Thank you very much for saying this, I totally agree.
This is despite the fact that I want absolutely no part of "the metaverse" or whatever folks want to call ubiquitous AR/VR, and I don't want it to become commonplace in society. This is mostly for personal reasons, as I feel like I've finally gotten a handle on my cellphone addiction and have recently started realizing how much happier I am spending extended amounts of time in nature and away from tech. I like the idea of tech as tools, and I've enjoyed playing games on VR headsets for a short while, but extended use of a computer strapped to my face is a WALL-E nightmare for me.
All that said, I really didn't like the tone of this article. Yes, I agree that "big tech" has caused a lot of harm in society. But it's not that hard to separate that from many good things it has done, and this article felt so cynical like it just wanted to piss in everyone's soup.
We should celebrate it when big companies take real risks, even if they swing and miss. What would the author of this article prefer, more stock buybacks?
The author's articles seem to be relentlessly negative about all technology. Being negative on everything is a low-effort way to get attention, but it doesn't really contribute much to anything.
The amount of energy invested in pointing out the flaws in a 1.0 release of something reminds me of the ridicule heaped on the iPad.
It’s much easier to tear down something than it is to create something. It also garners a lot more clicks for someone whose primary contribution in life is pontification on the internet belittling the achievements of people who actually -do- something and -create- and take risks. Those people still do, after all, have to eat so thank god for advertising platforms and breathless naysayers.
It's really not a 1.0 though. Yes the vision pro itself is 1.0, but 99% of people's complaints are not with the vision pro directly, but more about the entire concept of AR headsets. These issues have been known since at least the hololense era of 2017 and despite incremental improvements to software and hardware, the firm Factor can never escape these issues without massive leaps like eye glass or contact lense sizes hardware ... which is sci Fi for at least 20 more years
But it’s also fair to say (imo) that AVP has made massive leaps. Are we now taking for granted the major leaps in nailing the interaction model (look and finger-tap), and delivering display tech that makes watching movies on it unlike any other movie experience just 85 days after release?
Yes, it needs to be lighter. Yes it needs more software/apps/content to fit greater use cases. Yes it needs to be less expensive to broaden its appeal, etc. Apple has a decent track record of patiently iterating YoY, polishing products to their mature, stable design state (thus giving rise to a new cycle of complaints about stagnation and not being bold and innovative).
Wait, who is actually defending look and finger tap as primary interface?
Psvr2 can do look, and it is largely best used as a rendering optimization, not as input detection. For controls, haptic is so important that the most emersive game is driving, but only if you have a good steering setup. Indeed, driving doesn't even need vr to be emersive with a good steering setup.
Ok - fine - but unless people keep working and innovating for those 20 years, then it never happens right ? and the fact is Vision Pro is science fiction compared to HoloLens (which is an era that’s only 7 years ago)
The issue with Vision Pro IMO is that it costs so much and includes price boosting features like the creepy eye see through that are interesting in a prototype release like this but can be cut to reduce cost weight and other factors. If it had cost 1/2 as much it would have sold more than twice as much, and while it might not become the next iPhone, it would have a much more established user and developer base to build on over the next 5 years as they iterate. Then I think by 2030 we would have both the social understanding of where headsets and AR fit and Apple will have had the chance to iterate designs, software, supply chain, materials, etc and we would have a practical device for a much larger addressable market. But even so, the die has been cast and things will improve.
All that said, the point isn’t this - it’s that the tech critic authors are the worst type of people - the people who make their living nit picking great achievements in the goal of tearing them down and regarding investment and purchase for no other reason than “engagement.” Their points are only right from the narrow view of some people, cherry picked and mixed together, into a giant breathless fallacy. It’s lazy and slimy.
Apple’s core competence is to wait for some good product hit the market and later improve it to make it much better and fetch their market share. Being forefront of the tech is not their skill, their skill is integration , supplier, and supply chain Logistics’s, and a design
The experience you get is probably better than any existing VR headset but I struggle to see myself valuing it at more than $500. The FOV and resolution still both suck and the headset is super bulky. I would rather use a phone or laptop/tablet to co some content since it’s much more pixel dense. If they can make a slimmer, lighter version with much higher pixel density it might be worth getting one but the tech is nowhere near there yet.
Facebook bought Oculus 10 years ago. Nothing is better about weight. It's worse, in fact. The 1.5 pound dorkbox smashed against your face is literally heavier and uglier than it was a decade ago. Take that Moore's law bullshit somewhere else. These things aren't going to be 30 grams for 30 years.
I don’t think this has ever been true. There are too many things they do where they have created a market out of nothing. The general public had never paid for digital music or apps until apple created the market. Same with contactless payment from phones.
You can argue that any of these technologies existed before and they “followed”, but that’s a pretty distorted view when apple made the market - they didn’t take market share from others.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen them claim to invent any of those things. I’ve only ever seen other people claim they do.
> They don't invent much
They probably invent at the same rate as others investing in R&D.
> and willingly lock you into it.
They vertically integrate. Their customers obviously like this and aren’t bothered that it isn’t open. It’s not a bad thing, unless you consider the behaviour bad from all companies.
