Apple Is Reportedly Scaling Back Production Plans of Its Vision Pro Headset
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The little bit of consumer AR I've seen tended to be ad laden. I'm talking about Yelp walking overlays, etc. I can't think of a need for AR in my life except navigation, personally. But I lead a pretty boring life.
The whole AR thing just seems like a solution in search of a problem. Like 90s strategy video games that try to show you everything in the UI all at once. Maybe cool if you're trying to do some super specialized complex task like car maintenance or air traffic control or whatever, but otherwise it just seems like a distraction, like smartwatches but worse.
OK, back to my old man lawn now.
The Apple Vision Pro has VR and AR capabilities. When you view a representation of your monitor it's VR. When your monitor is represented as an object in physical space then it's AR. Apple Vision Pro can do both, but my point is I don't understand the value in the latter, at least at the price point, and you actually seem to be agreeing with me.
> The little bit of consumer AR I've seen tended to be ad laden. I'm talking about Yelp walking overlays, etc. I can't think of a need for AR in my life except navigation, personally. But I lead a pretty boring life.
I can think of literally hundreds of interesting applications. Imagine any scenario where you have superhero vision in the real world.
> The whole AR thing just seems like a solution in search of a problem. Like 90s strategy video games that try to show you everything in the UI all at once. Maybe cool if you're trying to do some super specialized complex task like car maintenance or air traffic control or whatever, but otherwise it just seems like a distraction, like smartwatches but worse.
Again, to each his own, but I love my smartwatch. I have a personal status screen that I can check in under a second without pulling out my phone, and tons of simple apps to go with it. It saves me tons of time and mental energy every day, and I can think of lots of cases where having things displayed instantaneously in your field of view would generate value.
Safety is a big reason to prefer AR for "big monitors" in HMD, especially in any home with furniture (much less clutter) or children or pets. Apple's argument so far seems to be that to get that sort of AR right in an HMD form factor much of the price is necessary (they pack in a lot of cameras to do it right) and the high price may not be an accident, it may be a requirement for good AR (at least in an HMD with current tech).
But once you get a product in market, you start to understand things about the future of that market.
the article clearly says theyre ballparking 100-400k Vision pros and pushing back production of Vision (non-pro). They arent stopping at all, its just a complicated product.
I bet this was Apple's bet on the 'metaverse'. Now that it seems clear it probably isn't going to happen, they look at revising their plans.
Certainly, that's what the reports I've read suggested: Apple seems to be reacting that the demand is unchanged, but they are saying they got hamstrung by an 11th hour supply chain issue.
I can't tell you if that is true or not, but it is a complex product (much more so than competing HMDs, with all those cameras, not to mention unique custom fabrics), so there is enough baseline evidence to suggest that Apple is telling the truth, that this isn't a demand-side adjustment, and that there have been supply chain hiccups that they didn't expect following their launch announcement.
That said I can tell you that Apple's expected demand still sounds startling high based on what I know of the finished product and its cost, so I can agree that a demand-side expectation shift makes sense as a theory, but also Apple is the company that sold millions of first gen products people were skeptical about before and I can imagine Apple doing it again.
I sold all my AAPL stock as soon as I could.