No it's not remotely the same. The iPod represented a truly revolutionary interface for listening to music.

Really? Of all the places to bring that up you choose the very forum that spawned the quote

No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.

, by the cofounder of the site in fact.

The iPhone had quite a few doubters convinced a keyboard less smartphone was going to be a fail.

The vision pro's big selling point is very high resolution. Maybe that'll turn out to be a very big idea. Maybe it will be the next G4 Cube (I'm absolutely aware that Apple swings and misses, just because they launch a product doesn't mean it is "the next iPhone", so far they have had only one of those, and given the confluence of events around it that may be the only success any company ever has of that scale ever). The iPhone was basically all technology from elsewhere (some of it purchased by Apple, like FingerWerks). It was successful in large part because Apple decided on a particular set of features they thought were needed and worked backwards to a price point. I think Apple did the same thing with the Vision Pro, but the process isn't important, it is if that set of features is a useful combination. For the iPhone the answer was a resounding yes. With Vision Pro the answer is entirely unclear, ask again in a year or so.

The iPod was substantially over the price of the Diamond Rio which was the most popular price point for MP3 players. The nomad was the toy for rich people if I recall correctly.

But tye AVP doesn't add anything really new

Maybe. The resolution is dramatically higher than other VR products. True if meta had decided that was important they could have done a higher resolution product if they had given up the price point they wanted. I mean the "new" thing is mostly buying very high resolution displays from Sony. It is possible that Apple's gesture recognition is also new, although other VR systems have done that sort of thing, so I think it will only really count as "new" if it actually works dramatically better then competing systems.

It is entirely fair though if a company decides a particular feature set is what is needed to make a product segment viable, does what it takes to make a product that handles that features set even if other companies could have made the same choices but didn't .

The iPhone wasn't "anything new", it was touch technology purchased from FingerWerks (or by buying the company), a CPU from Samsung, a radio from, um, I think infusion, basically all off the shelf parts. The "only" thing Apple added was software (which they have done in the Vision Pro as well). The Vision Pro even has a whole bunch of custom technology that we can argue other companies "could have made", but it isn't even off the shelf stuff (the M2 and R1 were designed by Apple, the M2 is a hard act to match, beats me about the R1, maybe it is all easy matrix math type stuff that at least 4 other companies could design, maybe not).

I'm going to say the Vision Pro is something new. The real question is is vision Pro in someway useful or interesting in the long run? Maybe ultra high resolution isn't important. Maybe it is. Maybe controller less interactions are important, maybe they aren't. Maybe Apple's development platform is useful, maybe it isn't. Maybe Apple's poor reputation with developers is important, maybe it isn't. Maybe their poor reputation as "not a team player" amongst other companies is important, maybe it isn't. (Clearly some of these things are important in "the wrong way"). For the most part only a bit of time will tell here.

yes this will come down in cost once the early adopters get burned

That is one way to look at it. Or it will come down in price after the early adopters have gotten to use it long before the more cost sensitive consumers. Maybe some (or most) of the early adopters actually put more value on using the thing for a few months/years/decades then they do on the higher cost.

I'm sure some early adopters don't realize that there are likely going to be future cheaper versions. I'm sure even fewer realize that the first version to market no matter how state of the art it appears now are very likely less capable then what comes out in a few years. You could view them as getting burned. The vast majority of people realize these are expensive, and that they will almost definitely get less expensive. I'll argue they are not getting burned by price reductions. They are deciding the value of being able to use the thing now outweighs the value of having that money now to use on other things.

It might not be a good economic argument, like almost no one is going to splash out $4k for one of these and get a $4k productivity enhancement or write a vision pro app that actually makes $4k (it is estimated Apple can make maybe 200,000 of these this year, so a $1 app would need to sell to about 3.5% of the entire theoretical installed base to make $4k (after Apple's one third cut) -- possible, but unlikely)

But it could be a great argument if you actually want something it does well. Unfortunately about the only thing reviews agree on is it does awesome video content, if you don't watch with a family or friends it is way cheaper then a 70+ inch TV and also it is the only full brightness 3D TV solution and looks super awesome for that. Is that worth $4k? Probably to some people. Is it worth spending $4k for that this year when it may be $3k next year? Or $1k in 4 or 6 years?

Of corse this thing may never be cheaper. It might not hit whatever internal goal Apple has and they may decide not to continue working on future versions. Not all Apple products are successes. This could be the G4 Cube or the iPod Hi Fi.

Ding! Ding! Ding!

100% yep on all points, although the moderation is now no longer broken in the way you describe. It is now broken by not actually existing. I should probbably leave it, but I still find some interesting things, mostly from the same people that have had interesting answers all along. I haven't found any interesting new authors and clearly some of the prior interesting authors have stopped writing, or at least dramatically reduced output. Which isn't surprising given the reduced quality of questions and the vast increase in BS.

And there is not even a category to report such questions that should be simply deleted for being sloppily worded and insincere.

