But are those notifications and pop ups directly saying something like “from now on we will start to train ai on your information”?

Or is is one of the hundredth change of terms and conditions that people usually just skip, which mentions the major change in some fine print. Or a pop up designed with dark patterns to influence people into just accepting without actual informed consent?

I wonder if this method doesn’t overproportionally eliminates valuable workers, who can easily switch companies.

You are right, Apple also has some legit professional staff. And if the person using it gets paid a lot, then a one time hardware purchase becomes negligible.

Accurate fine motor control and even basic stuff like typing does seem not quite fleshed out, so that is indeed an issue. But I don’t think it’s a deal breaker that you can’t do long shifts with it, since you’d probably only use it for certain tasks.

Even more of a niche, but I could see it for something like architects. Both for work and to maybe even present to clients.

Performance and bettery is good, but they’re barely better than what Intel and AMD offer.

And both AMD and Intel have pretty exciting new architectures coming soon with zen5 and lunar lake.

Meanwhile, on Vive, you could stand up, walk around, and manipulate the world with two tracked remotes.

Issue is that if I remember correctly the vive was an outside-in concept that required base stations to be setup. So you lose the cable, but are still bound by location. And importantly also needs a pc aswell. So still far away from standalone.

I think the core issue is that every piece of new technology so far has helped us get lazier. People used to walk around an office, then they sat at a computer, now they carry their computer with them and do things from the couch.

Nobody wants to get up to do things if they can avoid it, and that’s the only real benefit VR/AR provides

But I think VR/AR could make us lazier:

For VR the promise is immersion. You get to experience a concert, sport event, unique experience or exotic place from your own living room. And for many of that it is just fine to sit on a couch and still have a benefit from the technology.

For AR i think it’s a bit more productivity focused. For example less need to train personel, if you can project every instruction into their field of view.

Ordinarily, Apple is good at throwing its weight (money) around to make things like this happen, but it seems like there weren’t many takers this go-round, so we just got an overpriced, beautiful and fascinating paperweight.

Yeah normally Apple is maybe the only company that has the scale and control over their ecosystem to force rapid adoption. But this was clearly not a consumer product aimed at capturing the masses, but more or less a dev kit sold to anyone willing to shell out the price.

The PS VR2 sounds nice, but feels like it is only aimed at the gaming market and even there sony only captures a fraction.

The Quest as a standalone device imo really would have the best shot at mass market adoption, but Facebook rightfully has an image problem. And despite spending so much on development doesn’t seem to create any content or incentivize others to do so.

Edit: actually kind of forgot “bigscreenVR”. I am somewhat surprised that the default is to cram all hardware into the headset making it much bulkier instead of a seperate piece on a belt, back, or maybe strap on your upper arm.

but it’s utterly useless.

That imo has been the issue with VR/AR for a while now. The Hardware as you said is pretty good by now and looking at something like the quest even afforable. What’s lacking is content and use cases.

Smartphones had an easier time being adopted, since it was just moving from a larger to a smaller screen. But VR/AR actually needs a new type of content to make use of it’s capabilities. And there you run into a chicken/egg problem, where no one is putting in the effort (and vr content is harder to produce) without a large user base.

Just games and some office stuff (that you can do just as well on a regular pc) aren’t cutting it. You’d need stuff like every major sport event being broadcast with unique content, e.g. formula one with the ability to put yourself into the driver seat of any car.

Sounds like what Apple is trying to do…

Yeah, although sadly Apple isn’t quite the good guy either. I feel like in a way instead of ads they use their walled garden approach to achieve a similar result.

They’ll make it really annoying or even impossible to use alternatives and mix things. This way they you are by design drawn to use their desired solutions.

Does make for a better user experience as long as you pay the price and play by their rules. And probably also better for privacy, because with the closed system approach they don’t need the data as much to target you.

But imo still problematic and Apple doesn’t want to just sell good Hardware, but also services.

