I owned the first iPhone right when it came out. It was a revelation. It’s original cost was about the same as Windows Mobile devices off-contract, and it quickly got a price cut weeks into its launch, so it really wasn’t more expensive than any other Windows Mobile device or BlackBerry. And it was a revelation - blazing fast, did everything important the competition did (except enterprise support), and it truly was a giant leap. Nobody bought the iPhone and said, This thing sucks now, but just you wait… It was great from moment one.

Vision Pro is a bust. Tim Cook’s Apple is one where bean counters rule. Steve Jobs would never have shipped this. He would have felt like a dork with this heavy monstrosity without purpose, and he would have killed it. That’s what leadership and taste look like. Today’s Apple is not capable of bold things like the iPhone anymore. The model is the Apple Watch - put out an unusable piece of shit, and then iterate until it sells well.

You might be right about Apple under Tim Cook, and the Vision Pro, but this is revisionist history that I’ve seen repeatedly about the Vision Pro comparing it to the iPhone.

The original iPhone was many thing but certainly not blazing fast. And yea, many people said it not that great now but this is the future, most of the reviews if I remember correctly.

CNET: https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/original-iphone-review/

Ars: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/07/iphone-review/16/#h1

> “ We love the concept of the iPhone. It's extremely easy to use and almost entirely self-discoverable; the interface looks better than any other phone—smartphone or not—currently on the market, and it's just plain fun to use.”

> “However, we are not buying something else either; we plan to wait to see what software (and hardware) updates might come out for the iPhone in the near future. We believe that the iPhone is cool enough to wait for whatever might come out, and we have confidence that many of the nits we have picked can be fixed through a major software update.”

I remember very frequently switching back and forth between my iPhone and Android or Windows Mobile devices.

I owned one shortly after launch day. It was absolutely blazing fast, especially compared with the Moto Q I had just come from. Not the mobile internet speed, of course, the speed of the interface. It was completely smooth and fast unlike any other phone at the time.

The Moto Q was particularly slow, I had one. Not a great comparison imo.

The interface was buttery smooth, everything else was ok especially before the App Store. Once you had third-party apps I remember being disappointed. The 3GS was fast, the original was not.

Regardless most of the comment, including that bit imo, is complete revisionism. Almost every review of the original iPhone talks about the imperfection and promise of it.

Uh, it’s revisionism to say that third party apps were slow, and therefore the iPhone was slow, when the iPhone was out for an entire year before the App Store launched. I’m talking about the original iPhone at launch, not capability that was added a year later. I don’t care what the reviews said, I had one and experienced it, after several years of owning other phones. The reviews also moaned loudly about the software keyboard, which I thought was great on day one. It’s not revisionism that I (and lots of other people) have a different opinion of the iPhone launch than you do.

You really have no clue, if you had owned one you would know how much faster to use it was than pretty much all the competition in practice. Maybe it was beaten on some benchmarks or whatever but it is largely irrelevant and its exactly what people wish Apples would go back to...

Yup. It was one of those truly magical devices that leap frogged everything else. People who dispute that must not have actually used it when it came out.

Sure Jobs was a legend but I don't think Tim Cook is doing a bad job at all - under whose leadership Apple came up with Airpods which quickly became a cultural icon, and the M series Apple Silicon.

Both were great moves under Cook. But great writers need great editors, and Cook is not a great editor. It takes tremendous fortitude to kill an iteration of a device before its launch, and Jobs would have done so without hesitation, as he has done many times before. And honestly, I’m down on Apple right now for its truly awful rent-seeking approach to technology, thinking it has a right to collect a fee on digital transactions just because you use the device they made (and already paid handsomely for).

Thank god I'm not the only one to think that.

This thing is a farce, as you said, it lacks taste and purpose like most of the stuff of Cook's Apple.

And as an Apple Watch owner (2 models over 5 years), I can attest that in many ways it is still a piece of shit and in fact for what is the only relevant use case (sports) Apple has no proper cohesive approach and makes very little investment. In fact, they try to push their garbage subscription on you. For the price it is sold at, the Apple Watch is a piece of shit, the price of the SE should be the price of the standard model basically...

Anyway, I don't understand how people are so delusional about the iPhone history but I guess this is Stockholm syndrome trying to defend Apple on everything. Reality is that all the products they made since the iPhone are "meh" at best and not exactly groundbreaking especially when you consider prices...

Yeah, Apple Watch is still a piece of shit. I’m on my third since launch, its functionality is basically nothing for me except telling the time and buzzing way too often for alerts I don’t care about.

> It's clear that this is a first gen problem.

AVP is an incremental improvement on literally a decade of 3D headset development. The idea that this is some kind of MVP to be followed on by rapid improvements in an emerging technology seems pretty strained. What it actually is, is a luxury-targetted Quest 3 clone that weighs 50% more and costs 7x as much.

What we have here is a Rolex, not an iPhone.

And yet everyone who knows anything about VR disagrees with you.

Vision Pro is far from incremental. Expensive, needs more work etc. But not incremental.

Angular pixel resolution on AVP is about as much better than a Quest 3 as the Quest 3 is over a Rift S. Sounds pretty incremental to me? Where's the revolution here?

And yet people using the two point out how much better it is. Maybe this seemingly arbitrary metric is as relevant as comparing amount of ram between iOS and Android devices. It’s more complicated than can be expressed by some stat.

>It's clear that this is a first gen problem.

