I’m not sure I agree, but I’ll do my best to argue the position.
The neural net software algorithms have been around for decades. What made LLM’s feasible are the hardware advances to achieve unprecedented scale, just barely providing the ability (at great cost) to train today’s LLM models. Transformer architecture might be called a software innovation, but RWKV Raven gets similar performance to transformers and is built on decades-old RNN technology. So it is the hardware that was far more instrumental than the software in achieving LLM’s.
Counter to that argument: had google not done neural net research for google translate and proved the transformer approach scaled and performed well in their “attention is all you need” paper, people wouldn’t have spent the money to train foundation LLM models and we would not be having this discussion, so the software really mattered more than the hardware.
Your content is extremely prolific, good work! I think your thumbnails specifically do a great job of selling the content.
Having a focus on numbers can definitely be caustic; at the end of the day it's about the whims of hundreds, thousands, or millions(!) of people, and even the algorithms in charge of leading them about.
If you make good content, you'll be appreciated for that content regardless of what the numbers reflect.
assuming that handtracking doesnt confuse you eating popcorn with pinching gesture. But anyway i hope your headset doesnt smell of popcorn and coffee afterwards
As a quest pro owner, I can tell you that trying to do anything with your hands, such as take a sip of coffee, is extremely awkward, and so is the act of attempting to pick up the controllers after setting them down to do something. Same goes for handing off the headset for someone else to have a turn. There’s always this super awkward controller transfer and they fumble to orient them the right way in their hands, frequently accidentally swapping left and right and then discovering it’s hard to swap them without dropping them because you have to hold both in one hand.
Not having the controllers at all would be very nice for this. Not sure it’s worth losing the haptics though.
And given how little you actually touch the headset, you’d really have to be some kind of sloppy maniac to end up with it “smelling of popcorn and coffee.”
Another annoying thing about having your hands full is when you want to take the headset off briefly, eg to answer the phone. You need to find a place to set the controllers so you can use both hands to take it off. And unless you’re using passthrough, you’re blind to where you can set them down. Then when you put it back on, you need to then find the controllers. My usual routine is to intentionally break the guardian barrier so I can see well enough to find a table to put the controllers on. Without controllers, I’d just reach up and remove the headset in 2 seconds.
There’s a reason that all the drinks containers that Apple showed in their videos on the Vison headset had closed lids and straws.
You can’t easily drink out of an open topped container whilst wearing a headset, so without highlighting that (minor) issue, they wanted to plant the idea of having a sealed container with a straw on your desk as a solution before you ran into the problem yourself.
I worked at an electronics retailer in high school for a couple years, my job was to sell laptops. I sold a lot of laptops. Nerds like us who post comments on hacker news can have a hard time understanding the mind of the vast majority of regular people who simply could not care less about trackpad quality. It's just not a thing most people even think about.
I think the average person does care about and notice quality, its just a question of if they can afford it. When I look around the coworking space, its almost universally macbooks. And these aren't tech people mostly.
But the uni student with a budget that only buys half a macbook doesn't get to care about trackpad quality.
Normal people don't say things like "The trackpad is unresponsive and the wifi drivers unreliable" They say "I just don't like it" "It feels kinda crap"
Most people don't care about 'drive shaft quality' or 'steering wheel quality' in their cars either, but you can be sure it will be taken good care of by engineering, and subconsciously noticed.
There's truth in your point. People do feel the difference even when they don't notice it, but it doesn't seem like that's always (or even often?) reflected in the bottom line. Nissan sells an awful lot of cars with their crappy CVT transmissions and crossovers continue to be hugely popular in the US.
If I may, I’d make a slight modification to your statement.
The vast majority of people don’t care about trackpad quality when it comes to shopping.
They do care when they *use* it but they either take it for granted when it works well, or it’s too small a papercut to trade in their device and buy/research a new one.
but it all combines together to make a smoother experience when using it, and it can convert people as a part of a whole.
Yes, they buy bottom of the barrel and, if it doesn’t work, assume that is where state of the art is.
Few months back I’ve seen anecdotal posts somewhere that new generations of managers are trying to shift computing to phones and tablets because they’re “better than laptops”. No one enforces a delightfulness standard for Windows laptops, and it is creating a skewed perception.
