[tsojer]

I feel like this is the original Apple MO that has worked for them for all their most innovative products. Looking at iMac, iPods, iPhone, Apple watch - it was never a perfectly polished product they were pushing, it was a paradigm shift.

When they launched the firs iMac, the paradigm shift was personal computers are for everyone, and belong to every home and should fit into your surroundings. There were a lot of things you could not do with your iMac that you could do with a lot of much cheaper PCs, especially outside the US. You could do a lot more with your BlackBerry than you could with the iPhone, but here we are.

This seems like a similar strategy. They are trying to win the space by changing the paradigm and moving xr from metaverses to visual computing.

That said, they have had a lot of flops with this strategz as well (Pippin, Newton, eWorld, iTunes Ping) so it's not a given that this approach will work.

But I'm definitely happy to see this strategy reemerging, as opposed a gazillion versions of iphone with a slightly better battery, one more camera, and less or less periphery in the box.

[dmarcos]

Difference is that Apple enters categories that have already product-market fit (PCs, MP3 players, laptops, smartphones, fitness trackers). Only exception probably being the iPad. VR doesn’t have product-market fit except for some games genres (driving / flight simulators, rythme / dancing)

[tsojer]

I somewhat agree, somewhat disagree. There was also some product-market fit, but they never entered a formed market - their specialty is creating a need for a product through marketing and product strategy.

When they released the iMac, they sold 800.000 computers by the end of the year, and that was 32% of those buys were people who have never owned a computer previously. So they were going for the Windows users, but also for people who have previously never seen the need for a computer. By creating an easy to use product aimed at the masses, they created a product-market fit in an untapped market segment where there was none.

When you think about it, smart phones did not exactly have a product market fit - there were mostly mobile phone users, and kind of smallish dying market of handheld computers, some Blackberry/other users that were I guess what you'd call a smartphone users. First iPhone did a lot for unifying those users into a smartphone market.

So I see some of that here as well. By introducing Vision Pro in a demo that showcases all the most popular uses of desktop/mobile computing, they are pushing the XR into the space of mobile/desktop users who were not interested in XR previously. It's the opposite of the killer app approach, but I think it can work for them and is a tried tactic. And it pushes bring XR closer to general use than gaming.

But definitely a larger leap of fate, as you point out.

[dmarcos]

PCs and smartphones were both proven markets regardless of market size in a way VR is not today.

People owned smartphones (blackberries and palm) and PCs, use them a lot and had established (not speculative) use cases. Clear market signal while VR only has significant traction for a handful of games.