this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2024
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To be fair, a lot of people were wondering the same thing when the iPad was announced. Now there's like a billion of them out there.
They were wondering that for the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad, the Apple Watch, and AirPods. I’d bet that in 10 years a decent portion of the population will have some sort of headset, Apple or otherwise.
None of those had a point nearly as questionable as this headset thing. The ipod was an advanced mp3 player, which was very popular and common tech at the time. The iPhone was an advanced phone with a large touchscreen, which was rapidly becoming very common at the time. The iPad was an advanced tablet, which was a concept that had already been tried many times by many other companies by then. The air pods are just advanced wireless earbuds, which nobody could ever deny were rapidly becoming more popular.
VR headsets are fundamentally different from all of those, in that there's no technological and social precedence quite like it. People used mp3 players and watches and phones before Apple did something new. Nobody was wondering the point of a better mp3 player that could hold massive amounts of songs. But the history of humankind says nothing about the masses' willingness to walk around in public with big ass high tech ski goggles strapped to their faces. VR is much, much more unknown compared to those.
I get what you’re saying, and regarding people walking around in public wearing a headset, I completely agree. It’ll be a very long time before that happens, if ever.
I disagree that AR won’t become more ubiquitous in people’s lives. Right now, the biggest gripe I see when people talk about Vision Pro is the price. Which was also the case with all the other Apple products I mentioned. The price will come down, it’ll get more features, and it will become more attractive to consumers.
Only time will tell which of us will be right.
The iPhone had 2 interesting things going for it. Everyone had been begging for an iPod phone for years before this happened. Apple had been working on the iPad since the Newton failed and the iPhone was a combination between iPod phone and iPad.
All glass all touch screens were not a thing people thought they wanted before Apple made a really compelling (and pleasing) device.
AR has been a thing for years, but hasn’t garnered the popularity or utility that MP3s and phones ever had. QR codes being the possible exception and only since most phones handle them natively at this stage.
It’s possible that AR just hasn’t had a good enough UX to break the “cool experiment bro” uses imagined so far (because of screen/camera/movement limitations). It’ll be interesting to see if Apple has managed to revolutionize the experience enough to imagine new and more widely needed AR uses or not.