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Comment Re:Number 1 complaint (Score 1) 59

It should be obvious that changing a 0 to a 1 (whether or not one swaps other digits) is not cutting a zero off the price. The normal price is not $3490.99, either.

Yeah, the snark is high in this thread.

But in all seriousness, $3,499 really is an order of magnitude too expensive to compete against Quest at $499. If they had game availability that could compete with Quest, they might be able to get away with more like $750, but not $3.5k, or even $2k, realistically. It's just way too overpriced for something that in practice is only usable for gaming.

Comment Re:Red Hat has EEE'd Linux (Score 1) 86

Wrong attitude. The correct attitude is "if you don't like Red Hat, there's Debian, Devuan, Gentoo, Mepis, ....". Don't depend on any single distro. (see https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdistrowatch.com%2F )

Debian is my current choice, and has been for a decade, but ANY distro can be coopted. I'm still unhappy wit the way Debian adopted systemd.

Comment Re:Red Hat has EEE'd Linux (Score 1) 86

There actually are problems with many of the distros and particular applications supported by Red Hat. I think there are only 2 or 3 good choices for an enterprise system with special applications.

OTOH, I've always avoided those "particular applications" that depend on distro-specific features, so this is third-hand reporting. But if you don't want to get locked into a specific environment, avoid applications that require that specific environment. (FWIW, I've found Debian to be easy to use, reliable, and able to run all the "non-locked-down" applications. But your use-case may be different.)

Also, and IIUC, the SUSE geo-locking is optional. It'd intended use is to allow it to be easy to avoid transferring user information outside of a particular area (like the EU). I've no idea about the implementation, but the purpose seems important.

Comment Re:Pay up or shut it off. (Score 1) 184

The wealthy aren't the problem with inflation. Giving money to them (or not taxing it away from them, same thing) isn't inflationary, they'll more or less invest the money to increase their wealth. Rich people always want more money.

Ah, but for the most part, that money just sits there. Investing money in stocks has only limited impact on anything, in practice, which is why it doesn't impact inflation much. The money doesn't ever get spent on anything that meaningfully contributes to strengthening the economy.

Cutting checks to people on the street, that's inflationary because they spend the money on goods.

It is, but not proportionately. The increase in funds availability does increase demand, which increases scarcity, but the price people spend on goods and services doesn't increase to absorb all of the extra money going in — just some of it. That's why if you compare San Jose, CA to Jackson, TN, the median salary differs by more than a factor of 2.8, while the overall cost of living differs by only a factor of 1.9 (and if you ignore the housing costs that are largely caused by San Jose being landlocked, by only a factor of 1.5).

Improving people's standard of living has little to do with giving them money. You need more goods, which then become relatively cheaper within the existing money supply because of the lack of scarcity. That means producing said goods, whether we're talking about consumer stuff or housing.

While true, absent government intervention in how people run their companies, you can't prevent scarcity. Scarcity allows companies to charge higher prices for the same amount of labor, so except when you're talking about true commodities, companies have a perverse incentive to keep supply down as much as possible, so long as they stay below the point where the profit margins become too high relative to the barriers to entry into the market and another competitor is encouraged to enter the market and compete with them.

Comment Re:simple (Score 1) 59

Because the people working on that product want to stay employed. Unless Apple cancels the product and lays all those people off it will continue to be developed.

I suspect that Apple's hardware design teams are rather fluid in terms of what projects they work on. Certainly nothing fundamentally prevents Apple from shifting them to work on the next-next iPhone design, or designing eyeglasses with a HUD, or designing some other new consumer device that someone comes up with. There's really no need for an updated version of the Vision Pro hardware right now, IMO, unless doing so would reduce the price by a factor of 4 to make it able to compete with Oculus. They'd be *way* better off having those people work on other projects until the technology reaches a point where there is a pressing need to do a hardware revision.

Comment Re:Number 1 complaint (Score 1) 59

I never heard anyone complain the original vision pro was "slow", so why are they adding a faster chip?

I can't imagine. Spending more money on Vision Pro hardware right now seems like throwing good money after bad. For most users, Vision Pro is a fun toy, and an expensive one at that. Toys don't get upgraded very often even if they work well and are frequently used. Unfortunately for Apple, surveys show that users aren't using them very much at all, and there's no reason to believe that CPU speed has anything to do with the lack of use, which means you should expect nearly zero upgrades unless Apple takes a cue from the PC playbook and makes them connector-compatible with the existing design so that users can bring them into an Apple retail store and get a $500 main board swap. And even then, upgrades would be a hard sell.

Similarly, users who don't own one are not going to be persuaded to buy one because the new version is faster. Cutting a zero off the price, yeah, but faster, no.

What Apple should do is focus on making the software and user interface not suck. Once they get it to that point and sales start to pick up, *then* start thinking about a new version with a faster CPU. For starters, what we want to see is:

  • 100% compatibility with iOS apps (and remove the option to not make apps available on Vision Pro)
  • 100% compatibility with Mac apps
  • Virtual keyboard that supports touch typing (probably using a fair bit of AI to figure out what is likely being typed)

Get those three things, and the platform will be an immediate success. As long as doing any meaningful work with the device requires being tethered to a physical keyboard, which completely defeats the purpose of using a headset, and as long as a significant number of apps that you might want to run cannot be used at all without being tethered to a Mac, any marketing claims of it being a "spatial computer" are rather comically aspirational, to the point of being an outright lie.

Alternatively, Apple could try to make Vision Pro compete with Oculus by throwing money at the gaming industry in one form or another, but that will still have a pretty limited market, and would require Apple acknowledging that it's really just a high-end gaming headset, so I wouldn't hold my breath. Oh, and you'd probably need controllers to make that work well, so that would be a pretty big pivot.

And of course, Apple could also pivot by acknowledging that Vision Pro was the wrong approach for augmented reality and take a cue from Android XR instead of Oculus, by building an iOS-compatible eyewear fashion accessory that provides a HUD rather than a full active blending of reality with computer-generated content, and supports a more modest feature set, such as real-time text translation, reminding you of people's names and recent conversations, highlighting foods it thinks you might like on restaurant menus, providing access to email and text messages without whipping out your phone, letting you watch movies while out for a walk, etc.

None of these things involve taking Vision Pro and giving it a faster CPU, though. That's just pouring money down the drain. The only rational reason to do that would be if they're going to run into contractual costs related to continuing to build the M2 chip in small quantities and if the R&D costs for doing the board rev are less than the projected annual cost of continuing to make (or stockpile) the old chips. This seems unlikely to me, but I'm willing to acknowledge that it is a possibility.

Comment Re:Oh I got the evalator no go blues (Score 1) 184

Every decent song has ALWAYS been full of plagiarism. Liszt copied music from the Gypsies. Irish Bards used to be *forbidden* (by their guild) to create new tunes. They were only allowed to set new words to old tunes. Copyright law is an abomination in the realm of music. (In some other places I'd argue that it was just too long, but in music it just shouldn't exist at all.)

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