Marvin

charlesn said:

The SE selling proposition was certainly a whole lot easier for customers to immediately grasp: a brand new iPhone for a dramatically lower price. Everybody gets that. An SE was 46% cheaper than the base iPhone 16. The 16e is only 25% cheaper--that's a huge difference and takes what was an easy decision for price-sensitive shoppers and makes it much more complicated. Do you want the full feature set of the 16 for $200 more? Or the full feature set of the 15 for $100 more? OR: maybe all the new iPhones are too expensive now and you'd rather shop refurbs. Or go to Android. The 16e certainly gives buyers a lot more to think about before making a purchase decision.

All we know for certain right now is that competing in the aggressively lower price point arena was not good business for Apple and so they have abandoned that effort completely. Sales of the SE never equaled those of any of Apple's more expensive iPhones, even the Plus, which is itself on the chopping block due to reported low sales. I'll be very curious to see how Apple markets the 16e and what they'll choose to emphasize about the phone. I think the greatest risk with this phone is the degree to which it might cannibalize sales of the regular iPhone 16. I could imagine that for many shoppers considering the 16, the "e" in the 16e might very well mean it's "enough." 

Apple has a comparison page with the iPhone 14:

https://www.apple.com/iphone/compare/?modelList=iphone-16e,iphone-14,iphone-16

The 16e is effectively a replacement for the iPhone 14, which was also sold at $599.

Instead of an older model at a lower price, it's a cut down version of the main model at a lower price. The old SE had an IPS display, moving to OLED had to increase the cost.

There have been some marketshare reports showing the low-end and mini models don't make up much of the overall sales:



https://www.techradar.com/phones/iphone/iphone-15-sales-figures-show-the-pro-models-have-become-the-default

It's still a lot of people as the total is 250m units so 6% = 15m. Most of these people will eventually buy a larger model, very few would move to Android as they have large screens too.

A lot of people buy on contracts so the price difference is negligible:

https://www.att.com/brand/apple/iphone/

The 6.1" size is bulky but it's the most popular size. There was a poll done here that had 6.1" as the top choice:

https://www.gsmarena.com/weekly_poll_what_is_the_ideal_screen_size_for_a_smartphone-news-57173.php

After using larger displays for a while, the 5.4" mini display felt cramped, especially when typing in portrait but the 5.8" on the iPhone X felt like the largest usable single-handed size. Larger phones (above 2.8" wide) have to be shuffled around or held with one hand to type with the other because they are too wide and it's difficult to do gestures like swipe back on a browser.

If they make a mini model again, it would be good to see a 5.6-5.8" model that is thinner and lighter. It probably still wouldn't be lower than $599 due to the OLED display and higher spec components.

crazyexcalibur said:

You’re lucky that you don’t have any issues with the weight. I’ve tried at least ten different iterations of the face cushions and none have been able to make it where I can wear the AVP for longer than a couple hours. It’s not so simple to do this either. I’ve had to buy them, try them on for a week or so and return them. Then repeat the process. I’ve even bought third party head gear hoping it would help. I’ve found a few but they just transfer the weight from my eyes to my forehead. I only use it for watching media because of this, as media usually is about 2 to 3 hours, the max before my face hurts too much. 

There are a lot of components inside:

The weight is actually similar to most headsets:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1337114/vr-headset-comparison-by-weight/

AVP weighs 600-650g for the headset and 350g for the battery pack.

The Big Screen Beyond VR headset (display-only) is lighter and weighs 170-185g:

https://www.uploadvr.com/bigscreen-beyond-weight-specs/

An iPhone 15 weighs 171g, including battery.

An iPhone 15 compute unit (minus display) + Big Screen Beyond headset would weigh 356g, almost the same as the AVP battery pack. It may need more battery power but they can still build a much lighter unit.

Hopefully the 2nd revision will see a big reduction in size and weight. It would be good if they could sit it closer to the eyes to increase field of view.





In September this year, they will have the 3nm A19 Pro chip, which could go in AVP 2 or a smaller model. This will run much cooler than M2 and drain less battery.

