> * edit: Let me just add that Apple TV hardware which is largely abandoned and afterthought product line considered unsuccessful, for example is a 13M/year item for Apple. 20M lifetime is not mass market.
Besides it seems like comparing apples to oranges. Apple TV works with existing TVs which are already billions in numbers. VR devices are completely new devices. Meta has sold 20M headsets SO FAR, not in its lifetime.
Weird semantics on so far vs lifetime.. it's the same thing.
Meta and Apple are targeting different markets and you can tell by Apple's product videos.
To me, Meta is entrenched in the currently gamer centric VR market. I call it this because 100% of the people I know who have been excited by VR over the last 10 years have been young, single, male gamers. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, but the marketing & people excited about the product, to me, seem to align there.
Apple doesn't even call it VR because they are trying to target a much wider market.
I agree with this (though trying is the operative word). It seems a strange moment in time to choose to call the game for Apple though, at a grand total of 0 units shipped and a price point of $3500+tax. It is literally not knowable now in 2023 if they will be able to manage to do what Tesla did, in transitioning from “toy for rich jerks” to “reasonable mass market choice, and we can manufacture them in mass quantities too.” I mean, it’s not even clear yet if the rich jerk set will adopt it.
Tesla is not a great analogy for this. Their lowest priced vehicle is only just below the average sales price of all new cars and that vehicle excludes the Tesla brand features that Apple would not strip out of their product. And that is when the average vehicle sales price has increased 10k in the last four years. So for the analogy to work Apple would effectively have to strip down their device to the point that it is just an expensive copy cat Quest and Meta would have to raise prices 50% (to be fair, the price rise might happen).
Source? https://www.businessofapps.com/data/apple-statistics/#AppleT... says there 31M active Apple TVs in the US. https://9to5mac.com/2020/09/02/apple-tv-market-share-report/ says Apple TV has 2% share of 1.14B global TV platforms. These don't look like 13M/year of sales.
Besides it seems like comparing apples to oranges. Apple TV works with existing TVs which are already billions in numbers. VR devices are completely new devices. Meta has sold 20M headsets SO FAR, not in its lifetime.