The Vision Pro in its entirety seems like a cog in a much larger strategy.
It seems like a platform to test ideas, concepts, and reactions related to “spacial computing” that will show up in much higher-volume products later on… as opposed to being a high-volume product itself.
Essentially like a lot of other people I’m wondering “how many of these clunky ugly things could they sell?” But thinking that maybe they know that too, and they’re working toward something more compelling.
The Vision Pro’s existing sales have already justified the project. They have sold 560+ million dollars worth of them at presumably insane profit margins.
I think Apple’s strategy is to just execute whatever the next tech thing is better than existing participants. MP3 players weren’t a forever thing, but they were a very profitable thing for Apple. Watch, tablet, 3D glasses etc timed after someone else proved the market and just in time for Apple to slurp up the most profitable slice of the pie.
They don’t want to be the first self driving car company, they want to be the most profitable self driving car company.
Apple's profit margin on the Vision Pro, from a purely bill of material perspective, is estimated to be around 45%. But of course they have spent billions of R&D towards that project and it is far from out of the woods yet. It will be in the red for a few iterations over years.
Meta has sold more than twenty million Quest headsets of various types, and by most measures that project is still basically a money pit.
Meta quite likely also subsidize their headset. They follow the console market plan of getting money back on software sales, but a big issue has been incredibly low user retention.
With low retention, every sold device is likely costing them.
That’s 20 million headsets with ~zero to negative profit margin on each sale.
Meta’s investment in VR has been a dumpster fire, but the headset R&D isn’t where the overwhelming majority of that money is going. They’ve done everything from making VR movies to promoting 3rd party games most recently spending 400 million for beat saber’s publisher.
Meta is investing in VR movies? How much and where? I can count on my fingers the good VR videos from Meta, and I mean that from a tech point of view. The median VR porn has better video quality than 90% of videos on the Meta video app. Also Youtube VR is limited to just 4k and looks like garbage. VR video only starts to look good from 6-8k and 60fps.
More recently they also bought Supernatural (fitness app)
Meta are playing the long game with this, they are building out the eco system and the devices. They are doing a great job despite it being a money pit, the Quest 3 is an awesome device. It just needs a bit better software and better marketing around those killer apps, like fitness etc.
I don’t believe for one second that they are doing a great job. They have lost so much money. The only reason they haven’t completely abandoned the idea is because Zuckerberg has a controlling stake in the stock.
I'm not saying Vision Pro won't eventually justify itself, but $560m revenue is likely nowhere near the cost for this programme so far.
This project has been rumoured to have hundreds of engineers for 5+ years, that's that revenue already (let alone profit), then the manufacturing setup, new chip development, etc.
Even if this product makes $2bn revenue, which could be unlikely just based on the rumoured manufacturing limitations and number they expect to manufacture this year, it probably wouldn't be justified once you figure out the profit margins. This is clearly all about the next product, or the one after. It's about the iPhone 4 launch, for this product, not the first, 3G, or 3GS practice runs.
Apple have a history of healthy margins, but huge production costs on their high end stuff, so while this is $3500, I wouldn't be surprised if it's still only 50% margin. That's great, but it's not the 70% one might expect from such a high price, and it will be because of things like maybe the body costs $200 rather than $50 because of some silly uncompromising design choices that don't make sense for high volume consumer hardware.
A lot of the individual tech pieces to make it work have been going into other products for years. Like head tracking in AirPods, face id, Memoji, probably lidar, certainly other things that aren't coming to me right now.
A lot of things that seemed like gimmicks that turned out, it seems to me, were really for Vision Pro.
I highly doubt that the head tracking on AirPods is the same implementation as VP. VP uses iris ID, not Face ID. Memoji is a non factor. Lidar’s usage is probably also very different.
There’s minor overlap but I feel like the R&D cost of the VP didn’t have much overlap with other products. Except the M2 SoC.
Yea but the inherent costs are not in the implementation. The complexity of integrating something like head tracking is only 10% to do with the “type” of head tracking.
So even if VP head tracking works differently, the groundwork has been laid for that category of feature.
