It’s as though Apple had decided to sell the 2007 iPhone in 2002 – what would the price have been?” So the Vision is a device pulled forward from years into the future, at a price that reflects that. Meta is trying to catalyse an ecosystem while we wait for the right hardware – Apple is trying to catalyse an ecosystem while we wait for the right price. Meta, today, has roughly the right price and is working forward to the right device: Apple has started with the right device and will work back to the right price. This is the opposite decision to Meta: indeed Apple seems to have taken the opposite decision to Meta in most of the important trade-offs in making this. Of course the rest of the industry would like to do that, and will in due course, but Apple has decided you must do that. ![]() Apple has decided that the capabilities of the Vision Pro are the minimum viable product – that it just isn’t worth making or selling a device without a screen so good you can’t see the pixels, pass-through where you can’t see any lag, perfect eye-tracking and perfect hand-tracking. “I think the price and the challenge of category creation are tightly connected. At the core of this claim is that Apple’s product augments reality while keeping the user engaged with his or her surroundings rather than plunging the user into a totally artificial fantasyland.Īs Benedict Evans recently wrote, Apple and Meta have approached the market from opposite directions in terms of price and capabilities. Apple’s strategy is not to directly compete with Meta but to present Vision Pro as a product in a completely different class, not even comparable to Quest. When I think about Meta’s positioning in the virtual reality market with the Quest series and Apple’s strategy, I am reminded of the Mac vs. In a good natured way, Apple emphasized the aesthetics and “cool” factor of its products at the expense of the PC market, specifically ridiculing Microsoft’s operating systems. I am reminded of the amusing Get a Mac series of commercials from the mid 2000s. At $3,499, the Vision Pro will not be a mainstream product at the outset, but that too seems to be part of the strategy. Apple specializes in making products aspirational for the mass market. ![]() The Vision Pro just looks like a cool product, unlike the nerdy look of the Meta Quest product line. I am not sure what Steve Jobs would think about Apple’s strategy as the company enters the augmented reality market, but it is very clear that the ethos he tirelessly cultivated continues to emphasize aesthetics and management remains quite uncompromising when it comes to price. Just as a skilled carpenter would never use a piece of cheap plywood for the back of a cabinet, Jobs was a perfectionist when it came to the aesthetic appeal of his products. This is a man who obsessed over what the inside of Apple’s products looked like. Jobs was a firm believer in getting the big decisions on design and functionality right and took the beauty of Apple’s products very seriously. ![]() Would Steve Jobs care more about the functional and aesthetic details of Vision Pro or the stock market’s reaction to the product’s unveiling? It’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields the results that make our heart sing.” “It is in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough.
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