I7guy
macrumors Westmere
Steve Jobs would t have the foresight to develop such a technologically advanced product. He didn’t even want the iPhone 6, from what I can remember.
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Apple Has Given Up on the Vision Pro After M5 Refresh Flop
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no... not remotely. I have pretty much every VR headset - Rift Kickstarter onwards ( I have 20+ headsets and some vintage one too now ) and the Quest 3 is a toy compared to the AVP.
BUT the quest 3 is great for what it is. But the processor is poor and the passthrough is terrible for the most part. Games are like PS2 at best.
The AVP is capable of amazing graphics now with the M5 but apple need to poke and pay some devs to actually port them. THEN make it half the price...
turbineseaplane
macrumors Penryn
It released over two years ago now (2/1/2024)
It's way past time for optimized apps and more immersive content.
That needed to happen in 2024.
An article on Techspot says Vision Pro returns were higher than any other Apple product. 1% seems low if that's your guess.
They also mention "a few hundred thousand" sold...800,000 seems like more than a few hundred thousand.
Dirk Pieters
macrumors 6502a
I developed my own apps for iPhone and iPad for 10 years or so and wouldn’t touch visionOS with a 10 foot pole. The device is waaaaaay too expensive and does not have enough users to make a profit.
The investment of time and effort in building apps for it just makes no sense. Even if you made that killer visionOS app and sold it for $99, the numbers just aren’t there.
At least iPhones and iPads are out there by the hundreds of millions.
The investment of time and effort in building apps for it just makes no sense. Even if you made that killer visionOS app and sold it for $99, the numbers just aren’t there.
At least iPhones and iPads are out there by the hundreds of millions.
Ok boomer! Just kidding. 😉 I'm in my 50s and I certainly remember the early tech days when many people were developing purely out of passion, when freeware and "shareware" produced some of the most amazing apps. Those good old days are long gone my friend. It isn't that today's developers are greedy. They live in a very different world.
I don't blame developers. I blame Apple. They built this quite amazing piece of hardware and proceeded to shoot in the foot with weak software. But it's not entirely their fault either. VR is a Hollywood fantasy. We've been seeing amazing VR interfaces in movies for decades now. Someone puts on the goggles or glasses and images float around them. They swipe, they reach into something, data is swirling all around them, it looks so futurist and amazing! And that's the rub. People expected something really cool and futurist from the experience and they didn't get it.
Most of Apple's customers are very happy working on a 14" laptop screen or an iPad or even their iPhone. Most Apple customers are not big techies. All of those customers took one look at Vision Pro and didn't care. It wasn't the price that turned them off (although it certainly is prohibitive). It was the lack of functionality, the WHY, that failed to turn them on. Why do I need this? When the iPhone launched, many people found it prohibitively expensive, but they wanted it! I had the first iPhone and people were fascinated by it. I had many people ask me to show it to them, let them play around with it a bit, etc. There was no public fascination with Vision Pro. The entire concept failed to land.
I'm very doubtful that VR headsets will ever take off in a meaningful way. There are many great niche applications for VR, but it'll never go mainstream. VR is far more interesting in the movies than in reality. I definitely think AR glasses will be a thing, but I don't believe they'll replace screens entirely either. We're not going to wear our iPhones as glasses in the future. Many people don't like wearing things on their faces, be it goggles or glasses. Why do so many people who need glasses use contacts? They don't want to wear glasses. So I don't ever see a future where we're all wearing glasses all day instead of carrying phones in our pockets.
The need to define a product by a "killer app" is overstated in my opinion. These are computing platforms and aren't defined by a single killer use.
iPad didn't have a "killer app", Steve listed 7 different things (Browsing, Email, Photos, Video, Music, Games, eBooks) that were already possible on other platforms, but were experienced in a new way on a tablet.
Steve explicitly stated that for the iPhone, "The killer app is making calls", which turned out to be the least important thing about it.
Spatial Computing frees digital content from flat screens - the platform and UX is the killer app. Even windowed 2D apps can be wherever and whatever size you want. Your Mac's content can be wherever and whatever size you want. Spatial home photos and videos are more vivid and emotionally resonant. Immersive videos are jaw-droppingly good and are especially great for sports and concerts. Watching movies and TV is basically like having a private theater where nobody bothers you and you always get the best seat. 3D assets are actually 3D, so you can inspect objects from all sides, get a true sense of scale, and place them in a physical space. It enables whole new gaming experiences, whether native spatial content or streaming from Steamlink.
