Meta has ceased work on a headset designed to rival Apple Vision Pro because it reportedly wanted to keep the cost of the device below $1,000 – a virtual impossibility due to the cost of the high-resolution dual micro OLED displays. Meta considered a sub-$1,000 price point as “necessary for the product to sell well.” The Apple Vision Pro starts at $3,499. It does not “sell well,” with sales expected to be fewer than 500,000 units in 2024
Sylvia Varnham O’Regan and Wayne Ma for The Information:
Meta Platforms has canceled plans for a premium mixed-reality headset intended to compete with Apple’s Vision Pro, according to two Meta employees.
Meta told employees at the company’s Reality Labs division to stop work on the device this week after a product review meeting attended by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth and other Meta executives, the employees said.
The axed device, which was internally code-named La Jolla, began development in November and was scheduled for release in 2027, according to current and former Meta employees. It was going to contain ultrahigh-resolution screens known as micro OLEDs—the same display technology used in Apple’s Vision Pro.
MacDailyNews Take: Is Meta wrong about the price point? Almost certainly not.
Unfortunately, Apple decided to do it this way, so it’s going to take the company a long, long time – or they’re going to have to sacrifice a ton of quality – to get VisionOS devices down to prices that are palatable to a meaningful number of customers.
[This] is exactly what you’d expect to occur when a product is released too early to average users… Apple Vision Pro is a devkit for developers, not for average users, and should have been released as a devkit for developers. – MacDailyNews, March 26, 2024
There are a lot of people inside and outside of Apple who think the company should have waited on the Vision Pro, but it’s fairly easy today to see why Tim Cook released this beta (alpha?) devkit: He likely knew last year, or had a strong inkling, that Project Titan was a goner and there wasn’t much excitement in Apple’s pipeline. He’d need something to point to as “innovation” while he continued on his seemingly unending quest to iterate and monetize products invented by Steve Jobs’ Apple (a very different place) while continuing Apple’s retail store buildout. He also needed something to energize developers and, who knows, they might come up with a killer visionOS app while Apple toils on the long road to real lightweight spatial computing glasses and beyond.
More importantly, Apple last year had already come to the sad realization that they’d missed the generative artificial intelligence revolution and would need a distraction while they feverishly scrambled to catch up (the fruits of which — alongside what sound like disappointing partnerships which hopefully, somehow, preserve user privacy — we’ll hopefully begin to see at WWDC this June).
You have to feel for Cook. After a decade plus of being able to iterate and monetize Jobs’ inspired products and services and continue adding retail stores around the world to spectacular effect, and being lauded for it, he now finds himself in a place that requires actual vision to be able to see which path to take. And he’s not the guy. Even the guy who put him in the position knew it.
Tim’s not a product person, per se. – Steve Jobs
See also:
• Contrary to popular belief, Steve Jobs knew about Apple Watch – February 13, 2023
• Work on Apple Vision Pro began under Steve Jobs – August 23, 2023Beyond the fact that Cook can’t even execute a compelling live keynote address, his big send off, the “Apple Car,” [the idea of which was also germinated under Jobs] fizzled in ignominious failure.
See also:
• Scrapped Apple Car ‘a massive disappointment that will alter the course of the company’s history, perhaps for decades to come’ – Gurman – March 11, 2024
• Apple employees referred to doomed Apple Car project as ‘The Titanic Disaster’ – February 29, 2024So, despite myriad misgivings and protestations inside Apple, Cook pulled the trigger early on the Vision Pro. He had to have something to point to that would buy him some time. Even Apple’s rubber-stamping board of lackeys would wake up and start asking questions otherwise.
While Cook is hemming and hawing when faced with shareholders (virtually, of course, never again in person for as long as Cook remains), Apple is currently in scramble mode trying to catch up to rivals — including the world’s most valuable company, Microsoft — in generative AI, a technology the company seems to have completely missed while focusing instead on the not-ready-for-primetime Apple Vision Pro, visionOS, its now-canceled decade-long multi-billion-dollar electric vehicle boondoggle, replacing leather in iPhone cases and Apple Watch bands with overpriced junk in a quest to “save the planet,” forcing employees to endure a constant barrage of time-wasting zero-productivity DEI sessions, and myriad other various and sundry “initiatives” which Cook deems of import. – MacDailyNews, February 28, 2024
When you lose your visionary CEO and replace him with a caretaker CEO, this is the type of aimless, late, bureaucratic dithering that ensues. – MacDailyNews, November 21, 2017
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Bla bla bla…only complains…I think that Cook is doing a very good job considering that there is not and there will not be another Steve Jobs…so stop comparing him with one of a kind brilliant mind and try to focus on what Cook is… a one of a kind master mind…whom Steve was not…in organization and chain supply master…
Apple is a locomotive. Built and run up to speed by Steve Jobs. Everything Apple has, including Apple Watch, Apple Services, Apple Silicon, and Vision Pro began under Steve Jobs.