Unfortunately I think without some kind of regulation that makes personal info a liability / hot potato, it will still be treated as an asset to be collected:(

Agreed, this is one of those problems where it is much easier to legislate from the top down, rather than trying to get each individual consumer to make fully conscious decisions.

Yeah, sadly from a economic perspective it is kind of obvious how a continuous source of revenue might be more appealing compared to a one time purchase. Especially with a product like TVs that usually have a pretty long lifetime before being replaced.

Although i would point out that (at least in our current society) privacy and an ad-free experience in many ways is treated as a luxury good. Persumably a TV with a better OS would be sold at a higher price, and confronted with this choice many consumers would likely choose the cheaper one.

Also I don’t think we’ve really run out of suitable space to install new panels. If that ever happens it might be worthwhile to replace them, but as you said we can otherwise just run them alongside new installations until they break or maintenance costs surpass their profits

Smartest thing they could do now is shut down their remaining software development. Ship the TVs with vanilla Google OS

I think there’s a difference between smartwatches and TVs in terms of being able to monetize the operating system. On the tiny screen of a watch you can’t really put any advertisement (at least not without destroying the usability completely) and most of the things you can analyse are happening on the smartphone.

A TV on the other hand gives you a huge surface in the living room of a families home and if you have control of the OS there are plenty of ways to monetize it (and companies willing to pay for it). You can preinstall certain streaming apps (and get payed for it), promote newly released movies and give links to rent them (either your own shop or again for commission), you can collect userdata and sell that to other companies, and much more.

with 85% of the promised functionality no longer functional

To be fair 85% of threads retracting doesn’t seem to translate to an equal amount of functional loss. The article mentions

Neuralink was quick to note that it was able to adjust the algorithm used for decoding those neuronal signals to compensate for the lost electrode data. The adjustments were effective enough to regain and then exceed performance on at least one metric—the bits-per-second (BPS) rate used to measure how quickly and accurately a patient with an implant can control a computer cursor.

I think it will be impossible for us to asses how much it actually impacts function in real world use case.

It seems clear that this is a case of learning by trial and error, which considering the stakes doesn’t seem like the right approach.

The question that this article doesn’t answer is, whether they have learned anything at all or if they are just proceeding to do the same thing again. And if they have learned something, is there something preventing it to be applied to the first patient.

people find a lot of value in the products and services they offer

This is definitely true to some degree, but there imo is also another side to this.

Yes, they there are underlying problems/demands that they solve, but they definitely also create and shape those since psychology sadly works extremely effective. And they really try their hardest to manipulate customers.

Another aspect is that they might have originally created that value and given the users what they wanted, which got them in the position they are in now. Sometimes even operating at a loss to bully competition out of the market. But once they achieved this dominant position enshittification commences. Which wouldn’t be that much of an issue, if they wouldn’t also often prevent competition from growing enough to be able to compete.

Example Google search: The demand for a way to navigate the web is real and google fulfilled it best, which made them huge. Timejump to the present: the demand is still the same, but now google shows you what they want you to see and pay billions to be the default search engine to hinder any competition from gaining any traction.

And even then they’ll think of the most malicious way to comply:

Forced to change the connector to USB C? Better only give it USB 2.0 speeds on the regular and Plus model.

Forced to allow third party app stores? Better give it as many restrictions and limits as possible. I assume/hope they’ll eventually be forced to open up more, but they’ll fight it for as long as possible.

Agreed. As you said it’s a similar situation as with reddit, where I decided to delete my comments.

My reasoning is that those contributions were given under the premise that everybody was sharing to help each other.

Now that premise has changed: the large tech companies are only taking and the platform providers are changing the rules aswell to profit from it.

So as a result I packed my things and left, in case of reddit to here.

That said I think both views are valid and I wouldn’t fault those that think differently.

I think the answer to this is both yes and no:

Yes, iphones have good build quality and especially in regards to software updates have been great, keeping even older models up to date. Whereas only recently some android manufacturers changed their update policies to support models for longer.

