Ok...I'm a happy Apple iPhone user. What are these new "alternative" stores going to give me, the customer/user that I don't already have?

Ownership over the phone you bought. And you don't even have to use other app stores! But Apple's willingness to "allow" things like Xbox Cloud game streaming is entirely based on how much pressure they are under from fair competition. The more you accept that Apple doesn't have to compete and can decide what you can do with a device you bought, the less they are going to let you do.

The warnings aren't necessary at all, because side-loaded apps are not really dangerous. All of the protections against malicious apps (like the app sandbox) are built into iOS, not the App Store and there has been no talk of changing that. The big security holes with malicious software on iOS have all involved things like code silently getting installed through an iMessage, and it running outside the app sandbox. If there's going to be security warning somewhere, it should on iMessage.

What the industry needs to do if they want to make the share holders happy is actually skinny-down. Rather than trying to increase revenue with different pricing games and splitting up streaming services, etc, they just get better about the analysis as far as what is actually 'selling' and stop making so many other things, thereby reducing costs.

This is pretty much what HBO did for decades.. they produced fewer shows than the networks, with the best people available, while figuring out niches broadcast TV didn't serve. The end result was so consistently successful that for a long time hotels would literally advertise they had this one channel.

The day they said "Let's make it about quantity!" and renamed the service Max is the day they gave up the thing that made them special, and now there's no reason to subscribe to them over anything else.

Be thankful we have companies with so much money they can play around with crazy tech, even when they don't have a known killer app for it.

Wait, what??! I'm supposed to be thankful that tech companies squeeze so much money out of their customers that they have piles of cash to burn? And you know Microsoft HoloLens, the Oculus, the Vive, etc. all came before, right? We have literally be playing around with this stuff for a decade.

Whatever else you think about Apple, they are one of the few companies willing and able to spend the resources it takes to do something like this.

Fun fact, the HoloLens cost $500 less and Microsoft didn't demand of a 30% cut if I wrote apps for it. Generally, we would all be better off if a company that didn't lock their products to an App Store were bringing us this technology. And it's not just about money.. Apple will block any interesting AR apps that could potentially cut into any of their other businesses. So my my most exciting use case for something like this (using virtual theater mode with a PS5) is going to be completely dead in the water, because Apple wants to lock me into playing the mobile version of NBA2K that lives in their App Store. The best version of this technology is the one Apple will never build.

By all means, pick one up if it interests you. But that $3500 might not have as much longevity as you might hope.

I think the first release here is really about charging developers to buy the hardware outright and the consumer version will launch next year when they have actual apps and some idea of what people could actually do with it.

1) People don't have VR cameras for the level of VR you can watch with Apple vision pro or Quest 3, not even Quest 2. The best we have with Youtube VR is 8k, and if you're lucky - you can find a few videos in 180vr with 8k, but they're not many. It's the same dilemma we had 8 years ago with 4K television sets, zero material, and only the famous demo videos made by Jacob & Katie Schwarz (costa rica, which probably everyone with a 4K set today already know by heart)...

I think the lack of content is actually masking a bigger problem which is it's hard to create compelling video content for VR. To me it's more like the content problem with 3D TVs... it was nearly all about the novelty. ("Ohh, look at this thing moving in and out of the screen!") Of course 3D movies still exist as a desperate theater's upsell, but Hollywood never started churning out significant volume of 3D content and I think that's because the 3D experience never justified putting something on your face to watch a movie. VR video is much more like that.. on top of needing headwear, it takes active effort to look around to "get the effect" and doing that inherently negates any sense of a director and cinematographer's framing of a story, undermining a large part of what makes a good movie good. VR movies would be movies that are literally harder to consume.

Once the quantity of pixels are there a flat "virtual theater" experience could be nice, but that's going to be completely undermined for years to come by battery life. Apple's own movies like the beautiful "Killers of the Flower Moon" would require two full charges to watch! And sure, at home I could plug in, but now I can't lie down on the couch or see my spouse or rest my head on somone's shoulder..? It's going to have to be a really compelling experience to take people away from the sheer comfort and simplicity of sitting on a couch to watch a movie.

