Marvin

charlesn said:

The SE selling proposition was certainly a whole lot easier for customers to immediately grasp: a brand new iPhone for a dramatically lower price. Everybody gets that. An SE was 46% cheaper than the base iPhone 16. The 16e is only 25% cheaper--that's a huge difference and takes what was an easy decision for price-sensitive shoppers and makes it much more complicated. Do you want the full feature set of the 16 for $200 more? Or the full feature set of the 15 for $100 more? OR: maybe all the new iPhones are too expensive now and you'd rather shop refurbs. Or go to Android. The 16e certainly gives buyers a lot more to think about before making a purchase decision.

All we know for certain right now is that competing in the aggressively lower price point arena was not good business for Apple and so they have abandoned that effort completely. Sales of the SE never equaled those of any of Apple's more expensive iPhones, even the Plus, which is itself on the chopping block due to reported low sales. I'll be very curious to see how Apple markets the 16e and what they'll choose to emphasize about the phone. I think the greatest risk with this phone is the degree to which it might cannibalize sales of the regular iPhone 16. I could imagine that for many shoppers considering the 16, the "e" in the 16e might very well mean it's "enough." 

Apple has a comparison page with the iPhone 14:

https://www.apple.com/iphone/compare/?modelList=iphone-16e,iphone-14,iphone-16

The 16e is effectively a replacement for the iPhone 14, which was also sold at $599.

Instead of an older model at a lower price, it's a cut down version of the main model at a lower price. The old SE had an IPS display, moving to OLED had to increase the cost.

There have been some marketshare reports showing the low-end and mini models don't make up much of the overall sales:



https://www.techradar.com/phones/iphone/iphone-15-sales-figures-show-the-pro-models-have-become-the-default

It's still a lot of people as the total is 250m units so 6% = 15m. Most of these people will eventually buy a larger model, very few would move to Android as they have large screens too.

A lot of people buy on contracts so the price difference is negligible:

https://www.att.com/brand/apple/iphone/

The 6.1" size is bulky but it's the most popular size. There was a poll done here that had 6.1" as the top choice:

https://www.gsmarena.com/weekly_poll_what_is_the_ideal_screen_size_for_a_smartphone-news-57173.php

After using larger displays for a while, the 5.4" mini display felt cramped, especially when typing in portrait but the 5.8" on the iPhone X felt like the largest usable single-handed size. Larger phones (above 2.8" wide) have to be shuffled around or held with one hand to type with the other because they are too wide and it's difficult to do gestures like swipe back on a browser.

If they make a mini model again, it would be good to see a 5.6-5.8" model that is thinner and lighter. It probably still wouldn't be lower than $599 due to the OLED display and higher spec components.

Motion-Ben said:

Anyone know what mo-cap technology is being used? Capturing a whole team, processing the data, and then running it on the headset all with only a half second delay feels leagues ahead of what we're used to seeing.

It's probably the Sony Hawk-Eye pose-tracking system, NBA partnered with them:

https://www.hawkeyeinnovations.com/news/4155239/nba-and-sonys-hawkeye-innovations-launch-strategic-partnership-powering-next-generation-tracking-technology



At 0:25 in the video, it shows the motion tracking and 3D animation.

AppleInsider said:

A new patent filing shows that Apple has been working on a fairly standard external game controller device for Apple Vision Pro, backing up recent rumors of it hoping to partner with Sony.

Tell us that's not a game controller -- image credit: Apple

The neural wristbands that are coming out look like a more comfortable option and could be used for more than games:



They can detect pressure so even if a game was better when holding an object, it can be a passive object. A shooter game can have the player hold a toy gun and it would detect the pressure of pulling the trigger.

A stick would work ok as a controller but it would be better to clip over the knuckles so that it's possible to extend the fingers without dropping the controller, like the etee controller:





A wrist strap is useful to avoid the controller slipping off and hitting something.

crazyexcalibur said:

You’re lucky that you don’t have any issues with the weight. I’ve tried at least ten different iterations of the face cushions and none have been able to make it where I can wear the AVP for longer than a couple hours. It’s not so simple to do this either. I’ve had to buy them, try them on for a week or so and return them. Then repeat the process. I’ve even bought third party head gear hoping it would help. I’ve found a few but they just transfer the weight from my eyes to my forehead. I only use it for watching media because of this, as media usually is about 2 to 3 hours, the max before my face hurts too much. 

There are a lot of components inside:

The weight is actually similar to most headsets:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1337114/vr-headset-comparison-by-weight/

AVP weighs 600-650g for the headset and 350g for the battery pack.

