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by surprisetalk·3y ago·view on hn ↗
I recently wrote a long piece about why I think Apple will win the AR/VR wars.

They might have a rocky start, but they still have a lot of advantages.

1. AR will devour smartphones.

2. Apple is the only company that can quickly overcome consumer AR/VR design challenges.

3. Apple has positioned itself to distribute the best AR/VR content.

4. Apple will cement its early lead with a new blue-bubble effect.

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[1] https://taylor.town/apple-will-win-vr

2 comments
I think number 2 is a really good point. But I think the biggest reason why they could be immensely successful there is, Apple dog foods their own stuff. Apple will generate enough apps for it to be useful. This is where I feel like Oculus/Facebook(Meta)+Oculus kind of messed up where the Google really messed up with Daydream. The expectation for most of the product life cycles was for developers to just jump on board and start developing, turning out the apps. I love DayDream, but there were hardly any decent apps. Google relied too much on indie devs and 3rd party. Most of the daydream apps by google were essentially just demos. Apple will provide at least enough apps to make it useful while also using that knowledge to feed back in to the development cycle.
Apple notoriously hinders it's own potential so it doesn't cannibalize it's own market share. They have no incentive to turn off the iPhone faucet, so why would they make a product that devours smartphones?
> why would they make a product that devours smartphones?

Likely because they expect AR to eventually devour smartphones, and they would rather devour it themselves than let others do so.

Plus, it will be a painful growth with rough edges anyway, so the iPhone faucet isn't turning off anytime soon. In fact, it would be quite a helpful source of revenue, until AR adoption reaches the masses and gets to the stage of actually being polished and commonplace enough to devour smartphones.

See: Apple slowly winding down iPod over the course of many years, as iPhone cannibalized it almost entirely.

"If you don't cannibalize yourself, someone else will," Jobs famously said. It's not just a good quote--it might be the smartest realization he ever had, and the reason the company he founded is now more valuable than any other. It's not often that a company is willing to cannibalize its own product to make a new one.