jclardy

Personally I don't see the same relief when ticking a box, but I 100% get the unwritten list. If there is something I need to do that is unscheduled and undocumented, I feel it always takes up a huge portion of my thinking. Writing it down and creating a reminder forces me to at least think about when I will try to do it, and lets me forget about it till that point.

As someone with a VR headset that supports all the games, those headsets are already sunk. Right now, gaming is all that exists in the VR world, because all headsets currently are horrendous for any other task other than gaming. I own a Quest Pro and have attempted to use it for work, but the poor resolution horrible passthrough make it quite uncomfortable to use. For games, it’s great.

I’ll be ordering a Vision Pro primarily to use as a display for my Mac, but also for development purposes. It is definitely a niche product at launch, but I think it’ll grow into the consumer space over time - it is really only niche because of the price tag.

Games will come, but gaming is the “easy” part of VR because you control the entire environment. AR interactions are what will make this into a viable computing platform that actually moves beyond the current 2D paradigm.

> All of that other stuff makes operating menus and AR aspects better, things that are useful for tasks you can already do on a device 1/4 the price.

As a Quest Pro owner, that is exactly what a headset needs. Passthrough on the quest is a blurry, noisy mess that feels like looking through two original iPhone cameras attached to your eyes. The VR part is great currently, and you get that “for free” if your screens/cameras can do an impressive AR mode. I can work in VR mode on the quest, but the AR mode gets way too distracting when you can’t read a phone notification that popped up on the device in your peripherals.

The screens aren’t the only upgrade though, hand tracking on the quest is mediocre currently, doing simple hand gestures requires me to do them repeatedly often as they don’t get recognized. Eye gaze + small gestures on the Vision Pro are the “pinch to zoom” moment of the VR space.

The fatigue in the case of the quest will be because there is no eye tracking, so you constantly have to turn your head to get good focus (Only the center of the screen is fully rendered), the displays are of poor quality in terms of color accuracy, screen door effect and resolution, and the lenses have a very small sweet spot. In addition your eyes have to have one of three specific IPD measurements, otherwise you are by default not in the sweet spot.

I have mechanical watches and an Apple Watch...I swap bands on my Apple Watch almost every day because it takes about 5 seconds. I've swapped bands on my mechanicals maybe once this year, because it is super finicky, the spring bar always launches into another dimension and you spend 10 minutes feeling around on the floor to find it. All while you risk scratching the finish on your watch as you try to push back a tiny metal spring with a tiny metal pick. And that is if you have a springbar tool available, which is the best case scenario.

To be fair, this is a pretty lackluster "announcement". They basically said "hey, here is some new hardware that is a bit better than last years model"...and forgot to say "hey, here are a bunch of new ways this will actually improve your life".

Better resolution...great. Am I actually going to be able to read text comfortably for extended periods to do work within the headset? Better passthrough...cool, but does that enable any new mixed reality setups? Can I use other devices around me or sip my coffee without taking the headset off?

I expect next week we will see a lot more interesting experiences from Apple's announcement.

I have a Quest 2 and use it occasionally, I have basically relegated it to only gaming. The displays are just too low resolution to try productivity, not to mention passthrough being barely usable to find something on your desk. So this seems like it should improve on the issues I had with the first gen with higher resolution displays, color passthrough, and improved performance.

I am a bit confused on the placement of this device in comparison to the Quest Pro now though, does this have better resolution? Processor? Passthrough?

Definitely an interesting month for the VR/AR world with Apple's announcement coming next week.

Same here. And so far with TotK I've got the same feeling. My original zelda experience was a link to the past on the SNES though, so maybe I enjoy the "openness" aspect more? LttP lets you go around pretty much wherever from the beginning, while OoT is pretty linear, especially at the start.

For me Zelda was always more of a puzzle game than an adventure game, and I feel like those puzzle aspects are much more amplified in the last two entries, though in a much more "freeform" way.

Yeah - I understand the technology is complex, but if you think about it you can buy a iPhone 14 Pro and an iPad Pro 11” for the same price as a single foldable. Maybe it is too soon for foldables, but usually “all in one” devices trend towards being cheaper than buying the devices seperately they are supposed to replace, since they are usually lesser versions of each device (IE a super thick normal phone, and a small, squarish tablet with a crease down the middle.)

