12 ms·

> So far at least, this is a tech that is being pushed onto people rather than being pulled. I think it's very hard to tell the difference between these things

• _glass 3y ago
  I remember the argument against tablets, I was one of them, I thought because of the weird hand/arm position, this can never be a serious format. It was pushed through several iterations, and now it is accepted.
  • nologic01 3y ago
    I never had the same feeling about tablets. If anything, I am still somewhat surprised that they have (in relative terms) flopped. I was really expecting much more widespread use given it is quite a sweet-spot form factor (small and lightweight to carry around to far more places than a laptop yet offering a good fraction of the laptop functionality)
    • irrational 3y ago
      I was listening to a famous shoe designer give a talk today. While telling a story, he mentioned in passing that he no longer uses paper but does all his design work with a stylus on an iPad. This guy has to be in his 60s or 70s. I was kind of surprised.
    • sangnoir 3y ago
      > I am still somewhat surprised that they have (in relative terms) flopped. I am not - Apple's "Post-PC" vision was clearly not viable to me, despite initially out-selling the entire desktop industry initially. The "What is a computer" ads were cringe.
      • coffeebeqn 3y ago
        They never stopped their PC lines so I don’t think they believed it either.
    • Al-Khwarizmi 3y ago
      In my view it's the opposite: the worst of both worlds. If I need to do work involving lots of typing, precise clicking or sitting for a long amount of time, I'd rather use a laptop (or desktop). And for less demanding stuff, the smartphone (which I'm already carrying everywhere by default) is enough. The tablet sits in an awkward middle and I don't really find much use for it.
      • nologic01 3y ago
        I think the tablet market share agrees with you. We've also got touch sensitive notebook screens that removed the edge from a pure tablet experience. Which is something important to keep in mind when discussing VR adoption. A few people getting overly excited (or overly dismissive) is not necessarily a good predictor.
      • mavhc 3y ago
        Tablet is for playing touch based games and watching Youtube
  • darawk 3y ago
    I thought that about tablets too! I still don't really use them myself, but they just seemed like a dumb interface to me. I do understand their appeal now, though.
  • Al-Khwarizmi 3y ago
    They didn't really live up to the hype, though. It was said that they would replace laptops. While they have their space in the market, sales are in a declining trend, and considerably behind laptops. (I was like you and still am, by the way... I don't find tablets comfortable. I only bought one once, and I think the number of times I actually used it can be counted with both hands).
    • williamcotton 3y ago
      Kids love tablets and parents on trips love that kids love tablets!
      • coffeebeqn 3y ago
        They’re convenient consumption devices. I’d never work on one but I can watch something on it. Personally I have a phone full that niche but I get that having a giant phone is nice to some people. But keeping kids calm during a plane ride is a great use case
    • pjmlp 3y ago
      They surely replaced laptops for artists, digital note taking, journalists, travelling and mobile terminals.
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      • rocketbop 3y ago
        For some people, some of the time. Many journalists will have their MacBooks prized out of the cold dead hands. I travel with my laptop and my iPad Pro never leaves the couch. And how close to most working artists’ realities are those slick Apple keynotes showing sexy young people drawing with their Apple Pencil? I don’t know. Artist is a broad term.
        • pjmlp 3y ago
  • bombolo 3y ago
    They're still fairly rare.
  • utsuro 3y ago
    For all intensive purposes tablets became normalized but are far from widely accepted or bought, Part of the reason it’s only kids and old people often seen using them.
    • brookst 3y ago
      Haven’t been on an airplane recently?
• roomey 3y ago
  I'm sorry, but buying things on the internet wasn't laughed at, if anything people were worried about it cause of their credit card numbers. It was that basis of the dot com boom of the late 90s. Everyone saw the potential and lashed money into it. It didn't deliver at the time, but that dynamic is totally different to vr headsets. Think smart phones, they weren't pushed, people wanted them in a serious way
  • mach1ne 3y ago
    It was laughed at by consumers. There was a time not long ago when buying anything from internet was considered taboo because, you said it, fear of losing your credit card information to scammers.
    • crimsontech 3y ago
      Not just this, but you couldn't see the product. In a store you can look at the product, see how it feels, try it on, test it out, etc. Early online shopping was a big gamble with different stores having different rules. It was often a frustrating experience. Distance selling regulations helped with it a lot. I can buy a product online and if I'm not happy with it, for any reason, I can send it back for a refund. This just isn't the case with shopping in a store. I learned this the hard way twice buying in store from Argos in the UK, only to get home and find I had bought a used product which someone else had returned already. Argos refused to refund or replace the items because they are used. I looked this up at the time and it seemed to be a common occurrence, I can only assume people returned items they bought online and Argos just put them back on the shelves. Had I bought it online and had it delivered to my house I could have returned it. I buy online wherever possible now. Interestingly "click-and-collect" services are not covered by distance selling regulations which is how I got burned twice by Argos.
      • pmontra 3y ago
        > Not just this, but you couldn't see the product. In a store you can look at the product, see how it feels, try it on, test it out, etc. This is why I still buy clothes, shoes and sport gears at stores. Returning products takes time and you still don't have what you wanted to buy. If I buy a new item of the very same model I bought before, that's OK to buy online. Unfortunately companies keep changing models every year.
• unsupp0rted 3y ago
  Is ChatGPT being pushed or pulled?
• twoodfin 3y ago
  Another example: Video-on-demand was pushed for decades and essentially laughed at outside of a narrow niche where it found purchase… until one day it ate the world.
