The "de minimus exemption" isn't a loophole or cheating, it's a choice by virtually every collecting tariffs to only collect tariffs from large cargo shippers, not one-off purchases, because it's a waste of time and money to do the import duty paperwork for every single little item shipped. The whole system globally, for all countries, does the same thing because they don't want to charge a typically $50 or so processing fees (to cover the manual labor and processing fees for doing the paperwork with the various governments) in order to collect a few dollars in tariffs, they want to focus that work on tariffs for bulk shipping containers, etc., not wasting their time on tens of millions of individual items. In response to the US cutting the de minimus exemption dozens of countries have stopped all shipments to the US as they're not prepared to process an increase of several orders of magnitude in the volume of bureaucratic paperwork, so other than letters and gifts under $100, which aren't tariffed, they're cutting the US off.

Apple has a long history of replacing proprietary with open standards, working with the open standards to make them good enough to replace the proprietary tech. Apple likes to have the option of innovating, e.g. ADB was better than the serial ports for keyboards and mice that PCs had, then they worked with Intel to create USB that replaced ADB. Similiarly, Apple had early cheap LANs when ethernet was very expensive and fragile, then when ethernet got cheap and easy Apple moved to ethernet. And they helped create USB-c, and adopted it aggressively, giving it the advantages of Lightning, replacing older tech. The only lightning ports they still had when the EU mandated USB-c were on low end (low power, slow data) phones, keyboards, and mice, where Lightning worked well. Desktops, laptops and iPads were already USB-c. Moving the low-end devices to USB-c wasn't bad, and I don't think Apple fought against that, they just don't like mandated tech, because it prevents them from future innovations. For example, if the EU had mandated USB-a, then that would have blocked USB-c, so the both like open standards and they like the ability to innovate, they balance the two.

It would let you see where Apple is heading, giving you hardware and software to develop for, letting you start developing and prototyping to be ahead of the game for the future market, when Apple works down the price into a higher volume AR product. As Tom Cook and others explained in interviews and presentations.

Apple has a much higher success rate than most product companies. They're famous for killing off numerous internal products that could have been "fine" because that's not good enough, they want "amazing". They don't always succeed, of course, but many companies would have shipped things Apple refused to.

Yes, Apple's products are for people willing to pay more for better, not for people buying the cheapest possible solution. That's not bad positioning, they dominate the high end phone market, for example, last time I saw the numbers they made 85% of all the profit on selling smartphones globally, Android phone sales are more units, but mainly just breaking even on low-end phones. (Yes, there are some high end android phones...)

Apple was pitching a vision of how AR could work, which was fundamentally different from VR gaming, it's about embedding virtual in the real world. Of course, the use case to show that vision are things people do, at work, play, etc. It was very clearly described in numerous interviews as the first generation, for developers and early adopters who were willing to buy in early to be ahead of the curve, priced for that market. it was absolutely not marketed to be bought by normal consumers. Apple sold more of them than they initially targeted. It's similar market segment positioning as the MS Hololens 2, which is also aimed at developers and early adopters, low volume high price market, though of course the product details are different. In both cases the product descriptions are about what the products do, the pricing is what makes the market segment they're selling to obvious. Kids playing VR videogames don't buy either one, they don't buy a $3,500 headset for that!

Survey response rates completely depend on context.

For example, if you're in a paid panel that does high value surveys for real research, response rates are fine.

If you're sending out fake "push polls" or fundraising appeals using a fake poll as a hook, and there are a flood of those, they've trained people that polls aren't real, they're just scams of one sort or another, so people tune them out. I would not be shocked at all that the scammers have driven people away from all polling. Which is why real pollsters have paid panels of people who opted in.

This is IMO a reminder that changing an industry from the inside is unlikely, because the legacy players have too many internal conflicts. That's why the legacy companies, such as Sears, utterly failed at transitioning to online eCommerce, it took a new player, Amazon, to make it work. So while renewables are booming, led by new companies, not oil companies, oil is roughly flat, which means that they're trapped by their need to maximize short term profits so they're missing the big strategic transition that'll ultimately be very bad for them. BP was a bit smarter than most, covering both renewables and oil, but apparently the investors are demanding that BP destroy their long-term options to maximize short-term profits. Sigh.

OCR is AI. AI is a much broader field than LLMs or Generative AI, it's teaching computers to do things that "only people could do", such as image recognition, OCR, speech to text, etc. People have been doing AI for many, many decades. GenAI and LLMs are just the latest technique that expands the scope of what can be done by AI and not just people.

Sure, $100B is a lot, but that also created products that are selling well (Quest is the top VR headset by a huge margin) and selling a lot of software for the Quest. So they didn't just burn $100B they spent $100B and generated about $50B in revenue so far. That's a big investment, but rather obviously they produced real products and a lot of revenue, they didn't just "piss it all away", they're investing big in trying to make a big new market that they dominate.

Very true - their model is to the 'console model' of subsidizing the headsets and use revenue from the store to pay that off and eventually grow to make a profit. And to do that, they don't want people side-loading apps outside the store. Though they did open up the 'lab', making it very easy for people to install those apps, which are easy to publish.

That being said, since you can easily stream games to the Quest from a PC, e.g. run Steam VR games, it's pretty easy to run any VR games you like, assuming you have a VR-capable computer, and those games will look a _lot_ better than the native Quest games.

of course, the $100 billion is total spend over many years, which included (for example) developing many generations of hardware and software. Giving people products that wouldn't have existed without spending to make them isn't much of a 'solution'.

So you never owned or tried to use a Compaq iPaq. It was in theory cool but in reality, was nearly unusable, it perfectly illustrates the difference between having a bunch of specs and being an amazing device to actually use.

The problem had nothing to do with open vs closed source, it was that they didn't sufficiently test the update, compounded by them releasing it globally at the same time. They should have of course tested more thoroughly, and then released in a "canary release" model, so when it crashed 0.1% of their customers they could have detected that and stopped the update before it crashed all their Windows customers.

Some copyright holders tried to make that argument, suing people who read content online because there were copies made in routers, modems, in computer memory, on screen, etc., and they lost those lawsuits, because copyright prohibits distributing copies.