Apple’s New CEO Has a Background in VR Headsets, But is Reportedly Bearish on Vision Pro

By
Scott Hayden
-
29

Apple announced that CEO Tim Cook is stepping down, and John Ternus, a long-time Apple veteran, is set to take his place. As head of hardware engineering, Ternus oversaw the launch of Vision Pro in addition to a slew of core Apple products over the years, although the new CEO may have some reservations about the company’s premium XR headset moving forward.

Fresh out of the University of Pennsylvania, where he majored in mechanical engineering, the soon-to-be Apple CEO actually did a four-year stint at Virtual Research Systems, a now-defunct hardware company making some of the first commercially available VR headsets.

Virtual Research’s PC VR headsets were decidedly of a different era, although they helped spark the latest generation. Just three years prior to the release of Oculus Rift DK1, in 2010 Oculus founder Palmer Luckey even called an owner of a Virtual Research V8 a “lucky bastard”, noting the device’s 60-degree field-of-view was “pretty fantastic” more than a decade after the headset’s release.

Virtual Reality Systems V8 | Image courtesy ResearchGate

Notably, as Ternus was a mechanical engineer at Virtual Research Systems from 1997-2001, he likely worked on the V8, which came out at the tail end of the VR craze of the ’90s.

Leaving Virtual Research Systems in 2001 for Apple, Ternus worked his way up through a number of the company’s hardware teams, contributing to the development of multiple generations of core products, including iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

His biggest role came in 2021, when Ternus became Apple’s Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering, taking over from Dan Riccio. As a result, Ternus also inherited the company’s long-term gamble in XR, which spanned more than a decade in the making, as he oversaw Vision Pro’s launch in 2023.

John Ternus | Image courtesy Apple

Still, despite his XR lineage, Ternus seems to be skeptical of Vision Pro’s place in Apple’s lineup.

As mentioned by Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman last month, Ternus has shown some trepidation around Apple’s previous moves in the past, including the now-cancelled Apple Car project as well as Vision Pro, which has underperformed relative to other hardware launched under Ternus, including the Apple Watch and AirPods.

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“When the company has taken swings at big new product categories in recent years, Ternus has often been in the conservative camp,” Gurman says. “He was circumspect about Apple building a car, fearing it would distract the company, drain profits and pull engineers from core products. He was similarly wary of the mixed-reality headset that became the Vision Pro, drawing on his experience of trying to create a virtual-reality head-worn device at a startup in the 1990s. In both of those cases his skepticism was prescient. Apple eventually killed the car, and the Vision Pro has been a bust.”

Slated to take over as CEO once Cook officially steps down this summer, he’s also inheriting the company’s years-long efforts in developing AR glasses, which Cook reportedly hopes they can release before Meta.

“Tim cares about nothing else,” Bloomberg reported last year. “It’s the only thing he’s really spending his time on from a product development standpoint.”

Apple Vision Pro (M5) | Image courtesy Apple

It remains to be seen just how enthusiastic Apple’s new CEO will be on pushing those segment-defining XR devices though. Heading into the second half of the decade, the Cupertino tech giant is ostensibly now balancing ambitions across more segments than ever, including the new consumer-friendly Mac Neo ($600) which is making headway in stripping market share from a host of mid-tier Windows laptops.

Meanwhile, the company’s XR hardware roadmap may be taking a slightly unexpected turn. Last month a separate report from Gurman detailed a move by Apple to more heavily invest in a competitor to Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses—a stark departure from Apple’s initial XR strategy, which supposedly include three distinct categories: an iPhone-tethered AR headset with wireless controller, a high-end mixed reality headset, and standalone AR glasses.

Whatever the case, Ternus’s entry as CEO marks a decisive next chapter for the company. And we’ll be watching to see how he ultimately views Vision Pro, be it a dead end or a launchpad to sleeker, more consumer-friendly XR devices in the future. As it is, we’re still waiting to hear more about the reported follow-ups to Vision Pro, which supply chain leaks suggest could include two new headsets.

