Increasingly Familiar Apple Lust Objects for 2016 and onwards

A swing…and a miss. Good try though

From where did they build their expectations?

Increasingly Unfamiliar Apple Cringe Objects

no surprise. regular people aren't going to adopt AR/VR until it's the size and weight of a pair of sunglasses.

I tried the demo at a store -- the eye tracking and peripheral-free gestures are mind-readingly "this changes everything" magical but yeah, it's so heavy that the thought of watching a whole movie in it immediately felt like a chore.

They'd already separated out a heavy, bulky battery pack -- why not offload the computing hardware and weight itself onto a separate portable computer? they could have made the headpiece lighter and possibly carved out a headless portable mac category for people who don't even care about VR.

If that also helped cut down on development time, they could have released this during the pandemic and likely would have definitively "won" the VR space but maybe having your signature product be emotionally tied to a global catastrophe is off-brand for Apple?

I mean they launched the iPod right after 9/11 and that was OK

Ha! I guess in retrospect U2 did more reputational damage to Apple than Al Qaeda

Philip... thank you

I dont think it’s the computing hardware that’s the weight but rather the glass and metal accents (purely aesthetic) vs thr quest’s use of plastic

M4 iPads, great, my M1 iPad is just way too slow at reading PDFs and watching YouTube videos.

haha i was gonna say. tremendous upgrades for something that is user-hostile for anything other than watching netflix in bed with

even that isn't ideal if you want to eat some popcorn at the same time

Apple deletes San Francisco highway to better advertise new iPads

https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/apple-ipad-launch-sf-highway-19444449.php

That new version of Final Cut getting some screen time

new Logic Pro adds AI!!!!!!

AI, anyone?

"Hey Siri, call goomah"
"CALL MOM?"
"No! Call goomah!"
"CALLING MOM"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liNG2--GczI

I was going to outburst "I remember when you saw actual code in the WWDC keynote" until I realized that it's like complaining that MTV doesn't show videos anymore.

when they led with the Vision Pro stuff I thought for a moment they might do the funniest thing: tell the devs they'll get more API features on all the other platforms as soon as they start shipping apps for the headset

Apple takes a page from AllTrails and will have hiking maps of all 63 U.S. National Parks available.

Which is great, if you live within 1000 miles of Cupertino. The rest of us will be using them to get around the city of Hot Springs and the Gateway Arch museum, I guess.

The popular location app will also have voice guidance for trail directions

I'm bringing bear spray just for the moment I hear Siri yapping in the Flatside Wilderness.

the only national parks are on the west coast? news to me!

well they’re very concentrated in the west. here in the northeast we have acadia and that’s it.

the only national parks are on the west coast? news to me!

Who said they were?

You said this hiking trails feature is only useful within 1000 miles of cupertino

Hmmm mmmm. And you know what I didn't say?

https://i.imgur.com/dwuAkAs.png

Look, I love national parks. I love to hike. But it's a little unnecessary to include all this!

It sounds like Apple seeing a cool app out there and attempting to blow them out of the water in some sort of hamfisted way.

Hahaha I think it’s very telling that Apple is now at the point where one can say “this app is most useful within 1000 miles of Apple’s headquarters” and everyone assumes it’s because of an app limitation and not because the dataset powering the app fits that paradigm

pour one out for platt national park

Hiking the St. Louis arch

Which is great, if you live within 1000 miles of Cupertino. The rest of us will be using them to get around the city of Hot Springs and the Gateway Arch museum, I guess.

can someone dumb this down for me

they're not really hiking locations

Great Smoky Mountains National Park is the most visited national park in the country!

Look I'm all for shitting down Apple's neck but I don't think this is a sound line of critique

many of the national parks not within 1000 miles of cupertino kind of suck (i.e. gateway arch is a manmade monument that was made into a national park for political reasons and that the NPS was against making into a park, hot springs is actually a resort, indiana dunes is just like a lake beach? and cuyahoga valley is a superfund site) and as mh said don't really have hiking

Also I love cell service please, sir, tell me, is there cell service in gates of the arctic?

Sir, I must know, do batteries do well in the cold?

Sir, I can no longer wait, tell me what the hiking trails are for the reefs in the US Virgin Islands

i didn't mention congaree, which i actually like, but many people dismiss as just a big swamp. for comparison, compare the number of trails available in congarees in alltrails with those available in, say, glacier:

https://www.alltrails.com/parks/us/south-carolina/congaree-national-park
https://www.alltrails.com/parks/us/montana/glacier-national-park

anyway i don't really agree with pp's criticism but i understand where it's coming from. this is a feature that is much more likely to be dreamt up in cupertino than in hoboken. but as a parks guy i think it's cool and welcome it. and it gave me an excuse to talk a bit about congaree, which has a mosquito meter.

when america is put on the scale and judged by the angel of history, i think it will be known for making two contributions to the sum of all good things in the world:

-public stewardship of public lands, and
-baseball.

everything else america has done has been a net drag on the world, an oily putrescence, an abscess in the brain. the decline of the empire cannot happen soon enough.

i mean we can argue about origins given any number of factors but you’re missing some pretty big musical gifts to the world…

all the good stuff is cancelled out by improv comedy

I have at least a dozen lines of criticism about national parks, the origins of the entire environmental movement, the Department of the Interior, and unequal access along usual race and class lines. Who has the ability to take time off from work and go somewhere where they'll need an offline hiking map on their phone?

I love the parks. I love hiking. I'm really happy that a National Monument moved in up the street from me last month. I think smartphones in general have affected who is doing what out in the backcountry and all the apps: AllTrails, Peakery, TripAdvisor, etc. have amplified all that long before Apple finally getting around to building in hiking maps.

My prediction is that more people will sacrifice themselves on Mount Baldy and search and rescue will go above and beyond to get them out of trouble.

Gawd, this is what happens when you have a complete snoozefest of a keynote.

but you’re missing some pretty big musical gifts to the world…

I'll put my map of the Channel Islands right next to my free U2 album in my phone.

Channel Islands is the absolute worst national park in the USA:

1 hour ferry slog through often rough, open water
Islands are absolutely plastered in rat/seal/pelican shit
The surrounding water is insanely treacherous and a great white feeding zone

Scratch that: The Channel Islands are the U2 of USA National Parks

Flagged for nonsense

https://i.imgur.com/R4UMomN.jpeg

I dl'd the beta of iOS18 and it is buggy af but I'll be off the grid (no cell service/wifi) next week so I wanted to make sure I have that alltrails offline integration plus satellite text capability. I hope I get an update push by the weekend.

ps: JimmyTM, I will be at an actually amazing national park, you can have the ratshit islands lol.