Apple on Monday, June 5th at 10am PDT / 1pm EDT is expected to unveil a $3,000 XR (mixed-reality) headset that promises to overlay information over the real world and also transport users to new worlds, games, concerts, sporting events.
In the best-case scenario, it’s an early version of tech that hints at the promise to come, when we get a better, cheaper, lighter version … someday down the road.
So on the one hand, Apple is set to unveil a device that could say a lot about its future and the future of consumer tech. But it’s also a bit of a daydream, which will make it very hard to determine whether it’s a hit or a dud. And in the meantime, Apple will very much remain the company that sells iPhones, which is a very good business to be in…
The first is a “copresence” feature, which I’ve heard described in a couple different ways. In one, someone wearing a headset can share video of the thing they’re looking at with another person wearing a headset, and they can both experience the same thing at the same time. Say, you’re walking on the beach, and you want someone who’s across the country to virtually join you while you walk. The other version is closer to something we’ve seen before: You put on a headset and talk to a computer-generated avatar of another person appearing in your field of view.
And perhaps most confusingly, Apple is supposedly going to place exterior screens on the front of headsets, so people who aren’t wearing the headset can see a video display of the eyes of the person wearing the headset. Does that sound like a straight-up nightmare to you? Me too. But people who’ve heard Apple’s pitch say the company thinks it will make the device more social and less dystopian than the zombie-with-computer-on-face image that Mark Zuckerberg proudly showed off in 2016 as part of a marketing push for his Oculus headsets.
MacDailyNews Take: Zuckerberg doesn’t need to wear a headset in order to look like a zombie.
[H]ow is Tim Cook going to convince consumers [to pony up $3,000 for something that looks like high-tech ski goggles]? It’s going to be tough. For starters, while Cook has been a highly successful CEO — under his tenure, Apple’s stock has soared, and the company is once again approaching $3 trillion in total value — he is not a charismatic salesman in the Steve Jobs mode.
And even Steve Jobs would struggle to sell the benefits of AR or VR goggles. That’s because, by their very nature, you can only see what they do when you wear them yourself. And if you stand on a stage telling people how great they are, you’ll just look like someone onstage with a computer strapped to your face.
“I call it the ‘TV on the radio’ problem,” says Magic Leap founder Rony Abovitz: It’s hard to describe a “television” to an audience that has never seen one and is listening to you talk about it on the radio. Abovitz thinks Apple will solve this by sending devices out for hands-on demonstrations at its hundreds of retail stores.
MacDailyNews Take: Of course, without Steve Jobs operating behind the scenes, Apple’s new product classes have to be beta tested by the early adopters and developers (see Apple Watch), so we’ll see on Monday what Apple thinks are the use cases and then, in a couple of years, we’ll see what they’re really meant to do.
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