Yes, it's too big, too expensive, with too few apps, and not a commercial success. But lack of killer app, dead on arrival, end of story? It's Apple's biggest technological breakthrough since the iPhone, hands-down.
I love the creamy, savory smell of claim chowder in the afternoon
Super biased piece.
Selling 600,000 of something is generally considered a success.
The high number of returns is from people buying it to try it and return it. Social media made that clear.
This piece the tech wasn't even usable for a lighter device then two hours later there is a piece about glasses that will use the gesture controls, which is it, was this a wasted effort or was it a platform that just other things are growing from? Or has this site become part of the Apple stock price manipulation ecosystem, that will try to produce volatility in Apple stock at any price.
The iPad (though without being released) was the project that gave birth to the iPhone which developed the tech further to get the tech to a place where the iPad could be a successful product. Vision Pro planted seeds that will benefit other things that will loop back around.
Selling 600,000 of something is generally considered a success.
The high number of returns is from people buying it to try it and return it. Social media made that clear.
This piece the tech wasn't even usable for a lighter device then two hours later there is a piece about glasses that will use the gesture controls, which is it, was this a wasted effort or was it a platform that just other things are growing from? Or has this site become part of the Apple stock price manipulation ecosystem, that will try to produce volatility in Apple stock at any price.
The iPad (though without being released) was the project that gave birth to the iPhone which developed the tech further to get the tech to a place where the iPad could be a successful product. Vision Pro planted seeds that will benefit other things that will loop back around.
jakey rolling
macrumors 65816
😅 Nobody lives in "the community of Vision Pro users."
My gosh, I'm getting flashbacks of comp.sys.os2.advocacy from the late 1990s. Still waiting for OpenDoc and CHRP to deliver on their huge promises.
turbineseaplane
macrumors Penryn
They apparently sold about 6 million iPhone Minis ... and cancelled
I take no credit for that # -- it's from the below link
link of below
Source:
iPhone Mini accounted for about 3% of iPhone sales https://9to5mac.com/2022/04/21/cirp-iphone-13-best-selling-l...
iPhones sell about 200 million units per year https://www.demandsage.com/iphone-user-statistics/
200 million * 0.03 = 6 million iPhone Minis per year
Dirk Pieters
macrumors 6502a
You make it sound like trying to make a living off software is a bad thing. I’m in my 50s and in the peak app/AppStore days I saw a lot of developers leaving payroll jobs (often in Windows environments) to try and make a living off their own apps and the AppStore.
Building apps “for the fun of it” isn’t going to cut it if you have a family and mortgage to pay. In the end, you need some sort of income to pay the bills. The bank doesn’t accept passion and fun as payment, I’m afraid.
I have seen developers tweaking their apps without end, making everything pixel perfect, full of pride, only to resume a payroll job because the income wasn’t there.
Even a stunningly crafted app needs a bit of luck to be discovered amongst hundreds of thousands of other apps in the AppStore. Then you need some luck that Apple doesn’t pick up on your idea and Sherlocks your app and you need to deal with others who see your successful app, copy it and give it away for free.
And that was in the iPhone/iPad business, a market of hundreds of millions of devices.
Keeping all of the above in mind, it’s no wonder why almost no developer wants to invest time in visionOS. Heck, most devs I knew were done with apps even before Apple Watch came along.
So, it’s not about greed but it’s more about realism.
skaertus
macrumors 601
I have no idea how supposedly great decision-makers in charge of a $4 trillion dollar company thought that a $3,500 clunky and uncomfortable device, with a 2-hour battery life, and which could not make use of the existing ecosystem of apps, would be a good idea and would unleash a whole new category of products.
Yet none of this resonates with the public. That's the bottom line. Nothing you've said is wrong and every point you made is definitely a cool feature, but people just aren't interested. Maybe they'll be more interested when the device itself is a better form factor (ie: glasses), or maybe they really just don't care?
