mpantone

slow n easy said:

Elon Musk announced that Tesla will be investing $10 Billion in FSD technology for this year alone. They are dead serious that this will be a solvable problem.

It is reasonable to assume that FSD is a solvable problem. The big question is when.

We have already seen many companies come and go because they couldn't get FSD to work before they ran out of VC cash. But the castoff survivors of those shuttered companies will go to work elsewhere, many on the same problem. Eventually it will happen.

Rome wasn't built in a day and today's smartwatches are a far cry from what the cellular telephone was in the late Eighties, in many instances far more interesting scenarios than Dick Tracy's watch television or the Star Trek communicator (which didn't even have video).

Teenagers are a notoriously fickle audience so this longterm and ongoing admiration for the Apple brand over years is actually very enviable. It's not like Apple didn't have competition before (like RIM BlackBerrys, T-Mobile Sidekicks, Windows Mobile) or now (Android).

In the end, it comes down to the overall user experience -- particularly software -- not some weird mobile device hardware specs circle jerk.

miiwtwo said:

mpantone said:

miiwtwo said:

with a 3500 starting price, i dont think so, maybe in 2025 or 2026, besides they dont have an AI, comes from google and others   

Which is why the target price increased from $210 to $220, less than a 5% increase.

As for AI, Apple has shipped hardware with it (or more accurately machine learning) since 2017, starting with the A11 SoC in the iPhone X and iPhone 8 series, in the form of the Neural Engine.

There isn't just one path entering the massive machine learning realm. Apple is unsurprisingly taking their own approach to it, different than how Nvidia has entered the machine learning universe.

One thing I guarantee you, Apple isn't going to be shipping their own AI accelerator cards to third parties to shove into datacenter racks. Apple will keep their machine learning hardware for their customers to provide a competitive advantage in the same way they don't sell A-series and M-series chips to outsiders.

It is likely that Apple will release a cheaper sibling to Vision Pro in the future if the platform is viable and shows good growth potential. Remember that the original iPhone (2007) released at a carrier subsidized price of $600. That's in 2007 dollars. But eventually prices came down with future models released that addressed the lower end of the market (iPhone SE, the minis, 5C, etc.).

Without a doubt there are hundreds of Vision prototypes sitting in labs in Cupertino, some of which may see the light of day as a future retail product. Undoubtedly Apple's senior management team understands that not everyone can fork out $3500 for an HMD, especially when the Meta Quest 3 is $500 and the previous generation Quest 2 is $300. Again, somewhere in a lab in Cupertino is a room full of competitors' products. I wouldn't be surprised if the retail price is taped onto the unit as a reminder to everyone.

so you need to release an expensive product to know if will works mmm im not sure sir, press says than meta loses money with the quest 3 so ...

Apple has a long history of jumping into any given market at a premium price point.

Don't you remember CmdrTaco (Rob Malda) of Slashdot's dismissal of the original iPod? "No wireless? Less space than a Nomad? Lame."

Apple entered the MP3 player market with a product more expensive than the competition. They did the same with iPhones and iPads. Same with the Apple Watch. Hell, people still refer to the "Apple tax." Owned the >$1000 PC market for years and years, they still own the premium segment.

Even the iPod shuffle ($79) -- their low end MP3 player -- competed against no-name MP3 players around the $20-25 price point. Maybe Creative had a $30 player.

They always aim for the premium price point, walk away with most of the industry's profits because selling cheap stuff at razor thin margins doesn't turn you into a company with a $3 trillion market cap.

VR/AR is still far from being considered a mature market.

Apple never thinks they need to win on unit sales. They want to clean up on gross margins. Nothing new, this has been their modus operandii for well over twenty years.

hmurchison said:

avon b7 said:

They should have shipped a real TV years ago and that's where the camera would sit perfectly. Make it a clip on magnetic affair with its own wifi and let users stick where they want (in case they don't want it on the TV) or just remove it for complete privacy.

The nonsense about the TV business being a low margin industry has nothing to do with premium offerings that do far more than regular TVs. 

When it's all said and done I think people will feel like Gene Munster was right on this one and that  Apple should have just made  2levels of TV (50,65 inch) and added the necessary Apple.    

Dan Moren last week wrote an article about the rather strange place that the Apple TV in and most of his sentiment I totally agree with. 

You clearly do not understand why Apple never sold a television. They are low margin, well below what AAPL shareholders would expect from an Apple hardware product.

Worse, they aren't replaced by owners on a regular basis. It is far easier replacing some sort of streaming stick (~$30) or even fancy set-top box ($200) than replacing a $1500-2000 TV. Apple themselves have very limited influence on the technological improvements of the primary hardware component: the display.

Hell, and now that AppleTV+ service is available as an app on third-party hardware, the argument for owning an Apple-branded television set is even hard to push to consumers. 

Televisions are commodity electronics.

Apple has rightfully focused their attention on improving the service: "content is king". This is where they can differentiate themselves in 2024. They cannot source some sort of television display panel that will blow away what they can get from Samsung, LG, Sony, etc.

More importantly, the future will be decided by people who aren't even really involved this this conversation. Teenagers used to watching video content represent a generation of people who don't expect to pay thousands and thousands of dollars on a television screen for entertainment.

miiwtwo said:

with a 3500 starting price, i dont think so, maybe in 2025 or 2026, besides they dont have an AI, comes from google and others   

Which is why the target price increased from $210 to $220, less than a 5% increase.

As for AI, Apple has shipped hardware with it (or more accurately machine learning) since 2017, starting with the A11 SoC in the iPhone X and iPhone 8 series, in the form of the Neural Engine.

There isn't just one path entering the massive machine learning realm. Apple is unsurprisingly taking their own approach to it, different than how Nvidia has entered the machine learning universe.

One thing I guarantee you, Apple isn't going to be shipping their own AI accelerator cards to third parties to shove into datacenter racks. Apple will keep their machine learning hardware for their customers to provide a competitive advantage in the same way they don't sell A-series and M-series chips to outsiders.

It is likely that Apple will release a cheaper sibling to Vision Pro in the future if the platform is viable and shows good growth potential. Remember that the original iPhone (2007) released at a carrier subsidized price of $600. That's in 2007 dollars. But eventually prices came down with future models released that addressed the lower end of the market (iPhone SE, the minis, 5C, etc.).

Without a doubt there are hundreds of Vision prototypes sitting in labs in Cupertino, some of which may see the light of day as a future retail product. Undoubtedly Apple's senior management team understands that not everyone can fork out $3500 for an HMD, especially when the Meta Quest 3 is $500 and the previous generation Quest 2 is $300. Again, somewhere in a lab in Cupertino is a room full of competitors' products. I wouldn't be surprised if the retail price is taped onto the unit as a reminder to everyone.

Dear Elon,

The problem with your service isn't the availability of whiz-bang security trickery. It's the content.

And the bad guys will crack any security ploy you come up with, maybe not tomorrow but soon enough where many simply won't be impressed by passkeys or anything else.

Passkeys just are a "better" way of securely accessing some ghetto online neighborhood but it doesn't actually clean up the garbage or its dumpers.

Passkeys won't improve ad sales on Twitter (a.k.a. "X").

Hell, you might get more user traffic switching the service name back to Twitter.

Anyhow, thanks for the laughs.