StrangeDays

darren mccoy said:

Why does this site hate X so much?

coolfactor said:

I agree 100%. Many employees are paid way more than most of them *earn* (or are worth to the company). Overtime, holiday pay, benefits.... on top of their hourly wage or salary. Yet they bitch and complain and unionize against their employer just to get more, more, more, without giving more. It's a sad state of affairs.

(this doesn't apply to everyone, but a very loud portion of workers)

Those of us that are self-employed know what it's truly like to work hard without any return on that work until the job is done. We don't get to sit around getting paid by the hour whether we produce results or not. I suppose commission workers experience this to a degree, which explains why car salespeople can be so pushy. 

coolfactor said:

A modular iPhone really would be a next-generation evolutionary step for Apple, but I don't see it happening.

twolf2919 said:

I think this is going to be one of those times when Apple should have either waited another year or two to release the AR glasses Tim originally dreamed of - or it should have started with less ambitious AR glasses in the first place - eg ones that let the iPhone do all the heavy lifting computationally.  The latter would have made it a lot easier to develop something people wouldn’t mind wearing in public.

Alas, Apple produced a super expensive engineering marvel that nobody outside extreme dorks would wear in public.  The author says that developers are excited about this product - I bet their business bosses aren’t: who would they sell those Vision Pro apps to?  There’s no market - at least not for another year or five.

CiaranF said:

Maybe people are getting pissed off with your prices eh? Your actions on the market then drive up the prices of other smartphone manufacturers cos then they get greedy too. I remember buying my first iPhone 3GS for £299 or £349 back in 2009 or so. Now the same equivalent for me in a Pro Max model is circa £1400. That’s greed too, not inflation. 

By way of example, Ternus explains that Touch ID and Face ID are critical pieces of infrastructure in a smartphone because of how a person's entire digital life is accessible via the device. 

"We have no way of validating the performance of any third-party biometrics," Ternus admits. "That's an area where we don't enable the use of third-party modules for the key security functions. But in all other aspects, we do."

PauloSeraa said:

It amazes me the lengths these guys will go to build a fantasy around something in hopes that people believe they are committed to it. In truth Apple will drop Vision Pro entirely if it doesn't sell well enough. Presale data isn't good, and Tim's continued experiment to see how much he can convince people to pay for something is starting to unravel. Apple simply does not do low volume products. They either cancel them entirely, or they let them die on the vine for ages while the 8 customers who bought into the idea are left hanging in the wind. Given the general feeling toward VR headsets on the market, the presale numbers most likely reflect a huge chunk of the people even interested in buying a Vision Pro, leaving day to day sales from here out to be scarce. If Apple can't even sell half a million units in the first year, their interest in the category will quickly diminish. Everyone assumes that version 2 is a given, but that's a bad assumption. Apple does not throw good money after bad, and they've already spent exorbitant amounts of money on the development of something that has amounted to an iPad for your face that costs $3,500, and requires wearing an objectionable piece hardware that is heavy, uncomfortable for any length time, nausea-inducing for most people, tethered to the wall, and completely world-isolating. What other Apple product even comes close to having that many negative tradeoffs? There is almost nothing good that you can say about this product that isn't outweighed but its downsides.

Apple has said that AR is the future, and I agree. So they go and build a VR headset, something no one anywhere thinks is the future, and try to do AR with it.

AR is all about the view finder. We already have the ability in software to do amazing things with AR, but they're nothing more than a tech demo until we get the view finder right. And a VR headset is not it. No more closer than holding an iPhone up to your face and looking through the lens of the camera. Apple knows this, and knows that glasses are the wearable of the future, and that everyday glasses that can be powered by iPhone to project AR into your world are a game changer. They also know that the technology to do this well is still several years away, and Tim Cook knows he won't be CEO by the time that comes around. He wanted spatial computing to be part of his legacy so badly that he pushed a product onto market years before it was ready, bolstered by his successes with overcharging customers in the last several years. Things like raising the price of products every time a new feature is added is a Tim Cook invention that customers have rewarded him for, and it has led to some poor decisions...Vision Pro's release being the pinnacle.

The comparison of its cost being in the same ballpark as a high-end television, sound system, computer, and camera but providing more value "may be factually true" but is still "quite misleading," suggests Gurman. TVs are intended to be shared, unlike the headset's single-user existence