Most people aren't techies and are more than satisfied with a laptop screen for what they do (emails, surfing the web, etc). Most people aren't manipulating 3D objects. Unless you live alone, you probably want to share an entertainment experience, and you certainly don't need all the spatial computing nonsense for the product to be an amazing private theater. Personally, I think that's the product. Get rid of all the spatial computing hardware, slim it down, and make it an amazing remote wireless display that connects to other devices for content consumption.
Dirk Pieters
macrumors 6502a
I think visionOS has tremendous value. It’s just used (for now) on a weird/heavy/expensive device. I don’t think that investment is lost.
turbineseaplane
macrumors Penryn
If the leaks are correct, we can blame one Timothy Donald Cook for forcing it out the door against internal opposition.
"Product Guy" he is not.
jakey rolling
macrumors 65816
It's not even that it is necessarily a "fantasy" per se. Nowadays (and probably for the past at least 15 years), those VR interfaces would be quite feasible to build. The main reason they don't exist today simply because they are just.. well.. really, really stupid. Nobody in the real world wants to have to walk down a hall of virtual filing cabinets and swipe open a drawer to retrieve a file that they are looking for. Two minutes of thinking about the task you're trying to accomplish in those interfaces and it becomes clear to anybody that they do nothing to make life easier and just add work to what are already pretty simple tasks.
macduke
macrumors G5
And people told me I was a fool. This thing had no shot at this price with a laundry list of compromises.
Apple should do what I suggested in the past: Either wait until the future tech is ready to have smart glasses that connect to your iPhone, or right now make a lightweight headset with an R chip only. Keep the price around $999-1499. No battery. No external stupid eye display. It runs power and compute/graphics off of whatever device it's plugged into, such as an iPhone Pro or Mac. Maybe that would require Thunderbolt to be added to the iPhone Pro, not sure.
I'd love to have something like this for travel, to watch movies on my iPhone, and to have multiple displays for my Mac. Probably still not mass market, but it would sell a lot better and be a really useful device for many of us.
Apple should do what I suggested in the past: Either wait until the future tech is ready to have smart glasses that connect to your iPhone, or right now make a lightweight headset with an R chip only. Keep the price around $999-1499. No battery. No external stupid eye display. It runs power and compute/graphics off of whatever device it's plugged into, such as an iPhone Pro or Mac. Maybe that would require Thunderbolt to be added to the iPhone Pro, not sure.
I'd love to have something like this for travel, to watch movies on my iPhone, and to have multiple displays for my Mac. Probably still not mass market, but it would sell a lot better and be a really useful device for many of us.
I have had my AVP from the day it was launched and it is my favorite tech possession. I use it every day for work. The ultra wide display is incredible and once I started using it it is hard for me to go back to using a laptop screen. The spacial video content is fun and it is also great for watching movies.
The new head strap is much more comfortable than the original one.
I think the high price is probably what led to low sales. If Apple removed the front screen and made a somewhat smaller, lighter, and much less expensive version. I think it would do well.
The new head strap is much more comfortable than the original one.
I think the high price is probably what led to low sales. If Apple removed the front screen and made a somewhat smaller, lighter, and much less expensive version. I think it would do well.
jakey rolling
macrumors 65816
Only if the break-even point for the R&D that goes into the thing is substantially lower than that number. And also only if you're living in a vacuum and not relying on critical mass adoption to spur third-party support.
Context matters, and this isn't a startup and it isn't a stand-alone appliance.
I guess that would mean that the high number of purchases in the first place were also from people buying it to try it and then return it. 🤷♂️
jakey rolling
macrumors 65816
Same rumor mill everyone else is following, so really no. I would say, though, that if Apple indeed is seeing a "higher than normal" return rate on the thing, it is going to be substantially higher than 1%.
jakey rolling
macrumors 65816
While not the same thing, it would be good to remember that 3D televisions and monitors were the latest big thing and there actually was a lot of 3D content being made for them. And some people loved it, just as some people love VR headsets and the AVP. The problem, though, was that far, far more people hated it.
It was spectacularly half-baked. As cool as the software aspect was, anyone should have been able to see that no one wants to put something giant, heavy, and clunky on their head for any period of time. The design also lacked Apple's typical polish, it was not particularly easy to try, and it was very expensive. Apple should have recognized the promise in the internal software and kept reworking the hardware until it ended up with something that a person would want to wear.