sloaah

isaiahmontoya said:

It will still be used at events regardless. If you have perfect vision or you wear contacts, optical inserts aren’t even necessary. The option to wear optical inserts for people who wear glasses is a luxury we haven’t have at these types of events in the past. Thankfully it sounds like they’re working on adaptive liquid lenses for a future version of the device which adjust to your vision without the need for optical inserts.

You underestimate the number of people who wear glasses. 74% of people have some form of vision impairment; 64% wear eyeglasses some of the time. Over half of those wear glasses all the time, and only a quarter of those wear contact lenses. 

What's far more likely is that the price/performance ratio of the new Mac Pro is so much more compelling that it will open up the Mac Pro to a much larger user base than when it topped out at $54,000

No that's not the case. The larger user base is covered by the Mac Studio; the Mac Pro serves a niche crowd still.

It's pretty clear what's happened. Mac Pro users are traditionally more from the creative industries, where Apple has historically a strong foothold. There are a few different categories of use cases that benefitted from the Mac Pro including (but not limited to):

1. 3D/VFX
   
2. 2D/compositing
3. Video post-production
4. Sound/music professionals

Those in (1) Apple lost a while ago, when they switched from Nvidia, since much of the software was CUDA driven. They've been trying to build support for Metal but it's super limited even now, although following M1 they had a little success.

Those in (2)-(4) generally don't need massive compute performance, and instead benefit significantly from the Apple silicon's SoC approach. Some in (3) and many in (4) need PCI-E expansion slots for hardware input/output of industry niche ports (e.g. SDI for some video post users like colourists). The Mac Pro is really for them... it doesn't really offer any benefit over the Mac Studio except for these sorts of users.

For those users in (1) and for some in (2) who do need massive computer performance... Apple has just decided that it's easier to drop those markets, at least for the time being. Besides, as mentioned, Apple lost those markets a while ago; and regaining them takes time. Even if they came out with SoCs that had GPUs on par with the best GPUs that Nvidia has to offer, the simple fact that all this software is optimised for CUDA and either not compatible or still very new on Metal means that they would still struggle to get a foothold.

3D/VFX people have been keeping an eye out on Apple since Apple Silicon came about, so it's a bit of a shame that Apple didn't have a standout product suitable for them; because if they wanted to regain those users, the launch of a powerful Mac Pro would have been that moment in time. As it is, M2 Ultra – even if it's powerful – is a far cry from their needs, falling massively short in GPU compute and in available RAM capacity.

tmay said:

Hopefully, a third party will be able to provide a hot swappable, dual battery configuration so that there is essentially limitless power with multiple batteries.

With VR headsets you have lenses in front of the screens which cut some of the brightness.

Currently there are two types of lens designs: 

Fresnel lenses have been used on the Meta Quest 2 and PSVR2; they are the old generation of lenses, which have focal rings and create lots of distortion towards the edges and blurred highlights.

Pancake lenses are a much thinner lens design that will be used on the Quest 3, which address many of the shortcomings of fresnel lenses. However, they cut out a huge amount of light; as a result the Quest 3 doesn't use OLED screens, because they simply aren't bright enough with pancake lenses.

If Apple can have ultra-bright OLED screens in conjunction with pancake lenses, it will be clearly best in class. Add on the fact that there will be separate screens for each eye, rather than one screen across both eyes on the Meta Quests – the quality will be excellent I'm sure.

A decade after its launch

Wasn't Gmail launched in 2004? So it's been nearly two decades.