Why wouldn't the head tracking be the same? They use the same H2 chip as AirPods. FaceID probably implemented ideas used by iris ID. Learnings from Memoji almost definitely underly the personas. Lidar in the wild I am sure provided valuable data and got developers used to working with AR.
From what has been reported - a lot of the AR things, including RealityKit and ARKit came from the TDG which are also who made VP.
The project could be 7-10 years old but they didn’t start on day one with hundreds of people. Let’s say a core of ~50 people for 5 years as proof of concept then ~350 people for another 5 years at 300k per person on average, that’s a 600 million dollar investment.
Sure they could have a larger team, but they also don’t pay testers anything close to 150k year.
$300k/annum is the carrying cost of low to mid engineers at big tech. For the kind of talent you need to pull this off, I’d at least double it (and maybe closer to $1M/year for the early folks)
Employees are expensive. That $200k salary comes with 100k in RSUs and then 25+% overhead.
Then factor in bonuses for leadership when they finally get the thing to ship…
And 350 people sounds like way too few, considering the novel R&D. Maybe 2000 would be my guess.
What’s the ratio of testers:developers and how much do testers make? Not everyone on a this kind of a project is making even low end software developer salaries, and not every RSU vests which is a big part of why they are so popular.
I’ve heard people quote hundreds of people working on the Vision Pro which is already a lot of people for Apple. The company only recently broke 150k employees globally and a large fraction of that are working retail at their stores. Now split the remainder across iPhone, Mac, iPad, App Store, Apple TV, Air Pods, Watch, marketing, this car project, back end infrastructure etc and ~2,000 people on Vision Pro for 5+ years just doesn’t line up.
I agree that for the Vision Pro headcount 2000 is unlikely, but you also have to include all the other functions – chip design, marketing, all the people that interface with the manufacturing partners, the manufacturing partners themselves, the people who design the production lines, the people who design and program the machines on the production line, the people embedded in TSMC overseeing chip fab, the people TSMC will have embedded in Apple overseeing chip design... it goes on.
For an idea of the scope, a number of years ago it was reported that Apple had 40 business class seats from SFO to Shenzhen pre-booked every single day. That's how much it takes to interface with manufacturing. Now this isn't the iPhone, the scale is smaller, but this stuff is hard and takes a lot of people, it's practically why Tim Cook got the CEO job.
I completely agree manufacturing takes significant oversight, but only a tiny fraction of that manpower goes back 2+ years on a small scale production project like this.
Apple has a pipeline and they move experts between projects. The team making commercials is another late yet critical addition.
IME, having worked at big tech on moonshots, outsiders wildly underestimate how many people it takes to build a new platform. There is just so much work needed. I could be wrong on the AVP, Apple might make it work, but my prior is what it is.
Now discuss the millions spent on the physical R&D, corp acquisitions (Apple was for a while averaging 1-2 acquisitions/day), whatever licensing fees they need to pay out for initial access, this is easily a multibillion dollar bet.
Meta burned through ~$50B to get where they are with Oculus. Apple has likely spend at least a reasonable fraction of that. My guess is somewhere in the league of single digit billions.
Developing R1 itself would have cost ~$500M. Not to mention the cost of tooling the factories for mass production. Apple has fronted money to TSMC in the past to accelerate their manufacturing roadmap.
That said - a car is a completely different beast. They are going to upend a lot of things with it, including the dealership model. Probably timing it based on projections of when the demand is set to rise, given many countries are “banning” sale of new ICE from 2035. Though my money is on that deadline getting extended a few times.
I seriously doubt Oculus VR would have spent 500M as an independent company on the R1. Especially when looking at the other head set manufacturers.
Mega wasted 50B on VR as a category but that includes money subsidizing headsets, making VR movies, buying an VR company that had less than 100M invested for 2B etc. It’s a story of management incompetence not some requirement for headsets R&D.
But the point is: Tesla had to build a service network. Apple would have to find a solution for that too. You cannot bring your car to an Apple store nor mail it in, if something is broken.
