I’m glad to see this sentiment expressed here. I have grown increasingly frustrated with this very thing over the past few years. Anything which even approaches, erotic or titillating is immediately suppressed, censored, and pretended like it never existed in the first place. Apple is one of the worst here, but far away not the only one. All of the AI companies are exactly the same: try and generate an image of a woman and a bathing suit with DALL-E and you will inevitably fail.
Instead, they pretend over and over that these are simply productivity devices, meant to enhance our capabilities as workers or consumers of Disney-level entertainment.
I am a human being, who occasionally gets horny. I masturbate. This is not something that corporate America recognizes, and in fact, seems eager to censor and suppress.
A world curated by conservative HR departments is not one that is particularly appealing to me, and the Vision Pro seems like it is the month of this attitude.
One is sinister and gives pearl clutchers new talking points. The other describes what should be a basic aspect of owning a computer.
Numerous American companies recognize this and are developing services and products tailored to your needs. The comment just above yours highlighted some of these companies.
However, Apple may not be the best-suited company to take action in this regard.
How is that not a dichotomy, and (possibly) hypocritical?
We as a culture have a weird relationship with horny, and it’s mostly a negative one. Sexuality is fine. Horny is not.
But I also don't know why you think the Vision Pro can't play videos or go to websites. It can do that stuff.
(Actually, I'm informed by a VR porn enthusiast that it doesn't support some stereo video formats. I guess you have to stick to 2D.)
I think this is largely driven by the concern that the model could be used to (whether intentionally or inadvertently) generate an image of a person who looks underage. That's a gray area of law (not to mention morality) that people are very hesitant to test, so it's better to just block porn entirely.
The really obvious MR sex app is one that overwrites your partner with somebody else like Strea or Bremington. Not sure if most partners would like that. You might get something that feels like motion sickness if there is too much of a difference in breast size.
I'm right at the edge of turning off autocorrect altogether, just because it has a habit of changing previous words, not just the one I'm typing. If I only ever talked with very generic English this might be okay, but when I'm using subject matter lingo it fails utterly and becomes a tremendous nuisance to try and convince it to leave that text alone. Sometimes even deleting the correction and re-typing what you want doesn't stop the behavior.
Wilful ignorance - or sensible marketing?
Apple's ability to get celebrities and subway riders using their product in public depends on completely denying that it's a $3500 masturbation aid.
When Jobs acquired Apple, his vision of computing appliances was restarted - iPod, iPhone, et al. They have a lot more functionality, but the iOS walled garden keeps enough of the users happy - at least in the Silicon Valley/USA.
Look at early 20th-century Sears-Roebuck shopping catalogs online - one of the pages showed a hand-sized motor and the various attachments one could buy to attach to it - want a blender - get the motor and the blender attachment, et al.
An early 20th-century motor-based ecosystem similar to the battery-powered power tools you see today.
Eventually the idea of a generic motor that gets specialized with whatever particular attachment you want was refined to combine a motor and each particular attachment into its own separate integrated device - no swapping of motor and attachment anymore. There are pros and cons to both systems, but the integrated specialized appliance approach won for the most part.
This sentence is backwards. About the only users not happy with the iPad as computing appliance are the ones in Silicon Valley USA or drinking its "car makers should design for garage mechanics not for driving" koolaid. (Commenters here, for instance.)
If you accept the premise the best tech disappears behind "the job to be done" for users, if you acknowledge driving is not about tinkering under the hood, to run an errand a driver shouldn't need to even know how it works under the hood, and most drivers are better off picking up groceries or kids or traveling, not ever opening the hood, then you will have a better time making cars for the drivers who buy Apple because it's an appliance farther along the novel engineering utility curve, where tinkerability is for engineers, utility is for users, and most users are not mechanics.
See also this, on Apple's "brand promise" and the EU's DMA:
https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/215-buildi...
My opinion? They are, but of a somewhat restricted sort.
From Apple's perspective, it's important that using the device in public doesn't have a stigma.
Otherwise, we don't need to wait for deepfake AI / AR apps to undress people.
Creeps could go in public, see a person they like, and put porn next to them without anyone knowing.
Without restricting porn, an AR device just becomes a machine to violate others boundaries. There's a reason cell phones in Japan cannot turn off the shutter sound.
