This device: no. But this isn't a good product for the masses, this device is what the Pixelbook tried to be for Chromebooks, aka the expensive thing to kickstart a platform.

Let's talk about that platform. Chromebooks are for people who need to type but don't need to do any real work. My kid has one through school and when she's serious she whips out an iPad or a Windows PC. We're buying two Macbooks this month because we have new employees who walk around with Chromebooks but discovered they can't do a single fucking thing with our office infrastructure because it's real.

The Pixelbook was an expensive, useless thing with no ecosystem to try and move a cheap, useless thing with no ecosystem upmarket.

That product, I think, is immersion slash flow slash escapism.

Yeah but nobody wants that. Beating my dead horse, Second Life is legit two weeks from crossing the 20-year mark and nobody, ever, in that entire ecosystem has ever cried out for immersion. The tech industry has been fishing around for a killer app for VR since Lawnmower Man and it just don't exist.

It doesn't matter how great you render the world around you - what matters is whether or not you benefit from having something floating virtually in front of you. Here's a theory - everyone is chasing this because we've been promised holograms since Fritz Lang's Metropolis. It's an easy trick to do in camera or in post and so everyone's got it in their minds that volumetric displays are the future. They're also much, much harder than strapping on a set of goggles, though, so goggles we strap. And have done since these things.

I think it was MKBHD who said he'd totally pay per view to watch big sports games in 3D at courtside with the Vision Pro, because it is so convincingly immersive.

Yeah friend just got back from Turkey where he was shooting footage for MSG. The Sphere has the keen advantage of you don't have to do it alone. 'cuz you can pretend that that avatar next to you is a person? But it's not. It's an avatar. And it always will be.

And yes there will probably be people buying this to escape their shitty apartment / environment, but that's what people have done for decades in all sorts of ways.

They haven't been, though. It's not a lack of technology, it's a lack of application. Thirty years after Lawnmower Man and we still have nothing to do in VR. Meta has lost double-digit billions trying to come up with something and they have fuck-all. Three billion Facebook users, headsets sold at a loss, and 24 people in their comedy club.

There are already completely deranged weirdos who spend their working days inside a Quest Pro.

I don't think there are. I've never seen one, I've never heard of one. Can you point to one?

I know how impressive your audio setup is, but I also vaguely know how expensive it is, and if I can get your setup for $3500 in an interactive 3D space instead of building it out?

And there's the fatal mistake.

See, I pay a premium for buttons. I pay for knobs. I pay for faders. And I pay that premium because what makes me fast is muscle memory. I've got three touch screens in front of me right now - I used 'em this morning to cut a DJ session. didn't touch a single touch screen. No, I touched the buttons and the faders and the knobs. And I reached for them and they were there regardless of where I was sitting, and I didn't need to look at my fingers while I did it because my body knows where they are, and uses tactile feedback to tell me what the fuck is going on.

Wanna see the most important mouse in my day?

Six axes of control, I never look at it. I use that thing like a rented mule, all day every day, moving stuff around in 3d space on a pair of $170 HD monitors. I'd turn down 3D if you gave it to me because I don't need it - at middle distance my 3d sense comes from moving my head around or moving the subject around and I just don't need it in three dimensions. I don't even turn on perspective most of the time. My sense of the objects I work on is tactile by virtue of how I move them around minutely through a 2D display.

All the channels and such I have in my life are laid out the way they are because it is logical. I don't want them in 3D, any more than I want a piano keyboard in 3D. Neither does anyone else.