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Comment by baby | Hacker News Reader

Why should they be in panic? They already iterated on 3 headsets, they definitely have the advantage (weren't people complaining that they spent too much $$ in VR? Now they should be terrified?)

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Thats what I am saying. They had 3 iterations, yet, are technologically behind Apple.

I mean, just pure technology wise, the screens, number of sensors, processing power itself is mind boggling.

I am sure that all their hadware decisions regarding oculus were constrained by the compute hardware. Apple has the moat of world class custom silicon that means, the constraints on its designers are far less.

And we are seeing just the first gen device.

Probably not technically behind. Were aiming lower for price, is more likely.

One is priced at $300 and the other is more than 10x that. I don't understand why people keep comparing the two as if they were designed with the same objectives.

isn't the objective to capture and define the market?

metaverse vs spatial computing?

and whoever can make money for their respective business: sell ads or sell apps/integrate with rest of apple ecosystem?

Quest pro is $1,500 (albeit 8 months old )

Yes, Apple is priced quite premium but that is also their strength Apple can price at this level and still command enough sales , Meta or any other company cannot .

Even at the same price point (HoloLens 2 costs the same) as Apple it is hard to imagine another headset competing.

Also none of the concept headsets MZ has shown so far come close to this

For Apple, I don’t think it’s about sales. It’s about introducing something new to the mass market. So they want to sell this to developers (price doesn’t really matter). And early adopters/fanboys (for them it matters a bit more).

Apple is using these two groups for development of new software and for marketing. The fanboys will carry this thing around for a year or two and familiarize the general public.

Just a bit, but the $1500 price point didn't stick around for long. So really it's a $999 headset now vs $3500 "next year".

Yeah it’s like saying that a Honda Civic has had many generations but it’s not as fast as the latest Ferrari.

It's more like saying that Ferrari is going to compete head to head with Toyota next year. Apple are experts in making all sorts of hardware at scale, directly and through partners. Now it's on display that they've always been ahead of Facebook which acquired a much smaller hardware maker and has had its own hardware products which flopped.

In your analogy I'd still buy a Civic lol. Also, it's more like, Tesla has the advantage in EV land, but you'd rather buy the first EV car from BMW?

An Apple company never become a monopoly in a big market. There must be at least one competitor, and Meta is the first candidate.

I disagree on the tech part. I suspect much of the raw onboard power is going straight to keeping those high density displays fluid with pixels. Ambient awareness is a nice trick, but really? A bunch of flat apps floating in front of you? I had that shit with my GearVR adapter for my phone. I also think they may have a disadvantage on some the actually useful features of the Pro, like facial tracking for avatars, due to patents.

I'm also going to call it on the dedicated floating eyes screen: it will be a joke once it hits market, and everyone will turn it off to eek out a few more minutes on the battery pack.

It's 7 times the price, I sure hope the hardware is better. I don't expect $200 phones to be on par with $1500 iphones either.

They're going for different markets. Meta is trying to be the VR kids get for Christmas and people buy for fun, Apple is aiming at...something else.

They’re constrained by price: they haven’t trained the market to accept a $3500 piece of hardware from Facebook.

Apple has.

The “people with $3500 to spare” market knows that it’ll be polished and likely worth the price tag due to the “sparks joy” factor that Apple regularly delivers.

Exactly. Apple has a track record and fanbase that means they can sell a $3500 device. Meta know that even if they could build this device, there is zero chance anyone would buy it. They have to start with the low price point to make up for the lack of branch cachet.

Apple "has"? Hey the device is not even released and there is nothing like a preorder number that can tell a story. Please just be more mindful of the facts here. Your own speculation is simply meaningless.

The comment:

> "They’re constrained by price: they haven’t trained the market to accept a $3500 piece of hardware from Facebook. Apple has."

Can be justified by a lot of the Mac range costing >$3500, especially when you consider non-basic configurations.

Apple has (past and present tense) trained its audience to accept the most expensive hardware of any major consumer electronics company.

They did this by delivering consistently on their “coupled with our ecosystem, this is the best one of these you can possibly get” promise.

Don’t confuse targeting a lower price point with being behind. We have no evidence that Meta wouldn’t have arrived at the Vision Pro if they also targeted a base price of $3,500 + tax.

While I think Apple throwing their hat in the ring with a super-high end device is great for the market and should light a fire under Meta (and everyone else's butt), I think that the idea that Apple has a super-advanced technology lead isn't totally true for those that have been paying close attention to the XR space.

