[HN Gopher] Apple's new headset meets reality
___________________________________________________________________
Apple's new headset meets reality
Author : sudheer_paturi
Score : 78 points
Date : 2023-05-18 13:25 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bloomberg.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bloomberg.com)
| jmull wrote:
| It will be interesting to see how this plays out, and if there
| really is a viable Apple-scale device here.
|
| The overarching XR vision makes sense to me -- that you could
| instantly drop into any kind of environment you might want to,
| whether for work or entertainment or socializing.
|
| But who creates these environments, and for what purpose? They
| seem like they'd be quite expensive if done well, and if not done
| well, you wouldn't want to go there unless you had to. If there
| aren't great places to go, what justifies a $3K headset?
|
| Meanwhile, with the reality of technical limitations, how good is
| the experience really going to be?
|
| I suspect you're going to be able to pay $3K to buy into some
| games and productivity software that, once the novelty wears off,
| are going to feel pretty mediocre and may never really get past
| the tech demo stage. And your hardware is going to be dreadfully
| obsolete in about 2-3 years too.
|
| IDK, maybe I just have a lack of vision and I'm too down on this
| stuff.
|
| I would like to try it and see!
| themagician wrote:
| For me it comes down to optics. I've tried damn near every VR
| headset ever made, including many that never made it to
| production, and they all suffer from the same core issue: poor
| optics. Even industrial headsets that costs thousands are still
| using flat screen and lenses with fixed focal points (with few
| exceptions, but even then nothing truly extraordinary).
|
| Current optical designs mean that there is a large out of focus
| area when you look anywhere that isn't forward. That's just
| never going to fly for the general consumer. For VR to truly go
| mainstream you needs an optical system that is truly sharp,
| edge to edge. That probably means some kind of active optical
| system (like reverse OIS) or some kind of magic lens that
| currently only exists in theory. Instead what manufactures keep
| doing is trading off FOV for sharpness.
|
| If Apple has implemented a new optics system here I think they
| have winner and the industry will change overnight. If it's the
| same as current designs just a little better it feels DOA to
| me.
|
| I'm optimistic because I can't imagine Apple, of all companies,
| putting out a headset that's blurry at the edges.
| anonymouse008 wrote:
| This is true - but let me say this, you couldn't pay me to
| wear an Apple Watch all day and you won't be able to pay me
| to wear a headset.
|
| There's just no dang reason to use these things like their
| creators want. Someone needs to be brave in these
| organizations and say "hey look, we tried pushing Siri for
| years and never gained the loved adoption that chatGPT has,
| why are we trying the same strategy here?"
|
| If the compute offering is not excellent, it does not deserve
| to be in a new context. Period.
| themagician wrote:
| I can _imagine_ a headset that allows me to have the
| equivalent desktop space of quad HiDPI displays for the
| price of one display, and the ability to bring that
| anywhere. The ability to edit video on a display that is
| absolutely massive would be a win for me.
| anonymouse008 wrote:
| Yes, this can definitely be true, but is the context
| really so that you can be social with someone else - or
| is it for you to have the creative space to work on an
| idea?
|
| I feel there's no idea of what the context is anymore -
| and that's what's killing all of these devices. No one
| can say 'this is the emphasis we gave these products for
| this reason' - because they all want the success of the
| iPhone, everyday use and wear.
|
| We have to allow the pendulum to swing back to
| specialized devices - that's why Teenage Engineering is
| so captivating.
| ska wrote:
| > you couldn't pay me to wear an Apple Watch all day
|
| That's your preference, but it's clear that lots of people
| not just willingly, but enthusiastically do this; makes
| this an odd example. Likewise Siri/Alexa I guess - I would
| never use them but some people do dozens of times a day and
| love it.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| > Current optical designs mean that there is a large out of
| focus area when you look anywhere that isn't forward
|
| You sound like you are a year or two out of date with your
| "current" understanding. The industry has moved to pancake
| lenses which make the view clear edge to edge. There's no
| more out of focus peripheral view, in recent headsets you
| read and look around using your eyeballs and not your head
| just like you would naturally.
|
| It is already known that the Apple headset uses this updated
| optical system, along with micro OLED displays at super high
| resolution (approx double current industry standards). The
| clarity and focus are going to be absolutely amazing.
| themagician wrote:
| You mean like the pancake lenses in the Quest Pro? Those
| are still what I'd consider garbage tier old tech. Probably
| the best we are going to get down the path of fixed focal
| point acrylic lenses, but definitely not what I'd call
| sharp edge to edge. The edges might qualify as "very soft"
| instead of "totally out of focus" but that's about the best
| you can say.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| Quest Pro is probably the leading example yes. If you're
| calling that garbage, then I think you're (a) setting
| impossibly high standards and (b) out of sync with most
| people's perception, as most people perceive these has
| having "edge to edge clarity".
| themagician wrote:
| Oddly enough, the reason I have so many VR headsets is
| because I mostly give demos to non-tech people. Quest Pro
| still gets the, "Pretty cool, but why is it so blurry,"
| comments. Not as much as other headsets, but still enough
| that it will never fly for general use. Meta, to their
| credit, does a good job of masking the poor optics by
| keeping texture detail to a minimum in their own software
| and encouraging developers to do the same.
|
| I think people really into VR get so used to looking
| around with their head and having low expectations that
| they don't notice just how poor it is. By comparison it's
| good. In isolation, not so much.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| One of the perplexing things about Quest Pro is that Meta
| keeps the default UI rendering at the same scale for the
| Pro as for the Quest 2. The result is that all the home
| environments look blurry and poorly antialiased. It's
| hard to judge the lenses themselves properly actually
| without connecting it to PCVR mode and looking at some
| ultra high resolution content there. It really is very
| impressive when you do that.
| nvarsj wrote:
| * * *
| surprisetalk wrote:
| I recently wrote a long piece about why I think Apple will win
| the AR/VR wars.
|
| They might have a rocky start, but they still have a lot of
| advantages.
|
| 1. AR will devour smartphones.
|
| 2. Apple is the only company that can quickly overcome consumer
| AR/VR design challenges.
|
| 3. Apple has positioned itself to distribute the best AR/VR
| content.
|
| 4. Apple will cement its early lead with a new blue-bubble
| effect.
|
| ---
|
| [1] https://taylor.town/apple-will-win-vr
| taeric wrote:
| Why do we think AR will devour smartphones? I just don't see
| it. I say this as someone that loves Gran Turismo on PS5.
|
| I could see an argument for it growing along side smartphones.
| But even then, this feels like fantasy. VR only "works" for
| driving simulation because... you are sitting there. Any dreams
| of it making Zelda more immersive will have to grasp with the
| fact that, you know, you can't actually win a fight with most
| wild animals. Or climb a mountain. Or hike across the entire
| continent...
|
| (I say "works" for driving, because even that is glossing all
| of the physicality of driving that fast. Which is intense and
| would also be beyond most of us.)
| surprisetalk wrote:
| I totally agree.
|
| "Growing" is probably a better word than "devour".
|
| In a companion essay, I try to make the argument that AR
| peripherals are likely.
