This is the first product miss. And I don't know where Apple goes from here. Others will also leapfrog them is my instinct. Basically they are too big now and startups have a chance of beating both Google and Apple.
Apple has had other misses. They themselves cancelled the iPhone mini. There was the newton, quite similarly a product that the technology level was not quite ready for but they had great success with later. They constantly screw up with the Mac pro, introducing one version and then letting it whither away for many years.
Nah, the first iPhone was too expensive, slow, and limited in capabilities (no App Store). They quickly iterated to improve on all of that. The first watch also kind of sucked. The initial iPod wasn’t a blockbuster, either - didn’t work well on Windows, required FireWire. I’m sure there are other initial misses. I think there’s something there with Vision Pro, they just need to iterate and get the cost down.
It was a good product, but it took a lot of iteration to make it the juggernaut it is today. Add bad battery life to the list of flaws, along with slow web browsing, slow processor, etc. With all of those, and the high price, it was relatively niche. The 3G lowered the price substantially, and iirc that plus the faster modem gave it a big popularity boost. And the 4 was substantially more popular than that.
My point is, don’t write off this whole product category because people balked at the price of the first iteration, it happened with the first iPhone, too. Apple grinds its way to excellent products.
I dunno if you were alive at the time but that's not really what happened. The first iPhone was really expensive but people bought it anyway because it was sooo far ahead of the competition. Until the iPhone most people didn't even bother with smart phones because they were so bad (Blackberry was a partial exception).
The web browsing wasn't slow - part of what made it so compelling was that you could browse the real web without going insane. No WAP nonsense.
Yes, it was rough compared to the later versions, but even the first one was insanely better than anything else. It was pretty clear what the issues were (battery life and lack of 3G as you said).
I don't think the Vision Pro is like that at all. It's big issues aren't missing features or lack of polish. It fundamentally makes no sense as a product even if they improve the resolution, speed, battery life, etc.
>I dunno if you were alive at the time but that's not really what happened.
I was pretty alive at the time, I was an intern on the iPhone team at Apple when it launched and the run-up, so I was using the first gen phone/touch all day every day, and I was paying pretty close attention to its launch (but just watching what was said in the press/by the people I knew, nothing privileged on the sales side). Looking around at sales figures, it looks like the first gen sold low single digit million units total, 1.4M in 2007. The 3G sold 1M on the first weekend (the press release tagline was "Twice as Fast at Half the Price", and that lower price is a big part of what brought it mainstream). Now they’re up to a couple hundred million phones per year.
I wouldn't say it was a "miss", it was very good compared to the status quo trash on the market, but it also wasn't the company defining success it turned into until the following gens, it made much less revenue than Macs at the time, and the Mac was pretty niche. My point was that it took a bit to really dial it in, and Apples first gen products don’t usually reflect their eventual success very well.
I don’t think Vision Pro is at 1M sold yet, and Apple products definitely have more sales reach now, but again, I wouldn’t count it out. I was pretty impressed when I tried it, they really nailed a lot of the hard technical problems, especially around text rendering, and if it was 1/3 the cost, I’d definitely have one now, maybe at 1/2. Which means that unless they really dilute the capabilities or drop the cost less than I expect, I’ll probably have one within the next couple of iterations (I'm also assuming they'll sub out the metal for cheaper/lighter materials to improve long-term comfort). But yeah, maybe it’ll end up being a modern day Newton, we’ll see.
I don't think so. You are confusing the absolute and the relative. The iPhone when it launched had die hard fans. The sheer excitement was palpable. The Vision Pro has nothing like it.
In my opinion, nothing is lost here. They will either put out new improved and cheaper versions until they get the interest they want, or wait for someone else to innovate and then copy it better, the apple way (TM). I don’t see a way where this is apples downfall until they continue to f it up again and again.
