I started my career as a dev working in VR apss. At the time there was consensus in the industry that apple was about to release something huge that would push the whole industry to the mainstream - and indeed you couldn't rely on any new VR/AR product or software without it being silently acquired in months and their website redirecting to apple.
Fast forward one decade, nothing's happened yet. I moved to web dev long ago, but people seem to be still waiting.
Apple is centered around the iPhone, it's hard for them to make anything that isn't a peripheral of it. The best idea they've had in the last ten years is the Apple Watch, but I'm using Garmin because I don't have an iPhone.
The Mac benefited from all the work Apple has done on the iPhone CPU, but the software scene on the Mac has been deteriorating because developers are using the same tools and the same toolkits to develop desktop applications that are motivated by mobile. The article mentioned here
claims to be about the deterioration of desktop interface but it's by someone who's so steeped in the Apple culture that they don't get it is really about the deterioration of Mac interfaces.
Apple doesn't care if you buy a Mac, in fact they'd feel most comfortable if the Mac became a peripheral of the iPhone. It's hard for them to picture developing a new peripheral for the Mac, even something straightforward like the Magic Mouse. A peripheral for the Mac that's groundbreaking? It doesn't fit into their world view.
Macs obviously have an outsized mindshare and market share in Silicon Valley but globally make up like 5% of PC sales. In Apple’s own books the entire Mac division accounts for 8% of revenues. Apple is serious about the line, sure, but it doesn’t have anywhere close to the importance of iPhone for the company.
I wonder if that's a 'kill your startup' pattern, that is, develop an app for Mac because you're surrounded by Mac users, but then you don't sell many units because the market is too small.
I had a time when I was involved with startups of various kinds (sometimes West Coast, sometimes Research Triangle Park, more often NYC or upstate.) I was a Windows user in a MacOS world and the most important accessory I packed was whatever I needed to hook up to mini-Displayport.
I think this might be happening more for iPad Pro style apps than for MacOS style apps now, but the failure pattern of building great software for small market hardware is historic. It was a bigger deal before IBM Compatibility.
My take is that tablets are underrated, however I'd like to see more 'higher end' applications aimed at at 'lower end' tablets.
For me the magic of tablets is that they are low cost, so I'm not afraid of losing or breaking them. They don't become a nexus of further expensive consumption: adding an expensive case, particularly one with a an expensive and special purpose keyboard, just takes something sleek and easy to handle and makes it klunky and awkward.
Go to a hackathon? Get any Bluetooth keyboard and mouse and a $5 plastic clip from Amazon Basics and you've got something sleeker and more stylish than any Macbook or gaming laptop with which you can connect to a powerful desktop computer or a cloud instance that is anywhere from 50 cents to $4 an hour depending on your thirst for power.
I started out with a B&N Nook, then Amazon Fire Tablets (amazing value for the money), then iPads, I had bad luck with my last iPad (either lost or stolen) and figured I'd use an old Samsung Galaxy tablet I had kicking around. Every time I got an iPad I looked at my options, hypothetically I thought I might like the Pro but a new Pro is crazy expensive (I couldn't afford to break or lose it) and an old Pro in my price range is old technology.
(Note I'm a little weird because I've never owned a smartphone with a plan. Carriers choose not to serve my valley, why should I get an expensive plan? My data plan is WiFi, and my phone plan is Skype)
The Pro, like the AVP, also seems hobbled by Apple's short-sightedness. A device that expensive, with hardware as capable, should be able to do 100% of what a MacBook can do. It should be able to completely outdo the Microsoft Surface, but it doesn't.
I mostly agree with everything you said. However at this time I wouldn't risk my business by releasing software primarily targeting tablets. The rate that people pay for iPad specific software is too low.
95% of the development work I've done in the past 25 years has been for the web platform. I don't see that changing. If you make desktop web site that are WCAG AAA compliant they also are great on tablets for XR. (In the limited sense of "windows hang in space that you can use like an app)
I haven't wasted a minute arguing with the app store if I'm allowed to do this or that. For what? So I can add an icon to an over-crowded home screen that is already crowded with twisty little icons that all look alike? So I can spam people with unwanted notifications?
