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Until VR optics can display crisp clear visuals at 1080p (at a minimum) VR will always be a bust in my opinion because there is just far too much visual technology where we can enjoy visuals at 1080p and above, televisions, mobile phones, tablets, laptops so why on earth would people spend a lot of money on VR devices that can barely push beyond 1980's graphic card output quality.

One of the biggest potentials of VR is adult entertainment but when the adult entertainment industry does not want to touch VR you know there is a problem with the technology.
 
But of course cook and the exec had nothing to do with it,...yeeeeright 🙄🤦‍♂️, at $1billion a year to develop, this has Tim's hands ALL over it!
Exactly. No way Tim’s signing checks hands off and no way Craig and The rest of exec c-suite are hands off distancing. That’s just dramatic click bait bs headline from somewhere.

If they weren’t convinced of a future they’d kill it. If it were off track they’d fix with all hands on deck. There’s no in between.
 
While there's no doubt the market for this product will be small in comparison to anything else Apple sells, if the cost to manufacture is let's say about $1600; I think that Apple is going to surprise everyone with the actual retail price. Everyone is expecting $2999; watch it be $2499. Still very expensive but a price surprise like that would lead to more sales.
To recoup the billion dollar investment, they need to sell about 400,000 of these. At $2999, it would be about 333,000. That could be done within a year or two if the rumored features are true.
Might be a bit longer than you calculate because it was said to be 1B$/yr. But I agree otherwise.
 
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This thing is DOA. Meta has all but given up on VR. Microsoft exited its HoloLens investment as well. Even Google just recently decided to cancel their entire Google Glasses project (remember that?).

Wallstreet investors now see VR as a huge negative on tech stocks. In 2021, releasing this thing would have probably boosted Apple's stock. In 2023, this will drag Apple's stock down.

People refer to the Apple Watch as a device that took a few generations to become popular. But we've had a century of demand for a wearable device on your wrist. The Watch had a huge market. VR has a tiny market in comparison. If Apple doesn't sell enough, I can easily see them canceling the project after 2-3 generations.

Millions of people wear glasses.

While this is focused on VR and very niche it will evolve over time.

If we can eventually “Apple Watch” prescription glass I think we will see and uptick in adoption. Even if it’s a passive device you don’t interact with very often (like the watch).
 
While there's no doubt the market for this product will be small in comparison to anything else Apple sells, if the cost to manufacture is let's say about $1600; I think that Apple is going to surprise everyone with the actual retail price. Everyone is expecting $2999; watch it be $2499. Still very expensive but a price surprise like that would lead to more sales.
To recoup the billion dollar investment, they need to sell about 400,000 of these. At $2999, it would be about 333,000. That could be done within a year or two if the rumoured features are true.
At a price of $2,499 and a cost of $1,500, the gross profit is $1,000. They will have to sell 1 Million to recoup the investment, not 400,000.

But even 1 Million they will sell in the first three months.
 
At a price of $2,499 and a cost of $1,500, the gross profit is $1,000. They will have to sell 1 Million to recoup the investment, not 400,000.

But even 1 Million they will sell in the first three months.
They might sell 1 million units but how many of them will be returned due to customer dissatisfaction? That is the one thing many companies so conveniently leave out when they quote initial sales figures, they never disclose how many of the sales got returned within the first few days, week of a product being launched.
 
That's not what Zuckerberg said in their most recent earnings conference call, saying they (Meta) are still committed to spending billions at Reality Labs. And they still plan to release their new Quest 3 headset later this year.
That's right. They haven't completely axed the division because they've already invested tens of billions into it. They're still keeping the project around due to sunk cost fallacy but it's no longer a priority at all.
 
Millions of people wear glasses.

While this is focused on VR and very niche it will evolve over time.

If we can eventually “Apple Watch” prescription glass I think we will see and uptick in adoption. Even if it’s a passive device you don’t interact with very often (like the watch).
Goggles aren't glasses. People aren't wearing skiing goggles on a daily basis.
 
One of the biggest potentials of VR is adult entertainment but when the adult entertainment industry does not want to touch VR you know there is a problem with the technology.
VR actually has already been a thing in that industry for quite a while. Just google for it.
 
