It's useful to think of the transition as starting close to 15 years ago with Apple buying PA Semi and Intrinsity, shaping ARMv8, doing test ports of macOS, etc. Of course deep analysis too, but some pretty empirical evaluation of multiple generations of running prototypes to find the gaps that mattered (product and performance). They telegraphed the plan pretty plainly when they announced the A7 as "desktop class."
It started even further back almost 34 years ago. The first PowerPC Macs shipped with Motorola 68000 emulation in 1994, but development was being investigated back in 1988 or so. Apple has successfully made this kind of transition before, and it's entirely possible they will do so again in the future!
The first version of 68K emulation they shipped was not great. At least one third party (Connectix) sold a faster version that replaced the OS provided routines with their own.
In defense of the original emulation strategy it shipped on time, fit in the ROM, and worked reliably with good compatibility. The first round of PowerPC Macs were so much faster than the 68k Macs than even emulated apps worked better. I don't remember the history any more but Apple did eventually do a new emulator, while Connectix made some other emulation products (PlayStation, PC) and eventually sold to Microsoft. I've read that Connectix people helped seed Microsoft's virtualization efforts.
I think that highlights the different incentives for an OS vendor and a third-party: Apple needed to be compatible but they didn’t want to be in that business long-term and focused more on getting developers to port their apps. Connectix arrived a year later and they had to deliver speed since nobody would buy it unless they did.
Very possible. I think of their approach as "experiment and remix," that is they test a lot of the technical and supply chain ingredients for new products years in advance, then combine at the last moment to create a widget for the public to buy. I've been watching the pieces of their VR/AR effort come together and my guess is they will do surprisingly large volume for how expensive the headsets will be. Collaboration, but done well.
> my guess is they will do surprisingly large volume for how expensive the headsets will be.
Bloomberg estimates that Apple intends to ship less than a half-million headsets it's debut year. By comparison, the Meta Quest 2 sold 10 million units in it's first year at sale.
Bloomberg also estimates that Apple's headset is going to cost $2000 or more, as opposed to the Quest 2 which debuted at $299. Your definition may vary, but I'd consider moving a half-million headsets at that price to be surprisingly large volume. (Also, surely anything at that price point is going to be positioned against the Quest Pro, right?)
It might turn a good hardware profit (Apple is known for sizable margins in that respect) but Apple really cares about having a wide audience. The only thing more profitable than hardware is taxing the transactions on that hardware. If Apple doesn't have a large installbase, it will be hard to justify keeping the platform alive.
> Also, surely anything at that price point is going to be positioned against the Quest Pro, right?
At what, $2,000? At that point, you're competing against everything. You're competing against the price of a new-in-box Valve Index with a VR-capable computer to-boot. You're competing against the price of buying everyone in your family a $300-400 headset. You're competing against the price of a Playstation 5 with PSVR2.
This product is a suicide mission for Apple. It will come out, and it might even be great, but it's value proposition is non-existent in a market that already lived through Beat Saber, VR Chat and Half Life Alyx.
I mean, the consensus I hear among the tech talking heads is that this is basically a product for (a) developers, so they can start seriously building V/A/XR apps and (b) Apple congregants who have both the disposable income and desire to buy literally any product Apple brings to market, no matter how pricey.
(a) for apps and (b) for hype, while Apple works on bringing an actually viable consumer headset to market in 2024.
This is a pretty bold departure from Apple's normal strategy of "wait until several others have rushed to market and them blow them out of the water with a 'premium' product you claim is better than all the competition, at a higher price point than all the competition."
In part it's because companies like Pimax are already sort of doing that, and because Meta got Apple scared that Zuckerberg was going to beat them to monopolizing the VR market if they waited too long.
(We'll have to wait and see the reception to the Quest 3 to see how concerned they really should have been, because the reception for the Quest Pro has been... not great. Turns out, making a quality headset is just expensive)
Less high than combined - they don’t sell in the cheapest price points but since they aren’t dividing the money their products tend to be the same or even cheaper than equivalent quality PC/Android devices since you don’t have the duplicated overhead across multiple other companies.
Not that I've seen, though I expect it'll be like phones where they err on the side of more compute not less. If you look around on the software side there are pieces of a headset collaboration experience all over though, even beyond the obvious stuff in ARKit. Memojis, FaceTime spatial audio, AR Spaces in the Clips app, Freeform, App Clips, Metal variable rate shading, etc. It'll be interesting to see what actually ships.
