Please, a product of this price should at least include the case. Lenses should have also been free for those who need them. That Apple sells this extra for $200 is just sad. Revenue optimization is important but in the recent years it took a worrying turn.
Apple Vision Pro…. Anybody buying?
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Please, a product of this price should at least include the case. Lenses should have also been free for those who need them. That Apple sells this extra for $200 is just sad. Revenue optimization is important but in the recent years it took a worrying turn.
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I think in the end it boils down to all corporations ultimately having a board of directors to answer to. From working at a variety of tech companies over the years, from very small (5 employees) to very large (30K+ employees), proposed projects not hitting the required gross profit margin (GPM), don't get out of the proposal stage and never see the light of day. Apple's current GPM is currently around 45% over cost of goods sold (COGS), up from around 30% pre-pandemic. *
I imagine hitting a retail price of $3,495 (which includes Apple's GPM) was determined to be a critical number for market acceptance. And that lenses and a case were thus pushed out of the basic product in order to go forward. Just a guess.
* As an aside, that's a big jump, and possibly/probably due to Apple not engaging in mass layoffs during the pandemic that most other large Silicon Valley tech companies (Meta, google, HP, Zoom, PayPal, LinkedIn, Qualcomm, Salesforce, Twitter, Yahoo, and on and on) needed to do
Maybe Apple should include a basic case but offer a better travel case at additional cost. I don’t agree about the lenses, though, because not all users will need them.
I guess Apple could sell the AVP for a bit less, with reader or prescription lenses optional, but I don’t think many people willing to shell out more than $4k when you include AppleCare, tax, and more memory will be put off by $149 for prescription lenses or $99 for readers.
Apple also knows this isn’t a mass market product for now. It’s going to appeal to early adopters who have the money, as well as people in corporate or educational settings who can get funding to support exploring vertical market applications.
Herdfan
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You are correct. After you posted that I went and found it was coming on TV so I recorded it.
Sure enough they rerecorded not only the very last scene, but from the point Marty is out looking at his truck when Jennifer walks up. Reshot from there to the end with Elisabeth Shue.
Now back to your regularly scheduled debate.......
Nycturne
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In Google’s case, it’s probably a mix of both. The point I was trying to make was that the platform such that anyone wanting to invest in Windows Phone had to start from scratch. Few to no major developers are down for that sort of work, and the blame for that should be laid at Microsoft’s feet first as the owners of the platform. No different than Apple being on the spot for Mac ports, although Apple has been working on that with Catalyst, SwiftUI, improvements to Metal, etc, etc.
Meanwhile, the Vision Pro is UIKit + additions to more fully integrate RealityKit. That said, there could be some jank in the YT code causing issues. But it certainly doesn’t seem to stop Google from shipping a glitchy YT app on iOS… So who knows, you could be right that Google is betting on Vision Pro failing.
Shouldn’t be a surprise, as the basis for visionOS is UIKit. Although I will say there’s only one Office codebase at this point. The Mac fork (which iPad/iPhone was built with) got merged back with the Windows/Android codebase. Doesn’t mean that every platform exposes every feature or bit of functionality though. Some features just don’t port or are not allowed by store policy (VBA being the big one), and others require work to adapt a very PC-centric UI to touch/etc.
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I find office/ipad to be fairly functional, but not being able to modify graph properties in excel constantly bites me. I use word/ipad often to review drafts of docs and make edits, but I couldn’t use it to create a document from scratch (at least not without bringing it back to a pc/mac to do a lot of formatting work). Would be nice if, someday, MS brought more feature parity to these other platforms.
somerandomusername
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somerandomusername
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It comes with a cover. Guys, please, read the website and tech specs lol. You’re getting similar amounts of accessories like with the first iPhone and iPod.
throAU
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We have literally been using HoloLens occasionally for this since before Covid.
throAU
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People will laugh, but porn is a defining factor in whether or not new tech takes off.
Sooner or later porn gets onto it and then it takes off.
Same for home video (VHS vs Betamax) same for the internet.
