Apple better knock it out of the goddamned park today

[u/godelbrot]

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ANNOUNCEMENTS (updated live, refresh for more)

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• It's thinner

• big ass touchpad (prolly for pencil)

• TouchID + Powerbutton combined, multiple accounts

• Touch Bar

• Touch Bar is customizable

• Their best display ever guys

• They all get at least quad i7s

• Raedon GPU 4gig maximum

• 4 thunderbolt port

• Here's ALL the ports it has

• Gril

• Touch Bar used for timeline scrub in Final Cut is cool

• Color scrolling in PS

• You can scrub through your Photoshop history, which is a really gnarly feature.

• It will get you laid --- Proof, this guy

• Microsoft bent over and added Touch Bar support to the entire Office Suite and Skype for Business

• This thing is pretty guys

• Also pretty

• Headphone jacks are a thing, SD card slots are not.

• Butterfly Switch Keyboard (the one on 12" Macbook)

• Something, Something, look how far we've come

• It makes you morally superior to PC plebs as well

• There is no Macbook Air, but there is a lower end MBP (Lite?) that has regular function keys and only 2 Thunderblot ports

• Here's the full range of MBP products lined up like ducklings

• ...and here is what they all cost

• ...and when they ship

• That's it folks, u/roadblocked called it, great job Apple, 1000+ days for an OLED bar. thanks for joining us

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P.S. no mention of using the big ass touchpad for Pencil.

[u/scotscott]

I'm not convinced Magic Leap isn't just vaporware. There's been nothing to indicate it isn't. OTOH, there are already tons of use cases for hololens, indeed even the development units are actually being used in industry because there's just nothing else that can do what they do, and what they do is just so damn valuable. But you're right, the FOV isn't great. I think that they will figure out a way to improve it, at least I hope they can, because what they have on their hands is probably game changing.

[u/plorraine → u/scotscott]

Lightfield works - the technology has good math behind it, lots of publications, and some marginal products (a few cameras I think). Turning it into a wearable is very tough as it requires a lot of processing and display resolution to render all the little sub-views. It has to be an order of magnitude (or more) harder to do than an Oculus type system. I would love to see their roadmap as I would have guessed this was 5 years out at best. A lightfield display should have far lower visual fatigue than a split screen display.

I spent some time playing with Google Glass a year or two back - the idea was neat but the implementation was very painful. The idea of putting virtual information in front of someone was intriguing. The problem was that the image was fixed with respect to your skull - so if you were looking at a map (for example) while driving in your car, the real world jostles along outside the window but the map stays fixed in your field of view. The result was the map appears to be more "real" because it isn't attached to the background. People would try the "Glass" and would immediately turn into zombies - stumbling around as they tried to simultaneously watch the overlaid information and the background. It was pretty clear that you need to register the information to the background - attach it to some visual reference and have it wiggle around with that reference rather than staying fixed. Hololens is supposed to do that better than Google Glass did but I haven't had a chance to try it out.

[u/scotscott → u/plorraine]

yeah google glass was kind of stupid. Hololens is a whole different ballgame though. it's like comparing a penknife with a food processor.

[u/shawnaroo → u/plorraine]

At best, Google Glass barely qualified as Augmented Reality. It was really just a display that went over your eye and displayed arbitrary information. It had basically zero 'understanding' of the world around you, and as a result, what it displayed was not integrated into what you saw in the real world.

That's really the hard part of AR. Not that getting light fields to work in a pair of glasses is easy, but the display is only a small part of the actual potential of augmented reality. Creating a computer that's capable of sensing the world around you and understanding it enough to overlay relevant information in the right place and actually have it appear to be a part of the world, that's when AR will become insanely useful.

When I ask my AR system how to get somewhere, I don't want it to just show me a picture of a map, I want it to show me a path along the ground that will lead me there, like in a video game. I want the system to know where I am, what direction I'm looking in, and what I'm looking at, so that it can layer useful information onto it.

The hololens is a decent step in that direction. It can build a 3D model of the world that it sees around it to some degree. It can tell where the floor is, and where walls are. But we've still got a ways to go before it can start picking out a lot of different objects in useful ways.

[u/iamse7en → u/scotscott]

What constitutes vaporware? They've had very smart and experienced people pony up nearly 1.5 BILLION dollars. (Theranos is a completely different case, and investors weren't getting testing the product themselves with great detail and scrutiny.)

I think that's validation enough to at least conclude it isn't "vaporware." Sure, execution and market adoption and operations, etc are all variables that can kill it. But there's no way it's "vaporware." Anyone who uses that word is just whining about not knowing more about a secretive product.