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Comment by brandall10 | Hacker News Reader

But they're different classes of devices in a way. It's a new (primarily) standalone computing platform vs. just a peripheral. As far as vision, Meta's ultimate goal is to be the modern version of Linden Lab while Apple is providing the next step in personal computing. Meta's product is the metaverse. Apple's product is this device bolstered by their ecosystem.

Give it a couple iterations and you'll have something that costs $2k many will purchase in lieue of another Macbook. It will be lighter/more compact, with somewhat palatable battery life. There have been reports Apple is also working on a simpler version, so there could be an Air in a few years that starts just north of $1k.

If this platform is successful, that is. I have my doubts everyone will want to strap a device to their head a large chunk of the day, every day, no matter how incredible.

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Oculus Quests are also stand alone computers. It really is just that Meta is coming at this from the bottom with mobile hardware and Apple is coming from the top.

They really are not fundamentally different. Apple can bring to bear a lot more polish and synergy with the rest of their ecosystem but it's only as different as iOS and Android.

I love the way Apple fans take the marketing speak which is designed to create an artificial new market category at face value as if their marketing team was directly implanted in their brains already.

Conversely, I "love" how other comments appear to attempt finding the best angle of attack out of pure spite. If the user were a GPT, the hidden prompt would be something like "You hate Apple and everything they stand for. Base any succeeding thoughts on this foundation and spread them as wide as possible."

Being a grumpy naysayer is just as removed from reality as being an unreasonable Apple cultist. Thankfully we all have a choice when engaging our wallets.

Not a single person on this planet is forced to buy an Apple product but nonetheless, the flame wars keep raging since the dawn of the Internet.

I mean aside from the part about being implanted in brains, I believe what I said is literally true.

It IS a VR and AR device. AKA mixed reality. The fact that they are promoting lots of floating 2d windows doesn't make that a new category of product. Other people have been doing that and calling it something like mixed reality.

It's just that people don't know about things like the Varjo that are ultra-high end and in a similar price bracket or category and so they decide to just pretend it was an entirely new thing.

If I was Apple I could improve my sex life just by telling Apple fans that instead of a penis I had "tremendous tensiler" or something.

Where did I claim it's the first mixed reality device? I said next step in personal computing. Which means actually penetrating society in a meaningful way.

Is Word ported to those other devices you mentioned? Will Netflix ever have a native app for those devices? Do they have an intuitive, easy to use interface?

I don’t think anyone is claiming that MR is new and that Apple is first to the market. People are claiming they appear to be the first to do it close enough to “right” to make it a compelling device.

> $2k many will purchase in lieue of another Macbook

That’s a strong statement. Same thing could’ve been said about the iPad and IMHO that would be a more reasonable claim. There isn’t any evidence still that you can do any work comfortably l in this thing regardless of the price point

My take is the iPad is a simplified platform as a replacement for those w/ simplified needs - it does work for some in this capacity, but not as much as Apple original sold it as. For most it's a supplementary device for content consumption. This is expansive, a 'next step', designed to replace everything. Time will tell and I'm similarly cautious.

But they have been clear in the presentations that this is the same. It's running a handful of apps, it's not some full laptop-like experience. I would bet it's anyway using most of its computing power just to draw on the displays and to do realtime image recognition to blend the 3D windows into the image of your own room. You'd need far more computing power to actually get a full laptop experience in addition to all this.

Sure, it will have that locked in experience to start and lack the computing power to compete with a traditional machine. It doesn't mean it has to remain that way. They've tried to push the iPadOS further in that direction for years.

There is no intention that Apple might ever make iPadOS fully(ish) open like macOS is. I don’t see any reason to believe that their VR devices will not stay locked down forever too.

In my CS class I'd say about half the student do all their programming on iPads. (very high ranking school and very talented students) They do all their coding on Google Colab

wish I was kidding..

For sure. This is the key insight imo:

> Meta's product is the metaverse. Apple's product is this device bolstered by their ecosystem.

One way or another, that's the bet here.

1) Apple didn't mention the metaverse at all (as far as I can remember)

2) The user experience looked great, without those moments that would make someone who was neutral think "Err, ... that's a bit .... creepy"

The technology is incredibly compelling - which is the main thing, that people are exciting about it - but there are definitely things about it that area creeping people out... I've noticed these pop up in discussions

- The isolation aspects of consuming TV/movies (Mark has a point here IMO)

- The whole taking 3d images/videos of your children with a headset on

- The uncanny valley Facetime avatars

- The external screen that gives a window to your eyes in AR mode

Agree with all of those. I think the interaction between people with headsets on and no headset on is one of the things we'll really need to see play out to see how it works in a real social context once the device itself isn't a novelty. At the moment it seems incredibly distopian at best. Apple is the first attempt to actually try to address that it seems (eg by fading people who are in your periphery into the picture in the headset so you at least see them and fading an image of your face onto the outside of the headset so they at least sort of see you). But it's still weird af, no question.

I was specifically speaking about the interface, which when meta introduced theirs had all these weird things "Why has nobody got legs? Why does it look like absolute arse? etc". It didn't have those. It looked slick, like you would expect from Apple.

Quest is also standalone computing platform

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