Bloomberg News‘ Mark Gurman states it plainly, Apple’s “Vision Pro headset, despite being a technical marvel, is clearly a commercial flop.”
Mark Gurman for Bloomberg News:
Apple realizes that it’s not worth continuing to invest in this approach — unless it’s just to increase the device’s specifications or reduce the cost and weight. So attention has shifted to figuring out a more appealing form factor.
One intriguing idea was to build augmented reality glasses that serve as an external Mac display, but that was axed earlier this year. Instead, Apple is back to trying to get standalone AR glasses to work (we’re talking about lightweight AI-infused spectacles that you could wear all day). It’ll probably take Apple another three to five years to crack this challenge, at best, but the company is exploring a lot of ideas and underlying technologies right now.
Apple also is still discussing the idea of making its own version of the popular Ray-Ban glasses from Meta Platforms Inc. Such a product wouldn’t be a proper AR device, but it would include AI, microphones and cameras to create a pretty good user experience…
It’s mind-boggling that Apple hasn’t gotten there yet. The Ray-Ban glasses are clearly doing great in the marketplace and provide a stepping stone to AR.
MacDailyNews Take: It’s not the least bit mind-boggling. This is Tim Cook’s Apple: misplaced priorities which lead to stagnation, missed deadlines, and missed opportunities are, unfortunately, par for the course.
By the way, Steve Jobs didn’t strive to build and release products and services that deliver “a pretty good user experience.”
What we have here is a company that was once led by a visionary who set the agenda for entire industries, now led by a reactive caretaker who heard somewhere that VR headsets and electric cars were the next big things (probably read it in “Wired”), so that’s what he had Apple do, while completely missing artificial intelligence, especially generative AI, and now is scrambling to catch up to something Steve Jobs would have focused on long before anyone ever even heard of OpenAI.
Steve Jobs bought Siri in April 2010. Steve Jobs would never have ignored Siri, basically let it rot, for well over a decade and counting. Steve Jobs would have made Siri the first conversational generative AI assistant years before anyone else. And the company would today be worth at least a trillion dollars more than it is currently. (Yes, we’re lowballing that estimate.) – MacDailyNews, February 21, 2024
Tim’s not a product person, per se. – Steve Jobs
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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