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Scott Hayden
Well before the first modern XR products hit the market, Scott recognized the potential of the technology and set out to understand and document its growth. He has been professionally reporting on the space for nearly a decade as Editor at Road to VR, authoring more than 4,000 articles on the topic. Scott brings that seasoned insight to his reporting from major industry events across the globe.
  • sjefdeklerk

    Yeah can't blame him, it's hard to be bullish on VR, the field seems completely dead. I stilll believe in VR, strongly even so, but I also see that hardware has to become better and cheaper for it to become a success. Which will probably take several years.

    • Leisure Suit Barry

      It's worse than dead. At least if it was dead then we could get a hard reset in several years

      Instead it's in a coma, just dragging along like a 3 legged dog

  • Christian Schildwaechter

    TL;DR: the Apple Vision Pro is here to stay

    Virtual Research's Flight Helmet was the first VR HMD I tried, sometimes in the early 90s on a techno and media exhibition. I don't recall what I actually saw, or the impression the 320*240/eye stretched over 100° diagonally left. My main memory is this thing being very heavy, because it was literally a steel helmet with the optics attached at the front, bringing it to 3x the weight of a Quest 3 without the cable, and 4x with. I never got to try the successor V8, pictured above and referenced by Luckey, but it was apparently a big improvement doubling the horizontal resolution, halving the weight and reducing the FoV to 60°, so the virtual world no longer looked like Minecraft.

    Apple's future CEO John Ternus wasn't the only one skeptical about AVP at Apple. Apparently the Vision Pro design team itself thought that it was too early to release it, with the tech still to clunky to be usable as a consumer product. But Tim Cook decided that 2023 would be the year they introduces it to the world. The result was a device that managed to deliver the baseline Vision experience they were aiming for, but at an extremely high price point and excessively high weight, due to all the tech this still required, limiting it mosty to developers, first movers and enterprise customers.

    Cook overruling the design team may have been driven both by Facebook betting heavily on XR and the Metaverse, rebranding itself to Meta in 2021, and pushing for Mixed Reality with the 2023 Quest 3, as well as wanting to launch a new Apple product category before he retired, one that wasn't just mostly an upgrade like the Macbooks getting Apple Silicon previously only used in iPhones or the Apple Watch, both initiatives already started under Steve Jobs.

    Given Ternus' VR background, I'd suspect that he isn't opposed to the idea of XR/VR in general, and instead just thinks that it is still too early simply because the tech isn't ready. And with all the discussions about VR needing to get to a form factor similar to smartglasses before it might become attractive to the mass market and regular consumers, that's a valid point of view for a company that expects tens or hundreds of millions in unit sales. Apple is still investing heavily into media for AVP, keeps pushing OS updates that really benefit the users, and updated AVP to the M5 for enterprise users, making it the most powerful standalone HMD by far. And Tim Cook isn't leaving Apple, he just steps down as CEO and becomes a member of the board instead. So the Vision line will very likely stay, and hopefully see much cheaper and lighter versions under Ternus, who is said to have a similar focus on usability as Jobs. The recently released Macbook Neo using a binned version of the A18 Pro SoC from the iPhone 16 Pro to bring down cost while improving repairability, receiving universal praise, may acutally be a good template for future Apple Vision HMDs.

  • xyzs

    Then make it not weigh a TON by packing useless bs such as a fake eye screen on it, and reduce the price by removing stupid bs such as mentioned screen or the all in one glass shell or integrated speaker (use airpods pro for sound), and it may have a future.

    The guys released an unusable, overweighted overpriced product never updated decently yet and are like “hum, people don’t like VR that much” … no we don’t like what you did with VR and how stupidly expensive you try to sell it for !

