skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No kidding. This honestly felt like something out of Hunger Games, with some obviously well-off, out-of-touch, work-from-home dweebs wearing this unit to show off their status to their Apple ecosystem social circle. And then we have Disney! With Marvel and Star Wars! So you can experience Adventure! Without leaving your home!

Yeesh, this says a lot about their target market.

Cool tech, though. Let's hope I'm not peer pressured into wearing one of these masks for my kid's goddamn birthday party.
If a $300-400 Oculus falls off your head, who cares, but $3500? Just nope.
Disappointed there was no mention of WebXR support in Safari.
People are using the term "luddite" as a means to trivialize and dismiss real concerns others have. It's just an insult that deserves to be ignored, nothing more.
You're speaking mips and bits...

This is not what got Apple to where it was. It was recognizing what we wanted to do to go further, individually and together, and amplified that with technology.

This literally amplifies your ass to the couch. I'm shocked. Stunned. And sad.
Billy Joel's rule: "You are free to speak your mind, but not on my time."

That is, sure, you can speak to whoever wants to listen. You can't make anyone want to listen, though - including, you can't make a forum want to listen. It wants to talk about gardening, and you want to talk about the latest Covid conspiracy theories? Great, knock yourself out, talk about your conspiracy theories - but not on the gardening forum.

See, I support free speech. I support their freedom to talk about gardening without having to wade through a bunch of conspiracy theory posts. "Post anything anywhere" reduces actual communication - willing speakers finding willing listeners - because the listeners give up rather than wade through a bunch of garbage that they don't care about. I support their freedom to talk about gardening without getting drowned out.
Maturana & Varela's concept of "autopoiesis" is not widely known but I think it should be part of biology programs in high school. It is a simple concept that opens the door for complexity and evolution in an open-ended course. It is relevant to this topic as it is foundational to the theoretical journey that is shared in all the videos of this page. I don't have a book reference at the moment so forgive me for the wikipedia reference. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopoiesis

"""
The term autopoiesis (from Greek αὐτo- (auto-) 'self', and ποίησις (poiesis) 'creation, production') refers to a system capable of producing and maintaining itself by creating its own parts.[1] The term was introduced in the 1972 publication Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living by Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela to define the self-maintaining chemistry of living cells.
"""

I had the opportunity to attend a couple of his lectures when I was in the Biology program at the University of Chile. I must say hearing him, his students (neuroscience professors) and colleagues discuss different topics changed my view of the natural world by allowing me to understand "systems" in a way that is both holistic and practical (autopoiesis, natural drift, etc.). His laboratory was full of students that vibrated with the teachings of "The Santiago School of Cognition" and I will always be thankful for being able to interact with them.
>This means every Mac Apple creates, from design to manufacturing to customer use, will have net-zero climate impact.

My guess is that the largest contributor to carbon emissions comes from Apple's employees living their lives: Apple pays the employee a salary, then the employee uses that salary in a way that result in heavy carbon emissions unless that employee is one of the very few who seriously rearrange their lives to intentionally pessimize their climate impact.

I doubt Apple is counting that.
I wonder how this will work without the ability to capture full facial expressions. Can they extrapolate from the features they can see, to fill in the gaps of what they can't see? Or will tone of voice be sufficient to let people know when you're happy or upset?

This could be the next generation of "tone gets lost in text".
Back in the 1990's, the in-person User Groups were a thing of the past and we didn't have Patreon style support donation system wasn't widely accepted. Funding was mostly out of owner/operator budget like it was in the BBS days.

Usenet was part of the ISP plan, part of your monthly dial-up (or otherwise) costs.

