HDMI) and an Ethernet cable and who knows what else hanging below it.
Now that I think about it it wouldn't be hard to cut a few holes and route the cables through the wall and have them come out in a spot that's not too conspicuous but who's going to do that?
People who believe in aesthetics uber alles (Apple fans?) might appreciate a TV that has just a power cable and connects through WiFi but you could mostly accomplish that with the right kind of stick. You might say in 2024 who needs a cable box or Blu Ray but game consoles are still a reason to have HDMI. (Though somehow I think Apple would think plugging a Playstation into an Apple TV is as unthinkable as plugging a phonograph into an iPod.)
> Apple might be left with the maintenance burden forever but no real prospects for a mainstream product.
This seems unlikely. Apple has not hesitated in the past to exit market segments they felt did not suit them. To name a few: servers, displays, routers.
Actually, I find airpods to be very usable as bluetooth earbuds for all kinds of devices, these days I mostly use them behind my desktop PC when playing games and they work just fine.
When I pop them out of the case they automatically connect to my PC just like they would an iPhone or other apple device. They won't automatically switch to the PC like they would for apple devices but they also won't just switch from the PC so I don't mind.
Taking them out doesn't pause media but the play/pause controls do work.
I do think that most people without an iPhone won't buy them so they're essentially still bought as iPhone accessories, but they don't have to be!
I agree about the watch though, that's definitely an iPhone accessory.
I think the last few years have pretty conclusively proven that there is no VR train to miss. It remains mainly a novelty (with some niche uses) and none of its fundamental issues have been resolved.
Microsoft failed to disrupt the smartphone market because they tried doing it at a period of all time low Microsoft sentiment, especially in the developer community. If they tried it again today, it might actually work.
Apple putting a toe in the water is roughly equivalent to Microsoft's HoloLens effort. I wouldn't compare it to Xbox or even the Windows Phone. Ironically Apple might fail here because they're developer relations isn't exactly great right now and they might lose this the same way Microsoft lost mobile.
I could imagine that might have been why it came about originally but that line of thinking doesn't seem to justify the R&D spend alone. I'd imagine they have some belief in it being able to make new business of its own.
If I'm not mistaken this is the first properly post-Steve product?
> If I'm not mistaken this is the first properly post-Steve product?
Jobs publicly bemoaned the lack of, and presumably thought a lot about, "headphones for video". I think it's a safe bet that he set the stage for Apple Vision (and probably sketched out a 50 year plan) with current Apple leaders before his death.
> "You know, the fundamental problem here is that headphones are a miraculous thing. You put on a pair of headphones, and you get the same experience you get with a great pair of speakers, right?
> "There's no such thing as headphones for video, right? There's not something I can carry with me that I can put on, and it gives me the same experience I get when I'm watching my 50-inch plasma display at home."
Yeah, I honestly hadn't thought about those statements in quite a while. Thanks for bringing them back to mind. It makes me ponder whether they had a very rough, early prototype of an FPV display device at that time, and if so, what that looked like. The interviewer briefly mentions what was available at the time, which Steve calls "lousy", so it could also be that he was more fascinated by the inherent concept.
As is often the case, I'd give a lot for companies such as Apple to be more open with their ancient prototypes once a new device gets launched. Sometimes brands, such as Microsoft[0] in the console field showcase iterative prototypes or even produce full-on documentaries of their history, but rarely for new device categories.
I understand why that's not possible, but still, one can dream.
The Apple watch was 100% post-Steve, conception to delivery [0]. This is definitely the first post-Jony Ive product though. (Rumors are that Ive was against the idea of doing a headset from the start, so it happened either without him, or after he left, depending on when it started.)
Nah, Ive is cited on a bunch of the patents for Vision Pro core technologies, including the first inventor listed on the EyeSight display patent, filed in 2018, 6 years ago:
Like so many Apple things, I thought AirPods were dumb until I got some (as a gift). I'd tried some Logitech wireless earbuds just a couple months before first trying AirPods. Those were dumb. God they sucked.
I've avoided the Watch for that reason. The little conveniences of various Apple-thingies are the sort of stuff you can't un-experience, and then you're stuck buying the damn things forever.
