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Comment by porphyra | Hacker News Reader

It is a technological tour de force and an amazing demo of what's possible and what is soon to come. But if we define a "good product" to mean a commercially successful one, then it isn't very successful. Still, I'm hoping it won't be killed and that it will continue to evolve and become successful eventually.

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> But if we define a "good product" to mean a commercially successful one

Why would we define a "good product" as a "successful product"? These are 2 different things. There are many ways to define a "good product" (is it useful? is it well made? is it innovative?), success is something else. All combinations of good-bad / successful-unsuccessful are possible.

Thats a very naive understanding of success. Youre telling the soap maker on etsy doesnt have a successful product because she doesnt sell a million units a day? Youre telling me that Rolls Royce Aerospace isn't successful because they only 100 aircraft engines a year?

That soap maker didn't spend $10B in R&D figuring out how to make the soap. Your retort makes zero sense. Apple's worst products sold tens of millions of units in their first couple of years while Vision Pro sold about 370K units in year 1 and well into year 2 still has plenty of inventory sitting on warehouse shelves to cover all of 2025 demand. It literally bombed in the market. It's an abject failure of a product that couldn't be called a success in any way beyond a great prototype and some excellent demoware. It's a flop and a joke.

It didn’t bomb in the market. It was priced for supply constraints. They basically tied Meta on all headset revenue in its first year (450k units and $1.4 billion). visionOS is a triumph and foundation for the next decade of computing, and the entire product line of Apple is adapting to its look and feel. The entire XR / VR industry is changing their strategy to respond to visionOS , particularly Meta horizon OS which has incorporated numerous improvements that were directly inspired by Apple. And plenty of Apple products sold a lot less than 10 million annually to this day.

> It literally bombed in the market.

Compared to what?

> abject failure

Applying this to apple is beyond comprehension... What do you mean by using such a term? Apple is likely the richest single entity to have every existed, outside of perhaps the US economy as a whole. This single vr product line made apple more money than either of us will make in a lifetime. So hopefully i'm mistaken and you can educate me as to what the word means.

But hopefully you meant "objective". Which is still stupid, but is at least a familiar and manageable form of stupidity.

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