Kbase Dump the Quarter: Apple Vision Pro Support Documents

Joe Rossignol:

Apple on Friday shared a wealth of information about its new Vision Pro headset, including a detailed user guide and dozens of support documents.

Joe’s article is full of links to support documents about the new platform. The use of “beta” in the headline for this one jumped out at me:

Get tips for setting up your Persona — a dynamic, natural representation of your face and hand movements that allows others to see you while you’re using Apple Vision Pro for FaceTime and other videoconferencing apps. This process also sets up EyeSight, which reveals your eyes on the front of your Apple Vision Pro.

Mine is really … something:

iFixit Tears Down a Vision Pro

I have been waiting for this since June of last year:

We knew it would be tough to get inside (it was). We hoped we wouldn’t break anything (we did). But we knew it would be worth it to see all the new technology Apple squeezed into this thing, from the EyeSight display to the sensor array, the external battery back to the R1 chip. We brought in the heavy hitters for this teardown, including x-ray views of the frame and high-resolution microscope shots of the displays.

We’ve got a lot of observations, some opinions, and a couple educated guesses about why we got the Vision Pro we have today on the teardown table. There is a lot in this device, so we’re splitting our analysis into two, with more detail on the lens system and silicon coming in a few days.

Let’s go spelunking into a never-before-explored cave of glass.

There’s a video as well:

The level of engineering in this thing is just next-level. It’s amazing what the folks in Cupertino can do.

Inside Apple Vision Pro

Pei-Ru Keh at Wallpaper:

With no set deadline or pressure to be brought to the market, Apple Vision Pro has been in the works for decades. On a recent visit to Apple Park, Alan Dye, Apple’s Vice President of Human Interface Design, and Richard Howarth, Vice President of Industrial Design, sat down together to explain how hardware and software came together in an unprecedented way to make an idea a reality.

‘For Vision Pro, we understood the idea that this technology of wearing something that could transport you to another place was a very powerful one. And that there were really profound experiences that could come out of it and from changing the users’ context. But we also recognised a lot of the problems that existed with these sorts of technologies, especially around isolation,’ says Dye, while stating that Vision Pro is neither AR nor VR. ‘Once we understood that the product could be used for connection, for bringing people together and helping to enrich their lives, as we do with so many other Apple products, that’s when we got fully immersed in the program and wanted to bring it to life. We got excited about what this could mean as a whole new platform. That’s why we call it spatial computing.’

Apple Reports Q1 2024 Results

Apple Newsroom:

Apple today announced financial results for its fiscal 2024 first quarter ended December 30, 2023. The Company posted quarterly revenue of $119.6 billion, up 2 percent year over year, and quarterly earnings per diluted share of $2.18, up 16 percent year over year.

“Today Apple is reporting revenue growth for the December quarter fueled by iPhone sales, and an all-time revenue record in Services,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “We are pleased to announce that our installed base of active devices has now surpassed 2.2 billion, reaching an all-time high across all products and geographic segments. And as customers begin to experience the incredible Apple Vision Pro tomorrow, we are committed as ever to the pursuit of groundbreaking innovation — in line with our values and on behalf of our customers.”

If you blacked out reading that block quote, Jason Snell has you covered with a bunch of charts.

Project Tapestry

The folks at The Iconfactory have a Kickstarter campaign running for an app built for the open web:

What if you had one app that gave an overview of nearly everything that was happening across all the different services you follow? A single chronological timeline of your most important social media services, RSS feeds, and other sources. All of the updates together in one place, in the order they’re posted, with no algorithm deciding what you should see or when you should see it.

With Project Tapestry, we’ll create a universal, chronological timeline for any data that’s publicly available on the Internet. A service-independent overview of your social media and information landscape. Point the app toward your services and feeds, then scroll through everything all in one place to keep up-to-date and to see where you want to dive deeper. When you find something that you want to engage with or reply to, Tapestry will let you automatically open that post in the app of your choice and reply to it there. Tapestry isn’t meant to replace your favorite Mastodon app or RSS reader, but rather to complement them and help you figure out where you want to focus your attention.

I think this is super interesting, and pitched in $40 as soon as I saw it. I do have one feature request: to rebuild a Nuzzel-like experience, letting me quickly see what links are being talked about most across the sources I have loaded into the app.

Hobbes OS/2 Archive Shutting Down

Benj Edwards, writing at Ars:

In a move that marks the end of an era, New Mexico State University (NMSU) recently announced the impending closure of its Hobbes OS/2 Archive on April 15, 2024. For over three decades, the archive has been a key resource for users of the IBM OS/2 operating system and its successors, which once competed fiercely with Microsoft Windows.

In a statement made to The Register, a representative of NMSU wrote, “We have made the difficult decision to no longer host these files on hobbes.nmsu.edu. Although I am unable to go into specifics, we had to evaluate our priorities and had to make the difficult decision to discontinue the service.”

This has the potential to be a big blow to the OS/2 community, but thankfully mirrors are being spun up at the Internet Archive and OS/2 World.com.

Understanding Apple’s Proposed Changes to Meet the DMA’s Demands

John Voorhees has a great walk-through of the changes Apple is making in response to the DMA:

What makes understanding last week’s announcement difficult is that, superficially, Apple’s press release bears a vague resemblance to a typical Apple product announcement, at least until you catch its tone. EU users will now have a choice of browser engines, new payment options, and access to alternative app marketplaces. If you were watching a WWDC keynote and heard these things, you’d probably expect they’d apply across Apple’s OSes.

However, that’s not the case with most of what was announced last week. Instead, the changes announced are carefully tailored to address the DMA and nothing more. These aren’t product announcements. They’re regulatory compliance responses by a company that has made clear in various contexts that it will respect local law that impacts its products, but isn’t interested in letting one country (or countries in this case) dictate how it designs its products. I’ll revisit this point at the end of this story, but it’s important to keep in mind from the outset. Once you view the details through this prism, you can see the shape of the DMA in every facet of what Apple announced, which makes the situation easier to understand.

It’s important to note that these are proposals, as John Gruber wrote:

I’ve emphasized throughout this piece the word proposals. That’s key, because no one, including Apple, knows whether the European Commission is going to find any or all of them compliant with the DMA. Apple has met with EC representatives dozens of times across several years regarding the DMA, but the way the EC works is that (1) they pass laws; (2) companies do all the work to attempt compliance with those laws; and only then (3) does the EC decide whether they comply. Companies like Apple don’t get to run ideas past the EC and get a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. They have to build them, then find out.

[…]

The delicious irony in Apple’s not knowing if these massive, complicated proposals will be deemed DMA-compliant is that their dealings with the European Commission sound exactly like App Store developers’ dealings with Apple. Do all the work to build it first, and only then find out if it passes muster with largely inscrutable rules interpreted by faceless bureaucrats.

On today’s Upgrade, Myke and Jason talked through the changes, and it’s the best podcast episode I’ve heard on the topic so far. Understandably, there have been a lot of errors in early reporting, all three of these pieces benefit from the work that went into them.

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A Tour of QuickTime VR

Michael Steeber:

Despite the profound impact Apple Vision Pro will have on the Apple Retail experience, I’ve scarce mentioned it here on Tabletops, and that’s no accident. A major new platform deserves careful study and an awful lot of context — the kind that’s only possible to grasp when the product is available in stores.

The future makes more sense when you understand the past, which is why I’m sharing this slice of history with you today.