Apple Vision

Yes and no.

Knowing the entire state of the game? Sure, TV's pretty good.

But watching on TV doesn't give the strong impression of the sheer physicality of the game that sitting a row or two away from the court does. I used to sit baseline for Warriors games and it sure left an impression.

A 10 second clip that will have been tuned to perfection by the very best editors for the demo is one thing. A live, un/rough-edited capture of a game broadcast in real time is quite different.

I've seen some truly amazing sports coverage to show off my OLED TV when I bought it. I still have the USB drive the TV came with and it does indeed look gorgeous. You know what doesn't look quite so good? Live broadcasts of those same sports. They are pixelated with some macroblocking and judder and posterization as the cameras quickly pan around the field and cut randomly.

It still looks pretty good but no way near as good as the minute long demo video LG used to show off how good their TV can look.

Obviously I've not used a Vision Pro so my comment isn't about the Vision Pro specifically, just that it is quite easy to make things look very good in a highly tuned demo for something vs real world broadcast quality.

Apple said : "We are going to throw infinite money at a pilot product that's basically a tech demo, and convince the market that this tech is for-real-for-real."

Meanwhile, Facebook refused to create a balls-to-the-wall VR headset for years and still ended up with a conservative 1500$ device even though they knew no one will purchase it. T̶o̶ ̶b̶e̶ ̶f̶a̶i̶r̶,̶ ̶C̶a̶r̶m̶a̶c̶k̶ ̶h̶a̶d̶ ̶b̶e̶e̶n̶ ̶p̶u̶s̶h̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶a̶n̶ ̶a̶l̶l̶-̶o̶u̶t̶ ̶d̶e̶v̶i̶c̶e̶ ̶b̶u̶t̶ ̶g̶o̶t̶ ̶s̶i̶d̶e̶l̶i̶n̶e̶d̶ ̶b̶y̶ ̶Z̶u̶c̶k̶'̶s̶ ̶p̶u̶s̶h̶ ̶t̶o̶w̶a̶r̶d̶s̶ ̶c̶h̶e̶a̶p̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶s̶c̶a̶l̶e̶.̶ (I might have mis-remembered)

Apple's strategy is dead obvious. Of course. When you want people to change how they have consumed information for decades, you HAVE to blow their socks off. Samsung understood this with the 2000$ Fold devices. The first computers cost tens-of-thousands of 2023 dollars. Car manufacturers understand this with Halo cars.

Facebook had a 7-8 year head start, and it never struck them to lead with a 'Halo VR device' ? Meta has among the best ML teams in the world who could produce 'Apple quality' face renders with ease. Sadly, the entire group was strapped down due to limitations of the kind of compute you can fit into a 400$ device.

    premature optimization is the root of all evil -Knuth

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What makes Apple great:

All big companies have competent employees. Competent employees come together in dysfunctional manners. 100 good ideas produce 1 terrible one and the final result looks worse than any of the initial solutions.

Apple somehow manages to preserve their obvious wisdoms & the brilliance of the best ideas across their development (product and software) process. The constant erosion caused by committees, meetings & standard communication friction does not atrophy the seed that was the initial idea.

It seems like faint praise. But, despite sounding easy, Apple seems to be the only company that's able to do this on a consistent basis with physical electronics. (video games, cars, construction projects achieve this in their field, but consumer electronics seems to completely lack this, barring Apple)