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by barbariangrunge 723 days ago
It’s not financially worthwhile for most third party developers to develop apps for a platform with too few users. Not sure how the iPhone originally did it, that seems pretty amazing to me.

But yeah, need a product to drive up adoption so a healthy ecosystem can form around it… so they can capture 30% of it
4 comments
dylan604 723 days ago
> Not sure how the iPhone originally did it

It was crystal clear that the iPhone was going to be a huge thing. An AR/VR headset is much less clear. I think it's only slightly clearer than mud at this point. Apple does have a history of trying to force things on the industry that went over like lead balloons. The VisionPro could be the next trashcan MacPro, or it could be the next hotness after building from a slow burn. Apple never released an updated trashcan, but they are looking at the next headset. So that's a signal in and of itself

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jmull 723 days ago
Right. Probably not the original plan, but as people have pointed out, the Vision Pro has landed as essentially a dev kit.

What’s the point of dev kit 2 when there still aren’t a lot of regular users?

(Seems tough though. Even if you can keep all the key parts of the Vision Pro at a $1500-$1600 price - that’s got to be very hard — will that be enough? I guess we’ll find out.)

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freedomben 723 days ago
The iPhone did it by being essentially an iPod Touch that could make calls. Lots of people were already familiar with iPod and iPod Touch, so when it turned into the first programmable phone, it was novel and exciting, and then the gold rush took off when people started making money and it grew from there.
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hnfong 723 days ago
FWIW, the iPod Touch was released after the first iPhone.
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gizajob 723 days ago
Yeah it was "essentially" a mobile phone that people already understood the value of, particularly because of Blackberry, so it was a potentially improved mobile phone given its touchscreen and interface. It was also a much better iPod and a web browser alongside. The iPod touch came much later.
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sitkack 723 days ago
The first wave of iPhone development was done by solo developers. This seeded the market with apps and created the ecosystem. Then the larger more expensive apps moved in to harvest all those sweet customers.
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