Not really. Sales collapsed after an initial rush of excitement. By the end of 1984, Apple was selling only 10,000 Macs per month, much less than they had projected. Jobs was ousted a couple of months later.
The success of the Mac was to show what a pc could be. This headset is the same. Both Apple Watch and iPhone sucked when they came out, but they were good enough at showing what the future could be; enough for people to buy them. Both have improved dramatically around 5-10 years after release.
This headset should be thought of as a dev unit, except substitute dev with early adopters.
If it’s good then there will definitely be a value add in maybe 5-10 years. If it sucks then they’ll just have failed at creating a compelling headset experience that has broad appeal, just like everyone before them.
It’s important to realize just still how early we are in the computing revolution, and how much of the growth curve there’s left.
[This is not here for you, it's here for me as a record that I said this, and I was either very right or very wrong, but at least I said something - and put words down to clarify my thinking]
I feel like the 'how many times do we have to tell you old man' character - hearing that the iPhone and the Watch sucked coming out and both eventually became successful.
The iPhone did not suck in any way shape or form. It was everything anyone who touched a PDA or Blackberry before that wanted - text messages in a gorgeous swipe-able full view context, visual voicemail, a phone that had contacts as a first class citizen, you could actually read the screen and not feel claustrophobic, and a frickin' full web browser! And it was your iPod too!? Dude... we all need to sit back, stop playing revisionist history, and realize how in awe we were waiting for this stupid phone to activate - it took me over a week to activate my iPhone because we all overloaded Cingular. But the swipe gesture just to unlock it, and it's beautiful screen just had me staring at the thing for the full week - so damn excited. Simple things like the highlight 'Swipe to unlock' was a designers wet dream for a few years - come on man! This was flippin' insane.
The same thing happened to me with mp3 players and the iPod. I won't bore you with a similar story - but come on! We all bought mp3 players, the experience sucked but the end goal was worth it - and when the iPod made the thing we wanted to do easy - it was a natural success. The same thing happened with Desktop Publishers and people who used spreadsheets on a daily basis for the GUI based computers.
To spell this out again, the world already had and used on a daily basis the product class Apple made great. Most people did not care for fitness trackers/watchers when they came out [see Pebble's fall from grace, fitbit's early IPO failure, etc.], nor do most care for VR and AR headsets.
Here's the kicker, I've bought almost every generation VR and AR headset trying to make these devices compelling - but every experiment just shows these 'take over a human field of view' sucks. They do nothing for us like the music player or PDA did - maybe it's an Alto issue (we need the GUI break through for these) - but I've worked on this problem from every angle for 7 years and it sucks. Even the dang architects and mechanical engineers think it sucks - and they are in the spatial computing context! I was there with the DK1 met with HTC in Taiwan and other people I can't say, and did all the BS - this tech strata sucks for what it wants to achieve. It just needs to be a beautiful hands free reader accessory - that's where it's compelling - this whole ambient computing will not be head worn, it just won't.
Hey future you, I just also just want to clarify that I don't really think the iPhone sucked!
Obviously it was amazing. I just meant on day 1, which many of us forget about, it wasn't there for most people. It has conceptually stayed more or less the same product but it really has gotten so much better that we take for granted how much it's improved.
In my opinion, for example, the iPhone 4s was the first that was good enough for most people, but even then for many people it wasn't until the screen became giant that it became usable.
Anyways, I was too poor to own the first iPhone, but I had the first Apple Watch. It was weird for me because I simultaneously felt like it was amazing and a huge let down. I kept telling myself, "Well, at least it's a nice watch", but the truth was that it was just too limited.
I think conceptually the watch has stayed the same but is so much better now.
I'm excited to see the non-head-work ambient computing future, and I think Apple will be successful.
Thank you. One of the more frustrating aspects of the Apple Watch and now VR headset is the bizarre tarnishing of the launch of the iPhone and iPod. It’s a strange cognitive dissonance too, since people do still point to that Keynote as earth shattering. No one goes back and watches the Apple Watch announcement.
I used to say Apple wasn't good at games but they have a lot of experience making content and publishing games these days. They have continued to let mac gaming flounder but its a different story on mobile. This headset will almost certainly feel closer to mobile than anything else.
