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Comment by threeseed | Hacker News Reader

It's too easy / lazy to joke about Meta and their bet on a future AR/VR world.

But what I don't see is people willing to do the same with Apple who has also invested billions in the space and will be showcasing their Reality platform in the next couple of months at WWDC.

Do people really want to bet against the company that has had so many consumer product successes even ones for which there was widespread doubt e.g. Apple Watch, AirPods etc.

And what if it takes off ? There will need to be another platform similar to iPhone/Android and isn't that the type of bet Meta should be making.

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I think the Apple headset will be a (relative) disaster. I'm sure it will sell OK, but we're talking Apple TV numbers not iPhone numbers.

What AR/VR needs is a mass market killer app, like Pokémon GO (in its heyday) or World of Warcraft or something. Not another headset. People will put up with all kinds of discomfort/inconvenience/cost if there's something interesting to do. The current crop of Metaverses don't cut it in this regard.

I think market will be there it’s just like 5 years from now and most people seem to know this such as Roblox and Epic (creative 2.0). It will be speed up by generative AI

You certainly can do somewhat useful AR on a phone. See e.g. some of the ML photo and sound identification tools (e.g. Merlin, Google Lens) that have very quietly gotten quite useful.

But AR that is really a killer app almost certainly needs a fashionable, light, easy to use headset and that's a hardware problem to a significant degree that probably doesn't have a quick fix. Yes, you can do something that's effectively a prototype that's more like a "headset" but that's almost certainly not a mass market device that most people will walk around wearing.

(There's also the social glasshole issue but my guess is that goes away with a useful enough device even if some people hate the idea.)

> What AR/VR needs is a mass market killer app

I really think we're just waiting for the resolution to increase and it to become thinner and lighter and better at hand tracking.

The Quest 2 is already a better experience watching 1080p surround-sound content than most people's TV's -- if you're watching by yourself. But streamers haven't quite caught onto that yet.

But once the screen becomes sharp enough to do real work and hand tracking improves dramatically, I think we're going to start seeing some dramatic shifts.

I think the Apple headset will be successful primarily because it's an Apple product. As a VR headset it'll probably be technically worse for higher prices than comparable non-Apple headsets (although it'll probably be better than competing AR headsets simply because there aren't any), the software will be top notch and it'll "just work", and most importantly devs will get excited about it and build apps for it.

This. I have never been a fan of watches but after seeing the other 3 people in my house adopt and actively use, year over year, I believe they can produce and market about anything successfully even in crowded market. They truly are good/best at usability.

It is not easy/lazy to joke about something that has cost dozens of billions and has resulted in an empty Second Life where avatars have no legs.

Meta has sold 20+ million Quest devices making it more popular than Xbox.

And most of those billions have gone towards acquiring app developers, game studios and Meta Labs.

They deserve a little more credit than building a Second Life clone.

As of 2021, Xbox installed base was 63 million units: https://www.tweaktown.com/news/89000/microsoft-gives-xbox-co...

But sales have been declining every year from 7.6m in 2017 to 0.35m in 2021: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1085604/annual-unit-sale...

So it seems popularity is decreasing.

That's the Xbox One, which released in 2013. They released a new console in 2020 (Series X) which has sold 20m units in 3 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_game_cons...

I don't see where these Quest devices have gone to though, who and where is the market? Because even though I run around the tech circles where people are eager to be early adopters, own multiple tech gadgets, etc. I still don't see a single home with a Quest device. I see multiple Xbox and Playstation devices but no Quest.

How can that be more popular than Xbox? Where are those 20 million devices in use? Do people hide them?

Since the iPhone release i have seen about 10 people with one. Wikipedia says Apple has sold more than 2.2 billion of them. Do people hide them?

Considering the context presented (the sampling of very tech forward people who really enjoy advanced gadgets), then OP's question makes a lot of sense.

Your comparison is a bit weird. I have seen more than 10 iPhones today, and all I did was walk to Starbucks and back.

You live in a place that has many iPhone users

Exactly my initial point: I live in a place where a gadget such as the Quest should be found quite easily, yet I haven't seen one.

That comparison makes very little sense. Meta Quest is the best selling VR unit, maybe you should compare it with the best selling console? Nintendo Switch has sold more than a 100 million units. Not to mention that Xbox games also run on Windows - and that has a market reach way above 20 million decices.

The same internal presentation that discusses this 20+ million number also mentions huge problems in retention. People don't use their Quest very much nor very long.

Overall usage numbers are abysmal, and it is a flop. One of the major reasons why it is a flop is that even the people who really want it and actually buy it don't really have anything interesting to use it for.

Legless Second Life is a very good representative of the flop that the metaverse is.

If the Meta pivot was going as fantastic as you say it is, Mark wouldn't be going ballistic on his own employees.

> But what I don't see is people willing to do the same with Apple who has also invested billions in the space and will be showcasing their Reality platform in the next couple of months at WWDC.

Nobody is criticizing because... there's nothing to base those criticisms on - there's no product (yet) and WWDC is rumor. Once (if) it launches, the praises and critiques will follow.

Apple also failed many products.

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