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.

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.

Also at this point they don't give a damn about quality controls. E.g. there was a time when you could order shoes online rather reliably. Today? What you get in the mail is barely correlated with the size you specified on the order.

From the last 10 days: we order two pairs for our kids, size X and Y - which we selected by actually following measurement instructions of the shoe company. When the order comes, it it turns out size X is too big for the younger kid, size Y is too small for the older. We return those, and order again, this time sizes (X-1) and (Y+1). What we got is... the (X-1) shoes were identical to X shoes (therefore still too large); the (Y+1) shoes were like Y+3 - way overshooting the target.

This was same models, same company, with no logistical confusion according to labels. Just one of multiple similar events we had (and many more I heard about from others) where the size of shoes received was pretty much random. So this is one category of goods that we're going back to buying in person.

And yes, that means dragging a 1.5 y.o. and a 4 y.o. into a shoe store in a large mall - the very one I mentioned above. Yes, our kids will likely get overwhelmed by lights and wares and ads, and start making all kinds of scenes. I don't care. If the store doesn't want a scene, they should not be routinely fucking up their order sizes.

I have never experienced this buying shoes from both big and small brands. Adidas, Nike, Allbirds, Converse, John Elliott, Beckett Simonon, etc. Maybe kids shoes are a different ballgame?

Also never experienced this with clothes. I buy everything online and it always fits as I would expect from the measurements listed on the website.

I do find shoes sometimes have inconsistent sizing between brands, but they usually say something like "runs 1/2 size small". Worst comes to worst I can compare size charts with a pair that I already own.

It's never a crapshoot where I can't rely on their sizing at all.

That's a distinctly American problem. As is the (over)use of credit cards in general.

Here in Europe, the main worry was simply paying in advance and not getting the item. Early on, the popular choice was just paying to the postman on delivery - it moved some of the risk on to the seller, but it was balanced out by the seller making this option ~50% more expensive. It took some time for people to get used to dispute processes in marketplaces, and then for the laws to be updated with additional safeguards (e.g. 14 days no-questions-asked return policy for online purchases, which I think is an EU directive), and at some point, transferring money in advance of delivery became a normal practice. That was even before payment gateways, or even smartphones, became ubiquitous.

There is no demand for VR outside gaming. Efforts to try and create that demand are failing.

And the first mobile phone was sold to the public in 1949. It took time to catch on. People needed it to be convenient and accessible. VR/AR is neither convenient nor accessible today.

You can use your iPhone camera for an AR experience, but your hands are occupied holding the phone so you can't do much at all when using it.

The whole meta verse thing seems like it was 100% hype building by people with money invested in it and none of the platforms had any users.

If VR was so compelling, people would buy the headset to get the experience. It's not so they don't.

Impossible. My extended circle which leans tech overall is maybe 4%. And many just tried it and aren’t really actively using it.

They’re counting numbers very funny.

Half the population is above 45, and it’s not above 2% for that cohort they barely hear about it on the news and have no idea how to even sign up for it.

Having seen this before, I don't think the numbers are incredible. Everyone I know has signed up for an OpenAI account, and probably 25% are paying for one. Granted I'm in the HN bubble, but this is so 1995.

Most gaming will be casual, in VR just like non-VR.

But there are much better and deeper games in both cases.

VR just isn't that wanted by average people. "Immersion" just isn't a magic panacea that older execs seem to think it is, and being in a "virtual world" while you play most games don't make them better games! Oddly enough, most people don't play videogames to emulate real activities, but rather to play games, with their own made up rules and concepts. FIFA on the Xbox is nothing like actual soccer, but the players prefer it like that, and a FIFA that requires you to kick the ball with your real foot and costs hundreds of dollars is NOT better as a game, or more fun to most people, than "flat" FIFA.

We literally already went over this with the Wii; shoehorning in "realism" into games that don't benefit from it just makes shitty games.

Actually its more like 30 years.

People get too focused on devices and the recent storyline around Google/Oculus/Meta/Apple etc. Any and all devices are and will always be WIP, they get refined once there is strong demand in the direction of that demand. The concept and experierence of immersive / interactive computing is much older and we should not ignore the lessons it may try to teach us.

What we have here is a new round of device refinement in anticipation of strong demand for an alternative computer interface that did not materialize in several decades - even though it could have.

It may be that VR is an exception. Some people are arguing that there is some sort of threshold that needs to be reached. Its possible.

But this is not the usual pattern. People are extremely adept and keen at glossing over grave limitations and filling in the blanks if a technology helps them achieve something relevant to them.

How much money has ChatGPT invested? Billions.

GPT1 is from 2018, but neural networks have more than 70 years now. VR have more than 30 years since the early prototypes.

If I could replace my monitor with a portable device that would grant me huge virtual desktop space I would pay 3500$

Right now I'm waiting to see the feedback and for the early adopter issues to get ironed out.

But I'd say this demand is far greater than gaming. Being able to work from any rental where I can plop a keyboard and laptop without having to deal with bad desk height and non adjustable chair/lack of monitors is huge - it would literally mean I could work from anywhere.

Right now I can't - and I've tried many times. Experience is terrible and after a few days of bad desk/chair combo, even lugging a small 24inch monitor in the car, I get insane cramps/headaches from neck strain or back pain from bad posture.

If VR can solve this I know a lot of people would buy into that.

People keep parroting this line, but have you ever actually tried this? There's way more to discomfort in VR than just pixel density.

But it's been like 7 years at this point ? If Apple has decided to launch it I would assume they worked out the kinks.

I'm not buying it until I see enough evidence it's usable (doubt I'll get to try it for 8 hours without buying one).

But the practicality of not being able to see the people around me gave me the screaming heeby-jeebies. I just wasn't comfortable not knowing who was near me.

I will happily have 3 monitors in realspace just so I can turn my head to see who's near me.

How big was the demand for the first mobile phone?

ChatGPT was the first chatbot to cross the magic threshold, after which point consumers enthusiastically adopted it.

AI has been around since the 50s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_artificial_intellig...

VR has been around since roughly a decade later: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_reality#History

... AR / VR may have the same promise. But the implementation is sufficiently far away, that most people look at it and think "Wow, really cool toy. I don't have a use for it right now", and walk away. They'll be back if / when that tipping point arrives, but unlike ChatGPT, its not here, not yet.

And like... are you sure about being able to buy stuff online? I remember when being able to buy pizza online was new and there was a TV show in Japan about some crazy guy trying to survive off of stuff he ordered on the Internet, and the entire concept was just not a thing normal people were into... remember: the dot-com "boom" was actually a bubble and a lot of the stuff that came out during it failed.

Additionally they seem to always pick the perishables with the closest expiry date. IE milk from the front of the shelf that is expiring tomorrow rather than the stuff at the back that has 7 days before expiry.

The obsession with perfect produce is so dumb, and has genuinely harmed our shopping.

The grocery store should be pulling terribly produce, but my local one apparently does not.

Yes, it was laughed at and during the early internet days, people were skeptical that online shopping would become mainstream. An example includes the famous prediction from Clifford Stoll from 1995[1] :

>Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure. [...] Then there's cyberbusiness. We're promised instant catalog shopping--just point and click for great deals. We'll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet--which there isn't--the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.

Clifford was correct in that brick & mortar stores didn't become obsolete. But he was very wrong about the mass consumer adoption of internet shopping. Many agreed with his mispredictions at the time.

[1] https://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirv...

It was definitely laughed at by people like travel agents - remember them? I can remember discussing it with people in the travel industry around '94 and '95 and they literally laughed at the idea of people arranging travel online.