The context matters a lot. Early PCs were released at a time when there wasn’t really anything else like these products. That early pricing reflected the creation of a brand new category.

The Vision Pro is a remarkable piece of tech, but isn’t required to achieve many of the use cases it supports, and people are primarily paying for the immersive experience.

Given that, spending $3K on immersion in a market where a few hundred dollars will buy you most of the non-immersion capabilities is quite different than spending $3K on an early PC.

Around the time of the 386, weren’t there a bunch of lesser options that did a bunch of similar use cases well? I’m thinking Commodores, Amigas, even a NES.

There was a huge delta between what these systems could do.

e.g. the Commodore 64 was an 8-bit 1 MHz processor vs. the 386's 32-bit 12-40MHz, could not run a full operating system, had 64 KB RAM vs. 1MB or more on the 386, etc.

In terms of raw computing capability, the 386 was a significant advance over those cheaper systems and represented capabilities that just weren't yet on the market, and those capabilities unlocked entire worlds of possible use cases and unlocked general purpose computing.

The Amiga 1000 is closer to the 386 in terms of capability, but was ~$1,600 (with a monitor) and was still significantly slower, i.e. if your use case benefited from raw processing power, there was a clear value proposition for the 386.

I'd still put this in a very different category than what is effectively an iPad with + VR/AR interface.

This isn't a "supercomputer". It's not even a computer. It's a locked-down device, with very few tailored apps and content (for now anyway).

Every multi-GHz multicore computing device today would place on the Top500 in the 90s. Your phone is a handheld supercomputer.

Yeah, but that's because it's Apple. If the same hardware was made by pretty much anyone else, I'd probably be interested. It's like the iPad Pro. It could probably replace my laptop if it could run real Linux.

If the community had free reign to do whatever with the hardware, it would be much more than a toy. Someone would port SimulaVR (or a different window manager) and it would feel like a real computing device.

I can imagine a world where I travel with one of those headsets and a wireless keyboard. Then I can setup shop anywhere and do development work in a cloud environment. The headset just being a dumb terminal to render the terminal or whatever.

It really feels like we are only a few years away from that being reality. I really want the apple headset to succeed, so that other companies invest in open/hackable hardware.