‘Meta and Apple: Same Game, Different Rules’

Jason Snell, Six Colors:

These are companies playing the same game, but in different ways. Who’s ahead? I would argue that it’s impossible to tell, because if Apple had a product like Orion we would never see it. We can argue about whether Apple’s compulsion to never, ever comment on unannounced products is beneficial or not, but it’s a Steve Jobs-created bit of Apple personality that is very unlikely to be countermanded any time soon.

Here’s how tenuous the Orion prototype is. Meta claims it would cost $10,000, but they haven’t said whether that would be the cost of goods or the retail price. But let’s give them the benefit of the doubt and say that the retail price would be just $10,000 if they brought this to market today. That’s expensive. But it’s not ridiculous. You can buy high-end workstation-class desktops that cost that much. A fully-specced 16-inch MacBook Pro costs $7,200.

But according to The Verge, these Orion prototypes only get 2 hours of battery life. And they’re too thick and chunky. You look weird, if not downright ugly, wearing them. So Meta not only needs to bring the price down by a factor of at least 3× (which would put it around the $3,500 price of Vision Pro, which most critics have positioned as too expensive), they also need to make the glasses smaller — more svelte — while increasing battery life significantly. Those two factors are in direct contradiction with each other. The only easy way to increase battery life is to put a bigger battery in the device, which makes the device itself thicker and heavier. (See this year’s iPhone 16 Pro.)

Orion by all accounts is a really compelling demo. But it’s also very clearly a prototype device only suitable for demos. Even at $10,000 retail it wouldn’t be compelling today. Yet somehow Meta wants us to believe they have “line of sight” to a compelling consumer product at a compelling price.

It’s exciting that they showed Orion publicly, but I don’t think it helped Meta in any way going forward. There’s a reason why Apple didn’t show off a prototype iPhone in 2004.

★ Sunday, 29 September 2024