VR actually has already been a thing in that industry for quite a while. Just google for it.
and this is where a lot of employee's suddenly get warnings or fired because their company IT department raised a red flag of someone searching for porn due to a link they clicked on lol
 
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Apple crucially needs to get three things right for this headset to work out:

1) It needs to be cheap as hell - actually cheap. Aside from a small group of enthusiasts (gaming and 3d ...video...) the typical Apple user does not spend hundreds of bucks on 3d headsets, let alone thousands. I think this will already break that headset's neck, they need to hand it out like candy but the Apple brand cannot do that due to the optics. No pun intended.

2) They need an incredible content-incentive to convince the normies to spend even that tiny amount of money on it. Otherwise in the very best scenario it ends up like Apple Arcade.

3) The quality of this headset needs to be beyond anything we've seen. Sorta like releasing the first iPhone if the first iPhone was the iPhone X. I am imagining something you can wear out in public for augmented reality. If it's the typical "brick" you put on your face and use exclusively at home it's dead on arrival. I have had multiple of these and they all eventually turned out to be too inconvenient to use day to day.

They will have to sell 1 Million to recoup the investment, not 400,000.
They better not try to recoup the investment over the next few years, let alone this year. At more than few hundred bucks there isn't a chance to see widespread adoption. Are they making a headset for the 1% or do they want everyone to have one like it's an iPhone?

Apple needs this to be a monetary loss short-term and even mid-term. Nobody is going to question that in 10 years when we all walk around with the 5th iteration of that headset like they're sunglasses. That's what Apple has to aim for here.

Millions of people wear glasses.
People don't wear prescription glasses by choice. Sunglasses aren't commonly seen in bad weather either. Apple's headset needs to do more than overcoming the inconvenience of wearing glasses and having some neat but ultimately gadget-y tech built in.

im struggling to find a use case for this
Think of a nth gen headset many years down the road that you can wear like sunglasses and it tracks your eyes and allows you to scroll through your feed that way. Sorta like a hands-free iPhone. Siri in 10 years should be able to understand us instantly with "AI" assisted processing allowing us to interact with this kind of tech by voice and eye movement exclusively, integrating it seamlessly into our daily lives.

That's my long-term vision for this. The first generations won't be great and it will struggle. That's a given. If it's not Apple that does it, someone else will come along. It's unavoidable that we'll have more and more of that kind of tech, that's eventually implanted, or worn like contact lenses, for example. We are still decades away from this, but unless climate change and the already beginning famines stop the acceleration of tech development, many of us will still be around and perhaps think back to 2023 and that silly clunky gadget-y Apple headset... and perhaps wondering how we went from that silly old time to ...2055?... so quickly.

For many people alive today commercial airplane travel didn't exist in their childhood. And I am sure plenty of them thought they'd never travel by airplane. That's us, right now, we are wondering about some headset that's just one of the many things that will help create a future we will be able to see with our own eyes. Whether you see a use case now in 2023 is of no consequence.
 
What problem is VR solving? What need does it address? What's lacking in our daily lives, daily interactions, where VR will step in and fill the gap? We STILL don't have that answer after years of well-funded, valiant VR efforts from well-organized companies.
 
If they are able to create A headset that doesn’t need two controllers but just your two hands I think this can do well.
having A visor on the face is never going to be as great as a device that you can just hold with one hand tho
 
To me, which is the number one factor why VR is struggling and will continue to struggle and something that is never talked about in VR discussions/debates is the effects on the human body. I speak from experience here because I have an Oculus rift DK2 and VR for my playstation4 and I can tell you that it's near on impossible to go 30 mins using a VR headset without feeling nauseous, eye strain, dizziness and onset of headaches leading to migraines. It has not only happened to me but to my family, friends and work colleagues who have come to try them out. Everyone who has tried them all say the same thing, VR is great BUT it's not for them because of the medical reasons it brings on to them. I have also seen many post in forums dedicated to VR where users have returned their VR headset because it causes them medical problems. Not everyone will have the same effects but I am of the opinion that many people will suffer and thus return the headset.
 
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