I can even use the web platform to make real immersive applications for XR, though I'm currently trying to figure out the exact memory limits to make things work on the MQ3. I've got a vision in my mind of an app that provides a visually intense and expressive experience on phones but also puts you in a world if you've got the hardware for it. The web platform is totally up to it, I just have to figure out to do it.
This may be true globally, but isn't necessarily reflective of actual market share for the markets targeted.
If your startup is selling to people in say, United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia or New Zealand, then Mac marketshare is 20% to 30% of all computer usage (depending on which nation, how you count, and whose measurements you use, etc).
It's not even just SV. Go to pretty much any tech conference. Many of the attendees are not SV and you'd still conclude that Macs were the dominant laptop platform.
I got one, a shell you can put your phone in, so you can slide your phone around your desk AS your mouse. It can provide vibration feedback, alerts, sounds, etc. It can use the macro lens and the IMU for tracking its location across the desk. Would also serve as biometric auth for websites.
Prior Art for
G06F 3/0338 - Computer mice, trackballs or similar devices for computer control
G06F 3/041 - Digitisers using touch-sensing
G06F 21/32 - Biometric authentication
I think this is a niche technology that people keep trying to make go mainstream, but most people just don't want it. For most people (including myself) trying VR a little is a novelty, but it's not something I want every day, and AR seems like it'd be useless or annoying unless I were using it in e.g. some industrial context like a heads up display.
It's like NFTs in gaming, NFTs in general, AI shoehorned into places it doesn't make much sense, wifi connected can openers, Soylent, ...
Startup founders are always told that there must be market pull, and many startups fail because they try to push an idea nobody wants, but it's not just startups. Big companies and VCs do this too.
FWIW, with today's social media environment...I'm ACTIVELY managing the ways I'm interrupted. Having that in front of my field of view is a non starter.
I'm an early adopter, but even at that, I don't use VR a whole lot over the course of a month. It's a tech that people (nerds) really want to take off and it just hasn't. I'm not sure it will...it could be replaced with other equivalent technologies that aren't strapped to your face.
I think it's a tech advancement issue, just like touch screens wasn't a thing for a very long time while it they were resistive. Then the iPhone came with capacitive touch screen and now they're everywhere. When (if ever) XR won't suck, which could take a decade or two, it will be adopted massively.
I don't think it's even that. I don't think most people want it.
VR is for gaming. I can see it finding a solid niche there. Make a VR headset that connects to a PC/Mac with extremely low latency and focus all the engineering on the quality of the display and making it lightweight. Gamers will buy it.
AR is IMHO for industrial uses. I could see it being incredibly valuable doing inspections of industrial systems, working in a high-risk environment (for safety awareness), etc. I think the most practical depiction of AR in sci-fi is probably the heads up displays in The Expanse, which make perfect sense to augment human sensory in both military and industrial/maintenance operations in an environment like space.
I actively do not want AR for civilian uses. Yeah, I want to wear glasses and contacts to superimpose ads and slop and Internet drama in front of my life. Get that the hell away from me. When I want to touch grass, I want to touch grass.
A lot of that kind of stuff shows up in cyberpunk, and people forget that most cyberpunk is dystopian. The cyberpunk aesthetic is also kind of 1980s-1990s and is not contemporary. People are stuck in it. We're well past that and even on the tail end of "millennial minimalism" (the Apple aesthetic).
There are certain other things you can imagine VR being useful for like virtual explorations. But monitors actually work pretty well for that and, really, none of that has really developed beyond the gimmick stage. Yes, there are certain types of high-end gaming it works for but that's a niche of a niche that's decreased in size over time. (e.g. flight sims used to be a bigger thing)
We can imagine HUDs of various sorts with AR glasses that are light and non-obtrusive. But largely well into the future. You may have (probably do have) early adopters who can overlook the manifold limitations that exist today but now you have a tiny audience that isn't enough to drive interesting software development.
I suppose with everyone on HUDs the subway train would be full of people catatonic staring straight ahead in their own little worlds, possibly recording everything around them on video.
The Bigscreen Beyond is getting there in terms of form factor, but it achieves that in part by being a dumb headset which relies on a PC and external tracking beacons to work. There's no free lunch unfortunately, putting the brains in the headset itself is always going to add bulk.
