I think it’s fairly widely understood at this point that the product Apple wants to ship is more like glasses than a helmet. But the tech to achieve this isn’t there yet, and the current product is a necessary iteration to get to that future.
Apple will of course heavily market/sell the current iteration of the product in the short term - but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to view this as a prototype given what we know about their longer term ambitions and the limitations of the current hardware.
> wants to ship is more like glasses than a helmet. But the tech to achieve this isn’t there yet, and the current product is a necessary iteration to get to that future.
Why is that step necessary? How does it help on the path to glasses?
Why not develop glasses that can block out peripheral light, have all the sensors, need little power etc. before selling a helmet? Those seem like intractable problems to solve in a glasses or contact lens form factor so my prediction is it stays at the helmet design OR we jump to direct neural solution.
But all of this begs the question if use case still, which even at $500 or $1000 doesn’t seem compelling (with other VR and AR as proof points).
> Why is that step necessary? How does it help on the path to glasses?
Almost every modern device has such a history. It’s necessary for the same reason room sized punch card computers were necessary, or 3-inch thick laptops were necessary, etc. Most modern tech is built on a long history of small (sometimes large) iterations.
Aside from that, building a helmet now allows them to build, iterate and perfect the software, and to introduce people to their vision of what a spatial OS could be like. Will they ever manage to make these into glasses? Hard to say. But given the obvious hurdles to get there, not starting from somewhere is a guarantee they’ll never get there.
> Why not develop glasses that can block out peripheral light, have all the sensors, need little power etc. before selling a helmet?
There are accounts from insiders who say this is exactly what they wanted to do, and releasing the helmet was internally controversial.
The flip side of this is that they’d invested 10s of billions into R&D, and needed something to show for it.
> Those seem like intractable problems to solve in a glasses or contact lens form factor so my prediction is it stays at the helmet design
They may very well end up being intractable problems. If that turns out to be the case, that leaves Apple in the position of having arguably the most advanced AR/VR helmet on the market instead of with nothing. Such a device is also useful when determining whether or not to even continue trying.
> But all of this begs the question if use case still, which even at $500 or $1000 doesn’t seem compelling
I strongly disagree. If Apple could ship something like the current AVP for $500 or even $1,000, I think it would sell very well. I’d personally buy one instead of replacing my aging 65” OLED TV that needs to be replaced due to burn-in. Watching movies in the AVP is a spectacular experience.
Pretty much what happened with the MacBook Air. The MacBook Air was preceded by the MacBook 2011 (yes, horrible model name to search). It had no keyboard backlight, an 11" crappy screen, short battery life and it overheated. But compared to contemporary laptops it was futuristic. What do you mean, a laptop you can slide into an envelope?
But then it was followed up swiftly by a secondary model and then the MacBook Air. With the MacBook Air it really started to become a nice device.
Another device that comes to mind is the iPod Touch 1, which didn't even have volume buttons.
This timeline isn’t right. The MacBook Air preceded that particular MacBook, but they were different categories (Air didn’t have a Retina display, for example).
The MacBook Air eventually took on the general unibody design of the 11” MacBook, then improved upon it in most ways.
Yeah, you're right. I had to do some Google-fu, but the timeline is:
MacBook 2008[0] into MacBook Air 2010[1].
The MacBook 2008 was the chunky unibody that would be inherited by the Pro line. This model had non-backlit keys on the cheaper model, backlit on the more expensive. Only 13", 1280x800.
The Air 2010 had no backlit keys, and 11" or 13", 1366x768. Despite having the better processor it overheated quickly. The battery life was pretty abysmal too.
There is also the MacBook Retina 2015 12" [2]. But this had all the modern amenities.
The MacBook Retina would go on to be killed, but like you said, some of the design decisions would end up being inherited by the Air line.
I guess I got my wires crossed in regards to the Air and the MacBook Retina 12".
It is, there's other competitors releasing glasses-like VR and they have been for a while. The Bigscreen Beyond and Beyond 2 gets there. And, they're not gimmicks - they're really good glasses, and out-compete a lot of big VR glasses on image quality.
This is an apples/oranges comparison for a number of reasons:
1. The Bigscreen Beyond 2 is still a tethered device and can't do anything without a beefy computer. It wouldn't be so small if it contained a computer capable of driving the screens at 90hz.
2. The AVP displays are 3660x3200 pixels per eye at 90-100hz vs the Beyond 2's 2560x2560 per eye at 75hz (can only reach 90hz by upscaling 1920×1920 per eye).
3. The Beyond devices don't have video passthrough which is a core use case of the AVP and its OS and adds to the computing needs and resulting form factor.
Presumably Apple could have made a smaller device if they had limited themselves to the specifications of something like the BB2. The existence of the BB2 is not evidence that the tech existed to miniaturize the AVP since the BB2 is simply not able to achieve the same outcomes as the AVP. They're just fundamentally different devices.
Prototype? I do not get that impression from Apple's very prominent product placement: https://www.apple.com/apple-vision-pro/