Who paid to moderate and solve problems was starting to fail under the load and the easy ability to mass spam.
Down for me too, I'm unable to leave comments.
> Thank goodness that criminals aren't very smart

No, the criminals are extremely smart. Its just that these were amateurs who didnt know that in Anglosaxon common law, you have to avoid being honest about anything and even deny any wrongdoing even if you get caught the act of murdering someone. Then you can exercise plausible deniability, claim incompetence or mental incapacity and you can negotiate your sentence. Any kind of honesty works against you in the US law as a result. That's how you end up with people who are total experts in their field testifying in courts that they "didnt know" that something they did would cause so much harm to something or somebody or the society.

As of this very moment, thousands of much, much bigger corporations are actually destroying the entire US society in a real way and not like these amateurs who were just shuffling some funny money. But the real psychos know how common law works. There wont be any trail of their wrongdoing, and when there is, there will always be plausible deniability in that trail...
Can't wait to run GopherVR [1] on this.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GopherVR
Useful metric to gauge potential success of an innovation: will it make consuming porn more enjoyable / transcendental?
> writing boring posts is bad

This is highly subjective, what you think is boring might be super interesting to another person.
The hardware is no doubt impressive, as expected, but I just can't see myself in any of the situations they keep showing in VR/AR demos.

Does someone really sit on their couch, put on a massive headset, and scroll through their vacation photos? Does someone watch an entire 2+ hour movie with a sweaty headset strapped to them (and plugged into a socket) instead of on a couch with their family/friends? Would I want to be in a group call with generated avatars of people rather than their actual faces? If the kids are having a fun moment would I want to run inside, grab my headset, strap it on and record a video, or just go join them? Would I rather work on this all day instead of a laptop?

And the one thing I could maybe see this being useful for – gaming – was barely even mentioned in their keynote.

If I'm dropping $3,500 and cutting myself off from the outside world (and no, that weird eye display thing doesn't count), a half-assed substitute for consuming the same content as I would on any other screen isn't going to cut it. Show me the actual future, in terms of software/content/communication/immersiveness, then we'll talk.
SBF and FTX were charged for bribery and fraud, there were victims.
Do you own a pair of AirPods? My Gen2 AirPod Pros are what I consider to be the best purchase I have made in the last 10 years. The small package and ANC is fantastic. Before purchasing AirPods I would walk around with ATH M50X (Great headphones; not fashionable) and these have replaced that.
My take would be that it would be Apples track record of making software work well with the hardware, more seamlessly than either Samsung or Meta.

Just look at the virtual avatar they demoed compared with Meta’s. Apple went with a more professional looking avatar instead of a cartoony one.

Another app that was shown was a Birds Eye view of a basketball game. I’d love to be able to watch a sporting event live from that perspective (if I could stomach the entry fee for the experience).

I was on the fence about this product, thinking that there wouldn’t be many good use cases, but their presentation gave some activities that I’d want to try on the hardware. Whereas Meta’s presentation didn’t show anything I was interested in.

Apple is giving developers 6+ months to make even more interesting apps. I think there’s a good chance that this could be a successful product. But I should hold my judgement until I’ve seen the caveats of this device (ie comfort, battery life, display quality, etc). I’m sure we’ll see more in-depth looks in the coming months. We can judge it more fairly when these reviews come out.
Not if they're big and cozy; you can all clink your earmuffs together while being choked out by the battery-pack cable!

I can't wait for the third or forth generation of this product.
Which competitor is providing $500 AR headset?
> At 3500 this will be niche at best.

The original 128k Macintosh was $2,495 in 1984--that's $6,244.14 in todays (2023) dollars, just to put things in perspective.

Obviously there will be less expensive models to come; this is just the start. This will be mostly for early adopters and developers.
The demo greatly exceeded my expectations. If the v1 actually works as well as their presentation, then this is going to fundamentally change personal computing. Sure, it's expensive, but that's because they are bringing to market something that is truly high tech.

In 5-10 years this will be mainstream if it's not too expensive. It's going to be interesting because we're going to repeat the cycle of a new competing platform coming up, like Android, and copying the UX. This time around though it seems that they patented it really hard, so it'll be interesting to see that fight go down.

