I wonder whether the behavior Apple has exhibited around their developer relations (especially their EU / notorization related troubles) has had a chilling effect on people's willingness to support a new platform like this. Without the raw number of users that something like the iPhone has, does Apple make it worthwhile to create apps / games for their platforms? I'm not a developer, so maybe there is a more technical reason for this, but from the outside it seems as though both indie developers and large tech companies (like Google not making a YouTube app, and Netflix) are reluctant to support VisionOS.
Or, maybe it isn't Apple-specific; maybe there simply isn't enough users, or VR/AR as a software paradigm is currently too far removed from how companies design their applications, and it is just a matter of time until they adapt. Like I said, I am not a developer, so maybe I'm missing something obvious here.
It's an expensive gadget for a niche [0] market. $3500 is an incredibly high price for what it is.
0, https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/ 1.75% of Steam users have a VR headset as of June this year which is lower than the people who are using Linux for gaming (2.08%). So you can see how small the VR market is. And the top alternatives are $500 (Quest 3) and $1000 (Valve Index) which are expensive on their own but $3500 (that you can't even use on Steam gaming lol) is just an astronomical difference
"It's a dev kit for those willing to spend on early access to Apple's AR/VR ecosystem" was always the sane take, it was really weird watching so many people convince themselves that it was a mass-market product and then convince themselves that the failure of a mass-market audience to materialize was some kind of a disaster.
I have no visibility inside Apple so I don't know if they drank their own kool-aid on this one or if this is just Ye Olde Yellow Journalism, but it's a strange amount of drama over something that in any other industry would be a complete non-story, even at ten times the dollar amount. Probably more than that, depending on the industry!
Apple has no problems clearly announcing dev kits as dev kits, just look at the Developer Transition Kit hardware they released for the PowerPC->Intel and Intel->Apple Silicon transitions. These kinds of things are not only clearly labeled as dev kits they have required paying to join dedicated dev kit programs which expressly forbid getting the (loaned, not bought) device for non-porting or non-development related work. Apple Vision Pro was nothing like that, it had consumer focused announcements at consumer focused events, had consumer ads, sold through the normal consumer channels, and used standard consumer accounts.
The other thing that doesn't line up with this take is how Apple announcing they've cancelled the next Vision Pro to work on a lower cost version is squared up. Even if you still take the Vision Pro as having always been intended a dev kit for early access, needing to cancel the follow on model development to rescope to a lower end product for the market is no less a miss than the initial launch in that the entire program was completely misaligned with the market until well after launch.
I think half of the news stories are a result of Apple pushing this to release to market instead of just shuttering the version internally and the other half are a result of a launch problem like this being relatively rare for the most valuable company in the world and not necessarily about viewing the product itself with blinders.
iMovie exists. Technically speaking. Ever since they lobotomized it I too have tried hard to forget, but it has an icon and presumably someone finds it useful or at least clicks on it by accident every now and again.
I think zamadatix convinced me that Apple drank their own kool-aid on VR though. That's too bad. I'm sure someone had a bonus large enough to prevent them from seeing straight. Hopefully it doesn't turn into another Scott Forstall situation, where Apple fires them and then it turns out that sins notwithstanding they were the voice of reason when it came to something else. Dammit, it's been a decade and Apple still hasn't given up on the Fisher Price widgets. Ah well. The world spins on.
They're plenty of reports they announced that change to hardware partners. I wouldn't hold my breath for a press release if that's what you're referring to though.
> and the presence of the "Pro" moniker implies that a non-Pro version has always been planned.
What's this to do with the price of tea in China? Apple halted work on the next Pro version to work on the lower cost version. This doesn't say Apple just now invented the idea of releasing a non-pro version. It does say Apple has realized the initial market tier they were developing for was the wrong one to start with and they need to stop any more work on that tier for now to instead work on getting said lower tier model to market next.
I mean, when it's early in the failure, you can say this about any company's failed product: Oh, well [COMPANY] is really just thinking ahead, and might actually be playing 5D Chess... Think of what the long term might bring!
> it was really weird watching so many people convince themselves that it was a mass-market product and then convince themselves that the failure of a mass-market audience to materialize was some kind of a disaster.
They were presumably following Apple’s lead. Apple predicted far higher sales than we’ve seen and have had to cut those predictions down to size.
I think it's pretty optimistic to expect either of those will be realized in a couple of years. If Apple does release a v3 in that time (big if), I'm doubtful it will amount to more than a minor iteration on the first gen model. I think Apple is probably happy to let this stay a niche product with a very slow release cadence.
