YouTube and Spotify won't launch Apple Vision Pro apps, joining Netflix
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
It's a small population, no doubt. But it's also a population that's willing to spend a substantial amount of money, and if you can get people creating content for your platform ("VPTube" or whatever you'd call it) then it's going to be harder to pull those content creators back to YouTube after that wait and see period. They're dealing with that problem with TikTok right now.
I certainly remember the period when Apple didn't want to hand over the user IDs for users while they were accessing Google's map data and Google refusing to allow turn by turn driving directions on iOS until they did.
Apple's solution was to spend a fortune to develop their own Map data.
I wouldn't bet against them rolling their own 3D video sharing site.
They most likely just downloaded openstreetmap database and spent nothing. Do you have any source that the logical and easy thing is not what they did?
They've been replacing licensed map data with data they gather themselves for over half a decade now. So far, their own data covers North America, Europe, Australia as well as a few countries elsewhere. 35 countries so far.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/29/apple-is-rebuilding-maps-f...
https://www.justinobeirne.com/new-apple-maps-expansions-curr...
> The main provider of map data is TomTom
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Maps
> contributed none of that back
OpenStreetMap seems to think that Apple contributes both tools and data.
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Apple
Almost all of the large tech companies with a mapping product contribute data to OpenStreetMap, with Google being the sole exception that I'm aware of.
Like I said, they contributed nothing from the maps they created from scratch back, only corrections to OpenStreetmap while they were using it.
Yes, openstreetmap's data was WAYYYY better than Apple Maps at launch.
In central London Apple Maps had such bad data that some of the business listings hadn't existed since before Apple Inc was formed as company, which were certainly not problems in openstreetmap.
However I welcomed the change as it was Google which was preventing Siri from working outside of north america ("find restaurant near me"; didn't work in the UK until after Apple Maps)
Today the landscape is different. Google Maps is positively littered with ads which makes it in some cases very annoying to use.
Turn-by-turn navigation, if you have carplay is much superior with apple maps.
They have comparably updated maps data.
So, it's a marginally better usability in some cases and equivalent in most.
Google has two advantages: Reviews and more accurate points of interest (if they are businesses).
Unless someone can prove me wrong, Google probably has four advantages, and the last two are MAJOR ones.
3. Google Maps probably has MUCH better worldwide coverage. Which means that Apple Maps is useless in large parts of the world.
4. Google Maps can be used on any platform (Android, Windows).
But that is not a major disadvantage for everyone. It’s a disadvantage in those areas only. Same app version might work great for me, but not for someone else. I wonder if they specifically target improved coverage in areas with most iPhone customers?
Yeah, duh.
However from the original experience with Apple Maps, it was very US-centric and especially California-centric at the start.
And I assume even Americans and Californians want to travel to places with bad coverage.
So yes, this is a total blocker for people that live in those (many?) regions and a major issue even for people that don't live there.
Edit:
https://old.reddit.com/r/applemaps/comments/14wo26t/apple_ma...
Apparently it's basically NA, Western Europe, Australia. So that's what, 1 billion people? The remaining 7+ billion people, tough luck.
That's not as obvious and not true for most applications. A game or a note taking app will be great or crappy regardless of the area. Maps is an application where the same version works great in on area and then completely unusable in another geographical area. That's pretty odd if you think about it. So then it leads to endless debate "It works great for me, better than Google maps" and of course there will be someone who says "NO! It's complete crap and never works". And both may be right.
> And I assume even Americans and Californians want to travel to places with bad coverage.
Most people don't travel that much. iPhone and Apple's ecosystem in general was never positioned as affordable to 7+ billion people everywhere. I don't know if Apple is going to bother mapping details of some remote village just become an iPhone carrying American might visit. Maybe eventually, but they'll start with US probably.
> The remaining 7+ billion people, tough luck.
Sure. Apple doesn't run a charity and providing details and accurate navigation and maps everywhere is not something they're in the business for.
Sorry, is your criticism that this free app is only suitable for 1 billion or so people?
That's a failure from your viewpoint?
