If this is really what went down, it's highly disappointing, and potentially a market-losing choice akin to Microsoft chopping off the internal processing for the original Kinect (which left it far too under-powered to perform its core competencies). VR is already computationally-intensive; adding in the features necessary for AR UX and still trying to achieve a compelling experience on, essentially, mobile hardware is a fool's game (ask anyone who has been underwhelmed by Magic Leap and, again, Microsoft's offerings). From a performance perspective, perhaps the latency of using an wireless connection to a hub was concerning, but if it wasn't, that would have been the only way to achieve the kind of exceptional performance expected of a market-defining product launch of an Apple product. They really shot themselves in the foot on this one, for a guy who was about to jump ship anyway.
>For Ive, who left last year after almost three decades at the company, a more realistic experience was potentially problematic: He didn’t want Apple promoting technology that would take people out of the real world.
And, on a philosophical level, that's not his decision to make. People build artificial worlds to suit or make up for their imperfections; that's just who we are as a species. I notice that those who are successful in the real-life social or corporate world are often horrified at the prospect of those not being central to the average person's experience, but the truth is that they're just as manufactured and distracting from "reality" as anything else. What is reality? I would say, "The base layers of Maslow's hierarchy," with everything above being artifice. Apple's contemporaries have shown that one doesn't need a false 3D overlay of their apartment to be swayed by the unreal; all you need is a willing mind and a text editor/reader. The problem is therefore orthogonal to the medium, and instead a matter of mental self-regulation of the near-limitless bounds of our imaginations. Let's get that figured out and stop trying to hold technology back.
>For Ive, who left last year after almost three decades at the company, a more realistic experience was potentially problematic: He didn’t want Apple promoting technology that would take people out of the real world.
And, on a philosophical level, that's not his decision to make. People build artificial worlds to suit or make up for their imperfections; that's just who we are as a species. I notice that those who are successful in the real-life social or corporate world are often horrified at the prospect of those not being central to the average person's experience, but the truth is that they're just as manufactured and distracting from "reality" as anything else. What is reality? I would say, "The base layers of Maslow's hierarchy," with everything above being artifice. Apple's contemporaries have shown that one doesn't need a false 3D overlay of their apartment to be swayed by the unreal; all you need is a willing mind and a text editor/reader. The problem is therefore orthogonal to the medium, and instead a matter of mental self-regulation of the near-limitless bounds of our imaginations. Let's get that figured out and stop trying to hold technology back.