|
| My best guess is that a smartphone-like peripherals will be
| shipped alongside the flagship AR/VR headsets. I guess the AR
| headsets might be viewed as the "peripheral" in the
| beginning, but I think eventually the AR headset will be the
| main focus, and the thing you hold in your hand will feel
| more like a keyboard/mouse.
|
| [1] https://taylor.town/ar-peripherals
| dangus wrote:
| 1. What problem with smartphones will AR device solve? So far
| it seems more bulky and requires you wear shit on your head. It
| automatically excludes everyone who already wears glasses or
| doesn't want to wear glasses. Anyone can put a smartphone in
| their bag or pocket.
|
| 2. Not Meta? They're the #1 VR company with 75% marketshare and
| a years-long head start in the industry. The Reality headset
| from Apple has no rumored/leaked feature that goes beyond what
| the Quest Pro already has on the market today.
|
| 3. Is distribution difficult? Meta distributes content. Valve
| distributes content. What's so hard about distributing content?
|
| 4. What early lead? Meta has the early lead.
| bni wrote:
| AR is impossible to do well enough with todays technology. This
| is also the reality for Apple sadly.
|
| VR works very well today. But it's a niche business sort of like
| racing wheels and joysticks. So not very interesting to go VR
| only for the big players.
|
| AR and VR are separate things, and it's sort of a delusion that
| has been pushed by Meta and others that one leads to the other.
| Or that they can be combined even.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| Biggest red flag is the part about Tim Cook being disengaged.
|
| But I'm much more bullish than most of the commenters here. Many
| seem to not have shifted their understanding of progress in VR/AR
| in the last 5 years, when there have been fundamental tech
| advances. Then, others don't seem to understand how much Apple is
| planning to push the state of the art here. Their headset will
| have roughly double the resolution of existing devices, and
| contain not one but two, laptop level mobile chips. The lenses /
| optics are going to solve a lot of issues people have had, the
| pass through quality is going to be near photo-realistic - you
| won't feel you need to take these off at all. Some of the apps we
| know about include photo-realistic video conferencing with
| quality that is unheard of outside of laboratory conditions
| before.
| cubefox wrote:
| From the information available so far, the Apple headset will be
| fairly close to Meta's Oculus Quest in terms of hardware:
| Portable and with external cameras to allow for orientation and
| "mixed reality".
|
| Maybe Apple is on the right track here, since the Oculus Quest
| has sold more units than all the other VR headsets combined. But
| there is one big difference: Apple's product will be a very
| expensive premium product (apparently around 3000 USD), while the
| Oculus Quest costs just 400 USD.
|
| I think consumers just don't want to spend a lot of money on VR.
| Except for the Quest, they are all far too expensive, and that's
| why they didn't sell. Apple just makes the problem worse by
| increasing the price even more.
|
| John Carmack has made the same point repeatedly: VR is not a high
| price product category. If he is right, the Apple headset will
| fail. It may be more feasible to sell $3000 smartphones than to
| sell VR headsets at this price.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| it's all a question of what you use it for.
|
| If you use it for a high value application then a high price
| isn't a barrier. The fundamentals that are shifting here are:
| (a) Apple is going to push a _massive_ increase in quality (b)
| Apple is accessing a different market - cashed up professionals
|
| So the real question here is, does the increase in quality get
| it into a space where new high value applications become
| viable.
|
| For me, it would only have to be equal or better than using a
| physical monitor and that would probably justify its value. The
| fact I could just go anywhere and a full multi-monitor setup
| with me would be enough.
| yayr wrote:
| I think with respect to compute/GPU capability the Apple
| headset will be vastly superior. One of the major issues with
| the Quest is the lack of graphics quality that can be brought
| to the virtual environments. Unless you run it via Link to a PC
| with a top end GPU it is just a toy. Having VR experiences like
| the recent Unreal Engine provides is simply orders of magnitude
| away for Quest in the current state... Thats one major reason
| that this thing does not take off for FB
| barbariangrunge wrote:
| What a clickbait title
| xrguy wrote:
| if they can make the floating elephant magic leap failed to
| deliver, that would be great
| blairbeckwith wrote:
| Better (and source for this article) link:
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-05-18/apple-s-m...
| ericmay wrote:
| Yea but paywall too
| bentcorner wrote:
| https://archive.is/EqNVo
| whitemary wrote:
| this archive.org link is so buried in ads on Firefox iOS that
| it's completely unusable. I can't even zoom to get the text
| into frame.
| bentcorner wrote:
| There's this one too: https://archive.is/6auZH
|
| I don't use archive.is that often so I don't know if that
| link is any different from the one up there ^
| [deleted]
| surprisetalk wrote:
| I recently wrote a long piece about why I think Apple will win
| the AR/VR wars.
|
| They might have a rocky start, but they still have a lot of
| advantages.
|
| 1. AR will devour smartphones.
|
| 2. Apple is the only company that can quickly overcome consumer
| AR/VR design challenges.
|
| 3. Apple has positioned itself to distribute the best AR/VR
| content.
|
| 4. Apple will cement its early lead with a new blue-bubble
| effect.
|
| ---
|
| [1] https://taylor.town/apple-will-win-vr
| eq88 wrote:
| Apple notoriously hinders it's own potential so it doesn't
| cannibalize it's own market share. They have no incentive to
| turn off the iPhone faucet, so why would they make a product
| that devours smartphones?
| tough wrote:
| "If you don't cannibalize yourself, someone else will," Jobs
| famously said. It's not just a good quote--it might be the
| smartest realization he ever had, and the reason the company
| he founded is now more valuable than any other. It's not
| often that a company is willing to cannibalize its own
| product to make a new one.
| filoleg wrote:
| > why would they make a product that devours smartphones?
|
| Likely because they expect AR to eventually devour
| smartphones, and they would rather devour it themselves than
| let others do so.
|
| Plus, it will be a painful growth with rough edges anyway, so
| the iPhone faucet isn't turning off anytime soon. In fact, it
| would be quite a helpful source of revenue, until AR adoption
| reaches the masses and gets to the stage of actually being
| polished and commonplace enough to devour smartphones.
|
| See: Apple slowly winding down iPod over the course of many
| years, as iPhone cannibalized it almost entirely.
| tcmart14 wrote:
| I think number 2 is a really good point. But I think the
| biggest reason why they could be immensely successful there is,
| Apple dog foods their own stuff. Apple will generate enough
| apps for it to be useful. This is where I feel like
| Oculus/Facebook(Meta)+Oculus kind of messed up where the Google
| really messed up with Daydream. The expectation for most of the
| product life cycles was for developers to just jump on board
| and start developing, turning out the apps. I love DayDream,
| but there were hardly any decent apps. Google relied too much
| on indie devs and 3rd party. Most of the daydream apps by
| google were essentially just demos. Apple will provide at least
| enough apps to make it useful while also using that knowledge
| to feed back in to the development cycle.
| philip1209 wrote:
| "Execs distance themselves" - Good, that means the company can
| still push through risky projects without getting caught up in
| bureaucracy.
|
| "Selling at-cost" - Also good, because they need to get the
| device into the hands of developers to seed the ecosystem before
| it becomes more mainstream.