A dumb headset is exactly what I'd want. I don't want yet another device with an OS that locks you into someone's f'ing ecosystem or alternately requires me to find apps specifically for it, etc.
That's the form factor I want and that's the reliance on a PC that I want. I want VR glasses that are driven by my setup, not yet another account and yet another app store.
I'd buy that in an instant except last time I checked they thought they'd be scanning my face as part of the purchase.
The Palm Pilot (not the first PDA, but an early decent one) pre-dated the iPhone by about 11 years. By that standard, we're likely on the order of a decade away from an "iPhone moment".
Every company in the space realizes that it's the next computer pillar, after desktop PCs and smartphones. Even more so: these devices see everything their users see (and more), hear everything they hear (and more), and can provide significant insight into their mental and emotional states. The prospect of controlling the platform all of this takes place on? No one - especially incumbents that know their history - wants to get left behind. Everyone knows Apple's modus operandi: wait for others to experiment, then define the standard and run away with the market. So, Facebook bought Oculus (and slow-walked its R&D), Google shelved Project Tango, and everyone resolved to wait for Apple to make their move. Apple knew this, and kept pushing back their own reveal. The arrival and demise of upstart Magic Leap (and smaller failures from Vuzix and Snap, among others) confirmed to everyone that there was no point in trying anything until Apple had shown their hand.
So, we've been in a stalemate for more than 10 years. The AVP finally had to come out - antsy investors - and turned out to be the overengineered product of Apple trying to outmaneuver everyone else's outmaneuver, with the entire field understanding that whoever wins this owns the next 20 years.
However, it's a bit of a Chinese finger trap. Consumers and users want actual value out of this technology, and developers want to provide fantastically innovative uses, and both are at odds with the platform owners' lust for unilateral control. The platform that wins will be more like a PC than a Silicon Graphics workstation (which is what Apple et al seem hellbent on forcing down people's throats). Get something with basic functionality that just works out of the box, and that is open and ready for experimentation, into as many hands as possible. It will bulldoze the field. (This is why the Quest line has gotten so close. Shame about the owner.)
I agree with your sentiments on an open platform ultimately prevailing. The hardware is still not there yet for good AR glasses (IMO). The processing power, connectivity, power, displays, etc.... just can't be crammed into an almost invisible pair of glasses. You basically need to squeeze the equivalent of the latest apple watch into a form factor about the size of a stick of gum (cut in half length wise)....
The Vision Pro, and despite being pretty good they were kind of a flop. Like I said elsewhere I think VR and AR are niche products tech companies and investors keep trying to make go mainstream because they showed up in a lot of sci-fi. I don't think many people want them.
If the Vision Pro was indistinguishable from a regular pair of glasses and didn't cost over $1000 it would take over the world. I don't think it's a case that people don't want them, it's more that people want what's in sci-fi you spoke of and not this early iteration.
Yeah (at least maybe). If AR were in a fashionable pair of glasses that you could effortlessly switch into a Google Lens mode for example or call up a Wikipedia article that starts getting interesting. But that's a long way off.
Meta is having some success with the Meta Quest, but it is in the gaming sector where they have cultural problems. [1] The notable thing is that the Meta Quest consumer is price sensitive: when the MQ3 came out and they dropped the price of the MQ2, MQ2 sales surged. Next year they came out with the MQ3S which has the brains of an MQ3 in the body of an MQ2, so it is a cost-reduced device that can run MQ3 software.
The AVP, on the other other hand, was just too expensive. At that price it could go with a seat of [2] (been a high end enterprise play) but no way was it going to compete with buying a big ass TV and a home theater system, which you can enjoy with other people. Worse than that, Apple rejected the immersive world experiences that are big fun on the MQ3 -- if a device is that expensive it has to do it all.
The "something huge that would push the whole industry to the mainstream" seems to be the missing piece here.
I'm sure the Vision Pro will get some follow up, but as someone who wears glasses I don't see the glasses/headset version of AR/XR ever catching on in the mainstream.
I started my career as a dev working in VR apss. At the time there was consensus in the industry that apple was about to release something huge that would push the whole industry to the mainstream - and indeed you couldn't rely on any new VR/AR product or software without it being silently acquired in months and their website redirecting to apple.
Fast forward one decade, nothing's happened yet. I moved to web dev long ago, but people seem to be still waiting.