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This comment thread will go down in history along with the famous HN Dropbox thread. This thing is incredible and will eventually crush the iPhone. Solves iPho

by sam 3y ago

This comment thread will go down in history along with the famous HN Dropbox thread. This thing is incredible and will eventually crush the iPhone. Solves iPhone addiction while retaining the utility of an iPhone? Solid gold.

crazygringo 3y ago
The thing is, most people don't actually want to solve their phone addiction even if they say they do. In reality, they want to read news while waiting at a doctor's office, play games while they take the subway, and see Instagram updates from friends throughout the day. And if you already want a less capable device, it's called an Apple Watch, but it comes with a little screen that is way more useful than laser projection, and will soon surely have a powerful LLM it can access. (And paired with AirPods it does a much better job preserving your audio privacy.) So it's hard to see how this is going to succeed, when Apple can just copy the good part (LLM) as part of the Watch.
dbish 3y ago
Apple watch? Cellular mode allows this, has siri built in, can handle calling/messaging/etc. People don't want to replace their phones though.
troupo 3y ago
> along with the famous HN Dropbox thread. Most people saw the utility and the use cases of Dropbox even when it launched. What's the utility and use case of this? What problem does it solve?
killerdhmo 3y ago
Maybe in the long term view - people correctly identifying that Dropbox had no differentiator (to quote Steve "this is a feature, not a product').
superluserdo 3y ago
IMO "Solves iPhone addiction" is more or less a rephrasing of "people will quickly get bored of this". It's just a smartphone, except you can't run third-party software, can't directly interface with it, and can't connect it to other machines. And instead of holding an N-million pixel, M-million-colour, extremely high-constrast display directly in your hand, you have to indirectly project (meaning extremely LOW contrast) a single-colour display onto your hand from a projector that's shaking around being clipped to your clothes. The only single hypothetical upside I can see to this tech is that it might lower the two-second delay in looking at my phone caused by putting my hand in my pocket before raising my hand, but you could say that that goes against the goal of solving phone addiction.
concinds 3y ago
> iPhone addiction This is not a thing. "Screens" aren't 'separating us from one another', or 'distracting us'; that's fuzzy verbalistic nonsense, made up by marketers who want to sell you non-phones, and bloviating op-ed columnists who don't have a clue. It's so ridiculous, that everyone has seen the memes debunking it.[0][1] True invasiveness is expressed as: "how long does it take me to do this thing I want to do?" In other words, you need a human-computer interface that reduces friction as close to zero as possible. The phone won because it's the best at that. The "pin" is orders of magnitude worse, so it won't catch on. [0]: https://xkcd.com/610/ https://xkcd.com/610/ [1]: https://imgflip.com/i/1swr7j https://imgflip.com/i/1swr7j

by sam 3y ago

crazygringo 3y ago

The thing is, most people don't actually want to solve their phone addiction even if they say they do. In reality, they want to read news while waiting at a doctor's office, play games while they take the subway, and see Instagram updates from friends throughout the day. And if you already want a less capable device, it's called an Apple Watch, but it comes with a little screen that is way more useful than laser projection, and will soon surely have a powerful LLM it can access. (And paired with AirPods it does a much better job preserving your audio privacy.) So it's hard to see how this is going to succeed, when Apple can just copy the good part (LLM) as part of the Watch.

dbish 3y ago

Apple watch? Cellular mode allows this, has siri built in, can handle calling/messaging/etc. People don't want to replace their phones though.

troupo 3y ago

> along with the famous HN Dropbox thread. Most people saw the utility and the use cases of Dropbox even when it launched. What's the utility and use case of this? What problem does it solve?

killerdhmo 3y ago

Maybe in the long term view - people correctly identifying that Dropbox had no differentiator (to quote Steve "this is a feature, not a product').

superluserdo 3y ago

IMO "Solves iPhone addiction" is more or less a rephrasing of "people will quickly get bored of this". It's just a smartphone, except you can't run third-party software, can't directly interface with it, and can't connect it to other machines. And instead of holding an N-million pixel, M-million-colour, extremely high-constrast display directly in your hand, you have to indirectly project (meaning extremely LOW contrast) a single-colour display onto your hand from a projector that's shaking around being clipped to your clothes. The only single hypothetical upside I can see to this tech is that it might lower the two-second delay in looking at my phone caused by putting my hand in my pocket before raising my hand, but you could say that that goes against the goal of solving phone addiction.

concinds 3y ago

> iPhone addiction This is not a thing. "Screens" aren't 'separating us from one another', or 'distracting us'; that's fuzzy verbalistic nonsense, made up by marketers who want to sell you non-phones, and bloviating op-ed columnists who don't have a clue. It's so ridiculous, that everyone has seen the memes debunking it.[0][1] True invasiveness is expressed as: "how long does it take me to do this thing I want to do?" In other words, you need a human-computer interface that reduces friction as close to zero as possible. The phone won because it's the best at that. The "pin" is orders of magnitude worse, so it won't catch on. [0]: https://xkcd.com/610/ https://xkcd.com/610/ [1]: https://imgflip.com/i/1swr7j https://imgflip.com/i/1swr7j