It’s almost time. Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) is just days away. Come Monday morning, both Dan Moren and I will be somewhere on the Apple Campus…
If someone walks away from the event thinking they might buy a product like this from Apple someday, that's a win for Apple – even if they're not sold on the current device.
This is what I'm most curious to see on Monday. So far VR hasn't really excited me, and the idea of a new headset with a price barrier the size of its rumored bill of materials only makes me less enthusiastic about it as a consumer product.
If it's a product intended for creators or developers – not just as a development kit but with actual productive use cases – then Apple might have my attention for a future generation. But if, as rumors suggest, this is primarily intended for gaming, I don't see a future where I'm interested in any generation of it. In 18 years of following Apple, that's a first for me.
I seemed to be in the exact market segment for it when the OG HomePod was announced: I was thinking of getting a Sonos at the time, and as a long-time Airfoil user I was already using AirPlay for everything. Plus I have a weird living room layout that makes regular bookshelf speakers difficult to place without drilling holes and running wires. To this day I feel like Apple made that damn thing just for me.
I totally understand its lack of inputs being a blocker for most. It wouldn't be so bad if they sold something like an inverse AirPort Express (which could output AirPlay audio to a home stereo through a mini-TOSLINK/3.5mm jack) or at least supported the open source efforts to build such things.
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