The delightfulness factor is something that’s a big deal and that technical people trivialize and can’t be expressed adequately on paper for non-technical people.
I used to be a die hard Android and Windows/Linux power user. I’d scoff at all the stuff people would mention on iOS/macOS because “well I can do that too if I do this and that”. But then I switched back to iOS/macOS for a project and a lot of the papercuts being solved out of the box was actually such a huge gain.
That’s not to say Apple is perfect. They can improve a ton too (give me a proper path bar in finder please!), but (and I say this often) the products they make are more than the sum of their parts.
but of course none of that is something that is evident when you’re shopping for a product.
Plus, the question one would ask is: “can this do this banal task?” not “which one does this banal task better”. So I see why it’s not prioritized on other platforms.
Most people are just shopping for capability and specs. The delightfulness is too ephemeral to consider until you encounter it yourself.
> or it’s too small a papercut to trade in their device and buy/research a new one.
Most of the time they don't notice at all unless its truly atrocious or truly mind blowing (and whilst I can firmly say the macbook trackpad is the best I've ever used, lets be honest its not mind blowing). They might notice things don't feel as smooth as it did on their macbook (assuming they even had one last, if not how can you tell something is worse if its all you've ever had), but they're unlikely to narrow this down to the trackpad.
The vast majority of people don’t care enough to pay for it.
This is why people balk at the price of Apple Vision even though Apple managed to miniaturize a Macbook into a visor and added LiDAR, two 4K screens, a separate depth sensor, several other cameras, and even a 3D camera to it
That said, Mark’s devices aren’t bad for the price. They’ve been the best overall VR headsets for the past 2-3 years.
Apple did manage to patent the pythagorean theorem (“pinch zoom” uses the hypotenuse of a right triangle as the zoom factor), but, from what I can tell, the bad windows touchpad thing is self-inflicted.
What boggled my mind were the trackpads on some laptops that weren't just average, but actively bad.
The worst by far I've ever used was on a circa-2007 HP convertible laptop that ran Vista. Despite it costing more than some models of MacBook at the time, the thing was built with that cheap creaky "fake metal" glossy plastic, and that included its trackpad. The trackpad would've been bad enough just like that with the smooth plastic gripping at your fingertips, but to make it worse its surface had inverse dimples, and because its touch sensitivity wasn't all that sensitive you had to apply more pressure when using it which pressed your fingers down into the dimples and made them stick even worse. Oh and of course, as was customary for non-Apple laptops at that point it was also tiny.
It's almost as if it was someone's job to make that thing's trackpad terrible to use. Just mind boggling.
Windows led to a few market failures like this. One that comes to mind is high DPI displays. In terms of pixels per inch, today’s 1080p displays are laughable by 2001 standards.
It has been a quarter century since high DPI CRTs were affordable, and 20+ years since LCDs were.
However, Windows wasn’t compatible with such things until at least 2010, so here we are a quarter century later, and laptop lines still often only offer meh-for-the-late-90’s displays.
A more recent example is suspend resume. I’m not sure of the details, but I am sure that intel will never do better than S3 sleep from ten years ago, and Microsoft pushed them to change how sleep works.
It's certainly improved over the past few years to a point where they're comparable to Macbooks. Windows Precision drivers and large glass trackpads are slowly becoming common in mid to high tier Windows laptops.
I have an XPS 15, the touchpad is fine. When I use a macbook I don't think "oh my god the touchpad is great", although that might just be because I'm too busy thinking "oh my god this OS is terrible".
Why does every comment chain devolve into this(although you admitted it)? Apple touch pads are an improvement over all other laptop brand touchpads. But then this fallacy is the only response.
"These rounded corners in the UI really make me not care about the touch pad"
"I wish I could care about touchpads, my ssd won't replace itself without a soldering iron though!"
"They have touchpads? I use a mouse"
Great. Apple touchpads are next generation compared to most other laptops.
I was confused by "touchpad", I assume it's the trackpad ?
More extensive touch support, like having touch support on the laptop display alleviates a lot of the trackpad needs. It's still nice when it smooth and responsive, but looking at the the Surface devices for instance, it's nice enough.
