the realistic best you can do for a quality outsourced engineer is $80k. Good ones go for $100k, and you can easily, easily get junior devs for that price. You can even get decent U.S. engineers for $125k outside of HCOL places.
Not to be an egghead/navel gazer about it, but I’ve grown skeptical of “innovation” as an end in itself: was Facebook innovative, or was it just another small iterative improvement on an existing form? Same with Google and search. My gut tells me companies should focus on more concrete measures of success rather than the abstract “innovation”.
It’s probably not semantically wrong to say that these two cases really were/are innovative, but even so, was that really the cause of their success? And is it replicable as a methodology? My gut tells me that a lot of what gets labeled as a massive innovation is really just a market inevitability, and someone got to the right idea first, either by luck or having a single clever differentiating idea.
I tend to agree that both practically and legally, when you’re dealing with a fraud as big as this one, that successfully prosecuting the Big Man At The Top is the best strategy.
People might scoff at mid-level fraud “doers” getting a slap on the wrist deal for their testimony, but the alternative where you go full scorched earth and fail to get a conviction would be terrible for the defrauded and the system beyond them. Capitalists (i.e. the owners of capital, the investor class, in this case) love a system where you don’t really have to quadruple check that a financial document is valid. Who can blame them? I certainly wouldn’t want to live in a world where something like FDIC doesn’t exist or where fraudsters can easily rip people off with low chances of jail time if/when the operation goes belly up.
I’m less concerned with the “VR Games as a market segment” and more concerned with the “all video games will eventually, essentially be AR/VR” concept.
Like you I’m less than convinced that Apple knows what they’re talking about/doing with Unity, but time will tell.
I too have trouble thinking this is truly “cool” - it’s basically a self-contained Plato’s Cave. I feel like the “cool” of the next decade will be distinctly luddite-inflected, but who knows.
Sure, but again… it’s like 10x the price of a competing piece of equipment which is still regarded as pretty niche. In the case of an iPhone, 2x the price for 1000x the functionality was a clear “buy”. There’s a reason that among basically everyone I know (mid class millenials) scoffs at watches and iPads but is a complete iPhone addict - the value proposition is just that good. For all the talk of these ancillary/luxury devices, the fact remains that the iPhone (or Android knockoffs) is still the absolute Crown Jewel of tech that cuts across demographics in a way that their other products do not.
Good point imo. In the Serious Gamer contingent, you’re perceived as being basically wheelchair-bound if you try to play any major title PC game on a Mac, regardless of its basic capability of running said game.
It’s similar to how many coders will scoff at someone running Windows, pointing out Mac’s higher quality ergonomics, nix OS, and overall friendliness to common dev tools. In recent years the gulf has closed a lot with Microsoft making solid gestures toward dev-ex, but the perception remains.
That said, Apple’s resistance to reaching out into the Serious Gamer market has always confused me, but as a Not Serious Gamer it’s very likely that I don’t really understand the engineering difficulties that they’d face in making those inroads (other than the fact that Mac products are seemingly modification-immune, and the Serious Gamer contingent avoids that mindset like cholera).
Agreed, I think they may struggle to overcome the whole “Black Mirror” effect. Feedback from my brother and parents (veritable Apple-philes) this morning amounted to “sounds kinda cool but I’d probably think someone was a grade-A weirdo if I showed up at home and saw they had a AR/VR headset / I’d take that $3500 and go on a nice weekend trip, play some golf, have a nice dinner, etc.”
While HN may be more “the target market”, I’m still fairly certain we’re a vanishingly small contingent of consumers, and apparently we’re not even completely onboard with AR/VR ourselves.
That’s my take as well. You can stretch out, watch a movie on a flat screen TV, sleep, stand up and walk around, have food and drink with a sturdy table, or curl up with a book or otherwise. I recently did international first class for the first time and wasn’t particularly dying to escape the hellishness of it all.
Sure but.. there’s just the fundamental “not real” element of digital “stuff”. It goes away when the $3500 headset comes off. And I’m not even a pure luddite about this shit, I enjoy getting a new sword in Diablo IV, but the notion that the average guy will buy VR Christmas deco for their AR home (which they don’t own) is hilarious/deluded in a special way