c.f. Bloomberg recent piece on this; tldr lot of internal strife at Apple because that’s what they were supposed to do and simply couldn’t. Now it’s limping out the door because they might as well ship something. Lead was saying as recently as a year ago that glasses were 3 years out, but they were shelved because there’s no path to it
One big thing Apple has going for it is that they will iterate on a product year after year instead of doing one hardware update and giving up like Microsoft did.
Regardless, developers need hardware in their hands if you want third party apps for the new platform.
Think about its 'most compelling' consumer use case - Lifelike Avatars in FaceTime. Which one do you think is preferred, cooking in the kitchen and wearing a headset, or propping your iPhone up and FaceTiming while cooking? Where on earth does it 'change the experience' to have a real-life like avatar? We have the 'life like' avatar right now with Zooms - and the reason Zooms suck is innately the human part, not the rendering part - most meetings could be emails or 5 min phone calls.
Everyone had spreadsheets and publishing needs (Mac), portable music players (iPods), cellular phones (iPhone), headphones (AirPods), home wireless music speakers (HomePods)... think of fitbit / pebble, 1980s VR and then todays VR ?
That's amusing, since wearing the headset while doing physical tasks on factory floors was the exact use case Microsoft pushed for Hololens 2.
> Microsoft’s HoloLens 2: a $3,500 mixed reality headset for the factory
https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/24/18235460/microsoft-holole...
(we this found out with GM doing a pilot)
[Edit] to keep it going, external cameras are how you verify parts are picked correctly and put in the right place - you don't need FPV for that to be verified either.
[Edit 2] Until a flight simulator uses VR and AR headsets as primary training, this stuff just doesn’t make sense. CAE has definitely explored with this but it’s not what they reach for
And how'd that work out, commercially?
It's the Lisa vs the Apple II all over again. If only they had the courage left to send this project the way of the headphone jack.
Pancake optics just recently became a thing and they really are transformative compared to fresnel lenses of the past. You have edge to edge clarity instead of the massive blurry mess of earlier HMDs. They’re also typically thinner and don’t need compute power to compensate for pincushion distortion.
If this Apple headset takes off, I’ll almost feel sorry for Meta. The Quest Pro was their “business prosumer” device that needed another 6-12 months in the oven before it would be usable for that purpose. Great PCVR headset, but nobody makes money on those.
If anything, Meta has shown that VR CAN be sold to the masses as a video game console (Quest 2 sales numbers are honestly impressive in that context), but the console model doesn’t bring in the billions in revenue promised to investors. And nobody wants Metaverse garbage. It’s make or break on the prosumer market, and if Apple bombs I wouldn’t be surprised to see the Zuck pack it up soon after.
I am hopeful with recent increases in nits from OLED and luck from uleds / smol oled, we'll get "glass but 4x the size and more contrast" by 2025 from someone.
which has me pretty convinced AR is dead-ish
Even in a dedicated HMD like the Pro, they had to redesign the SoC to move the memory so they could fit a chonkier active cooling system (that mysteriously is on full throttle constantly in recent firmware, which makes me wonder if they were seeing thermal failures). Bosworth admitted in one of those Facebook livestreams that the reason the Pro tops out at 90hz isn’t because the panels don’t support 120 - it’s because you’d cook your face from the heat of running those high nit panels at 120hz.
Iirc, Apple dumped the iPhone onto the market even though it was not ready yet and was missing many elementary functions.
So not sure what you mean by "people seem to forget this every time".
People seem to forget that this wasn't ever intended to be the mass market consumer version of the tech.
They've been iterating internally on a consumer version for years now, and they'll keep at it until they have something for the mass market that they think is worth shipping.
For another, the competitors were also all missing at least one vital elementary function: Internet support that didn't suck.
So I don't think there are a lot of comparisons to be drawn between a yet-to-be-released VR platform that, ultimately, nobody is really asking for, and a phone that almost everybody who wasn't named Steve Ballmer, Mike Lazaridis, or Ned Ludd desperately wanted.
(Admittedly I said the same thing about the watch -- who in the world wants a watch? -- and that was way off-base given how much demand there turned out to be.)
And, from memory, only came about because Apple was Apple and could say "We don't care that you're AT&T. Create this plan for us or your customers won't be able to get an iPhone."
Blackberry for email, Windows Mobile for doorstops, and Palm for 'jack-of-all-trades, master of none'. None of them got mobile web right, none of them had iTunes, and none of them had Steve Jobs hyping them.
People seem to forget this every time, but this version of the tech is aimed at developers and early adopters, just like version one of Hololens was. It's also priced like Hololens was.
The consumer focused version in a thick sunglasses form factor comes later.