One of the commenters was thinking the same thing as me
> People are going to only read the headline and interpret it as “discontinue”. Like the article says, it just means they have enough inventory until they replace it with something cheaper. [https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/report-apple-may-stop-p...]
I wonder how Apple would go through with this, hopefully with a better form.
Effectively, there's no real difference. The model is discontinued, the article says they've produced their last batch and are focused on making a cheaper one.
Apple is free to continue selling what they have in inventory.
> Effectively, there's no real difference. The model is discontinued.
There is a huge difference. My interpretation is that the GP is making the point that with just the headline people will think the product as a whole was discontinued, not just this first version.
Whether the 'product' is discontinued depends on what the next product is. If they drop the AR using VR (its distinguishing feature), then the Vision Pro as we know it is dead and lives on only in name--effectively becoming an Apple Quest.
Considering the number of people Apple marketing is able to reach, compared to the MacRumors website --- I really don't think it will have that kind of deleterious impact on people's interest in Apple VR.
That said, Apple marketing has been mostly dead silent since the product announcement 1.5 years ago.
My prediction is that they will "continue" the product as a different product, maintaining the name. A bit like how the Macbook Air is still a product, whilst we all know it was discontinued some years ago.
I’m not sure I follow. It has a different form factor now, but it still follows the same design ethos as the original model. It’s not like, say, the Ford Ranger, which had a long gap of non-production before being “brought back” in a different product category from the original.
Without the bit of info that they are looking at how to make a cheaper one, some might take “discontinued” as a sign that they are giving up on the whole field. That’d be big news.
As to selling the rest of the inventory: of course they are free to sell whatever they want. But this is a device whose only real use is to be a sort of preview/testing ground for developers who want to get ahead on writing VR code. The pricing is ridiculous for a consumer device, and it is too goofy for Apple users to wear to coffee shops. Continuing to sell it without any note that it was pointless would be a massive betrayal to third party Apple devs if they aren’t planning on making a serious product.
No they're just overspec'd and overpriced. If their goal was to ultimately release a consumer level device, they shouldn't have gone overboard with tech that has limited room for cost cutting.
It's typical of Apple's hubris, to throw in all these features they think people will want, meanwhile if the headset had no cameras and was just a display strapped to your head for $1000, it likely would have sold a lot better. But they didn't want a VR device for whatever reason.
At the same time you could blame discretionary spending being at some of the lowest levels in a decade.
I remember when apple got universally panned for putting cameras in laptops. Most people surely wanted the cost savings, while the small number of power users who needed video chat should have no trouble picking up a USB camera for $100 (more like $200 in present-day USD). Of course, what actually happened was that people (and apps!) in the mac world could suddenly assume that everyone else already had a camera set up, even if they weren't technical, and that was the real killer feature. The rest of the industry quietly memory-holed the snide commentary and followed suit.
Volume will drive price down once VR gets Good Enough. Right now it isn't, so I'm glad that Apple is playing to their strengths by taking swings at substantive challenges -- like the fact that VR makes the wearer look like a complete dope -- rather than becoming discount VR vendor #312.
Disagree, it needs to be better and different, not worse. Every other Apple product is sleek and fashionable, this is a big goofy VR headset. A VR “screen for your face” device would probably be a little better but only in the sense that it is better to not waste a bunch of money on R&D for a device that is not going to be bought.
For a real attempt, the UI needs to be augmented reality you can wear walking around, and the form factor needs to be a pair of normal glasses. It is certainly possible the tech doesn’t exist yet. But that won’t convince people to buy a silly version.
They need cameras for tracking your position and orientation. Also, tracking your eyes can be beneficial in many ways, i.e. enabling foveated rendering, not just for showing a blurred face on the external screen.
I'd wager they overstuffed this thing with sensors and high quality tracking to gather good training data, and the next model will be as effective with fewer cheaper sensors.
Isn't it part of the Apple way to release expensive and weird products at times to keep Apple in the minds of people as a luxury brand. Things like $400 wheels for Mac Pro or the $1000 stand for the external display.
I can see AVP as being half luxury and half tech-demo/devkit for a more budget friendly device.
> to keep Apple in the minds of people as a luxury brand. Things like $400 wheels for Mac Pro or the $1000 stand for the external display.
I have never seen anyone look at those two examples and think “luxury”. Even the most ardent proponents of Apple products laugh at those prices and think they are absurd. With good reason. Who ever is going to look at computer wheels and think they’re a sign of luxury¹?
