Could be a competitor in a future possibly-irrelevant product line is a far cry from being a competitor.

2 months is hardly far into the future, and no Apple analyst would agree that it's irrelevant. People expect it to be bigger than Apple Watch, and to eventually supplant both computers and phones.

I do so love the wild ideas of tech market theorists. People really believe that they're going to put smart glasses on everyone's faces? That they can fit in all-day batteries? How exactly do we type into this head-mounted beast? Will the contrast be remotely acceptable for movies? I don't think these problems can be completely solved for the majority of users.

You'd do much better comparing them to smart watches and second screens. That's where they can actually work.

> "We've learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone," Ed Colligan apparently laughed about with John Markoff last Thursday morning. "PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They're not going to just walk in." [0]

You ask good questions! But you make the same mistake as you accuse the tech market theorists of: You seem to think you know what is (or isn't) going to happen, and what dimensions an unreleased product should be measured on.

Apple like Nintendo doesn't primarily market their products based on specs, or on expected use cases. Novel interfaces and uses are far more important to creating demand for a new product than meeting the spec and feature expectations of the market (or market watchers) before the product is announced.

[0] https://www.engadget.com/2006-11-21-palms-ed-colligan-laughs...

Vr headsets are not replacing phones this year.

Or in the next 10.

I wonder if someone would have said the same thing about pocket computers in 1997.

They would have been mostly right. The iPhone didn't come out until like 2007, and handheld computers before that were pretty niche

They said 10 years, hence why I picked 1997 as the year specifically. The average person in 1997 could not comprehend the iPhone a mere ten years later, just as we today cannot comprehend 2032 in terms of VR/AR/XR glasses.

What I said was that VR gear won't replace smart phones in the next 10 years.

So it isn't about presence (after all, we have and have had VR/AR/XR equipment for quite some time now), but rather about relative ubiquity and obsolescence of what came before (in this case, replacing smart phones).

I might have a blind spot here (or lack imagination), but I think some of the reasons why I don't see these glasses making mobile phones obsolete in a 10 year time frame as a confluence of:

- people in the US by and large prefer not to wear things on their faces (is it seen as weak, esthetically unpleasing, sign of old age?)

- mobile phones (and smart watches, etc.) provide a good balance between mobility and utility

- if VR/AR/XR moves to contact lenses, the first point goes away but you will still need input mechanisms etc. and I doubt that contact lens formats will be able to supplant photographing/video and music playback which has become such a big use case for mobile phones.

Arguing against myself (somewhat): I think for VR/AR/XR to be truly successful, you need to feed the experience directly into the brain because that gives you high fidelity, high mobility, and removes the physical barriers that a contraption on your head brings. But that is even further out than 20 years, assuming humans don't retaliate against the idea of interpersonal communications that is so heavily mediated (read: manipulated) by a company (this happens in social media already).

People have said the exact same things about phones ("who'd want to carry around a device in their pocket everywhere? It'd be too heavy and annoying"). Really, it's simply a lack of imagination. People wear glasses and contacts all the time and no one bats an eye (metaphorically speaking at least).

It is going to be an interesting technical challenge to build contact lenses (or glasses) that, within the next 10 years:

- have enough compute to render the virtual artifacts

- are self-powered (maybe from electrical impulses from your body?)_

- have some way to get input

- can power your headphones

- have storage (or networking capability)

WITHOUT you having to carry another device on you (likely a smart watch or smart ring or smart phone).

Anyway, I think we're getting bogged down in boring device debate. The more interesting thing (which you allude to somewhat) is how weird / different the future virtual world will be. My money is on it being more Borg-like and less Matrix-like.

Star Trek TNG literally had small handheld computer pads in early 1990s.