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Comment by m463 | Hacker News Reader

"You're not the target market"

sigh.

this seems to be the way the world is going.

The market for what the tech world seems to be producing is people who can be easily swayed from their own vision to the company vision, and have little expectations of (actual) privacy, of actual utility, and just adapt to what they get.

It's hard to push back against this sort of thing.

Mindful people don't want to be limited by the scenarios the manufacturer has allowed. They don't want to ask permission, to be locked-in, to have subscriptions, to have surveillance, and advertisements.

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Ugh - so much of what you say resonates with me.

This is certainly the future (VR) but I'm not really interested in it. I'm interested in just being outdoors (not indoors). I want to feel rain, and cold. I want to know I can't just escape.

Others not so much, and all you need is a little bit of money. The brain doesn't know the difference. Doesn't know you're in a dead neighborhood in suburbia in a house that looks like all your neighbors you don't talk to anyways, far from any restaurants or public spaces. We have this now. Food and other items are being delivered to our doors. So on and so forth - I'm not going to belabor my personal view of a future hellscape of rich tech countries.

Unfortunately, this is the reality. Most people will choose the comfort over those discomfort. Just like the 99% moving matrix, going to select the blue pills over the red pills. Even the people who choose the red pill change their mind. It's just a big lever to enlarge those points.

It's astonishing how much you see this sentiment online, but no impact from it anywhere. Sure there is pushback on this sentiment online as well, but just from how much it's expressed online, you' expect at least like 30% of new developments to be more dense, mixed-use that encourages community, walking etc. Yet, somehow it feels closer to 1%. I wonder if that's because online is a small bubble or because the people engaged in zoning and planning are in a bubble or the venn diagram just has little overlap.

I mean real estate and development is a whole 'nother thing. Demand is wholly outstripping supply for places you want to actually live in, so you get what you get and you get to be happy about it.

If we're talking US real estate here, it's largely because of zoning making it de facto illegal to build anything except suburban single family homes or a downtown high rise, and because our public transit was dismantled long ago in favor of colossal (now decaying) highway and stroad systems, which we now have to build around.

Definitely. As I said though, given the push online and my social circle, I'd expected at least some higher percentage of areas to get much more relaxed zoning. Where I live there are a ton of new developments and they are all the absolute worst of both worlds. Hundreds of identical townhouses with nothing within walkable distance. It's too dense to feel rural and free, but has none of the benefits like being able to walk to a cafe or store and the density isn't high enough to make a massive impact on the market either. You even still hasn't neighbors you share walls with.

> given the push online

Have you ever been to nextdoor.com?

But who is the target market for this? I like to think I am usually pretty good at saying this isn’t for me but it is for demo Y. It isn’t clear here, but if I take the marketing video and the price point and put two and two together the target audience is people with a trust fund. Not upper class, but multi-millionaire inherited wealth types. The kind that travel a lot and so something like this makes a lot of sense when on a plane or in a hotel room.

For everyone else though? It is too much money and too little utility. I am sure it will come down in price, but I still don’t see it unless they let you plug it into a PC and use it like a normal VR headset for games, because those are the only people that will shell out over a grand for a headset.

What are the 'self assembled PC' equivalents in this space?

That's why no real programmer or hacker owns an iphone - overpriced, non customizable phone...

I am sure that plenty of "real ones" own iphones. I've met them. I've always had android phone but I haven't felt the urge to even change the background wallpaper for about a decade. Phones feel kind of underpowered, overpriced and anachronistic for my life.

The desire to customize your environment is not a pre-requisite for being _authentic_ and _true_ to making the blinky lights blink. Underneath all the artifice and baubles, all we need are to chain some magic words together, and to see if they do what we expect, over and over and over again. That's unaffected by whose logo is on your hoodie-vest.

> I am sure that plenty of "real ones" own iphones.

I think they've either been trained to not care so deeply about their phone, or they're jailbroken.

Unfortunately it's really a shame. We need more choices.

Google now occupies 50% of my screen with an intrusive non dismissable message telling me I need to enable autouodate of the apps in the appstore.

I am switching camp, Google is selling the illusion of choice. They want control back from options and I don't intend to be part of that journey.

My experience is exactly the opposite.

I know quite a few programmer/hacker types, many of whom are cognizant of and responsive to contemporary security and privacy issues. Almost to a one, the smartphone is where they compromise most dramatically, carrying iPhones or, more bizarrely, stock Android.

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