I am looking forward to seeing Apple execute on Generative AI. While I think shoving it into every product you can think of (Google, Samsung) might have unforeseen consequences, I don’t think the other extreme is the right play either. This field is moving fast and they may not have time to do it the Apple way.
I have both of those devices on my desk. The originals of both. The similarities of both: rectangular, displays, batteries (dead), audio jack, charging ports and could play music.
Aside from the large list of physical differences (like, one has cameras while one has a big flat physical turntable as its input device), the biggest category of differences is as large as the number of unique apps there are in the app store. Because the biggest difference is: one does anything, the other does one thing.
Still, you're right. One doesn't leap over oceans of differences. There were many products and ideas between the original iPod and the iPad, each one potentially sharing with or influencing the other.
Pretty sure they meant a big iPod touch, which was basically an iPhone without the phone part, not a gen 1 iPod.
The 2nd gen iPad was the real magic, and made me start paying more attention to Apple. There were rumours of a "Retina display", higher res than an HDTV in a tablet size. I was doubtful. I figured if display manufacturers could do that, we wouldn't be stuck with all these 1080p monitors and 768p laptops... Well, it turns out I was wrong. Display manufacturers just can't be bothered to make compelling displays on their own for some reason.
That crisp display, with enough horsepower to run things smoothly, there was nothing else comparable at the time.
> What specifically do you think the iPad inherited from the Newton, that didn't come to it through the iPhone/iPod Touch lineage
iPhone / iPod Touch / iPad all come from the Newton lineage.
But the person I responded to said “iPod”. The iPod is far removed from iPhone / iPhone Touch / and iPad in terms of interaction modality, operating system, application platform, etc.
The iPod doesn’t run iOS, is a media player not general purpose computing device, like the others and their ancestor, the Newton.
The person you responded to did say "iPod" but they surely meant iPod Touch. It's an easy mistake to make, you even made a similar mistake above writing "iPhone" when you meant "iPod" so very easy to do:
> And the supercharger network is no longer an advantage as almost all EVs will now be using them.
Having more demand for the network means the network can grow and expand at a much faster rate and make it cheaper. That's good for Tesla drivers in the long term. And Tesla itself. Tesla making more $$ also filters back to the consumers through R&D and new products.
If EV is truly going to be everywhere then charging needs to be generic and everywhere like today's gas stations. Currently it's still very much a luxury type thing when you consider a lower-middle class person living in a skyscraper in a city (which is a ton of people these days). In urban areas you don't have the luxury of multiple separate gas station services, given the limited real estate. Having to drive longer distances to use one near your apartment for ex. The more the better.
The network was always going to become a commodity anyway. Why not establish yourself as the leader ahead of time?
> Essentially like a lot of other people I’m wondering “how many of these clunky ugly things could they sell?” But thinking that maybe they know that too, and they’re working toward something more compelling.
Apple is a master at having the users pay for R&D. They didn't go and raise millions to billions of dollars in venture capital... they started with phones using cheap Samsung SoCs and from there on, they evolved rapidly, with their M-series SoCs now being on par with Intel performance-wise.
The hipsters pay outrageous amounts of money for Apple hardware - me being amongst them - and Apple doesn't go and waste all their income on stock buybacks or luxurious dividends, but invests it into developing technology to legitimately drive the state of the art forward.
I think this is exactly right. Notice how they actively avoid AR/VR words, preferring spatial computing. I think this is because, to them, AR/VR are going to be much more compelling than spatial computing, and they don't want to sully those efforts by mixing it with this stepping stone we have now.
> AR/VR are going to be much more compelling than spatial computing, and they don't want to sully those efforts by mixing it with this stepping stone we have now.
I disagree. I think they don’t want to be compared to a $500 VR headset. VR hasn’t taken off enough to move the needle on Apple financials. It’s not “good enough”. As nice as the Vision Pro is can it justify its extra $3000 cost in comparison if it’s also just VR/AR? Sure it’s more powerful, but it doesn’t even have controllers.
On the other hand AR has largely failed so far too. The HoloLens didn’t revolutionize the world. And the level of AR a Quest 3 offers is much lower resolution than Apple had. And, again, $3000 difference there (HoloLens was way more).
