AppleZulu

9secondkox2 said:

One thing is for sure. NOT. An iPhone moment. 

Even the original iPhone was a hit and literally everyone knew it as it was being announced. It transformed a massively useful and needed segment. 

This just iterates on other similar niche devices. Nothing groundbreaking. 

The original iPhone was criticized for being exclusive to AT&T, having a crappy camera, having no physical keyboard, having no stylus, not having a user-replaceable battery, and being so expensive that Apple soon dropped the price to try to stimulate sales and (after an uproar) had to give store credit to the early adopters who paid full price. Not everyone 'knew it was a hit' as it was being announced.

So it's even more expensive than the rumors and it is kind of clunky-looking. 

It's not, however, another VR headset like others are already selling. It's an immersive, high-end computing system, plus an immersive, high-end entertainment system.

The people who can buy such things will dive in now. For the rest of us, just figure what three to five years of refinement did to the Apple Watch or iPhone, and you'll see the potential for a smaller, more refined device with currently unimagined features, and probably a lower price. So we'll see what happens with it.

22july2013 said:

Approximately half of the population wears glasses. Will this device work with them? I tried a competing model last month, and without my glasses it was almost unusable.

What is the focal length I will need for my glasses to work with any headset? Eg, will I need my reading glasses or my long-range glasses? Or will I need a new prescription with a 5 cm focal length?

Or, perhaps the device will have a built-in autorefractor. Take off your glasses, put the device on, it measures your needed vision correction and applies that to its output. 

I'm skeptical that any of these reports on design and features of this rumored device are either current or accurate. We may find out shortly, but I'd bet that the image above will bear little resemblance to any actual Apple device released to the public. I mean, why would the company that makes AirPods build wearable goggles that include clunky speakers on a head strap? If you want immersive audio to go with your AR/VR, you're not going to use head strap speakers, you're going to use AirPods that play the spatial audio directly into your head through your ear holes. Further along these lines, would a company that introduced an iPhone that depended on regularly connecting to a Mac, and a watch that was initially highly dependent on a connection to an iPhone develop a clunky $3,000 device seemingly made to operate independently of every other device that Apple makes? 

I'm betting that whatever it is, it will be slimmer, smaller, and less expensive than suggested here, and will rely on (and be enhanced by) integration with existing devices like AirPods for audio and an iPhone or Mac for computational power. The more functions it can offload, the smaller and lighter it can be. I'm betting that even the thing about the external battery pack is either nonexistent or an optional add-on, or, surprise, the thing described here is simply a MagSafe connector that uses the same charger as the Apple Watch to charge the device, with no expectation that you'll walk around with a wire hanging off of your left temple. 

elijahg said:

JP234 said:

enacting policies of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion will benefit Apple Inc. in the long term through hiring and promotion based solely on merit, not race, class or religion.

Enacting policies of forced inclusion and diversity is the exact opposite of hiring solely on merit, and therefore will not benefit Apple whatsoever. It forces recruiters to discriminate against highly capable white male applicants to reach some arbitrary diversity target. If these targets were representative of the workforce it would be a noble objective, but they are not. To be anything but representative of the workforce is discriminatory, but apparently discriminating against white males is fine. 

Women are underrepresented within Apple relative to the population, but not the workforce. There are simply very few female engineers in the workforce. Generally, the number of women who enjoy engineering is tiny compared to men. Arbitrary targets wont fix that, it needs to start in schools. 

In a company like Apple there is very rightly very little discrimination against underrepresented groups. Asian men are very much over represented for example - because they make brilliant engineers, but no one is complaining about that. 

It’s impossible to hire “solely on merit” when some people have arrived with credentials based on a lifetime of cultural assumptions about their gender and race said they are more deserving and possess inherent aptitude for something like engineering, and other people arrive (if they arrive at all) after a lifetime of cultural assumptions about their gender and race said they are less deserving and are lacking in inherent aptitude for something like engineering.