    • Christian Schildwaechter

      Roughly USD 700 of the estimated USD 1400-1800 AVP build costs is just for the microOLED displays. The EyeSight OLED is estimated to cost USD 15-30, with the lenticular lens in front of it just being a stamped plastic sheet. The glass front is necessary for the 14 different camera (like) sensors, and made from extremely strong technical glass that adds a lot of rigidity while being very thin/light. A similar plastic cover would no doubt be cheaper, but would also have to be much thicker to provide similar protection to the current AVP, which survived drop tests from 2.5m/8ft without issues. And when the glass finally popped off after being dropped onto hard floor from 3m/10ft, both the glass and the AVP were still intact and working, only separated.

      A cheaper and lighter Apple Vision Air will most likely use newer/cheaper displays, only one cheap A-series SoC instead of an expensive M-/R-series combo, and reduce the number of sensors to whatever Apple found to be the acceptable minimum. Depending on how fast the ridiculously high prices for microOLEDs fall, this alone might half the build costs and cut some weight. More weight will be shed by reducing the very complex multi-PCB inside to just a few PCBs connected with less screws, and optimized for machine assembly instead of requiring literally hours of expensive manual labour, roughly ten times as long as assembling an iPhone.

      The things that don't really have to change are the glass front and the EyeSight display, simply because these don't significanty impact either price or weight, and are very important for Apple's attempt to not make AVP an isolating experience.

      • XRC

        An unfortunate side effect of using glass was the numerous reports of glass cracking during normal use with no impacts but from thermal/mechanical stress.

        • Christian Schildwaechter

          I assume that these were mostly early production kinks. Apple released a video about the custom machinery they built to create the AVP's front from a flat glass plane by selectively heating and then bending it, and they were apparently very proud of it. Glass is stiff, so any bending will lead to internal stress that creates default lines along which the glass will break. Most of the glass has to be bend in an outwards curve, but over the nose there is a change from an outwards curve to an inwards curve and back. So this is the area with the highest likeliness of uneven internal stress.

          Which is why some AVP glass fronts broke exactly there for no apparent reason. As this is a production issue, not an inherent problem of the material itself, they should be able to mitigate this by altering the process, maybe stretching the glass either more or less in the inner curve, or heating it more, or adding more structural support. I'm pretty sure that the tool development was/is the most expensive part of the front glass production. Once this is perfected, all that is still required is rather cheap pieces of flat technical glass.

      • xyzs

        The cost of screen certainly decreased since 2 years, now that it went larger scale. The other issue with the weight is the internals nature of myltiple metal chassis screwed together rather than being a unified simpler structure. They could easily divide the weight by 2 by dropping the luxury look and revamping the design.
        There must be an luxury/weight middleground between a beyond 2 build and a vision pro build.

        • Christian Schildwaechter

          I was quite shocked that Valve went with 2K LCD in Frame instead of 4K or at least 2.5K microOLED. During the hand-ons they explained that this was due to the still low brightness of microOLEDs not working well with the high refresh rates they were aiming for, but I assume that the price was a big factor too.

          So far only a few HMDs use microOLED displays, and of these the AVP is probably the one that sold the most despite Apple not even reaching their already low estimates of a few 100K units. So economies of scale haven't really kicked in yet due to low overall sales, while other displays benefit from similar panel tech also being used in phones, 3D printers and tons of other devices, driving down cost, while microOLEDs are pretty much XR exclusive.

          One reason the first AVP upgrade changed only the SoC and added a more comfortable strap was apparently that Apple still had so much unsold inventory of the very expensive Sony microOLEDs that they had to use these first. The Sony production line for these has been shut down to now produce the 4K microOLED used in GXR and a few others, but these all sell in minuscule numbers, not enoughbto bring down the cost. It's kind of a chicken and egg problem: for prices to drop, production has to be scaled up, which requires that more HMDs selling in large numbers start using microOLEDs, which they currently don't due to the prices. Time alone doesn't drive down prices, volume production and process optimization does.

