The saga of Apple’s troubled mixed reality headset
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Therefore, VR should be a replacement for large displays in productive work, not a device that everyone is wearing outside or casually watching videos with. The use cases are professional; such as programming, CAD, design etc. I believe that properly implemented VR would allow utilizing full visual-spatial capabilities of our brains, totally eliminating the process of hunting for files and switching windows.
It would be possible to dive into code and see it all at once like an intricate factory. Our brains are capable of navigating very complex environments, but this capability is lost when its viewed through a small window.
I wish they'd explore this area, rather than go for a mass market appeal. What kind of software is possible, and how much productivity can be increased with maxed out hardware with high resolution VR? I'm not sure if 4K resolution with a M2 chip is powerful enough for a truly innovative product. Maybe it is, but there's still room for a "pro" product.
I don't think there's a use case for glasses-type product, with a watch-like functionality and environmental AR which would show information pop-ups everywhere. We already have information overload, and we don't need any more of that.
Where do you get this from?
It seems to me if there was even a correlation, which I'm not sure, it would have more to do with resolution, since same resolution but bigger display doesn't actually show more information.
Its true, up to a point.
you just have to ignore that at the extremes it's probably negatively correlated, and there's a significant non-zero possibility that at least in the short term, that possibility of negative correlation applies to the area VR is interested in as well.
It’s a popular myth propagated by American public. Funnily enough, in many European and Asian countries the opposite is deemed to be true. The truth is that there has never been any conclusive evidence one way or the other.
“The first evaluation of the impact of human size on longevity or life span in 1978, which was based on data for decreased groups of athletes and famous people in the USA, suggested that shorter, lighter men live longer than their taller, heavier counterparts. In 1990, a study of 1679 decreased men and women from the general American population supported these findings. In the present study data on the height, weight, and age at death of 373 men were obtained from records at the Veterans Administration Medical Center, San Diego, CA, USA. Men of height 175.3 cm or less lived an average of 4.95 years longer than those of height over 175.3 cm, while men of height 170.2 cm or less lived 7.46 years longer than those of at least 182.9 cm. An analysis by weight difference revealed a 7.72-year greater longevity for men of weight 63.6 kg or less compared with those of 90.9 kg or more. This corroborates earlier evidence and contradicts the popular notion that taller people are healthier.” [0]
I find a hard time believing this. Do you have a source?
That's a dubious statement. Filling the binocular field of view is fine; it's about 120° horizontally, give or take. But past that it starts to be a problem. Generally, if you look at the screen and any edge is blocked by your nose without turning your head, it's likely too large to work comfortably on. (but still fine for immersive content like games or movies)
I tried to work on three 16:9 displays for some time, and found it exhausting. The cognitive overload isn't worth it, workspace switching with a hotkey turned out to be far easier for me. That's not even mentioning constant neck movement.
Maybe it's just me though, I can't speak for different people; but I strongly suspect it's the same for many.
I mean this doesn't seem to be true for anyone working in the trades. "Mise-en-place" allowed me to tend a 24-foot-long bar by myself with 60+ customers. At the time, I was essentially a highly trained, top performing athlete. Just because I can't see the cash register / margarita machine / well drinks / etc... it doesn't mean it's not an extension of my body.
It is possible for your entire workshop to become a second-nature extension of self, not just the desk in front of your face.
I think part of this discussion is: "What can be part of a singular focused task vs. what requires some amount of 'context switching'?" And its not always super obvious. Practicing a workflow can integrate context-switches so that it becomes one singular focused task.
But VR/AR can also assist with neurological training by allowing you to switch environments when you switch contexts. For someone who is WFH in a studio apartment it can separate their "gaming desk" from their "work desk" from their "hobby desk" ... or even their "React desk" from their "Concurrency-wrangling desk" from their "Email/Communications battlestation". This could enable much faster context switching -- meeting in 30 seconds? pop over to your "Virtual Conferencing Room". Then come back to your sanctum of concurrency troubleshooting.
The way you expressed it actually reminds me of Iain McGilchrist's "left brain" versus "right brain" thinking model, wherein the narrow-ish "task-focused" approach is typical left-brain concern (essentialist, to a fault), whereas the wider "contextual" approach is typical right-brain associative concerns ("everything is complex/connected"). I'd never noticed this ergonomics question (should I say dichotomy) could be neurologically framed that way, thanks for the insight.
