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The past Windows and Android waves show that this is a great strategy if demand is really there.

When the mass market exists, multiple vendors will race to design competitive semiconductors, and even clunky UX will satisfy 90% of users. Windows 3.0 and Android 2.0 weren’t awesome in any sense. They were still good enough to surpass Apple’s sales in terms of units.

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An interesting point about VR (and AR eventually) is that clunky UX can move from being merely annoying to literally nausea-inducing. I’m not sure that there can be VR equivalents of the low-end Android market for instance where there you can overshoot perf demands and have the UI lock up and the user just waits. Low-end VR will have to undershoot performance demands which can close doors on entire use-cases.

I’m not saying that platforms won’t figure out ways to profit off market segmentation, just pointing out the inflection point we’re crossing in the human-computer interface.

I recall the tech gap between original iPhone and Android wasn't that big. Apple had no custom CPUs or display tech. The tech gap between Quest and Vision is more like Atari vs Macintosh. One is a toy and other is a workstation.

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