danwells

Apple is historically better than most about letting you turn off some of the targeting. Hopefully this can also be turned off. Of course the problem is that gambling companies (or other deep-pocketed spammers) will get around everything by simply buying so many slots that everyone gets it. It's like the horrible flyers pitching cheap cigars and really bad idea gold investments that spam every physical mailbox. They get the cost to print and deliver down so low that they can afford to annoy nearly everybody to catch a few suckers.

This is a vertical market device, and I wonder which of two verticals it will fit in (Or will it fit between them in some odd way)?

Consumer VR headsets are gaming devices, much as their makers try to make them something else. Every vision of the metaverse I have seen is about expanding the paradigm of gaming, about gamifying the world. This ignores the fact that, while gaming is incredibly popular, most people are not gamers. Many non-gamers are non-gamers by choice - we have looked at games and decided that they are not for us. We don't hate gaming or gamers, any more than someone who ignores baseball hates baseball. Maybe a few people actually hate baseball, but many more are fine with its existence - it's simply not for them. The same is true of video games, and this is the problem with consumer VR. Things like Horizon Worlds are sufficiently gaming-adjacent that they won't interest a lot of non-gamers, and non-gamers will resent it if they are forced into them, just as non-baseball people would resent being required to watch a bunch of baseball games.  Vision Pro is VERY expensive as a gaming-type headset. Nobody's made a really successful one much over $500 or so. Maybe Apple could get away with $1000 for something noticeably better - but $3499???

The other vertical is the professional use of VR - by the standards of astrophysicists using VR to visualize galaxies, or engineers seeing how parts will fit together, this thing's CHEAP. There are two problems - one is that isn't a big enough market to interest Apple. They haven't made a stand-alone camera in decades, that is a MUCH bigger market than the Pro VR vertical, and a professional camera can easily cost $3499 or more. If they were interested in markets of that size, why not a great mirrorless camera - they could join Leica, Panasonic and Sigma's L-mount so they started out with lenses available... NONE of the camera makers can write software, and Apple CAN - I'd love to see what they'd do! 

The second problem is that a LOT of the Pro VR vertical requires ruggedness. Astrophysicists don't need it, but engineers often do, and mechanics certainly do. Nobody has yet built a VR headset that is right for car mechanics, even though aircraft mechanics use them all the time. The Vision Pro could be a huge breakthrough for fixing cars, helping diagnose and replacing the service manual - but can you imagine one lasting five minutes in the shop? Even a Porsche repair shop? How quickly is someone going to put a wrench through that front glass (hopefully while nobody's wearing it)...

One important caveat on products like this (I found this out the hard way on an earlier generation) is that any cloud backup solution that will back up a RAID, but not a NAS (Backblaze is one, I suspect the same restriction applies to many others) considers these things to be NASes. So does any piece of software that doesn't like network drives - even when you're connected to the Thunderbolt port, it's considered a network drive. 

It's not really a Thunderbolt/NAS hybrid drive - it's a straight-up NAS that issuing Thunderbolt's ability to serve as a fast network interface - but it's a NAS from a management and software standpoint, and that's important to realize...

The base model is mainly for fleet purchase, as the article says. At $1449 (best price in the AppleInsider price guide), it's an attractive machine for light-ish workloads. Going to 16 GB of RAM brings it up to $1649. $150 more ($1799) buys the M3 Pro (and that comes with the RAM upgrade). $150's generally worth it for a P-core and 2 e-cores (it's a shame they traded in two P-cores for e-cores - a ton of e-cores are rarely useful because anything that wants more than a couple of cores also wants P-cores), especially because you also get GPU cores, one more Thunderbolt port and the ability to drive an extra monitor...

A digital ad tax is about the best tax I've ever heard of.

1.) Taxes reduce consumption of whatever they're applied to (this is why cigarette taxes are high - they're equal parts anti-smoking measure and revenue generator). An ad is a nearly unique product of generally negative value to the consumer (the consumer would prefer to have FEWER of them). Special cases like Super Bowl commercials which are funny enough that consumers seek them out notwithstanding, no recipient will pay for ads, and many people will pay to get rid of them. Netflix WITHOUT ads costs more than Netflix WITH ads, ad-blockers cost money, websites offer paid subscriptions to get rid of ads. Maryland has made the brilliant decision to tax something PEOPLE DESPISE.

2.) The tax falls on big companies that can easily afford it, and they don't have an easy way to pass it on. They can't charge end users more for ads, because end users don't pay for ads, they sometimes pay to avoid them. Any tax that sticks to big companies is useful - if you add a tax to most products, even if the producer is responsible for the tax, they pass it on (if you charge a value-added tax that manufacturers have to pay, they add it to the price of the product, passing it to consumers). The best way to keep a tax applied to the intended target is to target a product that makes passing the tax on nearly impossible - and taxing a product with a negative value is the best possible way to do that.