Ultimately it's going to come down to if their products lives up to its claims, and if they'll be able to bring the costs down.
23M pixels across the field of vision of two eyes doesn't meet the requirements of a design studio. A retina display is minimum 60 pixels per degree. This will be around 30.
Stephenson’s joke with the Gargoyles is that the Protagonist looked down on them throughout the story, but eventually became one.
Are you including the remote which, for free, comes with no mute button?
Keep in mind the battery is not enough for a movie. So the entire family will also be plugged into a wall wart. Mind the wire for any bathroom breaks!
> People said the M1 Pros were overpriced

Yeah but most people aren't paying for those: their employers are.

I don't think many employers are going to buy such an expensive tool.
People get upset because they don't have a "cheap" product offering.

With Dell there's the Inspirons

With HP there's the Pavillion

With Lenovo there's Ideapads and Yoga's and stuff.

With Apple, their cheapest laptop is comparable to a business laptop (Elitebook, Latitude), and their most expensive laptops are comparable to the "creator" laptops like Dell XPS or HP ZBook -- except the Apple computers have better build quality than those.

But people only look at the spec sheet and claim it's overpriced.

Apple are definitely guilty of gouging the price of upgrades, but that's just business sense, if you need the update then you have to trade how much it's worth to you- it's just that other manufacturers do not do that.
I am sure that I bought a TV for the very last time. This is mind blowing, the future is here!
Tiger teams can work in some scenarios, but it seems unlikely that's going to work at AMD. The reason the driver is bad is a lot to do with the fact that the driver team have to basically make lemonade out of the lemons that the hardware team hand them. The hardware team have a difficult enough job just to get the hardware to work and they're where the core success of the business (traditionally) was seen. So the driver team have to do the best they can, but at the end of the day they can't independently solve the problem because they're downstream of the hardware. So yes, you could spend some money and get better engineering on the driver side, but there's a limit to how much you can do without re-prioritizing the hardware team to be more responsive to software requirements and at that point you're talking about full scale organisational change. Only a handful of companies can do that. Look at Gelsinger trying to change Intel - the stock market is not thanking him for his efforts, we're at the point where they're a legitimate acquisition target for Nvidia (ignoring anti-trust concerns)
Somehow it's still the only smart TV with < 1s input delay
I didn't think people would enjoy looking at a 6 inch screen while hunched over for every second of their waking lives, but here we are.
I understand they have built a whole deal of spatial audio technology around it. But in a practical sense, I hope one could just plug in Airpods instead to go with the MR display. Under no circumstances, real world settings will match their design studio perfection. Too often stray sounds & ambient noise pollution could dilute that experience.
Sorry, what's app down ?
from my...market research...vr porn super disappointing.
For someone who hasn't really tried this kind of thing (VR goggles...), what's it like after thirty minutes? Two hours?
I feel reluctant because it's a huge thing wrapped around my head, isn't that something a twelve year old likes but not a 32 year old?
Hardly any different from Windows then.

In case you feel like mentioning Vulkan, it doesn't come in the box, works thanks to plugging into OpenGL ICD driver model and via GPU vendors, not OS vendor, and it isn't supported in all scenarios where DirectX is.
Did they say anything about Lidar and room mapping accuracy? The gestures seems very minute. I am astounded they can pick those up well.
Fully agree! Their "hobby" has turned into possibly the best experience in their lineup (from a UX perspective).
> want it or not that's a different implementation,

Implementation is the same. In both cases it's the same set of CPU instructions, but async/await languages create artifical division, forcing developer to think othervise.

So, let me explian my reasoning. Code starts with a developer's mental model of a problem and behavior of the system and then translating it into the code. The more straightforward this translation, the more readable the code. Code is a second degree map of problem domain so to speak ("real" world -> mental model -> code).

Like if you want to add two values, the simplest form of code would be "add(2,2)" which is pretty straightforward. If the code forces you to do some mental gymnastics (i.e. "2 2 addOnlyEvenNumbers") - that's less straightforward, less clear and less readable.