I would go farther: we should be concerned if there aren't flops like this, as that would indicate big tech isn't pushing the boundaries nearly hard enough.
Big swing? VR and AR have been around for a very long time. Apple is good at making things that already exist nicer. They aren't big risks at all, they are generally safe bets. Take something that's out there, put 3 years of design into it and act like you invented it.
Apple's miscalculation here was overestimating the market's price tolerance for a category whose prosumers have already explored for 1/3 Apple's price point.
If this had been 5 years ago at half the price, they'd own the category.
But we don't actually want big corps to take swings to build the torment nexus.
There's a wide consensus that this kind of tech is going to have a negative effect on society and how humans interact with each other, but there's also this myth that this is inevitable and that we just have to accept it.
But it's not reality: there's no reason for it to be inevitable, and it's just that the most wealthy companies are pushing it hard, because they see it as a big money maker.
Well for VR headsets people actually don't buy these products. And we now have 2 of the biggest companies in the world who have each burned a dozen billion trying to make it happens.
Also, even if people did this isn't a argument either: people do buy Fentanyl, and that's not a good justification for inventing it.
Ah yeah, the most hyped device since the Game Boy selling out like the Wii U is the canonical definition of success.
Worse than that, even people who bought it aren't actually using it. No wonder why Meta's VR division operational losses are higher than their turnover…
Nope, you are: I never said the consumer base size is strictly zero, what I'm saying is that it's not the market driving the pursuit of this technology (as can be seen by the low traction compared to the enormous expanses it incurs on Facebook and Apple) but the ideology of technological inevitability, and the desire of the big corporations to create a new market from scratch in opposition to consumers preference (who aren't really interested).
But there is “no market” in the sense that it's just a heavily subsidized product (except the subsidies come from private companies and not from the public sector) and if it wasn't driven by this multi billion yearly subsidies, the product would not even exist.
I totally agree with this on the surface, but I never know how to align it with trying to solve larger problems we often hear people raising alarm bells about.
For example, if we really are concerned with climate change do we really want companies spending small fortunes to either fail or build an expensive product that takes a ton of resources to create? If we really are worried about health concerns related to excessive screen use, do we really want companies trying to strap screens on your face? If we're really concerned with inflation, is it beneficial for a company to spend this much money and resources to try to build a very expensive product that could very well become more of a novelty than anything else?
The problem with your argument is there is no singular "we" here. The are groups of people with a range of concerns and goals all working simultaneously, often at cross-purposes to each other.
Maybe I could have phrased that differently, I said "we" there thinking about all of us individually running into situations where we make choices that go in the face of bigger concerns we otherwise feel.
In this case, I'm torn on the idea of us needing companied to take shots like Vision Pro when I also personally think we as a society need to be consuming less and using fewer natural resources overall. I see others run into the same thing when someone, for a very specific individual example, uses petroleum based products to glue their hands to a street in protest of climate change.
There are no solutions to such dilemmas, only actions which suck in different ways. Ultimately, I think big changes have to come from governments for this sort of thing. The ozone hole wasn't fixed because all the peoples of the world made separate and independent decisions not to purchase and use products with ozone-depleting agents. Even if there were big public awareness campaigns and giant warning labels. There would still be many people deciding to buy/use them because of the local short-term needs trumps long-term global effects. It was only when these products were simply never made in the first place that things changed.
I've always seen it as two different solutions depending on timing. Collective action, from governments usually, is most effective when we already broke something. Individuals are much better at avoiding problems before they occur, usually dependent on people being informed enough to know what they opting into.
I do wish more consumers would be hesitant to buy new products when they know little about how they're made or how they work. Ironically the more government we throw at preventing problems the more likely consumers are to skip past being skeptical and blindly trust that the big, regulated company must be doing what's best for us.
> individuals are much better at avoiding problems before they occur
I think this is only really true for themselves, but even then short-term vs long-term biases affect decision making. Even when people know what the overall best choice is, they often just make the choice that makes them happy in the now. They will also tend to discount ill effects to others if those people are unseen and unheard.
> usually dependent on people being informed enough to know what they opting into
> I think this is only really true for themselves, but even then short-term vs long-term biases affect decision making.
I can't think of a decent example of governments effectively avoiding a problem beforehand, curious if you have any for comparison though. I'm used to seeing governments either blindly ignorant of problems before they happen, or unwilling to act until something breaks and it becomes a talking point for elections.
> This is not a small qualifier.
We're in total agreement there. It shouldn't be a needed qualifier at all, but our education system is junk and we have collectively leaned into trusting experts rather than informed consent.
> a decent example of governments effectively avoiding a problem beforehand
This would be hard because it would be counterfactual. Like if a rule/policy was put into place to prevent/avoid BAD_THING and then BAD_THING did not happen. It's not really news or remembered. In fact, the opposite can happen. The fact that BAD_THING is not happening becomes a reason for dismantling the original rule/policy because since there is no BAD-THING, we obviously don't need this rule. I think of recent moves in some states to re-enable child labor as a good example of this thinking.
Airline safety is another. Government intervened with rules that made planes really really safe. But since air travel became so safe (as a direct consequence of these rules), then operators/builders started chipping away at them (or circumventing them, or straight-up ignoring them) because they aren't needed because air travel is so safe.
