> There were dozens of Windows headsets that lifted the performance ceiling […]

Wow, I didn't know that! I thought there were probably some super high end ones (I used one a few years ago which basically required that I strap a tower PC to my back to experience a Star Wars VR thing in a shopping mall…), but didn't know there was stuff in-market which is meaningfully better than the Vision Pro (assuming you mean screens, tracking, pass through)?

> Imagine if Steve Jobs' "phone, iPod, and internet communicator" moment culminated in a product that cost more than all 3 of those things combined. That's what the Vision Pro's announcement felt like.

The original iPhone was $600 on a 2-year contract at a time when nearly everyone got a free phone on renewal. The ROKR E1 (2005's attempt at a Motorola & Apple iPod phone collaboration) was $250 on a 2yr contract.[^1]

Remember Steve Ballmer's reaction to iPhone? "Five hundred dollars! Fully subsidized with a plan! I said that is the most expensive phone in the world and it doesn't appeal to business guys […]"

Vision Pro might be more disproportionately expensive, but iPhone was absolutely a lot more expensive than a combined phone and iPod (I think Jobs even referred to this in the keynote to soften the $599 price point: "So what would it cost to buy all of these devices separately?").

I think the critical difference between then and now is that the sheer utility of cell phones meant that unit shipments were rocketing year after year despite the crappy experience. Here there's a crappy experience in the market but not the kind of hyper growth we saw with cell phones in the mid-00s.

> Low-end VR sells like hotcakes though, and Apple will struggle with that more than Meta with retina graphics or eye tracking.

They do sell a lot of Quest units, but that seems to be a function of the price point ($400-ish) rather than the experience. E.g. did you see the comments[^2] from Meta on user retention? Valve's former head of VR put MAUs at <10% of the install base.

People have, to date, bought it, tried it, and stopped using it. To me that sounds like Meta has a price point which is not a barrier to entry (because people are buying the device), but not the much, much harder consideration of "actually build a product people love".

So my bet would be that Apple -- a company which is preoccupied with trying to build products consumers genuinely love (or which builds products which people are brainwashed into loving, if you believe the HN conspiracy theorists) -- can figure out how to reduce the ASP of a Vision headset to $999 faster than Meta can figure out how to create a resonant user experience at their existing price point.

Is there anything about the task of creating a compelling user experience with hardware/software and combining huge scale efficiencies and expertise in manufacturing and supply chain to lower cost over time which makes you think Meta has an advantage over Apple?

I guess you could argue that Meta's apps are compelling user experiences, but they aren't a general purpose computing platform, which is what Zuck seems to want to create (?).

[^1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/08/technology/circuits/ipod-...

[^2]: https://www.roadtovr.com/quest-sales-20-million-retention-st...