OSM has all the mountain trails and caves and hostels, where as gmaps just shows a huge green blob.
Apple Maps is accessible through the web.
For instance, if you search for a place on DuckDuckGo and then click the Maps button, you get Apple Maps results.
Google Maps excels in providing comprehensive information on public transportation routes with much better coverage, but driving routes are equivalent.
4. Eh. We are talking about Apple products so hardly relevant.
Apple successfully displaced Google on its platform with a product that is sometimes better and not particularly worse.
This is factually untrue for most of Australia outside of the cities. I can't validate other countries but its not even close here.
As an example of how messed up it is.
Uh?
Google maps will never ever send me to a restaurant that is 200m from me. It will rather show one that is 5km away and not show the nearby one.
Same thing for hotels.
Once, at maximum zoom level, it didn't show the restaurant I was in. So I added it… turns out it was in their database, they just decided to not show it.
I think they're running a mafia racket and if you don't pay for ads, you are basically taken off the map.
However it is very much improved these days, and workable enough. Definitely worth a re-evaluation.
Incidentally, I encounter two intermittent bugs in google maps:
- This past year there's a bug that mirrors the old apple maps problem of sending me somewhere way off from my destination in some rare and particular (barely inhabited) areas, like an AI is trying to snap the point to something normal people would recognize as a destination. But no, my destination really is the side of a field. I find I can get around this by doing a longer hold press when setting the location which seems to force the coordinates. It's always important to double check the destination didn't change on me.
- Sometimes when clicking "Start", the app will get stuck presenting some kind of text only directions with no way to get away from that damned useless white screen until I kill the app and re-enter the destination.
It might be uneven in different markets, but they’ve been working very hard at improving the content and UX and in a number of markets it’s a viable and very strong competitor to Google Maps.
It will sometimes feel the lack of Google Business Listings, but the driving/walking/biking/transport/streetview experience is uniformly great where they’re released optimised versions of their maps — in my case Australia.
In germany it should be very good.
I thought the same thing till I bought my new car recently and started using Maps due to Carplay. It has MASSIVELY improved since launch. In fact, my wife is an Android user and we will compare them regularly on trips and in many case Apple Maps will cover parts of the route that Google Maps will not. An example is gated communities, Google Maps usually ends at the gate, Apple Maps will route to the house.
I think Google Maps has better traffic data (but that’s thanks to buying Waze), but Apple Maps has better routing. Google Maps has more up to date POI data, but Apple Maps is not far behind. Try it again and see, you still may be prefer Google Maps but it’s not the night and day difference between the two it once was.
Meta developed the Netflix one in-house for example.
I doubt Apple would offer that.
They have certainly received bad publicity over the App Store.
Because they smell leverage. Vision Pro adoption has to be subsidized by Apple, there’s no demand. To bootstrap demand popular apps with users need to be available. They have no risk of losing customers to a competitor by not shipping this.
So they are building negotiation ammo for a bit for the next round of conversations over platform fees, app review processes, etc.
For whatever reason the VR industry has been a particularly strange stand off ground in this universe because of a certain huge player trying to get mainstream user interest to take off to make their negotiating hand with potential suppliers much stronger, but it has not worked.
If I was any of those companies I wouldn't bother either.
Can you imagine any hard-charging SV CEO saying "actually it might be a bit buggy or muck up our analytics data, best leave it for now folks, enjoy your weekend, take it easy"
It's left up to Product Managers who very much do care about whether their analytics data is messed up given that it is often used to evaluate their performance.
My sweet summer child, the relationship between Apple and Netflix/Google is entirely determined by their respective platform Bizdev teams + executive relationships. Product happens after the business terms are hashed out.
Chrome, Edge, Firefox or Opera only.
Either Google only built it to use Widevine (which Safari doesn't support) or Safari's limitations on the amount of data that can be stored make it too unreliable to roll out to customers.
I thought people in Apple world desired the walled garden experience where the guardian is so strict to "monitor the quality and safety of apps" that you can't possibly allow for side loading.
