Thanks !

I'd personally compare BlackBerry to Kodak. They had a strong market position, brand and loyal customers. They also had a vision for what should come next, but little to no incentive in fully executing on it, probably didn't want to canibalise the existing sales, while also seeing too much value in their existing customers who only swear by their products.

That's also kinda where I see Apple to a lesser extent: they masterfully executed on the iPhone concept, tried to push further on the iPad, but ultimately see too much value in their current moat to risk losing it. That's where I see the HomePods, Apple TV, Apple Watch being fiercefully bound to the iPhone when they could have been independent products the same way the iPod was. Same way the iPad only got its OS in name and couldn't get much beyond being a gloridied iPhone in many respects.

Any of these products are successful in a vacuum, but given the size of the watch market for instance, the sales numbers for the Watch don't feel as successful as the iPod was.

I'm curious to see how the Vision Pro will work outside of the Apple ecosystem, as at this point it's touted as a display, and that should open the door for more than just being a macbook or apple TV accessory.

On why the iPhone succeeded...until the iPhone 4, it had miserable battery life and crashed all the time, you'd miss phone calls, "you're holding it wrong" was only funny because of how bad we had reception problems. But it did net browsing, photo handling, and emailing better than any device on the market (way better than BlackBerry for half of the world, in the sense that BB was stuck on the western market). So it was a powerful device with a unique proposition, but delightful? hell no. Better than android sure, but it took a long time for it to be smooth and stable IMHO.

On Meta...I have a Quest 2 and completely agree with all the point. It's not good, just "barely good enough" for the price it is. But I'd argue it's here, when the Vision Pro will be real next year, and who knows when we get the next iteration. While I don't see Meta successfuly pushing the field, the sailant point is that the Quest 2 and probably Quest 3 are PC VR compatible, where the Vision Pro has almost no chance to be. This means that the next Beat Saber or Supernatural could come to Steam VR, get tested, and be successfully enough to go to the Quest store, then perhaps the Apple VR store.

I base that on the observation that ML didn't come to Mac or iOS first, but went to the more open windows world first. I don't see new VR creators starting from a Vision Pro when next Christmas gift season will still probably be Quest headsets and perhaps Vive if they can get their price low enough. Perhaps Apple will have a shot at it in 3 years, but we can check back the situation when they arrive there (I'd love an ultra competitive landscape for the next 3 years)

I also find it super interesting that the main use case is as a macbook multi-monitor when macos isn't touch ready. It'd be super excited if they bring a big surprise in that area at the same time the Vision Pro hits.

My worst fear is still that Apple eats all the high resolution display factories of the space, the same way they litteraly consumed all the displays at the peak iOS times and competitors had the leftover, even as the display technology wasn't Apple's.