The Big Screen Beyond VR headset (display-only) is lighter and weighs 170-185g:

https://www.uploadvr.com/bigscreen-beyond-weight-specs/

An iPhone 15 weighs 171g, including battery.

An iPhone 15 compute unit (minus display) + Big Screen Beyond headset would weigh 356g, almost the same as the AVP battery pack. It may need more battery power but they can still build a much lighter unit.

Hopefully the 2nd revision will see a big reduction in size and weight. It would be good if they could sit it closer to the eyes to increase field of view.





In September this year, they will have the 3nm A19 Pro chip, which could go in AVP 2 or a smaller model. This will run much cooler than M2 and drain less battery.

If Apple had made AVP1 like an iPhone strapped to a headset, even with 2K displays around $1499-1999, they'd have sold a few million units. It would still have been the best VR headset on the market and people would mostly use it for media consumption. Text would have looked more blurry but people used SD monitors for decades and this problem will get resolved in time as display manufacturing improves.

A more mainstream model would let them see what the demand is like and would drive more software and content having a larger userbase.

AppleInsider said:

Like the creation of its headset, producing smart glasses with AR features is a technical nightmare. It's a hard set of problems to solve, ranging from creating the image in front of the user's eyes to producing something light enough to be like regular spectacles.

All while dealing with other long-term issues like handling processing and communications, and somehow hiding a battery on the frame.

However, Apple is far from the only company to be working on smart glasses. 

Meta's Orion AR glasses prototype is expected to arrive as a product in 2027, making it a very early release in the field.

Then there is Google, which is producing the Android XR operating system intended for next-gen headsets and smart glasses. Gurman writes that Google demonstrated the operating system to him in December using various glasses, including some with displays.

Those prototypes were considered to be quite polished, but unlikely to reach the open market until the harder challenges like battery life are solved.

Batteries are a massive problem for VR headsets now, let alone lightweight spectacles. It's a weight that must be minimized and carefully placed so the glasses don't feel heavy to wear, which is extremely hard for a purposefully lightweight item like spectacles.

Apple certainly has to come up with a better answer than the current tethered battery on the Apple Vision Pro. But, short of magically making batteries as light as air, it's a difficult problem to solve.

That said, tethering to an iPhone or another device could help further, by handling processing for the glasses. This offloads another set of components and reduces the power draw, but it still means it'll be connected to another piece of kit. 

There are companies that have been shipping AR sunglasses for a couple of years now so the first part about getting AR displays into a glasses form factor is available:

https://us.shop.xreal.com/products/xreal-one-pro

This product offloads processing to a tethered device and only handles the display + motion tracking so no battery needed in the frames.

The power usage is said to be around 2W. Airpods Max has a 5Wh battery, iPhone 15 has a 13Wh battery.

Assuming a new product isn't offloading compute, it would use an iPhone chip for half the power of M-series chips around 5W (max, not average). The displays would be around 2W. The battery would have to be around double the Airpods Max at around 10Wh, increase the cushion on top to distribute the extra weight more, possibly have a thin strap at the back to stop it tipping forward and have lightweight displays that sit in front.

I don't think glasses are necessarily the end goal because even normal glasses are uncomfortable to wear for a while and they can still look unattractive to wear:



One thing that sets Apple products apart is they all look good. Almost every product they design is the best design in its class. Best looking laptops, phones, tablets, displays, headphones.

The end product can look something like this:



The display would wrap around with optional light blockers, mainly for above and below the eyes. The blockers are only needed for immersive content, AR content shows the surrounding environment so it doesn't need to block the light unless the environment light is too bright.

The connection point for the display would have to be the headband if the cups still have to swivel and they should be easy to push up to the headband out of the way. There would be no weight on the face or ears like glasses, the displays would be suspended in front of the eyes.

Retail cost should aim to be under $2000. If they can only manage 2K resolution at this price point, so be it. HDR and black levels are more important than sharpness for media content. It's not going to be great for text but usable and they can sell 4K ones at a higher price in a Pro model.

People are already walking around in public with this form factor and it looks perfectly normal.



No matter how much the current AVP form factor iterates, the bulk of the device is in the wrong place and needs too many cushions. The product itself is just the black/silver part at the front, which would be even smaller without EyeSight components and the compute parts:



I don't think it needs to take as long as 2027 to deliver something like this. They have all the parts this year to make a revision 2 with a more compact form factor.

This form factor would sell fairly well for 5 years while they iterate on getting things more compact and power efficient. It may end up that having compute on the wearable never needs to be the end goal if visuals can stream fast enough wirelessly to a nearby device but at a minimum they need to power the displays so a battery needs to go somewhere to get rid of the wire. If it goes on the front or back of the head, it's back to a helmet form factor again with weight on the face.