Why allow subpart experiences onto a new platform that makers can't afford to make "safe and perfect"?
Sounds like not so much an explicit opt-out as holding out for apple to make the headset run their existing apps.
Allowing their content on Apple’s platform will create a gap in case they want to compete in the future
(For some reason the iPhone YouTube app's icon was an image of a retro cream-and-brown 1940s TV. I guess Steve Jobs just liked that design because it certainly didn't have anything to do with YouTube's branding and didn't look like anything Google would have picked for any product.)
When Microsoft shipped the revamped Windows Phone a few years later, the "app gap" was one of the main problems. High-profile apps like YouTube never became available on the platform because by then Google was busy promoting their own mobile OS.
There were great native third-party YouTube clients in the official Store on Windows Phone. On the contrary, I missed my Youtube client after I had to switch back to Android (until I found NewPipe).
It was as boring and stupid as reading "yeah that igpu is fine but not for gaming of course unless you restrict yourself to 2d or indie games" is.
Spotify isn’t something that should need a dedicated app to play music in the background, it could run in the browser just fine. I think the same Is true for YouTube. It may not have VisionOS specific features, but watching videos shouldn’t be a problem.
I removed the YouTube app from my phone a few months ago, because I thought I was using it too much. I still load it up in the browser all the time and it works fine. I don’t have background audio anymore, but that should not be an issue on VisionOS, and is a premium phone feature that most users don’t have.
It's not like Windows Phone didn't have a browser too (IE). And it's not like Apple aren't the ones making sure Safari doesn't support everything for Progressive Web Apps which could have come handy here.
> Spotify isn’t something that should need a dedicated app to play music in the background, it could run in the browser just fine.
Maybe. Would it work if your browser is on the background while you're reading something from another app on the Vision Pro?
Not sure about Spotify, but the only thing that stops YouTube’s mobile website from working in the background is its own code. On Android, with the Firefox addon disabling the Page Visibility API for it, it plays perfectly in the background.
I do see a big issue: not having the ability to use Netflix' and YouTube's (app only) download feature, to allow you to watch videos offline (on a plane for instance).
That’s exactly what Windows Phone strategy was. And web browsers still can’t run websites like apps no matter what the PWA advocates say.
Electron isn't the same as PWA and runs in Chrome for starters and also has an underbelly you can control and extend with native code. Apple intentionally limits Safari's multimedia capabilities to push you towards making apps.
Mobile web apps were pretty janky until 2016 or so, and the last Windows Phone came out in 2014.
I'm probably wrong though.
Think he looked at the home screen like ad space and didn't want the YT logo on all the iPhone marketing and being the first thing people see when they unlock it every time.
Is it possible that this is actually a coordinated message to Apple that these large media companies are done paying the 30% Apple tax? Especially if this thing has a fully-featured, desktop-like web browser. The blocking of the existing iPad apps tells me it's the later.
I suppose it could be some bizarre internal political vendetta against Apple has led them to be unwilling to invest in improving the iOS app, but that seems like an odd strategy.
A long time ago, during the Flash time, the recurring theme on the Internet was the low quality of engineering in Adobe products.
There was a popular response to that whining which superficially sounded like a rebuttal: "Hey, be cool and always remember that not all of the bad programmers are employed by Adobe".
I guess there was enough of them to fill all the positions at Spotify.
Netflix remains the dominant player over Apple TV+, for example.
Chrome remains more dominant than Safari.
Outside of Apples specific ecosystem: Do you know anyone who seriously uses Windows Media Player or built-in Calendar/Mail apps? (Outlook is not the built-in).
If your third party app is better and has better social capital: it can kill the first-party app.
I'm just forgetting which ones completely died because: they are history.
Chrome has 77% market share across desktop operating systems & Safari has 8%: https://kinsta.com/browser-market-share/
OSX has 16% market share which would indicate thar its somewhere ~around 50% of OSX users using Safari: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide
The inference being made here of course that all the remaining people not using Safari are using Chrome which is or course not true; but it shows somewhat the fragility of the incumbent software: as Safari is actually quite good for users, chrome has very few feature advantages compared.
