InspiredCode

Strangely it is launch day for the new HomePod and my original HomePods have suddenly started working fine again today. They were giving errors similar to "Sorry I cannot complete your request at this time. Try again later." 50% of the time for at least a month. I've been trying all day to get Siri to misbehave and she has been good. Crossing my fingers it sticks. 

Apple, if you are listening... bring realtime audio playback like the Apple TV has to the Mac and I'll buy another pair of HomePod 2nd editions immediately.

gatorguy said:

Quote: "...Google has tried and failed to introduce an augmented reality device before as well, called Google Glass. The eyesore wearable spooked the public as it pointed a giant camera at other people's faces -- earning Glass users the affectionate nickname "Glass-hole."

FWIW Glass has never been discontinued, just re-focused, (!) nor did it ever have a giant camera.  But yes, it did get a cute internet tag. Glass-hole.
https://www.google.com/glass/start/

In the time since they've been planning and developing a consumer product, perhaps two, and waiting for the right time to announce it. There's no scrambling.

Once Apple clears the way by proclaiming it's now OK to have a camera on your face I suspect Google will be ready to release their consumer-oriented augmented reality product. Apple's may still be better overall. Or not. Even if not it will be more commercially successful, but it will be 2024 before a headset/glasses for "the rest of us" will come to market from either company and a better idea of how accepting the public will be. 

This is more of a public vs private thing. Apple has brought it up before. Cameras on your face are fine in private, but not in public. In public it makes people feel uneasy and cameras get overexposed to bright light too easily for tracking. As a result, any future Apple glasses will probably have awful tracking compared to a headset (headsets have sub-millimeter tracking) but probably make up for it by not rendering much of of your view so it doesn’t make you sick. One of many reasons there will probably always be two classes of XR devices.

On the plus side, this is a good year to buy in for long term investment. The externalities that resulted in this will resolve by next year.

Obviously no traditional RAM, but many workflows that require that can already use RAM disks and virtual memory.

I think part of the GPU story is being missed, but we will see. Apple knows they have a hole to fill in preview rendering and they have been putting a lot of effort in to making metal ready on the software side. No idea what the plan is, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they create some type of rendering acceleration card that might not work as a normal GPU. I can’t imagine they will say they have the embedded GPU– end-of-story. As great as that GPU is, it isn’t quite powerful enough for people buying $50K machines which need a minimum 4X more GPU performance. I’ve thought that either they are getting AMD support for compute or maybe something out of the 2020 partnership with Imagination Technologies. Imagination has been helping with hardware ray tracing. Maybe they also have an ace up their sleeve. Originally Apple was building a discrete GPU for these machines code named Lifuka, but it was rumored to have been canceled for being too slow at the tasks it needed to perform. The Imagination contract was signed pretty close to the time that GPU was rumored to have been canceled. This is all conjecture, but I think we will see a surprise when the Mac Pro is launched.

I feel Apple should just create a casino category to move all the gambling and gatcha games to. Either Apple's algorithms promote those due to massive amounts of IAP or they just have so many reskinned versions of the same games that they overwhelm everything. It would be nice to be able to find actual games on the App Store again and to try to stop feeding peoples addictive and OCD impulses. Although I don't like outright banning and I'm opposed to censoring games, I feel we have whole categories of games that are pretty toxic to society. At this point probably half of America needs some Psilocybin therapy to undo the damage from these types of games and social media.