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Comment by makeitdouble | Hacker News Reader

This whole tweet had the same tone as when pop science crime investigation TV explains a criminal can be identified through its gait alone.

It's always magic, except when the predictive model doesn't work and there is no corrective action possible on the user side.

We're talking about physical reactions, so that means it's supposed to be the same through gender, age, race, health conditions from the algorithm's point of view...That's a lot of variables, and I wonder if Apple have analyzed this beyond the US population, assuming the device will be sold internationally at some point.

Apple seems really confident about this as they are foregoing controllers on the default interfaces, but that also reminds me on how they were rumored to make a car without a driving wheel...fingers crossed, I guess.

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*) They are foregoing controllers on the default interfaces, for the presentation of this initial product which is expected not to ship for another 6 months.

It's what i would do as well if I would want to steer the developer ecosystem in a certain direction.

From what I heard it also supports Bluetooth Mice and Keyboards to productively use a Macbook (which is streaming its video into the glasses)

Yes, Apple is clearly steering developers towards voice input and simple click based interfaces.

On Mice/Keyboards, I hope this supports third party VR controllers, otherwise the gaming/fitness side is really toast. That feels like a given, but considering the time it took for iOS to get Nintendo controller support, it's not unprecedented, especially given their relation with Meta.

They also demoed using a Bluetooth game controller for Apple Arcade games (that already support them).

Considering the performance numbers you wouldn't need the Macbook, the VR hardware will be much faster.

If they ever opened the system to run MacOS, that is, which is very unlikely :(

Technically, there's nothing that prevents them from running macOS in a VM to offer a virtual Mac. They built a lot of virtualisation tech into their M processors.

But I guess they won't, because (a) it's probably a bad idea to put unnecessary computational load on the headset that will use power and heat up your face, and (b) because they want to keep selling you Macs.

You'd hope that a $3500 head computer wouldn't require a computer to do computer stuff :(

> but that also reminds me on how they were rumored to make a car without a driving wheel...

This is it. They've pivoted and instead of a car, you get to use Vision with a karting game

A lot of these large companies spend millions of dollars recruiting participants from various demographics to test prototypes and fine-tune technologies like this. It's a tremendous effort.

A lot of these large companies also, for some undisclosed reason or chain of events, design a phone so that a non-neglible amount of people can't hold it without dropping calls (iphone 4), and then blame the user for "holding it wrong".

Also such a thing as being too conservative with battery size (iphone 6?) so that when it unavoidably degrades, you must throttle down the phone to avoid killing the battery and perhaps more (literally by a current draw it can't handle since the internal resistance has increased).

And that's just apple, then there's unintended acceleration (toyota), exploding airbags, faulty ignition (ford was it?).

Don't think that just because they are large, or a company, or old, or whatever, they always have their shit together. Companies are people. People make mistakes. Mistakes can slip through the cracks.

I believe you, and it makes sense. Apart from that, though, it's hilarious to imagine an ad like "Wanted: Black women with long hair to quietly walk into a room, pick up a vase, drink a can of coke, and then leave through the same door."

Yes. Although it's damn hard to recruit a Spanish stay at home mom with a slightly twitching left eye who's too busy to participate to random studies and will receive this a gift for her 50th birthday.

It kinda makes sense that some of her traits would be covered inside the test pannel, but looking at the face unlock and the level of adjustments they're still doing, it doesn't look like they got nearly enough data before launch. And that's for a product that is selling in billions of units.

you can use a keyboard and mouse if you want to. this is just fearmongering over nothing.

As usual, people will try to use workarounds. For missing ports on my Mac Book Pro, I use a hub. For connecting my AKG headset to my iPhone, I use a dongle. I guess sooner or later Apple will make available a kind of API for device makers to make it possible to interact with the content in ways different that eyeballs tracking.

Those aren't workarounds. The whole point of 3-4 USB-C/Thunderbolt ports is that you can do anything you can do things like plug a docking station into it via one port and do power, display, USB ports, etc off that one cable.

But instead every screams about dongles.

I'm not sure what you mean. I used to have all the ports I needed without a docking station.

The whole point is having the option, yes. But it makes no sense in having only USB-C ports and nothing else. Apple seems to agree, they added a couple ports back in the M2 Macbooks.

Quality Thunderbolt 4 hubs cost about $150-500, which is fine if I need to extend the selection of ports at my desk, but there's no point in having everything on one USB-C port just because it's technically possible.

You're right. The same way face unlock doesn't work for some people and they inout a password every time, so it's not intractable.

I expect people for who eye tracking fails to be stuck on third party controllers for the default interface (hopefully they're supported outside of games ?).

The bummer though will be that this device is US only for its launch, so the first round of application might also not care at all about these kind of issues. Accessibility is something Apple usually cares about, but third party devs can be more casual about it.

Well Apple is only expecting less than 1M units to be sold. Must such a niche product be designed for every variation of human? Seems reasonable that if you fall outside of the most common human forms by enough standard deviations then you're just out of luck.

I think people can understand if you tell them their ear is a bit odd shaped, or their makeup throws the dectection off. But it will be weird to explain them their eye movement is really out of norm, especially after they paid 3500.

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