i wouldn’t normally be concerned since any company releasing a VR product with this price tag is obviously going to fail… but it’s apple and somehow through exquisite branding and sleek design they have managed to create something that resonated with “tech reviewers” and rich folk who can afford it.
what’s really concerning is that it’s not marketed as a new VR headset, it’s marketed by apple and these “tech reviewers” as the new iphone, something you take with you everywhere and do your daily tasks in, consume content in etc…
and it’s dystopian. imagine you are watching youtube on this thing and when an ad shows up, you can’t look away, even if you try to they can track your eye movement and just move the window, you can’t mute it, you certainly cannot install adblock on it, you are forced to watch the ad until it satisfies apple or you just give up and take out the headset.
this is why i think all these tech giants (google meta apple etc) were/are interested in the “metaverse”. it holds both your vision and your hearing hostage, you cannot do anything else when using it but to just use the thing. a 100% efficiency attention machine, completely blocking you from the outside world.
i’m not concerned about this iteration as much as people are not hyped about this iteration. just like how people are hyped about the next apple vision, i’m more worried about the next iterations with somewhat lower price tag and better software availability. i hope it flops and i know it probably won’t achieve any sort of mainstream adoption even if it’s deemed a success because it probably can’t get less bulky and look less dorky, but the possibility is still worrying. what are your thoughts?
I just don’t understand how Apple, a company known for their sleek, elegant design aesthetics above all else, put their name on something that looks so dorky
I think how the headset looks only somewhat matters…
Apple has generated an image of being “the innovator” in technology. There was “no smartphone” until the iPhone came around (even though that statement is not completely accurate). Their computers are “superior” (even though that statement isn’t necessarily accurate either). Still, the point is that the masses feel that Apple is a technologically innovative company and they still want to own some Apple technology rather than dealing with anything else.
In some realms, this is arguably working. The newer generations (today’s school children) see iPhones as far superior than Android (statement accuracy not relevant) and that anyone not having an iPhone as something being too poor to own the superior phone. Apple wants to keep that brand identity - of being superior technology.
Things like VR put a bit of a damper on that vision. If VR is the “latest and greatest thing” then why does “the owners of Facebook” have their own VR technology while Apple has nothing similar? There is a feeling that Apple introduces products when they are finally ready for the masses… but there is also a growing feeling that Apple is just falling behind and can no longer be innovative. The lack of innovation feelings is something that needs to be removed.
So we have the Apple VR headset. Does it look good? Well, it looks innovative in advertising. Is it for you? No. They would prefer that you don’t use the headset but instead that you “have feelings of technology superiority” when thinking of Apple products. Actually using the headset could harm those feelings. So they make sure to actually release something VR that only people with a ton of money could actually use so that those people can brag about having the latest innovative thing (while also not mentioning any issues with the device). Those people help deliver the actual product…
The actual product is the “innovative feelings”. So, to conclude the point, I feel that something that looks “so dorky” is sort of the point here.
I think they tried to do everything they could to make it look not dorky, but the technology just isn’t there yet
100%. There’s a reason there aren’t other standalone sets this good or better. It’s very, very hard. The tech just isn’t there to do a lot better than this without the price being even more insane. I’m really curious to see how the tech progresses. Some of the hurdles are incredibly complex.
This is one of the crazier teardown videos I’ve ever seen for any device. It’s just jam packed with stuff. The engineering involved is ridiculous, regardless of what you think about the device’s validity or of Apple.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVJPAYwY8Us
The difference between Meta and Apple are really well illustrated by this. Meta’s motto has been “move fast and break things” so they brought the Quest to market without legs and then iterated and iterated.
Apple sat in highly secretive development for years to make sure they got as much right as they could. I can only imagine how many less dorky designs their skunkworks came up with that were just unworkable.
Yeah Meta is taking the very different angle of wanting to get their stuff in as many houses as possible, right away. I believe various Quests have basically been sold at a loss for at least part of their retail life. They’re targeting about as low of a price point as they can.
And when they did go for a more premium high pricepoint product (The Quest Pro), it seems to have been a disappointment and an overall flop. I’ve seen a number of people say the Quest 3 is about as the Pro good for average use. Its main differentiator seems to be face tracking.
All this said, I won’t be buying this iteration of the AVP. I think it’s really cool tech, but I’ll stick with the Quest 2 for now. The AVP is basically a dev kit as far as I’m concerned. And it’s way more money than I can justify.
I agree. It’s a new computing paradigm, and Apple needs developers to come up with some killer apps for it. So they price it so high that ordinary consumers won’t buy something half-baked, but devs who want to move in this direction will buy it as a business expense.
Hopefully this will lead to something more impactful than games and media consumption. Like, it would be awesome if you could walk around holding the AVP and have it generate 3D model of your house, and then go into a virtual world where you can delete walls and stuff.
I’ll be honest I think their watch and AirPods both look kinda dumb, but they seem to be quite popular. And I distinctly remember that when both came out people were taking shots at how they looked, myself included.
Pretty simply, the perception that Apple has around design makes anything they develop fashionable by default.