Personally I picked my next phone based on which had the most useful AI this year.
I've been waiting my whole life for, basically, the computer from Star Trek, and I think it's on the way.
Gemini was really disappointing. It could do some incredible things but it was more like the first hints of what will be possible. For example, I could ask it to show me the biggest files in my Google Drive. And as far as I could tell, it had access to Google Drive APIs, and _could decide how to use them_. That's extremely powerful, that means it could think of what to do to accomplish any goal you have and determine how to do it. If the API can do anything the UI can do, then the AI can do anything you can do, and you don't have to point and click and type like it's 2024, and we're suddenly in the 24th century.
But, it was too early. Many of my requests were met with "I'm sorry I can't access x y z" when it could and did at other times. The unreliability is what got to me.
So I went with an iPhone (my first ever, I'm not American) because I think in the short term, iOS is going to have the experience which is closer to this intelligence. Because it can drive behavior in other apps and will increasingly do so as features roll out.
Don't be fooled though Apple Intelligence is currently very, very limited.
Side note: I don't care about the text and image gen capabilities at all. Though the notification summaries are pretty handy and occasionally hilarious.
Not saying your opinion is wrong, but for some reason I found myself consciously liking the yellow a lot, which is rare for an article background color for me
I think about the logistics and shipping and manufacturing and packaging and warehousing and manual labor when I buy a $12 tea kettle made on the other side of the planet.
Yeah I had the same response. He makes lots of anecdotal claims about tribespeople's back trouble but where's the data? It's mildly interesting nonetheless.
Note: having lived in Melbourne CBD, cities can indeed be loud, e.g. at 1 am on a Saturday (bass from clubs, and apparently drunk people really enjoy going Woooo!!! really loudly all the time)
I bought a cheapish wifi router to use for dedicated AirLink and I do SteamVR -> Quest 2. It works great. No latency (but I will admit the very occasional lag spike, it doesn't bother me and I don't miss a note while Beat Saber is going super fast, so it can't be that bad)
Yes, you do need a gaming PC. I got a gaming laptop for like $2400 AUD 3 years ago and it's going great with VR (and Starfield on Ultra, not in VR)
"The very occasional lag spike" completely destroys the ability to play Beat Saber. It'll drive you crazy (as it did me)!
...and I too tried dedicating my Ubiquiti UniFi 6 Wireless Long-Range Access Point (U6-LR-US) just for the headset to see if that would improve things (set it up with a new hotspot name so it'd be dedicated and only told the headset about it). The Wifi AP was on the wall just about 3 feet from my head and I still got the occasional lag spikes and I confirmed that they were due to the Wifi network (not just rendering spikes on my PC).
There's just too much random interference on the 2.4GHz and 5.8GHz bands for it to be buttery smooth. I suppose I could turn my house into a Faraday cage and that might improve things :)