I think about this frequently while using my AirPods. It's annoying that we're all becoming accustomed to spending anywhere from like $130 to $250 on in-ear headphones that aren't guaranteed a particularly long lifespan, to replace wired headphones that an acceptable quality pair can be had for like $15.
But I'll be damned if the AirPods experience isn't far more convenient, and has me using them more than I ever did with wired headphones because they're so quick and easy to use. I can pop one in an ear and immediately I'm listening to a podcast while doing laundry. No cord tethering my head to my pocket, nothing to get snagged on a doorknob, it just works. When I pull one out of my ear it pauses, and resumes when I put it back in. When you only have one AirPod in, it knows and automatically converts the audio stream to mono so you still hear everything.
Still would be nice to have the 3.5mm jack back, but I certainly haven't felt a desire to go back to wired headphones since I got AirPods.
If it makes you feel any better, I think the watch is more of a "pickup or put down" device, especially if you do not usually use a watch. I sometimes wear it religiously, meaning all the time, and sometimes religiously, meaning only for an hour on Sundays and holy days ;).
I got an Apple Watch in 2019, and I don't wear it anymore. It was just another thing that needed to get charged every day, and none of the apps are very useful, and most of them are buggy and poorly supported.
Why is that surprising? I just charge mine while I’m getting ready in the morning and it last all day and does sleep tracking. My Ultra lasts multiple days on a single charge.
- controlling Spotify
- telling time
- monitoring my health stuff
- an easy to wear timer
- getting filtered notifications of things I want to see without grabbing my phone to check
- counting rows for knitting
No way will this tech destroy phones as you know them today. What is going to destroy phones is natural language. Maybe, maybe in the distant future this tech will be mature enough to provide the visual support to a natural language first device.
xBox addressed a very well defined product sector with a couple of big players doing stuff that is well understood. xBox wasn't a toe in the water, they planned a whole strategy around it using known facts about the industry, how people play, what kind of games work, they didn't break much new ground with the xBox. All they had to do was make a compelling, affordable gaming device that had amazing games on it. The rest takes care of itself. Apple Vision Pro is nothing like that. There is no existing market to put your toe in, there are no real competitors, we haven't even found a killer use case for these devices.
No one really knows how these AR/VR devices can fit into everyday life. Currently Apple is working on finding the water to put their toe in. Right now they are at an exclusive oasis when they really need an ocean.
Hard disagree. Phones and computers do text/images/video. Voice input and audio output is a poor substitute for text and not at all a replacement for images/video.
I didn't say there wouldn't be a screen. But natural conversations will be much more fluid and efficient than a keyboard and google search. Having a conversation is so much better for all sorts of applications.
Today's smartphones have to evolve this way, imo. I don't know what the most efficient hardware realization would look like but I imagine it's something that isn't in your pocket most of the time, more of a sleek wearable. It will need to be able to hear and see what you do.
I've been testing Android's dictation stuff while speaking quietly and it works better than I expected. (That is, the mistakes it makes seem to be the same if I were to talk louder; some common repeating misunderstandings, some things where it's thrown off by my accent.) Having the mic close by makes recording a quiet voice much more tractable than hearing it in conversation, we humans tend to stand further apart and mics are better than ears by now.
Not that I'd be advocating this for library study halls!
> No way will this tech destroy phones as you know them today. What is going to destroy phones is natural language.
I'm extremely skeptical of this, just because of the vast number of situations where speaking-out-loud isn't going to be desirable. It'll have a place, for sure, but I think it'll be more of a supplement to our current phone paradigm.
I kind of disagree with this. They made networking and online gaming on consoles finally a thing most home consumers were interested in. Sure, there were some earlier forays into online gaming/networking on previous consoles (SegaNet, for example), but those were generally pretty niche. Sega only included a dial-up adapter by default, while the Xbox shipped with an Ethernet adapter. Shipping the Xbox with Ethernet made networking on the box pretty simple right at the time when people started buying home routers and broadband internet and opened up the console to easy LAN gaming.
Microsoft made Xbox Live a pretty massive feature of the console a year after launch. While Xbox Live launched a year after the console shipped, I'd still say the planning of it and including the Ethernet port was something nobody else in the console gaming world was doing and ended up defining the console gaming future.
