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Comment by thomastjeffery | Hacker News Reader

That was a lot of words for nothing to say... To sum up the entire article in one sentence:

The author got to play with the thing, and is very excited to develop software for it.

I think this was an interesting point:

> That intuition is developed by following a platform’s development from its early stages. You have to have seen and experienced all the attempts and missteps along the way to know where the next logical step is. Waiting until a platform is mature and then starting to work on it then will let you skip all the messy parts in the middle, but also leave you with only answers to the “what” questions, not so much the “why” questions.

I definitely think there's a lot of truth in this, not just for the Vision Pro but for many (if not most) platforms/frameworks/what have you. This could be an entire blog post in itself.

I think reviewers who don't get excited about Apple products stop getting invited to new Apple products.

David Smith is not a reviewer. He’s been a longtime app developer with a huge number of apps. Apple has even featured a few of them.

He may be best known for Pedometer++ and Widgetsmith which was the app that went viral on TikTok when widgets first came out for the iPhone.

Apple gave him an exclusive invitation to be one of the first people to try the device on.

Do you think Apple is unaware that he has a popular blog and is a popular developer of software that runs on Apple products?

It doesn’t surprise me that Apple would want to give a demo to someone who has consistently made high quality apps for their platforms, often on day 1 of a new platform.

It’s a developer conference. Yes there are media there, but it’s also to court developers.

Marco Arment was invited to WWDC as he is north a developer and operates a Mac focused blog. He is frequently very critical of Apple’s tools and actions. I don’t think Apple just invites ’yes men’

"both" not "north"

Looks like I could use that new AI autocorrect. :)

A lot of those words were explaining why they're excited to develop software for it.

What did you want them to write about instead?

More of the "write about" and less of the "write about why I'm writing about".

I think you can expect some more detailed insights from David once he starts testing out things in the emulator.

Next episode:

developer gets frustrated as Apple refuses to relinquish full control over the device.

You could further summarize it with one word: excitement.

Excitement is good. It's not a revolutionary take on anything, but it can be interesting to know why a seasoned iOS developer finds this new platform worthwhile to invest in.

this blogpost is the platonic ideal of hype

It starts with the early adopters and spreads like a virus.

Thanks for saving my time. Always read the comments first.

Also: don't cry about the price. Quality costs money.

Altogether sounded like an GPT Apple Ad.

It's true though, the device is clearly intentionally overbuilt, it's not like Apple is adding some huge arbitrary markup.

We'll see about that.

From the previews people have had so far, I feel like they decided their target was "could plausibly and comfortably replace a computer day 1 even for someone who had never used a VR device before", then went backwards from the hardware needed for that to figure out their price point.

Can I write software using Xcode day 1 for this? Do I need to also have a Mac? I mean I do have a Mac but an extra $3500 is steep.

That said I’ve planned to get one since I heard rumors years ago that this was in the works.

I sort of expected it to be a full replacement for a MacBook though.

Apple has an app developer story for ipad with swift playgrounds. It would not surprise me that their long term strategy is to grow that into the default app dev experience and have it be on all platforms, including visionOS.

As for developing from day one, web development should be ok, as things like vs code online have really opened ip options.

Apple miniaturized a laptop + MacBook into a visor

Yeah, i was a little afraid of an iphone or ipad mini level of compute, was happy to see that this thing can run untethered with some actual muscle under the hood.

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