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Comment by brtkdotse | Hacker News Reader

> next consumer electronics platform

I really hope this isn’t the case. We have enough screens around us as is, the last thing I want is screens pressed up against my eyeballs

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Sort of the whole point of this style of waveguide optics is that the screen is not pressed up against your eyeballs. It's projected out 3-6 feet in front of you (and ideally, anchored to the real world in some way).

For your children’s children, AR is going to be a commodity product like cell phones are today.

I highly doubt it. People are people and don't change much. Teenagers especially are all about personal fashion/appearance, and outside of a short-lived fad don't seem likely to want to wear a computer on their face, regardless of how fashionable you are able to make them look. You may as well build the battery pack into a baseball cap and say you have to wear that too.

Teenagers don't have any problem wearing airpods even though those look really stupid. I wouldn't count out the power of marketing or teenager's need for approval from their peers.

> [...] airpods even though those look really stupid

speaking /as/ a teenager, that's presumption. maybe it's an Apple-sponsored mindhack, but I actually think wireless earbuds (incl. AirPods) look quite a bit better than their dangly wired counterparts.

Maybe I'm just a lot more accustomed to seeing wires than sticks pointing out of people's ears, but I'd hardly be the first person to say they look dumb. It was a concern reviewers took into account (see for example https://mashable.com/article/apple-airpods-review) and people often say they look like Q-tips/antennae sticking out of people's heads (or worse https://screenrant.com/hilarious-apple-airpods-memes/)

Part of it is that they stick out way too far so you can see them when looking at someone directly. It's especially distracting in cases where they're sticking out in different directions.

it might just be that I was never in a terribly wire-laden environment -- I'm in college now, where something like 70% of people have airpod-shaped devices in their ears at all times, and even in high school seeing wired earbuds was infrequent. the AirPod aesthetic is the only one I remember wrt listening devices.

I don't know if the same effect would occur with these glasses, though. it seems unlikely that they'll have significant /public/ use amongst young people any time soon. I've never even seen an Apple Vision Pro.

Could be part mindhack! I remember Apple's iPod advertising campaign which centered around silhouettes of hip looking users with the trademark white dangly wires snaking into their pocket. I guess with this desirable tech hidden in your pocket, the wires were the best way to recognize that someone had one!

I guess since airpods are visible (and expensive) they are now the desirable focus, and anyone with wired earbuds is hopelessly out of date!

Making them stick out visibly from the sides of people's heads was absolutely a design choice so that people could be "seen" with the product.

Apple is very big on being a status symbol which is why they put a giant shiny (at one point glowing) logo on their laptops and why they spent a lot of money trying to convince iphone users to not use a case which would hide the logo.

Children’s children? What? Like 50 years from now?

These AR innovations are going to produce great value already 5 years from now.

it's not really a matter of if at this point, it's a when... it's the peak of screen technology that we've been hurtling towards for nearly 100 years

I really hope you’re wrong. I suspect that the future is technology which blends further into the background rather than being shoved closer to our faces.

I agree with your ideal goal, but there are hundreds of billions of dollars being spent on getting it in directly into our eyeballs.

Maybe we'll be lucky enough to die before it's normal for this stuff to be integrated into our brains (which again, billions of dollars being spent on figuring this out).

I think the main question will be if Meta can run the glasses under a different business model than ads/personalization. I know Meta feels like they missed out on owning the hardware ecosystem with mobile, but a big part of why Apple's product work is because their business model is not ads.

If they can fix their incentives there it will address 80% of the concerns in this thread.

Counterintuitively I think a passive screen affixed to your face will reduce your reliance on all other screens. Glasses aren't a great form factor for scrolling feeds, but they are much better at connecting you to your physical world (which phones are the worst at). That plus just the posture improvements [1] that glasses can provide over the phone may make this a winner.

[1]: https://www.today.com/health/texting-neck-how-hunching-over-...

It doesn't matter if they can or can't, Apple will do a better version of this and people will buy it because they're a much less shitty / shady company than Facebook.

Even if apple’s was worse in most ways, it would still sell.

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