Source: Sina Technology
Author: Zheng Jun
Also at WWDC every year, Apple's annual developer conference can be called the Spring Festival Gala for the global consumer electronics industry. It is a guarantee of network traffic and media focus, and is also a weather vane that affects the industry's products.
Chinese media returned to attend the conference
Apple cannot live without the Chinese market. This year, a large number of Chinese media and self-media were invited to Silicon Valley again after a few years to experience one of Apple's two most important launch events every year. However, after media from around the world arrived in Silicon Valley, they still gathered in Apple Park to watch the video. Other than seeing new products after the press conference, they weren't much different from Apple fans around the world.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, Apple has been recording video of the press conference in advance, and has enjoyed it. Even though Apple began to resume offline activities last year, it did not return to the traditional way it was shown on stage before. After all, recording videos in advance has many advantages. You can record beautiful videos. Coupled with all kinds of dazzling transition effects, two executives, Cook and Craig Federighi, also enjoyed the cool thrill of role-playing.
Another benefit of recording and posting the video in advance is that Apple can add more accurate subtitles in various languages, and there is time to do manual editing. Chinese translations such as “breaking the circle” are impossible to see in the middle of a rough game. In the past, when the domestic media connected to Apple's WWDC video stream, they also needed to request a simultaneous broadcast in Chinese. It is difficult to guarantee the accuracy of the translation; now Apple has directly eliminated this middle ground. Users can fully understand all product information by directly watching the live broadcast on Apple's official website.
What's impressive is that in this year's WWDC keynote speech, Apple CEO Cook only made speeches at the beginning and end. Senior Vice President Federighi alone led the launch of many products throughout the audience. The 54-year-old is also Jobs' favorite at NeXT. Step by step, he was promoted to product manager for all Apple products. Perhaps he is the most suitable successor to Cook.
Getting back to business, let's briefly introduce the products released by Apple. Several major software platforms for iOS, iPad OS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS are updated every year. This is also a regular part of WWDC every year. The upgrades to these platforms are mainly fine polishing, adding more personalized and user-friendly features.
Apple has “once again” demonstrated its ambition to expand in the fields of desktop gaming and remote collaboration. In these two entertainment and productivity markets, the Apple platform currently doesn't have a strong presence. Over the past few years, Apple has been hoping to attract game developers and plans to turn the Mac into a new gaming platform, but there is still a long way to go to shake the Windows platform; in the field of remote collaboration, Apple software is not the first choice for migrant workers, not even a second choice.
WWDC didn't introduce any updates to CarPlay this year, because none of last year's extremely cool products were implemented. After all, Apple hopes to use the iPhone to become the center of interaction between users and cars, not only to obtain the core data and permissions of the car, but also to turn the automobile manufacturer's large intelligent central control screen into a display for its own products. This will directly dampen the intelligent ambitions of car manufacturers. For this reason, GM has taken the lead in announcing the abandonment of CarPlay, and Toyota and BMW are also on the sidelines.
Although WWDC is traditionally a software release event, Apple will also update hardware in the summer, mainly the Mac product line. Apple has successively released: the 15-inch MacBook Air with the M2 chip has completed full-size coverage of the notebook product line; the Mac Studio and Mac Pro, equipped with the upgraded M2 Ultra chip, have completed the complete transformation of the Mac product line to self-developed chips. At this point, Apple computers no longer use Intel processors.
Of course, at WWDC this year, these software and hardware updates were completely supporting roles because everyone's focus was on a mysterious product. In the first half of the press conference, Apple was almost in a hurry to introduce all the hardware and software in a hurry, just to allow up to 40 minutes for this One More Thing to display.
There is no one of the best products
The legendary Apple mixed reality headset has finally been released. It's no exaggeration to say that Vision Pro is definitely Apple's most watched new product in the past ten years (and the Apple car, which is far away). This is the first time Apple has entered the MR product field. Although it has been rumored for several years, Apple's secrecy work is quite strict this time around, and the outside world didn't really understand the product's features until the press conference.
