That's because almost nobody has released games for this thing yet. I mean, apart from subscription-only Apple Arcade games, I really didn't find very many out there that are worth playing.

For me, the killer app would be a virtualization environment running macOS Sonoma, combined with high-quality vision analysis that can let you type on a virtual keyboard floating in front of you.

Not to mention that screens tend not to move with you on the Vision Pro, and neither do physical keyboards and trackpads. Their text input story, other than with a keyboard (where you might as well use a real computer) is basically nonexistent, and a "spatial computer" that can only be used for media consumption device and gaming doesn't make much sense (because you might as well buy a Quest for a fraction of the price).

AVP has serious problems when lying down, though. Yes, if you can get a virtual screen positioned correctly before you lie down, it works, but try repositioning it while lying flat, and it jumps in random directions and is completely as unusable as the Quest 2.

AVP also lacks any obvious way for the user to mark a screen as "floating". One way I'd like to use it is as a media consumption device while out for a walk. Have a picture-in-picture with the screen floating in front of me. But I haven't been able to figure out a good way to do that. I'm pretty sure the Quest actually does have a way to do that, at least in some apps, though I don't remember how off the top of my head. So for at least one consumption mode, Apple's offering is actually inferior in some ways (though I'll grant you that its image quality is much better).

Passive LEDs have blocked light for decades. That's solvable. So in theory, if you combined a projection-style setup like Google Glass used with a 1-bit LCD panel, you might be able to do a passable job. But I've obviously never tried it, so I could be wrong.

It doesn't mirror the MacBook screen. It blacks it out and replaces it entirely, making it the ultimate privacy screen.

But you have to either use the computer's keyboard/trackpad or an external Bluetooth keyboard and mouse/trackpad/trackball, so you can't usefully use it as the only display unless you're sitting right at the computer, so it is basically useless unless you are working on an airplane, on a bus, in a coffee shop, or in an open office and you don't want other people seeing what you're doing.

Actually, I find it to work pretty well for that — better than a laptop screen, anyway.

What doesn't work well are:

• Low rate of iOS app compatibility — most iOS apps don't run on it, despite it theoretically being able to run them, because most developers don't check the checkbox
• No Mac app compatibility
• Zero keyboard or mouse control when controlling your Mac (i.e. you're still 100% tethered to the Mac when using it as a display)
• Almost zero games that are not part of Apple Arcade (subscription-only)
• Frequent inability to connect to nearby computers, and no way to figure out what's wrong, with the only reliable fix being a complete reboot of the Vision Pro

Basically, you can't do anything with it except in a few limited situations, and when you can, it's still a pain in the a**. It can give you a private screen for working in a cube farm or on an airplane, and that's about it. Mind you, its Wi-Fi support is miles ahead of what you can do with non-Apple hardware, which at least makes those things practical, but it is nowhere near good enough yet, IMO.

At some point, when the apps are there, this could be pretty cool, but right now, it really just isn't there.

Yeah, I'm overstating things a bit. I'm sure there are a certain percentage of people who aren't in power who want peace. But the problem is that the people with power mostly don't seem to want peace if it comes with any strings attached, and most of the people voting for them are too blinded by the rhetoric from their leaders to realize that both sides are the problem, not just one.

Until the overwhelming majority of people are willing to do what is needed to actually bring about peace — specifically, throwing out the people in power, running for office against them, amplifying the voices of the sane and reasonable, and speaking out constantly against abuse, oppression, prejudice, and violence, without regard to who is being abused or oppressed or being prejudiced against or committing the violence — I don't expect anything to change.

People have to not just want peace, but want peace badly enough to choose moderate leaders, knowing full well that their long-time enemies could easily take advantage of reduced militarism to do them harm. And that's hard. I get it. That's really, really hard. The tendency to "other" people who are not like us is so ingrained in human nature that even when we're taught not to do it, most people still seem to go out of their way to find different ways to do it. And that's doubly true when your actual life could be on the line.

But that's what it takes to have a lasting peace. That's the only way. One side has to take the first step by standing down, and given the lopsided power dynamic, nothing the Palestinians do will change anything, because all it takes is one bad seed deciding not to do so and killing some Israeli settler while shouting some anti-Israel chant, and Israel will send in missiles again. Israel, being the side with all the power, is the only side that is truly in the position to end this long-term, by actively choosing not to use their enormous military might against the Palestinians on an ongoing basis — actively choosing not to overreact — actively choosing not to punish all Palestinians for what are presumably the actions of a few — and instead using diplomatic means to coerce the Palestinian government into bringing the responsible parties to justice.

