canukstorm

charlesn said:

hammeroftruth said:

charlesn said:

I am shocked... SHOCKED, I say! Who woulda thunk that after 15 years of Siri idiocy under Apple, Apple wasn't going to be able to fix it in 10 months? The WWDC announcement last year always seemed suspect--it was like we were being told that Siri, essentially held back in about third grade for the past decade and a half, was suddenly going to have a PhD by next April. Sounds like maybe not. 

You would be even more shocked that Apple has been working on this for at least 3 years and not 10 months. 

It's truly mind-boggling. Apple had a huge, years-long jump on the rest of the industry when it acquired Siri, Inc. in 2010. Alexa didn't debut until four years later, and its speed and capabilities left Siri in the dust, where Siri has remained ever since. Google Assistant wasn't until 2016, but it, too, has surpassed Siri. I'm all in on Apple everything except when it comes to a voice assistant, where I still rely on Echo Dots throughout my home. Alexa works with just about everything that can be voice-controlled while Siri works with a WHOLE lot less. Very hard to understand how or why Apple allowed this to happen. 

tht said:

twolf2919 said:

If this really existed - not an assured thing in this rumor driven world - then it's the dumbest idea ever.  Thanks god it was canceled!  I could understand AR glasses tethered than iPhone - at least you could still experience AR's promise of augmenting the world with useful information as you moved through it.  But what's the use of augmenting anything while you're sitting somewhere with your MacBook???  Add a virtual calculator or calendar to your office walls?  Who'd walk around with a laptop in hand?  Makes no sense at all.

The current darlings of the mediarati are the Meta Ray Bans camera glasses and the Xreal AR glasses. Various people want Apple to develop one or both of those form factors.

The Meta Ray Bans are shades with camera, microphone, and speakers, plus the chips needed for them, and battery, USB, wireless. Theoretically, something like visual intelligence can be used to help the wearer identify things they see, audio chatbot interface to the cloud service for things.

I assume audio-only interfaces will fail as mass market devices unless proven otherwise. 

The Xreal AR glasses are see-through AR glasses with about 50 to 57° FOV. Includes camera, microphone, speakers, wireless, chips and batteries. A lot of people use this as an external monitor. Connect through DP/HDMI through USBC something to the other. So, they use it with portable game consoles, laptops, desktops etc. Mostly for games and video. They are not good enough for text work yet.

The renders that AI shows are just glasses. Unrealistic. See-through AR glasses will have a display with a prism/wave guide layer to show AR objects. They will make the glasses look fat and cumbersome compared to the made up renders. For people that need prescriptions, that would be another layer in front of the prisms. The prism can just look like the lens as seen in the Meta prototype, but I’m not what happens in bright lighting situations with it. 

Can this be mass market successful? Not so sure.

For Vision Pro, if it can sell 1m units a quarter, I think that means huge success. Apple needs to rev it. It won’t reach 4m to 5m units unless ASPs are like $1200 to $1500. Apple knows it, they just don’t have the component costs yet. 

CheeseFreeze said:

I have the Vision Pro dev kit, basically the same hardware but with an extra USBC port and a bunch of accessories, but otherwise close to the product you’ll get from Apple today.

The device was both released too late and too soon. 

Too late because Meta pushed an entire ecosystem for years - at a huge loss, albeit with a different positioning.
if Apple didn’t have Meta as competitor I bet their current positioning would have been different. They just couldn’t enter the market so late with a “Samsung let’s copy” approach. So it became a “spatial computer” instead that no one wants.

Too soon because they weren’t ready by a long shot. Most of the apps are iPad apps projected on a flat plane in a 3D space. The only way they can sell that odd reality is because of their “spatial computer” positioning: these are windows on your spatial desktop! Sure, whatever. The end result is that most of the UX isn’t truly spatial. It’s just flat stuff in a 3D space. The spatial nature isn’t leveraged. 

The “you can have 10 monitors” argument is also nonsensical. Nobody needs it. And you can buy pretty decent monitors for $500-$700 if that’s what you need. 

 

The truth is, you’re not really productive with a VR device. Especially one that feels way too heavy on your face and puts two monitors right in front of you. 

AVP it’s a terrible device for gaming. Meta was smart enough to go for a dual approach where you can switch between hands and controllers based on your use-case. 

So at least with the Meta Quest, you can consume spatial videos and many fun games for $550 or so. On AVP, you can’t really do much.

nubus said:

Wesley Hilliard said:

soundsinmotion said:

I thought they retired the Vision Pro project? Wasn’t that news like last year or something?

Nope. Never retired, not even close.

Well... Apple stopped production as the current model was about to go Lisa. Production of some components ended May last year due to sales being far below expectations.

This is the first major product from Apple that hasn't been upgraded within 1 year. Newton, iPod, iPad, iPhone (major upgrade), iMac (3x the first year). AVP was presented in June 2023, the hardware is on M2, and the OS still doesn't do AI. This indicates that AVP was only launched due to the failure of Car. It wasn't ready or planned for being launched. All they had was this prototype and no viable roadmap.

I would say AVP is on hold. New countries are not being added and the Midas touch clearly didn't work. Apple will have to fully rethink what the technology is good for. There could be a speed bump version but something major will have to change for this to absorb the development costs when moving beyond 2026.

And it is all fine. Iterations are nice but moonshots are required for taking us and Apple beyond the current state of computing.

dewme said:

The iPad has been my most-used personal, as opposed to work, computer since the very first version was released. The intimacy and immediacy of the iPad is unmatched by any other computer I’ve ever used. I also agree that the iPad 2 was the first iPad that demonstrated the full potential of the iPad. I’m a big fan of the 10.5”, 11”, and Mini versions. Even though I have a 12.9” iPad Pro, it’s by far my least favorite iPad. It’s just too damn big and clumsy to comfortably use as a tablet.