Vision Pro seamlessly blends the real environment with the virtual world, and users can move freely even while wearing a headset. Users can switch between AR and VR modes and independently adjust the screen display range. When the user is wearing a headphone, if someone else gets close to a certain distance, they will automatically appear in Vision Pro's field of view. Myopic users are not allowed to wear glasses at the same time, but magnetic myopia lenses can be used as an option.
Every revolutionary Apple product will be equipped with a new way of human-computer interaction. Just as Mackintosh pioneered the commercial use of a mouse, the iPhone uses disruptive multi-touch, and Vision Pro also uses various technologies such as innovative spatial position sensing and eye tracking. Users can operate and input with their eyes, voice, and fingers. Compared to the beautiful virtual world presented by Apple, Zuckerberg's metaverse is like a rough copycat space.
Currently known information about Vision Pro includes: using a dual-chip design, using the M2 computing chip and real-time sensing of the new product R1; 4K display, infrared camera for spatial sensing; the new operating platform, VisionOS, has yet to be built by developers, but is compatible with iOS and iPad OS applications; it can be connected to a power source for continuous use, and the external battery lasts for two hours. It will go on sale to developers in early 2024, and the price is as high as $3,499.
Although Vision Pro will only be available next year, no specific parameters have been announced, and there have been no open media reviews, the user experience presented at the press conference was certainly fascinating and amazing. It's definitely one of the best mixed reality products in the industry right now. Of course, the specific usage experience, wearing comfort, and level of heat generation will need to be learned later.
Whether it's smartphones, tablets, smartwatches, or smart speakers, Apple is not the first industry pioneer to launch products. It always waits until competitors release at least three generations of products and cultivates sufficient market popularity and user demand before launching its own products. Relying on mature and perfect products, exquisite design, and workmanship, and the ecological stickiness of the platform, it can harvest market users in one fell swoop and take away the biggest share and revenue of the industry.
The same goes for their foray into virtual reality. Major manufacturers such as Google, Microsoft, Sony, Samsung, HTC, and Meta have been testing the waters in this field for 78 years, iteratively releasing and updating several products. Product forms range from VR to AR to XR, design parameters, usage scenarios, target users, and ecosystem construction. All manufacturers have carried out trial and error and exploration time and time again.
Apple is always the last to enter, but it takes away the biggest cake, leaving competitors envious and amazed and helpless. However, there is another reason why Apple's MR headsets are getting a lot of attention this time: Apple only joined this field when the metaverse trend has cooled down significantly. Can it once again drive the ecological prosperity of the entire industry?
The metaverse concept is rapidly cooling down
A year and a half ago was when the metaverse concept was at its hottest. At the end of October 2021, Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would change its name to Meta and invest $10 billion a year to fully build a metaverse platform and lead the company's transformation into the virtual reality world. For a while, the tech industry seemed to be making a big splash in the metaverse. This craze quickly swept into the Chinese tech community on the other side of the Pacific, spawning a number of metaverse concept companies.
The metaverse craze has been sought after by many giants. Bill Gates also agreed with his little teacher Zuckerberg's judgment. He optimistically predicts that in just two or three years, most of the industry's teleconferences will shift from video to 3D virtual metaverse meetings. Two months later, Microsoft announced a $68 billion acquisition of game development giant Activision Blizzard. One reason was to lay out the future metaverse game industry.
However, with the sharp cooling of the US economy last year, the stock prices of technology companies plummeted, and performance stagnated or even declined, and major technology companies had to start laying off workers and shrinking. In just one year, Zuckerberg's metaverse dream had to cool down in the face of harsh reality. A year after Meta's metaverse platform was launched, the number of users was less than 200,000, far below the 300,000 target set by Zuckerberg.
