For starters we're in the middle of a huge financial crisis, so releasing yet another VR set, a 3500 USD one at that, is hilarious. To further hammer in how terrible the timing of this is, we are also amid so many tech bro shit schemes failing. Cryptocurrency, NFTs, you name it. The Metaverse was a laughingstock, Twitter is imploding from Elons idiot decisions, Teslas are literally crashing and burning and all major tech companies have been on the News at some point for fucking with people's personal data and other con jobs. AI is scaring people as much as it is entertaining them. Confidence in emergent technology is at an all-time low. It doesn't help that the promo poster features the most dead-eyed soulless-looking person staring through it at you. People are sick of it. VR headsets were already niche, who cares if it has AR or whatever tacked on? Sure, some rich yuppies will buy it to impress their friends, but they buy anything the market tells them is the next big thing and are a small minority (again, more poor people than ever at the moment)
TLDR this is going to be Google Glass again but this time even more of a flop because now people are poorer and more skeptical of big tech than ever.
Cell phones were a niche in the 80s when a handful of game companies made their first forays into VR. By 2007 mobile phones were already mainstream, can't-live-without-it devices for a great number of people, including the vast majority of kids at my high school. Palm pilots existed for years, the Blackberry, Sidekick, and the like were pretty popular long before the iPhone, too. It's not shocking that a direct competitor would make glib remarks about Apple, a potential future competitor at that point and a company that spent the better part of the preceding 15+ years as the butt of every joke about failure in tech. Samsung still pulls that shit every year despite literally sharkbiting Apple's marketing and design language to sell their stuff.
With the iPhone, Apple nailed it on implementation and UX, which might be the only point I'd concede to their headset since they have a pretty good track record of doing that. But that's really about it. What long-established market full of subpar devices and services does the ski mask leverage and replace? Who occupies this market and what kind of sway would they have with the general population—even if we ignore the whole issue with strapping it to your face and assume this thing were the price of an Oculus? Above all, what practical reason is there for this thing to even exist? Based on what they've demoed, it doesn't even seem like even Apple knows lol. So at best we have a novelty with an mode of interaction that is an instant turn-off to an overwhelming majority of potential users because they simply don't want to wear their computer on their head. At worst we have a device made for the most selfish and/or lonely suburbanites ever, who can't reasonably share what they're doing with anyone outside of their single-occupancy dissociation device.
This is an indictment of what capitalism does to pervert technology and technological advancements and peddle them as some kind of bazinga toy that Changes Everything™ despite not actually improving on anything that came before it. And because there's no money in improving core services/experiences on already-mature platforms, the baggage just builds over time. Especially in Silicon Valley, which has been hollowing itself out (was there ever anything in there?) to keep the music playing at the expense of everything else.
This junk is nothing like what the iPhone was to mobile phones/smartphones. This is like what the iPod Hi-Fi was to home stereos/hi-fi systems: expensive, incredibly niche device in an already-niche corner of the market with interesting technologies but a severely limited set of practical uses that no one can coherently articulate that fanatics will ardently defend regardless.
What really ticks me off is that, looking at what else they had to talk about yesterday, Apple dumped all of their time and effort into trying to do Google Glass again while sacrificing their actually thriving product lines: all the software updates were lazy and lackluster (even looking at the extended lists of features on their website is still super light on under-the-hood optimizations and improvements) and the Mac Pro update is an utter fucking embarrassment. Despite having what I think is the most coherent product line in 20 years, Apple is trying too hard with this one, and their time would be far better spent making their existing shit work better. But the line needs to go up, so of course those initiatives will take a back seat indefinitely to peddle some shiny new turd.
Sorry for the rant; wasn't expecting to write so much lol. It's nothing personal, just that I've seen more than my share of this comment in the last few weeks and months regarding the headset (this and the "in x years it'll be the size of a contact lens bro, just x more years bro, I swear"), and looking at how neglectful the "World's Most Valuable Company" is to the actual products and tools people use every day to live their lives, be productive, be creative, etc. in order to pursue gimmicks is really infuriating. So much potential in spinning up their own SoCs and specialized hardware-software integrations, and this is what it's getting us.