I think they want to be seen as a new category and not just another AR/VR thing. Sure the Mac was technically a personal computer, it was so different from a PC AT as to be almost a totally different thing. iPod vs Creative Nomad. iPhone vs early Windows CE phones.
That’s what they want. They want to be judged on their own. Not “I bought a Quest 4 and it was OK, why should I pay $X more? It wasn’t useful to me.”
Will it work? Time will tell. If it does the Vision line will be looked at as a totally different product category from the Quests/etc of today. If it doesn’t they’re in trouble.
AR and VR is a wasteland where money gets burned on ideas that have not advanced much since 1990s and the first Virtuality devices https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtuality_(product) in terms of being more useful than an Apple Watch, an iPhone, or a laptop for pretty much anything. A computer does not get better when you wear it.
Realistically, for a VR headset to be successful it would need to be as light as a baseball cap and have a ~12h power source that would not cause overheating of the wearer's head.
AppleVision is going nowhere. Apple is a mass market manufacturer of status products with a limited lifespan and support. When they work and are supported they generally offer great experience for the money. Apple Car and AppleVision are not such products, but evolutionary dead ends in Apple's history, just like Newton or Apple Network Server. Apple is investing money into an old personal transportation platform when the future of transportation will be based on something else and that "something else" will emerge out of new ideas for urban planning. Some of the tech developed for those products may make its way into those new modes of transport, but it will take a while and may lesser impact than we think.
Nobody needs any new ideas for urban planning. Urban planning mostly just makes everything worse when it's tried, so what's needed is ideas for how to make the planners go away.
I think having an infinite power source via plugging it in will work well enough for power in this case.
Do you think urban planning made Amsterdam worse in the last 40 years? That it made Paris worse? Or Barcelona? All these cities have been greatly improved because they planned it (after some terrible decisions too, especially all the decisions related to making more cars enter the cities).
All great cities have had several planning phases, over centuries
The good parts of Amsterdam and Paris come from undoing previous bad ideas, and Paris is still too expensive because of height limits, so I don't think it's an impressive showing yet.
Good Asian cities' planning efforts are mostly making illegal to let NIMBYs have input on anything.
> Urban planning mostly just makes everything worse when it's tried
Is that generally true or only in the US? I’m also wondering what you suggest we should plan urban centers with if it isn’t the methods of urban planning itself.
No, it's even worse in other Anglo countries, and China, Brazil, etc. (not sure of the details of the last one, just remember something about planned cities not working)
The US just has an unusually large money and land budget to spend on car dependency, but other countries have made their housing even less affordable.
Copenaghen or Amsterdam aren't perfect from the Urban planning PoV but after having spent a few months in an LA suburb vs a few years in those cities... Yeah, Thanks but no thanks, I think I'd rather have the imperfectly urban planned towns for the next few years. Matter of taste, I guess.
At this point I feel we're arguing a no true scotsman fallacy.
Care to point a good example of "unplanned" urban environment with an excellent quality of life for _all_ of its occupants? Outside of, dunno, some exceptionally small villages in the Swiss alps or northern parts of Scandinavia (which are basically unchanged since the middle ages), I can't think of any.
Tokyo is the usual example. (Of course, it has a planned road network too.)
American suburbs are just about the most planned things in the world though. Try building an apartment there - you can't do it. They would never exist if it wasn't for artificial zoning laws. Gotta read Strong Towns.
I think none of those "innovative future of transportation" ideas will come to life in any meaningful scale. Transportation for the most part is a solved problem.
Car dependency is the main issue and no "super innovative personal transportation device" solves this.
Meta likes to call quest 3 "mixed reality" since AR is generally defined as adding images to the existing light going into your eyes.
I just feel like the technical challenges of AR are much larger than people give it credit for - even just dealing with "how to project an image" before even trying to miniaturize it is really hard!
I can see the reasoning yeah, for now it seem to be treated similarly though. Maybe a v2 could help like it did with the iPhone, after all the first model also had a lot of trouble to find its place.
