[wpietri]

When do you believe that time was? Because that's not how I remember it.

I borrowed an Apple QuickTake from friends in the mid '90s, and bought an Olympus 1-megapixel camera not too long after. People definitely complained about the low quality. And some said they didn't want to have to go to a desktop computer to view their photos, which was very plausible given the size and slowness of desktop computers of the time.

And they turned out to be basically correct. Digital photography became wildly more popular with the rise of the smartphone and the tablet. Basically computers had to get much more human-friendly, fitting into the existing human world, so that you could use photos as you would with an album, handing them around, pointing at them, etc.

Which is part of what makes me skeptical about facehugger VR. Instead of putting technology in their living rooms, it requires people to cut themselves off from their surroundings and pretend to be somewhere else. It's the exact opposite of what made digital photography work for the masses.

[parasubvert]

Digital photography had already won by the time the iPad came out 13 years ago, the DSLR and Point and Shoots were everywhere, and Kodak was on the brink of bankruptcy. Smartphones as awesome cameras didn't really take off until 2010-2011 with the iPhone 4/4s, where it was competing with point and shoots.

Facehugger AR is potentially great for bringing remote people into your living room. AppleTV is getting FaceTime, (and Zoom/webex), SharePlay already exists to sync media across remote participants, etc.

Also 3d moment captures / replays could be a killer app.

[wpietri]

Depends on how you look at it. Rummaging for stats, it looks like analog photos peaked at around 80 billion photos per year. Digital cameras were rapidly replacing that and increasing the number of photos taken somewhat. But current estimates are in the neighbor hood of 2 trillion photos per year. Digital photography won over film early in the smartphone era, but that was still just the beginning.

[parasubvert]

For sure, I get the point that photo taking exploded after 2011 or so. Just saying that growth in new product categories is non-linear, and often builds on the prior modest successes.

The VR headset business has been beset by boom/bust behavior (boom in 2016, led with the PSVR ; boom in 2020 led by the Meta Quest 2). It's seen as disappointing that it hasn't reached a sustainable mass market stable growth rate. But what's not broadly recognized is that it is still showing strong growth, just lumpy and subject to over inflated expectations. The Meta Quest 2 has sold 20 million units total, that's about half of the Sony PS5 and MORE than Microsoft sold of Xbox Series S|X consoles so far. it's also 400% higher than what we saw from the PSVR 's lifetime sales. now, global console (including VR) sales collapsed in late 2022 and layoffs followed, but... they're beating the Xbox, which is notable. Sony has now shipped the PSVR2 into a terrible market for game consoles and even they expect 1.5 million units to ship this year.

It's nothing compared to the iPhone, but nearly all products in history are nothing compared to the iPhone.

I would bet Apple can only make a small number of Vision Pros in 2024 (1-2 million?), and the price is more about the production limitations of this next generation of screen than the actual cost of goods. This stuff takes time. I would expect 2026 is when the mass market version is widely available.

[wpietri]

It might take time. But we can't assume that. Like 3D movies or 3D TV, it might get pushed for a while on a wave of investor and corporate money before it goes back to being irrelevant. Sometimes a modest success is the harbinger of great success. Sometimes, as with the CueCat, it's the absolute peak.