          The best chances for high volume HMDs using microOLEDs are probably a Quest 4 or a Vision Air, both not expected anytime soon. Meta/Apple could negotiate lower prices if they ordered several million displays, but they will probably be still much costlier than current LCD/OLED panels, so I wouldn't even bet on Quest 4 getting them. I still expect a Vision Air, offering the baseline experience they defined with the M2 AVP, with some smaller things cut that nobody used. And the rumors already said it would be half the weight due to newer tech and design optimizations. I doubt though that they will cut what you consider luxury look/features, as these are part of what they consider the baseline Vision experience. AVP was made good enough to allow testing that in the real world, which due to technical limits led to high weight and costs. Future versions will be optimized for higher comfort/lower weight and prices approaching high end iPhones, but not at the cost of compromising the experience. They never wanted to make a VR HMD, so the Beyond 2 isn't anything they would ever consider as a template to reduce weight. And they have plenty of other options to improve on AVP, which really is still mostly a very polished prototype with lots of remaining optimization opportunities. Unfortunately this will take longer than planned, both due to AVP's reception outside the enterprise market being rather depressing, and Apple now throwing their resources at catching up with Meta's surprise success with much more primitive, but lighter and cheaper smartglasses.

          • xyzs

            If Quest 4 is not micro oled, I give up on VR until they wake up.
            With the billions Meta invested in their crap of Horizon World, they could have almost funded a half Vision Pro per customer…

          • Christian Schildwaechter

            With Phoenix going after AVP, GXR and other media HMDs, a still gaming focussed Quest 4 could go for 2.5K microOLEDs like those used in Beyond 1/2. That would allow it to again run the same apps as a cheaper Quest 4S still targeting the mass market, which would probably stick to Fresnel with either LCD or OLED panel to keep down the costs, as lossy pancakes still require brighter displays, more cooling and larger batteries in addition to the more expensive lenses themselves. With Quest 3S vastly outselling Quest 3, the subpar lenses don't seem to concern budget customers all that much, but they limit the viable display resolution to 2K or less, which in turn would most likely limit the resolution of a matching Quest 4.

            So a 2K Fresnel/LCD Quest 4S for USD 400-500 unsubsidized and a 2.5K pancake/microOLED for USD 600-800 might be viable, because the lower res microOLEDs are cheaper to produce and will probably get somewhat cheap faster. At least I hope so. Meta no longer selling HMDs at cost and aggressively trying to grow VR makes it quite hard to predict how much they will push for cutting edge tech in future Quests, or if they will basically just release variants of Qualcomm's reference HMD design for the XR2 Gen 3, now that they significantly reduced the size of their XR HMD hardware development team.

  • VR Slut

    This article is quoting hearsay by Gurman about Ternus being skeptical about AVP at Apple. The fact that he worked on the V8 is great news because he should be well aware how Occulus and Meta have been wrecking VR for over a decade and will now have the power to help Apple make VR even better.

    • Andrew Jakobs

      Wrecking sounds negative, as it sure thanx to Meta VR is still around. They did a much better job at getting VR along as any other VR company, especially by making it affordable and wireless (anything with a cable is actually wrecking VR for me).

      • VR Slut

        Sure, I will concede they helped get SLAM tracking into the Snapdragons thereby getting rid of the cables, but the best they can hope for in the hindsight of history is to be commended like Xerox Parc was for helping Apple computer with the WIMP interface, although history is not going to be that kind to them.

        • Christian Schildwaechter

          TL;DR: Quest's development is more similar to the first Mac than to any Xerox products, and it took the Mac a long time too to find wider success outside of some specific niches.

          Technically Meta got SLAM onto the Hexagon DSP that is part of Snapdragon SoC, which was quite a clever feat, because this left CPU and GPU free for VR apps. They weren't the first ones to use the Hexagon for VR though, Google's 2016 Daydream required a Snapdragon 820 because they were running complex sensor fusion on the Hexagon to achieve stable 3DoF tracking without drift, removing the need for an external, calibrated IMU like the one Samsung/Oculus relied on in the technically similar Gear VR.