Of course you need two of those screens to fill your field of view, unless you have a square screen that goes below your desk, but I'm sure that's available somewhere.
My subjective impression is that the nonperipheral visual field isn’t square. I would find 3:2 displays optimal, or maybe rather 16:11. While a 16:9 or 16:10 display could be extended vertically to fill more of the visual field, that extended portion is not large enough to usefully fit a second monitor there (without head movement).
If you're like most people and the horizontal field is close to max, you'll do better stacking monitors than putting them side/side. Inter pupillary distance is a bit over 2in (~65mm), but that's usually small compared to screen distance, which is why I say roughly square (~16:14).
I have three monitors, and it's still not enough. I would be thrilled if each of my monitors had four times the apparent area in a 3D space that layered applications and documents behind each other in some approximately intuitive way.
In my mind the real power comes from spatial hand tracking as a new UX paradigm(seeing an interacting with objects in 3d space) and possibly the addition of large displays anywhere a monitor couldn't have feasibly been, (eg, floating in the server room in a cramped space when needed).
I don't think working on code will be all that different. There isn't any physical spatial interaction with text on paper that the current editors are missing.
When I work on a laptop I also keep one app or one tab in focus most of the time.
Counter example, imagine fixing your car engine and having 100 tabs open everywhere.
If we're talking about programming instead, an intuitive way to switch between modules when working on a large project would be to have their windows laid out before you on a virtual desk and you could switch between the active one displayed on a central virtual monitor by making a gesture (probably something like the Oculus pinch) towards the window you want to switch to. This would allow you to use your spatial reasoning to remember which windows you have open and would also allow you to group related windows. Additional displays could show console output from your development server, the GUI part of the app you're working on, a test runner, etc. positioned where you can glance at them easily.
That being said, I think the real killer app for the new "facetop" computing devices that are around the corner will be physical fitness and social interaction. If you think a standing desk was a big improvement for your health then you'll love being able to freely walk around your office and work from any position whether it's standing, sitting at a desk, perched by the window, lounging on the sofa, or even crouching while giving those legs a stretch. You can also kiss zoom meetings goodbye with the unnatural wall of faces almost but not quite making eye contact with you. You'll talk to an avatar, realistic or not, that has full eye, face and body tracking allowing you to tell if your interlocutor is paying attention or thinking about how long it is until lunch while checking the wait time at the nearest restaurants. It actually does feel like you're in the presence of another person and spending a few hours talking to people virtually will no longer leave you with a headache and eye-strain.
I'd also invest in learning how to use a one handed, portable chording keyboard, it'll probably be useful.
We might end up with a phone as the go-to XR keyboard. Would be pretty funny if that evolves into everyone wearing AR glasses with a 90s Nokia sized blackberry keyboard in their pocket.
If you have a good idea, you should prototype it and get it out there (and maybe get a nice buyout in the process..)
I'd love to know if this is true. I've heard that in a VR headset, your eyes are always focused at the exact same distance, even if it appears like something is far off in the distance. And that this can lead to eyestrain. Can anybody here speak to that?
Your shortcuts are your bread and butter and you are super fast.
Perhaps for sculpting.
I only see this as a supplemental feature for certain use cases (coarse-grained 3D operations). In general nothing beats the efficiency of working with a keyboard for navigating application functions, or (at least with current technology) the mouse for precision 2D navigation/selection. Their advantage being precise and definite/discrete input.
For actual work, even with a VR headset I see myself still mostly using keyboard and mouse.
Perhaps, in a lab setting, doing straightforward, focused tasks like the ones they use in these productivity studies, I could sustain a productivity boost long enough for the researcher to get a two-tailed p<0.05.
Make me do it in real life, though, 40 hours a week, week after week after week, and I expect I would burn out very quickly. I like my work well enough, but I don't think I want to actually stick my whole head inside of it.
If it's for vacation, just unplug. Mixing work and vacation makes both worse.
If it's for business, your attention should be on whatever it is that prompted you to travel. Presumably that's face time with people, not grinding away in front of a computer.