I have read the website and got close to ordering in the app, but decided to wait. From what I’ve seen, the cover just fits over the front of the AVP, but isn’t the same as a travel case, which is rigid and completely encloses the headset. I’d think Apple could have included a basic case without charging $200 extra, though I doubt it’s the deciding factor for many people. Regardless, there are a few third party cases that seem better than Apple’s for much less.
somerandomusername
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Fair, but its not like the cover isn’t helping protect the device in transit vs. if they included nothing and now it can get easily damaged. Point being they did include protection for the device in the box. Is it to the level a particular individual wants? That’s up to them. But otterbox was invented for a reason even though Apple included a case with the iPhone.
Also Spigen is selling a really cool one for only $89.
somerandomusername
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Yeah, you’re missing the point.
Since when the fuck is $500 a small sum of money. Maybe YOU guys are too rich for my blood lmfao!
For someone who wants to do VR gaming (which isn’t spatial computing), they need to spend $500, And that doesn’t include the fact that the Quest 3 isn’t an all-in-one. If you want to play VR games that aren’t on the level of a 2D cartoon, you’re required to buy a gaming PC. You can build your own, but you’re still looking at $650+ for basic gaming PC capabilities. So the fact that to make it comfortable they need to spend an additional $129 adds insult to injury. And the fact that they charge $129 for a headband that objectively costs extemely little to make, both because of the materials and manufacturing involved, and the design itself, is really bullshit.
Defending a $500 product not including at least the most comfortable headband for most people, as well as a troll post on Macrumors is fucking insane, no offense.
I’m not gonna lie, stuff like this makes me want to block you on here. Which is ridiculous because there’s like only 250 people on here to talk with.
Nothing, NOTHING in this product has been done before, let alone to mass scale. (Edit: To be clear, nothing in terms of technology at this quality, precision and scale. Since apparently it was not clear from the context of my entire post, I’m not stating it’s the first ever headworn product of this nature. That the following technology is designed by Apple at this level of quality, precision, and scale is what “Nothing, NOTHING in this product“ is referring to, with obvious omissions to this caveat, like with the curved lenticular OLED display, which IS a world’s first in both concept and execution and execution to a high level, as well as custom Apple technologies, which practically includes everything I’ve listed here. I’m not sure how I could’ve been more clear about what I was referring to with the proceeding 1,174 words.) Everything is custom and brand new, industrial design, hardware, software, and everything in between including manufacturing. Your comment is so reminiscent of fools on MacRumors, both literally and figuratively. You clearly don’t like this product, and you’re entitled to said opinion on anything. But to say “revenue optimization” in the context of a product that literally has:
A display fitting 11,500,000 pixels on the size of a postage stamp, with OLED which is incredibly difficult to manufacture to begin with anyways, on a product that requires the Quality Assurance to essentially be perfect, because it’s going to literally replicate your vision with it, built on top of TSMC silicon, and all of that and each product needs TWO of them.
Do you really think Apple only wants supposedly 500K to be produced? No! I guarantee you Sony is producing a shit ton relative to 500K and tossing out 90% of what they make because they didnt come out well. This OLED debacle has been a thing since day one of Apple using OLED with Apple Watch, and especially iPhone X. OLED is shit to build compared to LED/LCD. micro-OLED? The hardest next to microLED.
Those displays are by far the most costly of the entire product. Analysts speculate, and they’re so far off it’s fucking hilarious.
Oh, and ANOTHER OLED display on the front. Not just another OLED display, but a curved lenticular display that is able to make the device look transparent, such that upon multiple videos I’ve watched of people’s 4th demo (which included EyeSight) they’ve said it’s unreal how real it looks. That Apple pulled it off. And how it’s confusing their brain because it looks real but they technically know it isn’t. Again, the world’s first curved lenticular display with OLED.
Additionally, the product has 12 cameras, TrueDepth, LiDAR, and 6 microphones as well, and 4 inertial measurements units, which I gather goes beyond a traditional gyroscope. Oh yeah, it does, take a read:
”It is composed of 3 accelerometers, 3 gyroscopes, and depending on the heading requirement, 3 magnetometers. One per axis for each of the three vehicle axes: roll, pitch, and yaw.
Raw data are outputted at 1KHz for demanding real-time applications.”
(https://www.sbg-systems.com/inertial-measurement-unit-imu-sensor)
And I’m sure in typical Apple fashion they customized a solution for their 4 IMUs, either entirely on their own or with a manufacturer.