¹ Yes yes, someone surely will, just like there’s someone for everything. I’m making a general point.
Rich tech fetishists. I worked for one for several years and he had every fancy Apple gadget they ever made. On a positive note, I frequently got his castoffs when he got bored with them.
Yeah it really feels like a devkit they sold in hopes someone would come up with the killer app because they hadn't figured it out themselves yet.
It's a shame as it seems like they maxed out the tech specs, but given the state of the art it still ends up being too low resolution for true MacOS productivity replacement, while also being too heavy & tethered to a short lived battery pack.
Maybe a worse-is-better version that is cheaper/lighter will sell more for entertainment uses.
I guess if they just called it a devkit, nobody would have bought it. But, with the specs, price, and the ridiculous form factor, it was a devkit in all but name.
Except there is so little investment in devs and the ecosystem that even as a devkit it falls flat. VR/AR is a teensy niche of simulation enthusiasts and a large group of people who essentially play 30 minutes of beat saber occasionally. That's not exactly a thriving market, and Apple explicitly eschewed that market entirely, because nobody sims on a mac anything, and there are no controllers to play beat saber with.
Where are the grants to devs to buy and develop something good for it? Apple just kind of expected everyone to do that work for free for them. Watching movies on an airplane is not a $3500 use case. Mirroring your desktop to a head mounted display that is too heavy and cumbersome to be a $3500 use case. Putting iPad apps into the air is not a $3500 use case.
Where's the killer app? What even IS a killer app for head mounted displays? They've been around for 30 years now. It has never been an insufficient hardware problem. The original oculus devkits were genuinely terrible, but VR IS a killer app for sim enthusiasts, so they rushed to implement it into everything they could straight away. Euro Truck Simulator was one of the earliest integrations. But that's not an Apple market and never will be.
If someone wants VR/AR to be some stupid ShadowRun heads up display for managing all the info you encounter in the world, that app should be built and iterated on first. How many average people even run an "organize and remember everything" app? What percentage of iPhone users even use the damn calendar?
> People love their electric scooters nowadays, and they’re just worse Segways.
Not sure about that. The scooter is a >200year old design and there is a reason it subsist to this day. Segways are huge and not as easy to store/fold. Onewheeler are more elegant design and much more compact but awkward to operate when powered off in places you aren't allowed to use it and you cannot carry loads as easily. In that sense a scooter offer the speed of the segways/onewheelers, with the convenience of being able to push them easily anywhere with minimum effort while staying foldable, easy to hide away once reaching destination yet they can carry stuff.
"high profile injuries" is a wonderful understatement. The most notable "injury" being the death of the president of the company while riding his Segway [1]
Maybe ... he bought it out in 2009, which was also when Paul Blart: Mall Cop came out, which served as a eulogy for any chances of dignity for the Segway
Segway was in a sense ahead of its time and trying to create a new market segment.
The early problems were it was illegal to use them on sidewalks but also there weren't bike lanes like there are in big cities now.
It was also pretty big & heavy it didn't work for multi-modal like using it for the last mile to/from a train or bus.
So the e-mobility space got won decades later by worse, cheaper products that were smaller & lighter .. being used heavily for food delivery app drivers using them semi-legally in bike lanes. A use case that wasn't imagined in the Segway unveiling.
That's a good point but.. if they have enough inventory that almost points to a sign that inventory is not moving. They may stop producing them until they figure a way (an app) to spark a buying trend.
Headline:
Apple May Stop Producing Vision Pro by the End of 2024
First paragraph:
Apple has abruptly reduced production of the Vision Pro headset and could stop making the current version of the device completely by the end of 2024
Later on, it also says that Apple was stopped work on the second-generation Vision Pro and is focusing only on a lower-cost device. So that’s actually pretty reasonable.
I personally don't think it's reasonable for a publication to suggest Apple is outright discontinuing a product in the headline, only to reveal that, no, they're actually just making a strategy shift with the product line.
That's newsworthy all by itself. No clickbait needed.
I'll be curious what the collecter's market looks like for Apple Vision Pro a decade from now. I imagine there are far fewer of these things out in the world than Apple hoped there would be, and I wonder how that'd impact long-term scarcity.
HN had fifty people in every thread swearing that nobody predicted the iPhone would be a success so we should all shut up and buy or else FOMO.
