conciselyverbose

I really want to get on the ground floor of AR apps. (Or say I am, then watch a bunch of movies and do nothing.)

I figure I probably have to at least make a chunk of the cost of the headset on a normal phone app to justify actually buying it, but AR is more fun.

They’ll get it down eventually.

But if you look seriously at the space, the price is aggressive for what it is. You’re not getting a dumb display that’s close for $2k. And the passthrough is insane and completely unmatched. There was a tiny bit of video noise, and it marginally removes your sense of the depth of the environment, but except for the fact that you have a display strapped to your face you could almost completely ignore that it’s not the real world. Add the M2 chip and how powerful ARKit is and it’s really a lot of tech for $3500.

$3500 is a lot. It’s perfectly reasonable to wait, especially when it needs to be in developers’ hands before the app ecosystem that really leverages what it can do really gets built out. But the “Apple tax” if they weren’t sincerely trying to make it as affordable as possible (within their requirement of actually being good enough to constitute AR) is probably $5K plus.

That doesn’t even resemble a coherent argument. A price point doesn’t change whether hardware manufacturers have any kind of obligation to open their platform or not.

It’s also a lie. Nintendo doesn’t sell jack shit at a loss and never will.

Facebook will just disable the app with some warning and redirect people visiting from Safari.

No, it wouldn’t. The relevant companies aren’t the ones that want that 30% cut back. They’re the ones who want to be malware and are reigned in by Apple’s policies.

Google lets them do whatever they want so they have no reason to add friction.

My understanding was that their right are pretty broad and that they could basically use official designs, fully custom designs, or anything in between.

My question is whether they adopt any design elements from ARM (whether modified or not) or if it’s completely an implementation of the instruction set from scratch.

Ignoring that Apple’s chips as laptop flagships have pretty much singlehandedly changed the perception on their viability for actual computers, how much of ARM’s work are they actually using?

They design their own chips that are meaningfully ahead of ARM’s. I understand that their contract allows them pretty broad access to IP, but are we sure they’d be that much worse off (especially compared to ARM) if this deal wasn’t signed and Apple put the investment into a different instruction set?

Hell, they built most of the smartphone and tablet market. Are we sure ARM would even be relevant without Apple’s weight?

The balance on the Magic Keyboard is still pretty shit. It will work on a flat surface, but the adjustment aren’t good and it will fall over if you try to use it in your lap.

The trackpad is really nice, but it’s worth considering a third party option that gives a more functional laptop form factor if you intend to use it on a lap.

It doesn’t matter that very few devices connect. That’s the only reason they have to volume to be affordable at all.

If you took the total cost of having satellite coverage available and divided by the amount of satellite assisted rescues needed per year, the amount that a satellite company would need to charge just to break even would absolutely be thousands. Satellites are expensive. Rescues are rare.

The only reason it’s able to be something regular people can pay is because there are hundreds or thousands of people who don’t ever use it paying into the pot. Without those people, the economics don’t work. “Unlimited SOS” isn’t any impact to the network at all, because frivolous use gets punished by other people.

Apple being able to get you literally any discount at all is already a value add. (And they’ve completely footed the bill so far).

Less than “unlimited” isn’t meaningfully cheaper to provide. It’s $144/year and not thousands per use exactly and exclusively because you can’t buy it when you need it.

If you could buy it on demand, 99.999% of revenue disappears because there’s no reason to pay for a subscription, and you have to massively raise the price per use for the service to break even.

They’re probably not paying per incident, because that model doesn’t work. They’re paying per authorized device.

What if that number was 10 grand? Higher?

That’s more in line with what covering the costs with “only pay if you actually have to connect” looks like. Actual forest services offer similar programs in some places, where you pay a small annual fee as “insurance” against being liable for needing to be rescued if you’re negligent and need it. Capacity is expensive and use of these types of services is simply not common enough to benefit from economies of scale. You can’t make your costs back that way without charging out the ass when it’s needed.

And it’s not even because the high precision modern games want is harder to do, because the precision brand new out of the box is a dumpster fire.

Seems like a pretty serious downgrade to me. I have no interest in separately charging it when it works perfectly well as is.

Proper security requires some level of intrusiveness if you want functionality as well. It’s not possible to meet varying levels of required tradeoffs for different use cases without asking for informed consent to access restricted information or functionality with some regularity.

Granularity is a good thing. Making users notice privacy violations is a good thing. Windows giving a generic “can this program make changes?” dialogue to every installation whether it’s extremely simple or basically a rootkit monitoring every process and memory access is a terrible, extremely insecure approach.

Too many popups is really Windows’ issue. It’s not that all the bullshit companies do doesn’t require you to authorize it; it’s that anything you install needs effectively the same permission and you’re basically conditioned to ignore it.

Apple’s version where it tells you what it wants permission for is much better.

In all honesty I’m split. There are times when it’s more hoop jumping than I want to deal with, but I’m also closer to a power user, and am capable of at least finding the information on the hoop jumping. The fact that by default, an average user gets spied on less is a good thing. The insane malware developers call anti-cheat on Windows is a far worse default as far as I’m concerned.

I don’t see how anyone would make their money back on this. It’s way below niche.

Or “I threw it with some random amount of force that I’m sure was the same for both”.

My understanding is that Valve is paying a good bit of money to CodeWeavers to make Proton a thing.

Yes, it’s an investment they obviously benefit from, but if they had wanted to make their investment in a closed source proprietary solution instead, they could have done so. They chose a partnership with CodeWeavers as an open source project that advances gaming as a whole.

Again, yes, they benefit from advancing gaming. But they have the market share and cash reserves where they could have chosen to do so in a way that benefited themselves at the expense of everyone else, and chose to do so in a broadly beneficial way instead. That deserves recognition.