Comment by zamadatix | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zamadatix | Hacker News Reader

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I don't think the price itself is the root problem. I mean don't get me wrong if it were $350 it'd sell a lot more than $3,500 but the point is it still wouldn't sell well anyways so why only ever talk about how it costs a lot.

To me the problem with the Vision line is it doesn't give any compelling reason to want it now or in the imminent future, even if it were priced similarly to lower end headsets, to really drive large numbers of sales on yet another VR walled garden. There is no killer app you'll spend hundreds of hours in, it's not going to actually replace/upgrade using your traditional apps, VR gaming is already relatively niche in established and open marketplaces but this has a brand new walled garden marketplace, and it offers nothing particularly "revolutionary" people haven't been promised 100 times about VR/AR to be disappointed with already. If it offered something meaningful against all of these points then it'd still sell decent numbers even at $3,500 but the problem is it's just lame despite being so high end.

When the price is higher than many people's average monthly post tax income, and its not a must have device like a fridge or washing machine, it's definitely a pricing problem.

In 2022 the US median personal income was $47,000. That's pre tax. Consider approximations with averages and marginal tax rates and take out 12% for tax, and you have $3445 per month median personal income.

The apple headset is $3500.

Take out average rent of $1350. Average credit card debt per consumer is just over $6300 in 2024, which seems high, but is also nearly twice monthly post tax income (holy crap). Average car payment for used vehicles is just over $500. I've not discussed food or utilities.

Given the above are for the average consumer, I'm not at all surprised a luxury and discretionary niche item such as the AVP has had next to no sales.

AVP is incredibly expensive but Meta makes a consumer friendly budget option for $500 and that’s not selling crazy well either.

The entire VR market, including budget headsets, sold somewhere near 8 million units globally last year. In the US alone over 15 million new vehicles were sold at an average price greater than the personal income you quoted. Individual luxury car models even sold more than 100k units in the same timespan. One can get a good new vehicle for significantly less than $47,000 so there are clearly tens of millions of Americans willing to pay thousands of dollars for more premium products.

The problem isn't that the price of this particular VR headset was too high for average people to hope to afford it's that there is no compelling reasons for average people to buy VR headsets like this in the first place. Particularly when that company is just entering the market. Put another way: Even if a person were given a Vision Pro for free at launch I doubt they would have spent 100 hours in it by now. Is that not at least worth mentioning instead of just deferring to price when talking about why nobody wants it?

And, again, if the headset were targeted towards the budget market there is still no reason to expect it would have sold particularly well. E.g. there is a cheaper (~$550) but similar headset from an already established VR company with a lot more compelling a marketplace/ecosystem for an already existing line of products. They're (Meta, Quest 3) in the same ballpark with total revenue and less than a million units on their latest headset in a similar time period despite all these advantages and having the "right" price.

In all fairness my opening paragraph highlighted that it's a highly discretionary / luxury purchase by direct inference.

Your statement that 8m units were sold followed later by a statement that it would have not sold well in the budget market is also contradictory.

I stand by my claim that the cost is the main issue, because when you're playing a volume sales game in a small market and you're significantly more expensive than the competition, and your product is a purely luxury / discretionary purpose, you're probably screwed up your market segmentation and product placement.

I don't know if it's the root problem, but it's the first and biggest problem. I earn a comfortable salary in France and although I think I would like to get one (the movie watching experience looks really cool), there's absolutely no way I'll spend more than 1 month of salary in this. I don't even know if I would like the thing, even if I were to buy it, I can't afford to buy it and then not using it because it turns out to be useless.

I think the price is a massive problem.

I have the Xreal Airs. They run $300 for a 1080p screen. Apples screen is much better, but not 10x better.

Apple really needed to come in the $1k price range for this to be viable.

One could say the same thing about TVs where in 2023 the average price was $400. While the screen on a $4,000 TV is not "10x better" any more than the screen on the Vision Pro is "10x better" manufacturers don't have any trouble at pushing 100k units of TVs in the latter price range because whether the screen is 10x better isn't the whole story on premium purchases.

Again I'm not saying the high price was the optimal value, I'm saying the high price is far from the whole story on why the device didn't sell well and that a downmarket version still would not have sold well, even compared to existing peers in the lower cost space.

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