          And Meta certainly did more for VR than Xerox for WIMP. Xerox's management was still focused on selling paper copiers and had no clue what to do with the brilliant paperless office tools their researchers had come up at their Palo Alto research center. Meta fully realized that they had to pour money into the market to get it going, selling hardware at cost and releasing the USD 299 Quest 2 with an incredibe value proposition. They sure also did some damage, but they at least tried. In contrast Xerox released the Alto I, an extremely advanced machine for what today would be about USD 150K, basically a miracle machine that sold only 120 units, with the Alto II selling 2000.

          We've had USD 15K-150K VR HMDs since the 1990s, limited to industrial and military use. And just like it required Apple to take the core concepts of the Alto, refine some of them and drop advanced, but expensive Alto features like networking or OOP, and merge them in a much simpler machine for only USD 2.5K (~USD 8K today) to get UI driven computing going, it took Oculus/Meta and a duct taped DK1 prototype consisting out of a tablet LCD, lenses taking from magnifying glasses and an STM32 based IMU to take all these already developed VR features from a tiny high end market to the PC gaming masses. And the very impressive Quest hitchhiking on smartphone tech to go beyond that. So Oculus/Meta actually did for VR what Apple did for the GUI.

          And remember that from 1984 up to the release of the first iMac in 1998, Macs were largely niche devices, mostly associated with professional graphics design at high prices. It took them roughly 20 years to sell a total of 20M Macs, something Meta achieved with the Quest 2 in less than four years. Apple's real success came due to the iPhone, released 23 years after the first Macintosh, so Meta still has some time to turn XR/smartglasses into a similar success.

          • XRC

            Daydream 3dof tracking was very good but suffered drift and required quite regular recalibration (in game)

            got to try Google's World sense 6fof on the Mirage Solo and that was excellent, they completely threw away their lead due to internal battle over AR/VR with their teams being disbanded.

          • Christian Schildwaechter

            Daydream still suffered from drift by accumulated errors from repeated turns, but usually didn't drift when the head was held still. This was a huge improvement compared to Cardboard, where you could often see the world turn by a few degrees per second even while standing completely still, depending on how badly calibrated the IMU in your phone was. Drift is an inherent problem of all relative gyroscopes and accelerometers that aren't regularly corrected with a fixed, externel reference, something that still plagues IMU based FBT systems like SlimeVR.

            These days phones are more than fast enough to run SLAM as a side process to serve as a low FPS reference to allow correcting any IMU drift and also enable 6DoF. They can even do handtracking and usually come with special image processors that speed up computer vision tasks, so a Daydream phone/HMD these days could provide an experience similar to a dedicated device like Quest. And with several billion Android phones in use, Google would have the perfect entry drug to drag their gigantic user base towards more advanced options like Android XR.

            A 2026 midrange phone paired with a USD 20 viewer could now play in a similar league as a Quest 1/2 (using hand tracking) and still serve as a phone for 99% of its usage time, significantly lowering the entry bar. But Google decided to waste this opportunity and instead sit on all their XR research, to then finally release a USD 2K XR HMD with Samsung that's mostly about their Gemini AI and sold in only a handful of countries in minuscule numbers.

          • XRC

            Been to several paid research sessions the first one years ago pulled out my pixel XL one asked "what's that?" I was surprised they all had iPhones in their hands. Sometimes the dog food just isn't good.

            The pixel XL and Daydream View with the remote was surprisingly good with a number of standout titles, experiences, native access to Google services including YouTube, webvr, chrome and Firefox, etc.

            of course never being happy with stock builds i embarked on Daydream Cool which repurposed an aftermarket pixel XL case with a copper cold plate and large low profile aluminium alloy finned heatsink out front, rebuilt harness with top strap and ergonomic face mask with custom cushion shaped to my face. Phone ran cool no throttling and longer runtime, very comfortable.

          • Christian Schildwaechter

            I'm very curious how well Valve will handle the thermal issues on Frame. Using a SD8 Gen 3 phone SoC with much higher core clocks, and featuring an extremely power hungry high performance core suited for burst loads, but not constant high loads like in VR, it should suffer from similar throttling issues as Daydream, even with improved active cooling.