I think companies want to go where users are and if and when there is some sort of mass adoption of Vision Pro these companies will at the very least enable their iPad apps to work on it.
Like who would at this point till it's established? Look at all the time and effort wasted on Apple Watch apps, Apple TV apps for very little returns.
Apple needs to realize that expecting developers to write apps for 5 different operating systems to get coverage across their ecosystem is absurd in both engineering time and engineering team money.
End of the day the $3500 vision pro needs Netflix more than Netflix needs the vision pro, and they already had a VR app that Apple could have supported but chose to build something completely new and bespoke requiring all devs to write completely new code.
It's an interesting problem for the rest of us. We seem to be heading to a situation where there are a bunch of tech companies, each with their own silo and little direct competition between them. If they won't talk to each other or cooperate then we all end up with diminished solutions.
> Spotify also isn’t planning a new app for visionOS — the Vision Pro’s operating system — and doesn’t expect to enable its iPad app to run on the device, according to a person familiar with matter. But the music service will still likely work from a web browser. Bloomberg News reported on Netflix’s decision Wednesday.
Emphasis mine. No need for Apple loyalists to convince themselves that they never liked these services anyway.
In this instance it would be the same, visionOS can run iPadOS but the devs won't enable the flag.
If Apple strong arm them to run without a flag it can get pretty messy for Apple since they would be taken over control of what the app developers allow or not with their own apps.
edit
I should add that that I can certainly expect many people who might buy this won't be thrilled, and for them if this is the kind of thing they are interested in, I would understand their dissapointment.
It makes no sense why Netflix/Amazon would neglect apps for a 20m userbase. The most rational explanation is that the VR userbase still has a very low active/attach rate. Maybe Netflix/Amazon aren’t excited to help Meta, but it’s not like they’re making their own VR headsets yet.
I wonder if Apple's handling of the app store has finally come around to bite them.
Steve Jobs was a pretty good integrator, and got the people in different industries to work together. That's all over as apple turns inwards and doesn't do "relationships" anymore.
If you use a normal browser to buy stuff and it activates in the app, they get zilch.
But it's not like Google costs money, people can find out by themselves.
Vision Pro has 0 users so far, will have a negligible amount for a while given the retail price, and almost certainly every single user of Vision Pro will have another device that these companies' apps already exist, so they aren't losing potential users.
You can't watch unless you are alone, the surround sound is reduced to stereo and the resolution is sub-4k once the rendering is done.
Home theater VR is indisputably better than a phone/tablet/laptop and headphones.
And if you have the right app, you can lie back on your bed and watch your movie on a cinema screen that feels like it's floating above you in the sky. Incredibly relaxing, and amazing if you have any kind of back problems.
Also the best way to watch 3D movies -- no loss of brightness like in cinemas, and none of the ghosting you get using Bluetooth shutter glasses with a TV/projector.
But that doesn’t mean it can’t be done!
It also had a non-blurred glass toilet door, clearly the future was imagined to be very exhibitionistic.
That’s really all it is. Till Meta put in the effort, nobody will really want to support them.
It didn't when the Netflix app launched, but the Quest 2 and 3 support Widevine Level 1.
Either way, I think it’s on Meta to do some of the legwork to land third parties.
Oh absolutely. If Meta want a good film rental service on the Quest they'll have to either cut someone better terms on the 30% or pay for one themselves, but they've done neither. Apple are almost certainly doing some of those, and the most interesting Vision Pro launch is their own service which they paid for. Meta keep chasing metaverse experiences that are not ready for prime time instead of services that could be good now like collective film watching even if they are less exciting for internal slidedecks.
I tried it for use as N external monitors, but I can't see the point (no pun intended) when I have a 49" wide monitor or for anything else specific because I have an 85" TV on the wall.
The only real case I can see would be if most people on a work team worked in VR and "Zoomed" on a platform that supported VR, then it would make some sense if some people chose not to live stream video of themselves but wanted to participated more than audio only by sharing a VR "Workplace"-like stream instead.