I find that the high DPI trend has a tendency to limit us unneccesarily more than actually fix anything. It is still common to say max 80 characters per line. In the olden days where that comes from, it would require 640 pixels horizontally. So at 100% scaling you can fit 3 standard terminals side-by-side and fit 60+ lines vertically, what more do you need when you also have multiple workspaces to tab across?
I truly believe that VR is perfect for training/sim type games. Actual games.. Could really only count on one hand the games I feel are worth diving into VR for.
- OLED panels could provide much darker screens and cause less eye strain.
- Eye tracking with higher resolution where they only have to render properly where you are looking at
- I think the headset would be much lighter and comfortable.
Do you have a source?
Anecdotal, I work without external displays and keep one window in focus, this helps my productivity.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/1753326.1753336?casa_toke...
There’s much more. Search “sensemaking” or “immersive analytics” on Scholar. Depth and width of field, achieved via stereoscopy and tracking, is well documented as a performance enhancer when it comes to generalizeable task completion in VR.
And displaying more things mean you need to context switch less.
It's way better than I would have expected. It's still not good enough to make me want to use it daily (even for just an hour or so)
Their hardware like the Xbox or surface are not crappy.
Is this just trolling?
You get retina resolution, high refresh rate, HDR, and 2Factor authentication (Biometric+Goggles)/information security in one package. Of course you'll still likely want to have a laptop to drive it (untethered) except for the simplest mobile games.
- 4k is not nearly enough. I think we will likely need 8k screens.
- The headsets are not light enough. You need something with all day comfort for work.
- There is still too much eye-strain from the quality of the lenses and the fixed focus.
- Input is still not natural and precise enough. We would need to be able to see our own hands and type with zero latency. Hand-tracked pointing needs to be able to pick up on small subtle finger motion like a mouse or trackpad can
You can throw a grain of sand only so fra, a pebnle somewhat more, a baseball probably very far… And you stop there, more or less.
People can learn 3D environments by viewing them in a 2D screen very happily, and millions of gamers do exactly that every day. I can still remember my way around the map in GTA 3 about 20 years after I first played it...
The "flight" in GTA is more like a moving viewpoint than a space full of 3D objects and affordances.
Full immersive 3D navigation through code and file systems would be an interesting experiment. I suspect we'd get used to it very quickly, and we'd then wonder why we spent so long tied down by virtual paper metaphors. (I could be wrong, of course.)
inb4 "It's a Unix system, I know this!"
This is such an Engelbart-esque statement. Bravo! I'd love for AR to go there too :)
I don't think VR headsets will not take off as display alternatives.
People don't even care about highdpi.
I hope you’re wrong about this.
I hope there will be a great personal (non-work) use case for the next generation of VR/AR. Something like gaming, watching sports (always have awesome “seats”), movies with friends, maybe map/gps/etc. for when I’m running.
I know there are options for this already. But honestly, I haven’t seen anyone who’s not a dork using VR/AR. I want the version the average person is excited about. I’m ready to plunk down any amount of money Apple wants from me.
If it’s VR/AR for work, count me out. I don’t have any interest in increasing my work productivity lol.
I can’t wait for VR/AR to be fully monetized and mainstream. I’m sick of speculative VC-funded crap that I can’t pay for because they’re in “growth mode.” When something’s monetized at least then I have some faith that it’ll be around for awhile.
Think late 2020s at best, and probably well into the 30s for the kind of refined VR we all know possible. It's like we had nice and functional pocket computers since the 1990s (PDAs etc), but it would take a solid decade for the iPhone to be made under the vision of a statistically rare product genius (means we can wait ±5~10 yrs for things to emerge as commercially successful tech). Or how video games took about 20 years to move from whatever came before the current "modern" era/paradigm (say late 1990s) that lives on to this day in terms of UI/UX. Same with the "desktop" metaphor for PCs, etc.
We have yet to nail the hardware for VR, let alone the OS code (core libs etc) whose precision and intuitiveness will feel tremendously "corporeal" in the case of VR, visceral, much more than any TV/monitor + vibrating thing could ever do (let alone keyboard/mouse). If you've ever did the timing for an action-paced fast video game, you know the kind of intricate subtleties I'm talking about, where one frame can make or break some experiences.