But that also depends on there actually being a functioning Palestinian government that isn't a branch of an extremist group. And that's not going to happen unless a whole lot of things change, and that change will take decades, and it only takes a single aggressive response by Israel to set such changes back by decades overnight, losing any goodwill that might have been built up prior to that point.

At this point, I don't see an obvious way out that doesn't involve massive third-party intervention. The Israeli and Palestinian governments have simply both done too many bad things over too many decades, creating an environment of distrust that won't be easily fixed. IMO, the threat of international action against both sides would go a long way towards pressuring both sides to come to the table in earnest and to stick to their promises for once.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe in the near future, Israel will stop this latest wave of attacks and will begin working to help the Palestinians rebuild (without putting Israeli settlers and businesses in the newly built houses and buildings). That would at least help repair trust a bit. The longer this goes on, however, the less likely a positive outcome seems.

Not if they're allowed civil autonomy. I'm not suggesting a plan where they would be *governed* by someone else, just one in which those governments don't have an active military or police force, relying instead on a neutral third party for all security for an extended period of time. And yeah, they might eventually grow to resent the rest of the world subjecting them to that, particularly if policing isn't even-handed. But them not being happy about it isn't in and of itself a good reason not to do so.

Realistically, neither side will trust the other side's negotiation to be in good faith, because both sides ignore any agreements whenever it suits them. Nothing short of a neutral third party tying their hands militarily can realistically fix this unless both sides *want* to change.

Both. They're both victims of the governments of those two nations/regions. Hamas's barbarism is entirely inexcusable, but at the same time, the leaders of Israel (and Netanyahu specifically) turned their country hard to the right in a manner that pretty much gave rise to Hamas's power. Foreign governments have also added fuel to the fire, which doesn't help.

The tragedy is that nobody actually wants peace enough to make it happen. All it would take is the U.N. declaring all of Israel to be a demilitarized zone, ordering the Israeli government and Hamas to both disarm, shooting anyone who refuses to comply, and then keeping those million or so troops in that region to help rebuild, slowly drawing down the number of troops over... say 200 years, so that by the time they are gone, no one alive still remembers the horrors of this day.

Early operating systems were basically just a bunch of code for starting a main executable, along with runtime libraries that got called synchronously from whatever program was running, which is a far cry from anything that we would call a kernel today. So I wouldn't even say that an OS necessarily contains a kernel, though modern OSes typically do.

Heck, there have even been attempts to do kernel-free OSes more recently.

Not waterproof, less grain than a Nomad. Lame. :-D

*blinks*

In the U.S. (Apple's biggest market at 44% of net sales), only 3% of people are vegan. About 57% of U.S. phone users use iPhones. Even if every single vegan who uses a cell phone at all uses an iPhone, that would still be *barely* over 5% of their customer base. They might be one of the more *vocal* parts of Apple's customer base, but they're certainly not a large percentage of it.

When so many spooks come out against it, that's how you know you're doing the right thing. Let's unpack their statements a bit.

You're not realistically going to magically prevent any of those things with more spying. At best, you might catch the occasional low-hanging fruit, and even then, only if you do incredibly invasive levels of widespread spying on everyone. The right way to prevent those things is by infiltrating the relevant community. People who say otherwise are kidding themselves.

First, their claim isn't even true at a superficial level. Since at least 1961, we have been compelled by law to recognize diplomatic couriers and the contents of their bags as beyond the reach of law enforcement.

Second, our societies have always tolerated spaces that are at least by default beyond the reach of law enforcement, which allow law enforcement to peer into those spaces only after establishing probable cause.

Recent behavior by law enforcement agencies has thrown out the entire notion of probable cause, creating mass spying programs that sniff all the traffic going into and out of various organizations en masse. That, combined with parallel construction and courts being lax at enforcing the fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine, has resulted in substantial violations of the public's right to privacy.

End-to-end encryption is necessary entirely because law enforcement has repeatedly shown an unwillingness to respect the bounds of privacy that a free society requires. And the fact that law enforcement's irrational "slurp everything up and sort through it later" approach has resulted in everyone encrypting everything is not the fault of the "everyone encrypting everything". It is the fault of law enforcement being utterly egregious and unscrupulous in their behavior.

There are consequences for actions, and when governments show that they are untrustworthy on an ongoing basis, people stop trusting them. Welcome to the real world, kids.

They're "getting into" power generation? That makes it sound like this is something brand new. I remember when Apple put in its first natural gas cogeneration plant to take its build infrastructure off the grid, back around 2002 or 2003, I think. Google has massive generators around a bunch of its buildings, presumably for the same reason. Big tech has been in the energy business quite literally for decades at this point.