In the same vein, if you want to execute some function ("EatADonut" or "MakeHTTPCall") – you may care or not care about blocking and waiting for results. But it's your call. So it makes sense to give you two options to run this function. Go has simplest possible solution – "eatADonut()" vs "go eatADonut()". It doesn't matter what is a "default" here – it could be "eatADonut()" (go to background) vs "sync eatADount()". What matters that "eating a donut" is just a set of instructions to the CPU, and it's up to caller to decide how you want to execute it in terms of concurrency.

Now, "async/await" approach turned this ownership of "synchronicity" around. Now function is deciding how it should be called. Mental model of "actions" now needs to be translated into "actions being async or sync for the purpose of fitting into this language concept". Which is cognitively expensive for no added benefit.

Sure you can rationalize it, and get used to it as to any other absurd design, but it still adds unneeded complexity to the code, makes it less readable and less clear.
IMHO this really is what's gonna make or break this product. Will the screens have good enough fidelity and not strain my eyes in such a way that I will want to wear the headset for my entire work day.
2 is also true of gold and any other commodity.

3 I'd quibble with you about "overwhelming majority", but yes that's a common use of gold. It's a fairly common use of cryptocurrency too though, especially in countries with high inflation.

4 Maybe in that specific situation yes. Sounds like you agree that's not all cryptocurrencies though. It's also kinda weird that something could go from not being a security to being one (and back) depending on how people happen using it at any given moment in time. E.g. If someone somehow managed to orchestrate a pump and dump scheme with silver, would it temporarily become a security for that brief moment in time and then go back to being a commodity afterwards?
While everyone might benefit from it, as many have from tablets or smart watches, the Meta play to be the first of owning groundbreaking hardware has failed.
Of course if we lie to ourselves. It's just an iOS app browser inside Oculus Quest like product + Disney content.
Had a similar experience with the Rift and it made me buy a different VR headset.
The software stack is critical to these devices not being painful or pleasant.
Devices that are steamvr native have been so much nicer to use, just plug&pay.
I'm assuming Apple isn't going to make their headset SteamVR compatible so I wonder how things will shake out a few years from now - is Apple going to be in their own little world or will existing software really support it?
that's how it will be, because there will only ever be at most one person using one of these things. The others are on their phones or macbooks.
True, but the price will come down. The early MacBook Air's were also super-expensive, rich-early-adopter-only pricing, and now they're the mainstream product.
Funny how every time I click a link to a dreamwidth.org hosted blog the,

>"Hello, you've been (semi-randomly) selected to take a CAPTCHA to validate your requests. Please complete it below and hit the button!"

...pops up and the button doesn't actually work. Truly one of the worst blog hosts out there if you actually want everyone to be able to read what you write.
Murder Rate Is Suddenly Falling: first 5 months 2023 encouraging overall trend
A TV is often a social device. this thing is not
The Quest is not AR focused in the least, it's pure VR. And the hand tracking is clunky. This looks like a very different experience in general.
So it is only useful with net power.
I've said this before, but Apple's attention to detail might finally bridge the uncanny valley to actually good AR. I can elaborate a bit more when I get on my computer.
Tested spacetop last year; it's not good for extended use. Glasses were dim, it's Chrome OS based so web apps for everything. You have infinite virtual desktop, readability is good, but ultimately it's just a consumption tool for reading and typing. But the cost is looking dorky.
> For people who actually know, it once again seems good.

If the way to make it work is to use "site:", to me that doesn't count as "searching the web" anymore.
No controllers, no waving your arms about. Eye tracking and hand gestures for navigation. Screen on the front that shows your face to make it feel less isolating. I don't know that it'll be a success but it's a lot more than just putting an Apple logo on it.
i don't see where it says people outside your contacts will see it.
I was sceptical going into today that Apple were going to be able to make an AR product for $3000 that could justify that price point, especially when my XReal glasses only cost $399. I was even more sceptical when I heard they were going to be VR capable and goggles.