            According to Valve engineers during the handons, their way to deal with this is having very precise "maps" of in-SoC heat creep plus game specific compute requirement profiles that allow them to set individual core and speed configurations for each game to run at the best possible performance while staying within the themal envelope. Fine tuned power settings in SteamOS and the ability of the FEX x86 emulation to enable or disable certain features like SSE again on a per game basis to improve performance or power usage will also help.

            All these measures would also be possible on an Android phone, it's just that nobody ever bothered to create a similar app specific performance database. And Android assumes a phone typical burst-idle use, so optimizations for long running high load scenarios rarely make sense there. At best they'd help with performance hungry mobile games, but they'd then also have to limit the tons of background processes in Android. And given the myriad of Android phone specs compared to the single Steam Frame configuration, and that higher end mobile games are mostly only available on iOS due to the unwillingness of Android users to pay for apps, this will probably be another case of Google could do it, but won't.

          • VR5

            A lot of people put their phones in cases which makes slot in solutions impractical. Also, I remember being very annoyed about dust between the lenses and the screen on my Gear VR. Slot in phone VR just has too many distractors to be worth it.

            But it is true that Google swings between these two extremes of highly affordable and expensive high quality. Meta nailed it with their entry level Quest models at ~$300, which is now cheaper than any current gen game console (even after the price increase).

            Kids in the US growing up with VR is the best opportunity for VR to grow in the future. It still won't be as big as AR, once someone gets that tech right. And it will likely be Meta.

          • Christian Schildwaechter

            TL;DR: with maybe 30-40M HMDs sold total compared to several billion smartphones, there is still a huge gap of people unwilling to invest even USD 300 for VR, and twelve years after launch Cardboard is technically still the most successful VR device regarding distributed unit numbers.

            Gear VR had extra issues due to requiring the phone to be placed in an exact tray that also only fit for certain phones, as it also needed to connect to the IMU in Gear VR via USB.

            The Daydream viewer worked around that by using the internal IMU with sensor fusion, and allowing to place any phone just in a mechanical flap. The viewer included an NFC tag that identified it wirelessly to the phone, so the Daydream app could render properly for the correct magnification and IPD. They also managed to compensate for the phone being placed slightly off center, but I don't remember how.

            So while it was quite a hassle to get a Samsung Galaxy in or out of Gear VR to for example respond to a call, all that was required on Daydream was lifting a single runber strap, which took mabye one or two seconds.

            Nonetheless using a phone is inconvenient for any serious use if VR, so such a solution would never replace dedicated devices like Quest. But there is also a space for more casual VR use, be it short 360° videos or educational content. Google actally invested a lot into such VR content, for example with Google Expeditions, designed to transport groups of pupils to remote locations where the had to complete short survey tasks, guided by a teacher from a tablet. Schools won't buy dozens of Quests that also have to be administered and maintained just for occasional use, but getting a bunch of cheap viewers the students could use with their own phones should be okay.

            Google Cardboard was actually a huge success, with est. 50M ultra-low budget viewers distributed, and the Cardboard app installed more than 10M times in AFAIR slighly more than one year. But like most of VR, it came way too early, with slow, lores phones using extremely drifty IMUs not really up for the task. A new version of Cardboard for modern phones using a less flimsy plastic case, maybe similar to slimmed down Viewmaster VR that Mattel sold in 2015 for USD 35, would be much more capable and attractive today. It could reach a much larger group that could access a lot more VR content that has been created over the last decade.

            And I'd fully expect that this would get a number of people to upgrade from a USD 35 phone viewer to a USD 300 HMD, while there was no real upgrade path in 2014 when Cardboard released, and by 2016 with the release of Rift CV1 and Vive, the upgrade was from a USD 5 cardboard contraption to a USD 800 HMD plus a PC for USD 1000+.

          • VR Slut

            Hence, putting a phone into VR is what wrecks VR.

