[minhazm]

I'm not sure it's fair to say that Facebook had a 7-8 yr head start because Apple has been developing every single component that goes into the VR headset for well over 10 yrs. They design their own cameras, displays, micro processors, lenses, speakers, sensors, etc. Apple has hundreds of engineers working on each of these components for various devices they sell. They've shipped a billion+ of their own custom processors and have a world class chip design team to make custom chips for specific products. Meta has no where near the level of hardware design expertise that Apple has. They've also been slowly laying a lot of this ground work for years now with ARKit and LiDAR on iPhones / iPad Pro, moving Mac's to Apple Silicon and supporting iPad apps on it (allows them to bootstrap the Vision Pro app store).

Even if Apple found the displays, cameras, sensors, etc. the one thing they won't find available is the processors(s). Apple is shipping an M2 chip, which they use for desktop computing as well as a custom new chip to handle sensor information. I read that the actual parts cost of the Vision Pro is $1500, and that's with Apple having huge contracts with their suppliers for other components and getting a discount. Add in R&D costs and even at $3500 Apple is likely not making much on this device. If Meta were to make a similar device I think it would cost $5k or they would have to sell it at a major loss.

[jnsie]

I'd be curious to know more about what has been done with ARKit since launch. I know it's a thing....I just don't know if it has been used for any major purpose or at any major scale and, by extension, if it is forming the ground work for anything.

[minhazm]

There are some really cool apps, but likely not ones that you and I would use on a daily basis. Most of it is like seeing furniture in your living room in AR, or products on amazon, etc. There's also some cool ones for scanning objects, generating blueprints of a house, and more. Even if the apps themselves aren't that useful right now, they've been working on the software & hardware to do this work for years and iterating on it. So when they finally launch Vision Pro they're not starting from scratch and a lot of the code is tested in the real world.

[RandallBrown]

Every year at WWDC they've been announcing more and more improvements to ARKit. I've never seen any "killer apps" that use it but now it feels pretty clear it was being invested in for Vision.