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Apple Ramps Up Vision Pro Production, Aiming for Launch by February
  • The game plan is the same as the game plan for the Mac, but they're going to run it in a fraction of the time because they already have the playbook. Apple's not in the business of "intentionally taking a loss," Apple is in the business of slowly iterating products into platforms over strategic time spans. That's exactly what they'll do here.

    The OLED displays are severely supply constrained; I doubt Apple can produce more than one or two million in 2024. With so few units available, there are more than enough dyed-in-the-wool Apple fans and die hard VR geeks with $4k to burn to guarantee that it will be sold out until 2025.

    This first million will create an ecosystem for the platform in the form of third-party software and enthusiast communities. The successful launch will entice more suppliers to make the OLEDs, increasing availability and reducing cost. That paves the way for a sans-Pro Apple Vision for $2,500 sometime in 2025 or 2026. The cycle repeats: more users, bigger community, more evangelists, more word of mouth, more software, cheaper components, and then Apple ships Apple Vision Air in 2027 or 2028 for $1,500. Then in 2030, Apple Vision Air 2 comes out but the original is still for sale at $999.

    Now we're looking at Apple's standard good/better/best product matrix that they use for the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Mac, and we're also looking at a relatively Mac-like price range starting at a grand but with options running well above $5k.

    The original Mac sold for $2,495 in 1984 which is about $7,000 adjusted for inflation. Apple's kicking this new platform off for half the entry price. No one knew what the heck the Mac was supposed to be for in 1984 either, but the entire desktop computing paradigm was forged in its image. We're now looking at a second Mac.

  • Steve Jobs Rigged The First iPhone Demo By Faking Full Signal Strength And Secretly Swapping Devices Because Of Fragile Prototypes And Bug-Riddled Software
  • Ken Kocienda, the engineer who led the team that created the original iPhone keyboard and predictive text system, wrote a book titled “Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs.” So there’s at least one real engineer for you who speaks highly of Jobs.

    They aren’t nameless. They write books and go on podcasts, their thoughts on Jobs are available to us. Plenty of them praise Jobs for driving them to do their best work.

  • On the end of Discovery
  • Right, I said it's "not bad," hardly a ringing endorsement. It had some good ideas and concepts but it also has a lot of flaws, which is why it's quite unfortunate that it's the best Discovery ever managed.

  • Steve Jobs Rigged The First iPhone Demo By Faking Full Signal Strength And Secretly Swapping Devices Because Of Fragile Prototypes And Bug-Riddled Software
  • It’s not false advertising because it did everything it was advertised to do in the introductory demo when it went on sale six months later. Google is the one faking their demos.

  • On the end of Discovery
  • Right? Put Lorca on the front of my list to round out all four seasons. The outsiders carry the cast.

  • On the end of Discovery
  • My problem with season 4 wasn't that it was slow, but that it was uninspired and by-the-numbers. I had worked out that the DMA was a "stepping on an anthill" situation by... episode 4, maybe? 5 at the latest. So then I got to watch one of the oldest tropes in sci-fi unfold for 8 more episodes, played completely straight. Yawn.

    I'd rather watch the B-plot from S01E06 of Babylon 5 to experience that particular story again. That way I'd be done in an hour.

  • On the end of Discovery
  • Yes, exactly. Season 1 knew what it wanted to be. When it was over, I remember thinking "alright, not bad, I'm excited to watch this show grow the beard."

    But it never did. In retrospect, Season 1 is the strongest season the show had to offer. Each subsequent season got a little worse as plots got more confusing, themes got more muddled, and no breakout characters emerged to carry the show through an abundance of narrative turmoil and worldbuilding strangeness. But above all else, seasons 3 and 4 are just boring. I don't care about the crew or their mission. The most interesting characters are consistently the outsiders: Pike, Vance, Rillak. I'll be watching season 5, but mostly out of a sense of obligation and morbid curiosity.

