Some Apple Employees Seriously Concerned About Mixed-Reality Headset as Announcement Draws Closer

[StupidOpinion]

i still fail to understand the hate for this thing. sure, the gen 1 might suck and be expensive, but you gotta start somewhere, right? gen 1 iphone isn't so great nowadays either.

with enough pixels and accurate colors, you wouldn't need a big and heavy monitor sitting on your desk every again because this headset could be that monitor. this thing is also great for pr0n, simulators (airplane, driving, etc), virtualize seeing the world without the traveling expenses, etc. one the hardware is built, it's the software that gives you endless possibilities.

right now this item might suck and it might still suck 5 years from now, but once it is mature, it will be amazing. eventually it will have 2x 16k screens, 210 field of view, microled, 240hz, etc. it will be amazing. nobody ever reached the moon without building a spacecraft first.

 

[BradPDX]

I see no immediate reason to believe this click-bait flavored report from NYT. Real information from Apple is notoriously difficult to get, and no internal sources are actually named - just the usual talking heads with heavily vested points of view, whining about a price that hasn't been announced, and a nod to long-departed Jony Ive for good measure.

I give this report <50% chance of being true just based upon that pattern alone.

I'm curious what Apple will actually do, but confess I have a hard time figuring out what on earth I'd do with VR gizmos of any kind at any price. Fortunately, that's not my problem to work out.

 

[Glideslope]

1st world Product Release Anxiety.

 

[macduke]

I have also been concerned, and for longer than most here. Many of you guys are just bandwagon doubters, lol. I’ll repeat what I‘ve been saying:

Nobody is going to want to wear a big blocky thing on their head. It needs to look more like a regular pair of glasses. It needs to be stylish.

Nobody is going to spend $3000 for something that overlays map directions and let’s you virtually meet and play probably gimmicky VR versions of mobile games.

Nobody wants to run a wire down their back to a phone or battery pack (that was actually another rumor).

And most importantly nobody wants Apple diverting resources to fix this failing project. Many of us here use our Mac and iPhone to make money. Focus on making those better, Apple! Companies that lose focus tend to go into decline as their core money makers fall off as they can’t keep up with current features in the market and become bug infested.

I’m not sold on the idea that the future of computers are wearable. At least not until you can wear regular glasses that are as powerful as a then-current laptop and allow you to project multiple displays at extremely high resolution (Oculus has this but you have to lean way in close to kinda see things on the virtual screen) so maybe 8K per eye or higher. And work as a virtual keyboard and mouse but even then I don’t know because haptic feedback is important for typing? So at a minimum I don’t see the tech being close to this level for a decade and I don’t see a wearable ever being as fast as a laptop of the same time so most people will still opt for laptops. Just saying there is a reason the keyboard and mouse and desktop environment has existed for like 60 years.

 

[Mr. 123]

I mean how many people are actually going to spend $3000 on this? I buy and sell men like myself everyday but even I’m not that stupid.

Are you a wealthy industrialist and bicyclist by any chance?

 

[blackcrayon]

Yah lost me at "hip-mounted battery."

That can't be right.
That just can't be correct.
No way.

Wireless systems for large VR headsets have had that for a while. It's probably where they need to start if they're going to have M3-like performance without having to strap a laptop battery onto your skull... I don't think it's going to be marketed as a device to put on and step out the door any time soon.

 

[biziclop]

Maybe the headset is the Apple Car – you put in on your head, sit on a chair and think you're driving.

 

[ThisBougieLife]

Just saying there is a reason the keyboard and mouse and desktop environment has existed for like 60 years.

Kinda like how what made the iPad more appealing as a laptop replacement was adding a physical keyboard and mouse/trackpad support. Probably why even though Apple has filed patents for a keyless keyboard, they still have yet to release a laptop with that feature.

But I guess we could end up being blown away at WWDC and wonder how we ever lived without these goggles. We'll see...

 

[sflagel]

Let's not forget that the first iPhone was also half-baked. It did not have 3G, and therefore basically useless, for $ 600 in 2007! But the 3G came around quickly and then it was smooth sailing.

 

[Nicky G]

Considering 99% of the existing VR market is gaming-oriented, and this is simply not Apple's space outside of mobile, I just don't see what they're thinking here, without some real killer apps in mind.

And for $3K, nobody's going to buy this thing for gaming, or move to Apple from PC for VR gaming. Nobody's buying this for their kid to play 3D Minecraft in the living room, certainly when a Quest 2 is a tenth of the price.

Well, The Apple Watch kind of sucked for a good 3 or 4 years, so we'll see where this goes.

 

[easy4lif]

This will make, or break Tim Cook’s legacy.

 

[BGPL]

Buyers of the first generation will be alpha testers for Apple. If employees are talking to the media, then it's hot garbage. Timmy must be seething at these reports. Timmy only cares about two things, Timmy time and sales. If he sells 15 million units of hot garbage, Timmy calls it a success. I wouldn't touch the first generation headset with Timmy's wallet.

 

[bluecoast]

I guess it's just a stake in the sand kinda project. it'll get better.