If Apple had made AVP1 like an iPhone strapped to a headset, even with 2K displays around $1499-1999, they'd have sold a few million units. It would still have been the best VR headset on the market and people would mostly use it for media consumption. Text would have looked more blurry but people used SD monitors for decades and this problem will get resolved in time as display manufacturing improves.

A more mainstream model would let them see what the demand is like and would drive more software and content having a larger userbase.

AppleInsider said:

Like the creation of its headset, producing smart glasses with AR features is a technical nightmare. It's a hard set of problems to solve, ranging from creating the image in front of the user's eyes to producing something light enough to be like regular spectacles.

All while dealing with other long-term issues like handling processing and communications, and somehow hiding a battery on the frame.

However, Apple is far from the only company to be working on smart glasses. 

Meta's Orion AR glasses prototype is expected to arrive as a product in 2027, making it a very early release in the field.

Then there is Google, which is producing the Android XR operating system intended for next-gen headsets and smart glasses. Gurman writes that Google demonstrated the operating system to him in December using various glasses, including some with displays.

Those prototypes were considered to be quite polished, but unlikely to reach the open market until the harder challenges like battery life are solved.

Batteries are a massive problem for VR headsets now, let alone lightweight spectacles. It's a weight that must be minimized and carefully placed so the glasses don't feel heavy to wear, which is extremely hard for a purposefully lightweight item like spectacles.

Apple certainly has to come up with a better answer than the current tethered battery on the Apple Vision Pro. But, short of magically making batteries as light as air, it's a difficult problem to solve.

That said, tethering to an iPhone or another device could help further, by handling processing for the glasses. This offloads another set of components and reduces the power draw, but it still means it'll be connected to another piece of kit. 

There are companies that have been shipping AR sunglasses for a couple of years now so the first part about getting AR displays into a glasses form factor is available:

https://us.shop.xreal.com/products/xreal-one-pro

This product offloads processing to a tethered device and only handles the display + motion tracking so no battery needed in the frames.

The power usage is said to be around 2W. Airpods Max has a 5Wh battery, iPhone 15 has a 13Wh battery.

Assuming a new product isn't offloading compute, it would use an iPhone chip for half the power of M-series chips around 5W (max, not average). The displays would be around 2W. The battery would have to be around double the Airpods Max at around 10Wh, increase the cushion on top to distribute the extra weight more, possibly have a thin strap at the back to stop it tipping forward and have lightweight displays that sit in front.

I don't think glasses are necessarily the end goal because even normal glasses are uncomfortable to wear for a while and they can still look unattractive to wear:



One thing that sets Apple products apart is they all look good. Almost every product they design is the best design in its class. Best looking laptops, phones, tablets, displays, headphones.

The end product can look something like this:



The display would wrap around with optional light blockers, mainly for above and below the eyes. The blockers are only needed for immersive content, AR content shows the surrounding environment so it doesn't need to block the light unless the environment light is too bright.

The connection point for the display would have to be the headband if the cups still have to swivel and they should be easy to push up to the headband out of the way. There would be no weight on the face or ears like glasses, the displays would be suspended in front of the eyes.

Retail cost should aim to be under $2000. If they can only manage 2K resolution at this price point, so be it. HDR and black levels are more important than sharpness for media content. It's not going to be great for text but usable and they can sell 4K ones at a higher price in a Pro model.

People are already walking around in public with this form factor and it looks perfectly normal.



No matter how much the current AVP form factor iterates, the bulk of the device is in the wrong place and needs too many cushions. The product itself is just the black/silver part at the front, which would be even smaller without EyeSight components and the compute parts:



I don't think it needs to take as long as 2027 to deliver something like this. They have all the parts this year to make a revision 2 with a more compact form factor.

This form factor would sell fairly well for 5 years while they iterate on getting things more compact and power efficient. It may end up that having compute on the wearable never needs to be the end goal if visuals can stream fast enough wirelessly to a nearby device but at a minimum they need to power the displays so a battery needs to go somewhere to get rid of the wire. If it goes on the front or back of the head, it's back to a helmet form factor again with weight on the face.

oberpongo said:

Where does „half the performance“ come from. 

