For mixed reality headsets, price isn't the problem

In a recent interview with Emily Chang, Palmer Luckey, responding to Emily’s question about Apple’s Vision Pro price by saying price isn’t the issue.

Virtual reality has to become something that everybody wants before it can become something that everyone can afford. You can’t reverse those two steps and expect mainstream acceptance.

He referenced his 2018 blog post Free isn’t Cheap Enough and appeared to believe it is still relevant.

Current VR technology as it existed a couple of years ago when I wrote it was so limited that even if you gave it away for free to every American most people would not continue to use it due to the technological limitations, ergonomic limitations, content limitations, and if that’s the case, if they wouldn’t use it even if it was free, then clearly cost is not the problem, and reducing cost is not what gets you to mainstream acceptance.

That observation from 2018 about high abandonment rates continues to hold. The Wall Street Journal reported in 2022 that more than half of Quest headsets sold are not in use after 6 months.

And returning to Apple, Palmer says,

Apple is taking the other approach. They are spending an enormous amount of money to drag what should exist a few years in the future and drag it into the present. And it is very expensive to do engineering that way. What they are doing is seeing if they can make it something everybody wants.

I and others have commented that the Apple Vision Pro may be the so-called minimum viable product (MVP). Anything less capable is not viable in the mainstream market.

The full 23 minute interview (the Apple Vision Pro section begins at (17:14):