Tim Cook sits in the engineer’s seat and the big heavy locomotive just keeps rolling down the tracks. He failed on Apple Car. He released Vision Pro when it wasn’t ready for primetime. He totally missed AI and had to resort to the old vaporware trick: announce first, after you’re already very late, to buy time to actually build what you’ve announced.
As is often the case with Apple, MDN is correct: Cook was a perfect stopgap after Jobs died. 3-5 years max. of iteration and then get out of there to make way for someone with vision and new ideas. Yet, we’re still stuck with Cook today. It’s bad for Apple. Cook is greedy and is hanging on way too long.
“Apple Vision Pro is a devkit for developers, not for average users, and should have been released as a devkit for developers.”
And that’s what they did.
It’s on the market to:
– Have a dev kit to sell to developers at a very reasonable price
– Allow a wider range of tech professionals to use and understand the technology
– See early adopters use the technology to better understand real world use
– Scale the supply chain / production capacity
– Price anchoring / establish perceived value of high-end products in the category
– Establish Apple’s approach as the standard / conventions in the space
The CEO of a company doesn’t have to be a superlative visionary – as long as s/he has superlative visionary people working for him/her. It is naive to believe Steve Jobs was SOLELY creating and evolving every product that Apple ever released. He had a lot of visionary people working for him! (e.g., Johnny Ives, etc.) Indeed, sometimes a product was released before the tech caught-up with how it would ultimately be. (e.g., Newton, etc.)
It is HARD to find a visionary that can ALSO run a company (like Steve) – just as it was to find a single CEO who could be both a visionary AND an Operations guy (which Steve wasn’t). That’s why Steve had a Tim (and many others) working for him. Now we have a CEO who is an Operations guy AND can run a company – and many others who are visionaries working for him.
Folks, the “inconvenient truth” is, Apple was NEVER as successful under Steve Jobs as it has become under Tim Cook. So maybe we should stop whining about it.
Got to agree with the take, visited an Apple Store last week and was shocked to realised nothing was really different to what I saw 2 to 3 years when I last bought my iPad Air. Really very little exciting to see other than the Vision Pro. Really is getting to the point a new CEO is becoming urgent rather than desirable, if people like me no longer see them as an innovative company, geez even a leader any more then a fall could beckon when the historical shine hits the masses as rather tawdry and dull.
the AVP can be fixed easily.
1) New design weight distribution headset. its not the weight, its the weight distribution, the AVP is too front heavy and presses the weight under the eyes. thousands of generations human ancestors have use their head to carry loads. Military battle helmets weight 3 times as much are more comfortable. AVP headset design is worse by design.
2) passthrough videos looks like iPhone 8 quality. Apple Should include iPhone15 pro max dynamic range are color precision. Update the pas through cameras
3) M4 with more graphics power with ray traced gpu support.
4) lower weight, slimmer design , integrate battery in the headset
5) maybe drop presona its creepy and wasted resources
“Easily fixed” arriving at a $5,000+ price point and you’ll be first in line to buy it, right? I actually have no criticism of the AVP as it stands now considering that it was rushed out of the door. The thousands of people who made this happen despite most of them certainly having misgivings is laudable. What’s damnable is the executive decision to push it out WAY too early.
I love my Apple Vision Pro. It has become completely intertwined with everything I do and has increased my productivity dramatically. I never use it for games, and do watch movies and TV shows with it, but I spent much more time using it for my various jobs that I have. I find it particularly great for zoom calls. The persona improved, and people now say they don’t even notice it. I am very much looking for visionOS 2.0.
Great report of actual use.
It was Steve Jobs who chose Tim Cook as his successor. There were surely good reasons for this.
Tim was a great pick to manage the massive logistical undertaking of producing hundreds of millions of iPhones and other devices that Jobs handed to Cook on a silver platter. Jobs probably overestimated the strength of the culture he created once he was no longer at its center. Cook has done a very admirable job for someone who obviously isn’t comfortable in the CEO role, but the time has come for him to go.
It’s painfully obvious by now that he’s past his prime and he hasn’t surrounded himself with lieutenants that can make up for his shortcomings. The fact that there’s no obvious internal choice to succeed him is also a very bad sign. The past 5 years at least should have been focused on preparing a new CEO. The company Apple has become over the past 20 years isn’t one you just bring some outside mercenary exec into.