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1. Embed this notice
   Eaton (eaton@phire.place)'s status on Monday, 05-Feb-2024 03:20:58 JST Eaton

   The iPhone’s success has really given birth to an ecosystem of bros who dismiss any critique of any half-baked tech solutionism with “they said the iPhone would flop, TOO.”

   • Embed this notice
     Eaton (eaton@phire.place)'s status on Monday, 05-Feb-2024 03:30:36 JST Eaton

     in reply to

     Hearing it about the Apple Vision Pro now is interesting, because all the impressive tech aside, it’s in a very different kind of category. The iPhone was Apple entering a big and active market whose benefits and utility were well established. 2007 era dismissals of the iPhone weren’t critiques of *the utility of cell phones*, they were centered on performance and feature parity between the iphone and existing products like the RAZR, Palm PDAs, and BlackBerries.

   • Embed this notice
     Eaton (eaton@phire.place)'s status on Monday, 05-Feb-2024 03:34:40 JST Eaton

     in reply to

     As far as I can tell, there’s no question that Apple has made the best VR/AR headset on the market. For it to be comparable to the iPhone launch, you have to consider it as a competitor to *monitors and traditional input devices*. And that’s where its cons outside of extremely specific niches loom very large, just like existing VR/AR devices.

   • Embed this notice
     Eaton (eaton@phire.place)'s status on Monday, 05-Feb-2024 03:36:31 JST Eaton

     in reply to

     • Yvonne Lam

     @yvonnezlam A true classic :D

   • Embed this notice
     Yvonne Lam (yvonnezlam@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 05-Feb-2024 03:36:32 JST Yvonne Lam

     in reply to

     @eaton It is beside your point, but you've reminded me of a favorite sequence from a favorite movie:

     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49BDynDH9K8

   • Embed this notice
     Eaton (eaton@phire.place)'s status on Monday, 05-Feb-2024 03:41:40 JST Eaton

     in reply to

     At some point in the future if they’re able to do things like extend the battery life dramatically, pul, the size of the device down to “eyeglasses” instead of “XXL snow goggles”, and so on, I think it’ll be a game changer for broad general purpose AR, but right now it’s Newton-like rather than iPhone-like.

   • Embed this notice
     Eaton (eaton@phire.place)'s status on Monday, 05-Feb-2024 03:42:42 JST Eaton

     in reply to

     • Derek Powazek 🐐

     @fraying “to be fair they said the CueCat would fail, too”

   • Embed this notice
     Derek Powazek 🐐 (fraying@xoxo.zone)'s status on Monday, 05-Feb-2024 03:42:44 JST Derek Powazek 🐐

     in reply to

     @eaton GOD YES THIS and it's such lazy thinking because you can say it in reply to anything.

   • Embed this notice
     Tim Carmody (tim@phire.place)'s status on Monday, 05-Feb-2024 05:24:51 JST Tim Carmody

     in reply to

     @eaton also the cost! The iPhone took off in no small part because it became much more capable and also widely available on multiple carriers for about $200 new (w/a carrier subsidy). If the original iPhone had stayed static, it would have taken a lot longer to take over the smartphone market

   • Embed this notice
     Eaton (eaton@phire.place)'s status on Monday, 05-Feb-2024 05:53:20 JST Eaton

     in reply to

     • Tim Carmody

     @tim yep. Even adjusted for inflation, the vision pro is in “high end laptop” range not “consumer device replacement” range, which doesn’t invalidate it but makes its success path very, very different