The next time you walk into an Apple retail store, try finding a virtual reality (VR) headset. You can’t buy one. You’ll find plenty of gleaming smartphones, tablets, laptops and headphones. Heck, you’ll even find drones. And it’s the same story with the online Apple Store — there’s not a single VR headset available for sale. (The one model that previously had been available — a cheap $29.95 View-Master VR headset that you can also buy at Walmart and Kmart — was quietly removed at the beginning of February)
That’s more than strange, given how much effort other tech giants — including Apple rival Samsung — have spent on marketing VR to consumers.
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But even if it were true, so what? Carl Zeiss makes a VR headset already, the Carl Zeiss VR One Plus, and it’s basically a superior version of the Google Cardboard and a slightly less spectacular version of the Samsung Gear VR. It retails for $100, but has picked up mostly mixed reviews on Amazon.com (a rating of 3.1/5.0). You can find better, cheaper VR headsets made in China. (Don’t tell Donald Trump this.)
That’s really a shame, because the experience of using VR with the iPhone is currently a lousy one. It’s still primarily an app-driven experience, where you download a VR app from a third party like the New York Times and watch videos from within the app. If you have a Google Cardboard, you can slip your iPhone inside and have more of a VR experience. But most apps crash or freeze after a few seconds and generally offer a middling (and blurry!) experience at best (especially if you are using Wi-Fi to stream a VR experience).
And forget about using VR with a souped up Mac. You basically need to rely on a hack from a Swedish computer programmer to get VR to work on a Mac. High-end VR headsets like the Oculus Rift are not designed to work on the Mac.
Which brings us back to the unsettling truth — either Apple really doesn’t have anything ready to go in 2017 and keeps feeding us all these VR rumors to keep us from getting locked into the Google, Samsung or Facebook/Oculus ecosystems, or it’s preparing a mind-blowing version of VR that we can’t even imagine.
If you believe tech analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, one of the top Apple analysts around, Apple is planning to introduce a version of either AR or VR that’s “3–5 years ahead of the competition.” And certainly, Apple has scooped up a bunch of computer vision, AR and machine learning startups that could form the basis of some world-changing applications. Some have conjectured that Apple could be preparing a heads-up display with Siri integration. It could be fantastic, whatever Apple is planning for 2017 or (more likely) 2018.
But there could be another scenario that most people won’t even mention — Apple has become the new Microsoft. In other words, Apple has become a company so locked into its version of reality (the profitable Apple ecosystem based around the iPhone) that it has been largely blindsided by virtual reality and other technological developments. In the process, Apple risks becoming irrelevant. When it comes to hot fields like AI and VR, Apple is really just an afterthought these days.
How is it possible that Samsung, Google and Facebook all have brought VR products to market and Apple has not? (Even Microsoft has some cool VR technology known as the HoloLens in the works) If Apple disappoints again in 2017 and doesn’t manage to introduce a compelling VR experience, it’s going to make it awfully easy for some VR enthusiasts to give up on the iPhone and (heresy!) switch to Samsung or Google, where developers are actually creating new VR experiences. OK, if you have to ditch the iPhone for a Samsung Galaxy or Google Pixel phone, so be it. If that’s the case, it will be a shame. Apple had almost three years to come up with a high-quality VR product, but instead, opted to sell cheap $29.95 View-Masters.
Source: Medium