“Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster today offers up yet another in a series of missives on virtual reality and Apple’s likely role in the technology, arguing the company will probably get deeper into VR because late co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs installed in the company a fear of the ‘innovator’s dilemma,’ the term propounded by Harvard professor Clay Christensen in his book of that name,” Tiernan Ray reports for Barron’s.
Writes Munster, who has an Overweight rating on Apple stock, and a $172 price target, ‘We believe MR (Mixed Reality) is critical to Apple long term’ because ‘over the next 20 years, the screen as we know it will slowly go away,'” Ray reports. “Munster doesn’t explicitly explain so-called mixed reality; the implication is its a mesh of virtual reality and augmented reality.”
Ray reports, “So, Apple’s going to realize it must cannibalize the iPhone.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple already knows that someday, as they did with the iPod, they’ll cannibalize the iPhone, if they wish to continue leading the way.
Gene hasn’t always had the best record of predicting what Apple will do next.
Apple won’t be interested in gimmicks. If a particular concept looks promising, they will evaluate it and assess how it works under real world conditions. They will only incorporate the idea into a product if it offers proven advantages and doesn’t have any significant drawbacks. There are a lot of obstacles to overcome before VR can realistically start replacing conventional screens and keyboards for every day use.
When the time is right, Apple won’t hesitate to cannibalise the iPhone, just as the iPhone cannibalised the iPod and later on iPads cannibalise MacBooks, but Apple won’t come out with some stupid-arsed novelty just for the sake of doing something impressive.
Just because something is possible, it isn’t necessarily a good idea. I would refer you to Google Glass for a recent example.
“MR (Mixed Reality)” is a bullshit term. It’s simply called AR, Augmented Reality.
An no, no one is going to adjust to living their life or performing their computing work with giant visor gear strapped to their head. That’s not the only method of VR. I fully expect an evolution of 3-D display walls with gesture control. Why the computer GUI hasn’t already moved into standard 3-D GUI elements is beyond my comprehension. It’s well over a decade late by my estimation. Apparently, it’s too scary for our current rendition of ‘the modern world’.
Yeah, I’m pointing at you, Jony Ive. Flat, flatter, flattest. 😛
Maybe a 3-D glass wall will make it to market before Munster’s Apple television. A glass wall would be expensive.
Certainly at this period of time.
Any 3d technology will be widely adopted only when its visual displays are readily apprehended by our existing natural system of sight. UIs today are still too crude, subverting our natural I/O senses in favour of programming constraints. Why isn’t every movie IMAX? Why does every videogame manual warn about frame rates causing seizures? The desired ideal technology is late because it’s hard and because companies settle for a decent ROI despite a target market diminished by unwary viewers dropping to the floor and writhing in agony.
I have some choice retching images, but I’ll refrain. 😉
I wonder how many Darwin Award types will die walking into traffic or driving while wearing a VR headset.
VR is not a category unto itself. VR will not be the next big thing. It’s already a thing. It already suggests by its design what it will be good for. VR will be a technology that i9s ultimately integrated into whatever larger task presents itself where applicable.
Hmmm… so you can put on big silly goggles in order to get information out of your teeny little Apple Watch?
But that teeny Apple Watch is a wonderful piece of technology. Have you bought yours yet?
I’m still waiting for the 3D hologram projector in the iPhone. Want to view that Excel file on a bigger screen? Tap here and have it two foot wide right in front of your phone floating in air.
The key here is “choice”, regular screen on the iPhone for the normal day to day use. Projected image for when you need to see something much bigger or superimposed over a background.
A hologram type setup would be great. No screen needed. But that may be many decades away.
Ya, running around with a VR set on my face all day…
Sound like a terrible technology achievement for me.
It will be big in the pron, game and simulation market but I have yet to figure out this technology will come handy in a day to day life.
Anyone who tries to tell you they know what customers will be buying in the “next 20 years” is full of it.
Hence the march to thinner and thinner iPhones while doubling down on performance. These techs will make for best in class wearables for AR
The problem with all of these VR/AR predictions, is that they ignore the fact that there still needs to be hardware to make this stuff work. It’s not going to appear in front of people through magic.
Let’s say you get all of this AR; what kind of hardware will present it? Glasses/goggles? Google tried that and failed miserably. I don’t think the average person wants to have technology be that intrusive.
So the irony is that for the foreseeable future, AR is likely to be yet another feature of a future iPhone, if it takes off at all.