We know that. It’s happened. Wordstar, VisiCalc, Photoshop, PageMaker or Quark Xpress, AutoCAD, Netscape Navigator, AOL. They, and their descendants, moved billions of units.
> What’s the mobile’s killer app?
Chat. Maps. The internet. Uber. Dating. Use as a camera. Email. Shopping. Again, billions of units.
No one has figured out a non-niche application for VR. Normal people don’t care. It’s not even on their radar.
That’s my point. More of the same isn’t going to change that. They either need the app to make it break through or some improvement that allows that app. This is a spec bump. Nice to those already interested, unlikely to attract new people.
Apple is trying something. They’re throwing hardware at it, especially in terms of a very very high resolution screen. They think that will make the difference, even given the price.
We’ll find out. But at least they’re trying something different. Because I don’t see why this would jump into the mainstream.
You have listed a dozen many-billion dollar sectors that have had massive impact on the world, stemming from computing. But it took decades for mass market productization to emerge in most of these areas.
Very very few were so clearly poised to take over. It's easy to point out established computing's wins. But you are demanding certainty & proof, & not granting a nascent form factor any time to find it's footing, to establish it's value.
Quest 3 seems to be .massively expanding the fidelity of the Quest 2's pass-through mode. You talk about Apple trying something, and I think they are, but Meta has been driving similar capabilities, if not harnessing them to such a sensible multi-tasking OS core.
What's the desktops killer app? What's mobile's killer app?
Computing to me is a general purpose system, which grows holistically. This kind of search for certainty, trying to annoint some specific app as the thing that a form factor is all for, is actively harmful to understanding the role of compute & how it fits into augments & enriches so many diverse different things we do.
Creating comfortable computing spaces is never going to be a fast burn. It's taken decades for the desktop to mature. This is a harder challenge, enmeshing with reality rather than being so tightly a self contained system.
I have a lot of questions & uncertainty about how computing rolls out a presence beyond the screen & into the world. It's unknown to me and maybe it flat up fails & never works. But I'd like some respect & acceptance that this is an open ended thing, not going to be so conveniently compact & singular as this ask tries to reduce it to. Searching so hard for certainty is dangerous, rejects the pioneering & open endedness & intergativeness that most rich complex & capable long lasting systems endure through. Let's not be so rash in demanding all our answers ahead of time.