flaneur

entropys said:

StrangeDays said:

entropys said:

Great Tim, where is my next iMac?

Wait, I thought the chief whine was "Yeah but where's the new Mac mini!" lol...folks will just keep rotating it based on what's not out yet

It’s 634 days since the last iMac update. I ain’t whinin’, I’m bitchin’.

What else do you do, ever?

GeorgeBMac said:

jeffythequick said:

At some point the social stigma of wearing AR glasses will fade*, and then it'll be nice to talk to people and know their name.  For some reason I have a hard time with that, and having an assistant just pop it up will be the thing for me.

....

That could be 'face blindness'.  Or the medical name for it is:  Prosopagnosia.   It is quite common in Austistics and Aspergians but is not limited to those conditions.    Something like that could be a huge help to those with the condition.

Oliver Sacks, of all people, was one of these prosopagnostics — he was the neurologist who wrote “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” and much else.

A bit of an odd duck, he just might have been one of the first to want to try out glasses for face recognition. But how this would work with current social norms is hard to figure. Who wants to be ID’d everywhere by AI and AR? This isn’t China, at least not yet.

Anyway, realtime identification of places and objects by just looking at them will be as revolutionary as the cell phone itself. Or maybe the computer itself.

AppleExposed said:

Good buy!

But when will Apple use their tech? Apple acquired a company years ago that had a voice assistant that was so smart it makes all the current assistants look like 4-year-olds.

Do you remember any details to search for this acquisition?

As for your question, I’m thinking that they’re going to need some really good voice AI by the time their AR glasses come out. With pinpoint binocular eye tracking, voice will be the way we “click” on an object in the depth field to select it for more information or whatever. Dialog with the data base on the object of regard will have to be ready for this platform. Revolutionary, needless to say.

StrangeDays said:

Google, Microsoft, Apple...guy got around. Surprised he left Apple before launching whatever it is he was working on. Hope it’s still an active product.

Maybe there’s not much to do until those little 8K screens are ready, one for each eye, in the millions.

https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/04/27/apples-rumored-headset-may-handle-ar-vr-use-8k-eyepieces-wigig

GeorgeBMac said:

flaneur said:

melgross said:

anantksundaram said:

Some of us predicted this. The singular reason that it's difficult to move manufacturing in tech back to the US is the same as it is to move it to, say France or the UK: the supply chain for components is almost entirely in east and southeast Asia.

This is what Jobs meant when he famously said in his (frequently misquoted) response to Obama's question on iPhone manufacturing in the US: "Those jobs aren't coming back."

Washington DC needs to digest that fact.

It’s only for some parts. Remember that Apple bought over $60 billion in parts and materials from USA companies in 2018 alone. That’s up from $50 billion in either 2016, or 2017. I forget which.

here’s a reason it’s a problem for companies like Apple. Corning produces the glass for the phones. But despite Apple trying to get them to do it, they refuse to cut and polish it. So Apple has to buy it in sheets, and send it to a company in China that was set up for that very purpose by a woman in China who had worked for a Chinese glass manufacturer. Now, she cuts and polishes, using the latest computer controlled laser machinery, virtually all the glass for just about every phone manufacturer in the world.

why doesn’t Corning want to do this?

And why didn’t RCA or Zenith jump into solid state radios and televisions like Sony and Matsushita did in the 1960s and 70s? Where were the US-made audio and video recorders for the mass market?

And speaking of fine machining of fastening components, where was the US when it was time to make all the billions of personal mobile electronics like Sony Walkmans, camcorders, digital camcorders, and iPod hard drives? 

The infrastructure for making all the microcomponents for modern electronics is in Asia. The US threw away these capabilities on the mass scale 50-60 years ago. Even the will to make fine things for the masses pretty much died in the US, except for Apple, notably, which is why I for one appreciate what they’ve accomplished continually in the face of US technical incompetence for the mass market. 

I worked for RCA in the first half of the 70's.   They thought their competition was Motorola rather than the Asians.   In the 60's & 70's American industry thought it was invulnerable and masters of the world.   In the few and specific areas where Asian technology and manufacturing broke through it was thought that they had simply copied off of us.  Any speculation that they could design and build better than we could was met with scorn and laughter....

And, to an extent, that is still true:   "USA!   USA!   USA!"   "We have the best workers in the world!"    (sigh...)

Hey, thanks for the inside look. I forgot about the disrupter (at the time) Motorola. 

Same with Detroit. They laughed at the VW bug until it got 10% of sales in the 60s, and then the Japanese started moving in at the end of the decade. The response was to drop the chrome and tailfins and go flatter, wider and heavier. It was another twenty years before they got away from solid rear axles and drive shafts, i.e, rear wheel drive. They’re still into it with their focus on heavy trucks and SUVs.

Never mentioned when we reminisce about the so-called American Dream in the 50s for the (lower) middle class, the industrial worker, is the fact that the wages were based on waste and planned obsolescence. The average American car weighed twice as much as the average European car (the Bug weighed 1800 pounds), and depreciated twice as fast because of yearly model changes based on obscene levels of retooling. There was a recession starting around 1958, when, I thought at the time, the “car-buying public” (actual business-news term) finally revolted against the chrome-plated monstrosities. The fins in ‘59 reached their peak. Detroit never really recovered, even when they “downsized” and had a brief hit with the “sporty” Mustang and imitators starting in 65. Note that they were smaller cars, but still stupidly engineered and designed. And redesigned yearly.