Worse yet there use to be a category to report them, but it has been removed. Either because it was too expensive to pay humans to take action on the reports, or because too many questions that got reported using that category were successful at driving engagement so economically in the short term Quora "wants" them.

At one time you could go to Quora for good answers and intelligent discussion on those answers. It's been a good while since that was the case.

A lot of interesting questions and good answers are still on Quora, but all the growth is clearly in machine generated word salad questions, and way to many answers aren't someone who "lived it" but some ChatGPT copy pasta that frequently people don't even smooth the obvious GPTisms out of.

It isn't a forgone conclusion that this means collapse is inevitable, but it sure seems like it is headed that way. Mostly because all the things that would make Quora less of a cesspool will cost money (hire human moderators again) and drive down engagement (people engage more with trolls, flaming back, pointing them out to their followers who also flame back then they engage with great answers that make them sit back and think, but not actually write much of anything or call others over to look; it is a general social media issue, the stuff that most reliabably engages us is not the stuff the stuff we actually want to be seeing)

Quora hasn't been about answers or helping people or exchanging information for at least several years. If it goes tango-uniform and the bigshots behind it lose their stock equity and get loans called in and lose houses and yachts, it's nothing more than poetic justice.

That isn't generally how VC funded companies collapse. The big shots do lose the stock equity, but generally they don't have equity backed loans and don't lose houses or yachts. They have yacht they were looking at getting when their company went public, and now they have a yacht they are looking at for when their next company goes public. They have a house that is hard to afford without a exec level paycheck, but they also have a exec level job on the resume, and frequently enough money in the bank to keep paying for long enough to get another job in that pay ballpark.

The fact that levels were way way higher in earthâ(TM)s prehistory and the earth was abundant with life; more than there is now.

MacOS may well be successful more because it runs Mac GUI apps then because it is a gen-u-wine UNIX, but it is successful because it actually runs stuff, is stable, has a security model that doesnâ(TM)t blow goats, and being built on top of UNIX is a big part of that. The conformance tests also amount to a huge set of unit tests for the command line, libc, compiler, and âoekernel callsâ (many of which donâ(TM)t do a kernel trap on macOS). It isnâ(TM)t a care of âoesuccessful despite being UNIXâ, it is successful because of what UNIX brings to the table as building blocks.

For a goodly long time, 10.4 or thereabouts. I worked on the project, resurrected UUCP for it even (yes, you arenâ(TM)t standard UNIX without UUCPâ¦).

You can do that but I will beat you there in my ICE car. It takes me 5 minutes to refuel. It wouldnâ(TM)t even be close.

Isnâ(TM)t this just https://ifttt.com/?

having your own LLC should firmly place you on the side of "contractor"

One might hope, but I'm not a big believer in trusting the government to do the right thing. So they may "fix" the Uber/DoorDash problems and hose over a bunch of singles person LLCs. I know I can opt out of workers comp on the federal level, and I think I can also do so at the state level, but one of my clients has a dumbass "we require the businesses we work with to have X, Y, Z" lists with no process for exceptions and item Y is workers comp. So I pay like $7 a month for a workers comp plan for my zero workers (the owner isn't covered). All for the privilege of having this particular company operate as a middleman and take a portion of my fee. I'm actually doing most of my work for a different client that is more of a "we trust you to have whatever insurances you need, obviously if you set up an LLC you probably pay someone to advise you on all the important stuff, so carry on".

I'm not saying I know they will hose me over, just that I think it is entirely possible that it might happen.

Now the LLC I own is going to be forced to pay the only contractor (myself) more. Which is kind of a pain because what I'm holding back is my estimate of taxes and business expenses. I wonder if I'll be forced to buy healthcare via the LLC rather than directly.

The vision pro will have to deal with software written for the vision pro only.

It lets you "project" a Mac display into it (yeah, it won't run the MacOS software). It will actually tun iPad apps directly (yeah, ok, maybe of limited value, but it is a lot more then "just what is made specifically for the brand new limited market sized product").

Come up with an actual solution to an actual problem. This is the cart before the horse

I have one, but it is pretty niche. I do laser cutting as a hobby. My most recent laser cutter is a 40W diode laser in the visible spectrum. I have it in an enclosure with some class two laser safety plexiglass, which if the laser strikes it directly it'll just cut through. Unfortunately even catching the reflected light from the class three laser might be too much for it to prevent enough laser energy from escaping to harm my eyes if I'm looking at it (through the safety cage) unless I also have laser goggles on.

It is already hard to see what is going on without the goggles. With the goggles plus the plexiglass I can't see squat, so I can start my burn and get no real feedback until it is done.

With the vision pro on my face I could just open the enclosure (and disable the safe interlock) and look in. I mean, yeah, this is a real niche because it requires someone to spend $3k to be able to get a "good view" of what is going on inside their $2k laser cutter. So that is a world wide market of, maybe just me, or maybe there are like a dozen of us.