A big part of the success of the Xbox (and maybe it's not the Japan destroyer the fanboys wanted it to be) was that they really really let it be its own product, and develop an ecosystem. They not only made it a "PC for your TV" which was widely what it was held as on release, but also expanded the capabilities of what a console was expected to do.
Sadly they also popularized and solidified the "pay to play games online" feature of consoles, vs the "online play is free except for MMOs" that PCs normally have.
Natural language really sucks as a UI because a lot of things can be done faster than when you speak it. Like volume control as a tip of the iceberg example
You can talk today to your phone in natural language. They don't seem very destroyed.
There seems something fairly fundamental about smartphone like devices at the moment in that people want a screen where they can see pictures, text messages and so on. A smartphone is a fairly minimal implementation of that. I don't think people want goggles / glasses stuck on their heads especially, at least I don't, regardless of how advanced the tech is. I mean looking around the cafe I'm in it's roughly 100% of people have smartphones, zero have google glass like things. Although the tech has been with us longer than you might think. I first tried a wearable computer with a small eye level display in the 90s and thought hey cool but they never caught on. https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-pc-goes-readytowear
Mobile phones and VR are different non competing markets. AR might eventually compete with phones once you can wear an AR device all day everywhere you go. AR and VR should be treated as distinct; a good VR headset is bad for most AR usecases and vice versa. Maybe at some distant time there will be hardware capable of doing both really well but not for many years. VR fits into daily life as a social experience and will be obvious once eye, face and full body tracking are included with the headset. Even before that if someone solves the network problems with concurrent users and delivers an experience that handles audio well enough to work with multiple people having conversations within earshot of each other. AR is really just putting screens and overlays everywhere, conversational interfaces will have more and better impact than that.
Making interfaces natural language is like making all buttons touch screen. Versatile, yea, but in practice it can be less efficient than dedicated controls or more tactile interfaces.
Bare in mind I am not anticipating the Google Home level of interaction, I am talking full sophisticated natural language. And there is no reason touch cannot play a role, I'm just saying these devices will be unlike our current phones. I've listed some use cases that I think beat out touch easily elsewhere in the comments.
Natural language is even worse than video for quick content consumption: you can’t quickly skip through content that way the can fast scroll through a blog post.
Natural language in place of other inputs, the command can result in summoning up a video for you, or a blog post to view.
If I am cooking and can hold a whole conversation with my virtual chef,that beats a video though. Talking through ideas at my desk would be great. Talking for navigation while I drive, yes please. Shopping with my headphones on and the device seeing everything I see and making suggestions about deals, recipe options, what's low in your pantry, and so on. I'll take that. I see technology becoming more and more transparent in our life. User interfaces will feel awkward when all you need to do is say "show me a video of cats" and it serves it to your companion screen without ever needing to touch tap any UI. No need to even have a web UI for youtube. Just an API and your device does the rest. It can show you a list of related videos without YouTube themselves providing anything more than the data model.
The cost cutting of not needing sophisticated front ends will be a big driving factor if this is as effective as I think it could be.
I get what you mean and the future you propose really does seem more likely than any other, assuming neuralink doesn't work. However then there's an issue. Apple style on device neural processing seems unlikely for these amounts of constantly on AI capabilites, at least with current hardware, batteries and AI models. So it'll be cloud. Then we'll all be developing natural language apps which run on AWS, paying money constantly to be able o use our own apps developed in our own unpaid time. Though I guess we'll get used to it.
> No way will this tech destroy phones as you know them today.
This device? No, absolutely not. I see it as a speculative play by Apple: release a very capable device with a bare-bones ecosystem at a high price.
"Early adopters" will buy it because that's what they do.
"Influencers" will buy it, because that's what they do. Their social media posts about it will give Apple all the data they need to nail down the size of the potential market.
Finally, developers will buy it, because it's cool tech. We'll tell ourselves that it's an emerging market, and we can get it early. The launch of the iOS App Store spawned a gold rush for app developers; I expect that the launch of the AVP and its visionOS App Store will do the same. The size and profitability of that opportunity will be determined by how well Apple develops and popularizes the product.