| ydnaclementine wrote:
| Other than games, I'm not convinced. I do think there's an
| interesting use case for sports and music. Imagine being able to
| walk around on the field during the superbowl or on stage at a
| concert. But then it becomes a how do you capture it so you can
| walk around a real, live event problem.
| Closi wrote:
| I do think there is a use case in work - I can imagine sitting
| down and doing CAD in a 'real 3D' environment once the
| resolution and responsiveness are high enough (probably still
| with a keyboard and mouse).
| FormFollowsFunc wrote:
| One thing that VR gives you that a monitor doesn't is 1:1
| scale. It's so easy to get that wrong when working on a
| scaled down version of the model. Though you can just place
| people in your scene for reference.
| cmpalmer52 wrote:
| At this point, with the boom in AI, I would settle for very
| simple AR glasses. Not trying to make 3D objects meld with the
| the real world view, but just superimposed graphics, kinda like
| Google Glass, but better. Imagine if it could automatically
| subtitle foreign languages, or translate Japanese street signs
| and advertising in real-time. Join that with a conversational AI
| so you could point your eyes at something and just say "What is
| that?" and then get whatever level of detail response you want,
| from a subtitle, to a voice description, to a full dive into the
| historical details. This is the market space for a fashionable
| device, but it needs to be a real view of reality, not video
| pass-through. Imagine renting one (if they're expensive) when
| traveling to a foreign country, or at a museum. The cool think
| about AI integration is that you wouldn't have to create the
| content like an audio-guide does. In a museum, you could learn
| about the artist, the time period, critical analysis, the school
| of art, etc. dynamically and organically. As a tourist, you could
| look at an attraction across the street, read (or hear) reviews,
| check hours and prices, book tickets, etc. Would also be great
| for directions.
| HellDunkel wrote:
| I don't like that you took the augmentation out of AR but
| "Translator glasses" are a great idea. Also a huge quality of
| life improvement for deaf people.
| [deleted]
| tikkun wrote:
| Here's one view for the device - FaceTime++
|
| If it's a gamechanger for remote working, then I'll buy them for
| my company and have my remote employees use them
|
| If it's a gamechanger for communicating with family overseas,
| then I might see if I can convince one of my relatives to get one
| (though the price will be harder to justify for personal use -
| but not impossible if it's a gamechanger)
|
| Both of those are contingent on how good it is. If it's something
| where I do a shared presence FaceTime call using it, and I feel
| like I can't go back to not having it, then I'll buy them and I
| expect it'll be a huge success. If I/people try it and it's not
| much of an improvement over regular FaceTime, then it won't be a
| big success.
| bullfightonmars wrote:
| The will have to make presence _really_ good for this to be
| worthwhile. The closest thing I have seen to next level is
| Google's Project Starline [1]. I would spend so much money to
| get one of these for my home and one for my parent's home
| halfway across the country.
|
| 1. https://blog.google/technology/research/project-starline/
| smoldesu wrote:
| The original iPhone was an iPod, a phone and an internet
| communicator. It was a hard sell at $599, and didn't take off
| until the price was lowered and the App Store started
| proliferating. If it had an external battery pack or cost
| $3,000, nobody would have bought it.
|
| If the big killer app for this headset is "calling people",
| then Mark Zuckerberg is probably doubled-over in hysterics
| right now.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| Videocalling barely works at 1080p because of network issues. I
| don't know how much bandwidth FaceTime++ would need but I am
| not optimistic on this usecase at all.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| I like the idea of the shared presence, but don't see how that
| doesn't come at the cost of losing the actual video off the
| person you are talking to. I want to see my family in higher
| fidelity, not their Mii version or have them look like
| Zuckerberg in the Meta demos.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| The rumors that have come out say that Apple has achieved 1:1
| 3d video chat where there avatars are almost completely photo
| realistic. I'm very interested to see this especially.
| Apparently this is a big reason why the device has to bundle 2
| X M2 processors and also limits it to one on one calls. I think
| it's going to be amazing and significantly shift people's
| perceptions here with how good it is. They should be able to
| demonstrate hyper realistic pass through as well so essentially
| you are looking at an almost completely realistic image of the
| other person teleported into your own surroundings.
| ben_w wrote:
| At this point, while I would be interested if Apple do actually
| announce a headset, I've heard this hype cycle so many times
| already I don't really believe it.
|
| Also, so many previous pre-announcement visualisations of Apple
| products were so way off-base that even if a headset does get
| announced, it's got an equal chance of being a $400 Siri version
| of the Amazon Echo Frames as it does of being what's in this
| article.
| sf4lifer wrote:
| Does anyone on HN actually use VR to workout? That seems to be
| the killer use case, but I don't know anyone that's getting fit
| because of VR workouts.
| divan wrote:
| I used FitXR througout this winter. Fantastic experience, I
| just wish I had a dedicated room for sweat-inducing activities.
| I especially liked HIIT training, where you hit glowing spheres
| and glass that appear in the air. Level and quality of
| multisensory stimulation (visual/audio/haptic) during those
| hits are just mindblowing. Reality can't offer that.
|
| One particular thing that I believe is underexplored is using
| visual/haptic cues for movement learning (motor skills
| acquision). For example in FitXR there is a glowing semi-
| transparent path showing how your hand is supposed to move. If
| you deviate from it, it gives a light haptic feedback. There is
| no substitute for that in reality - we learn hand movements
| (like in dance or martial arts) either by proprioreception,
| visual feedback through mirrors or verbal feedback from
| teacher. All three ways are inferior to what VR can offer.
|
| I think some progressive sports researchers are experimenting
| with VR (especially in Constraint-Led Approach community), but
| these are just first steps.
|
| PS. I personally want to invest in learning VR programming for
| years, but waiting until software ecosystem will stabilize and
| settle on something. So waiting for the Apple announcements in
| that field.
| nickthegreek wrote:
| I use to with Supernatural on Quest2. It was cool and at the
| same time a huge pain in the ass. But there is something there
| for sure, the headset just needs to be like a pair of those
| lightweight wraparound sunglasses that baseball players wear
| and I would be shedding pounds.
| JimtheCoder wrote:
| If I am going to spend $3000 on a VR headset, I don't really
| want to sweat all over it...
|
| Also, the sort of people who are going to work out consistently
| don't need a headset to work out. Or any other tech. They just
| do it.
|
| I know you're not implying this in your comment, but if anyone
| thinks you are going to take someone who is sedate, strap on a
| cool headset and give them some sort of virtual experience that
| will finally motivate them to work out consistently...I'll take
| the other side of that bet every day...
| crooked-v wrote:
| The key to losing weight with VR for the average person isn't
| in exercise-specific apps, it's in replacing sitting video
| game time with something just as engaging but that has you
| standing, walking in circles, crouching, and waving your arms
| around for a few hours instead. You're obviously not going to
| get buff from it, but it can add up fast for an otherwise
| sedentary person.
| samwillis wrote:
| I'm utterly unconvinced that AR/VR is a large market or is going
| to be game changing in every day life. I can see why Apple feel
| that they need to have a product in the market, but I wouldn't be
| surprised if its presented as "Just a Hobby" the same way that
| Steve Jobs presented Apple TV back when it launched (and for a
| good few years later).