Then will come the time to nail killer metaphors, high-level GUI/GUX, killer apps.
We're not quite there yet.
Is it a bad relapse of LOC metrics? ツ
The idea of an AR wearable that is tethered to a fixed base station is so very lame. Why even bother with AR when you can only augment the reality that is in your office or bedroom?
Also the eye-view outer display is essential for situations where one person is using the goggles but others aren’t. How unsettling would it be for someone to look at you, be able to see you, but for their upper face to completely obscured by goggles? How could you have an in person face-to-face conversation with someone like that?
Base station for AR would be detrimental, as you inherently want to explore and interact with the world around you.
For most VR use cases that is not the case, and I can see the argument for the benefits of a base station (higher performance) outweighing the costs (limited movement).
I haven't read more than the abstract, but it seems there is some good research going into this. It must be years off however, as we barely have LTE networks in some locations, let-alone UWB 5G to even begin supporting this type of architecture.
A 4K display per eye, a powerful and efficient SoC on the latest node, and some really fine industrial design will surely be within Apple’s reach.
Everyone will have to build apps for this thing. If it’s real, it will be every bit as successful as iPhone.
Very few people predicted the iPhone accurately before its launch. And it’s reasonable to say the iPhone blew minds because Apple figured out multitouch AND reduced the latency of the interface to the extend required so that it felt natural to use. If they mail AR in the same way, they will have the next iPhone.
I am bullish on the prospect of this happening.
I expect Apple’s AR product to be functional, and dubbed a niche failure by the tech commentariat, but by 2026 really start to eat into the smartphone market.
Meta and Google are just less capable of making humane software, and while they may release slightly better devices from a technical perspective they’ll miss out on the light touch that such an immersive experience will require for normal people to feel comfortable with it.
Apple buyers are not necessarily tech savvy (from a percentage perspective).
They use their high end phones for normal consumer things.
I have a hard time imagining what a normal person would want to do with VR/are glasses.
Showing your face in a Videochat? Not being able to show your face?
Playing games?
I would assume that there is still a lot of apple people not playing anything than casual games.
AR through a phone or iPad is lame and close to useless. Only looks good in video demos till you use it yourself and see how clumsy it is interacting through a tiny window.
Very clear they have a headset in mind for all this but are struggling to ship.
My takeaway though is that the device itself and how it should look/work is not obvious, and that is a bad thing.
For a device like the iPhone, iPod a few people kicking around ideas over sushi could very quickly (and with wild enthusiasm, no doubt) come to agree on the basic form, basic functionality.
If our VR-future has to be shoe-horned into existence, maybe it was not to be.
If anything, I want to see "the cyber" go away, not become more pervasive.
Nerd dads are famous for buying anything that might run an NES emulator, then not using it after it turns out their kids have better things to do than listen to square waves.
[1] https://arinsider.co/2021/08/02/how-many-quest-2s-sold-in-q2...
I did that to play around as I was playing with 3d programming and I'm a nerd.
And while friends and family know that and a few tried it out for a little bit and liked it, no one cares.
Which is fine but it is a gimmick.
I was hoping it would get more traction with real life training like how to use a lathe but nothing really came out or is in some internal companies.
Quest 2 would like a word with you?
Part of my problem with Quest is the "ick" factor of knowing that FB is looking over my shoulder whenever I turn the thing on. Giving up your privacy seems to be the price of just about every cool technology nowadays, and it means the tech has to be absolutely spectacular to make me pay that privacy price. My Tesla is sufficiently spectacular. Quest is not.
Why would you persist with something that makes you sick even when the enthusiasts admit they use it once or twice a month?
Personally, I just felt it was gimmicky - try it once or twice for curiosity's sake, then forget about it.
Nothing on VR enthusiasts - I'm sure you have reasons to love it. But as a piece of tech, unless there are drastic improvements, I just don't see it gaining mass adoption.
Some good first time experiences for people are Space Pirate Trainer if they like shooters or I Expect You To Die if they're more of a puzzle game type and Beat Saber if they like rhythm games. These games don't involve thumbstick based movement so they probably won't make you feel sick. If you want something that's really chill and is just kind of pretty to look at and walk through then Walkabout Mini Golf is pretty good, it's not the most exciting game but it does have multiplayer and it's pretty relaxing to play a round and just admire the work they put into the courses.
