> showing off half-finished vaporware

They have videos of actual people using the actual built devices at the conference. They are letting conference attendees at SIGGRAPH put these on and try them out.

I get the need to downplay anything good that Meta does, but stick to "reality" - this is very different from half finished vapor ware. Or to put it another way, if this is vaporware, so is Apple Vision Pro at this point.

Right. The prototypes work. It’s R&D.

We have no idea when, or if, this will end up in a shipping product. If they were to imply it’s a real product (didn’t read that clearly) it’s vaporware.

The Vision Pro was announced. Has a release date (within a quarter), a full public SDK & simulator. They have started the hands on labs for developers around the world this week.

That’s not vaporware. If it is every movie that’s been announced + shot but not released is.

The modern Apple (post Jobs return) had what, one product that was announced but didn’t come out? The AirPower. And that was a real product they were in the final stages of (best I understand) but hit insurmountable safety issues. Not “hey we’re thinking this will be a thing one day”, but a failed product launch that didn’t make it to market after multiple attempts to fix it in the final stages.

Apple doesn’t announce vaporware.

<vaporcomment>

Wow. You pointed out the exact thing I discussed in my comment.

Funny, because I certainly remember Copland, Taligent, OpenDoc,...

They were famous for it. That’s why Jobs, when he came back, stopped the practice. So people would learn that when Apple announced it it was done.

Which doesn't change the fact that they also did it.

And in regards to modern Apple, the settings panel and SwiftUI are more of a work in progress kind of thing, than actually done.

Yes they did do it. But I called out post Steve Jobs return in my comment gif that reason.

Have people called SwiftUI and the new settings panels vaporware? I’ve never heard that. I’m neutral on the new settings design, but they do have a lot to fix there.

SwiftUI is pretty great when you can do what you want. Every release that encompasses more. I’m not sure you can reasonably make a fully featured UI toolkit in secret, I think you need external devs to help find issues and gaps. Letting it out early may have been a good idea for that reason, though it was quite rough at the start.

I don't think most people care.

Let this sink in; Facebook alone has more MAUs than YouTube in it's entirety. That's frankly bonkers. After YouTube, the 2 next most popular are, yep, Instagram and WhatsApp.

If you went up to the average person on the street and asked them how they felt about the Cambridge Analytica situation, they would probably ignore you and think it was some sports thing. "the public" clearly doesn't care and journalists are probably pretty happy with Facebook's performance given what they have to put up with on Twitter.

I'm not saying anyone is particularly right or wrong here. I just think that this site's obsession with "Facebook bad" doesn't really extend beyond the constituent of hackers with a healthy distrust of organized power.

You and GP miss that FB products are used in worldwide. Foreign people don't much care about Trump related chaos. Though I might underrate that how US is big for a VR market, because they tend to spend money and tend to have big rooms.

Cambridge Analytica was an entirely fake issue so in this case the general public is more informed than the average hacker news reader.

I'm not a republican btw, I just know a lot about the nuts and bolts of the digital industry. Anybody who actually knows how political ad targeting works guffaws every time CA comes up.