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.

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.