Apple is a multi-trillion dollar company. You have to let that sink in for a while because if that doesn’t cause you anxiety, nothing will. It also happens to have a billion loyal customers. Some people call them sheeple, but I resent that term, not because of the substance of the slur, but mostly because it hurts my feelings as an Apple user.
So, now, if we are to believe everything we hear from its overwhelming supply of hype men in the press, it wants to get about a million AR/VR/XR (pick one, any one) headsets into the hands of consumers and that should be the beginning of a sea change in AR/VR/XR (for the sake of all that is holy, pick one and go with it) acceptance.
We are also been led to believe that the company is looking for content from Disney and Sony. But it is also going to do novel things with virtual meetings and immersive video.
The roughly $3,000 device, due later this year under the likely name of Reality Pro, will take a novel approach to virtual meetings and immersive video, aiming to shake up a VR industry currently dominated by Meta Platforms Inc. It’s a high-stakes gambit for Apple, which is expanding into its first major new product category since releasing a smartwatch in 2015, and the company needs to wow consumers.
Mark Gurman, Apple Whisperer at Bloomberg
We are also led to believe that the headset is going to be like the iPhone but better or meld with iPhones or something like that. And the gestures, let’s not forget the gestures, and the eye-tracking. Who in the right mind wouldn’t want to give up a piece of themselves and their dignity to buy a $3,000 headset from a multi-trillion dollar startup? Well, this guy, for one.
I’m calling it now: Apple’s AR/VR headset is gonna change everything.
— Sam Kohl (@iupdate) January 19, 2023
I CAN’T WAIT. 👀 pic.twitter.com/DgSzK13MWe
To be fair to Sam, he is not alone. But you take a look the actual headsets that are out there in the chart below and what do you notice, other than the fact that the authors of the report it came from picked VR and went with it, bless their little hearts?
You take Meta and its Oculus out of there and it is an overwhelmingly industrial/enterprise product market. And here’s the really interesting thing about all this information we have about the market: with the exception of Sony PlayStation, everyone else on that list couldn’t make a decent game to save their lives or headsets. You won’t get consumers without games, and you need one, just one, to change the conversation. Meta has proven that avatars and meetings and immersion are just not going to cut it. And yes, they sold millions of headsets but, to put it in perspective, if you a have a database of 2 billion names you could market to directly, 10 million is 0.5%, which is a pretty poor response rate for an direct marketing campaign.
Whatever you may think about the Pacific Rim movies, there is one thing that rings true, Ron Perlman is a national treasure, and harvesting Kaijus for fun and profit is about the most realistic thing in any of the movies. Well, if Apple ever falls, VR is going to be one of those harvested creatures at the 18 second mark of this video. But, if it is AR/VR/XR (you pick the one that works best for you because we give up) then, it may be a whole different ballgame.
