Japhey

JP234 said:

There should be, somewhere out there, a market analysis to determine the point of diminishing returns comparing markup/volume ratios.

"From" $3499 is too expensive for what VisionPro represents at this time. Yeah, I'm impressed with it. A lot. Am I impressed enough to buy one without asking, "Will this add $3,500 (or more) of value to my work or home life?" The answer is, right now VP offers nothing that is unavailable in some other, albeit less impressive format. Yet. There are plenty of ways to spend "from" $3,500 (plus tax, lens correction and AppleCare) that would equal or surpass the benefit I'd derive from a headset.

Dump the floating windows. The market for VP as a work tool is too niche. The transparency feature seems impressive at first, but you could also just take them off when you want to talk to someone in the room. Is that worth an extra whatever? And why do we need to create an artificial representation of ourselves NOT wearing the headset when using Facetime? Let your contacts see that you're wearing them, and envy you. Or take them off.

Do what's necessary to get the price to $1,999, and add an eSIM. Now there's mass market appeal. Keep the $3,499 model for the upscale customer, call it VisionPro Ultra or something so they'll have something to brag about.

mayfly said:

Japhey said:

mayfly said:

timmillea said:

There was a time when Apple always led with new technologies - mostly a deeply unprofitable time. In latter years, they work in secret, study what the competition is doing, innovates on top, patents to the hill, then embarrasses the competition. 

My first degree at Durham University starting 1992 was 50% in AI and 50% software engineering. Then no one I met outside the University had even heard of artificial intelligence nor believed in it when I explained what it was. Now AI is on the main broadcast news all the time. Even now, Nick Clegg of Meta was on the airwaves this morning explaining that the current generation of AI is simply predicting the next word or 'token' from big data. Back in 1992, Durham had a huge natural language processing system called LOLITA which was based on deep semantic understanding - an internal, language-independant representation based on semantic graphs. LOLITA read the Wall Street Journal everyday and could answer questions on it with intelligence, not parrot fashion. For my final year project, I worked on the dialogue module including 'emotion'. Then the LOLITA funding ended and that was the end of that. Had it been in the US, I can't help feeling that LOLITA would have morphed into one of the top corporates in the World. We don't support genius or foresight in the UK. 

It is truly depressing that 30 years later, the current state of AI is still neural nets trained on mediocre data sets. 

But to bemoan the fact that AI hasn't achieved singularity in 30 years shows a lack of understanding the enormous technical challeges involved. It will take processing power that does not even exist at the scale required at this time. Perhaps quantum computing will be the answer to the advances you're seeking. Decades from now.

Did you study AI and software engineering in college? If you did, well done  But if you didn’t, what makes you think that you know more than someone who did? 

Also, who said anything about the Singularity?

When I was in college, there was no AI. There was no software. The only computer in Chicago was an IBM 360 mainframe at the Illinois Institute of Technology. That's where I went to college, and where I majored in EE, with a computer science minor. The first engineering job I had was at Robert Bosch corp, developing electronic fuel injection hardware and software. Then in the engineering dept. at Siemens, working on the implementation of integrated circuit technology into their medical devices. Followed by 17 years of self employment in graphic arts (you could find my name on the original Adobe Pagemaker/Indesign and Illustrator teams). Followed by working at Apple until I retired in 2014.

Other than that, you're right, I'm probably unqualified to opine about the resources necessary to advance AI to pass the Imitation Game.

mayfly said:

timmillea said:

There was a time when Apple always led with new technologies - mostly a deeply unprofitable time. In latter years, they work in secret, study what the competition is doing, innovates on top, patents to the hill, then embarrasses the competition. 

My first degree at Durham University starting 1992 was 50% in AI and 50% software engineering. Then no one I met outside the University had even heard of artificial intelligence nor believed in it when I explained what it was. Now AI is on the main broadcast news all the time. Even now, Nick Clegg of Meta was on the airwaves this morning explaining that the current generation of AI is simply predicting the next word or 'token' from big data. Back in 1992, Durham had a huge natural language processing system called LOLITA which was based on deep semantic understanding - an internal, language-independant representation based on semantic graphs. LOLITA read the Wall Street Journal everyday and could answer questions on it with intelligence, not parrot fashion. For my final year project, I worked on the dialogue module including 'emotion'. Then the LOLITA funding ended and that was the end of that. Had it been in the US, I can't help feeling that LOLITA would have morphed into one of the top corporates in the World. We don't support genius or foresight in the UK. 

It is truly depressing that 30 years later, the current state of AI is still neural nets trained on mediocre data sets. 

But to bemoan the fact that AI hasn't achieved singularity in 30 years shows a lack of understanding the enormous technical challeges involved. It will take processing power that does not even exist at the scale required at this time. Perhaps quantum computing will be the answer to the advances you're seeking. Decades from now.

charlesn said:

Amy Winehouse at #8, but Nina Simone at #88 and Billie Holiday--arguably the greatest jazz vocalist ever--doesn't even make the list?! Was the voting limited to people with frontal lobotomies? Nina and Billie albums will still be selling and still be of consequence long after Amy Winehouse is Amy Who?

It's also stupid to put any album on this list that's less than a decade old -- not enough time has passed to determine how influential and consequential a given album will prove to be. I own both albums that SZA has released, but to rank SOS--released only and exactly one year ago!--as one of the greatest 100 albums ever recorded is just stupid. 

Yeah, these lists are always controversial, and that's fine, but THIS list is the most embarrassingly dumbass one I've ever read.