At WWDC, Apple’s annual developer conference on June 5th, the company is expected to announce a new mixed-reality (AR+VR) headset which resembles a pair of ski goggles, comes with an external battery pack, reportedly feature a $3,000 price tag, and likely won’t ship until autumn, at the earliest. Get ready for one of Apple’s most unconventional product introductions – ever!
Joanna Stern for The Wall Street Journal:
The mainstream appeal is cloudy, and the current market for these interactive headsets is smaller than any the company has entered in the past decade.
Yet Apple has a proven playbook for entering new product categories with a more polished version, expanding the whole market in the process.
“You dum-dum! iPods, iPhones, even the MacBook Air, all solved real problems. Mixed-reality headsets solve nothing!” I hear you, which is why I bring up the Apple Watch.
Just watch the 2014 introduction of the wearable. It’s pretty clear Tim Cook and team didn’t know what people would use the device for, other than to tell time.
The Apple Watch shipped anyway. But it took about four generations to land on a genuinely worthwhile purpose: health and fitness.
The headset stands to benefit from this if-you-build-it-they-will-come approach.
MacDailyNews Take: Again, Apple lost a lot when we all lost Steve Jobs. We early adopters are the guinea pigs, er… beta testers now. Standing in for Steve Jobs en masse, as best we can; product refinement takes significantly longer and it happens in public by the public.
No one should expect Apple’s headset to be laser-focused on precisely the right things as launch:
The glaring lack of a visionary who is immersed and invested in product design who is a single point of approval – Steve Jobs – means that early adopters have to take Jobs’ place en masse to perform similar functions – albeit over a significantly longer period of time – à la Apple Watch. – MacDailyNews, March 28, 2023
“Tim is not a product person.” – Steve Jobs
The Apple Watch certainly found its way – we, the users, were the Apple Watch alpha and beta testers, collectively standing in for Steve Jobs, doing much of what the singular genius would have done before release by brute force and sheer numbers after release. It took four generations of Apple Watch, but we’re here now and we wouldn’t trade the experience for anything! The same goes for Apple Glasses! — MacDailyNews, January 31, 2020
Please help support MacDailyNews. Click or tap here to support our independent tech blog. Thank you!
Support MacDailyNews at no extra cost to you by using this link to shop at Amazon.
The post Get ready for one of Apple’s most unconventional product introductions – ever appeared first on MacDailyNews.