I do agree with them on that, that's for sure. The VR market is minuscule and even the "market leaders" get chump change compared to smartphones and laptops, the market penetration is very low and worse than that, is looking like a flat curve now.
I don't know what will work to commodities VR but the current platforms just ain't going to cut it.
In my mind the big problems are a killer app and nausea.
Games are fun, but no one has come up with much compelling past that.
And enough people have nausea issues that it can’t be ignored. Higher frame rates will help. But a lot of software either ignores the issue or does half measures. The instant something screws up and gives you a huge lurch in your stomach the fun stops.
“Just wait until you get your VR legs” is not good enough.
> Games are fun, but no one has come up with much compelling past that.
Sure they have, it’s the only medium capable of offering anything close to the presence of real life social interactions.
The worst social experiences in VR are worlds ahead of anything you can experience in any other medium short of meeting someone in the physical world, which would be my preference but for many people, is not always possible.
“meet your friends in reality instead problem solved, it’s better anyway”.
My friends live all over the world now, but thanks to VR, we’ve still been able to catch up and hang out in the same space and converse, watch movies, play games and even dance and exercise together plus many more activities in a manner that is simply incapable of ever being delivered through a monitor and keyboard.
I’m a gamer (though I hate to use that word) but it’s not where I see the value to this long term and it’s never really been where I see it, though it’s a value add to me of course.
> “Just wait until you get your VR legs” is not good enough.
I hate hearing this.
I've tried with VR. I built my own HMD back when a bunch of people were building them, including the creator of the Oculus Rift. I've tried every commercial product I could get my hands on since, and without fail, something will flip a switch in my brain and that it, I'm sick.
Not just nauseated, but destroyed. Like, instant hangover with a side of migraine. It's unbearable.
My hope is that with high enough resolution/coherence/realism for passthrough video/environment, the VR sickness won't happen. I think I'm being more realistic though when I predict that that same "high fidelity" is just as likely to make the sickness occur, as any mismatch with my senses and what my eyes and ears are seeing will seem more obvious to whatever demon is waiting for its moment to strike.
Apple does have the benefit of the rest of their ecosystem and walled garden though, they can easily integrate with their own pre-existing apps/service/technology whereas competitors have to pick and choose 3rd parties and spend time building it themselves - meaning that they usually don't.
How memory fades. People used smartphones for years, in large numbers, prior to the iPhone. Nokia, Blackberry were the market leaders. Also Palm and MS and probably others I've forgotten. Sony...
I wasn't talking about anything except Windows CE phones (I had a Palm-based Treo phone at one point, but it was not really a very good phone or palm pilot.) WinCE phones were barely usable for their primary task, and were almost completely unusable for anything else because of the limitations inherent in WinCE and Microsoft's insistence on trying to replicate the Windows UI on something that was fundamentally unsuited for it.
Palm devices embraced the limitations of their platform; WinCE just struggled to run well on anything.
I will also dispute your "in large numbers" assertion, although I do not have access to detailed statistics. In 2008, Gartner asserted ~1.3 billion devices sold, with most growth in emerging markets. A couple of publicly available charts on Statista suggest that slightly less than 10% (~120m) of those were smartphones (Apple sold less than 1% of all phones that year at ~11m units, a ~9x growth over its just-over 1m units in 2007).
The only "smartphone" models sold meaningfully in largish numbers before the iPhone would have been BlackBerry. Everything else was an also-ran. And even BlackBerry was an also-ran compared to people just buying phones.
WinCE phones? No, they mostly weren't. When they weren't crashing, they were only really accessible with a stylus and often not well built. Microsoft didn't get mobile UI and stability correct until Windows Mobile, and by then it was too late for Microsoft to be a major factor.
I assumed by "CE phone" GP meant WM5 - how many non-WM && WWAN equipped devices were there? WM5 way okay for its days, and with the buttons and controls that don't change they were quite useful.
It should come as no surprise that there were many, which is one of the reasons where Windows Mobile failed. All the other manufacturers had been burned badly by Microsoft's inability to deliver anything reliable on mobile (and eventually saw themselves directly in competition because of the Nokia purchase) and Android starting being a cheaper, more focused option.
