What made the early apps great and viral on iPhone were the indie developers. The ones making flashlight and farting sound boards. They paved the way, and for them $3500 is a lot of money.

Who cares if it’s pocket change for google or meta, nobody wants another Facebook app.

$3500 doesn't matter at all for developers. It matters for users. If there are a billion users, devs will pay $3500 for access no problem. But you can't get a billion users for a $3500 product unless it's at least as useful as a car.

This is the best way to sum it up. The diehard Apple fans still defend it, with handwaved promises that the future will bring a cheaper one, but in this economy I don't think Apple can do it. The price people will bear is proportional to the current usefulness, and the usefulness is proportional to third-party dev interest. The irony is that of all companies, Apple would be the most capable financially of loss-leadering it into existence with their cash hoard, but they're so stingy that the idea of a loss leader offends them to the core.

But imagine for a moment an alternate reality where they at least moderately tried to keep the cost down, and then further subsidized it, selling the headsets for $599 and made developer terms wildly attractive (like, your first 20 million in revenue having a 5% fee instead of 30%). It would cost Apple billions, but they pissed away more on the car idea with nothing to show for it. This could have launched a category, instead I predict a future more like Apple TV hardware where it's niche due to being 4x the price of what most people want to pay for the category.

> Apple would be the most capable financially of loss-leadering it into existence with their cash hoard, but they're so stingy that the idea of a loss leader offends them to the core.

Or they tried that, saw it's a tiny garbage market segment attended solely by photographer types who enjoy spending $10k to complain of being unsatisfied and a few others far less savory, and sensibly exited. Just like they explored FSD in concept and said no thanks, this will never work, let the morons throw their bad money after our good.

I don't know why it surprises people that a cash-rich, culturally insular company, with the world's premier brand in affordable luxury technology of genuine quality, should behave in accord with its own precepts rather than theirs. I've always found it more useful to learn about what I see in front of me, than distract my eyes with some fantasy of my own preference, and remain a fool. (For example, Apple is dogshit at wearables, always has been, always will be. You wear one because everyone wears one, although of course I have better, but they're awful!) But as I think I said nearby, I tried VR already and it sucks. I guess some folks need longer to catch on.

Sure. And those early indie devs paid, inflation adjusted, iirc around $500-1000 for the hardware they developed against to put those indie flashlight fart noise apps on the then nascent App Store, because that's what an iPhone cost.

$3500 is, as I said, pretty close to petty cash even for a sole-owner LLC that needs taking at all seriously, and I would front that sum without a second thought out of my own personal pocket if I thought VR had legs, the same way I've put about $9k toward inference-capable hardware in the last two years because AI obviously does have legs. It's an investment in my career, or at least toward the optionality of continuing a career in software in a post-AI world, assuming I don't decide to go be an attorney or something instead.

I appreciate not everyone can drop a sum like that, like that. I can and I'm not ashamed of it. Why should I be, when it's exactly what I've worked the last 21 years straight to earn?

I think the issue is less the cost to developers and more the cost to users. Were there more users, no doubt a larger number of indie developers would be able to justify the expense. Without those users--or at least a reliable promise of those users in the near future--it's tough to justify even dipping your toes into it. It's a chicken and egg problem that's fundamentally tied to cost as well as hardware limitations. Discomfort from the bulk and weight was my biggest sticking point even before the price, for example.

Plus, the hardware is just the initial starting point. Your initial outlay will quickly be eclipsed by the dev hours spent working on Vision versions of your app(s), and that's when the opportunity costs become particularly noticeable. Time spent on a Vision app that may have no real market for years is time you could be spending adding features, testing changes, fixing bugs, marketing, etc. Skipping on Vision Pro is really a no-brainer for most indie developers, at least for the foreseeable future.

Yes. That was my original point, just above the head of the branch where you responded. Could I have been more concise or more clear? Serious question, I am mildly retooling my prose style of late.

Ah, sorry about that. Any lack of clarity is on me; I had walked away for a bit before responding and ended up flattening the branch in my head by the time I started typing. You're fine :).

The price isn't as much of a problem for developer adoption, it's a problem for user adoption. Users aren't buying the Apple Vision Pro because it's $3500. Developers aren't writing apps for the Apple Vision Pro because it has no users.

I said precisely as much in the comment to which you replied. Can you offer advice on my prose style therein?

You didn't really talk about users at all. The only part of your comment about users is "But why do that if there's no users?". There can be many reasons why there are no users, price being just one of them.

That's fair. The implication was all in the comparison with week-1 campsites for iPhones versus day-1 yawns for Vision Pro, but it's smeared across two paragraphs and should have been hoisted and made explicit. Thanks for the review!