Yeah, I do get it, Apple and all, but this is ignoring the elephant in the room.
> Something that doesn't exist is just so much more exciting than something that does. Real things have caveats, limitations, and costs.
Right now Apple's glasses aren't real, so they have no caveats, limitations, or costs: only raw potential. That's way more exciting than a real product which we already know is too expensive for the average consumer to use.
Physics is a bitch, there are some real reasons why you can't make AR glasses thin and sexy like sunshades and costing sub $1000 to boot.
I'm certain Apple could make an AR (ish) headset that is amazing for $2k
iPhone sells for $1000 because people will pay so much for it but that doesn't mean that the technology in it costs so much.
However, when a single diffraction waveguide (the piece of glass that forms the display of devices like a Hololens or Magic Leap) which is the only known way how to make a flat-ish display (otherwise you need bulky mirrors or prisms) costs hundreds of dollars (and you need 3 per eye minimum, one for each color), then it is hard to see how Apple would pull that off. And that's only a display.
At least if we are talking a proper AR device, not a personal HUD/"smartglasses" like the Google Glass.
On the flip side, if you've got an actual business case for hololens, acquiring them is rather trivial. And quite frankly for the use-cases I've seen hololens deployed, $3,500 a pair is barely a rounding error in the project budget.
PS: 28 cores and 1.5TB of RAM is still very much workstation territory. Few people need that, but it’s a solid investment if you’re in that group.
But its still a rather overpriced workstation. However, thats not the topic. Microsoft also charges what the market will bare, but it is a completely different market. MS has been quite focused on their B2B products for a while, so selling the expensive Hololens to companies and not private users makes perfect sense. So if you're in that group, its a solid investment
$5,000 mac pro is not targeted to the consumer market. I doubt it is responsible for 1% of Apple's profit.
If apple does VR, they want it in everyones house - not in a few hundred. That's not the scale they operate at.
Apple's approach seems to be powerful iPhone in pocket, wirelessly talk to a dumb display/sensors on your head.
Look what Apple did with watches...
Those cameras need video processing - that's big, hot and heavy compute capability somewhere nearby the camera itself because you can't stream that e.g. using Bluetooth to a phone in your pocket.
That compute also sucks batteries dry like there is no tomorrow, so a large battery has to be somewhere.
Oh and if you want to actually display an overlay to the user (and not only some text in the corner of your eye like Google Glass did), then you need fairly large optics - laws of physics won't budge only because it is Apple.
That's why the Hololens is so clunky and unsexy. Magic Leap has put the compute and batteries in the user's pocket, but then there is a cable between the two (and the goggles aren't much lighter/less clunky really).
Perhaps their plan is to start small and scale up only as much as will be "sexy" year over year. Rather than go all in on a massive headset and shrink with iteration.
https://www.kguttag.com/2019/12/18/hololens-2-not-a-pretty-p...
And the "no one is talking about them" kinda doesn't match with the coverage of Apple rumors - and even this discussion.
Like MS selling zune and music subscription decades before it became a norm ?
iPod 1st Gen was released in 2001.
What are you raving about?
If you create a thing that people don't want currently polishing and marketing all that matters.
The only thing I want that Apple currently makes is a UK phone charger[1]. Its folding mechanism is far superior to any other charger. These things are what I really miss.
[1]https://www.apple.com/uk/shop/product/MU7W2B/A/18w-usb-c-pow...
Edit: I realize that might be very direct, I have no knowledge of the smart watch market, only remember that Pebble seemed to be first in the space.
All they do (and all they have ever done) was reinvent the wheel. They do, however, consistently reinvent the wheel better than anyone else.
Case in point: In literally the year 2000, I owned an HP Jornada 548 pocket pc, complete with a wireless modem that worked on cell phone networks. It ran Windows CE, and I was able to surf the web, use AOL instant messenger, ICQ, do voice recordings (even transcription), handwriting recognition, play games, and yes, even make phone calls. But it was clunky, and it wasn't something that I would even dream of recommending to my grandmother (because the UI was terrible and slow, and it required a lot of fiddling with things to get it dialed in the way I liked it).
Contrast that with the iPhone (which was released a full 7 years later). Was it the first smart phone? Obviously not. But it was the first smart phone that I could honestly recommend to my grandmother.
For example, they made an entire new semiconductor unit just to make microled displays for it.
They also been hiring, and buying companies in light field imaging field for years now, and they may add a light field imaging/display into the mix.
I think Magicleap knows now that Apple is miles ahead of them, and tries to sell while they still can