I've heard that setting up a fan so it's blowing on you while you're playing VR is a good way to prevent motion sickness. I don't really get very motion sick though so I haven't had to try it.
Some very good games that will definitely make you motion sick are Pavlov and Bone Works. You will feel queasy after playing these for the first few times, have some Gravol on hand just in case.
For better screen quality you can either use a Quest 2 or the Valve Index, you'll be tethered to the PC with the Index though which for me is a deal breaker.
I only know one person who used bis VR set extensively like for 2-3 month and then falled back to play egoshooters.
'a lot of people' != Not market relevant
Trying to compare this nascent technology to the iPhone is really disingenuous, there are probably a billion iPhone users worldwide. I'd struggle to count on one hand branded devices that have the same number of users.
I've probably shown mine to ~30 people and not a single one had motion sickness with any of the "safe" experiences, assuming the device is adjusted properly (IPD). If you stick them on a roller-coaster or a super laggy app as their first experience then yeah that's going to be a problem. But for safe experiences - I think there is a percentage of people who experience disorientation or nausea but it's certainly not half (maybe 10% or so).
Native Quest games are the best as they are entirely on-device with no latency anywhere.
https://www.techradar.com/news/oculus-might-have-a-fix-to-en...
https://www.lifewire.com/how-new-tech-could-prevent-vr-motio...
It seems well-accepted hypothesis that having artificial locomotion in VR can induce motion sickness (cases where the VR body moves but your own body doesn't), whereas with "sit", "stay still" or "walk around IRL" (and even "teleport around") scenarios are highly unlikely to cause it.
There is a still a lot of experiences left in the latter scenario, though it does exclude driving games (in particular if you don't see the cockpit) or first-person shooting-and-moving-around games.
And then the worst thing to do with newcomers is to put them down for a ride in a VR rollercoaster.
Apple can and does make mistakes, for example the touch bar, and the MacBook keyboard.
If Ive is involved I predict that this product will experience a brief but intense surge in popularity based primarily on the novelty factor and social media influencers followed by a rapid decline into irrelevance.
That way, as long as everyone is wearing a helmet, it looks like no one is wearing a helmet.
Sounds like a good solution for a low probability situation. Eye visibility for normal humans is much more practical than issuing every human a VR system and requiring they wear it at all times to maintain the illusion.
It's gimmicky?
I'm really curios of Fashion conces people really like avatars. I don't think so and I also don't think that the apple brand is a good fit for it.
Real life Avatars with light enhancements will also be weird I think
Let's see.
Two extra external displays in raw hardware. But worse, they are on the front in exactly the place you want to place the passthrough cameras, so now you have to do extra image processing to virtually reposition the input as if it were on the eyes. So it makes passthrough dev more difficult.
It must be extremely compelling to see those eye screens in action. It must be selling onlookers on the device. That's the only that could justify that much effort?
Edit: ditto for automotive assembly/repair. Power plant maintenance. Basically all complicated engineering fields could make excellent use of AR.
Quite a juicy tidbit, this is not something I had even contemplated as a possibility. I struggle to imagine how this will work without looking bizarre. And the effect on battery life of doubling the screens would have to be significant.
I am not sold at all on "VR". It's one of those things, like "Firefox OS", that drained Mozilla's coffers when they should have focused on designing their own Android build the way we went from Knoppix[1] to Kali[2] in a very short time.
(I wish I could have stayed, but my Chrome loving supervisor who told me he doesn't even use the browser decided I didn't do enough work to be hired on full time before he moved from Brooklyn to Switzerland)
It will take a loooong time to drain Apple's money vault, though. They can keep spending stupid money on bullshit projects for years before anyone even notices.
So either Apple has figured out something really compelling in AR/VR that everyone--not just gamers and nerds--will want, or they are reaching.
>Apple CEO Tim Cook has been relatively hands-off from the product compared to others like the iPhone... The Information's sources say that Apple's mixed reality efforts began almost accidentally when the company purchased a German AR startup called Metaio to use some of its technology on Project Titan, its self-driving car project.
