What an interesting number! The original iPhone is reported to cost only $150M (~$225M today) to develop. Sure, Apple from 2006 is not the same as today's Apple, but I find it still amusing that they try to create a new revolution with throwing money around, instead of a real new idea, like the iPhone was.
The expectation and capability of the first iPhone is a minuscule fraction of what's expected of the Vision Pro. The iPhone wasn't a new idea, there were other smart phones before it, but they hit it out of the park with the interface and understanding what customers would want, before they wanted it.
The entire computing environment has evolved dramatically since then, as have the expectations of the once scrappy underdog to the second largest company in the world. At some point, AR / VR will eventually become good enough, and it's good that they are investing in it. It forces Meta to innovate and become better as well.
I personally hope that it will get to the point that i can go anywhere and take my ideal workspace setup with me and lose little to no productivity.
> understanding what customers would want, before they wanted it.
"relentlessly telling customers what they want, regardless of what they might need."
The walled garden doesn't appeal to most people, which is one reason why worldwide Apple has a very small market share. Price is another, and paying more for a device I have far less control over never made sense to me.
>I personally hope that it will get to the point that i can go anywhere and take my ideal workspace setup with me and lose little to no productivity.
My laptop has 3 very portable screens. I don't have to strap anything to my head to be productive. Sure, I'm not going to spread out 3 screens on an airplane, but I'm not typically going to work if I'm on an airplane (YMMV). I'm not sure how you get to be productive living inside a strap-on-bubble even with the passthrough video. It just seems so clumsy. Maybe it will improve, but that's a big maybe and I'm not sure Apple is going to be the one to perfect that experience, especially when their platform is so curated. Where am I going to run my servers and software development stack, on the Vision Pro? No. I still need a laptop to be productive, no matter where I am.
> The walled garden doesn't appeal to most people, which is one reason why worldwide Apple has a very small market share. Price is another, and paying more for a device I have far less control over never made sense to me.
Take off your HN glasses for a few minutes. I don’t think the vast majority (I’m talking 80-90%+) of people could even tell you “walled garden” means. It doesn’t even start to factor into most people’s buying experiences. In fact, to the average consumer Apple and Google’s policies for the App Store are identical.
Apple could allow sideloading tomorrow and it would not make an appreciable difference in sales worldwide because the people who say they care about it (let alone the subset of that who actually take advantage of it) is vanishing small. I know people on HN will bristle at that but it’s just the truth.
I don’t care what OS you use but I find it hilarious that I have some friends who are staunchly pro-Android/anti-Apple because <insert tired talking point> and then they proceed to use their phones in a way that never exceeds what they could do on iOS.
Price is a much larger factor.
As for your comments on the AVP I agree, at least at its current iteration.
It's a premium product. Iphone has the majority of US (and thus wealthy) customers. It's seen as premium in other wealthy nations as well. Second largest company in the world by market cap means that they clearly operate with more than enough customers who matter to get things done.
I used to be a hardcore linux everything person. Over time I stepped into the walled garden and found I enjoyed not having to constantly think about the interop of everything. It's different for everyone.
> Where am I going to run my servers and software development stack?
Right now you need a laptop. Rapidly approaching a future where devcontainers and remote dev servers will let you dev anywhere you want, where you just choose the interface of choice. You may want a laptop,
I may want to have multiple screens for analyzing data, modifying code, and doing other operationsy things.
The point overall is: Apple is good at shipping products that people want and iterating and improving them. That is undeniable. It does take time to iterate and improve, and Vision will probably get there because this pattern of product is in their DNA.
I attribute this to something else, something that’s operating across many different sectors.
Technologically, we’ve exhausted the low hanging fruit of various scientific and engineering disciplines. Energy, transportation, construction, computing devices, software, medicine, surgery and more - all these things rode enormous waves of potential in the postwar era that have now ebbed.
The iPhone was a low hanging fruit made possible by developments in compute, connectivity, and software.
The next set of fruit is much higher up the tree: see avp, development costs of.
The thing is, the original iPhone was bad. By today standards. But it came out at a time when it was leaps and bounds ahead of a good chunk of the competition. But you can’t release a product like that anymore, at least if you are Apple. People expect so much more these days.