It was constant and everywhere. Tens of posters who have apparently zero connection to the company Apple other than "They released the iPhone" as if they've never had a high profile flop, as if they've never had only okay sales of a product, as if they've never tried to change the world and failed miserably, as if Apple never misses.
Because of a single damn product release. One time. At the crux of a phase change in the personal digital device world.
Just, utterly divorced from reality. I feel like these posters are half of my company's management team.
Apple products have been successful specifically because they attract the mass market right away.
Early adopters didn't use iPhones, they used HP iPaqs and Dell Axim PDAs running Windows Mobile. iPhones obsoleted them by simplifying the UI so anybody aged 8-80 could use it.
If an Apple product seems like it's for 'early adopters', it's already failed.
> Everyone thought I was crazy for thinking this thing would get no traction. People want to spend less time plugged into screens, not less
Almost everyone I know (and people here on HN) thought this would be niche at $3500. But that doesn't mean people don't want to be plugged into screens. They totally are plugged into screens - just not Vision Pro.
Maybe? I dunno. I’m tired of my current screens. But I want better ones. I want mass market e-ink monitor and a pair of VR glasses that look like actual glasses. We’re halfway to 2030, where’s the future? I’m still using a laptop, we’ve had those for decades, what gives?
We want more screens, just easier to use them. We are too lazy to even stand up to wear a headset. We want them in front of us all the time, everywhere, without moving a finger, instantly!
I’m perfectly fine with standing up to get and use anything. For me, the problem is that it’s a /headset/ and not something else - as they have a host of ergonomics and comfort issues, causes fatigue and headaches, closes me off from my environment (despite their pass through idea), etc.
AVP user here who is wanting to get less plugged into screens.
What I really mean by that though, is that I want to make my screen time more meaningful. I don’t want to mindlessly scroll, like I often find myself doing, or like I see others doing in places like grocery store lines or on the subway.
The Apple Vision Pro is a very expensive, specialized device. When I use it, it's mostly to watch movies, TV shows, or other immersive content, but it’s still mainly just for entertainment. But I can't just sit in it and disassociate the same way I might my phone--I don't feel that it's built that way.
As for getting no traction, yeah that's correct. It's too expensive. I still love mine.
> People want to spend less time plugged into screens, not less.
Yes. I threw my phone away 2.5 years ago (after my 3yo daughter kept saying "no phone dadda") and it has made my life significantly better. Like living in the 1990's again.
In a land of the distracted, the phoneless man is king.
That being said, I think the AVP is very cool technology, and will have important applications in the years ahead. (Just not mass market for a long time, if ever)
From the beginning of the Vision Pro, I always expected Apple to take the approach of giving everyone an excellent, Apple worthy headset regardless of price. From there, focus on keeping the specs exactly the same but reducing the price until it's a reasonable purchase for people.
That's the thing, Meta is /not/ "doing" glasses. They had a very limited run at $10K+/ea just for internal testing IIRC. That's very different from a shipping $3.5K product. It's also not clear if Meta could ship their glasses at ~$10K or if they'd need to charge even more.
Apple has repeatedly said that AR is where they want to be and glasses are what they want to do (directly and via leaks) but the tech wasn't there yet. "There yet" can mean "we can't figure out how to get the cost down to something reasonable". The AVP was clearly a "Let's fake it till we make it" product with faux-AR (or maybe it's still just "AR" but faux-"glasses"?) with the end goal of removing the ski visor for just glasses.
I don't know, I just tested the Meta Quest last night and at $300 it looked GOOD. Give it a few years and I bet they could get that level of fidelity into a glass frame @ ~$1000-1200
I think part of the challenge Apple now has is convincing developers who were already on the fence that they should take the plunge now rather than wait for what looks to be a clearly superior form factor.
It’s not like customers (aside from those who already have the hardware) are beating down anyone’s door asking for the Vision Pro.
This is very handwavy, but if Apple does intend to pursue the glasses form factor it would probably benefit them to do the very make the very un-apple move of articulating how investments into developing for Vision Pro will extend into glasses.
I agree that the OS is the most limiting factor of the AVP. In its current form it's just an iPad with all the downsides that brings. I had high hopes for it as a MBP replacement or companion but MVD was disappointing and so I returned mine.
Were you planning on bringing a keyboard and mouse around with you? VR "gesture" controls are godawful and nothing has supplanted mouse and keyboard because they are absolutely wonderful control methods.
If you ARE carrying around a mouse and keyboard and AVP, that seems like a lot more clunk and silliness than just using a damn laptop. What are you doing that actually benefits from gluing the screen to your face?