So its tough to cite and example, because I'd need to point at something that didn't happen because of a rule, and that's hard to do.
Climate change isn't a matter of energy consumption; it's about massively affecting the balance of the carbon cycle. Fix the carbon cycle issue, and there's likely no reason to tie the development of technology to climate change. No amount of ceasing further technological experimentation will correct climate change the way moving away from fossil fuels would.
The carbon cycle is a massive over simplification of how the ecosystem works though. Nature isn't that simple and we are fooling ourselves thinking that we can boil it all down to one simple lever.
Beyond that, energy consumption just can't grow indefinitely without having a negative impact on carbon, if that's your primary concern. Not only would the entire energy infrastructure have to be carbon neutral, everything we use that energy for would have to be carbon neutral as well.
Let's say that is even possible, if all that matters is the carbon cycle are we totally fine with cutting down every forest on the planet as long as we find a different way to sequester carbon?
I'm well aware that scenario takes it to am extreme, but we have to play it out that far to see if the core principle is right. We need to use less energy and consume fewer resources, we can't get around that fact by moving around carbon in computer models and mathematical equations.
Would those companies otherwise have bothered to do anything productive toward reducing climate change or inflation with those resources instead of chasing novelty toys? I doubt it.
The companies presumably already have the piles of cash to burn on failed investments, unless your argument is that their R&D moonshots bid up the price for components of important research.
Agreed, but I don't think Apple published their VR set because they actually thought it's ready. They did it because Zuck is playing around with the idea and they didn't want to look less innovative.
It will be career death in apple to suggest anything like that for the next ten years..
Wish there was something like
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructive_vote_of_no_conf... in company culture, as in you can only express "I'm against that" , if you suggest some other similar bold endeavor. Not this "let's milk bettsy to death and then loose the farm" mindset that uses bold leaps as ammonition.
> Juicero was an expensive plastic box that squeezed a bag of juice and Theranos’ finger-prick blood tests were a big fraud that eventually sent its founder to prison for 11 years.
I guess.. the issue is that it's blatantly obvious how crappy the thing is. It's not that they failed but the disconnect.
But, some engineers got to work on some new green field tech which is pretty cool. All to often at work I'm presented with interesting problems that I have to solve with hacks / least amount of resources. I envy those that know how to convince a company to take swings.
It's true. But what we often lack in tech is an understanding of humans.
Like, real people.
Big swings in tech almost always fail when we push tech fantasies but don't understand humans.
And my fear is they actually set the industry back several years, because people start to believe a concept isn't desired by the populace, when really it was just the execution.
For example, thank goodness Elon came along and rescued the image of the electric car by grasping we humans want good-looking fast cars.
The strange EV designs out of Detroit always killed me.
Yet, it was hard for Tesla to overcome the impression left by those past failures.
I hope the industry doesn't abandon headsets because of the execution mistakes we're seeing now.
What I loved about Jobs is he understood humans so well.
I miss that about him.
His big swings felt natural once in your hand.
Tech CEOs are often taking big swings, but we tech people can be so nerdy sometimes that we struggle to understand how to make products look fashionable and feel natural to use.
That was Jobs magic sauce. Apple struggles with that now.
MP3 players we're clunky until Jobs added the scroll wheel.
Just a stunningly natural solution.
In comparison, the vision pro is clearly too bulky to be practical.
I was excited for the vision pro. But when I tried it, I was shocked at how front heavy it is.
I think it's a solid product for certain niche uses.
But we need a Jobs or Elon, to identify the heart of what humans really need out of a headset.
Zuckerberg is this generation's Bill Gates. Smart. Successful. But mentally and emotionally disconnected from the rest of humanity.
The successful headset innovator needs to shed the 'ready player one' fantasy that we humans want to live in a digital universe or to consume large amounts of entertainment this way.
In my opinion (just my opinion), for the foreseeable future, any non-productivity use of headsets will wear off as novelty.
We will power through the isolation and awkwardness of headsets for the right productivity tools.
But so far it seems that too much energy is going to entertainment and social concepts.
Edit: I see replacing the mouse, in mouse heavy productive activities, as the main use case for headsets.
Drawing, diagramming, navigating visualizations, reviewing large project timelines.
And then you take it off.
And then, incremental improvements to increase wearing time without eye strain, etc.
I do like the vision pro concept of immersive video and pictures to capture memories. That's definitely a nice-to-have feature.
Please don’t erase Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning out of Tesla’s history. They were the ones with that idea of making EVs sexy and then Elon came along and slowly ‘manoeuvred’ them out. He wanted to be known as the founder.
He”s a good marketer, but not a good ideas person or leader.
Look at the cyber truck, hyperloop, twitter and his crazy and damaging rants on twitter.
> Please don’t erase Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning out of Tesla’s history. They were the ones with that idea of making EVs sexy and then Elon came along and slowly ‘manoeuvred’ them out. He wanted to be known as the founder.
All the history is captured on Wikipedia including such bits as Musk funding $6.5m of Tesla’s initial $7.5m series A round.
