[wallabie]

And yet I'm left wondering why the investors had such a bad reaction to its launch? Early signs point to this being a technological marvel, and despite the price tag I think it'll have useful applications in businesses with deeper IT budgets. You won't give one to everyone on the floor, but there's likely a case to having a small set of these.

It reminds me of the "Neural SubNet" from Deus Ex.

[troupe]

If you are referring to the stock price, I'd guess there was a lot of run up anticipating an unknown great announcement. Once it was announced, the "fear of missing out premium" went away and the stock went down just a bit.

The other factor is probably the the high price made everyone realize Apple is really targeting devs and early adopters. They aren't ready to sell one of these to every person who owns an iphone...at least not yet. So regardless of how promising the technology is, they probably won't start making money from it until some point in the future.

[voisin]

This is the “Vision Pro”. I suspect they’ll come out with a lower priced “Vision” in the future that is missing some of the features but allows people to gain access to the product ecosystem.

Apple might also simply release this model Vision Pro as the Vision in a few years when they release the next Vision Pro generation, something like they’ve done in other product lines.

[sroussey]

The lightweight consumer version will be called Vision Air, a.k.a. Visionaire.

You know, for visionaries. ;)

[iLoveOncall]

Because the Oculus Rift was demoed in 2012, and in the more than 10 years since then, there has been not even an ounce of indication of a mainstream adoption of anything VR or AR related. Actually, more than that, the last company that massively invested in it, with bottomless pockets, has nothing to show for it beside failure and looks ridicule.

It seems insane that CEOs of the world's biggest companies don't seem to understand the very simple fact that nobody wants to wear a fucking headset all day long.

[deadbunny]

Indeed. I bought a Valve Index and it's great. But other than Half-Life: Alyx there hasn't been any other AAA titles that target VR it's all Beat Sabre level niche games that are fun for a few goes then get old (for me at least).

As you allude to there is no killer app for VR after a decade. Maybe the "Apple factor" might bring some more devs and some fresh ideas but at the price point its at you're still at the "the market is too small" for most companies to ivents in.

[voisin]

It isn’t about wearing it all day long. It’ll have a set of applications, just like the the phone and tablet and laptop have sets of applications, with some overlap.

The difference here from Meta is that Apple isn’t selling a dystopian future where we all spend our time in a meta verse with a “fucking headset all day long” - they are explicitly showing it as in use for certain applications as part of - rather than replacing - reality.

[peoplearepeople]

There is a really compelling use case for VR that is under-exploited due to low resolution and heat output of various non-apple headsets:

Driving video games.

Driving in VR is 1000% times better than on a 2D screen, you can actually judge breaking distances, and you feel like you're actually going through the corner.

[loeg]

Even taking this claim at face value, this is too niche of an audience to make VR compelling for investors.

[ghaff]

I don't know about the absolute numbers but my general sense is that the market for harder core flying and driving and other simulators has actually declined at least as a proportion of the absolute market in the past 10 to 20 years.

[dleslie]

Also flying. Flight simulators and space simulators are a blast in VR.

[Closi]

Adoption sometimes takes that long, we just always forget the predecessors to the devices that made it big (eg the worldwide success of mobile phones was not overnight, and was limited to business people and the rich at first).

[barrkel]

There's nothing especially valuable about a technological marvel. Applications matter. Applications people pay for, or can be served ads alongside. That market is untested.

[ghaff]

Everything about this seems an in-home thing. Certainly the announcement didn't suggest otherwise--including Disney's presence.

So more VR than AR? Not walking around with magic fashionable glasses that tell you things? I can imagine interesting aspects of AR but I'm not sure this gets to the starting line. (Other than maybe a developer platform)

[prawn]

I think the pitch is in-home and in-office (eventually this will be the same thing for more people). People might use it on a flight or commute but I don’t see the key pitch being anything like walking the street getting AR map directions etc.

[faeriechangling]

From the flight/commuting perspective it seems very appealing because it lacks the ergonomic issues of other devices, but the battery life is a bit of an issue.

[prawn]

Power bricks are pretty cheap and easy to carry. And many flights have USB charging plugs. I reckon they'll have more or larger power bricks as an up-sell.

And I agree - laptop on a plane wrecks necks.

[nescioquid]

I can vouch for this.

On my first trip to most antique Corinth, someone noticed the fine Casio timepiece from my last (Reagan-era -- ca. AUC 2750s, I think -- or do I reckon now from the founding of Christ?) trip. When the watch was seen to "move", I explained the function of the band by analogy to a water clock (a clay vessel with a small aperture near the bottom to let water drain) and compared the water to the (non-visible) battery inside the Casio. I even went into elaborate explanation about the special symbols for numbers which mark the hour and how they are distinct from the symbols for making sounds for speech (e.g. "sure, '1' is rather like 'alpha'...").

Sadly, it was a very clever Greek to whom I explained all this. Slightly irritating were the questions about why it was on my wrist in the first place -- something something WWI. But my heart sank during the debrief when I came to really understand the time-travel problems which were exploited to near extinction by ancient sci-fi authors.

Happily, those (extremely antique) courts found it so much more cost-effective to cut off an advocate when the water drained from a clay vessel than to invest the wealth of the city-state into the production of a -- dare I say 'Byzantine' -- contraption wrought of too much brass and requiring too many servants to operate?

I guess the real lesson here is that while everyone has been conditioned to be distrustful of the Greeks, my personal experience has been that they are pretty solid folk.

[quickthrowman]

> And yet I'm left wondering why the investors had such a bad reaction to its launch?

AAPL made a new all time high this week and yesterday it set a new all time high closing price.

Selling off 3% after running up to a new ATH prior to WWDC is not a bad reaction, lol.

[mercutio2]

Agreed that a 3% sell-the-news drop is minor.

But worth noting, in an era of higher inflation and stock buybacks, that probably the relevant metric for investor happiness is real enterprise value (that is, discount market cap by net cash, then adjust for inflation).

By that measure they’re pretty far from the pandemic peak.

[jeromegv]

Investors look at business potential and might not understand or want to bet on this market yet, it’s very much untested and unproven. If you want to know if it’s any good, likely better to look at tech publications.

[iLoveOncall]

> it’s very much untested and unproven

I feel like I'm reading cryptobros saying "we're still early".

It's not a new market, it has existed for more than 10 years, and it is a micro-niche market.

And I'm saying that as a guy that has a Quest 2.

[vosper]

> It's not a new market, it has existed for more than 10 years, and it is a micro-niche market.

So were smartphones before the iPhone. Sure, some people had a Blackberry. But now _everyone_ has a smartphone.

[FinnKuhn]

I would argue investors expected/hoped for some kind of application that is useful and would depend on wearing a headset.

[detourdog]

I think the demo looked too simple most viewers saw the demo as no big deal. The demo for me was the hand tracking. The labor that went into the product is not reflected in the demo.