Not personally interested in an OS from Meta - the only thing I use from Meta is WhatsApp, and that's just because it is difficult to replace here in central Europe. I don't get excited about new OSs unless they're FOSS. It sounds like an ideological take, but it's not: When an OS is not FOSS, they either succumb to the wrong incentives and lack of care (Windows) or just become a walled garden (MacOS). From what I've…
Not personally interested in an OS from Meta - the only thing I use from Meta is WhatsApp, and that's just because it is difficult to replace here in central Europe. I don't get excited about new OSs unless they're FOSS. It sounds like an ideological take, but it's not: When an OS is not FOSS, they either succumb to the wrong incentives and lack of care (Windows) or just become a walled garden (MacOS). From what I've…
I know this is totally tangential to what you're saying and irrelevant to your point but I'm curious. I'm pretty up on MacOS and Linux, not so much on Windows. Is Windows less of a walled garden than MacOS?
Not personally interested in an OS from Meta - the only thing I use from Meta is WhatsApp, and that's just because it is difficult to replace here in central Europe. I don't get excited about new OSs unless they're FOSS. It sounds like an ideological take, but it's not: When an OS is not FOSS, they either succumb to the wrong incentives and lack of care (Windows) or just become a walled garden (MacOS). From what I've…
I know this is totally tangential to what you're saying and irrelevant to your point but I'm curious. I'm pretty up on MacOS and Linux, not so much on Windows. Is Windows less of a walled garden than MacOS?
It's functionally the same - code signing is mandated unless you want your users to get a scary pop-up.
This entire thing is newspeak. Every headline means the opposite. For example, "A More Open App Ecosystem" means a more closed application ecosystem. By switching to a proprietary OS and setting up a walled garden where they have to approve all software you can run. This is part of the coming war on general computation.
> This is part of the coming war on general computation.
Coming? I'd say it's already full on. Apple's malicious compliance with the DMA is one part of it, for instance. Of course others try to imitate.
> So there’s no kind of existential danger to Quest here, but it remains to be seen if the hardware licensees can bring anything relevant to the table either. Why would I, as a potential hardware maker, wish to compete in a market where the existing main producer is a mega wealthy entity that is already dumping product below cost and is capable of doing so indefinitely?
Google did this early on with android - originally the Google devices (Nexus) were lower end, and high end devices were left to other manufacturers. They've flipped around recently, but I think the Nexus line was a decent enough idea at the time.
Nexus was supposed to be reference platform with a harmless quirk or two, not necessarily low or high end. The idea was everyone builds for Nexus and apps run everywhere.
That's confusing the decision to work on something with the quality of the folks working on it. Brilliant engineers often work on things which are risky from a market perspective. It doesn't make them less brilliant at engineering when it turns out there isn't a market for the thing. John Carmack appears to be brilliant. I'd guess he would admit the VR market didn't turn out as hoped.
> he would admit the VR market didn't turn out as hoped That's not what he said though. What he said is that Meta is basically incompetent.
And from a leadership perspective it might well be / might have been. I don't think he ever criticized the quality of engineers there.
As usual I get quite hopeful when I hear about a new operating system. We so absolutely need paths to move away from what we have today. I didn't even know what "mixed reality operating system" was so that made me hopeful. May include some nifty quantum processing. Alas, it is just stuff built on top of Android, which is built on top of the Linux kernel. Perhaps "Meta Horizon SDK for Android" would be a better label?…
Android is already quite cool compared with what traditional OSes happen to be. For starters it is what Microsoft has failed to do with Longhorn, because contrary to having internal sabotage from the kernel team, the Android team doubled down on their efforts to make a managed userspace actually work in a mainstream product. Dalvik sucked balls against Sony and Nokia J2ME implementations, with its DEX interpreter, ye…
Limbo and Inferno are partially alive in Go and plan9/9front.
On J2ME, it worked well in legay devices; but for modern usage, Android's Java-like API
was a godsend for the developers, as they could seamlessly transition from one Java-like
lang to another one. Heck, J2ME interpreters for Android do exist, and I think lots of them just
use shims...
Do devs really capture absurd margins? Or does Apple, leaving the dev with a pittance?
I thought ultra-ridiculously-high-end was referring mostly to Apple hardware and bundled software.
I mostly meant when Apple goes crazy like Vision Pro being $3500, Mac Studio and Mac Pro prices, etc. Those are low-volume items and I think Vision Pro will be relegated to that niche too. If they cut a lot of useless fluff like the eyeball cams/screens, and focus on fit/price they can have a good V2. But the "spatial computing" thing was dead on arrival, it'll never take off as it hasn't taken off in 40 years. People don't want to wave their arms in the air all day.