Comment Re:dear gawd (Score 2) 360
What's the market for AR? What's the killer app? Walk around and see adds plastered over items or on businesses? no thank you.
This is the million dollar question. At $3500, this is not a consumer product, even considering the Apple brand and the walled garden. If it's an enterprise product, then Apple will have necessarily have made significantly headway into the significant technical challenges that currently hinder adoption of headsets broadly.
Yes, but what challenges are hindering adoption? It's not price. If enterprises found significant enough productivity gains in AR, $3500 would be an impulse buy. The issue is nobody needs AR to do their current job, and AR adds little or nothing of value to productivity for those jobs. This is literally the case of a solution in search of a problem.
You could make the argument that uses for AR will inevitably follow the introduction of such a product. I would agree...if that product were priced low enough to make mass adoption possible. I'm sorry, but $3500 is nowhere near that price point. It's off by at least an order of magnitude if you want wide adoption. And without wide adoption, nobody is going to create any mass-market use cases.
If you want to see what semi-success in this area looks like, the Quest 2 is the benchmark. It was "good enough" VR for most folks, and the sub-$500 price point was nearly an impulse buy. People bought it in droves compared to anything else and ecosystems (to some extent) sprung up to take advantage of it. The Quest Pro was a serious misstep, pricing itself out of the market. Sales have been dismal and discounts haven't helped. Apple said "hold my beer" and went even pricier. Not going to bother taking bets on how that will turn out.