If I was Apple, I'd be more worried about chat-gpt and their seemingly lack of a proper AI strategy beyond imagining. imaging.

 

[GadgetBen]

Well if it’s just for games then absolutely I would be concerned. I cancelled my pre-order for PlayStation VR2 as there are few games for it.

I also wonder what mass use case there really is for VR right now outside of games. VR is just like Google Glass all over again. Trust me, I was a glasshole.

 

[deconstruct60]

aapl should take a step back and consider if the headset is -
in steve jobs words "insanely great"
before releasing this thing

100% agreed. You reminded me of this quote from the late Steve Jobs. Took this photo at Apple Campus, Cupertino, California. It's still there today!

View attachment 2179201

Steve Jobs also said "Great artists ship". That is pretty much correlated to the quote you have there which is essentially "ship something good and then move on to shipping something better later".

The VR/AR/MX headset has been in gestation for 5-7 years. It is time to piss or get off the pot. Reportedly there was an earlier design path that Ive nixed that had a tethered headset. That essentially pushed the product back until technology could catch up with putting all the environment inference and CPU/GPU/compute tech inside of a reduced sized heaset ( no over the top of head strap because also had strict weight limits). Can keep throwing more and more design constraints at the headset that require yet another '2 year out' technology breakthrough until it just never ships. At 5+ years of gestation there is likely some members of the team that have never shipped an Apple product on that team.


The iPhone shipped with no 'copy/paste'. Didn't really have an app store. ( just browser apps). No 4G cellular. ... there were lots "could have been insanely great" missing features.

The "insanely great" stuff is partially just Jobs 'reality distortion field" (RDF) stuff ('good' features which are spun as 'insanely great'). There is a balance of some deferred and some 'gotta have' features have to make to do a good design.


How much of the $3K price point comes out of components that have high utility versus the "Gold Apple Watch" case version of "insanely great" ( mainly just conspicuous consumption versus real user utility. ) is the bigger concern.

 

[AppleFanBoyForever]

No one can! But The market research was done with AirPower and it was killed before even being released to the consumer market.

Apple Officially Cancels AirPower

Apple today canceled AirPower, the charging mat that it first announced in 2017, because of an inability to meet its high standards for hardware,...

www.macrumors.com

Then Tesla engineers nailed it.

 

[marinersaptcomplex]

People are still wary and skeptical of being "plugged in" in a way that these types of devices require. And so am I. I don't see the market getting over that hurdle, and if price is lowered, compelling large masses of people to wear these devices daily as a lifestyle product. It is a niche product, and imo, more of a fun party toy to take out and show-off than something genuinely useable in the near future.

 

[Johnny London]

Maybe the right perspective here is to think of this product as Apples gateway into the virtual space, or a "proof of concept"? Like the Apple Watch was a gateway into customer empowerment let's say. The first edition was very slow and the most exciting thing was heart rate measurement, and a new interface with music controls. It was a iPhone accessory at that point. Look how far it got. As the virtual space is yet underdeveloped and niche, this could well be a niche product for conferencing or something, in its first iteration.

 

[slb]

2006…”Some Apple employees are concerned about the company's upcoming internet-connected buttonless phone.”

Practically everyone was excited about that product and buzzing about the rumors.

 

[CarAnalogy]

This has been sending out red flags since day one. Headsets are already niche. The success of this product depends on it being a "game changer"--not just for Apple, but for the headset market as a whole. Other headsets haven't succeeded at being anything more than a gimmick. The "Metaverse" is a huge flop. What will make this different?



I'm hoping it does because recent rumors have indicated that Apple is diverting resources and manpower from other products and divisions to focus on this thing, and for someone completely uninterested in it, that sucks.

I want to be positive and say it's coming into a similar market as smartphones around the time of the iPhone, where the market was there but not large because the potential was mostly untapped.

I agree with the second paragraph in that Apple seems unable to focus on more than a few things at a time the last few years, and I would like to see them have some enthusiasm about their existing products.

The rumors have not been encouraging, but as usual Apple will say nothing until they say all they're going to say when they announce it. We'll see.

 

[slb]

hey, if from 1 charge that mouse can last you 1 week or more and the mouse experience is good enough......it becomes irrelevant how it charges for 1-2 hours

If you're in the middle of something important and your mouse dies, it becomes very relevant that you can no longer use your mouse while it charges.

 

[smorrissey]

The more expensive this device is the cheaper iphones are gonna be, let's go!!

 

[slb]

Plenty of people inside Apple were skeptical about the Macintosh as well. It launched in 1984 with a 2023 adjusted price of $7224, a 9 inch grayscale display, with 128K of RAM. I believe Apple knows precisely what it’s doing, and in a few years these devices will be ubiquitous.

You might have forgotten that Apple lost that battle to Microsoft and the PC and nearly went bankrupt. The Macintosh never became ubiquitous.

 

[Pasqualem]

I hope apple has been feeding these leaks to set our expectations low and surprise everyone with glasses rather than that huge this on your head

 

[ProfessionalFan]

Apple car, Apple TV ...

Apple Car is a flop? It was never officially announced, how can a rumored product be a flop?

Apple TV is a flop? Based on what?