Apple says that they literally solved one of the most difficult problems with spatial computing, which is how do objects stay exactly in the position you left them in whilst in a moving vehicle (IE an airplane or passenger seat in a car). In ALL other head worn products, they all Suffer from the same problem: objects whether in “VR” or ”AR” start to drift even though YOU aren’t moving, because the sensors get extremely confused. No one has solved it until Apple did. You can now literally make an entire personal movie theater wherever you are, sitting in your bedroom or on a plane. It is actually incredible that they’ve solved that one problem, and they’ve solved thousands of problems with this product category, such that for the first time, the masses can actually use it and use it to benefit.
It has all of that, in addition to the M2 chip, which has fantastic performance and 16GB of unified memory at 5nm.
Then Apple designed yet another custom chip just for the task of real-time sensor fusion and processing R1, which processes it with 256 GB/s memory bandwidth, and a 12 millisecond photon-to-photon latency, which is 8X faster than you can even blink.
In addition, they include two high quality speakers that are able to replicate sound so well that people said it feels like you’re wearing headphones, but its shocking that it its that good because they aren’t in your ears. Also, it literally not only maps your space acoustically, but is able to determine the MATERIALS of each object in the room, and then literally adjust the sound output to make it sound like what it would be like if the sound actually reflected off each of those materials. Apple says that’s what audio raytracing is.
It literally included many accessories in the box, including TWO different kinds of headbands, additionally, whereas even thousand dollar plus headsets don’t.
All of this with Gaze, which allows you to operate the entire interface using your fucking eyes, and does it WELL.
So much so that it has been described by multiple journalists and YouTubers as mind reading.
So much so that you can literally just use your hands, controllers NOT required or included, and it works like you’re manipulating real objects.
So much so that ONE of the researchers at Apple who helped invent the system literally says that it DOES know what you’re thinking.
Screenshot below:
(https://twitter.com/sterlingcrispin/status/1665792422914453506)
That revolutionary input method and it has to accommodate a range of vision correction and still not only replicate the outside world well, but allow you to use the device flawlessly. And the lenses are from one of the top manufacturers of eye glass in the world: ZEISS.
The original iPhone had over 200 patents. This has over FIVE THOUSAND (5000+).
All of this has to be built to such exacting specification that Apple has never attempted before, because it has to replicate your vision and replicate it WELL.
All of this is in Apple’s most advanced and stunning industrial design ever, pushing the boundaries in literally every way from the seamless sculpted glass to the 3 Dimensional knitting. I’d go into further detail, but it’s best described by looking, not telling
A video of their manufacturing process:
So when I read stupid comments on MacRumors, of such low effort and quality, and then come here to read shit like this from otherwise smart people who usually put effort into their posts:
Sorry, but I get upset. You are not known for low effort comments on here. You’re way better than drooping to that level.
Expensive? Yes.
Cost cutting it is not.
P.S. You got the cost of the lenses wrong. They’re $149, from ZEISS, and that inaccuracy whilst claiming cost cutting really is beyond words, especially when they’re not much more expensive than competing headworn products that use shittier glass.
P.P.S. I wrote this because I know you aren’t a troll, and that if given some good information you’ll hopefully at least understand more of the situation. I didn‘t write to you to piss you off or insult you. I wrote it because there is paradoxically a lot of information but little information being discussed on this product, and I think you’d appreciate knowing more about how truly advanced the product is. Apple was not lying when they said it is the “most advanced personal electronics device ever.” And this is truly something only Apple can pull off. No one has even come close.
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When did apple include a case with the phone? I have a massive box of old iphones dating all the way back to the original, and the only time I remember apple giving me a “case” was the bumper from antennagate.
somerandomusername
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Lmfao you’re absolutely right and I have zero clue why I said that. I was wrong on that, and so are a bunch of comments I’ve read recently online.
It came with headphones, cable, charging brick, and dock.
Far less than what we’re talking about with this newest product category. Blah blah blah it’s $3500, point is other headworn products, including the absurdly expensive, don’t come with this many accessories.
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The dock was actually pretty nice. I remember using it at work.
throAU
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To be fair, most of the things AVP does have been done before, several years ago - just not to the same level of precision/quality as what Apple are hopefully releasing.
Inside-out tracking, passthrough, hand tracking, eye tracking, mixed reality have all been done at least 4-5 years ago.
