CarmB

igorsky said:

davebarnes said:

Colors. Really?
I had to remove my case to see what color my iPhone 11 Pro is.
Who does not use a case?

What a ridiculous comment. Lots of people don’t use cases. 

Some people use clear cases. 

Ad-supported tiers are the only way the streamers are going to be viable with so many of them now offered. Let’s face it, the amount any of us are willing to pay for all the streaming available has a ceiling. We’re simply not going to keep paying more, and more and more. On the other hand, if we can have a decent service at an attractive price, that works. I had abandoned Netflix because it had gotten ridiculously expensive. The truth is with multiple streaming services available, all of them delivering appealing original content, ditching one or two barely makes a dent. Then Netflix brought out a ad-supported service at an appealing $5.99 a month price point here in Canada and I signed back up. I’m a baby boomer who grew up watching ad-supported TV. It hardly bothers me and I’d rather save money with ads to live with than pay way more than I think a service is worth. The great thing is, keeping the price of the ad-supported tiers low is a good thing for the service provider because the more subscribers you can attract, the more you can charge advertisers. Meanwhile I can save $10 a month or somewhere thereabouts while still enjoying the content offered. The ads are not that intrusive and well work saving in excess of $120 a year. If the Disney ad-supported tier is launched here for $7.99, I’ll sign up for that - maybe not year-round - but enough to watch the few shows on it that I like.

As for Apple, hopefully the price will never go up and the quality remain high. What I like is that Apple is focused on what matters to me, namely, original content. The legacy stuff I’ve got covered with a vast library of movies, some digital some disc. The thing is, not raising the price can work in so much as the more subscribers you have the more money you bring in. Keep the cost in the sweet spot and over time the revenue will be there. 

What needs to be kept in mind is that when Apple works on a product, even if that product ends up not being produced, the innovation that results from working on said product becomes an asset to Apple that can be applied to other projects. As a result, putting resources into doing something like the car is not that risky. Maybe a car results from it but regardless, solutions are found and that’s a resource Apple can tap into when developing seemingly unrelated products. 

If you downgrade a product like this, you destroy the characteristics that allow it to stand out. It’s far more likely that what we will see is that the launch version of the Apple Vision will be retained at a reduced price when its updated version is launched by the end of 2025. 

To see an even bigger drop in price, Apple has to figure out how to deliver a comparable experience with less expensive components, and right now that is highly improbable. As such, what is quite doable is for the launch version to be offered at around $2,800 when the new version arrives offered at the $3,500 price point. 

What you get with the launch version is the absolute minimum that a product like this requires to pull off all the transformative feats required to make it worth the bother. Take any of the capabilities away and you wind up with something not worth doing. 

More often than not Apple plays a long game and as such that it could be three, four, five years before we see a sub-$2,500 version of this technology should surprise no one. It’s unlikely that we’ll see many if any competitors jump in to this space anytime soon so Apple can evolve this product on its own schedule. 

Mcnaugha2 said:

I had a 1080p TV in 2006.

I bought my first 4K TV in 2014 and my first HDR set in 2018. I often use either set to watch content that is neither 4K nor HDR. It’s great when you can enjoy content with both done well but it’s hardly an immense hardship to have to settle on content that has neither. Unless you have a poor TV, the picture quality of today’s sets is very good even with 1080p non-HDR source material. Keep in mind that broadcast TV is neither 4K or HDR, generally speaking. Having grown up in the 1960s watching black and white TVs, having to settle on 1080p with plain old dynamic range is no hardship at all. And today, considering how expensive everything has gotten, to have a ton of content available for about $6 a month feels like a real bargain.