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> could anyone have imagined walking into a living room 30 years ago and seeing everyone hunched over a phone?

True, but I don't recall smartphones ever being unveiled with promotional videos of people all being hunched over them at dinner.

Smartphones were promoted by enabling us to do things on the go: making and receiving phone calls, getting directions, finding restaurants in the area. This is why this feels different: the experience that is promoted is one that feels already slightly dystopian.

I wonder if anyone will feel brave enough to wear this on a bike...

Until the time they're arrested for using a smartphone while biking, or for relying on the computer not to malfunction just to avoid riding blind.

Skiing was what I was wondering.

Specialized AR goggles exist. Not for me but I guess I can understand the appeal to some.

https://ostloong.com/sirius/

Recon Jet made an HMD that is sorta similar to Google Glass, but designed more like ski goggles / sunglasses. One of its use cases when it came out around ten years ago was skiing, but I never used it for that. I mainly used mine biking with its ANT+ integration.

Or driving. It would interesting to have directions overlaid on the view of the road. The exit I need to take could be outlined and highlighted for example.

Until it crashes, and then you crash.

It's not proper AR, It's VR with passthrough which means it's purely active. If it fails it goes black.

I can’t imagine putting a CPU as complicated as the M2 in between my eyeballs and the road. It is too big and complicated.

I guess we don’t really know what the R1 does. It is hypothetically possible that there’s a failsafe road-eyeball path just goes through that chip, maybe that could be made as reliable as various other critical computers…

It's not as failsafe as glass.

I guarantee you Mercedes or Lamborghini would _love_ to have a fully enclosed interior with screens instead of windows, but it's a critical safety feature and anything that makes it less likely to work is just not happening.

We’re basically converging on fully enclosed interiors anyway, just without the VR headset (the pillars for the windows are ridiculous nowadays). Maybe the argument could be made that it’d be safer for everyone (especially pedestrians waiting at crosswalks) if drivers had a headset system.

Getting rid of the windows and making the headset totally necessary seems like riskier proposition though. For the Apple thing on a normal car, the backup option of taking off the headset is always there (assuming sufficient warning can be given before a failure, which is a big assumption, but should be doable).

Drive-by-wire systems exist, so it isn’t as if replacing some normally mechanical steps with electronics is impossible. The electronics just need to be made sufficiently reliable.

Wasn’t there a vampire movie maybe fifteen years ago, where the vampires drove fully enclosed cars via camera during the day? Daybreakers?

There is a separate processing path for the video pass through that is suppose to be distinct from the OS. If one crashes the other shouldn’t.

Yes I know the difference between in theory and practice .

I think that's both inevitable and terrifying.

I'm thinking it might have an onboard battery that affords a few minutes after the current battery is depleted to allow hot swaps.

Not a great solution to using these in such situations, because bugs as you say, but it might be a feature that allows people to feel so daring. Oof.

The iPhone was introduced as having three features:

1. An iPod - that was already isolating people

2. A phone

3. An internet communicator

I’m confused. Are we judging a product category based on how it’s promoted, or how it’s used?

I don’t think my opinion of smartphones would be any different if early promotions had shown the downsides, or bigger upsides, or bizarre and unrealistic scenarios. Am I wrong to be anchored on how they’re actually used, which literally nobody foresaw?

We're judging it based on the vision for how it will be used, as evidenced through its initial promotion.

Do you judge Viagra based on how well it reduces blood pressure?

I agree that demo was dumb and dystopian. But it's silly to latch on to one imagined usage, ignore the others, and have no interest in what the reality will be.

It would be silly to latch onto it, if it were the vision of some random fan, but it is the vision of the company creating the product, so no, it's not silly to consider it critically.

I don't think OP is saying smartphones aren't dystopian in practice, just that no one set out to create the dystopia. That part of the Vision demo showed that the designers thought that this additional contribution to our dystopia was a positive thing, and that's concerning.

Precisely. And you can withness this in sibling threads. For some reason, today some people actually openly desire or pretend to desire the dystopia.

My suspicion is that this is related to the longtermist movement.

> Our 15 year old and his gf have their phones out at all times, frequently switching to interacting, glancing at random videos, messaging, games, etc.

Yes, and this is a bad thing.

Was it better when we all gathered around the radio?

> gathered around

Yes, because by definition this is a shared experience. Phones are isolating because no one knows what you're looking at and it's rather hard to share the small screen even if you want to.

young people definitely gather online. people revel in twitch streams, voice chat on disc, and all sorts of online gaming, video calling, and more. these are still shared experiences although they are not in person.

there is a lot of isolating tech (most social media) but it's also quite cultural-- yes it's global, but america f.e. is largely idealistic and materialistic and it shows.

i don't think the mode of interaction is the issue

Yeah the question at the root of this is how much the "in person" thing matters. I think the answer turns out to be "a lot". And back when I was in college a decade and a half ago, I was super optimistic about the internet and wrote essays arguing that the answer to this would turn out to be "not at all". But I think after watching this develop for a long time now, that it has not gone well.

Yep, like the other commenter said, it's right there in your comment: "gather".

Yes people imagined that. There's a movie about the company General Magic where you will see people filmed at the time imagining just that.

There’s been backlash to being on phones all day. iOS even guilt trips you every week with stats. It even guilt trips you for being too sedentary. If anyone is going to guilt trip you for doing too much of something, probably apple.

You should understand the guilt is on the recipient side (you). Here the sender (Apple) may have genuine concern about their users health or have marketing incentives to express the same concern. Probably a mix of both.

Or Apple just has liability concerns so it includes these options as a feature.

Regardless of whether they are doing it out of genuine concern or to cover their own asses, they aren't reporting my usage or lack of activity so that I can not do something about it. If they wanted me addicted, they would do something else.

That is exactly my understanding too. Though I think « inform » is more appropriate than « guilt trip »: my first understanding of your comment was « Apple wants to makes me feel guilt when using their products ».

I’ve never felt guilt from those stats. They might make me evaluate the last week, but IMHO guilt isn’t really a helpful emotion when it comes to past (not active) behavior.

> could anyone have imagined walking into a living room 30 years ago [0] and seeing everyone hunched over a phone? Or 80 years ago and seeing everyone around a television?

True, but is it so different to be hunched over a phone than hunched over a book. You can still just look up and be present. With a headset, well… there isn’t such a parallel.

Maybe the Sony Walkman is a better comparison because finally you could go out in the world buffered from it.

Sure ! And still the Walkman only takes one sense away, AR/VR intervene in two senses.

> You can still just look up and be present.

AV is slightly different b/c it's trying to let people still be present. Is it enough and will it work still remains to be seen.

Isn’t AR comparable to a headset the same way VR is to noise-cancelled headsets ?

GP said 'AV' (not 'AR') for 'Apple Vision' I assume - which 'tries to allow people to be present' through the 'EyeSight' feature (where it reveals the wearer's eyes, becomes translucent).

Correct. Apple Vision (AV) is also AR first which will help people remain present in their environment. Will it work that way in practice remains to be seen.

and apple just showcased how their headset DOES allow for intrusion and awareness of the world around it

I was getting an economics graduate degree 20 years ago, and at that time we had economic reports describing the upward arc of mobile phones to be exactly what they became, with all the negative social issues we see today forecast with "we'll need to do something about this" repeated over and over. It was seen as the mechanism the "rest of the world" gets access to computers and the Internet.

Seeing people hunched over watching the news isn't honestly that much of a stretch: https://twitter.com/HistoryInPics/status/411376204231753728?...