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Comment by crowcroft | Hacker News Reader

I believe there's going to be a lot more investment if no other reason than Tim Cook seems to care deeply about it (and beating Zuckerberg).

Strategically it make sense. The only real threat to the iPhone which Apple makes all their money from, is a new form factor that replaces phones. Maybe glasses/goggles will never replace phones, but spending billions a year to make sure that you win the glasses market just in case they do is very cheap insurance.

https://futurism.com/tim-cook-obsession-ar-glasses

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>> https://futurism.com/tim-cook-obsession-ar-glasses

Red Flags!

>> "Tim cares about nothing else," an insider with knowledge of the matter told Gurman. "It’s the only thing he’s really spending his time on from a product development standpoint."

>> he's looking to beat Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg — who shares an obsession with AR and VR headsets — to market.

Is Tim Cook a product person now?

Does Apple care about being first now (instead of being best)?

Before the Vision Pro release we heard similar reporting from Gurman (1) (and recall the skepticism about Gurman's reporting: 2)

Yet here we are. After a decade of promoting AR (3) Tim Apple released a headset of which "the weirder things about visionOS (and the Vision Pro itself, really) is that there’s not a lot of true AR in the mix" (4)

Red Flags!

1. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-05-18/apple-s-m...

2. https://daringfireball.net/linked/2023/05/18/gurman-headset-...

3. https://www.theverge.com/21077484/apple-tim-cook-ar-augmente...

4. https://www.theverge.com/24054862/apple-vision-pro-review-vr...

Cook took all of the top Vision Pro talent and put them to work on Siri. Those who didn't go are either working on the spectacles (no relationship at all to the tech in the goggles) or they're working to clear out the pipleline of goggles work that's already close to finished that they can deploy along with a new model that uses mostly the same components as the first which lets them make their supply chain whole after they ended production well short of what they promised their component makers. Rather than leave their supply chain high and dry and their developers disappointed with early cancellation, they'll make one more go of it to buy themselves the time to progress on spectacles (again, totally unrelated tech) so Cook can claim that goggles evolved into spectacles rather than admit that goggles bombed and they're retrenching around spectacles and that entirely different tech stack and approach, for which zero of the goggles investment by Apple or 3rd party developers will transfer.

You’re covering this board with statements of rumor, personal opinion and conjecture, as if they were statements of fact and getting the rumours wrong consistently. The Vision Pro leader, Mike Rockwell, runs both visionOS and Siri/AI. Many of his lieutenants are working on Siri, while many are staying on visionOS. The architectural approach and UX of visionOS is infecting the entire software group.

Goggles have not bombed, and are not going away for at least a decade. Apple will not be abandoning visionOS for spectacles, I know you keep repeating this, but it’s false.

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