    As much as I like SNW, it's still not quite the show I've been waiting since 2005 for: seven curious officers on a ship called Enterprise set in the mid-25th century. I worry that SNW has robbed us of the opportunity to see the classic formula set in the immediate post-TNG era... even though that seems to be what season three of Picard was explicitly setting up.

  • Apple announces that RCS support is coming to iPhone next year
  • We all know the bubbles will still be green

  • When is season 4 anyway?
  • account from "An instance dedicated to nature and science"

    asked to provide evidence for claims

    refuses

  • When is season 4 anyway?
  • Cullen

    Seems like he's talking about... Twilight?

  • When is season 4 anyway?
  • It doesn’t. The episodes just get longer and more boring as the show progresses. The cancellation isn’t exactly a mystery.

  • When is season 4 anyway?
  • """"loudly declare""""

    Adira tells Stamets their pronouns, and Stamets says "okay" approvingly. That's it. That's the full extent of what you are calling a "big deal."

    You understand that even in a society where everyone is allowed to "just be," accidental misgendering is still going to happen and corrections will still need to be communicated, right? Marco misgendered Nico on their first appearance, so Nico must have corrected him. You are effectively arguing that enby representation is only acceptable if actual conversations about gender occur off-screen.

  • When is season 4 anyway?
  • A "multi episode story arc"? You mean these 90 seconds? The only way this bit of character and relationship development could be less "heavy handed" would be if it didn't happen at all.

  • When is season 4 anyway?
  • but as someone else pointed out it's still not super common for gay characters, especially male characters, to be shown as being romantically involved, which can be jarring when you're not used to it. Dunno, it's weird.

    Yep, many people still struggle with it. What do you think it would take to change this?

  • When is season 4 anyway?
  • That's not a particularly unique perspective, many Trekkies choose to process Star Trek as "historical documents." There's a movie about it.

    What I don't understand is why you've assigned this theoretical camera crew the intent of "get the camera on the gay dudes, stat" when "get the camera on the relationship between the two main characters" is a much simpler explanation. There are entire episodes dedicated to Odo & Kira, Paris & Torres or Trip & T'Pol relationship drama. Stamets & Culber screen time pales in comparison, and at least Stamets & Culber have some chemistry.

  • When is season 4 anyway?
  • It’s 24XX, who the hell is still getting bent out of shape about homosexuality 400 years from now?

    I'm pretty lukewarm on Discovery, I've seen all of it but most episodes only once, so maybe I just don't remember it. Who got bent out of shape over Stamets and/or Culber being gay?

  • Discount Vulcanoids
  • That’s true, it could have been worse. She could have been as stupid as she is ugly.

  • Discount Vulcanoids
  • True story, when I was 7 I got this game for Christmas, installed it on the spot and started playing, but this lady was so intimidating that I got spooked, quit, and didn't touch it again for years

  • Me after 13 straight hours of staring at my cell phone
  • Picard uses android

    He has unlimited data

    I’ll see myself out

  • Share your Fediverse tips, tricks, and finds

    I for one am having a lot of fun in this place. Small communities which are growing and changing are the most fun. The distributed nature of this platform means that I bet we all have a lot to share with each other.

    Other Communities

    I game a lot and so far of all the gaming communities I've found, the one at Beehaw is my favorite. In one month I think I've discovered more interesting indie games there than I did for the entire past year on Reddit.

    I also run a few home servers mostly for Plex and home automation so I've been digging the Self Hosted community over at Lemmy.world. It seems just as knowledgeable if not more so than the equivalent communities I left behind.

    Apps

    As a former Apollo addict, thank god Voyager exists. I've been dabbling with Memmy as well, but Voyager just goes right down my existing dopamine pathways and I keep coming back to it. Didn't like Mlem at all, which is unfortunate since the name and icon are great.

    What have you found out there?

    8
    Come to Quark's, Quark's is Fun!

    Welcome to startrek.website's fourth community, Quark's!

