VR gaming is a niche even among hardcore gamers. There’s some value in spatial computing for just being a more ergonomic way to do computer stuff (i.e. not being in a fixed position all day, being able to walk around while you work) but it’d need to be able to hit everything a Mac can do with no compromises to be worth it at that price (and at the cost of making you look goofy). So far it seems like it’s only found real utility in some very specific industrial and scientific research contexts, which is very cool but probably isn’t the lane a mass market consumer products manufacturer wants as their play long-term.

I find the “true wireless” form factor finnicky and comically easy to lose and easy to drop. I don’t really see much utility in it either aside from the cool technology flex. If they’d put the modern audio quality and noise cancelling on the BeatsX (and the more neutral AirPods response curve) I’d be first in line.

In fact, fashionable youths these days are wearing those vintage Casios which come in at 35mm to 39mm.

The cellular Apple Watch would be a great cell phone if all you want is to use your phone as a phone + iPod. But it’s hamstrung by its software and being forced to be anchored to an iPhone to be activated just makes it unsuitable as a primary device. We’d probably all be healthier as a society if we didn’t have the black rectangle of doom in our pockets all the time.

I’d love a cellular Apple Watch that’s elongated enough to have a headphone jack (lol) and all day battery life. It’d be fine even if it was meant to stay in my pocket instead of on the wrist.

There’s trade-offs, but in most cases the Apple call has tended to err on the side of ease of use and ease of access to the mass market at the expense of flexibility and versatility for tinkerers. It’s good for a market to have companies willing to make different sets of trade-offs to please different segments of the market rather than all herding around the preferences of a cluster of nerds.

The real problem is that the rest of the industry has “Apple envy” and just copies everything they think they can get away with instead of making their own sets of trade-offs.

Excel is the same way. I’ve been an excel power user as well as a Sheets power user and the latter just never managed to enable the level of speedy keyboard navigation Excel could. I can almost work blindfolded in Excel.

I think where the actual distraction is comes from the level of detail. It would actually benefit from just having silhouettes or lower resolution “suggestions” of what’s there. It’s maybe just the buildings on the corners of turns or specific landmarks you’d want fully rendered so people could follow ambiguous directions like “Turn left at church, but not the Methodist church the Episcopal one!”

I was childless and petless then though. The thought of squeezing everything in between school drop-offs, pick-ups, after-school scheduled activities, and dog walks is when things get really annoying.

Now maybe my employer has reason to dislike that I’m probably like 80% of the worker I would have been if we were in office, but the 80% has been enough to exceed expectations on my performance reviews so there doesn’t seem to be a problem. He has the equivalent of an F-150 that he only ever uses to commute to the office. People seem to be into that.

Killing USAID probably put a drag on that slowdown by reducing access to family planning resources, but we’ll have to see exactly how much in the coming years.