Right but that's a lot of space that not many people have available in their home office. Not to mention how much more portable a laptop + headset would be.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2013/8/16/4627342/microsoft-google-...
Meanwhile Google wouldn't need to provide support for Chrome on Windows ARM(or any other platform) since it's not a commercial product consumers pay money for and are entitled to support, it's just a free product shipped withotu warranty financed by vacuuming your personal data.
The parents argument is that Linux's user base is smaller because critical applications like office are not available there.
These arguments are not mutually exclusive. Microsoft would rather keep it's dominate windows market share _and_ have less support burden.
On the other hand, Steam making Linux work well is a massive support burden for a smaller user base, but it prevented os vendor lock in for their platform.
Decisions to release or not release software is not so easily distilled to single metrics such as support burden.
Bigger than the Windows on ARM market share, that's for sure.
Most them seem quite happy to use Google Docs, so Microsoft Office 365 should also be alright.
[1] Anecdotal, but: it recently added its own screensaver that plays instead of the system one, and never stops playing, meaning if I accidentally leave YouTube open, my TV never switches off. The VLC app can't discover UPNP services on my network as long as YouTube is in the recent apps list. It decides to be in French sometimes. (Our system language is not French). And, not entirely Google's fault, but there are about three different ways to cast a YouTube video from the iOS YouTube app to the same gorramn TV, and which one is actually going to work today is completely random.
The indifference YouTube gets away with on Apple TV tells me, if that team made an app for Vision Pro, it would provide guaranteed headaches. Apple is dodging a bullet here.
Steve Jobs had approved several dumb Apple products, but I don't think he'd have sold Vision Pro to the general public.
For Youtube it kind of makes more sense, as they have 360 and 180 content on there and VR headsets are probably best devices to consume it on.
But even with Netflix, having watched some TV show for about hour or so was surprisingly not so bad experience at all on Meta Quest 3.
Which is why I find the choice not to release an app for the Apple VP odd: it has better hardware so the experience should also be better. Maybe it's because they expect the VP to sell a lot less than the Quest 3?
Is this a reason to call it dumb though? Note that when Jobs presented an ipod in 2001, people also reacted this way[1].
[1]: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apples-new-thing-ipod.5...
Seems like Walt Mossberg made the girl comment in this video where Jobs is talking about headphones for video. Mossberg also made fun of Dell’s large phone, saying it was like holding a waffle up to your head, and the market proved him wrong there.
These devices, in their current form, aren’t something to wear while walking around town, like someone might do with headphones.
>Steve immediately shot his idea down and told the guy that he would probably trip and fall if that were the case. Steve also suggested he should get a girlfriend so he has someone to keep him company while running.
I predict that we will see people driving with these things on.
People are already so self-absorbed that they text and watch movies on their phones while driving. A lightweight, untethered headset is an ideal conduit for distraction in the car.
I genuinely prefer the user experience of linux and firefox -- I'm not religiously opposed to Windows^, Chrome, MacOS, etc. I also don't generally complain when websites don't work well for me, or the experience isn't perfect, I know that kinda comes as a package deal.
But, I often know that package deal is unnecessary. Netflix might not want me to watch 4K because of requirements from copyright holders, or some website might not have tested on Firefox so they throw up an error page (even though standards are standards...). But if I lie about who I am sometimes things work perfectly -- and those are the moments when I feel the unfairness sitting just adjacent to me, resting it's hand on my arm.
In this case, I wonder how well Apple can make the web.spotify (and netflix etc) sites work on their hardware, and how much they will have to lie about who they are when they're connecting to those services. I'm absolutely confident that the hardware and software will be capable of correctly and capably displaying movies, playing music, etc. It's more a question of trust, truth, and power.
For me, in my little home on my little street, while I don't usually fight that battle I'm still aware of the potential injustice. But when the big dogs fight over it? I feel it's good for me, shining a light on these kinds of issue. Netflix doesn't want to spend money and put dev work in to making things work perfectly on Apple's headset? That makes perfect sense, no problem. But attempting to block it, if Apple has spent the time and money to make it work? That strikes me as unfair.
