Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses

Yes it's been very easy to get advice, that's for sure, and it's made me want to go find a junkyard core and see if I can salvage it. Not that I have anything to put it in. This is a marine application so not everything applies (or applies differently) so the complexity is in navigating what's legitimately different vs. what's Mercruiser taking advantage of the ignorant.

For example. The engine has EV6 Bosch injectors, a completely standard off-the-shelf part. A seal kit (i.e. a bunch of o rings) for the injectors is maybe $20 from Fel Pro. If you go by the Mercruiser part number for the kit it's - get this - $297. Two hundred and ninety seven dollars for sixteen tiny rubber o rings.

The photographs (just to keep it on topic) are basically all around the accessories bolted to the heads and block. A remote oil filter, the heat exchanger, the particular fuel boost pump it uses, all with weird brackets and spacers and eight different types of bolt.

so where's the virtual HUD ?

This is a USA doctrine, and fewer than 4% of people live there.

Just because this is a fact of life in the USA doesn't mean I want ALPR devices on every street corner telling Zuckerberg et al every time I go out of my driveway and where.

I work in the optical industry. I do R&D/quality control for a lens manufacturer and agree Luxottica is an awful company, but your comment is way off base. It's actually quite wrong.

Your "zyl" acetate frames aren't higher quality. Modern acetate is stronger, lighter, less brittle, less subject to warping from temperature change, and more resistant to UV damage which impacts brittleness and color. 40 years of material science progress. No one in the industry would say older acetate is better. It's worse in every way especially because yours are old. They're breaking down.

People don't wear glass lenses anymore for a reason. They are heavy and the only advantage over plastic is less chromatic aberration which is a non issue unless you are comparing to an extreme prescription using high-index plastic. They are also fairly dangerous compared to plastic due to the way they shatter. They fog up more easily. Again, 40 years of material science.

Additionally, there are no low optical-quality plastic lens blanks. This is a solved problem. The only defects you'll get in lens blanks are bubbles and these won't make it through production. What happens after a manufacturer grinds the lens out is a different story but I can also tell you that their lens surfacing is not low quality by any means.

Your hinges aren't any better and get loose over time. You can't actually use these for 40 years, they will wear out too and are harder to replace. Spring loaded hinges are lighter and reduce strain on both the frames and the wearer. I know what they use, they aren't cheap, and are high quality.

I do agree with your point on the branding.

The optimization for optics is all about weight. Your old frames and lenses aren't better because they're heavier, they're worse. As well as being more brittle and shatterable. It's like pining for the old heavy golf clubs made of wood and iron or all steel cars with V8 engines. Yeah, they're heavier! But they're worse in every way.

I will also say that you should buy frames because you like the frames. If you want great lenses, you just get them made. You shouldn't expect high-quality prescription lenses from a frame manufacturer, that's what your optometrist is for. I buy cheap frames all the time and pop in whatever I want.

You may have a bit of a point if you are talking moderate to high prescription ordered from Ray-Ban, but if you are talking about their non-prescriptive sunglasses, you're just yelling about all the wrong things.

Edit: typo and swapped in "surfacing" rather than "production" for clarity.

First of all, nobody (certainly not me) is "yelling." I find the way you wrote this response a bit telling, and that sort of thing actually detracts from your ability to persuade.

I'd freely grant your point about the zyl. But the rest of your response is somewhat motte-and-bailey fallacy to me. For instance, I never maintained that there are "low quality plastic lens blanks." What I was getting at is that for a lot of consumers, the polarized Bausch & Lomb glass lenses are superior in quality and a better experience than the cheap plastic lenses. I also never, at any point, maintained that I'd "expect high-quality prescription lenses from a frame manufacturer." My comment was framed (pun intended) in terms of off-the-rack, non-Rx sunglasses which was absolutely clear from what I said above.

And your claim about the hinges is simply laughable. I'd dare you to stress-test (in the R&D sense) the old five-barrel bolted hinges against these cheap spring hinges. That's a Pepsi challenge I'd be willing to take any day. Incidentally, as I mentioned above, I have a pair of 1984 Ray-Ban Wayfarer IIs that are a few months away from being exactly 40 years old, and as I said they look and function like new even though they've been worn constantly for decades. Trying to maintain that the spring hinges Luxottica uses on today's Ray-Ban branded sunglasses are "high quality" completely destroys the force of your argument.