I never made all the comparisons you brought up. It’s like the iPhone in that it’s an expensive new technology released during an economic downturn and is being mocked and praised simultaneously.
I agree that there are a bunch of problems with the technology and its relationship with people. I think apple did a good job cutting out the parts that aren’t useful and focusing on the stuff that matters, ar, productivity, normal use and not looking like a weird psycho. Only a little bit of a success on that last part. It remains to be seen if the idea is gonna take off.
I kinda disagree with you about it being a mistake to not push bigger and faster computers. As someone who works with lots of different computers daily, apple has the fastest thing on the block with m2 and I’d even say the m1 machines felt faster than contemporary windows systems. When you’re on top with a technology that’s fundamentally different than what the competition has, why push that? That’s the part of the cycle where you mass produce your product, broaden your offerings and rake in a bunch of money.
People are claiming 18 tps with llama on the m2 max. That’s pretty good.
I also think you’re off the mark with this not being the promise of the m series socs. one of the shortcomings of the intel Mac’s was their variety. Plenty of the unibody computers have a fast enough processor and support enough memory to run the new oses but are excluded because they don’t have gpus that are supported, don’t have the cpu extensions required etc. even with patches and opencore there’s a big window of amd gpu models that are just not usable. The promise of the m series for me at least is even longer support windows after official support ends.
Im interested in hearing what was disappointing about the other parts of the announcements re: hardware though. Probably not gonna watch it since im also probably not gonna buy any of the shit in it.
Fair enough and agreed. Like I said, it's just one of those rebuttals I've seen flying around whenever criticism or concerns about the headset were brought up over the course of the last few months, so sorry if it sounded accusatory. I do think that if there's anyone who could sell this tech to people it's going to be Apple, but I worry a lot of the hype will come from the brand loyalty and the bandwagon effect. Overall, however, I find the whole idea of strapping tech onto your head to be strange. It demands my full presence all the time to use and interact with it—quite unlike a computer, phone, or watch. I can't use it when it's sitting on a table or when it's in another room, and I can't share things with other people in my immediate vicinity unless they're also wearing a headset. I don't see a good value proposition there, exchanging my current ability to log off, so to speak, for a big virtual screen and eye tracking.
I actually think the M series is dope as fuck and am really looking forward to picking up an M2 (or more realistically, next year's M3 since my i9 MBP is still chugging along) MacBook and/or Mac Studio. I can't believe that my grandmother's iPad is more performant than 99% of any other computer I've owned. I've been very impressed with its performance and the insane battery life even those MBP beasts can achieve. You certainly can tell that they've been doing a lot of work to make the seams between their hardware and software appear invisible, and as much as I know it's part of the show, I very much delight in how well they're able to do it, and how much more pronounced it is when their own SoCs are under the hood. Still would like a bit more QC on their first-party apps, though, and I do think there is a propensity to eschew that kind of stuff in general, but especially because Apple operates the way that it does internally as an organization.
My issues with the current notebook lineup is the decision to ruin some of the best displays in the industry with a non-functional notch that fucks with application menus and is just generally an eyesore. I can't for the life of me understand that decision and I haven't ever heard a good excuse for it. It's just a weird aesthetic that takes away from an otherwise great machine. The Mac Pro debacle revolves around the issues with having a RAM limit that's 8x lower than the Intel Mac Pro (1.5TB to 192GB), no ECC for unified memory, no additional GPU support at all despite all those PCIe slots, and that aside from that and the dual gigabit ethernet you're getting a Mac Studio for twice the price. I realize these limitations are part of the current M series and that could be mitigated or eliminated in a future iteration, and granted, I haven't been in the market for one since the OG Mac Pro in the G5 chassis, but it just feels like a very lazy port so they can say "we did it, we transitioned the whole lineup." Apple's had a very contentious relationship with the people who typically made up the market for these behemoths, so it is a fairly big regression in terms of specs outside of the M2 for the few people who stuck around after the last time they painted themselves into a corner from 2013-2019. I only watched clips from yesterday, but figured they'd still be selling the Intel Mac Pro alongside this one, so I was surprised to see they weren't.