They failed to come up with a strong selling point. Health is the big seller for Apple Watch. But AVP, at its price point, needs something better than "well you can watch movies on a big screen or work in a café while looking silly".
It absolutely failed to justify its price point IMHO. If it were affordable people would be finding uses for it, but when it is that expensive you basically need a business justification for buying one. That means you won't have a hobbyist community finding new and interesting things to do with it.
This leaves Apple and maybe a handful of subsidized third parties as the only people making applications for it, which is pretty much a guarantee that it will remain a tiny niche industry.
This, 100%. The only other headset I was aware of even remotely in AVP's price zip code was the Valve Index, priced at $999 and the AVP was three times that.
And even then I proooobably would've been able to justify it? But no external connectivity at all just sank it for me. Like if it had a DP port on it so I could hook it up to a gaming PC, I would've probably at least picked one up second-hand, possibly even new when my bonus hit but 3 large for... what? Email in my house? Movies shown in a way that makes it damn hard to eat popcorn?
As someone else said, it’s a developer kit. It was supply constrained and priced accordingly. IMO it was a mistake to not just call it a developer’s kit, abd promoting it as a consumer product was just weird.
But I guess the downside of the DK approach is it means telling developers when the “real” device will ship, which I’m not sure anyone knows.
As you note, the concept of a developer kit for a product that doesn't exist makes little sense. Why would I as a company spend the time and money developing for a product that isn't even on the roadmap?
But remember health was a small thing when the watch was launched. Then the focus was on notifications, communications etc. Fitness was more of a ”oh and it also tracks your heart rate”
I have no interest in using a headset in public or doing work on one.
Watching movies on a big screen would be interesting, but they still do not sell the device in my country in Europe, so I had no way to demo it and judge whether the quality is adequate for a home theater experience.
As a medical device for the vision impaired, AVP has a built-in audience that is used to paying top dollar, especially if paying means just a co-pay. It also eliminates popular disquiet about improper recording--no one will complain about a device that helps the vision impaired get around. Why neither Apple nor Meta went down this path is inexplicable.
I'm partially sighted. I've yet to see an AVP demo that made me want to try one out as an access tool. In fact, everything I've seen so far suggested it would be a hinderance. Can you suggest how it could help? What am I missing?
(I accept, I could book a demo at an Apple Store...)
I think they're kind of saying that's the problem, that intuitively having a screen inches from your face displaying things that are further away in decent detail, with things like contrast and saturation and brightness color palettes being modifiable should have some obvious possibilities for people with limited vision - but Apple wasn't interested in developing for and demonstrating these options.
I'm near-sighted, so I can see how magic glasses that let me focus on everything as if it's six inches away could be nice. That being said, normal prescription glasses work very well for my particular vision impairment, and "You only have to buy glasses once more ever, but they're $3000, weigh over a pound, and need to be recharged" isn't a great value proposition for my needs, but it doesn't take much imagination to figure that being able to toggle even just dark, high contrast, or colorblind modes irl would be nice for some people. Not worth it for me, but possibly for others.
I once tried using Gemini directly in Google Sheets to make a graph. I never managed to get it to do exactly what I wanted; after wasting way too much time on it I was able to fix the problem in a matter of seconds. It's fascinating because it is quite different from the situation in coding agents where they are in general really quick to read code and find issues/fixes.
Yeah, it seems like such an easy value add (especially since they gate it on gemini subs) to make Gemini do a great job in the google productivity apps, but they are generally pretty awful.
Claude with MCP access to the google workplace APIs consistently does a better job with any manipulation of google docs
Tried Gemini in Google sheets today and it was horrible. I simply asked it to apply a nice visual formatting (bold, header filling, currency signs etc) but it made everything look ugly despite working for 4-5 mins.
As is the entirety of using an LLM? If you want something deterministic and efficient you get the agent to write a script, verify it, then run it yourself.
Bring back FastCGI, enable the setting in Apache to list a directory, and point the agent to your cgi-bin directory full of all your tools. Calling the bin without any input provides the help text or the interface to the tool.
You can probably throw together a passible auth system on top of it that works with the htaccess format. Which is another cgi script but chowned so it can't be called from the outside. If not that, public key crypto - give your agents certificates that are part of the chain of trust. Mint those out of band and give them an insanely short TTL. Fail2ban or something like that to prevent abuse (agent getting handsy with the server gets blocked, credentials revoked).
The side benefit is that everybody starts writing perl and awk again. Who needs a JS runtime when you have CGI?
I have a company-managed Apple account on my work iPhone and Mac. So I beg to differ ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
It is quite nerfed compared to a normal Apple account - for example the App store is effectively disabled and you need some MDM to be able to install or update apps. But otherwise, it allows me to not use my personal Apple account which was the main objective.
Edit for precision: I don't work at Apple. My point is that it is possible - I guess Apple doesn't want to manage these accounts, but it is not for lack of technical feasibility.
WASM does not (yet) have access to the DOM or web APIs, meaning every direct interaction with the browser must first go through JS interop anyways, with a resulting performance penalty. There are proposals, and maybe we'll see it happen by 2035, but as of now WASM is best suited for heavier workloads where the edge in application performance outweighs the cost of JS interop with the browser rather than being a universal solution.
> Is there some limitation that WASM has that JS doesn't?
You need a JS trampoline to call your WASM and make browser primitives available to it, and IIRC calls into browser code incur some extra overhead, but those are pretty manageable.
Additionally: for high level languages, source code is _much_ smaller than compiled binaries. If your initial needs are simple, your users are likely downloading more than 10x as much code.
Well, it goes both ways. You'll see articles saying essentially "you don't need Postgres or any other fancy database, SQlite is enough" while ignoring the fact that some use-cases warrant a more conventional DB server.
Maybe they are just for internal use? I doubt Apple is going back on the server market, and given how little they have invested in the Mac Pro, I doubt they are going to make a new version. There is little advantage compared to the Mac Studio for most users. External GPU support would change that, but it doesn't seem to be what they want.
Expandable machines are attractive when the future is uncertain. I imagine a server chip would have abundant DDR6 and PCIe lanes. Oddly enough I’m now buying my PCs with all memory slots occupied because of bandwidth. I can still change the sticks for higher capacity, but expansion is a lot less convenient than when memory bandwidth wasn’t something more desirable than raw CPU performance.
I’m not sure if I can measure IPC and cache misse latencies on my machines, but I’m sure latencies are pushing IPC down.
Any centralized solution like GitHub is going to suffer the same fate as vibe coding chokes these services. The only option to have high uptime is to self host and most organizations can't do that easily. Time will tell if GitHub can scale up enough to meet demand.
It's a nice thought but I think the revealed preference from the history of the internet is that people actually only want centralised services, no matter what they say they want.
People love to clown on the fediverse because of having to choose a server. Which is no different from email. I guess the difference is that their ISP used to give them email.
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