Really odd tone for this, but I’ve never heard of these guys.

  it was timed so it activates on a spring Saturday,
  during a long weekend, when most of you should be flying,
  and most of our engineering team should be enjoying their
  well-deserved days off

Glad (most of) the engineers earned their weekends & holidays off…

Yeah - I do wonder if a giant touchscreen with permanent controls (Zero context switching) could be nearly as effective as a climate panel with fixed buttons. Part of the issue of a touchscreen in a car today is that every single view is context dependent, whereas a physical volume knob is always in the same spot, performing the same singular function.

My chevy has fixed buttons/knobs, but the only one I don't have to look for is the volume knob. There are too many climate buttons that I use maybe once every two weeks for me to gain any muscle memory from pressing them.

Yes, it is the most useless thing ever. I think my truck displays it maybe once per day? It isn't every drive, which ends up making it worse because I look to tap on the radio and I have to first reach across the entire display to hit OK, then wait for it to load, then tap the radio...If it was every drive I could just be programmed to tap the button without looking at it, which of course defeats the purpose of it in the first place.

I just used a similar product for making screenshot sets for an iOS app I just released. A real easy extension would be to offer export options for Apple/Google play screenshot sizes, then you open up to another (albeit, probably small) market.

TBH I'm hoping Apple will use this to actually improve the app store's position and security, get rid of all the garbage spam apps, fake clone games and whatnot. But I doubt they will, given they make a ton of money off the scam subscription apps.

I'm the opposite, as looking at android, where do we see this? All big players are still in the play store, because the average user of those services doesn't want to be bothered going to a website, clicking scary looking buttons to enable third party installs, then manually update their own installed apps.

Basically the risk would be someone like TikTok dropping out of the store, but I find that unlikely. Maybe at the best they will have an "unrestricted" version with bonus features outside the app store. Visibility for indie apps is basically zero on the big platforms, but for the large players, being in the app store is actually important, at least for now, as users are used to going to the app store to search for software, and not just typing something into google.

The other thing is, these apps will still be sandboxed. Being available outside the store just means they can accept their own payments, they aren't going to have full system access to photos/contacts/files/etc. without explicit user permission, same as an app available via the app store.

Thats what I did/will be doing with my old expense tracking app, Amounts. It was a paid app only, some 8 years ago before subscription apps were a thing. 3 years later I moved to free + a singular IAP unlock, existing users were grandfathered in. Now I am doing a complete rewrite of the app for fun on the side, and moving it to a subscription. All existing paid users will have the full subscription unlocked. I also built in a smooth data migration process so they retain all their existing data and functionality. I'd estimate I have about 50 or so long term users from app store install stats, as I didn't have any analytics in the old app.

Sadly, for larger companies loyalty to the customer base doesn't make financial sense, when you can make $$$ from new users, and your old users just cost you money to support.

That's because it isn't true, the replacement is the $599 iPad Mini 6 which is in a completely different class of tablet. Even the $300 iPad would outclass it by a mile.

Mini 6 has regularly been on sale for $499 as well since it is now long in the tooth already.

Apple already built this in an underutilized iOS feature - SharePlay.

Exactly - IMO any subscription service that is seeing flattening growth is likely focused too much on "growth hacking." Changing the text on your paywall can only do so much, as those subscribers will still churn if the product doesn't improve to meet their needs over time.

> However, they weren't even bringing enough value without subscription or with ads

This value is objective? Therein lies the issue with this argument. For some people, a spam blocking app is a waste of $2/mo. For another person, it saves them a ton of headache. I'm currently subscribed to 12 apps on my iPhone and I have 20 others that I let expire over the past year - I pay for them because I enjoy them and would like to support the developers and to continue using them. I have a ton of paid apps from years past that are now just junk, because the $5 the developer charged 10 years ago couldn't support development for 10 years of service. Subscriptions are the answer to that problem.

Subscriptions will naturally go away if they don't work, but that also means those services/products go away as well.

Also where is this data on flattening subscriber growth that you have access to?

It requires the iPhone to go "home" or "work" or any regular repeated location with the airtag following for some period of time.

That's why the dog airtag in the article continues to go off, when they take the dog on a walk, it follows the same path, then ends up back at the shared house. Their case would be solved by using an iCloud family plan, but they don't want to.

This is super annoying for me, as I bought a tag for our shared mailbox key thinking we both could find it when needed, but only my devices can. It seems crazy to me that this still hasn't been implemented in over a year now - iCloud family plans exist, CloudKit sharing zones exist since last year (In public API form, so likely they existed internally for even longer.)

Also the device ID's are already shared internally in some fashion across an iCloud family, as my key tracker doesn't make my wife's phone detect an unknown tag and vice versa.