Show me the science that says this might benefit ANY gamer. Maybe they just need some oxygen-free wire to hear their enemies approaching.

For a game, seeing 480 frames per second instead of 120 probably doesn't have any benefit (especially since most of the frames would be of an interpolated state between the "actual" frames), but after the GPU renders a frame it has to wait for the next display refresh to actually present it. So even for a game running at 30 frames per second, with a faster refresh rate that wait time is shortened. This effectively lowers the "input lag" from when the user does something to when they see the result. In a worst case scenario, a 480 fps refresh rate could shave something like ~10ms of input lag compared to a 60 fps refresh rate, but in practice it's probably much less. If a game runs without syncing to the display refresh rate (vsync), the faster refresh rate could mean much less screen tearing. So yeah, it's probably overkill, but arguably could be a better experience to use because of lower input lag and less screen tearing.

Fun fact: 5 years ago Bloomberg published an article about how China had inserted hardware backdoors into US electronics and used Apple as the prime example. Apple flat out denied this and there was a campaign to get Bloomberg to reveal their sources (who supposedly worked for Apple) or retract the story. Bloomberg did neither.

Sony shipped 1 million PSVRs in the first 8 months it was available, and that was a peripheral which automatically limited the market that would even consider buying it. Apple should be able to sell 100,000 vision AR goggles to developers alone, but all the developers I've talked to literally don't know what they would even build for them. Personally, I've had my doubts that anyone could figure out a killer app since Apple's introductory video showed a guy using it for "work" and the apps he was using were iMessage, Photos and Music. (None or which even seemed enhanced by an AR UI.) They've been working on this for how many years and that's what they've come up with?

Then the obvious use case for AR goggles (games) has probably been severely limited by Apple's rocky relationship with Epic Games, which builds the game engine that's the industry standard. Nothing spells motion sickness like poor frame rates, and the game engine Apple's promoting (Unity) is known for it's bad performance. You'd be a fool to count Apple out, but it's going to be interesting to see how they pull this one off.

I can finally hook up a hallucinating AI to my stereo and light switches! And because it has Gemini's reasoning, it won't even need to wait for me to give it commands!

If you read more about the Sherman Anti-trust Act, a company doesn't have to own an entire market to be a monopoly. And I think more importantly in the Google case (although I can't wait for anti-trust experts to weigh in), the fact that Google was making secret deals to kill any possible competition and their internal conversations were literally saying that, makes it hard to argue they weren't acting in an anti-competitive way.

I think their strategy of making macOS more and more like iOS is starting to backfire. The more alike they are, the less reason there is to buy a Mac. But maybe that's a deliberate end goal here? Push people away from their last open system so they can go fully closed? It's not like they need the Mac sales, and the Mac is a liability because it proves that iOS and its variants could be secure and open too. That's the last thing they need with the ongoing App Store lawsuits, potential government regulations and investigations going on.

Good.

Governments eye wealthy tech companies for their deep pockets as a way to grab some cash via fines. Such easy money!

Love how this troll answer neatly side-steps the question of how Apple and Google got those deep pockets, as if South Korea is grabbing money from two innocent companies that, you know, didn't actually abuse their dominant position to grab it from others in the first place. When people think "might makes right", it's always interesting to see where they draw the line... I guess for this guy it's when the stronger side is a Democratically elected government?

Wouldn't believe it at this point. There's not much money to be made in budget laptops.

No there's not much money in budget laptops, but all of Apple's future plans for growth are around services. A "budget MacBook" offers them something they don't dare do on their more expensive models-- a chance to completely lock the Mac to the App Store.

Mac developers have virtually shunned the Mac App Store despite Apple repeatedly attempting to push them into it, and Apple can't make an App-Store-only laptop for real users until the apps are there. An "educational laptop" with a web browser will be good enough for the school market, while giving Apple the supposed justification to lock it entirely to the Mac App Store for "security". This will force more developers into the App Store, and opens the door for Apple to grab a percentage of everything users do on their laptops.