In 2022 alone, Zuckerberg burned $13.7 billion on the metaverse concept. Meta's layoffs at the end of last year also included the “reality lab” department where the metaverse is located. Zuckerberg's obsessive investment in the metaverse has also become the target of questions from Meta employees and criticism from investors. Financial reports show that in the first quarter of this year, “Reality Lab” once again lost a huge loss of 4 billion US dollars.
Although Zuckerberg doesn't admit that his metaverse strategy has failed, he is actually being forced to face reality. Recently, he has clearly begun to change his tone. When he mentioned “priority growth areas,” he began talking about the hottest AI recently, and rarely mentioned his dream plan to invest 10 billion dollars a year to develop the metaverse.
Meanwhile, another company, Microsoft, which is driving the metaverse dream in 2021, is also adjusting its direction and fully investing in research and development in the field of generative AI. The once popular Holelen project has been thrown into the dark by Microsoft, the project team has made layoffs or internal adjustments, and the virtual reality company AltspaceVR, which was acquired in 2017, has been directly shut down.
It's not just tech giants that are rapidly cooling down in the metaverse, but also Silicon Valley's venture capital ecosystem. Statistics from venture capital platform PitchBook show that the total financing of US metaverse-related startups in the first five months of this year was only 664 million US dollars, which is less than a quarter of the 2.93 billion US dollars in the same period last year. Obviously, venture capitalists are no longer keen on this track.
The price is too high and the market is doubtful
In the past, many tech giants or startups also launched amazing products, but in the end they all ended up without problems because the market was too small. Google Glass, Magic Leap, and Microsoft HoloLens received no less praise when they were released than Apple today, but these once-popular products have now broken into the cold.
While every failed product has its own problems, they all have common reasons for their failures. Hardware prices, ecological content, and usage scenarios are the key to whether MR products can get users.
Although Apple also wants to enter the gaming industry, Vision Pro's target users are not limited to VR gamers. Vision Pro is almost a virtual extension of the iOS ecosystem, and is also compatible with current iPad OS apps, which means users can experience current iOS apps in a new virtual world. This positioning has greatly expanded the usage scenarios of Vision Pro.
To reflect Vision Pro's ecological content building strategy, Apple invited Disney CEO Bog Iger (Bog Iger) at the press conference. The latter showed the Disney content experience on Vision Pro and announced that the streaming platform Disney+ will be launched when Vision Pro is released. Ironically, however, Disney shut down its metaverse strategy division in the 7,000 layoffs two months ago.
Just how big is the metaverse hardware market space? It may be difficult to make accurate predictions, but the current market situation is really not optimistic. Market research firm NPD predicts a 2% year-on-year decline in sales in the global VR headset market last year. However, according to statistics from another market research company, CCS Insight, the total sales of AR/VR devices worldwide fell 12% last year, to only 9.6 million units.
Because of scale and cost considerations, Apple rarely creates niche products, because only by entering the mass market can it get huge sales. Apple sells around 200 million iPhones every year, and the average price exceeds 800 US dollars. This is the core cornerstone of revenue. But the MR headset is probably Apple's most special product. Market research company CounterPoint Research predicts that sales of Apple MR products may reach 500,000 units in the first year.
Overpriced pricing is clearly the biggest barrier preventing Vision Pro from gaining popularity. Although outsiders had previously anticipated that Apple's MR products might be priced as high as $3,000, the final announced price far exceeded expectations: 3,500 US dollars. This price is several times higher than mainstream VR products on the market.
The Quest 3, which was just released by Meta, is priced at only $499, and the Sony PlayStation VR2 is priced at $550. At a time when the global economy is facing the prospect of a recession and demand in the consumer electronics industry is shrinking (global smartphone shipments plummeted 14.6% year-on-year in the first quarter), if only one-seventh of Apple's VR products can't be sold, how much will the $3,500 Vision Pro sell in market?
Perhaps only Apple can bear the initial losses and wait patiently for several years to cultivate ecological market demand. However, the high price of hardware has always been the biggest obstacle to the popularity of Vision Pro.
Editor/jayden