Comment by outworlder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by outworlder | Hacker News Reader

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> people actually used their devices all the time,

No, not really. Like Steve Jobs said, smartphones weren't very "smart". Most people did not have blackberries (those that did have Blackberries, were mostly business users). The rest of us that were technically savvy were playing some crappy java games(the ones allowed by mobile carrier stores), and browsing the web with WAP browsers in our flip phones. Most people were not even doing any of that. And why would they? The experience was terrible.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/263437/global-smartphone...

Using the same metric, people already use VR headsets, and just "want them to be better". Sure, the marketshare is a fraction of phone marketshare(https://www.statista.com/statistics/677096/vr-headsets-world...). But we can argue that most headsets are tethered to high end PCs, Meta's version is one of the few decent standalone versions.

Apple's device has lots of potential. It's all about the execution now, and subsequent devices.

I don't know what was going on in the USA, but in the Europe people were using pre-ios/droid smartphones massively (and we basically didn't have any Blackberries due to region limitations). There were a ton of the WinMob PDAs, there were years of advanced HTC communicators which started expensive but dropped to a very cheap levels fast. At some point almost every taxi driver had been using one (it was easy to observe because drivers were using phones for nav in the cradles). The demand was super high. People were comparing generations of those early smartphones for example about GPS lock speed, because it was an age when receivers were rapidly improving and every gen shaved of minutes of lock time. And before WinMob era there were advanced Simbian 60 (iirc) devices, middle and high-end Nokia, Siemens, Motorola phones, with apps. Half of my class in school and uni were using phones with all support for texting, reading books, music and games.

Retconning phone history as if there was nothing between flip phones and first iPhone, or that transition time was short is dishonest.

If you look at the chart in the essay, you'll see that though there were lots of what I called 'proto-smartphones' before the iPhone, and enthusiasts (like me!) loved them, the actual user base was tiny. SMS was huge, MMS was a rounding error and very few people were doing anything else. I was a mobile analyst - I even went to the actual S60 launch event where the Nokia 7650 was announced - and then worked at a telco, and I wrote some more about this a few years ago. https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2016/2/19/mobile-sma...

(Also, Blackberry was big for UK teenaged girls due to free BBM)

How many people do you know that had pre-iPhone smart phones, bought them and used them for a couple months, and then "abandoned" them on the shelf, a common phenomenon with current VR/AR gear as mentioned in the article.

In my experience, practically nobody. I agree that the Vision Pro is a technological marvel, but it's still a solution looking for a problem, and it's striking to me how even Apple had a difficult time presenting actually compelling use cases in their videos.

To be clear, I think there are some viable uses: gaming obviously, and potentially media consumption, but even there this solution is so much worse than a home theater system (as another commenter mentioned, I can get a group of people together in my house to all watch a movie on a big screen TV that costs much less than the headset that each of my friends would also have to own).

> How many people do you know that had pre-iPhone smart phones, bought them and used them for a couple months, and then "abandoned" them on the shelf, a common phenomenon with current VR/AR gear as mentioned in the article.

The difference, IMHO, is that those with pre-iPhone smart phones were largely business users who didn't have a choice. Not that there weren't exceptions - I'm sure many had personal smart phones - but I vividly remember (in both Europe and the US) conversations with friends where the idea of paying for a data plan was considered the height of absurdity and would never happen for personal use.

Those phones weren't abandoned. They just didn't get much use for anything beyond calls, text and sometimes the camera.

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