|
| I really do think that Apple are much more likely to present some
| interesting AI products that run locally on Apple Silicone, thats
| where they truly can do something different and new that will
| impact all their customers. It will help them sell the next
| generation of iPhone and Macs.
|
| I want my AI to be _local and privet_.
|
| In some ways I think Humain have a better idea where this market
| is going to go. I'm not convinced by their product, I think it
| should be built into a phone, and I would be suppressed to see
| Apple do some stuff similar.
|
| To copy what I put in a comment the other day, a next gen Siri
| with chatGPT like functionality, trained on all your docs, email,
| calendar, movements, browser history, video calls. All local and
| not in the cloud:
|
| _" Hey Siri, I had a meeting last summer in New York about
| project X, could you bring up all relevant documents and give me
| a brief summary of what we discussed and decisions we made. Oh
| and while you're at it, we ate at an awesome restaurant that
| evening, can you book a table for me for our meeting next week."_
| woah wrote:
| Seems pretty simple. If you could have UI overlayed on the
| world around you, it would be huge, and would change how people
| use computers, like the smartphone did.
|
| The current stumbling block is that the tech sucks and the
| headsets are enormous. If someone got it into a lightweight
| pair of glasses or contact lenses, the use case is obvious, and
| it would be a big of a shift as the smartphone.
|
| Denying this is like being the guy in 1993 saying "why would I
| want a computer in my pocket? Am I going to work on
| spreadsheets on a tiny screen in the bathrooom? And where would
| I plug it in?"
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Don't forget the fingerprints!
|
| But yeah, so many things are obnoxious and clunky about
| smartphones. Glancing down is never a good look, let alone
| glancing down and then walking into a wall. The moment that
| minimum viable AR tech happens, people will suddenly remember
| how many compromises we have to make for smartphones.
| skywhopper wrote:
| I'm not sure that focusing on something no one else can see
| when you appear to be looking elsewhere is a good look
| either. At least other people can tell you are distracted
| when you're looking down at your phone.
| vehemenz wrote:
| > If you could have UI overlayed on the world around you, it
| would be huge, and would change how people use computers,
| like the smartphone did.
|
| Is this really a game-changer? Technology adoption is all
| about tradeoffs. We already have location-based services and
| applications that are granular enough for most purposes. AR
| applications add sensory awareness and localized interaction
| at the cost of distraction and intrusiveness.
|
| History is littered with inventions that were supposed to be
| the next telephone, computer, smartphone, etc., but most of
| them never materialize because they don't meet people's
| practical needs. And if AR/VR isn't the quintessential
| solution in search of a problem, I don't know what is.
| EnragedParrot wrote:
| It's absolutely a game-changer. Imagine having driving or
| walking directions laid out on the street in front of you.
| Imagine using AI to help you identify things like engine
| parts in your car, plants, birds, other people (never
| forget a name again). Looking at a package and scanning the
| barcode to get price comparisons. Recipe directions on the
| counter in front of you, even labeling the next ingredient
| and how much of it to measure. Walk into a museum and see
| highlighted details of every painting or information about
| a particular element in a sculpture. First aid details
| right in front of you, keeping both hands free to offer
| assistance in a roadside accident. Live AR-driven
| instructions for changing a tire or locating an oilpan
| plug.
|
| Currently any time you need information you have to pull
| yourself away from your present moment to dive into your
| phone. AR will make it so the information you need is just
| integrated into the world around you.
| majormajor wrote:
| There's plenty of neat ideas for what AR could do - but
| how often are you changing tires or having to find an
| oilpan plug on an unfamiliar car? Some great
| _professional_ use cases, potentially, but for a
| consumer? A lot of this sounds like an open-world video
| game with no design restraint, where your map gets
| littered with dozens and dozens of points of interest all
| at once and it just makes it that much harder to focus on
| what you actually wanted to be doing in the first place.
|
| And with people's resistance to paying for software
| services, you'll have exactly the same problem with
| looking at something on your phone of half the crap being
| ads intentionally trying to sidetrack you.
| Qweiuu wrote:
| I hear your killer features and don't care for them at
| all in any way to put on glasses for them.
|
| I only need real navigation on holiday and I'm pretty
| sure not taking some expensive glasses on travel. Neither
| when hiking nor in a foreign country.
|
| And all the other Infos? I don't even use my smartphone
| for them. Why would I wear an expensive headset to
| compare a 3EUR product?
| [deleted]
| ghaff wrote:
| Whether or not we're way off-base or not, it's certainly
| possible to envision a HUD in a fairly ordinary looking
| pair of glasses. It's certainly SF today but it's
| possible to imagine. There are of course various creepy
| aspects as well but, honestly, if the technology can be
| made to work well, most people will just get over that.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| With Apple Silicone, I think Apple is in the perfect place to
| take advantage of the AI craze to sell hardware with something
| like "Neural Engine V2". If they can figure out how to run AI
| workloads at fraction of the cost of what is costs on current
| hardware, I can see there being a huge market for their Mac's
| and they could even bring back XServe and become the
| predominant player in the "Server Hardware for AI" space.
| smoldesu wrote:
| > If they can figure out how to run AI workloads at fraction
| of the cost of what is costs on current hardware
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laconic_phrase
|
| It's discussed quite a bit on this site, but I wouldn't
| expect Apple to pull ahead in the GPU department. They really
| lit a fire under Intel and AMD's ass with the M1's IPC, but
| Nvidia laughed their way to the bank with every M1 upgrade.
| Even the 5nm M1 Ultra struggled to keep up with Nvidia's
| 10nm, bog-cheap 30-series cards. In the datacenter it's even
| more of a blowout, Apple would have to invest in something
| competitive with CUDA to turn heads. That's no small feat,
| and I don't think it's possible with an overnight API launch.
| It takes time and integration into the industry, something
| Apple wasn't patient enough for (see: Xserve).
| pazimzadeh wrote:
| What about in terms of performance per watt, rather than
| pure performance?
| smoldesu wrote:
| It's still not favorable, even compared to last-gen (30XX
| series) hardware. Here's the OpenCL scores for multiple
| different GPUs, including the Ultra:
| https://browser.geekbench.com/opencl-benchmarks
|
| The M1 Ultra is a 200w chip, fabricated with 5nm silicon.
| It's being outclassed by the RTX 3060, a cheap 10nm card
| that draws ~170w max. In Nvidia's 40-series cards (on
| 4nm), the M1 Ultra's performance profile is most
| comparable to a laptop-class RTX 4060 that draws less
| than 115 watts.
|
| There's a story in the total package draw to be made
| here, and it does weigh slightly in Apple's favor.
| Overall though, even with last-gen cards it's clear that
| there's a massive performance-per-watt lead in Nvidia's
| favor right now. Which is impressive, considering how
| they've been stuck with second-class silicon when the M1
| Ultra debuted.
| dangus wrote:
| VR and AR are a solution looking for a problem. It's admittedly
| a cool tech demo. I enjoyed my time playing Half Life: Alyx and
| The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners on my Valve Index before I
| decided to sell it out of disuse.
|
| The article says that Apple has a glasses product and a VR/AR
| product that sounds similar to a Quest Pro.