After all, why would they release a v2 next year? What significant improvements could they make in that time that would entice new customers - or entice existing customers to upgrade?
The MacBook is a work device used by many professionals and can easily be justified as a recurring business expense. The iPhone is a relatively cheap device whose sales are bolstered by affordable payment plans offered by US carriers. These devices sell in huge volumes and it makes sense for people upgrade them often, so there's a lot of money to be had in frequent iterative releases. That's just not the case with the Vision Pro.
If Apple releases a new Vision Pro, it will need to be a big upgrade - or a cost-down model with a more accessible price point.
> 0, https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/ 1.75% of Steam users have a VR headset as of June this year which is lower than the people who are using Linux for gaming (2.08%). So you can see how small the VR market is. And the top alternatives are $500 (Quest 3) and $1000 (Valve Index) which are expensive on their own but $3500 (that you can't even use on Steam gaming lol) is just an astronomical difference
Apple Vision Pro was never touted as a gaming device, so I get that. I still hope Facebook/Meta keeps up with the Quest.
> $3500 is an incredibly high price for what it is.
I think “$3500 is an incredibly high price for what it does for me” is true for most consumers, but if that were incredibly high for what it is, we’d see other companies sell comparable hardware at half the price.
I also think that means they have a bigger problem than just bringing the price down. What it is is incredible, but what it does for me? Mwah.
I don’t think it would fly off the shelves (for a company of Apple’s size) for half the price.
It could have worked for a more physical experience, but the Vision Pro does less for me than even an Oculus Quest 2. No controllers, no haptics, I just get that it wasn't aimed at me but I'm scratching my head about what they were going for. Even Meta isn't to keen on the experiences I value in VR (basically fitness), and even though they support it, I get the feeling that they would much rather be doing social experiences...I hope someone enters the VR space in the fitness area with more enthusiasm.
It seems like a developer tool for building VR apps, which could make sense if they were planning on making a $500 device later. But, absent clear plans there, I can’t really see why anyone would buy it.
OTOH they wouldn’t sell any at all to consumers if they announced there was a sensibly priced one planned for the future.
Apple is the last company I want a VR headset from.
Like I'd buy iPad instantly if it could run a real OS (like a surface pro) - but Apple loves the app store margins soo much they will fight tooth and nail too keep you locked in, at heavy expense of capability.
Likewise for Apple vision pro :
- productivity - only if it fits the store model
- entertainmen - only if daddy Apple approves
- hackability - no way
MacOS devices are a legacy from a different era in Apple business model - they would not build such devices today - and are not really expanding the range. iPhone I can live with the lockdown for the integration between MacOS, likewise for accessories (even here I might switch due to the taste their ecosystem business leaves in mouth).
But VR and iPad are things where I want fully capable/hackable environments - that's not going to happen with Apple App Store business model.
considering it has a CPU that is as powerful as the MacBook Pro, I find your target price extremely optimistic.
hopefully once the display tech becomes cheaper, the overall price will come down quite a bit. But $500? unrealistic expectations IMO. Maybe in 10 years.
Then it won’t be a success for another ten years. You can call them unrealistic expectations if you’d like but I’ll drop thousands on a laptop because I use it day in day out. There’s simply no chance I’ll be doing the same with a Vision so the price I’m willing to pay is adjusted accordingly.
i agree it won’t be successful for a very long time. I personally think fit and comfort are bigger challenges. The tech will certain get cheaper but how much lighter?
VR needs a more powerful CPU and GPU than a MacBook Pro needs if you're trying to break into the VR gaming market (not saying you need a faster CPU than an M3, but VR is extremely demanding and will use all the CPU and GPU you can throw at it to maintain 90+fps with multiview rendering), especially since Apple keeps pushing Metal and not supporting Vulkan. (Metal tends to have higher CPU overhead vs Vulkan, and means you have to add an additional rendering backend for existing VR games)
> VR needs a more powerful CPU and GPU than a MacBook Pro needs if you're trying to break into the VR gaming market
No, it doesn't. The Quest series has done well for itself with boosted smartphone chips.
Surely, that means simpler graphics, but the graphics aren't really the thing holding VR back right now. Ease of use, comfort, weight, eye strain, motion sickness, physical feedback, these are all bigger issues imo. (Though I'll admit that larger FoV would help, and that's tied to graphical power)
If you really want powerful VR yes, but this is not what Apple is going for at all. They're only doing some very basic AR usecases with floating windows.
