Apple just reduced Vision Pro production, but Liquid Glass was in motion well before that. What leaves me scratching my head is I never got the impression Apple believed in Vision Pro. It launched because after years of research, management wanted to see if the effort was worth continuing to invest in, but that wasn't a vote of confidence.
I'll have to second this. It's not even on Apple's homepage! I hadn't heard it mentioned for months before today. It had its niche share of users who actually found it useful, but apart from them it seems that the world is not ready for spatial computing (or maybe current spatial computing isn't ready for people, who knows?).
I'm hoping the new Valve headset will be like, 60% of what the Apple vision is. My boss got the Apple vision on launch day and it is really premier hardware, visuals that are almost exactly like seeing the thing you're looking at in real life, and the hand sensing / interactivity was the best I have experienced, even though it still had flaws.
But being tied to Apple's ecosystem, not being really useful for PC connection, and the fact that at least at the time developers were not making any groundbreaking apps for it all makes it a failure in my book.
If Valve can get 60% of that and be wirelessly PC tied for VR gaming then even if they charge $1800 for their headset it will likely be worth it.
I have a vision pro (obtained on day 1 for development purposes), and have given demos of it to a number of non enthusiast/non techie people.
All of them immediately hate that it’s bulky, it’s heavy, it messes with your hair,
messes with your makeup, doesn’t play well with your glasses, it feels hot and sweaty. Everyone wants to take it off after 5-10 minutes at most, and never asks to try it again (even tho the more impressive 3D content does get a “that’s kinda cool” acknowledgment).
The headset form factor is just a complete dud, and it’s 100% clear that Apple knew that but pushed it anyway to show that they were doing “something”.
Exactly. More expensive than a high end desktop or laptop while having less useful software than an iPad. No thanks.
If it were around the $500 point I’d pick one up in a heartbeat. Maybe even $1000. But $3500 is nuts for how little they’re offering. It seems like a toy for the ultra rich.
I assumed the price would eventually come down. But it seems like they’ll just cancel the project entirely. Pity.
I’m assuming Vision Pro is viewed as what the Newton was to the iPhone. It will provide some useful insight way ahead of its time but the mainstream push will only happen after a number of manufacturing breakthroughs happen allowing for a comfortable daily driver UX. Optics and battery tech will need multiple generational leaps to get to a lightweight goggle / sunglasses form factor with Apple-tier visuals, tracking, and battery life…
Magic Leap 2 and HoloLens 2 proved that we still haven't cracked the code on AR/XR. Similar price point, plenty of feasible enterprise use cases for folks willing to pony up money to hire Unity or Unreal devs. And I'm sure there are enough of them tired of being flogged to death by the gaming industry. But they both went splat.
It's going to take a revolution on miniaturization AND component pricing for XR to be feasible even for enterprise use cases, it seems.
It has incrementally improved, and gotten cheaper, to the point that I now see them everywhere. When they first came out, they were pretty expensive. Remember the $17,000 gold Watch (which is now obsolete)? The ceramic ones were over a couple of grand.
But the dream of selling Watch apps seems to have died. I think most folks just use the built-in apps.
The $17,000 Apple Watch was a (rather silly) attempt to compete in the high end watch space. However, they also launched the base "Sport" model at US$349.
Not really anything like the watch, the existence of a stupidly expensive "luxury" version doesn't change the fact that the normal one started at $350.
I think the current rumor is that development of a cheaper XR headset has been shelved in favor of working on something to compete with Meta's AI glasses.
Did they commit to additional production of the Vision Pro? I read their announcement as quiet cancellation of VR products. They announced some kind of vaporware pivot, but I didn't read a single analyst projection that Apple ever intended to bring another wearable to market. Customer usage statistics of the Vision Pro are so low Apple hasn't even hinted about reporting on them.
Wearable products, outside of headphones, have a decade-long dismal sales record and even more abysmal user retention story. No board is going to approve significant investment in the space unless there's a viable story. 4x resolution and battery life alone is not enough to resuscitate VR/AR for mass adoption.
That's probably regional then. In my area most people using watches nowadays are usually into sports.
I must admit I don't understand the point of a smart watch when most people have their smartphone in their hand a significant amount of time a day and said smartphones screen sizes have been increasing over the year because people want to be able to doom scroll at pictures and videos and interact with whatsapp all day. I don't know how you can do that from a tiny screen on a watch.
Those like me who don't subscribe to that way of living don't want distractions and notification so they use regular watches and would see as a regression a device that needs to be charged every few days.
Some people said payments but I see peolle paying with their smartphone all the time since they have it at hands or in a pocket very close anytime having it in a watch doesn't look like a sigmificant improvement. I'd be curious to see a chart of smartwatch adoption by country.
Apple watches have the highest marketshare in a lot of the world's markets. According to this analysis[1], watchOS (Apple watches) make up around half of all smartwatches used in Europe. Global sales puts Apple around 20-30% market share, with brands like Samsung and Garmin around 8% [2]. I haven't found good US-only statistics to show what the market share is of watchOS is, but I'd imagine its probably close to 50% or more.
I do agree though, anecdotal experiences will vary depending on the kind of people you hang out with. For the people I know heavily into running and cycling, brands like Garmin are over represented. Meanwhile lots of other consumers practically don't even know these are options.
Recent moves have convinced me that Apple is getting ready to push Vision Pro substantially harder.
In recent weeks, I’ve been getting push notifications about VP.
They hired Alex Lindsay for a position in Developer Relations.
And there’s the M5 update.
Just remember, it’s a lot cheaper than the original Mac(inflation adjusted). Give it 40 years – hell, given the speed of change in tech these days, it won’t even take 10.
I think they bought the metaverse hype and hurried up. If only they had put half the energy on AI, we'd have a createML with something else than yolov2 in 2026