Well fuck me. This thing looks absolutely insane. It’s come in at $3499 and if it performs as good as those videos make out then, if anything, it’s a bargain.

I can’t believe they’ve managed to do away with controllers for everything except serious typing. I can’t believe they’ve managed to cram more pixels than a 4k TV on to the size of a postage stamp. And I can’t believe we’ll soon be reliving memories in 3d (just please put the same camera technology into the phones so the kids don’t have a childhood of staring up at goggle eyed parents until this tech become sufficiently miniaturised).

Computers this decade are going to be incredible.
Virtual Light
Any one know how the finger gesture control works? I wonder how accurate it would be. That UI seems to be a big advancement compare to other VR devices.
Calling it now, the failure of this Apple product is going to be a big turning point for the company. Apple is supposed to be the company that sets trends, but instead they're following Meta down a path that has now shown to be a dead end, and no amount of aesthetics or marketing can prevent it.
What about $3500 says "accessibility" to you? You're just re-vomiting out all of the same promises VR companies have been making for the past half decade. No company is going to spend $3500 on a tool that easily breaks for low stakes jobs and is untested/unreliable for high stakes jobs.
A strong contender. Also, backyard pools kill a lot of kids :(
You probably can have a better AMD setup. Just look at things they brag about [1] - our newest 24-core machine is UP TO 4x faster than 8-core Intel from I don't know how many years ago. I have no idea about actual performance but it doesn't look great, especially given that they are running software for which these chips were specifically optimized.

I currently use macos, the software is tolerable, but when I need some serious computation power the server is running Linux. You can have more cores, you can have more memory, what else do you need?

1. https://www.apple.com/mac-pro/
Think before you post.

Remember, whatever opinions or hot takes you have of this product now will be resoundingly made fun of for the rest of history.
in the "technology" section of the presentation where they talk about the operating system, the graphic explicitly shows ios not mac.
Difference being I straighten myself occasionally and look at you in the eyes.
Apple blew me away with what they are doing for personal communication. Everything else felt like a refinement or new product trial balloon. But what Apple is doing to make mini-creators out of people here is jaw dropping.

I'd go so far to half-jest VisionPro launch was pushed up to smokescreen how big the iMessage changes are, what ecosystem dominance Apple is getting with iOS/MacOS. Apple is never going to participate with anyone else ever, after this. Apple is off executing incredible big advancements.

Users create a little avatar that shows up across products, with some solid flare & artistic effect gratis. Great first impression building, lots of enduring personality.

But the day to day is wow. Being able to positionally drag drop emoji into group chat is huge flair from the start. Drop in locations easily, nice, useful. Creating custom emoji really really impressed me, really let's folks develop repetoir & humor in their interactions with each other over time. ActivityPub/Mastadon impl MissKey has a very barebones custom emoji that I like, but the authorship tools here look really really friendly & helpful to really DIY, to go beyond being a meme bank.

Other communications tech touches were everywhere. Live Voicemail live transcribing is dead simple & sensible, albeit receive only. Shared CarPlay Sessions is tech Google has in Cast/Android but which no one uses (including YouTube Music): hugely prosocial connected computing. Journaling is incredibly compelling as a synthesis tool, a way to pull together a variety of computing bits & encourage user content generation, to make a shared computing space around the user.

Apple also situated into the home far better than Google. Android's widgets have been stagnant for years & crude, and Apple has gone from having nothing to relentlessly driving forward with microexperiences atop shared computing spaces. These ideas, of shared computing spaces, and shared interpersonal spaces, are massively on display here in a way no one else is computing is showing off, and it's incredibly compelling to me. And scary, as it's so purely Apple's space; the world needs some principled loyal opposition to the Cupertino Way, that keeps the path of computing available for open innovation.