And they still grew their business... One of the key takeaways I've had from Apple over the years is how Jobs took Wayne Gretzky's famous adage, "Skate to where the puck is going to be," and turned it on its head. They move venues, and get all the players on their turf for the home advantage...
No doubt about that, particularly where they can really lock out the competition with their hardware. Where their services have to compete more freely Apple isn't always that successful. But you're right, this is a hardware first thing so the point stands.
By bringing competitors into the smartphone space, they killed the Blackberry and the PDA. Likewise, by changing the venue to Mixed Reality, they immediately move Meta and Microsoft from the front to the back of the pack... and they grow the whole pie.
If this game had stayed in the VR space for gaming, it would be a limited market. But as someone on Reddit pointed out (I believe it was in the pcmasterrace sub), they now exist in people's minds as the device to match in terms of capabilities and experience, so everyone is going to refocus and redefine what the metaverse is, in a way that disadvantages the bigger competitors like Microsoft and Meta who don't have the consumer electronics competencies that Apple does, which brings us to...
Well, if we put the Apple Kool Aid down we might agree that day 2 following the announcement of a product that isn't yet shipping may be a bit early to proclaim a paradigm shift.
I don't necessarily disagree that AR has tremendous potential, but it remains to be seen if this really puts the competition on the back foot or if Apple's headset receives the same 'yeah, but no' reception like competing products.
Even if AR and computing in a headset is the next big thing, there's no guarantee that Apple will be as strong in this market as it is in the smartphone market. Some here have mentioned the Lisa and the Mac, which were very expensive but set the direction for personal computing and, at least the Mac, were very successful. Apple still almost went broke and Microsoft and boring PC makers won. I'm not saying that's necessarily the trajectory, far from it, I'm just saying even trailblazing innovation doesn't mean you get to keep and own all the benefits. For that we'll have to wait and see.
Either Apple Vision Pro is going to remain a niche product (and all other AR/VR headsets with it), or the interest it sparks in the possibilities of what AR/VR can be, the use cases and developers that find innovative applications for it, such as no-click purchasing e-commerce (just one example), may drive it to be the N.B.T. I think that's going to take the next 20 years to play out, but it is a far easier way to fund the buildout of the metaverse than focusing on the much smaller worlds of gaming and productivity. People want convenience, and they're willing to pay transactional fees to get it even when the alternative is free... that's what iTunes Store's success in the face of Limewire, Kazaa and Napster proved. The holy grail I see is something else entirely, and one that is probably closer to 100 years into the future, so I'm only thinking about that next leap for now, which is why retail makes a huge amount of sense
I don't disagree entirely, but until we actually find that use case that gets people to buy headsets, rather than the incidental uses people may find once they have it, we simply don't know whether the VP fits in the pack or not.
It really depends on what people want to do with these things and then we can talk about whether or not Apple is backing the right horse.
I'm going back to an earlier point I made, which isn't so much directed at you as to the discussion as a whole. People who say this headset will flop and people who say AR/VR is the next big thing can both be right, both be wrong or any combination in between.
I don't think it's sensible to define the success of a product by what it could achieve with speculative future hardware capabilities, but only by what it is. If this is a stepping stone to the future and to a product that will look and feel different and is more affordable than that's great, but it doesn't make the Vision Pro a success. You are completely right that these are valuable products and sometimes you need to just keep going until you get it right.
Personally I don't think this type of glasses will be as transformative as quickly as some think because, at the end of the day, they are still clunky and heavy, you can't really share a movie or watch a game with people, you can't comfortably lounge on the couch (and fall asleep), and while I think having a virtual workspace with lots of screen real estate will be really cool for like a second, the reality of every interaction with your workspace requiring to put on a headset will get very old very quick unless you have a headset that looks like normal glasses or contact lenses.
So we'll see what developers can come up with, particularly once the device gets actually comfortable and affordable (the latter is important because ultimately Apple is trying to position it as a consumer device).
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