The general cut and paste consensus around Apple’s Vision Pro is that it is a first version of the product, that the market will take 5 years to evolve, the Apple Watch didn’t take off immediately but users found a way to make it work for them and define the product’s success etc. etc.
Firstly, the headset market is exactly the same as it has always been: there has been not one serious, compelling reason to see it as a replacement or adjunct for existing computing displays. Secondly, the Apple Watch analogy is a lazy trope that doesn’t take into consideration the previous point here, and doesn’t account for the differences in pricing and comfort with smartwatches that existed at the time Apple Watch was launched. Thirdly, how effective a strategy is it to launch a product that is meant to change computing when you are pitching it as being only a first iteration, somehow not needing to be complete or fully functional?
On top of all that, you have a corporate pitch for the Vision Pro that is all over the map; it is certainly not an enterprise product because of the cost alone and the fact that every setup is highly individualized and probably needs to happen in an Apple Store. It is certainly not a consumer device because of its price and the fact that Apple spent an awful lot of time showing people watching movies on a Vision Pro when it only has about 2 hours worth of battery life.
Apple just threw a whole bunch of stuff at the wall, and is telling anyone who listens that something is bound to stick, in time, eventually, and that’s how you get to the future of these devices becoming ubiquitous because once something sticks, we’ll be on our way.
Frame all of this conjecture against a backdrop of dampened consumer demand, possible economic woes, and the likelihood that we have consumer fatigue when it comes to hardware upgrade cycles when there is very little to drive the market other than the replacement of aging products.
Right now, Apple is essentially asking users to pay $3,500 each to beta-test this new era before it becomes the reality. In a sign of how early days it is, Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook didn’t even wear the device at WWDC. And the company’s hands-on demos were carefully controlled in an exterior building.
Mark Gurman, Bloomberg
For a while there, the tech industry had a notion of market validation, an agile approach to going to market fast that relied on the feedback of users to help shape iterative changes to drive desired outcomes. Where is the market validation for headsets? I guess you could start with the billions and billions of dollars that Meta has spent on its headsets. Or the billions that Microsoft spent on its headsets. Or the millions and millions being spent by a swathe of startups, and established display manufacturers.
It’s the height of hubris to treat your customers, ardent enthusiasts that they are, as guinea pigs to cover for your own inability to come up with a compelling reason to launch a product. Maybe all the thousands of Vision Pro headsets that are purchased by competitors, to reverse engineer the good bits, will help to get us closer to something akin to a mass market headset. It’s unlikely based on the history of the industry. It is also unlikely because of eyesight being what it is, and wearing an electronic bucket over your head isn’t a great selling point for any device.
It just seems like you are crapping on your own users when you put out a product that isn’t a product.