Which is just wild and highly contrary to my expectations. It's been obvious for ages that, while quite a ways from hitting the tipping point, wearable displays are the natural next big disruption in the personal electronics space following in the steps of the PC, notebooks, smartphones and tablets. A retinal scanning display will be able to hit the limits of human visual acuity while also being portable, which completely obsoletes every single other display we use and has massive implications for a lot of our basic modes of interaction. Suddenly there is no connection between "screen size" and device, where you are etc, it's just a matter of tradeoffs with how much power is behind it. With an industry standard even embedded devices could have virtual "displays" with lots of info. If you think about the form factor of nearly everything portable we use, it's "a display, with stuff attached to it" (either attached to the back in the case of phones/tablets or on a hinge to a rectangle that otherwise matches the screen in the case of notebooks). The display bit almost completely defines the basics of how portable it is, how it's used, and the limits on thermal dissipation and roughly how much energy it can have. But a wearable display once again abstracts the human-computer visual interface part from everything else, which means single rectangles are no longer required. Belts, smoother ovoids that can be more easily pocketed, and who knows what else all become possible ways to hold enhanced computation/storage beyond what the wearable itself can do. And as someone enters LAN range (or sits down and plugs in even) of more computation power (in the form of a desktop computer say, or networked computers) there could be seamless switchover. And it's not as if this is 50 years in the future either, the pieces have been steadily coming together. Products like the RETISSA [0] demonstrate the potential that a company with Apple's resources could get to work polishing. The opening up of 6 GHz spectrum and WiFi 7+ along with a long awaited new shift in networking means LAN data rates are there too.
To say there are implications for, oh, products like the iPhone, iPad, and Macbooks (or even iMacs) is a bit of an understatement. With enormous irony if anything Apple's heavily neglected desktop section might be one of the ones that'd best survive. But whomever gets it right and gets the ecosystem going has the potential to really mess up established players. Given how Apple accomplished multiple disruptions and has repeatedly stated they're alert to it and the importance of being willing to go after their own cash cows early before someone else does it, I'd sort of assumed in the background this was one of their key strategic projects even if it was like a 10 year one. It's fascinating to find that no, actually not!
And Ive's influence without the leash of Jobs to make sure form and function stayed linked really seems to have been pretty toxic. Whatever Cooks' other strengths keeping that reigned in doesn't seem to have been one of them. I guess the forces of organizational inertia are always incredibly powerful.
----
Can you explain why people think "3D" is an important aspect of these? AR/VR would already pay for itself just by being able to bring up my desktop (or smaller individual windows or anything) anywhere, more efficiently.
Heat exists.
We're already basically at the limits of physics for making CPUs faster and heat dissipation is a huge issue even for products that you don't have pressed against your face and eyes all the time.
Humans interact chiefly via sight.
But it has still been "obvious for ages" that wearable displays are going to be some big inevitable hit? No it hasn't.
And why on earth would Apple have made this tech a priority ten years before it was viable as a consumer product?
P.S. No, Apple's desktop computer operation has not been "neglected" lately; they actually have been giving the Mac a lot of care and feeding, as evidenced by the really nice new MacBook Pro re-design, and the Mac Studio. The opposite of what you said is true.
??? I do too. What does this have to do with anything? The lens is irrelevant for something that projects right onto the retina (trivial to correct for). Hell, I'd love it for that reason alone, would be a huge improvement for my computer usage.
>We're already basically at the limits of physics for making CPUs faster and heat dissipation is a huge issue even for products that you don't have pressed against your face and eyes all the time.
Lol? Also that you think this is relevant either is kind of confusing.
>Humans interact chiefly via sight.
Yes, hence why wearable AR/VR displays are obvious.
>But it has still been "obvious for ages" that wearable displays are going to be some big inevitable hit? No it hasn't.
Yes, it has.
>And why on earth would Apple have made this tech a priority ten years before it was viable as a consumer product?
For the same reason they were thinking about the "iPad" and then "iPhone" (tablet consideration actually came first internally even though in 2004 it was redirected toward the phone first) long, long before it "viable as a consumer product" duh. You don't get out ahead of things by waiting until after your competitors do it to get started, you make it happen early with your own R&D.
