It doesn't have a poor battery life it has a poor battery design. If they put a decent battery on the damn thing it would be okay, it's not particularly power hungry but apple just give it a gnat's testicle of a battery.
The design makes perfect sense. You can trivially add an additional pack with capacity if that's your use case. The included pack does the power management and has enough for plenty of people without being in the way, and it's as simple as plugging in any source of USC-C power at appropriate specs to extend it.
That would be a fine argument if the device didn't cost more than my mortgage repayments. But for device that expensive, they absolutely need to put a decent battery on the thing.
A "decent battery" is bigger and more weight to carry around that plenty of use cases don't want or benefit from. It's not small for cost reasons. It's because it's a worse device if you force it to be huge.
The price is high, but only if you ignore how much tech is in it. A lesser but close dumb display from anyone else is thousands in its own.
There isn't a single use case that wouldn't improve with a longer lifespan of the device.
It is nothing but Apple marketing bullshit to claim people want a small battery, and nothing but Apple greed to increase the profit by using worse components.
Yes it's got lots of cool tech in it, none of which does anything. Excuse me while I go and watch Netflix on a display that costs 1/10 of the money yet has thousands of times the functionality.
Being overly complicated doesn't mean it's worth money.
But it's beyond idiotic to trash the first device on the market actually capable of functional AR because you personally don't care about the tech people have been waiting decades for.
When iPhone was released App Store didn't even exist. A smartphone without apps is just a phone and VR glasses without apps are just a 360 degree monitor you wear on your face. I think Apple's reasoning here is to provide the hardware and see what people do with it.
When Apple released the first iPhone no one had an app store, originally Apple wasn't even going to have an app store it was all going to be web apps and then they realized that they could make more money with an app store. It wasn't a feature people expected, but people do expect apps now and they're not present.
Can confirm, I had an Apple Newton. Hardware with no purpose is just hardware. So far, this seems like it's going where every VR headset goes. It's a solution looking for a problem.
I think Apple’s reasoning here is to provide the hardware and see what people do with it.
for sure, and in the rest of the tech world, we call these devkits, not finished products. Apple is trying to convince rando non-dev apple fanboys to pay $3500 for the privilege of playing with devkits. And in many ways, it's a dead end, especially on input. what a shit show.
I would be potentially interested in developing an app for it there are some things holding me back.
There's no documentation on how to develop for it, that's a big one.
I refuse to pay that much money for a dev kit
It's missing vital features like the ability to connect to a bluetooth keyboard without having to go via a MacBook
It's so expensive that only business users would buy it, and yet its battery is so small that it's no good for business use, so where the hell are my customers going to come from?
It's only available in the United States again limiting the number of customers that I may potentially have
It just doesn't seem like it's been properly released yet. It's a beta product with beta features and has been released as such except it has a non beta price. And also virtually no developers got early access so there's basically no apps.
you'll need an m1 or m2 dev box - so $800-3000+ for something with decent ram and storage. and you'll want an apple care subscription, $400 for two years (which won't actually pay for repairs, simply reduce the pain of them enough to justify); and you'll need to pay an apple dev id - $100 for indies, $250 for enterprise iirc; and you'll want to get some extra batteries to daisy-chain off the usb-c port on the existing battery because that shit only lasts 2.5 hrs at BEST. oh and spend another $100 on each devkit because they don't come with a fucking case.
it's like their dev chain is a fucking sadomasochistic loyalty test where the privilege to develop for the device's barren ecosystem costs more and more at each step. All for the honor of writing xcode apps that are running on ipad os++
Yeah the iPhone was successful at launch because it was a sleek blackberry and had iPod like capabilities. But it didn’t blow up until the App Store came out. I expect this product to do the same, and in the same way, companies to release competitive products with similar capabilities in a feature war until the newest releases are mostly talking about resolution and processor speed instead of new features
If I remember correctly, Apple said they can only make 400,000 a year. That's a huge bottle neck to overcome for anything to "blow up" in sales and users.
With it being this small, it limits user adoption. Businesses won't want to invest to see if it will help their productivity because even if it does, they won't be able to obtain enough of them to deploy to their employees (because it won't be just their business that will try to obtain them). Same goes for the education sectors, government, etc...
I feel that when Apple stated that production limit, they killed it from gaining adoption because it showed that it can't scale to needed potential usage.