$500 is what a new gaming console costs. If Apple wants to compete for the attention of people with better gaming/entertainment experiences then their price needs to come down.
I think it's unrealistic of Apple to expect sales for more than $500, and the market has proven that to be correct.
https://backlinko.com/steam-users 132 million active subscribers.
So perhaps 2.3 million VR sets on steam. Any VR producer capturing 10% of the market has 230k VR sets sold. Doesn't seem like that small of a market.
But I completely agree, the high price for a VR set without good support is absurd.
With an interesting chicken and egg problem. There aren't enough users to justify making content for it and nobody wants to buy it because there isn't enough content.
Pretty much all of the VR headsets have this problem. So did the Amazon Echo devices.
Apple has definitely, definitely soured their relationships with third party developers— but I think the far larger issue is the install base. There isn’t enough AVPs sold to ever recoup the cost of developing a VisionOS native application.
There are also effectively 0 well qualified developers for VisionOS — it’s so new that no one outside Apple has a significant amount of experience. So even beyond pure build hours alone, getting an application launched on the platform is a non-trivial amount of developer training.
Reminds me of the time where I taught myself AR skills and launched some mildly successful apps for iOS then applied for a bunch of roles only to be rejected soundly for all of them.
I doubt developer relations have anything to do with this at all.
There's no users, no plan to scale to lots of users, and therefore no developers.
It might be partially because of the size of the VR/AR market, but Apple's approach with Vision Pro was never to try to capture all of it. It seemed mostly to gain experience in manufacturing and start to see if anything actually materialized.
In many ways it's a very anti-Apple product launch in that it didn't have a very clear use for the common person from day 1, which has been the mantra for everything from the iPhone to AirPods.
> It might be partially because of the size of the VR/AR market, but Apple's approach with Vision Pro was never to try to capture all of it. It seemed mostly to gain experience in manufacturing and start to see if anything actually materialized.
Did they say this, because otherwise I'm calling ... you know what.
It's more that VR/AR is a high-cost solution still in search of a problem that makes it profitable.
So far the only market for VR is niche entertainment. VRC is fun, but VR games have been arounds for decades and never gotten past novelty.
AR has value as an accessibility tool because it can get around the high cost of some infrastructure changes. But like all accessibility tools, profit-focused eyeballs see it as a small, low-margin market. Enabling human rights is not considered profit.
> So far the only market for VR is niche entertainment.
That's not true. VR also thrives in corporate. Niches, yes. But it does do well there. Training and simulation scenarios in particular. There's some tools like uptale and arthur that capitalise on this.
And VR games are really really good and add a lot of immersion. I don't like to game without it anymore.
I don't think VR is for everything and everyone but there certainly are usecases for it.
I used to work in game dev ~9 years ago. iPhone is where the users are, so naturally that's your main target. But your game will accomplish success only if you're featured in the app store (I don't own apple so this might have changed drastically). But in order to get featured...
Haptic feedback in the newest iphone? You need to support it in order to be featured.
You can play games on apple watch? If you support it, a guaranteed feature.
New localisation guidelines? Featured only if you support all of them.
So back then (not sure how it is right now) you needed to implement useless or at the very least something unnecessary in order to be featured on iPhone and make a buck. Otherwise apple wasn't able to sell their new technologies.
If nothing has changed, people will try to port their games to apple vr so they are more likely to be featured on iPhone.
I can't seem to be able to edit. My wording was incorrect. It was not needed to implement all those useless features to get your game featured in the store, but very helpful. And it makes sense, imo.
My app was featured many years ago, and yes it’s true that they request changes to support the latest SDK. They weren’t feature requests though, more like removal of deprecated API calls, following the UI guidelines, and accessibility was a big one. But no I wouldn’t call any of those “useless features”.
It's a combination of two things: there's not enough users, and the device just isn't comfortable enough for that niche of ultra-enthusiast users to use it for extended periods.
Apple really shot themselves in the foot here with the headstrap design and by weighing it down with the metal and glass housing. Even the "good" strap is unbalanced and uncomfortable and so practical for very little but consuming content in a reclined position.
By contrast, the Quest 3 is noticeably lighter and has an entire ecosystem of head straps that allow for extended wear without discomfort, to the point that the limiting factor is the battery. Between that and the much lower price, the market of people willing to actually buy apps and services (mostly games, but also stuff like Bigscreen or workout apps) is orders of magnitude larger.