You might argue it's not a 100% clear cut issue - should platforms have some say in how their content is presented? - but I feel very comfortable disagreeing when a website says "must be viewed using ACME OS™", or even worse, "can be viewed everywhere except COMPETITOR OS™".
Now it would probably be stupid of Netflix etc to block VP users after refusing to also port their app or allow their iPad apps to run on the VP, but never underestimate companies' potential for counter-intuitive decisions!
It will outsell during the first years due to people with deep pockets eager to own one, and then it will wither and die, like most of the other attempts.
If they don't sell millions, there is no income and the product dies, or it does have a big company like Meta burning billions of dollars at it from investors.
What Apple is doing is bringing a product to market with no compromises on quality. It will be much more expensive but if it is useful for someone they will pay. They won't need millions of users for breakeven but tens of thousands.
I bought and restored a second hand Lisp Machine (with hardware accelerated Lisp). It was über expensive, but was a dream at the time to use. Even today it has things normal IDEs do not have. It was super expensive but did things nobody else could do at the time and that was worth it for companies that needed those things.
30 years from now there will be generation Z folks talking about how great Vision Pro was going to be, how they had fun restoring some devices.
Go ahead and try that at 17,000ft. Might not have a particularly good experience… or any experience at all.
Note that I'm not saying that gimmicks cannot be effective. They can and it is a distinction worth keeping in mind.
But in the case of 3D movies I think they are not only gimmicks, but they will also be (commercially and immersively) ineffective compared to a great movie that doesn't rely on that crutch.
This is traditionnally the porno industry that leads in term of new tech adoption.
I'm not sure why existing Meta headsets aren't being used for this purpose, or what features distinguish Apple's headset from existing products.
If Apple's headset ships with 3D video recording then there's probably an opportunity for some pair of adult creators to go viral by recording the first porno on it.
But we can't talk about it for obvious reasons. It's such a funny scenario to think of.
But the allure of porn was always the ease of access and instant gratification. I don't think Vision Pro fulfills any of this due to the barrier of entry with its price point.
If Apple would stop boning people over app payments, stop using MFI as a weapon, and implement RCS some people would probably come over and play.
I 100% would steer very clear of any new Apple marketplace. The once friendly and open platform literally considers things you buy from them ‘theirs’ (Tim Cook’s words).
It's the sort of impact I wish Microsoft HoloLens had, but I suppose HoloLens was released too early for the technology to make sense.
This feels like a calculated, possibly coordinated attack.
It is more of a proof-of-concept thing, so that Apple can show off their "vision" of VR. If successful, it may lead to a mass market product in the future, but by that time, YouTube, Nexflix, Spotify, etc... may actually provide first party support.
And I wouldn't even consider this unless it drops below 2000€. It's just insanely priced. Here in Europe with tax it'll be way beyond 4000€. And I own multiple Quests. And a gaming pc with 4090. All those added up didn't cost that much.
Of course it won't be as good at a €1500-2000 price point but I don't care. If it's three times as good as the quest 3 for 3 times the price, it would be amazing.
But my point is, if even an enthusiast like me won't even consider it.. And I travelled to a different country to wait for hours before opening to buy the first iPad :) A product I wasn't even as passionate about as AR/VR.
They're clearly aiming at the richest 1% even in the western world. But those are not necessarily the kind that would have affinity for this stuff. And the people that have enough money to buy it as a toy will have a lot of money to buy a lot more toys all competing for their attention.
I think a lot of these are going to get bought and end up as an expensive showpiece without seeing much use. The amount of people who have both the affinity to make the most of it and the purchasing power to actually buy it will be so few.
There is no competition for it yet, and the competition that will come out (Samsung/Google's collaboration, Meta's next attempt at Quest Pro, etc) will alike Android 1.0: planting a flag, but the actual experience will be measurably worse.
It's a fully-integrated standalone MR headset with access to the wider Apple ecosystem, the highest-quality components of 2022 (yeah, it's shipping late, but it's still better than the competition), and it's backed by Apple, which will end up redefining the conversation around XR as a whole.