>No, Apple's desktop computer operation has not been "neglected" lately; they actually have been giving the Mac a lot of care and feeding, as evidenced by the really nice new MacBook Pro re-design, and the Mac Studio.
This is just pathetic. You cite the MacBook Pro as support for desktop computers and consider just this last year as a trend. I've been using Apple systems since the late 80s. Desktop systems have absolutely been massively neglected in the last decade. The Mac Pro got updated TWICE in TWELVE YEARS (the first of which was total shit), and that was after Apple pushed it massively up market vs their reliable good tower. The Mac Mini also had multiple years of just being left to sit there. There was zero in between them except the AIOs. And we're not talking about big redesigns but just basic normal CPU updates and the like that every single other computer manufacturer on the planet does like clockwork as a matter of course.
They might, maybe, be turning that around now but a single release does not make a trend. And that desktop systems were a distant last place in Apple's priorities vs iDevices or notebooks has been extremely obvious and is utterly uncontroversial since the 00s. That's just a statement of fact. In terms of raw income the balance shifted dramatically mid 2000s in favor of notebooks, and then of course later to iDevices. The Intel transition was driven primarily by the needs of the notebooks, not that everything else didn't come along for the ride. And Apple's corporate structure doesn't do multitasking boring stuff that well in exchange for doing single stuff incredibly well.
But that's exactly what happened with the iPad though. Apple's competitors had already released tablet-type devices for years, they just weren't really ready as consumer products: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Tablet_PC
Identifying the likely optimal display mechanism has been primarily a matter of physics and biology. Without implants, can't do better than photons directly onto retina which also easily deals with lens/focus issues. There's never been anything to indicate that's physically impossible either. So "just" a matter of lots of hard work, but Apple has the kind of profit and strategic outlook to justify that. They've done so repeatedly. And this is central to their core business and talents as well. That other lesser tech might be of use in niches that aren't of interest to Apple, or that earlier efforts can't hit the strict superset tipping point, misses the forest for the trees.
If you can't figure out why wearing hot things on your face is a problem, you are not even thinking at all about product design.
I meant that humans interact WITH EACH OTHER via sight. Again, the fact that this does not even seem to occur to you as an issue says a lot.
The Mac Mini has of course been updated recently; you seem to be talking about the past. The Mac Studio, you failed to even mention, as if it does not exist, for some weird reason.
AR is technically impossible with current and near future tech.
All these companies are lying and faking and delaying to collect $ while people like HN are stupid enough to believe in them.
Zuckerberg's latest video blanked out the "AR" glasses. Google also lied and used fake demos glasses in theirs. Magic Leap = lol
The far easier and probably useful VR has gigantuous issues to move forward. For instance there's no way to create content. $100 million games go to half a billion dollar games. People don't want to move their heads when relaxing. At best it might be useful at work where people are forced to do things but that's also contentious, most people don't even want to turn the Zoom camera on.
AR is already proven tech in industry. I don't know what entertainment purposes it might serve but real world use is already benefitting from it.
Building and construction has tons of AR offerings in production. See for example Trimble's SiteVision.
> AR is technically impossible with current and near future tech.
This is simply not true, there’s been numerous AR products built (just not runaway success stories). IMHO, it’s not “technically impossible”, it’s “prohibitively expensive” generally to get the experience that’s been hyped.
The entertainment/gaming market is overrated - when it finally shows up, AR/VR will be all about work, productivity and interfacing. But I agree it's probably going to take a long time and I don't think it's going to be the hyped revolution everyone would like it to be.
It's also probably quite a ways off for mainstream adoption because the hardware and software isn't there and won't be for a while unless you're talking narrow use cases where compromises are fine.
Like you though, both figuratively and literally, I'm not buying VR.
Privacy aside, I don't think that would really take off either as I just don't think most people are that interested in people they don't know.
Text, as opposed to audio, doesn't really change the personality of the person you are speaking to, plus using your ears to listen directly to the person might create better immersion.
The uses of AR are endless and much more than just Minority Report type stuff.
And then as the controllers get better and more integrated, you get the sort of thing that currently only pilots of an F35 get, in terms of being aware of their environment.
Unless everyone can use it, its not going to work in an office setting. A single person in a team of six who gets motion sickness with VR (very common) makes it nonviable for the entire team.