I want to be explicit: I love VR and have been hugely into it since the very first oculus dev kits, but other than flight/driving simulators and gun games which all hugely hugely benefit from the physical immersion VR provides, there is nothing worth doing in VR. Not that many games actually benefit from a physical presence. Almost nobody playing FIFA or CoD actually wants to do it in VR. The (really fun and quite well made) CoD ripoffs and other shooters in VR are nearly empty, because so few people are willing to stand up while playing. The Wii made this clear 18 years ago FFS.
I'm still waiting for a single use case that isn't sim driving, sim flying, or shooting, or beat saber. Billions invested into producing something, and still there is nothing.
Whether it's VR, "Metaverse", or AI models, I want it to be open source.
I don't want to spend 8 hours a day in some corporation's world, even more than we already are. The incentives are not aligned.
The personal computer revolution (that Apple helped kickstart) was amazing. People could actually run the software locally, instead of a mainframe. People bought apps to run on their computer and videos to run on their own VCR. I feel like the Web started taking things backwards, empowering "the remote server" again, like a mainframe.
Now, we have Netflix, YouTube etc. and the broadband internet hurdle has been surmounted for many. We are fighting the wrong battles with "net neutrality". The real battle should be whether we can host the software on machines of our choice, or not.
> I don't want to spend 8 hours a day in some corporation's world, even more than we already are. The incentives are not aligned.
AR will be the 'future' for a very, very long time I think. Maybe there will be a Metaverse chatroom where all the worker bees can bounce around and have a happy hour on Friday or something
When it comes to AI, yes you guys are lucky Meta had that snafu with LLaMa researchers and chose to seize the moment and make LLaMa available freely to everyone. Otherwise it would be quite a different world. Mark Z returned to his open-source roots that he had with Synapse and Wirehog back in the day, before Sean Parker and Peter Thiel “corrupted” him.
But when it comes to everything else, it is the opposite, in my opinion.
Apple sells you the hardware and you install apps locally. It’s not open source, but at least it runs locally. And Apple cares about your privacy.
Facebook is the opposite, it is ad-supported, it will never give you their backend source code or let you run your own social network. They only promote “React” front end framework and other ancillary things. They will try to take your data by hook or by crook (surreptitiously recording your camera and audio as well). Their “Metaverse” play would have to recouo the tens of billions spent on development.
But yeah when it comes to AI, you guys lucked out. Zuck’s image has improved since the first 15 years of “dumbf%[#s” giving him their data. He now surfs in a suit and looks much cooler. But remember — it’s people like Linus Torvalds, Tim Berners-Lee, and all the “BDFL”s of all the languages you use (like Guido Vom Rossum for Python and the Zend guys behind PHP) who really create most of the wealth for the world. If not for open source, you’d be spending more and more of your life in some corporation’s world.
Just ask yourself, when the following technologies enter your home or your body, would you rather all be hooked up to a corporation like the Borg, or at least have your own installation where you have a say:
TeslaBot in your house
Neuralink in your brain
Microsoft Recall recording
Hours in “the Metaverse”
Security cameras everywhere
What do you think the incentives will be for TeslaBot or Microsoft Recall surreptitiously storing everything they can about you, including your passwords?
When facing the temptation. Microsoft has already done it. Facebook has already done it.
But it can go far beyond that. How difficult would it be for TeslaBot to get all the info to impersonate you? All your mannerisms, voice recordings, your heartbeat rhythms, gait, everything?
Apple 100% has something like Meta's Orion glasses or probably even better as a prototype in their basement.
Instead of an Orion puck for processing - it's your iPhone
Instead of the bracelet for extra precision - it's a future Apple Watch prototype.
They just won't do what Meta did - show off prototype hardware that they know they won't release in its current form and are working towards making viable for mass production.
My guess is the Vision Pro was largely driven by a need to get real world data.
By giving it all the bells and whistles they get to find out about more things and keep it at such a price range that it avoids being viewed as a colossal consumer level failure (instead if it's known by the general public at all it's as a weird but impressive premium level failure)
Translation: we sold almost nothing from the previous generation.
If the product was a hit, we'd just know about it. We'd see it around, people would talk about it. It wouldn't require an ambiguous comment from the CEO.
But I think they did this more to break into a new territory than to sell units. Of course, they didn't market it that way but that was probably their intention.