I am sure Apple can tweak some cores (more gpu etc) to easily double the PS5 performance 

GPUs have raw performance measures that come from core counts and clock speeds. These measures aren't always directly comparable but they tend to be fairly reliable. M4 is 4.6TFLOPs (around the same as XBox Series S), the PS5 is around 10 TFLOPs.

It's better to compare actual GPUs, the consoles use AMD hardware and the PS5 is close to an AMD 6600XT:

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Radeon-RX-6600-XT-vs-M4-10-Core-GPU_10939_12502.247598.0.html

There aren't many games on the Mac to compare but Shadow of the Tomb Raider is a well-optimized title. It shows M4 around 30% of the PS5-equivalent. With upscaling, it can get close to half.

M4 Pro is 9.2TFLOPs and roughly equivalent to PS5.
M4 Max is 18.4TFLOPs and roughly double the PS5, probably close to PS5 Pro.
A18 Pro in the iPhone is 2.5TFLOPs, around 1/2 the M4 or 1/4 the PS5.

Apple's cheapest M4 Max product would be the $2000 M4 Max Studio when it's released.

Nvidia's latest AI frame-gen can 4x the FPS. Apple will have at least 2x frame-gen in an upcoming MetalFX for the Cyberpunk 2077 port this year so this will help vs the PS5 performance, although PS5 has it too:

https://www.tweaktown.com/news/98570/amd-fsr-3-frame-generation-is-now-available-on-ps5-and-xbox-series-consoles-to-deliver-120-fps/index.html

The Nintendo Switch 2 is rumored to be around 4TFLOPs (10x Switch 1) and will support DLSS3 and frame-gen, this should perform closely to a PS5 without upscaling and frame-gen and similar to the base M4 iPad Pro. Apple would be competitive with Switch 2 in the iPad Pros and Mac mini and with upscaling and frame-gen can give PS5-like performance.

A TV dock would allow people to use their iPad Pros this way too and the dock could open a TV UI like Steam's Big Picture mode.

https://store.steampowered.com/bigpicture

Apple used to have something called Front Row, which was a media center software:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Front_Row_(software)

This is used for photos, music, movies. A dock could help get more Apple TV+ (and Arcade) users because way more people have iPhones than Apple TV boxes.

High quality games for this setup are still lacking but Ubisoft is having some financial trouble just now and seem to be putting themselves up for sale. Tencent owns a portion of the company but the owners have some contention about leadership. If Apple was more willing to let them lead the company, perhaps they'd sell to them instead (should cost $5-10b). Then they'd get a few decent franchises like Splinter Cell, Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, Rayman, Rabbids, Watchdogs, The Crew (like Forza), Trackmania, Just Dance. They'd get 2 game engines: Snowdrop and Dunia (fork of CryEngine). Snowdrop was used in the Avatar game:



They can port their existing library of games:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ubisoft_games:_2010%E2%80%932019
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ubisoft_games:_2020%E2%80%93present

auxio said:

leighr said:

The end of so called “fact checkers” is a welcome relief for true free speech. When one person, or group, has the power to decide what is ‘true’ or not, we are all in trouble. See exhibit one: China, or even worse, North Korea. We all need to fight against this sort of abuse of money and power, and while I am not a huge Facebook fan, I’m glad that they are following X’s lead in allowing free speech. 

Can you imagine what would happen if all the engineers who check bridge designs, buildings, engines in cars, etc thought this way?

There is a reality out there which has undeniable facts about how things work, despite what all the crooks in the world seeking money/power are trying to convince you of for their own personal gain.

That's not what it's about though and this was covered in the interview. Zuckerberg said the government had been forcing them to suppress information and had people screaming obscenities down the phone to suppress truthful information, they were trying to get memes/satire taken down.

Facebook's original intent was to fact-check clearly factual things (Zuckerberg mentioned flat earth as an example) and only those things but it evolved into political bias where they felt they were deciding between opinions. Some of the bias was in which things they chose to fact-check. This makes up a lot of the bias in the media that people don't pay attention to, which is selective reporting. One news company will push a story down or not even report it that doesn't fit with their general views or audience and another company will do the opposite with the same story.