And No, because apple consistently has made it difficult and costly to repair phones, e.g. by pairing all kinds of parts to each other through software.

As said, i am not really that knowledgable in the whole blockchain topic, so anyone feel free to correct me where i am wrong:

• Why should i trust those parents/friends (or doctors if present)? Presumably this would be a global system? So why should i trust a group of random people from idk Somalia? I probably don’t even fully trust any institutions there. My understanding (simplyfied) is that with bitcoin the coins themself are mined by finding solutions to hard math problems that once found can be easily verified by anyone. So at the base you have something i myself can verify to be true. Whoever finds the right number first gets the coin and after that you only need to keep track of trades and this is where the blockchain helps.

• What data would be stored on this block chain? Honestly seems like a bit of a privacy nightmare. I wouldn’t want all family history and identifiable information to be public, so it can serve as an ID.

• To go along with the point above, how would you verify that a specific certificate on the chain belongs to you? Similar to a password for a crypto wallet? So that it can be lost without ability to be recovered, that your parents have control over it from the start, and that people who gain access to it can abuse it? Basically all issues similar to the US social security number? Or by having a passport or similar do the job, which kind of defeats a lot of the purpose of that blockchain being the source of ID.

• It wouldn’t be enough to make a birth/death certificate. You would still need a system to change/add information. Like what if somebody changes their names? Also not every child will be added from the start, so you will need to handle late additions (that e.g. make date of birth even more unsure). What if someone goes missing or dies and it isn’t reported? Also a small number of people might also require new identities for security purposes (think victims of abuse), how do you handle the need for an institution having the ability to create such fictional new identities?

I could probably find more issues.

So imo truth ultimately has to come from somewhere in the real world. And at places that might benefit from some system that is seperated from institutions (because they are poor, authoritarian, oppressive or have unstable governments for example) will at the same time have more difficulties providing something you can trust.

And in reverse regions that might have an easier time like the EU don’t really seem to need it. Also as far as electronic IDs go the EU is planning that with eIDAS 2.0 and the EUID. Don’t think it invloves a blockchain at any stage.

But the accuracy of this information would still depend on external institutions or persons that you have to trust, right? I have admittedly never dived too deep into the whole block chain topic, but that seems to go against the underlying idea.

To be fair there are still a bunch of other aspects that may prevent even full remote jobs to be outsourced to other countries. Among others: language skills, time zone differences, cultural differences, legal frameworks and probably many more.

To give an example for issues that may arise from these differences:

An employee might cost your german company triple the salary in Germany compared to India. On paper it seems like an easy choice, you just outsource and even if you have to pay 2 person to do the job you still save money. But suddenly you run into many problems:

• They will likely not speak German and maybe not even great English. This might be irrelevant for the actual work to be done. But do they exactly understand what the task is, can they give accurate feedback, can they make use of existing resources or do those need to be translated, can they communicate with the rest of the company or your customers?

• They work in different time zones. And while most remote work is probably time agnostic, meetings with other team members, departments or your customers suddenly become much harder to schedule.

• Their culture might be different. So e.g. they might not be as straight forward when running into problems and instead try to hide them, which will mean everything looks fine until the house of cards suddenly crumbles.

• Having employees in different countries means you will need to have different workflows for hr to deal with contracts, payrolls, retirement plans, health insurance and so on. Also how does the other country handle IP, patents and non compete clauses? Could the employee just walk away and start their own business or go to your competitor? Or in reverse can you ensure that they e.g. don’t copy/paste code from somewhere else ignoring licenses.

Bloat and bad performance aside, you don’t see a benefit in having a all-in-one solution that in a way acts as a drop in replacement for people wanting to switch away from the likes of Google/Apple? I certainly do.

Yes, having a dedicated app selected for each use case will likely give better results. But it also means more management. And many users don’t actually need more than basic functionality.

But yes looking at the complaints, they should look at polishing existing features first.