radarthekat

sirdir said:

I have an iPhone. How does that help me if the people I want to communicate with don’t?

dewme said:

radarthekat said:

tht said:

Apple’s modus operandi is to go from the outside in. IOW, figure out the customer experience and then build the hardware and software to do it. Don’t ship until the minimum viable experience can be provided. 

There’s this notion that Apple needed a few iterations to figure out what worked for the Watch, implying the initial features were wrong. I think that is wrong, and Apple basically got it right at the beginning just like they did with the iPhone.

What form it took evolved and was iterated upon - it matured - with the core tenets remaining. With maturity comes great products. The Watch was advertised as a time piece, a glancible information device and an activity device. That holds true today. 

The VisionPro was presented as a spatial computer with big canvasses for apps for work, mobile and home; and, providing immersive experiences inherent to XR from games to photos. The hand and eye tracking combined with the R1 and microOLEDs is what really makes it possible. 

So I see it as a computer with which you do anything you want with it. Apple has to bring its Pro apps over as well as enabling macOS like abilities. You have to be able to do everything that you do on Mac, iPad, iPhone with it.

Oh, they have to solve the nausea issues with it. The number of people who get motion sick has to be a fraction of a fraction of the nausea issues current goggles have. 

Your comment comes closest to what I intended to write.  

Apple Watch is illustrative of why I think Vision Pro will be the most successful among all offerings in its market, despite its higher price.

When Apple Watch came out there was already Fitbit and, at around the same time, there was Microsoft’s fitness wearable.  Both those products were entirely focused on the app that everyone now says was the killer app for Apple Watch, which Apple only realized later.  

But Apple Watch was created as an extension of the enormous and tightly integrated ecosystem that only Apple provides.  Apple is a platform building monster, with products built on top.  So when the Apple Watch initially shipped, with potential to provide a vast array of functionality, it was only natural for the market, and pundits, to cast about seeking a killer app beyond what the purpose-built fitness trackers provided.  After all, with so much potential, so much technology packed in there, surely there must be something more to it than only fitness tracking.  

And there was/is.  There’s information at a glance, timers, stopwatch, hotel room access (virtual keys), walking directions, etc, AND great fitness tracking. Once the world, and Apple, figured out that fitness tracking as a central capability was the killer app, Apple won the day, because its combination of high-end hardware, ecosystem integration, build quality, elegance and ability to also do so many other tasks trumped its shorter battery life and higher price relative to the far less capable competition with minimal and fussy ecosystem integration.  

Shorter battery life and higher price, yet highly capable and tightly ecosystem integrated, built upon a massive collection of technology platforms.   That’s exactly what the Vision Pro brings.  History rhymes, as does the history of punditry who bring forward the same objections, yet again.  

Battery life
Price 
No clear killer app.

Okay, but when a killer app emerges for this form factor, perhaps even from the development labs of other goggle makers, or from their developer community, it’s not hard to imagine that app making its way to Vision Pro, and when it does, who’s going to offer it with the best experience?  Yup, the high-end, gorgeously designed, most powerful, most well integrated ecosystem Apple Vision Pro.  And then it’s all over but the wimpering for those competitors without the software ecosystem, without the many underlying interconnected technology development platforms, without their own class-leading and energy-efficient silicon, without their enormous user base to sell into.  

Yeah, this is gonna be fun.  

Where Apple has succeeded in a big way is where its product becomes the archetype for the product category. Once the iPhone arrived it established itself as the archetype for all smartphones to follow. Despite the seemingly impenetrable shield of patents that Steve Jobs alluded to with the iPhone, once the iPhone hit the market, the other smartphone makers had no choices other than to either copy the iPhone and try to survive the patent flack, or exit the market as currently established by the owner of the archetype. This pattern was repeated with iPad, Apple Watch, and AirTag. 

It doesn’t matter whether other makers were first to market or earlier to market with products that aimed to take over the market in question. Once a product becomes the archetype it becomes the standard by which all others are measured, like it or not. I always liken this pattern to the evolution of naval battleships from the end of the US Civil War until the early 1900s. Every navy iterated through competing battleship designs with an incredible number of variations, each with unique capabilities and limitations. But then the British Navy launched the HMS Dreadnought, which became the archetype of battleship design philosophy for every subsequent battleship ever built. Every navy had to essentially copy the HMS Dreadnought design philosophy or concede defeat.

