I'm not sure if you're arguing that Meta/Occulus wasn't innovative or their hardware isn't successful. The Quest Pro would perhaps be a failure, but then will the new Mac Pro be a wild success ?

Meta acquired Occulus and so far have released only a single popular product.

And no one other than yourself thinks that the Mac Pro is going to be a wild success. It's a highly niche product with the Mac Studio being the mainstream version.

Quest 2 outsold Xbox X/S. That's not bad for literally the only general consumer product they've released so far.

It’s also a little more than half the price. It’s not bad, but it builds strongly on brand recognition as well. They were really the only major game in town.

It’s a good sign for them but far from convincing

> It’s also a little more than half the price

The Series S is the same price, and estimates put it at around half of units sold.

> is going to be a wild success

The Mac Pro accounts for 11% of all Mac computers sold and 40-50% (~$20bln) of Mac revenues in 2022 (including laptops); the Mac Studio is only 1% of units shipped. What's your definition of wild success?

The Mac Pro is their lowest volume computer. You’re thinking of MacBook Pro, perhaps. The MacBook Pro is a laptop and the Mac Pro is a full tower desktop.

Nope.

https://9to5mac.com/2023/01/09/apples-most-popular-mac/

Oh, that report. No comment on the accuracy. I did misunderstand you to be talking about all Mac revenue and not just desktops. I work on a 2019 Mac Pro so am familiar with the price range.

Not sure where CIRP gets its numbers.

Because the Mac Pro outselling the Mac mini by 10x doesn't seem believable to me.

And especially in 2022 when the Intel Mac Pro was being outperformed by the Mac Studio.

There's a reason the Mac Mini went longer than the Pro without an update. Compared to the Studio, the Pro has dual 10Gb Ethernet, SATA and PCIe Gen 4, and a rack-mounted chassis option. For certain classes of enterprise workloads, that makes a difference. Think VFX, post production, sound stages and recording that can't use the Studio for lack of PCIe expansion slots for industry-related hardware (HDX/DSP).

Well, those same VFX people now can't use their GPUs on the new Mac Pro.

Thankfully VFX Reference Platform also accounts for Windows and Linux, https://vfxplatform.com/

Why would you need a separate GPU when you have integrated 60-core GPU with access to up to 198gb of memory? Like what you'd need a render farm? Apple Metal is already a target for all the important tools.

Because GPUs are more than just memory, and in regards to your memory comment, unified memory is not the same as having a dedicated.

And when the GPUs no longer can keep up, one doesn't need to throw away the whole computer.

VR being a niche in itself, I don't see absolute sales number for headset to be a failure (if you excuse the Mac Pro for being niche, any of the Meta headsets are probably a blasing success. Makes me wonder how many trash can were sold during these years)

Through that lens, I don't see Meta has having slacked and failed to capture the market when they're definitely the leader and pushed it a decent amount forward.

The comparison point could be HTC, who's also continuing pushing the envellope but can't touch Meta in terms of scale and price point.

You're comparing a hardware company with a software company. Meta only got into hardware in recent years. I would also point out that Meta is massively ahead of everyone in terms of VR (including Apple).

I certainly wouldn’t call Apple a hardware company. Their software is as much a part of the story of their products as their hardware, if not more so in many areas.

They definitely have a strong hardware history however.

One company was almost bankrupt and only by sheer luck with some injection of capital managed to avoid closing shop while bringing a former founder, and the other one didn't have to deal with such problems.