    This community is a general off-topic zone for the insightful and good looking explorers of this Lemmy instance. Why make an off-topic forum for a Lemmy instance, you ask? As you are probably already aware, this Lemmy instance is different from most as we are phaser-focused on Star Trek. But the fans are just as an important part of Star Trek as any other part, so we want to provide a place for Trekkies to be Trekkies together as we embark on the adventure that is growing the Fediverse together.

    Put differently, if the rest of this instance is the rest of the station where we are all "on-duty"—talking about Star Trek—together, this community is for having a blood wine, Aldebaran whiskey, or even a root beer together.

    What kind of stuff might you chat about here? Good question! Some examples might be...

    • Lemmy and the Fediverse at large. What are your second, third, and fourth favorite instances? Have your found fun Star Trek or sci-fi content on other ActivityPub based services such as Mastodon or Pixelfed? Have you found an app you like? Talk about it here!
    • Other sci-fi have you been reading, playing, and watching? What do you recommend? What book is your all time favorite? What game did you get in the Steam sale that you can't stop playing? What show are you binging that almost interfered with keeping up with Strange New Worlds season 2?
    • startrek.website itself. Young platforms and new communities love to talk about themselves; some people are into that and some aren't. We're scoping that kind of discussion to here so it can be easily found or ignored depending on your desires. More to the point, sometimes we need a place to talk about startrek.website itself. Information related to downtime, instance upgrades, and important security updates will be posted here.
    • Anything within reason and good taste, really. It's an off-topic forum!

    The one rule is don't make Odo come down here, i.e. don't be a jerk. We're converting all your tabs from latinum to Fed credits so drinks are on the house. And of course, this is more suggestion than rule, but don't get sucked into a conversation with Morn. You'll be stuck here for days.

    6
    In what fleet did the alternate USS Iowa serve?

    Uh, newest SNW episode spoilers I guess.

    In "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" we are introduced to James Kirk, captain of the UEF Enterprise. This prefix is visible on the dedication plaque when La'an arrives on the bridge.

    Curiously, later in the episode when La'an asks Kirk where he was born he says the USS Iowa.

    What gives? Was the Iowa was a cargo ship? Maybe in this timeline, "USS" stands for "United Shipping Service." Or perhaps at some point, UEF ships did use the prefix and they changed it because the wanted "Earth" more clearly in the identifier.

    What do you think?

    8
    Captain Kirk is sent to intercept the USS Phoenix. What happens?

    In "The Wounded," Captain Picard and the Enterprise are tasked with intercepting the USS Phoenix, commanded by Captain Benjamin Maxwell. Maxwell is destroying Cardassian ships and outposts, convinced that the Cardassians are preparing for another war.

    Lets make some changes to this setup and explore a hypothetical: what if Captain Kirk is sent to intercept the Phoenix instead? How do you think Captain Kirk would have approached and handled Captain Maxwell's actions differently compared to Captain Picard?

    There are actually several ways you could construct this hypothetical so here are my suggested substitutions:

    • Lets say that this is happening in the 23rd century, i.e. Captain Maxwell is the displaced captain.
    • Lets say we're talking about Paul Wesley's Kirk, for two reasons. One, we all currently have a big crush on Paul Wesley, and two, I think there's another interesting choice we can make here...
    • Lets say that Kirk is in command of the USS Farragut and La'an is his XO. Rather than the Galaxy-Nebula showdown where the Enterprise significantly outgunned the Phoenix, Lets say that the Phoenix is Hoover-class, and lets say that the Phoenix is better armed but not as fast as the Farragut.
    • Since we're in the 23rd century lets sub in the Klingons considering the context is the same: last war just ended, everyone is touchy about starting a new one by accident.

    One last bit of food for thought: how does Kirk feel about the Klingons in the early or mid 2260s? If David is alive he's an infant, but is it possible that Kirk was already primed to hate the Klingons due to his experiences in the first Klingon war? Is Kirk more inclined to believe Maxwell because he distrusts the Klingons?

    3
    GuyFleegman Guy Fleegman @startrek.website
    Posts 34
    Comments 107