Even as a portable home cinema I'd consider it, especially in my small European apartment :-) The price is high because it's expensive to make (~1700 USD [0]), they need to make the money back on R&D, they're supply-constrained [1], and likely because - yes - they want to limit the mass market's exposure to 1.0. Still, as an enthusiast, I've been waiting for this for many years; I'm ready to try it out for myself.
[0]: https://www.uploadvr.com/meta-quest-3-apple-vision-pro-produ...
[1]: https://www.uploadvr.com/apple-vision-pro-production-severel...
But as for Apple vision pro, I don't really see the value at this point. And with the limited amount of headsets that will be out there due to the price, it won't be interesting for content creators.
I have to say though I'm mainly in it for the immersion. I don't really care about mixed reality scenarios as much. I've been trying them with the quest 3 but even when keeping the much lower quality in mind I just don't really find them exciting as I do real immersive VR.
I'm much more enthused about the future of computing; I've wanted to get away from monitors for a long time now, and this finally feels like the first step towards that in the consumer market.
Unless this flops completely and developers/Apple can't figure out actual use cases, there _will_ be a Vision Regular with all the stuff removed that's not 100% necessary for the main use cases (like the stupid "see your eyes from the outside screen :D) and it will be a lot more affordable.
Not Quest 3 prices, but still cheaper.
A huge problem I've had with demonstrating - and being demonstrated to with - MR headsets is that I can't actually see what the user's looking at. This is much more troublesome with MR and passthrough, where it's very important for external users to be able to see that the user is looking at them.
Yeah, there's still a few quirks that need to be worked out, but I think it's a fundamentally important part of future MR headsets, and Meta agrees [0] (much more rudimentary 2021 prototype at [1]).
[0]: https://twitter.com/douglaslanman/status/1732441912043589993
[1]: https://research.facebook.com/blog/2021/8/display-systems-re...
Not to mention weird bugs in the iPadOS app - if you try to download more than X episodes too quickly, like because you're at the airpot before boarding a plane and want an offline cache to last the long flight, the downloads fail with a useless (classic Apple) error message, and nothing outside of a restart of the device fixes it. I hit this a few times, and there are forum reports going back years.
So yeah, had one free month, paid for 2, and cancelled because it isn't even close to being worth it.
What will the PORN industry decide?
Does this new platform drive new, exclusive revenue sources for immersive PORN?
If the answer is yes, then the technology and commercial infrastructure will follow. I suspect the answer sounds like an out-of-context Carl Sagan quote, "...Billions and Billions..."
Whoever drives that content through those goggles will be rich beyond measure... unfortunately.
As far as YouTube goes, I only use it in the browser due to my adblock working there.
Maybe I’m wrong but this could turn out as a win for Apple.
Though at this point Hey Meta's reliability of actually answering/working is 60/40, so i don't use it much. These glasses are great for taking pics and videos!
I don't really understand why they don't go for this especially because it's not a terrible lot of work to port their iOS apps.
infinitely better experience on android vivaldi browser.
Really looking forward to apple vision tbh. my last windows laptop became a macbook air, very very satisfied.
And like they say, apple has decent competing products anyway, so not kike device users are going to miss them.
They will need a tictok app tho.
I don’t care about Netflix or Spotify, so meh.
Google bought YouTube in 2006.
YouTube began running in-video ads in August 2007, with preroll ads introduced in 2008.
User and usage growth since introduction of ads in 2097/2008 suggests your assertion is not correct.
Apples volume today was 52,649,132 which times share price is 188$ => 9.8 Billion.
Netflix's market cap is 212.41 billion so if Apple tried to print enough shares to cover the acquisition cost they'd tank their share price to 0.
And if they did print more shares, how would it "tank their share price to 0"? It's not like a stupid acquisition would instantly vaporize a 2+ trillion market cap company overnight.
Apple has $162 billion in cash on hand.
They could acquire Netflix if they wanted (they don’t want to).
Much more likely they buy Pixar off Disney or something.