MacBooks can access an unrestricted amount of porn yet the public doesn't immediately equate computer users -> using porn right now.
So uh, can't people already do this with phones? I could watch porn on the train in front of people right now?
What NEW boundary does AR violate?
There is no new boundary except for the one puritans dream up. A holographic projection of their own inner monologue on the topic, if you will. ;)
It's all just so painfully dumb, and we have to weather the same arguments literally every time there's a new content format.
Does this affect anyone else more than imagining the same thing using one’s brain?
I don't want to discuss it too much because there's enough nuance here for people to hang you with no matter what you say, but, a brief parable: I spent exactly 1 sentence pointing out to someone you could make porn with Stable Diffusion and they started hosting a SD instance for deep fakes in our non-technologist community with girls in it, and also started what I still think of as a "porn dungeon" chat room.
It was immensely frustrating trying to verbalize why this was antisocial and why there was a set of people who were legitimately upset by it. They never really understood fully.
But I'm sure they had moment with the Taylor Swift deepfake stuff from last week.
There's isn't really a 100% logical Spock reason why it's bad, other than other humans find it deeply distasteful.
Just in case you're being serious, you realize that people can already imagine others naked in public or just snap a picture or video of them using their phone and upload it to your AI undressing service.
It being strapped to your head adds absolutely nothing, and you might be projecting your own fantasies.
I'm going to become a luddite and carry wads of cash and wear a tinfoil hat.
This is my startup idea: less of this crap. The logo is going to be a rabid woodland creature wearing a tinfoil hat.
I think having it watered down will actually push the dream of wearable computers for common use by making people feel less uneasy around it.
General purpose computing directly implies that each user is free to do what they want with it, just like the MacBook Pro they bought from the same company.
The world would be a lot more awesome if people weren't entitled to feel "uneasy" about what people they will never meet are doing legally in the privacy of their own homes.
I don't agree, but I respect that this strategy is seemingly self-evident to a certain brain wiring.
PornHub says that red states often represent their heaviest users, demographically. Can you even imagine how different things would be if the rugged individualists defended freedom of thought as passionately as they defended weapons?
In other countries, souvenir shops sell genitalia-shaped pastries or bottle openers.
Answer is no.
I think the idea of a general purpose OS without a company involved in deciding whether you are allowed to run programs or not is a thing of the past. If Apple and Microsoft could go back in time and change macOS and Windows to be like iOS where everything has to be approved and signed by Apple they almost certainly would. The only reason they haven't already (IMO) is that people are already used to those platforms being open, and there would be too much outcry to change it. Even then, they are certainly trying to chip away at it...
Think how much money would be collected if these companies got to extract 30% of every transaction carried out on every PC in the world. I'm sure they (plus Google) are busy trying to figure out if they can bring the "Apple Tax" concept to the web as well.
What was Windows RT if not an attempt to move Windows over to a walled garden model?
Windows S was another attempt.
Android is the most used OS on the planet, so no. Not even close.
The easiest way for me to buy something from any stripe or Shopify website (when on an Apple device) is to use Apple Pay.
Would love an informed reply, sorry for Google Laziness as I'm outdoors
They definitely do make some money off Apple Pay transactions via interchange, but it's probably something like 0.1 to 0.3%.
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-friday-ed...
Edit: it totally is!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12928655
Bruh you may have a slanted pov (pun intended) on what people would use an Apple Vision Pro for!
I think it's just easier for platforms to ban porn rather than deal with the criminal and financial risks of enabling it.
$3500 for a device that can't do the number 1 application of its technology.
That is, at least there is a way to load up the media player of your choice and watch porn.
Look, I get that corporate America is strangled by puritan values from the payment processing networks on up, but it is arrogant and willful ignorance to pretend that adult content consumption is not a major part of the VR/MR story.
You want to know what the people who actually use VR the most do with their headsets most of the time? VRChat and SexLikeReal, which is the PornHub of VR if you don't know.
Steve Jobs was a dude who loved to talk about doing LSD but in his later years, he became awkwardly fixated on preventing people from using Apple devices for the stuff most real people do.
He's been gone a long time. It'll be a shame if their vision for spatial blah blah is sanitized and safe for work, even after dark.