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Report: Apple CEO Tim Cook Ordered Headset Launch Despite Designers Wanting to Wait for AR Glasses

I still don't see the point in VR/AR headsets. There's no killer application. A buddy works at Meta/Occulus and wanted to gift us a Quest 2 for free and I politely declined. My wife and I did not see ourselves using it. I don't need to exercise blind and trip over my living room furniture. Our neighbors also got the $1200 HTC Vive a few years ago and that started collecting dust after a couple of weeks. Besides possibly watching a movie in bed without disturbing your partner, I can't think of a need to tune out and ignore the rest of my family. And I certainly wouldn't pay $3000 for Apple's ski goggles.

I am more interested in smart glasses that overlay some health or workout data, map route, terrain info, or weather info, and lens/displays that can adjust to anyone's optical prescription, magnify, reduce glare, and improve nighttime vision. While a headset may be able to accomplish much of the above, I don't like the bulk and weight of a headset and goggles that completely obscure my peripheral vision.
 
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robinp said:
I think the point was that the ‘insane requirements’ was the apple of old. It wasn’t about ‘over designing’. It was about having high aspirations. Perhaps almost impossible to achieve.
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The iPod and iPad would ship as poop in a case to make their deadlines. The third iteration of these products was when they really started to shine.

The original iPhone was horrifically slow. You had the full internet, you just had to wait for the screen to redraw if you scrolled too fast. Software and hardware both had to improve.

People who have been using Macs for ages often don't install the first release of macOS. This isn't a newly acquired behavior, it came from things like one of the 'big cat' dot-zero releases which irrecoverably corrupted external hard disks.

If you want to romanticize early-2000's Apple, you can say that they aggressively tried to avoid complexity and that made their software overall more easily to maintain. They also only had a single platform, however. That Apple would never have released a feature like iCloud Shared Photo Libraries, nor a dozen or so features that led up to it.

robinp said:
Or perhaps the real game changer needs technology that simply doesn’t exist yet. Eg, AR glasses that look like normal glasses are clearly at least a few years off.
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Wearables on your face in public are going to be a no-go for a large portion of the population. That is completely independent of the extremely difficult technical challenges in computational power, in battery life, optics and weight.

They could make a high end brand like Tom Ford look like new years party glasses and I still would likely not wear them in public. Steering the public to wear more watches works because you don't wear a watch on your face.

robinp said:
It seems pressure to ship anything became so great they’ve decided to just go with whatever they’ve got. That doesn’t seem very Apple like.
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We still don't know much of anything other than Apple is working on things here and has been for many years. That much is public (points at ARKit).

If you look at the iPhone however, there's leaks about who will make the screen, about the cut-out, about features of different models, and schematics. That's for a product releasing at the end of September. If Apple was about to make a huge mixed reality headset release, why have there been no real leaks from manufacturing yet?
 
dwaite said:
The iPod and iPad would ship as poop in a case to make their deadlines. The third iteration of these products was when they really started to shine.

The original iPhone was horrifically slow. You had the full internet, you just had to wait for the screen to redraw if you scrolled too fast. Software and hardware both had to improve.
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The iPhone was slow compared to what came after. But it was so far ahead of anything else that called itself a ‘smart’ phone at the time. It was revolutionary. It didn’t feel especially slow to me because what I was used to was some Nokia smartphone that did a load of stuff worse and similarly slowly (eg a pretend web etc)

As I used it for a several months and it became more noticeable that a much faster iPhone would be way better. But that was by no means my first impression.

The point is, they delivered a product that dramatically moved the state of the art forwards. It didn’t need to be perfect to be ready to release. But it did need to be ready to provide a good user experience. One that was better than the competition. The original iPhone did that.

That’s why pretty much every smart phone looks like an evolution of it rather than a Nokia or Blakcberry from 1997.
 
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FriendlyMackle said:
Yes, the a*hole head of the IMAX organization came up with a scheme whereby they could 'sell' the IMAX branding and a facsimile of the technology to be applied in post-production to film producers. So now all across the world there are theaters with crappy(!!!) little(!!!) and dim screens where the showings are labeled as "IMAX." It is horrendous and beyond disappointing.
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Well that sucks but I'm not surprised.

I guess they did a financial calculation that the additional revenue stream was more valuable than the diminished image that may happen to the brand as a whole.
 
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dwaite said:
If you look at the iPhone however, there's leaks about who will make the screen, about the cut-out, about features of different models, and schematics. That's for a product releasing at the end of September. If Apple was about to make a huge mixed reality headset release, why have there been no real leaks from manufacturing yet?
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Because they’re not gonna sell 200M headsets a year.
 
dumastudetto said:
We shouldn't judge this until Apple enters the space.

Apple has completely changed the game almost every time they enter a new product category with a perfectly refined device and cohesive user experience.
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but they haven't released anything completely different since jobs was around (the watch was beginning to be worked on when jobs was around, before someone uses that argument, and even then, neither of them even came up with the idea)
 
I'm sure Apple is keeping a close eye on Meta's experience in this space, which hasn't been good, so far, especially user reaction to Horizon Worlds.

"Over the past few months, generative AI platforms like ChatGPT have dominated tech conversations. Meanwhile, Meta has reportedly had a difficult time keeping users on its virtual reality products."

"According to an internal presentation shared with The Verge last month, Meta’s vice president for VR Mark Rabkin told employees that the three-year-old Quest 2 is struggling with new users."

"Further reporting from The Verge found that users weren’t coming back to Meta’s flagship Horizon Worlds social space, with only one in 10 users returning to the app within a month."


www.axios.com

Meta's metaverse is on the back burner

The company formerly known as Facebook is talking more about AI than the metaverse these days.
www.axios.com www.axios.com
 
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DelayedGratificationGene said:
You’re definitely right in one thing. They said the exact same things about iphone.
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I mean... the iPhone was a conglomeration of things people already had -- cell phone, PDA, portable music device, and digital camera into something that could adapt to the situation. Most people didn't have all four and certainly didn't walk around with all four on their person at once. This is just a VR headset, no frills about it, and presumably doesn't even offer interoperability with other VR headset software. The people who want a VR headset generally already have one even if it's just a piece of cardboard origami, and if they're a Mac user, they probably aren't using it on their Mac. Microsoft can't push through into the market with their former identical product, WMR, and they weren't even the ones who were making them, it was Samsung.​
 
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Snazzy Labs did a good overview of the rumours and how it fits into what exists now.

 
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