There are good uses for both. For example, architects have used VR to help prospective customers tour a virtual building instead of looking at floor plans or a model. There is some evidence to suggest that customers are more likely to go with an architect that delivers this or that they can find flaws with a design before it gets built, saving costs. Augmented reality works great for training certain types of professionals. I've seen a really great demo of some kit for helping train surgeons by recreating a

Yeah, that's not true. The App store was released one year later. They didn't just create that in a weekend as an afterthought. They clearly just wanted to push a number of iphones out to early adopters so that developers would be interested in developing for the iPhone and filling their coming app store with apps.

> People forget that when Steve Jobs released the iPhone 1 there were no apps for it at all! He believed that Apple had written all the apps the phone would need (eg. phone, calendar, etc.) and that everything else would be taken care of by web applets.

> Now, of course, smartphones proved wildly popular, and web-based apps weren't up to the challenges of everything new smartphone-owners wanted them to do. Apple quickly reversed course, and added the now (in)famous App Store.

> But the point is, when he released a product, that product was ready to be used (at least as he envisioned it). Tim Cook releasing the hardware for the VP without the software to make people want to use it shows a critical difference between the two.

While I don't really see the point of the headset myself, outside of virtual monitors or "theater experience" viewing, I am curious why a company the size of Apple wouldn't have written at least a smattering of highly "wow" factor apps for the thing for the initial release. It's almost like they created it with no actual vision of what it was they wanted it to do. "Here's some cool new hardware. We don't know what it does well. Have fun." That's a big price for a, "Invent something cool after purchase" type

Ironically, the original iPhone was overpriced, too. Apple famously had to give it a rather large price cut to stimulate sales. It's easy to forget it almost wasn't a huge smash hit, because initially it was just a glorified feature phone. It was also largely the enthusiast community jailbreaking it and creating homebrew apps that convinced Apple to create their own App Store.

...a toy without the proper infrastructure to be played on.

It’s way too expensive to be a toy indeed, I can see real use cases for commercial uses like CAD, the issue is making commercial software is way slower than just porting over existing social media/photo/crap already existing mobile apps to this is easy. It will take along time maximize the headset, its definitely cool, but looks like it will take a lot of time and money to squeeze it out.

> What we're witnessing here is Apple having too much pride to admit they severely overestimated the size of demographic willing to drop three-and-a-half grand on a toy.

Or, that they've really put out a developer prototype device to "prove" the tech, but passing it off as a consumer device that's over engineered (those "see-through eyes" gimmick) to try to sell it as such.

We all know you'd use it to visually undress the Receptionist.

10 years? How long has the last scene room of The Carousel of Progress at Disney World had the adult son character playing with the VR headset that he got for Christmas? And I've lost count of the number of movies where VR was featured, like the first Jurassic Park movie, where they're using headsets to sequence DNA to create dinosaurs. Come to think of it, bringing back dinosaurs would still be more interesting than VR.

People have been predicting this stuff is gonna catch on in a big way for a long time