          • VR5

            I agree that Google Cardboard (and the plastic 3rd party slot in devices based on it) is actually a great entry point for spherical media. People can try it for cheap then upgrade to a proper dedicated device if they like it. Problem is, Google isn’t offering an affordable device to upgrade so a better slot-in device/next gen Daydream would just be selling Meta Quests. They need a Meta Quest contender (in the same price range) to really leverage their Android audience to build an XR user base of their own.

            But if devices like Meta Quest would become ubiquitous that would severely disrupt TV sales, because if you watch any kind of flat media alone, Quest 3 is already a much better option, true home cinema. Google has contracts with TV manufacturers which use Android TV as an OS. It makes sense for Samsung to sell super expensive Android XR headsets so they don’t hurt their TV business.

            Meta doesn’t have any such financial dependencies so they don’t care if their product is hurting the TV market. They will push HMDs for media consumption more with Phoenix and although that will be more expensive than a Quest 3, it will be more affordable than a Samsung XR headset or AVP. Quest 3(S) will still exist as cheaper options as well.

          • Christian Schildwaechter

            Google dropped out of the low end market, shutting down Daydream and making Cardboard open source, with only a single developer updating the SDK with minor updates every few months. It's very unlikely that they will try again.

            So somebody else would have to come up with a similar solution, with very few contenders. I assume that the concept behind Android XR is similar to Android itself, with Google hoping that over time more companies will release more and cheaper HMDs. The first Android phones were rather expensive, but these days you can get a decent one from Xiaomi and others for less than USD 100. I'm still not sure how Android XR requiring Google Play services will work in China where they aren't available, but the Chinese market is the most likely source for cheaper Android XR HMDs.

            And China already has/had a market of dedicated media HMDs, and Cardboard like viewers for this purpose. Early models around 2015 came with low FoV and horrible chipsets too slow to even run Cardboard apps, but enough for simple virtual screens. Later several large Chinese streaming portals released what were basically Quest 2 clones. Both the 2015 low FoV and the Quest 2 clones came with dedicated buttons, remotes and apps to quickly launch several streaming services, and these services offered the HMDs very cheap with a streaming subscription.

            China with a very high population density and lots of people living in tiny flats that simply don't allow for a large TV screen anywhere had a need for low budget virtual screens early on. And with a lot of Chinese people using their phone as their sole media device that has to replace TV, gaming consoles and a PC, these are probably the users most likely to also be willing to use a very cheap slot-in VR viewer with their existing "does everything" phone. And who might later upgrade to a cheap Chinese Android XR HMD, if these ever come out.

  • Tech

    Such guys like this one or Carmack, would spiral down any company.
    He knows nothing about business. CEO should not be an engineer. They have narrow horizon and do not understand what business is.

    • xyzs

      Business is 90 percent networking, 10 percent basic rules you can learn in 2 months.
      And he’s not a small boss by himself, he has a huge team behind him.

      • Christian Schildwaechter

        I'd say two months is a little bit too optimistic, but we have seen many times that money people leading tech companies can quickly turn bad if they don't understand the tech or the processes, not only in electronics/computing. Boeing having been admired for their engineering for half a century then being driven into the mud by bean counters, leading to tons of quality issues and a couple of plane crashes comes to mind.

        I'm sure that someone like Carmack wouldn't be as good as Zuckerberg at driving up the stock value based on wild promises, but he also wouldn't burn billions on metaverse initiatives because he knows that this isn't technically feasible yet and cannot simply be forced by throwing money at it. And he also probably wouldn't fire 16K employees to compensate for insane AI investments, even though these AI promises are what is currently driving up the stock price. Having someone technically competent in the lead may be short term worse if your business model is hype driven money acquisition, but it long term leads to actually useful products and happy, paying customers.

        • Tech

          "but he also wouldn't burn billions on metaverse initiatives because he knows that this isn't technically feasible yet and cannot simply be forced by throwing money at it."

          true.

    • Jonathan Winters III

      Yeah, that damn Carmack who ruined those unknown companies that never got off the ground under his tenure: ID, Oculus. lol