Not really. Rendering a plane in space, distorting it, then having a lens distort it back and stretch the image over your field of view has many losses that just viewing a panel directly doesn't have. The only advantage for headsets is that the screen can be smaller than a full monitor which means that yield doesn't need to be as high to get a working display. If you want to render a 2d screen, physical monitors will likely always be the better choice. Headsets have an advantage of flexibility of where panels are and their sizes, but their picture quality will be worse.

iphone was kickass for many on day 1. Very different scenario here.

The scenario here is that people are believing this article, which is simply incorrect.

This is just revisionist history.

iPhone 1 sold 1.4m units at a much lower price point.

It was better than the competition at its time but definitely not a mainstream phone.

You’re crazy. The iPhone 1 was amazing on day one—even with all its limitations: no 3G, no App Store and no copy paste.

BlackBerry and Windows Mobile looked like horse drawn carriages comparatively. The writing was on the wall.

The limiting factor for sales, IIRC, was the $500 price tag. That was fixed the next year.

Thanks for jumping in! I still own my iPhone 1 and still works perfectly - cheers.

Yup. Nobody bought one and said, This sucks, but it’s the future… It was great on day one.

This is rewriting history. It was good, but not perfect.

Cameras were pretty common on phones, even with video, and the iPhone couldn’t shoot video for years.

There was no customized Home Screen which had a lot of hand-wringing.

Again, as everyone mentions no apps and that’s huge. Let’s not forget that the backup to apps, websites, weren’t made for mobile yet. Not even apples own website.

When the iPhone first came out it was halfway to a luxury feature phone in terms of ability. Until mobile web and apps became readily available, it wasn’t particularly “smart”.

It was subpar in ways people expected more from (basic phone stuff), and great in new ways (Touch! Web!). That sounds exactly like the reviews for this headset.

I don't know about that, yes you're right with regards to what the phone didn't have. But I still remember it being an evolutionary change when I watched the release. I don't feel that for the Apple Vision Pro.

Think about what the iPhone had at the time compared to what we were used to, provided my first was the iPhone 3GS.

It was one of the first phones that actually had an incredible touch screen compared to the best phones of the time, it was one of the first phones you could scroll and navigate smoothly without hitching, something Samsung struggled with for years. The ability for the device to seamlessly rotate between portrait and horizontal views. The ability to toss away my MP3 player and play music in the same way from my phone in a user friendly interface. The ability to do all of these things on the one device and have an interface that allows me to switch between active applications that could run in the background. The iPhone introduced the idea of gestures that actually worked, even just the idea of pinch and zoom functionality was an absolute game changer for mobile phones and Apple nailed it. It took companies years after the release of the iPhone to implement a decent touch screen that allowed smooth pinch and zoom functionality.

These were at the time some of the things that made the phone smart that we didn't have before. I think sometimes people forget some of the subtle things the iPhone brought with it that were a complete game changer

The 3GS was light years better than the original iPhone, and by that time it had things like actual GPS, the App Store, and usable mobile data. The original iPhone was seriously limited.

Ironically many of the things you are identifying about the iPhone are also true of the Vision Pro - for example the eye and hand tracking that enable gestures that actually work in an incredibly intuitive way is a game changer - including literally pinch to zoom.

I think there are other things you are seriously underestimating about Vision Pro - for example the quality of movies, including 3D, is better than anything I've ever seen in any home, movie theater, or other headset. It's simply stunning.

I also don't think a lot of people have tried thing like using FaceTime with the first person camera. I have, and it's an incredible way to give a presentation or explain things to people even if they are using a phone at the other end. Incredibly natural.

There really are as many steps forward, if not more so with the Vision Pro than with the iPhone.

Quite the opposite

It was so smart that you could browse the desktop web properly, and zooming worked great for it.

You’re making things that in the context of the launch were irrelevant.

The iPhone was lock ass from day 1

Yeah but you couldn't be on a call and browse the web at the same time

No copy/paste

Terrible camera

No apps

Kickass isn't perfect.

Never said perfect but was ahead of others in many ways. If I plan to rewrite history I would start with the VHS & Beta war. Cheers.

i disagree.

the iPhone wasn't mainstream because it was $500 with a two-year contract, but there was ABSOLUTELY NOTHING that could touch it from day one. Even before day one. Watch the demo. Moscone Center was LIT UP that day.

I used so many "iPhone killers" because I was broke back then and didn't have a choice. All of them "could" do more features-wise, but all of them were hella jank by comparison and looked significantly worse. If I had the money for an iPhone back then on launch day, I would've gotten one for sure.

It's not even just the iPhone. When the AirPods came out, I had been wanting truly wireless earbuds for many, many years. I even spent $600 on a pair of custom Bragi Dash Pros, which were CRAZY ADVANCED for their time but had extremely poor QC. The AirPods absolutely destroyed the "competition" when they came out, and the AirPods Pro set the standard for ANC-capabale truly wireless earbuds. Nothing _still_ comes close to these devices.

Same with the Apple Watch. I had been a Pebble loyalist prior to this coming out but still got two a few weeks after release (one for my wife). The Apple Watch was crazy limited and apps were a joke, but the value was immediate. No watch still comes close, IMO.

This...is nothing like that. I could buy one, but I'm also a guy that doesn't watch movies and works off of a single monitor. There's nothing irresistible about the AVP yet like there was for the iPhone, or the AirPods, or the Apple Watch.

I guess people who already use headsets might feel the wow-factor of using these, but this is the first major Apple product in recent memory that feels like a solution looking for a problem...unless this is a stepping stone for regular glasses. The Vision Pro's AR capabilities in a regular glasses form factor a la Google Glass would be earth-shattering.