Comments on: Apple – No Nirvana

By: Tim Nash

Tim Nash — Fri, 24 Nov 2017 11:10:15 +0000

This is go-to-market strategy. VR/AR glasses/contacts are not ready for mass market consumers and may not be for a few years. So it would make sense for Apple to make solutions for sectors, such as Health, where it is already putting in effort. Apple can also make the platform available to enterprise partners for other sectors. In this way Apple and users will gain experience at low volumes until the design is right for consumers.

Apple wearables is the size of a Fortune 400 company and while I expect this to grow, VR/AR glasses/contacts is an obvious missing piece and Apple showed with the Watch that it is prepared to enter a market early.

By: windsorr

windsorr — Fri, 24 Nov 2017 06:59:36 +0000

Yes and no.
On silicon certianly, I could see it putting Vevana tech into its silicon and making it much smaller.
On Enterprise, I am not convinced. Apple is in the enterperise because senior managment are consumers and wanted to have their products with them in their work environment. It has not really done any speciliase hardware for the workplace with the excpetion of that super high end Mac workstation. Thats why I dont expect them to go down the AR for enterpirse route

By: windsorr

windsorr — Fri, 24 Nov 2017 06:57:32 +0000

Yes agree… and I wrote as much on your first point. My research indicates that Apple has not abandoned the car completely but is now focusing only on autnomous driving. To me this is just plain odd as there is no way to bring this to market without hardware which is eactly the problem that Waymo has.

By: p

Thu, 23 Nov 2017 13:16:39 +0000

Apple has a history of shrinking technology and refining it, as recently as shrinking Kinect for the TrueDepth camera / Face ID function. Just because they acquire Vrvana doesn’t mean they’re going to release it as is. Their purpose would be to take it, refine it, repackage it into something useful.

And,”I see this activity much like the vehicle or the television which were experiments that failed to stand up to the scrutiny of market reality.” except that more research keeps coming out of the automotive project, and while there have been a few departures, the majority of the engineers hired for it are still employed at Apple. I suspect that you’ve written it off prematurely. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1711.06396.pdf is Apple’s research paper on using point clouds to improve LIDAR detection in driving systems that just published. Whether anything comes of it to consumers is another matter, but they aren’t done with it yet. They have leaked the concept of self-driving shuttles running on their campus, they still have the fleet of Lexus vehicles equipped with LIDAR, and they still have the investment in Didi, which would make a good partnership for equipping cars with LIDAR in China as a wider test, outside the view of their home market consumer. They bought the test track so they could run tests in private. Apple values secrecy, and I imagine they’d like very much for people to believe they’ve abandoned automotive entirely while they keep working on it.

By: Tim Nash

Tim Nash — Thu, 23 Nov 2017 09:09:02 +0000

Vrvana’s technology with Apple’s silicon expertise may be good enough for niche enterprise markets where effectiveness matters much more than looks. Now that Apple has a substantial and growing enterprise market and well established partners, it may be better and more profitable to provide AR/VR solutions there until the design is good enough for consumers.