Fact-checkers sometimes leave articles labeled 'inconclusive' if something is say 60% likely to be true. What is true or not isn't always binary, it can be a probability until more information is available or subject to interpretation and things that are considered indisputable are 99%+ true. A lot of things, especially in politics, have a lower probability of being true because they rely on hearsay, who witnessed the event and whether they are credible. Deciding whether someone is a credible witness is a biased process.

Here's an example where a fact-checker is trying to figure out if a word that was spoken had an apostrophe and had a different meaning, both interpretations are plausible but not everyone will see each interpretation as being equally plausible:

https://www.snopes.com/news/2024/10/30/biden-trump-supporters-garbage/

This is the kind of vague political nonsense that is a waste of time getting involved with. Politics is an argument that never ends and at the scale Facebook operates at, it is a near impossible task to fact-check everything in a consistent and reliable way. They will get a reasonable proportion of the checks correct but those are rarely the problem because they are obvious to most people too, it's the vague ones that slip through.

There are highly respected officials saying on record that UFOs with non-human creatures exist and mainstream news outlets report it, should this be reported and spread as truthful without them providing evidence or suppressed as misinformation until they provide evidence:

https://www.newsweek.com/ufos-exist-what-experts-told-congress-1985865

It's not enough to absolve themselves of responsibility by saying they aren't reporting that what is being said is true, only that those people said it (which is objectively true) because they could do the same for a quack doctor that says drinking pineapple juice every day prevents cancer. The 'we're just the messenger' defense.

The addition of memes/satire complicates things. If someone is spreading misinformation in text, it can be labelled as such and suppressed but it can be wrapped into a meme and permitted to spread because it's just a joke.

Having a central committee overseeing what constitutes what's true or not has the benefit of being authoritative and methodical but it also has a limited perspective, especially on international issues. While using the public for fact-checking can allow crazies to hijack the process, at a large enough scale this doesn't happen because the extremists are usually in the minority. The community notes on X.com have been very reliable and unbiased and that's what Facebook plans to use. It will probably catch misinformation, misleading content, AI content much faster than before because people who have a vested interest in opposing it will try harder to get it corrected than a team whose job is to clean up after it becomes a liability for them.

The platform operators aren't trying to increase hateful content or misinformation, they are trying to make their platforms the least oppressive platforms for discussion. Elon Musk's interview with the BBC shows how each side views the problem:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRkcLYbvApU

Musk says at 18:00 that they want to try to limit speech to what is limited by law. The people of a country agree what speech should be suppressed by law and that's what the platform abides by. This is a reasonable stance but obviously leaves platforms wide open for abuse on a large scale.

I think the focus on factual accuracy isn't the best approach. Misinformation and hateful rhetoric spreads much less in person than it does online and the reason for this I suspect is civility. In the real world, there's a social contract where people exchange information politely and with positive intent. This is opposite in the digital world because the social contract is different. Online, people who are centrists are nobodies, people who have opposing views are enemies, people who have more extreme views on a supporting side are allies and reward each other with affirmation. This breeds ever more extreme perspectives because it rewards it. Unfortunately, the more people spend online, this is making its way into the real world.

Focusing on promoting and rewarding civil conversation would create more wholesome platforms where the participants don't want to share hateful or misleading content because they won't be rewarded for it. This can be aided using AI where when someone posts a comment with expletives, incendiary content, some kind of attack, it will be detected and the platform can tell the user to write their comment more politely or it will be suppressed and count negatively against their digital persona. The digital persona will be tagged as a hateful, misleading persona and the worst personas and content can be suppressed by the platform. This can be applied retroactively. Reward people who are polite, tackle behavior rather than ideas, how people express themselves rather than what they express and the platforms will improve.

An example AI summary of an online user would say something like: this user frequently posts aggressive messages, is politically left/right/center, shares offensive/misleading memes, promotes extremist users etc and put the summary right where they can see it. Embarrass them into being a better person online.