|
| So if we look at the glasses product it immediately runs into a
| lot of issues. Do I want to be wearing glasses? Do I already
| own glasses? Do I like how glasses look on my face? Wearable
| tech is very personal especially when it's sitting on your
| face. At best this is a product for industrial environments.
|
| Then the Quest Pro-like VR/AR product...separate battery pack
| in your pocket, need I say more? Now compare that experience to
| an Oculus Quest for $300. It doesn't really matter that the
| Quest is a less capable product, it's at the right price point
| and form factor and its strong sales show it.
| zooch wrote:
| I don't think it's a solution looking for a problem. I'd be
| willing to put them on at work and see which pins on a piece
| of hardware do what instead of looking back and forth between
| a datasheet. Lots of examples exactly like that, especially
| if the glasses are fed sensor data so the
| temperature/pressure appears right beside the area it is
| measuring.
| dangus wrote:
| Like I said, industrial environments. A small niche group
| of people and businesses who could use some information in
| front of their face as they do hands-on work.
|
| Estimates of the size of this market were in the single
| digit billions of dollars for Google, who bailed out of
| Google Glass recently:
| https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/18/google-glass-enterprise-
| mark...
|
| For comparison, the iPhone makes $200 billion in revenue
| every year. Apple Services (Music, TV+, etc) make something
| like $20 billion every quarter.
|
| Apple does not enter many businesses that only have the
| potential to make $1-2 billion.
| vehemenz wrote:
| Agreed. The technologies will have their uses, like
| entertainment, training, education, and therapy, but it will
| never meet mass adoption for practical reasons like price,
| safety, and power consumption. I'd be curious to know why so
| many people think otherwise.
| crooked-v wrote:
| > I'm utterly unconvinced that AR/VR is a large market
|
| Gorilla Tag, an indie VR game where you're an ape and run
| around with your hands and tag people (seriously, that's the
| whole thing) has made $26 million selling virtual hats and has
| peaks of 90,000 concurrent users.
| the_sleaze9 wrote:
| > All local and not in the cloud
|
| Apple execs: "why not both?"
| [deleted]
| adt wrote:
| This thread is amazing, and has shades of the original iPod and
| iPhone launch [1,2] commentary.
|
| I can't believe that people would go on permanent written record
| with this stuff, but humans gotta human!
|
| 1. iPod launch thread on macrumors:
| https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apples-new-thing-ipod.5...
|
| 2. iPhone launch thread on macrumors:
| https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apple-announces-the-iph...
| bink wrote:
| Mac Rumors forums seems to be dominated by people who hate
| Apple. I have no idea what possesses people to join a forum
| where they hate everything the company does, but it's very
| prevalent on all types of content there.
| bvaldivielso wrote:
| The iPhone one seems mostly positive
| endisneigh wrote:
| Curious how this will compare to the nreal air. I'm not sure why
| apple insists on leading here. They should just wait until the
| tech is ready.
| AraceliHarker wrote:
| Tim Cook, unlike Jobs, is incapable of making major policy
| changes, according to the Bloomberg article.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| Yes - honestly, if a company like Nreal can do it using OTS
| components, I think Apple could easily have punched out a set
| of glasses like that and delivered 90% of this functionality
| just by attaching to a macbook pro in a true glasses format.
| They could probably have done it years ago and then built from
| there. What Nreal has made is already super compelling [0]
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSBESw3a_tc
| easton wrote:
| I think there's a false leak here, because one of the comments on
| the Bloomberg article mentions them going with a design where the
| battery is external and connected via a wire to the headset (to
| prevent heat issues). That seems like such a bizarre design
| choice for Apple that I can't imagine they'd actually do that.
| Just... make the chip weaker?
|
| (Like if you don't have pockets, where does the battery go? Or if
| you're sitting in a chair your back pockets may not be easily
| accessible, which means the battery is either in front and you're
| constantly bumping the wire, or it's on the floor or something. I
| know it's not a completely unsolvable problem because the Vive
| had that special head strap that draped down the middle of your
| head which was fine, but I still got tangled up from time to
| time.)
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| > _Just... make the chip weaker?_
|
| Making it not able to do as much is sometimes a winning move,
| but also sometimes not. The primary utility concerns that
| people have with headset products come from display resolution
| and framerate. It takes a lot of pixel density for readable
| text and a lot of frames per second to prevent display-lag-
| induced motion sickness. Crapping out on the displays and
| processing makes that worse, not better.
|
| > _Like if you don 't have pockets, where does the battery go?_
|
| Clips. Straps. Bags. Hooks. People have been successfully
| carrying things on their person without pockets for millennia.
| Have you really never seen someone at the gym strap their phone
| into an armband?
|
| You may as well be asking "Like if you don't have pockets,
| where does your cellphone go?" And yet billions of people all
| over the world manage to carry cellphones.
| throwuwu wrote:
| lol, just make the chip weaker? On an AR/VR headset that means
| potato graphics and motion sickness. Guaranteed flop.
| fshbbdssbbgdd wrote:
| This device is going to have color passthrough vision. That
| means it has cameras on the outside, and then an image of the
| real world is shown on the inside. If you try to just directly
| display the video from the camera on the screen inside the user
| will throw up. You need to do a lot of processing to
| reconstruct what the user's eyes need to see on the inside
| display, which probably includes a stack of analytic methods
| and ML inference that has to run in real-time and produce high-
| resolution video signal. Trust me that the engineers working on
| this are absolutely pushing the limits of what their hardware
| can do. The tradeoff space would include the following factors:
|
| 1) low quality passthrough is unpleasant
|
| 2) heavy headset is unpleasant
|
| 3) headset with weight imbalance is unpleasant
|
| 4) sensors, chips, and display all use power
|
| 5) battery with more capacity is heavier
|
| 6) battery with more power draw is hotter
|
| 7) hot headset in your face is unpleasant
|
| 8) battery at the end of a cord is ugly and annoying
|
| So it's easy to say "use a weaker chip", but what if that means
| you have to degrade some must-have functionality? Or it means
| you have to wait 3 years for TSMC to come out with a smaller
| node before you can release your product? Battery on the end of
| a wire is a "bold" choice, probably an engineer won a cage
| match against an executive to make it happen.
| tristanb wrote:
| Or you could just use transparent lenses you can vary the
| darkness of... but hey I'm not building it.
| fshbbdssbbgdd wrote:
| Ok, you just gave yourself a different set of hard
| engineering problems to solve. Turns out that field-of-
| view, brightness, color reproduction, and resolution are
| all difficult to achieve on that kind of display. You can
| try a Magic Leap 2 if you want to experience those
| constraints.
|
| One thing that Apple's approach has going for it is that it
| could also be great at VR content like Beat Saber, Half
| Life Alyx, Bigscreen movies, or as a monitor for your
| MacBook. A Magic-Leap-esque device will suck for any of
| those.
|
| However, the Magic Leap form factor may work better for a
| Google Glass type use case where you wear the headset as
| you go about your life and get some augmented features
| (maybe it can be an iPhone replacement eventually).
| Mandatum wrote:
| The display on these are bleeding edge. It's an order of
| magnitude more dense, and as such draws more power.
|
| Heat and weight from the battery directly just exacerbates the
| problem.
| yeeeloit wrote:
| Interesting take.
|
| I kind of hope it's not a false leak, just to see the battery
| with cord, lmao.
| [deleted]
| ksec wrote:
| >Apple selling it at cost; considered taking a loss
|
| That is the same PR tactics as AirPod. Gruber taking about AirPod
| was selling at a loss. Insane value coming from Apple.
|
| Most people who comment on these sort of things have absolutely
| zero idea about supply chain or manufacturing, let alone BOMs.
|
| But of course, people will fall for it. ( Thinking Apple selling
| it at cost or loss )
| dang wrote:
| Url changed from https://9to5mac.com/2023/05/18/reality-pro-
| headset/, which points to this.