Ideally you should be able to share beyond the family, IE I let my parents borrow the car, I should be able to "loan" the tag to their account (And I guess choose whether I can see tracking or not.) But if we don't have family plans we obviously won't get to this point any time soon.

I’m glad to have it as an option, but I think I’ve used my magsafe cable for charging two times in the past two years. The incredible battery life + switching my desk setup to USB-C means I pretty much never need to charge outside of normal usage at my desk

To me this sounds like issues on the Adobe side. I worked for 6 months on an M1 iMac with 8GB ram - it ran Xcode, iOS Sim, figma, slack, safari, terminal, calendar and zoom simultaneously for work on a large iOS app with zero issues. I used it because it was faster than using my i9 MBP 16” with 32GB of RAM - the MBP would be blasting its fans constantly with the same workload.

Now I’m on an M2 Air and I don’t see myself needing to upgrade in the next 2-3 years.

I played it in college, during the beta. There was no ending, no purpose, or quest, and the phenomena was already in full steam. To me part of the appeal was that it was essentially infinite, there was no end. By the year mark when the full version was released, the game was already cemented in history. I've since never seen the ending until reading it in this article.

If he wanted more than $20k he should have asked for it then, but I think the appeal of putting your writing in front of over a hundred million people and a $20,000 check was "enough" compensation for the work, at the time. But resentment grew as the game continued to succeed.

To me this feels like it was written after seeing the Doom music story...which is entirely different as the music of the first (new) doom game was a huge part of its success. This is literally the opposite as the text was tacked on after the game was already successful (Just not yet at its peak success.) And in some ways feels like it is inviting MS lawyers to intervene, but he has much less of a standing.

Hmm, are you using BT headphones or speakers? AirPods are the biggest annoyance for me with auto-switching as I'll usually have a mac, iPad and iPhone at my desk, be listening via iPad to something then opening a random app on my iPhone will request audio and stop the iPad from playing as the airpods swap devices. I know - it can be switched off, but it has to be done on every Apple device they connect to.

My new problem is with Apple TV and the Dynamic Island. Now by default when I walk into a room where my wife is watching TV, the phone will pick up the proximity and show me the remote as a live activity (Which is great, usually.) Then I use my phone for something and have no sound as my volume is down and the buttons aren't responding at all (seemingly.) It turns out if ATV is in the dynamic island, your hardware volume buttons now exclusively control the TV volume, and the only way to change the phone volume is to go into control center and swipe around.

I think App Store Search Ads were really the start of this trend. Think from a benefit perspective - do these ad placements help users? No, they lead them to apps they weren't looking for. Do these placements help good developers? No, they cost them money to ensure their own top placement isn't stolen in search. Does this benefit Apple? Of course - now every large developer on the platform is spending boatloads of cash to ensure they get the top result wherever possible. Essentially taxing developers to buy their own app name slot so that some other random company doesn't do it first. And it has the follow on problem of now allowing spam apps to have a voice on the platform - get your garbage ad-ridden, weekly subscription app approved, then just boost it up with search ads. The real problem is Apple still makes a boatload of cash from those scenarios, so they aren't incentivized to stop them.

iAd came before that - but it had a goal of benefiting everyone - users, developers and advertisers. "High quality" ads, privacy focused targeting, developers get a cut and as a result they remove other more invasive ad networks. Unfortunately it didn't work out, and with Tim Cook now at the helm the numbers for search ads spoke a little more loudly than before.

iPads are also the class leader in tablets, there really isn't anything close.

The problem is all of these product lines were likely already in R&D during the Jobs era (With the exception of maybe AirPods.) Not the current designs of course, but the ideas. I think the real test will be this upcoming year and the supposed launch of the Apple headset, as I don't think there will be any greater test of Apple's current design/marketing/hardware/software prowess. People are already sour on the idea of the "metaverse" so it'll be interesting if Apple can sell something new/different/useful in the space.

I'd give the M1 air more credit - I moved from a 2019 16" Pro to the Air and performance was nearly identical except for long running tasks (> 10 minutes.) So for mobile app builds, it was blazing fast. And in the meantime the intel machine was blaring fans after the first 30 seconds while the Air barely got warm.And then the real kicker was watching the battery on the intel machine visibly dropping a few percentage points, while the air sits at the same level the whole time.

I've since moved to the M2 air, and it is noticeably faster than M1, but it isn't the huge leap from last gen intel that the M1 was. But the hardware itself feels way better.