I think awkwardness is a much larger detractor here than price. I look at Meta with Meta Quest, a much cheaper device (less than 10% of the Vision price), that has sold over 20 mil units, has a bunch of very cool apps, and still has not managed mass adoption.

Food for thought: Apparently the bill of materials is $1500 before considering recouping R&D costs, which is surely in the billions of dollars

iPhone 14 Pro Max for context is just under $500 BoM for the cheapest model and retails for $1100

You'll see (slightly) more cost effective Vision hardware ~2 yrs after this one releases and then a budget version ~2 yrs after that.

The lead up time and early announce is all to help convince the public that they want to put this on their face.

Looks amazing, but I’m interested in the use-case that justifies normal consumers to consider buying this at that price point. But maybe that’s not what they’re going for at all.

What are some of the most insane bits? I don't follow anything but the outward display for your eyes and the 12 (?) cameras seem... expensive to do

I agree! And once you grog Unity's mental model it's kinda ridiculous how advanced a game engine is vs. a vector drawing program-ish with Figma. But I also remember coming from Sketch + 2D and opening Unity, and having no clue what was going on in it

Two 4K micro OLED displays is not cheap

12 cameras are not cheap

A second outer OLED display is not cheap

All with Apple's bill of materials which in general is much higher quality (= higher cost) than what most other companies are capable of

I agree with your points but I think this category still needs to go through a big evolution. Something you put on your face is not comparable to other wearables. As it is, the value proposition needs to be gigantic to offset the awkwardness.

They have a serious chicken and egg problem on their hands where they need developers to help them figure out what the killer applications are and then they will build on those in future revisions of the hardware and software. This is how every Apple ecosystem has been built.

I’m just here for the communal whiplash after everyone download Unity3D, open it, and go “…wat”

This isn't a product for normal consumers. This is Apple selling a vision (pun intended) of the future, not a product. 

Whales and Apple fanboys will buy Gen 1 but Gen 1 isn't meant to move units.

if you don't follow vr/ar tech, you really have no idea how insane that hardware is

i was kind of shocked it was $3500 because that actually feels kind of cheap

Unity and Unreal are cool as hell. I wish we had tools that powerful for software design

Ikr, with those features that’s a quick grab. I see this to be adopted by engineering industries and would take a while before it gets to the everyday user.

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