You can't let a product like Vision Pro stumble out of the gate half-finished with no launch event, no developer support and no meaningful updates or new content in 3 months. Virtually nobody even got a dev kit. There's little to no App Store discoverability, so apps that are there don't get surfaced, which means they make no money to justify future investment in the platform.
Apple has got so complacent that it's forgotten what it takes to fight for a new product category
@stroughtonsmith Today if you are not a developer it is a luxury remote screen for your Mac and a perfect Media consumption tool… the Hardware is here, WWDC should bring us software improvements, new language support.
I also hope for better integration with Apple products (view my watch, my iPhone and my Mac keyboard and mouse in virtual environment)
@stroughtonsmith I had a suspicion that Apple simply quietly "canceled" Vision Pro even before it was released 🤷♂️ They treated it as a "dev kit" for their own, and experiment with new kind of OS.
There're two possibilities how it will evolve:
No real future for Vision Pro. But the "real deal" will be some glasses running visionOS but on iPhone with some hi-speed, wireless connection 🤔
They want to slowly evolve it, introducing a cheaper version that could be sold for the mass market.
@stroughtonsmith Vision OS 2 and the next version of Vision Pro will prove how committed they are to this. Right now, I think it’s learning from what’s out there and hopefully aiming to get things right at the 6 and 9 o’clock analogy that Steve Jobs used for Mac OS 10.0 and 10.1 back in 2001. We have to accept though Apple is no longer the underdog anymore.
@matadan@stroughtonsmith I noticed many are using the 'dev kit' description a lot. Is that just a personal opinion or is there literature Apples web site you can point to? So far, I have not seen any indication that is the case. The descriptions and demos from #WWDC its a replacement for your home entertainment system not mention examples were dad taking spatial video of kids, face time chat, watching movies, playing games. How is that a dev kit?
@adacosta@stroughtonsmith It’s a dev kit in that it is has no other use case. It’s “Pro” and the only people that have one are podcasters and developers. The real consumer version is not out yet and might not be for a while. It’s just an opinion but if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck.
@stroughtonsmith 3D TV? No. Google Glass? No. Microsoft Kinect? Lol seriously still no. Some tech just fails. Companies don't understand the product and/or consumers aren't interested. Most consumers, not tech enthusiasts, don't want a screen directly in front of their eyeballs. Is the tech cool? Sure. Is it promising? Maybe. Remind me in 10 years. Will I ever consider buying one? Nah. It's still got a long way to go.
@stroughtonsmith I kinda feel that this is where it's heading, but I'm holding judgement until after WWDC. If visionOS 2 doesn't have some major updates, they have a real issue. The first year of AppleTV was Planet of the Apps and Carpool Karaoke. The first year of Apple Watch was a circle-of-friends UI and Digital Touch.
Apple has shown they can pivot new products when they're not working. Hopefully that spirit is still inside the company somewhere.
@jimmylittle@stroughtonsmith True Apple can pivot but both of those app platforms have arguably languished and are shells of what Apple had originally envisioned for them
The Watch is 30% of the entire smart watch category by itself. No other company is even close. Why? Because Apple listened. Nobody wanted a wrist communicator, they want a notification machine and fitness tracker. So that’s what Apple has focused on. It’s not a shell of its former self, it’s a more focused device.
AppleTV+ is small, but has some of the best shows on TV by any measure.
@jimmylittle@stroughtonsmith I’m talking about the app stores. The devices themselves have been successful, but the app stores haven’t lived up to what Apple pitched when they unveiled it. How many third party apps do you use on your Apple Watch? And no one is shopping on their TV like Apple had hoped
@Josh@stroughtonsmith The “shopping on AppleTV” thing hasn’t been a thing for years. I was there day one of tvOS with multiple streaming apps. Even then, we were all very skeptical that anything other than streaming apps or games would be successful. We were right.
To answer the watch question: I regularly use FitBod, Gymaholic, NikeRun, Omnifocus, Drafts, Timery, SimpleFasting, FoodNoms, Overcast, PCalc, Autosleep, and Flighty (probably more…) (1/2)
@jimmylittle@Josh@stroughtonsmith One might argue you were only half right. Games should have been successful, but they’ve been anything but. That to me is a big miss that’s all on Apple.
@craiggrannell@Josh@stroughtonsmith Yep, 100% agree. The AppleTV could be such a rad little console if Apple would make the deals and open the restrictions to allow top-tier titles. Now, it’s basically a JackBox machine for me, as far as games go.
@jimmylittle@Josh@stroughtonsmith I think it once could have been. But Apple missed the boat at least twice with Apple
TV. Maybe more. And it was always about surfacing games and supporting/encouraging devs, which Apple didn’t do. (Too many commentators appear to have gone headlong down “Apple should have made and bundled a controller”. Hell no. I remember the disaster that was the first line of MFi…)
@craiggrannell@Josh@stroughtonsmith I know. I got unjustifiably excited when AppleTV started supporting PS and Xbox controllers. “Here come the good games!”
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