By John Moltz
May 19, 2023 5:00 PM PT
This Week in Apple: Could go either way
The headset goes on a real expectations rollercoaster ride this week as Apple clears the deck for WWDC.
The Apple headset is awesome
If you were worried about Apple’s chances in the AR/VR space you can relax because it looks like they’ve got this headset business all sorted.
Word on the street—well, it’s more like an alley, a dark alley where rumors are passed—is it’ll knock your socks off. If you wear them on your face.
I’m not here to judge your fashion choices.
Oculus VR founder and noted rich person Palmer Luckey had this to enigmatically tweet about Apple’s upcoming offering this week:
The Apple headset is so good.
How does he know? Unclear. In what way does he mean? Who knows? Do we care what he thinks? Reasonable people can disagree.
Still: huge, if true.
This, of course, comes after a tester said last month that people would be “blown away” by the Apple headset. So, it looks like it’s going to be a tremendous hit. So good, in fact, that you can just close this tab and not bother reading the next bit.
The Apple headset sucks
I’m sorry did I say the headset was great? Apologies. That was a typo and should have been edited out. What I meant to say is that it’s kind of a mess and Tim Cook has actively tried to distance himself from the project.
Yes, according to Mark Gurman:
The device Cook will present, say people familiar with a development process that spread over seven years, has deviated far from his initial vision. Initially imagined as a pair of unobtrusive eyeglasses that could be worn all day, Apple’s device has morphed into a headset that resembles a pair of ski goggles and requires a separate battery pack.
Apple’s bringing back steampunk. Not that it ever went away.
As always, for those of you watching at home, please remember that…
The stakes are high.
Apple, teetering as it is on the edge of bankruptcy…
Wait.
Look, it seems silly, but a lot of people don’t know that if you write an article about an upcoming product from Apple and you don’t say that the stakes are high, you lose your membership to the Apple pundit gym. It’s a harsh rule, but it was laid down in the early 2000s and it’s hard to change bylaws.
For Cook, it’s the release of a long-awaited product that could be one of his last big swings as Apple CEO…
Tim is apparently about to go out for cigarettes and he’s not coming back.
…and will affect his legacy, either by giving him another major achievement or underscoring the narrative that the company’s biggest victories were initiated under his predecessor, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.
So, Cook has had “major achievements” but not “the company’s biggest victories”. OK. As an exercise for the reader, you can find charts of Apple’s revenue, profit, and valuation over the last 12 years. Have they gone up or down at all? Just wondering aloud.
It is Tim Cook’s great curse that it was Steve Jobs who introduced the iPhone, the biggest product in the history of products. And the history of history. And histrionics. Did Tim Cook also introduce the biggest product ever? No, he did not. ‘Nuff said.
Michael Gartenberg, a former Apple marketing executive who’s now an independent consultant, warns that the device could be “one of the great tech flops of all time,”…
As big a flop as the Apple Watch?!
For his part, Ming-Chi Kuo said Apple is “well prepared” for the device’s release. But that’s largely because it doesn’t think it’s going to sell that many.
Apple expects to sell just one headset per day per retail store…
Apple has 535 retail stores, so…that’s not a lot.
Well, at least we know it’ll either be a huge hit or an absolute disaster. Just like every other Apple product launch ever.
Before we begin…
Apple made a slew of announcement this week, the most important of which was a series of important new accessibility features that will be coming to iOS 17, including Assistive Access—an easy way to get to the things you most often do with your phone—and Personal Voice, a means of recording your voice for future digital use.
The company also said that it’s bringing new concert discovery features to Apple Maps and Apple Music, including Set Lists that show you what songs were played at a particular show. Now you can go home and listen to the songs you just saw performed, in the order you saw them played, instead of all random like an animal.
Some would say that set lists are what separate us from the animals.
Apple also said it had prevented more than $2 billion in App Store fraud. Boy, a billion in fraud, two billion in fraud…pretty soon you’re talking about real money.
Because of both these announcements and those last week, some are expecting the company to unveil its expected larger MacBook Air next week, setting the table for a really big show in June.
Personally, I think if Apple wants to show it has a really big WWDC planned, it should announce the headset next week instead of waiting. That’s how you throw down the gauntlet.
Wait, does the headset come with gauntlets? If not, how will I complete the ensemble?
[John Moltz is a Six Colors contributor. You can find him on Mastodon at Mastodon.social/@moltz and he sells items with references you might get on Cotton Bureau.]