> practical for very little but consuming content in a reclined position.
You can create content in a recline position too. It's utterly fantastic, actually, if you just have a little tray in your lap for a wireless keyboard, and a mouse on a table on your armrest.
I really think the future of VR is mostly in a reclined position, actually -- headset weight becomes a non-issue, and it just avoids developing postural problems. It's infinitely better for your back and neck and shoulders than sitting in a chair at a desk all day long.
The Meta Quest finally recently gained the ability to shift your environment to a vertical angle, for reclining or lying down in bed.
I don't really see VR's killer app being immersive games while standing up or sitting down, because of motion sickness. I think it's going to be reclining, doing work on big screens as well as watching content on big screens and immersively. I think we're just waiting for the displays to increase their resolution a bit more, and for prices for those displays to come down.
I still think VR's killer app is fitness. So definitely not sitting or lying down, but maybe stuck in place (since you can't really run around inside) like an aerobics class. I've never experienced motion sickness, but with BeatSaber you are just standing while the blocks come at you, and while you move around a little bit, it isn't like a roller coaster.
Reclining...why would you want to do that? It sounds like a huge step back, just give me a Switch at that point.
If you have lower back pain from sitting in a chair with bad posture for decades, it's a godsend.
When you're "in the zone" programming on a screen or writing a book or editing a movie, it's not like you're particularly aware of your environment anyways. And like I said -- not building up the lower back problems that will haunt you later in life.
Then you know how crazy expensive it is to have to mount one or more monitors above you, hanging from some kind of support.
And like I said, isolation while working is actually kind of a feature, when you're deep in productive work. Just think of all the people who wear noise-cancelling headphones in offices to tune out the distracting environment.
I don't want to use it for video calls or while multitasking, but for serious work I want to be isolated -- that's a feature not a bug. And passthru is a kind of nice in-between mode.
I've got a dual-monitor desk mount that can tilt ±40°, allwoing for easy reclined use[1]. $156 MSRP, hardly "crazy expensive" compared to a $3500 Vision Pro, even counting the monitors and computer.
I don't actually because my laptop screen is sufficient :)
I could see what you say being true if I was young, single, and lived alone. I have a wife and kids though and explicitly don't want to be isolated from that.
Sure you don't want to be isolated from your family while you're checking e-mails or watching a movie together. That goes without saying.
But most people I know with a partner and kids lock themselves in an office anyways while they're doing serious work in order not to be constantly distracted. If they are lucky enough to have a dedicated office at home. And there's nothing dystopian about doing your work reclining with a VR headset, any more than it's dystopian for video editors work in a darkened room with no windows, or software engineers to work in open-plan offices with two or four monitors and noise-cancelling headphones.
When I'm in the office, isolating me from the people around me is a feature, not a bug. Especially since this hotdesking/flexworking crap when I sit beside randos from other departments I have nothing to do with.
In fact the only reason I still come there is because sometimes I have to. Not because I want to or because it adds any kind of value.
Or, maybe it isn't Apple-specific; maybe there simply isn't enough users, or VR/AR as a software paradigm is currently too far removed from how companies design their applications, and it is just a matter of time until they adapt. Like I said, I am not a developer, so maybe I'm missing something obvious here.
Long term, here's what I suspect may happen. Robotics+AI is going to eat the lunch of VR. VR is only used when it's not economical to have the actual stuff, but the realm of nifty real world stuff is going to expand tremendously.
This may well result in a societal bifurcation, where the rich have a bunch of robots, and the poor have to settle for VR.
The relationship is transactional. If there's money to be made developers will be there. The core problem is there's no killer app for Vision Pro and price is way to high to be a impulsive purchase for most.
>Or, maybe it isn't Apple-specific; maybe there simply isn't enough users, or VR/AR as a software paradigm is currently too far removed from how companies design their applications, and it is just a matter of time until they adapt.
Pretty much this. People, generally, just are NOT going to wear this on their face for very long, if at all. This product solved zero problems that most people have. It's literally an iPad you wear on your face and most people would much rather spend $500 on an iPad.
Apple’s issues with the EU/etc have nothing to do with it.
Apple has a hard core base market. That said, the Vision Pro/headset market is small and Apple is only really going to get the Apple fanboy portion of that.
Or, maybe it isn't Apple-specific; maybe there simply isn't enough users, or VR/AR as a software paradigm is currently too far removed from how companies design their applications, and it is just a matter of time until they adapt. Like I said, I am not a developer, so maybe I'm missing something obvious here.