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.ph/dQaoh
| Flatcircle wrote:
| I once demoed the VR goggles at Facebook HQ on a tour, my boss
| and I put on the glasses and were immersed in a world where there
| was a large dragon. We really roared with excitement and kept
| saying "wow, amazing" and shaking our head in astonishment as we
| took the headset off. Then, later we said our goodbyes and left.
| In the parking lot my boss and I turned to each other both
| agreed, that VR headset wasn't that impressive at all, we just
| acted impressed to be polite.
|
| I think these VR headsets are built for the demo. How much daily
| demand they have is probably much more limited than the builders
| think it is.
|
| Also, prolonged use causes nausea in a large percentage of
| people.
| Dig1t wrote:
| >Also, prolonged use causes nausea in a large percentage of
| people.
|
| There's an excellent video of John Carmack talking about this
| and how to solve it. This is much less of an issue now.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHLpKzUxjGk
|
| I agree with you though that there aren't any killer apps for
| VR/AR yet, and it remains to be seen if there will be any at
| all.
| jsbisviewtiful wrote:
| > Also, prolonged use causes Nausea in large percentage of
| people.
|
| Supposedly Apple has been working off a patent that fights this
| specifically. Not arguing for or against whether this headset
| will slap (personally, I don't care for VR and think it's
| overrated) but just relaying some info.
| [deleted]
| inasio wrote:
| Just lean into the nausea thing and make a very nice sailing
| simulator, I'm sure Larry Ellison would sponsor as long as
| there are F50 cats.
| nickthegreek wrote:
| Hope the rumor in this article that Apple will sell the device at
| cost is true. Oculus understood that they needed to sell cheaply
| at first. I don't expect Apple to come in at $299, but the
| rumored $3k is a pretty heavy lift.
| bluescrn wrote:
| At PS3K, they're not going after gamers or even enthusiasts.
|
| They're more likely going after creative professionals who're
| already all-in on the Apple ecosystem. Maybe product designers
| or architects, who want to show clients their designs in VR,
| and a slick Apple device will probably make a better impression
| than a PC VR setup with a bulky headset, cables everywhere,
| fans whirring, etc.
| malwarebytess wrote:
| That's similar to the hololens approach to market. Didn't go
| well.
| jmu1234567890 wrote:
| But the HoloLens image quality was quite bad. Hopefully
| this is better?
| throwuwu wrote:
| Bit disingenuous about PC VR. There's only 1 cable to the
| headset and if you have a decent rig the fans won't be
| blasting. Big Screen's new headset is going to blow Apple out
| of the water on weight, size and comfort too.
| crooked-v wrote:
| The Beyond doesn't fit the kind of role mentioned here at
| all, though, since a major part of how they've made it so
| small and light is by ditching the idea of being adjustable
| at all and just assembling each unit to match a specific
| person's face.
| nickthegreek wrote:
| If $3k is the cost of making them without any markup, they
| are in big trouble.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| I don't think there is a consumer market for head mounted AR
| anymore - if there ever really was. That makes me sad having been
| in AR since 2010 - and knowing what we could do with it if done
| right.
|
| I just don't think society currently has an appetite for a $3000
| product that gives the wearer visual superpowers (that is the
| promise after all) and is an impossible to ignore distinction
| between classes. I honestly think we're at the point where I
| wouldn't be surprised if it's google glass all over again x 100,
| where unhinged people are attacking and pulling these expensive
| devices off of people's heads [1][2].
|
| Maybe in 2017 when AR was really hot could it have gotten
| adoption, but as it stands in 2023 the average consumer is
| starting to reject this level of tech and fewer and fewer people
| have the wallet that could support this.
|
| I also suggest avoiding a comparison with the VR market - the
| only thing they have in common is that it's a thing you put on
| your face. The infrastructure, deployment, product features,
| economics, user interfaces, battery, environmental use, UX, legal
| etc... are all doubly complex with HMD AR over HMD VR
|
| I think it's going to continue to be a long time before
| persistent everywhere HMD AR is going to be a reality
|
| [1]https://www.businessinsider.com/i-was-assaulted-for-
| wearing-...
|
| [2]https://mashable.com/archive/google-glass-assault
| melling wrote:
| " I just don't think society currently has an appetite for a
| $3000"
|
| Yep, that's an easy one. Guess what. It's not for general use.
|
| I have no idea where AR/VR is going. However, I'm all for Apple
| spending part of its large cash reserve in R&D. I guarantee
| something useful will come out of it.
|
| Hopefully, someone with a little vision comes along and says
| "you know what we could do with this technology..."
| fnord77 wrote:
| I think there's totally a market for a $200-300 version,
| something very simple.
|
| display in-coming text messages and caller ids, a navigation
| arrow and take snaps. that's it
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| >I don't think there is a consumer market for head mounted AR
| anymore - if there ever really was.
|
| All it takes is a killer app to come along. AR music instrument
| instruction is my bet. If Apple released this one app along
| with the glasses it would become a massive hit.
| philsquared_ wrote:
| I am thinking Pokemon or Yugioh. One killer app and you have
| people sold.
| treis wrote:
| Driving, I think. Google maps overlayed onto the real world
| is pretty killer. Maybe night vision delivered as an IR image
| overlay.
| MobiusHorizons wrote:
| I really hope it's not legal to drive while wearing a
| consumer AR headset. You would need to guarantee the device
| can't fail in ways that block important parts of your
| vision, and also prove that it is not a distraction hazard
| (which seems impossible)
| trafficante wrote:
| This already exists (at least for piano) on Quest. One of the
| few cases where I think the Quest Pro's color passthrough
| really shines.
|
| https://youtube.com/shorts/eeMte5UbFJ4?feature=share
| mutatio wrote:
| > and knowing what we could do with it if done right
|
| The implication here is that you know a compelling case for
| "what we could do with it" and how to "do it right", so what
| are the answers (because I'm stumped)?
| ghaff wrote:
| For AR, the vision is more or less an arbitrarily "good"
| (across multiple dimensions) HUD. Although we seem to be
| pretty far from that.
| DenisM wrote:
| For military or police use I can imagine superimposing models
| of hidden targets derived from aerial imagery. Granted the
| derivation part is presently missing.
|
| Interior design is another subject that comes to mind.
| screye wrote:
| > don't think society currently has an appetite for a $3000
| product
|
| Apple currently sells a pair of 500$ headphones and a 5000$
| monitor. High margin products that are sold as fashion to their
| top fans is Apple's thing.
|
| They will need one killer app and a sleek enough package, and
| those are the main bottle necks. The money is hardly an issue.