I mean yes, Apple is the best hardware company in the world, and they've assembled/polished best in class hardware and most importantly, have been willing to commit to the volumes for production for bleeding edge parts (eg, companies like eMagin have been demoing 4K micro OLED display for years [1] but no one's ever committed for an $X billion order - already we're seeing the "Apple" effect though as suppliers now have customers to chase [2]).

Meta's FRL has been working on pinch-and-release click for years with a haptic EMG controller that while bulkier, I think would actually be a more satisfying experience: https://tech.facebook.com/reality-labs/2021/3/inside-faceboo... Meta has also been working on next-gen displays (focused on varifocal displays/fixing vergence acommodation conflict) for years. I still think that Doug Lanman's 2020 EIS Plenary presentation is one of the best technical talks of recent memory, and highly recommend watching it to anyone interested in displays: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQwMAl9bGNY - Tested had a good demo video of what they have in the labs last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6AOwDttBsc and you can read about their DeepFocus work from back in 2018: https://tech.facebook.com/reality-labs/2018/12/introducing-d... or see their Half Dome prototypes going back the same time period: https://tech.facebook.com/reality-labs/2018/12/introducing-d...

You can go down anywhere down the stack, from spatial audio and custom HRTFs [3], haptics [4], avatars [5], FRL (or whatever it's called now) has done it all [6] but most of the cool stuff has only trickled into the market while Meta has focused on selling $300 consumer headsets and despite obstensibly being a "software" company has never figured out how to build a platform beyond a barely passable VR game launcher. Reading the visionOS docs [7] has been a breath of fresh air and is much more impressive to me than the hardware (which is great, but the biggest accomplishment on that end IMO was committing to launching such a high price-point to reach a baseline experience they were happy with; also their passthrough appears SoTA).

Still, I'm most excited that this will give the "courage" to others to launch high-end consumer experiences. Let's see true retina-resolution (60PPD+) varifocal HDR displays and actually seamless passthrough.

(Funny note, looking through old notes, back in 2015, I expected 4K/eye displays to be in an HMD by 2020, which was far too optimistic. [8])

[1] https://www.uploadvr.com/emagin-4k-oled-microdisplay-steambo...

[2] https://www.oled-info.com/tags/oled-microdisplays

[3] https://about.fb.com/news/2020/09/facebook-reality-labs-rese...

[4] https://www.xrtoday.com/mixed-reality/what-is-meta-doing-wit...

[5] https://theinnerdetail.com/meta-will-soon-let-you-to-make-ph...

[6] https://research.facebook.com/research-area/augmented-realit...

[7] https://developer.apple.com/visionos/learn/

[8] https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/k08jnu4t4qwerd0ln10w8/Virtual...

I don't get this comparison BTW. Apple needs an external battery, doesn't have controllers, doesn't seem fit for gaming. There's nothing interesting with their device. IMO the Quest 3 is objectively the superior device here.

of course they are terrified. Not being terrified is delusional. It's apple.

FB does not appear to be attracting young people. Apple appears to be a magnet for them. FWIW, Apple does PR and presentations a lot better ( I honestly can't remember FB VR rollout, but I was interested in Apple's toy ).

If FB is not worried, their CEO may not be doing his job.

I'm a middle school teacher in Europe. None of my students use Facebook. They even don't use Whatsapp that much anymore. FB has a big problem.

but they are using instagram no?

More likely Snapchat.

The girls, the skaters and bikers. The others just use snapchat most of the time. One of my students was complaining about battery life on his new iPhone. I told him that snapchat just uses a lot of battery because all of the shenanigans. He didnt believe me till I showed him the battery function of the phone where you can see what app uses how much percentage. :)

What do they use instead of Whatsapp?

Snapchat. All teens are communicating on Snapchat. And sometimes Instagram which is also owned by FB.

yup. Instagram is more used by the sports guys to show of their stunts... I have a kid who jumps into public water fountains with his bike. And girls with beauty stuff which may be a cliche but as a language teacher we often talk about their weekends and their hobbies...

Probably discord

Snapchat, Discord and Instagram. Mostly Snapchat. It's really strange for me. I'm 41 years old. Seeing the birth of the Internet and all, I always assumed that kids will grow up with stuff and be great with everything. But most of them don't even know how to create an email account. (or they don't want to invest time into it) They don't watch movies. Or Netflix. Most of them just use Snapchat and Instagram and Tictoc.

snapchat isn't a replacement for IM apps. They serve different purposes and most people still want the ability to send lasting messages.

I know that but tell this to my students. For me it also doesn’t make sense that they prefer watching tictoc for hours instead of tv series on Netflix… but they do.

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