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Apple’s new headset meets reality

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Re: Apple’s new headset meets reality

#171

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> 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.

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.

Isn't Time Cook ultimately like Steve Ballmer? He has continued and consolidated to build a golden prison with the construction of a monopoly and increase the money generated incredibly.

Re: Apple’s new headset meets reality

#172
post #157
post #148

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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 on…

I don't think casual users care at all about graphic quality. Just look at how the Switch or Wii exploded over every other game console. Same thing for games like Roblox. Graphic quality is purely an enthusiast niche target. If you want mass adoption you need to fix comfort and nausea.

it is something different if your screen is only a few square centimeters or if you are in a virtual environment. At least I do not agree to your point of view. For example running something like MS Flight Sim with decent realistic visuals is absolutely impossible, forget any other sims that require high quality characters, nature or anything else with a high polygon count or AI rendering

Re: Apple’s new headset meets reality

#173
post #45

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…

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.

Motion capture processed data and pre-processed 3D models are far less bandwidth-intensive than a video feed. The only problems that can't be really solved by super realistic 3D is latency.

Re: Apple’s new headset meets reality

#174

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 headset will be a very expensive premium product (a…

> I think consumers just don’t want to spend a lot of money on VR

And I don’t think Apple wants those people as customers, at least not initially.

$3000 for a headset from a company that sells $1000 monitor stands for $5000 monitors and $500 wheels for the computers doesn’t seem about right to me. In a year or two, the next generation of VR headset will be much better and still $3000 and you will be able to buy this one for, maybe, $2000.

There’s an awful lot of people who can afford $2k for a piece of hardware if it’s good enough.

All that said, I suspect the headset will be priced well under $3000.

Re: Apple’s new headset meets reality

#175
post #151

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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…

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.

And that, dear reader, is how we ended up with hundreds of bland copy-cat Android phones to the iPhone. There's something to be said, mentally, for working somewhere that's inspiring. A shitty office in yet a clone of all the other office parks, buried in office-park-landia of San Jose, is not it. Even a stroll through the secret underground parking lot at Apple is inspiring with all the exotic cars that are owned by early Apple employees, instead of Honda Civics and Toyota Camrys. Not that there's anything wrong with that, I drive a Honda, but they just don't have the same emotional pull.

Re: Apple’s new headset meets reality

#176
post #164

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[read the rest of the thread :)] Yes yes yes - a lot of people enthusiastically drink 3+ CocaColas a day too! Doesn’t make it a good use of technology nor dietary choice :)

Not really a useful analogy, I think. Most people do, or don't do, something that empirically is not optimal for their health. If your suggesting there is an objective downside - I think you have an uphill battle there.

No, just engaging with the ‘everyone else does it’ part which felt emphasized. Proving lost potential is hard without an example of something better - which I would argue is the Oura ring, but less popular for different reasons.

And for Siri and Alexa, you probably use ChatGPT, so you know the difference when you see it

Re: Apple’s new headset meets reality

#177
post #76
post #72

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> 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 m…

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.

Once there are true smart glasses, things will change. I love the Hololens 2 experience, it just needs better hardware and smaller form factor.

Re: Apple’s new headset meets reality

#178
post #132

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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.

> 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.

I use the voice to text feature of the Watch's Messages app daily. It has worked flawlessly since I bought the Watch.

Re: Apple’s new headset meets reality

#179
post #80

>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 imaginatio…

I would argue that the move the Apple Silicon was in the pipeline long before Cook took over. I mean PA semi was purchased in 2008 and the first A4 processor was 2010, the writing was already on the wall a good decade out.

But Air-pods, Apple Watch and Apple TV streaming were all under cooks watch. Maybe not as ground breaking but still very important. Mind you, who else has been doing ground breaking stuff like under Steve? I cannot think of anything other than the recent AI stuff. It kind of feels like Steve picked the last of the low hanging fruit and then bowed out before it came to stagnation.

Re: Apple’s new headset meets reality

#180
post #87

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Driving, I think. Google maps overlayed onto the real world is pretty killer. Maybe night vision delivered as an IR image overlay.

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)

Depends on the type of AR, passthrough or real vision with overlay like the Hololens
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