Apple are doing a much better job of it of course (hopefully) but that's because they're using hardware that is far more advanced both due to the passage of time and the revolution they had with the M series processors and other bespoke designs of their own.
But to claim that nothing in the VP has been done before is pure fantasy. There were rudimentary VR headsets back in the early 90s.
somerandomusername
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Fair, but to be fair to me I said “at mass scale” in conjunction with my intention of describing that “precision/quality,” which is what makes it $3500. That “precision/quality” is what I was talking about, including some of what they did to get there. I didn’t claim no one made a headworn product before. Your reply kind of missed the point of what I was trying to say in response to Apple “cost cutting” here. It stands true that what I listed after that statement — which includes “Everything is custom and brand new, industrial design, hardware, software, and everything in between including manufacturing” — has not been done before. No one has committed to passthrough AR more than Apple, and they designed and created technologies to enable their vision.
I genuinely thought it was clear what I was saying and the point I was trying to make in what I wrote after that statement, but I suppose I’ll try to be more precise and try harder next time.
Also people who have tried Varjo’s XR3 and later generations say the passthrough is better than that, and that’s a product that costs $7000 on top of a mandatory $1500/year fee to even make the device turn on. It also requires a workstation PC. It doesn’t even include an OS. Even the XR 4, which coincidentally has changed all of its marketing after Apple’s launch, now doesnt include the $1500/year fee, still costs $4000 on top of the required workstation PC you HAVE to use it with. That quickly goes up to $11,000 with XR4 + workstation for someone who wants to try it out, It’s fine for what it is: a viewfinder for industry, but the reason I’m mentioning it is $3500 is chump change compared to how expensive the competition is and it literally beats everyone out on quality + an OS, input method, and an entire app ecosystem with 1000s of features not present on those devices.
So I gotta say the hand wringing over the price needs to be tamed a bit. $3500 is a lot, sure, but it’s also a bargain. $3500 is a MBP with a couple upgrades, and people are balling their eyes out online elsewhere because this is $3500. It’s standalone. You can buy it without any other Apple product.
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somerandomusername
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For a small period when Steve was alive and shortly after:
source: statista.
also the GPM is averaged and includes high GPM things like services, and mixed it in with the iPhone, if I remember correctly hovered around 35% when they gave those sorts of details. So the margin doesn’t apply equally And is skewed by that. Additionally, even if they had a 44% margin with this, that would mean it costs $2,430 to produce. And somehow I doubt they’re making a 44% margin on it with everything they’ve put in and done. And to be clear, $2,430 is a lot of money to just produce something at mass electronics scale.
The most recent data says that Apple‘s gross margins on hardware was recently 37%, which was in line with what I said about iPhone. Which would put it at $2,555 to build. I still doubt they’re earning 37% on this.
Again, of course it doesn’t include that gross margin is gross. It doesn’t factor in the cost to actually build said device with R/D, employees, etc. The operating income profit margin across Apple was 30%. But that doesn’t factor in taxes, so after all is said and done Apple earns 26.25% if I read any of that correctly lol. I calculated 26.25 on my own from recent data I didnt screenshot, but this data says 25.
So if you do that, it apparently would cost Apple $2,778—$2,800 to build that product factoring in everything from R/D, employees, shipping, etc.
All of this is with the assumption that company wide numbers apply to this brand new product. Company wide numbers are just that: company wide. Apple has a single Profit and Loss sheet. company wide numbers are just averages.
I seriously doubt that just because company wide averages are 26.25% means they earn 26.25% here In this product. They could easily be $3000+ to produce. I swear to god I read a story a long time ago rumoring that apple was breaking even on this product, which is obviously unusual, but I can’t find it at the moment.
I still doubt it somehow only costs only $2,800 to build that product, but it at least seems far more realistic than the stupid shit I read from an analyst claiming only $1,500 lol. Yeah, maybe for the damn displays lmfao!
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throAU
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The AVP hasn't and won't do it at mass scale either
They have a manufacturing capacity of 100k units per year (or less) due to display supply constraints.
And yeah it would not surprise me if apple was even taking a loss on AVP headsets. They probably aren't, but if they had to I think they might to get the market started. That R&D and software development isn't free, even if the BOM is reasonably easily calculated (or at least close to).
the number of sensors, displays and quality of such are way out there.
