People were right about touchscreens, actually, and mobile phones.
They never did replace the productivity usecases. They replaced a lot of casual usecases, and created a bunch more usecases, mostly around media consumption.
But if you go to an office anywhere in the world, and you look around, it's not people on their phones. It's a sea of desktop computers, like it's 1995. Even at Apple. Not because everyone is out of the times, but because we did truly find the perfect form factor, and have chosen to refine it.
Apple vision pro wont replace the productivity suite, like the iPhone didn't. And it won't replace the iPhone, because it's way bigger and more inconvenient. So, I'm not sure where that leaves it.
the market agrees for the most part. VR goggle interfaces just aren't taking the world by storm. When it came out I thought: I'll wait for the iteration that comes 2 years later (the AVP 3 or whatever) since by then they'll have worked out the kinks and it will be a solid computing platform. It's 2 months shy of 2 years since general availability of the AVP and it's essentially identical to the initial release with just a minor chip upgrade. It's a dead product line
If someone cracks “smart glasses” that’s the next smartphone-size market and revolution, guaranteed, no question about it.
VR headsets ain’t it but I’m convinced the reason every company is working on them and developing AR stuff for their traditional devices (which are terrible to use for AR) is because they don’t want to still be at the starting line if someone figures out smart glasses.
This is the “answer” in plain sight and I agree. The iPhone is the beating heart of the modern Apple empire. Tim Cook has been a vocal proponent of AR since the summer of Pokemon Go. That combined with Meta getting traction with their Rayban line is almost certainly at the center of an overarching internal strategy at Apple to ensure they are positioned to maintain or even grow position as end user mobile computing form factors shift beyond the traditional smartphone. Getting the ux and app ecosystem ready visually is what ‘caused’ Liquid Glass.
Grandparents also said it about a lot of technologies that actually were worse and didn’t survive. Those are just not around anymore to be the subject of survivorship bias.
I’m not sure when we’re started dismissing the elderly’s advice as “just complaining because they’re old” but it seems we’re hell bent on reinventing the wheel of misfortune with every generation.
If old people complain about something, maybe they have a point?
If they're still complaining about something that's around, do they have a point? How do we know? What things have survived the fires of testing and should just be accepted, and what things can be groused about as bad?
