Realistically this "Pro" version is for early adopters. There will surely be a regular/SE/Lite version in a couple of years for the price of a MacBook Air.
> And who will develop software for something with such a small user base?
Everyone will, if they're smart. Being first to market on a new platform is huge, even if it will take a few years to have significant market penetration.
Angry Birds became a multi-billion dollar franchise for being one of the first iPhone games. Who knows what the equivalent will be for XR.
Respectfully, even the iPad hasn't fully evolved into a laptop replacement, so why should we think this device will fit all the multitude of use cases that necessitate the computing power represented by a laptop / desktop device?
In the presentation today, Apple specifically mentioned connecting to your macOS device as a seamless experience. In my opinion, this will be another "content consumption" device like an iPad that integrates with macOS devices and is not a replacement for them.
For now. I actually see them moving to this if it takes off both for battery life and computing. Them even labeling it as a spatial computer, shows there positioning this to be their future.
It is? As in it acts like a normal Mac OS machine that happens to be attached to your head, holds all your files and stuff without communicating to another PC?
It's no more a laptop replacement than iPad is. Almost 4 years down the road after the release of iPadOS and it's still a failure as a laptop replacement save for a few well-selected niches.
And the new VisionOS (or whatever Apple will decide to call it) will have to be even more restricted than iPadOS was compared to MacOS just because of the tighter coupling to your body.
I agree with your general sentiment, except with one small caveat. I don't think it' s a laptop replacement per se. It's more like an immersive glue that will allow your laptop, if you have one in the future, to remain as a standalone device, but through handoff/side-care/R1 it'll stitch everything together into a virtual environment.
When you take it off, your laptop, phone, whatever will still work great as normal.
It's a caveat because for a lot of people, I don't think laptops will be necessary in the future. My mom doesn't have one but is obsessed with her phone. Probably one day laptops will mostly be for pros.
But yeah, in general I agree with everything you said.
The WWDC demos suggested that it would be a full development device, and it has the same M2 processor as the M2 Macbook. It is basically a Macbook in a different form factor and with a bunch of extra sensors.
Everyone. It's a laptop replacement.
Realistically this "Pro" version is for early adopters. There will surely be a regular/SE/Lite version in a couple of years for the price of a MacBook Air.
> And who will develop software for something with such a small user base?
Everyone will, if they're smart. Being first to market on a new platform is huge, even if it will take a few years to have significant market penetration.
Angry Birds became a multi-billion dollar franchise for being one of the first iPhone games. Who knows what the equivalent will be for XR.