  • eloisant 3y ago
    The issues with video-on-demand were network connectivity, image quality, etc. It wasn't hard to imagine a future where all issues were fixes, and see all the benefits over the brick and mortar video rental. You take an existing common use case, add significant benefits without drawbacks and it becomes a no-brainer. For VR/AR however? Are we going to get to Black Mirror level of a weightless device that projects a huge AR screen without block your field of vision for the rest, and without making you look like a goof? Even if that's the case, the benefit over using a phone screen wouldn't not be as big as getting a huge library of movies to be rented in seconds directly from your living room (compared to driving to Blockbuster during opening hours for a much smaller selection).
    • cloverich 3y ago
      > compared to driving to Blockbuster during opening hours for a much smaller selection And the best movies all being rented out! That's a concept that doesn't even exist anymore. A bit tangential, but good technology has that effect, of making scarcity disappear.
• adverbly 3y ago
  > The promise of VR is to unlock a world free of the constraints of physics. Where physical distance prevents certain styles of communication and interaction - where physical real estate is finite and therefore rivalrous, etc. There are many things that VR, in principle, could solve... See. You just did the exact same thing that Op is talking about. You didn't describe a single actual use case. You just talked about unlocking things or solving problems. You didn't describe any actual problems or any actual things. op's point is that enabling technologies are useless without problems that require the enablement to be solved. And no one is actually demonstrating that any of those exist.
  • kasey_junk 3y ago
    If a set of vr hardware can make it so I can work as ergonomically from my patio as from my desk I will throw money at it.
    • varelse 3y ago
      [dead]
    • coffeebeqn 3y ago
      Doesn’t strapping on a VR helmet kind of counteract the fun of being outside? Might as well just load up a nice outdoor scene as your background environment
      • pohl 3y ago
        One wouldn’t even need to go outside to want it. This could be the ultimate standing desk — one that you can bring with you to the kitchen or to the basket of laundry.
        • ethbr0 3y ago
          Why would you want to bring your desk into the kitchen or to the basket of laundry? Not being flippant -- I really think that's the big question. Current AR/VR (Vision Pro included) lets us do desk things at not-desk places, but why would I want to do that?
• eloisant 3y ago
  The Internet was first available to the public in 1993. 10 years later, in 2003, it was so ingrained in everyone's life that we could no longer imagine living without it. VR is available to the public since the 90's, it's as old as the Internet. Even if you consider that "actually useable VR" started with Occulus it was already 10 years ago. I'm not saying the turning point for VR will never come, but it's certainly taking its time.
  • HDThoreaun 3y ago
    I would say AR is the real use case here and I think the apple headset is the first truly usable example of it.
  • dontupvoteme 3y ago
    Using the internet never required becoming a quasiborg. I like the idea in some cases but it's still absurdly komisch to the vast majority of human beings
• callmeal 3y ago
  >Buying things on the internet, for instance. This was laughed at for quite a while, while a few people and companies were committed to the idea that it was the future. Pretty much every developer (and reader) I know jumped on the OG amazon to buy books. All through the late '90s I (and pretty much everyone I knew) would buy books that were not immediately available in bookstores (remember those?) or libraries on the internet. Never mind that it sometimes took over a week for your books to be delivered, the point was that we could get something we wanted. I have played around with a VR headset, and been part of demos that have fallen flat, because there really is nothing that we want in that experience. This is not to say that it won't be successfull. Advertising and hard sells can be very effective after all.
• acdha 3y ago
  > But many things were pushed before they were pulled. Buying things on the internet, for instance. This was laughed at for quite a while, while a few people and companies were committed to the idea that it was the future When, for a couple of months in 1992? There are always a few people who dislike new ideas but that one was popular from the beginning because it was so easy to understand: just like ordering from a catalog but you get your stuff a week earlier and in most cases can see more info about it before buying. I worked at a web development company in the mid to late 90s and businesses were all over this concept. It saved them money having to pay people to answer the phone or open envelopes, let them do things they couldn’t afford with printed catalogs, and avoided a whole ton of problems around payment.
  • darawk 3y ago
    > When, for a couple of months in 1992? There are always a few people who dislike new ideas but that one was popular from the beginning because it was so easy to understand: just like ordering from a catalog but you get your stuff a week earlier and in most cases can see more info about it before buying. I think you were in a pretty distinct milieu if you thought this was a popular idea in 1992, or any time before, say, 1998. > I worked at a web development company in the mid to late 90s and businesses were all over this concept. It saved them money having to pay people to answer the phone or open envelopes, let them do things they couldn’t afford with printed catalogs, and avoided a whole ton of problems around payment. Yes, I imagine that the companies you interfaced with as an employee of an webdev company in the late 90s were all over this. That is not the same thing as it being generally popular.
    • acdha 3y ago
      > I think you were in a pretty distinct milieu if you thought this was a popular idea in 1992, or any time before, say, 1998. It wasn’t mainstream before people could afford computers and connectivity but nobody serious was laughing at the idea for the reasons I mentioned: it was an obvious extension of what businesses had been doing for over a century and there was tons of prior art (services like CompuServ had online shopping in the 80s). By the mid-90s it was obvious that it was going to happen for easily shipped items as soon as people got online - when Amazon launched in 1995 it had customers around the country almost immediately and the book operation was profitable within a couple of years. > Yes, I imagine that the companies you interfaced with as an employee of an webdev company in the late 90s were all over this. That is not the same thing as it being generally popular. Our customers weren’t tech companies but brick and mortar retail, banks, manufacturers, etc. They knew that this was an easy way to sell direct to customers - which cut out some hefty margins charged by major stores & catalogs - and try new products. The opportunity was obvious even to people who weren’t in the industry — absolutely nobody was laughing at that, although there were dotcoms of the “lose money on every sale, make it up in volume” persuasion who everyone knew were doomed.