No. It’s an investment into a new product category that will pay off handsomely in time. $1.5 billion+ in revenue is not too shabby for the first iteration that’s priced beyond the reach of regular consumers.
It’s amazing to me that a website that caters to Apple interested people still haven’t picked up the cadence of how Apple enters a new product category.
1. Introduce with features that the existing competition doesn’t have.
2. *Rapidly* iterate on the software and eventually hardware over the next two generations while the competition struggles to match the 1st gen because their business models simply don’t allow for a hardware-first approach. (We’re going to see that the R1 sensor fusion capabilities are the “secret sauce” that nobody will be able to replicate for a few years)
3. The more capable, less costly version is released from Apple, it’s a massive hit (compared to the other offerings in the category), and everyone simply forgets the teeth gnashing of the tech world that was wailing about gen 1.
I’m only 33, I’ve seen this cycle 3 times already in *my* short lifetime. How has MR as a whole not understood this yet?
AVP was and is the MVP (minimal viable product) for the experience that Apple wants to bring into the world. People are speculating about whether it’s a hit or not but that *doesn’t* matter. Apple is already years into designing gen 2, AND the actual mass market version of this (which will likely be glasses, 5+ years down the road when meta lens technology is ready for production).
Apple already knows what gen 2 is, the hardware is likely already in some stage of validation testing if not production line considerations for late next year or early 2026. You don’t manufacture at the scale Apple does without having all these pieces more or less locked in years in advance.