Next they're gonna come up with a cheaper device, hopefully below 2000 dollars with most of the things that made the vision pro interesting.
Success of every modern attempt at VR hinges on limits of self-expression. Meta's torsoverse and Apple's extension of the office failed while Second Life continues on with a thriving virtual real estate and retail market and VRChat makes commercial deals to support a massive yearly furry convention.
Second Life doesn't pretend to be anything it's not, so it attracts an audience who want that authenticity.
Apple and Facebook are the polar opposite of that. They look at a product segment and think "How we do sell this to X million people?" Turns out that regular people that buy iPhones and Macbooks, might not be as interested in VR.
They should have made an sdk that made it easier to port games (and excel). Iirc you had to use their gesture control, there was no way to use kb+m right? At least with other vr you can create a usable mapping to typical FPS controls.
You can connect a trackpad and keyboard to the AVP. Interestingly a trackpad worked but not a mouse. You can also connect a normal controller (like Xbox/PS).
I really hate all of the talk about how this has been received. It was clear to anyone that was not trying to push clickbait headlines that this was never meant to be a mainstream device. Apple may charge a premium for their devices but they also understand the market enough to have lower priced Macs, iPads, and iPhones.
No one thought a $3500 device was going to be mainstream when we see people complaining about phones being above $1k.
The fact that the first one came out with the "Pro" name made this even more clear.
Headlines like this make it seem like it "failed" in some way that is only because we are putting expectations on this to match other Apple products but this is just like the other "Hobby" projects that apple used to classify products like the Apple TV.
The market for AR/VR is incredibly early (if it manages to take off at all) and the technology just isnt there yet. But while we wait for the hardware to catch up why not start working on an idealized vision of what it could work like with its own caveats. I would much rather this than the xreal's and similar headsets way over promising (borderline lying in their marketing) and severely under delivering.
Rather than halting VR/AR efforts, this seems to be just cutting production of the current model. That doesn't mean there won't be future models but it does imply demand was lower than expected.
We've had 10-15 years of companies trying to make VR (and AR more recently) happen. I just don't think it's ever going to happen.
People are led astray by books like Snow Crash but there are fundamental issues with both VR and AR. Latency is a huge one for both. AR fundamnetally has an issue producing true blacks.
This product will go the way of the Apple Watch. Deemed a failure before eventually becoming the category leader about 3 years and 3 iterations later. The price will come down, the (few) hardware rough edges will be softened, and enough support from the massive iOS developer pool will create a “killer app” that starts to build momentum here.
Misleading FUD from Macrumors trying to get clicks.
I've had the watch since v1 and I've almost gone full circle on it.
Never had sound on, have disabled more and more notifications, steadily fewer and fewer complications until I finally just use the the silly Snoopy watch face instead.
What I do love it for is all the health tracking, and that I have about a decade of data on myself now. Really just activity level and resting heart rate primarily.
I'm at the point that I'd be similar (or, maybe more?) for a display-less slim Apple Fitness Band loaded with all the sensors of the Apple Watch.. and then go back to my analog wristwatch.
All of those things could happen, and it still wouldn't go beyond Oculus Quest levels of popularity, i.e. low.
Apple Watch is a status symbol in the same way Airpods and iPhones are. You're paying partially to be seen wearing them. The same is not true for Vision Pro or any headset. You'll just look like a Alamy stock image that comes up in an image search for 'technology'.
Possibly, but I don't think it's comparable because VR/AR headsets—whatever this category is—still has an unknown future. Smart watches had demonstrated use cases and a market before Apple released the Apple Watch. The Vision Pro is more like smart glasses, a category that still can't find a foothold 10+ years after the Google Glass.
So Google fails, Apple fails, Facebook has been failing for a while. It seems only Microsoft out of the big tech is still continuing its dominance now with AI and things like that. But this is a great time for startups to come up.
Not sure where Google, Apple, or Facebook have "failed"... If we are taking a single random product's success/failure and projecting it on the whole company then Microsoft has failed more times than I can count, the most relevant to this discussion being the hololens and the biggest recent history blunder being the Microsoft Phone.
I said they are failing. Not failed. Bleeding will continue for long since we didn't break these up earlier. But companies are either going up or down and anyone with half a brain can see that these three are going down.
> People are going to only read the headline and interpret it as “discontinue”. Like the article says, it just means they have enough inventory until they replace it with something cheaper. [https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/report-apple-may-stop-p...]
I wonder how Apple would go through with this, hopefully with a better form.
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