|
| Technologically, Apple has the distinct advantage of having the
| best power efficient mobile chips which Facebook did not. Other
| than that, I don't see how they can solve all the other open
| problems in VR/AR right now.
| pb7 wrote:
| Do you think the monitor is $5,000 because of high margins?
| It's not. It's arguably a bargain for its target demographic.
| screye wrote:
| Apple doesn't make money by selling to their target
| demographic. They make money by convincing buyers that they
| need a $5,000 monitor to do work that certainly does not
| require it.
|
| I can bet that most people and companies buying the pro-
| display XDR don't need that level of color calibration to
| do their job well. But as long as Apple is the most
| fashionable brand, they can convince people into thinking
| that's exactly what they need.
| jnsie wrote:
| > I don't think there is a consumer market for head mounted AR
| anymore
|
| anymore, or yet? I think the biggest barriers are form factor
| and price. History suggests that price of such devices will
| increase over time. Whether the tech can be squeezed into a
| form factor that will be desirable to the masses is another
| problem altogether. The fact that apple (according to this
| article) have not managed to do it suggests to me that it might
| be some time off.
| zamnos wrote:
| Right. $3,000 is obviously a luxury/niche product, but $450
| Nreal Air (which is a product you can buy today off Amazon)
| much less so. It's like 3D TVs, the idea will never die. Even
| if it's doesn't work out time around (which I doubt, having
| spent a tiny bit of time with an Nreal Air), expect to see it
| again in 10 years or so.
| bluescrn wrote:
| > I don't think there is a consumer market for head mounted AR
| anymore - if there ever really was
|
| I suspect there's a market there, but only if the device can be
| made to look like a pair of fashionable sunglasses, and was
| driven by the phone in your pocket, adding a customizable HUD
| to the real world, doing all sorts of things, from translating
| foreign-language text to overlaying directions or providing
| real-time info about the bus or train you're trying to catch.
|
| But for now, that's science fiction. Even if we could make the
| screens/optics work, the glasses still need power, and
| batteries are still relatively bulky. It wouldn't be much use
| if it had a short battery life, or drained your phone battery
| too fast.
| ErneX wrote:
| 1st iteration feels more geared toward developers/companies.
| Then release a cheaper consumer model down the road. This thing
| also needs software.
| [deleted]
| mrtksn wrote:
| The whole concept of AR/VR rises dystopian red flags,
| everything Mark Zuckerberg did with their attempt looked
| somewhere between scary and dumb.
|
| I think this is because these companies are preoccupied with
| controlling the content, they envision doing the same things we
| do IRL but on their platforms. This is problematic because it
| means people instead of improving their lives and actually
| doing things are expected to be pretending doing it and spent
| their precious lives and money away on this BS.
|
| VR and AR becomes exciting only when you can explore yourself
| and the world by doing things you can't do in real life. Maybe
| you want to try being assassin? Maybe you you want to try being
| from another gender or species? Maybe you want to try being in
| an actual war zone? Maybe you want to try to create a society
| with completely different rules from we have now? But no, these
| are too dangerous because someone might be offended, so in VR
| you are supposed to go to Paris and spend real money throwing
| virtual darts or something. They also can't distance themselves
| from the moral panic because they must milk the platform by
| controlling the content.
|
| It is outright dystopian and dumb. The core promise of the
| platforms is "do the same things you do when you don't already
| do on our platforms so we can monetise that too" and this
| doesn't converge with the core promise of the tech which is to
| do things you can't do in real life.
| ghaff wrote:
| I agree that getting to a genuinely
| useful/comfortable/fashionable AR device is a pretty heavy
| lift. (And that it's arguably unrelated to VR except maybe to
| some degree at the tech level.)
|
| But, if you get there, I'm pretty convinced that you will have
| a population of adopters whether it creates a class divide or
| not. Certainly cell phone adoption wasn't held back by this
| factor.
| haunter wrote:
| >I just don't think society currently has an appetite for a
| $3000 product that ... is an impossible to ignore distinction
| between classes
|
| What do you mean by that?
|
| Just curious because I feel the same about EVs, when I see one
| I think that's a richer than average person.
|
| So I don't see how an AR headset would be a problem. It really
| depends how does it look like though.
| ghaff wrote:
| I assume that it means you'll have people walking around
| wearing glasses that basically plug them transparently into
| all sorts of information. However, we've had an uneven
| rollout of mobile technology for the last 25+ years and that
| factor hasn't slowed anything down. _If_ (and I agree it 's a
| significant if over the next x years) AR is a genuinely
| useful mainstream technology people will adopt it even if
| others don't like it.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| People aren't in their EV while sitting in a restaurant,
| talking to you at a party or standing in a checkout line.
| It's literally in their face while talking to you.
|
| That said, usually people tend to seek out status symbols.
| People obviously wear Gucci sunglasses in their faces because
| they are Gucci and expensive. However, I also wonder if this
| case would be different because of the growing anti-tech
| resentment and the wearer now being associated with issues
| liked gentrification, disliked mega corps etc.
| bredren wrote:
| >underscoring the narrative that the company's biggest victories
| were initiated under his predecessor, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs
|
| What does the author consider to be a victory?
|
| Tim Cook was elevated because he had the operational capability
| to grow Apple. Jobs did not consider Cook to be a product design
| person. But Jobs trusted Cook to find and keep people who could
| design products.
|
| By any stretch of the imagination, the company's biggest
| victories have been in growing and holding together the vast
| ecosystem of HW / SW and services that continuously deliver the
| highest customer satisfaction ratings. The reward for that has
| been becoming the biggest company in the world. (Some might
| consider this a victory.)
|
| If introducing new hit products is the only kind of victory that
| can exist, then Apple Silicon and AirPods victories also go to
| Cook.
| [deleted]
| tguedes wrote:
| Absolutely. Between Apple Silicon, Apple Watch, AirPods, and
| scaling operations to be able to sell the amount of products
| they do in a year, that is hard to argue against being an
| overwhelming success for Tim Cook as CEO.
|
| Is it equal to the legacy of Apple under Jobs? Definitely not.
| But how many other companies/people released 3 revolutionary
| products?
| bredren wrote:
| It is hard to not compare the breakthrough product release
| count between Jobs and Cook.
|
| If that is the measure, then we have to bring in Jobs' tenure
| as not only CEO but company founder that stretched 25 years
| as CEO, 1976 to 1985 and 1997 to 2011.
|
| Cook only took the reins in 2011, and at that time arguably
| the company should not have focused on releasing yet more
| revolutionary products.
|
| iPhone is the most successful consumer product in history,
| focus was correctly placed in supporting that, building moats
| around it and positioning the ecosystem to support the next
| big thing.
|
| One product often left out, which may have started with Jobs,
| but delivery should be attributed to Cook is the new Apple
| HQ. The initial impact has crumbled due to Covid WFH.
|
| However, this campus may turn out to be a force multiplier
| going forward. If so, it is a victory, but not in the minds
| of consumers.
| deet wrote:
| I strongly doubt that the campus is any more of a force
| multiplier than a collection of far cheaper class A office
| buildings of similar capacity, with similarly serene grass
| and vegetation connecting them.
