A Wired wag will “bet everything that Apple’s Vision Pro will flop,” calling it ” a rare misfire” and an “unavoidable failure.”
This is not a “revolutionary” gadget, no matter how confident Tim Cook looks when he says it is. It’s a rare misfire, and a sign that Apple is losing its ability to turn tech-geek novelties into normie must-haves. It doesn’t augur the future so much as suggest that Cupertino doesn’t have a clear view forward…
[A]n Apple headset, no matter how nifty its specs, is still a big honking gizmo plonked between its wearer and the rest of the world, inherently a barrier more than a conduit…
The very basic truth that the appetite for daily-use headsets is simply not there has already damaged the Vision Pro’s reception; the normally rapturous public response to a big new Apple announcement has been tempered with skepticism this time around, with plenty of people pointing out that the VR/AR market is already littered with bold-named failures…
Apple isn’t the same company it used to be. When was the last behavior-shifting new Apple product launched, the type that gets absorbed into a daily fixture?
It’s a tough sell on a conceptual level, so no matter what the execution looks like, it’d be difficult to pull off. To make matters worse, the execution is flawed. If Apple had found a way to make a mixed-reality headset that weighed 4 ounces, or functioned more like regular glasses, maybe. Right now, though, it’s offering a marginally sleeker upgrade to a decidedly uncool-looking genre of headset. The nerd goggles look like nerd goggles…
This is an antisocial device, one which the average person would be wholly reasonable to reject and even ridicule… [T]his yassified Oculus is proof that even Apple can make missteps. One can only hope that the unavoidable failure of Vision Pro might clear the company’s sights, galvanizing actual innovation instead of this disappointing foray into gimmickry.
MacDailyNews Take: There is no evidence in this article that Kate Knibbs has ever tried Apple’s Vision Pro or that she’s even bothered to watch Apple’s explanatory video presentation (or that she has even a shred of imagination).
Knibbs instead admits that she’s based her opinion of Apple’s Vision Pro on Lauren Goode’s hand-ons article from the same publication, Wired, to which, of course, she links, in what reeks of yet another Wired self-promotion; writing articles about articles. Generative AI could do it better.
BTW, in two days, Apple’s 9:21 “Introducing Apple Vision Pro” video has over 25 million views on YouTube alone. There’s no telling how many views Apple.com has received of the same video; tens of millions for sure. Over a hundred million for the live WWDC23 keynote address, easily. This does not indicate a lack of interest from “normies.”
This is not an “VR/AR headset.” It’s a platform (yes, that can be a “VR/AR headset” whenever you want it to just do that). Previous failures in the “VR/AR headset” game from a raft of outfits from Google to Microsoft to Meta are meaningless as none of those possess what only Apple has: the ability to produce the entire widget. Only Apple has the custom silicon required, the custom operating system, the ecosystem and the interoperability it provides; no other company on earth can do what Apple has done here. Another bonus is that this is not as knockoff-able as cobbling together pretend iPhones with Qualcomm processors and skinning Linux to mimic iOS as much as possible and peddling them “Buy One Get One Free” to the undiscerning.
“The VR/AR market is already littered with bold-named failures” because they don’t have even a fraction of the ingredients required to do even a “VR/AR headset” properly, much less create an entire spatial computing platform.
This is a first step. Yes, it’s not yet at the smartglasses phase (that’s at least a decade away); the 128K Mac wasn’t at the M2 MacBook Air phase, either.
Untold millions will buy the Apple Vision Pro and its successors. Vision Pro sales will start out small, to the early adopters. These customers will show their friends and family – and sales will blossom. Just like the Mac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and AirPods.
Apple’s ecosystem is too strong and the Vision Pro is too compelling a portal into the ecosystem to fail.
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