Fundamentally, Windows CE was flawed beyond repair, and it should have been obvious from the very first iPaq and sibling devices. I used my Palm devices every day. I rarely turned on my iPaq (available third party software was also a problem; there was lots for Palm and comparatively nothing for WinCE).
If they had 100% capture of the current consumer VR/AR market it would still have a tiny impact on their overall numbers.
They use a new term because they feel the only way to succeed is to create a new product category.
And that is part of why it is confusing - it doesn't feel like they could create a large enough market to matter for any device in the current VR/AR form factor, or even the idealized version of the current form.
This VR headset isn’t but I think spatial computing will be. IMO this Vision Pro wasn’t meant to be a big seller but a way of taking a research project into an iterative production process. The first iPhone was shit too, same with Apple Watch, and this is far more complex than either. Now it’s time to crank the price/performance/manufacturing.
The better analogy would be the Lisa. It’s reasonably powerful but more expensive than they want it to be. The next version will probably lose some features but be less expensive. The Macintosh to the AVP’s Lisa.
> Essentially like a lot of other people I’m wondering “how many of these clunky ugly things could they sell?” But thinking that maybe they know that too, and they’re working toward something more compelling.
For the ‘clunky’ I think they’re just betting on Moore’s law (in some interpretation) keeping up and batteries getting more powerful in the next few years, so that they can shrink the device and its production costs.
IMO, that is a safe bet for batteries, a bit less so for the electronics and even less so for the mechanical parts.
And what’s considered ugly can change fairly fast, if the device turns out to be useful/entertaining (which it IMO will be) enough to warrant its sales price (that, I’m not certain of.
But mainly, if you know the use case, you can ship iphone-equivalent device with the sensors needed, not an expensive miniaturized laptop. Vision Pro is an user research platform.
yeah. people really have a hang up on VR and AR, but it’s almost entirely simply because the electronics and power aren’t there yet. once it is, it will almost already be game over, because… i mean literally everyone eventually will have one. it will be the most significant compute platform in history.
you can see this immediately btw if you book some time on the expensive industry AR and VR devices. but even those aren’t any smaller than the Apple device, for reasons of physics.
Apple Glasses is something they should already be working on and releasing sooner then later. Meta's most recent released Smart Glasses are solid and work solid especially for taking pictures and videos (just using them to film my ski runs this weekend; use them few times a week as my sunglasses and to snap pics). The smart features on this latest addition aren't terribly reliable though and need user experience work (i.e. audio just starts playing an inopportune times.. annoying).
> Apple Glasses is something they should already be working on and releasing sooner then later.
My point is that AVP is step 1 of working on and releasing Apple Glasses. Rather than start with whatever minimal features they could fit into wraparound shades, they started with the feature set they wanted, built the minimum hardware that could do that, and from here out will keep iterating and improving until they eventually fit it into a pair of glasses.
In other words, it only looks like and functions like a VR headset by accident; the form is a side effect of the current hardware, and the VR functionality is just a nice bonus on top of what they actually wanted to focus on.
Apple does not look at hardware and need to release sooner rather than later. Apple is a software company. When they look at a product category, they think of the software they want running on that.
With a computer you wear on your face, they’ve just released their minimal viable product. You’ll get glasses when they can fit visionOS in them.
In the meantime you can buy glasses from other companies that only take creepy pictures.
If enough people discover and buy meta glasses for taking pics n videos which I'm betting 51 percent out of 49 will...Apple will release their similar glasses too that are also only for taking pics & videos. Everyone I show my meta glasses too ..they show some level excitement yet a few think oh no I'm going to be recorded and not know. Well you can be recorded now and not know too.
It seems like a platform to test ideas, concepts, and reactions related to “spacial computing” that will show up in much higher-volume products later on… as opposed to being a high-volume product itself.
Essentially like a lot of other people I’m wondering “how many of these clunky ugly things could they sell?” But thinking that maybe they know that too, and they’re working toward something more compelling.