| thefourthchime wrote:
| Don't forget air tags.
| kmonsen wrote:
| I think even if Apple went bankrupt in 5 years, what Tim Cook
| has achieved is extremely good. It was not sure at all that
| Apple would grow this much over 12 years. It is not clear
| Steve Jobs himself could have had this success.
| tough wrote:
| How would it even be possible for apple to do so
| crooked-v wrote:
| > What does the author consider to be a victory?
|
| Well, there's the Apple II, the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone...
|
| Apple has had a long history of products that redefined the
| future of entire categories, and almost all of them up to this
| point except the Apple Watch included deep involvement by Jobs.
| kmonsen wrote:
| Apple watch? Airpods maybe? Apple silicon for sure.
|
| Other than that not much, but to be clear there has not
| really been any other inventions in this time span like those
| you mention. The market is more mature.
| Animats wrote:
| _" Apple's ambition is that customers will eventually wear the
| device continuously all day, replacing daily tasks done on an
| iPhone or a Mac such as playing games, browsing the web,
| emailing, doing FaceTime video calls while collaborating in apps,
| working out and even meditating. It will feature hand and eye
| control and run many of the kinds of apps found on Apple's other
| devices."_
|
| This concept has been well-explored in science fiction, and it
| doesn't look good. See "Hyperreality"[1] for one of the best
| visualizations. That's all too realistic.
|
| There's a line in Ready Player One:
|
| _" We call this Pure O2. This is the first of our planned
| upgrades. Once we can roll back some of Halliday's ad
| restrictions, we estimate we can sell up to 80% of an
| individual's visual field before inducing seizures."_
|
| I was expecting that from Zuckerberg/Meta/Oculus.
|
| Remember Google Glass? People wearing those were called
| "Glassholes". What to call people who wear this? "iDweebs"?
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJg02ivYzSs
|
| [2]
| https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/movie_script.php?mo...
| charcircuit wrote:
| If people aren't finding value in a product they will stop
| using it. People won't want to use products which displays ads
| in an obnoxious way.
|
| >What to call people who wear this?
|
| Why do you want to bully people?
| whynotmaybe wrote:
| > Why do you want to bully people?
|
| Is there a name for the mental situation where we make fun of
| someone because he dares doing something that we know we
| wouldn't dare to do?
|
| I think that's what OP is experiencing when wanting to give
| name to someone wearing the device.
| crooked-v wrote:
| The hypothetical dystopia you've invented here doesn't follow
| at all from even the worst behavior of the actual Apple
| company. Why do you assume that "having an app floating around
| in your field of vision" is automatically the same thing as
| "80% of your visual field filled with ads"?
| Animats wrote:
| > The hypothetical dystopia you've invented here doesn't
| follow at all from even the worst behavior of the actual
| Apple company.
|
| It takes a while to get there. Google started out ad-free.
| Google Search has now achieved "80% of your visual field
| filled with ads". Apple used to be ad-free. No longer.[1]
|
| [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/15/apple-reportedly-plans-
| to-pu...
| golergka wrote:
| Don't put too much faith in fiction. Especially cheap, pulp
| fiction like Ready Player One.
| nerdjon wrote:
| I continue to believe that IF (and that is a big if) anyone can
| make AR/VR a mainstream market it would be Apple.
|
| Just for the simple fact that Apple has in multiple occasions
| done 2 things:
|
| 1. Come out with something that shapes the rest of the industry.
| I mean how many times has Apple done something and within a year
| or 2 basically the entire industry follows.
|
| 2. Not captured a large (or majority) percent but continued to
| invest in a platform. I don't think anything they are in (except
| maybe the smart watch) do they actually have a majority
| marketshare but they continue to work on those platforms.
|
| So there is a part of me that hopes that Apple realizes that this
| platform will be the same way. It will be a very niche product
| that will take years of iterating on (like the Apple Watch) with
| it in consumers hands to turn it into a mainstream product.
|
| We have had too many failed attempts (Google Glasses and
| Microsoft HoloLens) just fail since they were not major successes
| right out the gate.
|
| They also have the developer buy in on their other platforms that
| they may be able to transition that to this if they handle that
| properly.
|
| That isn't saying that this is anywhere near a guarantee and
| obviously the hardware has to be there, the societal acceptance,
| etc. But I just don't currently see another company that is in
| the position to possibly pull this off.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| A study of futurism I read made the insightful observation that
| things which explode in popularity don't just do things
| differently -- they let you do _new_ things.
| Apple II - graphical OS iPod - music in your pocket
| iPhone - smartphone with cellular data iPad - large
| screen low cost iWatch - phone functionality on wrist
|
| These are all different in kind, not different in amount
| products.
|
| What does AR allow you to do, that you can't already do on a
| screen?
|
| It's different... but different in amount. It's a better
| screen.
|
| That might be enough to ship units, but it's not enough to
| explode in popularity.
|
| Hell, even mystical eyeglass AR _that was actually just a pair
| of eyeglasses_ would struggle. "Why don't I just do the same
| thing on my screen?" or "But I'm already constantly connected
| when I'm mobile."
| ska wrote:
| I think that is shortsighted. If you could realize a
| futurists dream of AR, i.e. smooth overly interacting
| properly with anything in your view, with context aware
| detail etc, it would pretty clearly be a game changer (I
| think).
|
| On the other hand, existing AR, like existing VR, just
| doesn't deliver on that promise, not even approximately.
|
| With current tech, it's more an issue that the juice isn't
| worth the squeeze. That can change when either (or both) side
| of the equation changes.
| pdabbadabba wrote:
| If "phone functionality on wrist" counts as a "different in
| kind" product, why on earth wouldn't "smartphone
| functionality without looking down at a smartphone, watch, or
| other device" qualify?
|
| For that matter, if "smartphone with cellular data" counts,
| why not "smart glasses with cellular data and apps"?
|
| As you can tell, I'm a skeptic of this difference in kind v.
| difference in quantity construct.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| wrist : insideOfPocket
|
| is more different than wrist : eyes
|
| Or, to put it another way, how many people do you know who
| complain about the difficulty in looking at their wrist or
| cell phone?
|
| That's the count of people for whom AR glasses would be
| different in kind.
| anonymouse008 wrote:
| > Or, to put it another way, how many people do you know
| who complain about the difficulty in looking at their
| wrist or cell phone?
|
| Everyone who tries to speak a text message with Siri.
| Apple should have been brave and not reshaped messages -
| that screen is not meant to consume text messages at any
| length - they should have changed the communication to
| match the context.
| fnord77 wrote:
| this is why you start with a minimum viable product. Something
| like Snapchat specs. And then iterate from there
|
| Instead they've been spending $1b/yr developing something that
| will never be finished
|
| The first apple computer wasn't a fully loaded macbook pro. It
| was a circuit board strapped to a piece of plywood
|
| some upstart will come up with something usable
| ghusto wrote:
| > It redesigned the battery as an iPhone-size pack that sits in a
| user's pocket, attached by a power cord
|
| aaaand, that's all I needed to read about that. It's never coming
| to market, maybe they'll revisit the idea in years to come
| though.
| nickthegreek wrote:
| I am most excited about this part. The headset needs to be
| light as possible and this will help that.
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