This is gonna flop harder than Google Lens. It’s an enthusiast, professional product, with a professional price, but with features aimed at your mainstream average user audience, it’s just so ill conceived it’s barely believable that it came from Apple.
Everything about it is wrong, the price, the presentation, the price, the battery setup, the price, the feature set and did I mention the price?!
It will get an initial Apple boom but it will die off. They tried hard at the end to sell the value but it didn’t land, it’s a phone, a Mac, a TV blah blah blah that can do so much more than those, hence the $3500 price tag, only it can’t do more than those, it can do some of those devices tasks with a few extra gimmicks, but costs far more in one hit (we all own those devices already) and loses many of their key features. A TV for example can be watched by a family, it can be hooked up to a game console, it can be used for audio only for the whole room etc. This offers productivity apps like a Mac but without the precision, speed and fine detail of proper tactile controls.
They advertised this all wrong, it was all promotional, conceptual and mock-ups, all focussed on it being slick and polished, but they focused so much on that, that they overlooked the most important thing, a key selling feature, a reason to buy it. We needed clear cut use cases for why we need one, innovative solutions and apps, stuff that makes you think wow I need that. Instead we got a half an hour presentation that told me I could use messages or safari on it, something I could do much quicker, easier, more conveniently and less obtrusive on my day to day life by using my phone/Mac/iPad.
Your hands being traced by cameras is not a precise control system, it’s Microsoft Kinect all over again, they did this same pitch and it sucked back then too. They also pitched similar features such as virtual rooms and gatherings to watch a TV show or movie in.
I wanted to like this, but they have no argument for why it exists, they tried to shoe horn some selling points that actually landed as poor ideas. For example transfer my Mac screen to this seamlessly… if I’m on my Mac already, why would I want to transfer to this? That’s not convenient. If you wanted to make this truly appealing don’t just demo iOS on it, we all have iOS already. This thing needed a killer feature, they didn’t present us with one.
They came close, with the Disney+ presentation (albeit again all conceptual and not real), and the talk of a huge cinema like screen you could use on a plane or something… they then announced the two hour battery life and buried that idea before it even took off.
The battery on a cable was also dreadful, I’d rather have the weight on my head. It reminded me of old school TVs from decades ago with the remote on a wire.
Sorry guys, this looks like a fun thing to try once, a thing you hope your work gets or your friend gets so you can give it a go, but it’s not a product any standard user who doesn’t have unlimited funds to waste would buy.