This is where I'm at on it. I expect the AVP to be best-in-class in terms of hardware and OS-level integration (though, to be fair, I expect the latter will be limited at first in odd ways, in the grand Apple tradition).
I'll get one. I plan to use it for productivity, and as long as that justifies the cost I'll be happy with it. I'll also work on some minimal apps for visionOS. The purpose there will be to "skill up". If Apple releases a more consumer-focus headset that gains adoption, I'll be in a good position to take advantage of that by selling paid apps that are already mature by the time the general public are getting on the bandwagon.
> What is going to destroy phones is natural language.
Maybe?
We've heard about "wearable computing" and "personal area networks" for decades at this point. While it still feels like something in the near future, the truth of the matter is that for a large segment of the population, it's already here. I already have an iPhone with me whenever I'm away from home, and usually an iPad as well. If I'm going to be away from home for a while, I've got an MBP in my backpack. All of those devices can hand off tasks between each other to an increasingly large degree - it's not uncommon for me to pull out my phone to show someone a website I had open on my laptop before I left home, then pull out my iPad if they're interested in it so they can interact with it more easily. Until recently, I had an Apple Watch surfacing an integrated notification stream from all of the above.
Today, smartphones are the central "wearable computing" device that ties everything together. They act as a hub for a computing experience. There's no guarantee in my mind that it will continue in that role forever. Maybe the hub will end up being the descendant of the AVP. Maybe it will be something more akin to a Humane AI Pin, or a Rabbit R1.
In other words... phones have already destroyed phones. Smartphones are really wearable computing hubs that we just happen to still _call_ "phones", because that's what they used to be. They're very rarely used for telephony, and many other devices are capable of doing so.
> Maybe, maybe in the distant future this tech will be mature enough to provide the visual support to a natural language first device.
My hope is that it ends up being a "spatial" interface that provides a generic interface so it can be used by pretty much anything.
> They're very rarely used for telephony, and many other devices are capable of doing so.
This is a really important distinction. And if you calculate your phone bill by actual minutes used for talking, it's an insane number of dollars per minute.
I'd be completely unsurprised if the amount of "talking on Zoom/Teams/voice chat" is soon to surpass the total number of minutes talking on phones.
But VR has been going on for a while now. I have a VR headset, I use it occasionally and I love it because it allows things that wouldn't be possible in any other platform. But strapping something on my face is not something I'd want to ever use as my main system. It's like a racing wheel, you use it for some games but it doesn't replace a controller so it's just a very niche product.
It’s not about that. It’s about if some new fundamental discovery shatters all barriers leaving VR in an uncontested position of technological supremacy. You know, the arguable position of the “smartphone” which apple leads in.
The transition from the PC/laptop has been brutal to the prior entrenched players. I’m inclined to agree with OP that this is a play that is about more about creating options now. Might be that Apple executes the winner and happily cannibalizes itself but it does not want to be in a position where it is 5 years behind in terms of R&D if another company breaks through first.
I also wonder whether it's an attempt to normalize certain aspects of the form factor to ease people into what Apple sees as the future of this technology.
Namely, I wonder if the tethered battery and lack of dedicated controller exists to prepare people for a future where their headset plugs into an iPhone (or iPad or Mac), which then serves as a battery, co-processor, and input device.
But it isn’t hard to see that people who are constantly glued to their phones scrolling wouldn’t want to just have the screen on their faces instead of holding it. To me it’s the natural evolution of the way we absorb digital info/entertainment
it feels like theyve been doing RnD on VR/AR, bleeding cash, and theyre making a product to "justify" this cash burn to me. That plus shipping a product is the only way you can iterate, and a common mentality in tech companies is "to ship". IMO theyre late to the game, and excited to see if they can offer anything new
It was argued that a big part of the original xbox for Microsoft was making sure they had a toehold in the gaming console market because that market had a change of disrupting the personal computer - and if that happened, they wanted to be there for it and have something ready to go.
They did something similar with phones, and we can see how it spectacularly failed - they have zero say or relevance in the massive smartphone market.
I almost feel the Vision Pro is Apple's attempt to put a toe in the water just in case this VR stuff takes off and destroys the smartphone market.