One thing that should be seen as consolation for those Apple competitors who fail to land on the archetype for a product class is that, like the HMS Dreadnought, archetypes can be superseded by new design philosophies that render the previous archetype obsolete. In the case of battleships it was aircraft carriers that rendered the battleships obsolete. But it was never a case of naval designers setting out to intentionally replace battleships with aircraft carriers. It was the application of each “product” in actual real world scenarios that dictated the outcome. The aircraft carrier (with its air wing) proved to be a much more formidable and effective force when the time came to prove how each design performed under real combat conditions. 

The takeaway here that applies to the Apple Vision Pro is that it still must prove itself in action. If Apple’s designers and visionaries got it just right, or close enough, like they did with iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch then Apple has a chance to define the archetype for a product category, one that it may actually define rather than simply filling a category based on current definitions. Again, just like they did with the iPhone, et al. For me it’s still somewhat of a mystery to see where the Apple Vision Pro will land because Apple appears to be defining and evolving the category on the fly based mostly on customer experience and visceral appeal. It looks amazingly appealing and exciting, but what will it do for me? I fully expect that once it gets in the hands of end users everything will come into focus. By the 2nd or 3rd release it will probably become a must-buy. 

Xed said:

radarthekat said:

tht said:

Apple’s modus operandi is to go from the outside in. IOW, figure out the customer experience and then build the hardware and software to do it. Don’t ship until the minimum viable experience can be provided. 

There’s this notion that Apple needed a few iterations to figure out what worked for the Watch, implying the initial features were wrong. I think that is wrong, and Apple basically got it right at the beginning just like they did with the iPhone.

What form it took evolved and was iterated upon - it matured - with the core tenets remaining. With maturity comes great products. The Watch was advertised as a time piece, a glancible information device and an activity device. That holds true today. 

The VisionPro was presented as a spatial computer with big canvasses for apps for work, mobile and home; and, providing immersive experiences inherent to XR from games to photos. The hand and eye tracking combined with the R1 and microOLEDs is what really makes it possible. 

So I see it as a computer with which you do anything you want with it. Apple has to bring its Pro apps over as well as enabling macOS like abilities. You have to be able to do everything that you do on Mac, iPad, iPhone with it.

Oh, they have to solve the nausea issues with it. The number of people who get motion sick has to be a fraction of a fraction of the nausea issues current goggles have. 

When Apple Watch came out there was already Fitbit and, at around the same time, there was Microsoft’s fitness wearable.  Both those products were entirely focused on the app that everyone now says was the killer app for Apple Watch, which Apple only realized later.  

I'd like for you to expand on why you think fitness wasn't something Apple realized as a core app for the Apple Watch and you think it's now the "killer app" for the device.

This is the announcement and demo of the original Apple Watch. I see the activity monitor on the device as being so well thought out that they're still using the same basic rings and badging for tracking your activity. 



And this video is Tim Cook talking about wellness and fitness on a wearable as being key.



- - - - - 

I've been using the Apple Watch since Series 0 and if I was pressed for naming a "killer app" I'd name the Notifications as the killer app. Sure, it's not a single app in an of itself, but it is core to the Apple Watch experience and what I feel makes it such a valuable asset to have on my wrist every single day of life.

From calls, to messages, to fitness, to alarms, to calendar events, to use Find My (or the quick find of my misplaced iPhone), to even the newer features that have saved lives by notifying users of possible atrial fibrillation, a fast heartbeat, and excessive noise, to notifying others when you've taken a fall, I find that my core use since day one and to this day has been getting and sending notifications so I don't have to get my iPhone or other devices out as much and just being able to know more information than I otherwise could on just my iPhone.

tht said:

Apple’s modus operandi is to go from the outside in. IOW, figure out the customer experience and then build the hardware and software to do it. Don’t ship until the minimum viable experience can be provided. 

There’s this notion that Apple needed a few iterations to figure out what worked for the Watch, implying the initial features were wrong. I think that is wrong, and Apple basically got it right at the beginning just like they did with the iPhone.

What form it took evolved and was iterated upon - it matured - with the core tenets remaining. With maturity comes great products. The Watch was advertised as a time piece, a glancible information device and an activity device. That holds true today. 

The VisionPro was presented as a spatial computer with big canvasses for apps for work, mobile and home; and, providing immersive experiences inherent to XR from games to photos. The hand and eye tracking combined with the R1 and microOLEDs is what really makes it possible. 

So I see it as a computer with which you do anything you want with it. Apple has to bring its Pro apps over as well as enabling macOS like abilities. You have to be able to do everything that you do on Mac, iPad, iPhone with it.

Oh, they have to solve the nausea issues with it. The number of people who get motion sick has to be a fraction of a fraction of the nausea issues current goggles have.