My states system is very transparent and has many systems for detecting fraud but people on the right claim otherwise and they are either ignorant of how it worked or just lying.
The Apple Lisa was introduced at around $10k (~$32k in today’s dollars). I do agree it is expensive but not historically out of line for a version one of a new product category for the company.
And thousands of Lisas went unsold, eventually getting dumped in a landfill after failing to find an eager audience like the Apple II enjoyed. There's a lesson, there.
Without the Lisa we wouldn’t have the Mac. The Vision Pro is a first gen of a new product category for Apple and I fully expect whatever comes from it will be very different than what we have today.
The Mac arrived one year and five days after the Lisa. Vision Pro is over two years old now. It got a speed bump, but not a price decrease.
I think the Vision Pro will be more like the Newton vs current iPads. Something will eventually replace it, but it will be significantly different, not slightly different, like Lisa vs Mac (I know they cut corners for the Mac, changing some nice OS features)
Without the NeXt Cube, we wouldn’t have the modern MacOS, or, for that matter, the iPhone (or Vision). Apple would certainly not be a multi-trillion-dollar company, and the Cube was a commercial flop.
In that case, it wasn’t the hardware, but the operating system and app development framework that made the difference.
And that will be true about the Apple Vision too, how do you get there if you don’t have the ability to put the operating system and the hardware together and then iterate, the biggest problems with the Apple Vision is that it needs to be three or four times faster performance wise than what it is, needs to be half the size and it definitely needs to be more energy efficient from a battery standpoint and last but not least half the current price how does that happen? Only through iteration over time.
AR simply has no market. Apple could sell Vision Pro for $10,000 apiece, if there was natural demand for high-quality AR hardware. But the product isn't competing for Hololens' commercial contracts, and it forfeit the consumer VR segment on release. The remainder of consumer-forward AR experiences are even less lucrative than Zuckerberg's commoditized Quests. Apple wants to build a nonexistent market with an inaccessible product.
Until that demand actually materializes, Apple's ability to miniaturize the tech is inconsequential. Vision Pro's "iPad for your face" philosophy is not enough to carve out a niche, and definitely not enough to displace the iPhone or the Mac.
I have always been amazed at how outlook just seems to always get worse. When I first used it decades ago I found it awful but it had a logic to it, now it is worse and makes no sense in the current world of options.
I live in the pacific NW and feel that we do largely have those but people don't know about them or don't want to use them. For example, the easiest way for me to get to Portland/Seattle/Vancouver is by far the train. In none of those cities would I recommend driving as public transit is better in almost all cases. I live in a medium sized city and even here we only drive about once a week. So it is totally possible but it takes some additional planning and tradeoffs that many people don't want to do.
Most cities have alternatives to driving simply because they geometrically have to. When I say there should be viable alternatives to driving everywhere, I mean small, rural towns as well.
I live in a well-connected, medium sized city in the North East, without a car. My parents live in a very rural town about 300 miles away. I can walk from my apartment to a local train, and then from there get to an Amtrak that will take me to 30 miles from my parents house. While I could technically bike that, that is quite the hike to make after 300 Amtrak miles. Especially fearing for my life sharing the road with distracted drivers.
There is no reason for there to not be regular bus service from the city that I get off Amtrak in to the larger town between my parents and the station, and between my parents smaller town and the larger one. In a modern, developed nation I would be able to make that trip entirely by transit and walking.
And by "modern" I mean as of the 1860s, because back then it was connected by train!
It is wild the type of AI generated videos I have seen on YouTube. Today I saw a short video on the history of OS/2 that I am 99% sure was AI made and I was just left wondering why would someone make that? Is there a market for a video like that?
I would have thought this but was amazed at the number of times people would think I was home while talking to them via my doorbell. I have neighbor that told people I was rude to not come to the door and didn’t know I was talking to her from work.
How long ago was that? Was this when smart doorbells were brand new tech?
I could understand peoples misconception back when such door bells weren’t known about so the default assumption people might have is that it was an intercom.
The neighbor was 2022 or so but even more recent people have seemed a bit confused. I think having a car in the driveway makes people think we are home.
West coast cities like Portland and Seattle both have very good transit and in my experience is generally better than driving since traffic and parking are awful. Where I live on the west coast is a mid sized city and transit is completely viable, my family only drives on weekends for example.
> West coast cities like Portland and Seattle both have very good transit
I live in Portland. Traffic is often quite slow. And even then it is much faster than public transit unless your destination is just a few miles away and on the same line.
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