SaaS cloud hosted solutions vs on prem solutions? Not necessarily a bad move. You can save money and a lot of overhead and headaches if the software we’re talking about has a lot of different potential hosting providers / licensors so that prices are competitive.

Things like choosing who to host your PostgresDb, sure you could do it on prem, but it will likely be cheaper to pick a cloud host. BUT, that’s only because Postgres is open source, leaving tons of hosting providers to compete, and it is also still very similar to the rest of SQL dbs, leaving for extremely little lock-in, both amongst DBs and amongst hosts.

Salesforce though, and similar cloud platforms, are the opposite of that. Everything you build on them is completely locked into them. The DBs are salesforces’ custom db technology (which sucks), their interfaces are coded in a combination of one of three different Salesforce specific programming languages / frameworks, and it does extremely little out of the box, meaning that as a company when you adopt it, you have to spend a ton of time and money on a salesforce admin / specialist to set everything up for you, likely a bunch of coders to write custom code for you, and at the end of the day, because of its restrictions you’ll still produce a piece of crap interface / application that requires weeks of training for any employee to use.

And after all of that, Salesforce willl still charge you somewhere on the order of 10-1000x as much for simple stuff like /GB of db storage, compared to open source competitive DBs.

When platforms have that much lock-in, then they’re ripe for exploitation, which is why Salesforce is so insanely profitable. I can pretty much guarantee you that every mid size and larger company that uses Salesforce would have spend far less money overall by hiring a dedicated software development team to build out their own applications and infrastructure using open source (cloud hosted) services.

Fair point then

That’s why I specified a “well working” remote desktop app.

IIRC the Apple Vision’s RDP is limited to a single remote monitor, at least it certainly was at launch and from googling around it seems like that’s still the case which is just absurd.

You have the power to place an infinite amount of windows anywhere in 3D space but Apple only lets you place a single monitor somewhere.

Compare that to the $500 Quest 3 which supports triple monitors OOTB (on Windows or MacOS) and has third party apps that can upgrade that to whatever your headset / PC can handle.

But for either headset to be an actually true, all day, monitor replacement, they need to get a lot smaller and lighter. They’re simply too hot and heavy for 8 + hours usage right now.

I always thought the entire point of them releasing this was not to make crazy money, but see how to improve upon what they built by having everyone beta test it for them. They really didn’t have much info on how to make VR successful since none of them are really big. Sure, there’s a market, but they want to know what it will take to get everyone on board not just the enthusiasts. Personally, I think it’s going to take more than just an app to get there.

"Let’s ignore the entirety of the existing VR market, where Meta sold more Quest’s than Microsoft sold Xboxes, and pretend like Tim Apple continues to personally invent everything. "

No, they don’t need those apps, they literally just need one app, a well working remote desktop one.

They will never be a workstation because you will never get the amount of power you can get into your desktop, into your ski goggles. They could however, function as a perfectly good wireless monitor solution for an existing desktop. Strip out some of the processing power, make them smaller, lighter, and more comfortable, like the big screen beyond, and then tailor MacOS and iOS to use them as remote displays that let you put windows anywhere and you have your killer app: monitor replacements.

Look dude, Gabe Newell and Tim Sweeney are capitalists just like anyone else with a big business. They make decisions based on profit, not on doing the most good

Everyone who runs a big business has to understand how capitalism works, that does not mean they have to believe in it as a system, nor does it mean they have to make every decision to maximize profit at every possible step. Especially when the company is privately controlled.

Breaking Terms of Service to get on the Apple store wasn’t a fucking holy war to save gamers from an evil corporation, it was one evil corporation taking a stab at another evil corporation because they wanted a cut of the profits.

It was a shot in a million stab, and it was a stab that if landed, would give every single software developer more money, instead of Apple hoarding it for no reason.

Stop acting like since both sides are corporations, both of their arguments will lead to equally bad outcomes. This is literally just a false equivalency fallacy.

Valve sucks, Epic sucks, they all suck because they’re all capitalists dude. In the end, the money matters, not the gamers, they’re just the source of the money. They only ever do genuinely good things when forced to by outside parties.

Even if I accept your premise that it’s impossible that Tim Sweeney is a human being motivated by human emotions and desires, it still does not matter, because Epic’s crusade to break up monopolies will mean less money that Apple hoards for no reason, and more money going to the developers actually creating the software you use. It is an objectively better outcome.

There’s a reason that EU regulators agree with Epic, and it’s not because they’re motivated by Epic’s profit margins.

which is ironically the most monopolistic and anti-consumer OS right now.

Really? Because

a) Windows is objectively less monopolistic and anti-competitive than iOS and Android

b) and it is pretty much equal to MacOS in this regard.

Them supporting Windows isn’t a matter of boosting the most anti-competitive OS, but following the easiest path, which is one of supporting anti-competitive OSes.

And yeah, overall, I would also prefer Epic to better support Linux. I’m hoping that Proton might convince them it’s a low enough lift to do but I’m not exactly holding my breath.

Yeah well, when everyone else goes “I don’t like two launchers on my PC so he’s the devil incarnate and everything he does is evil”, it’s hard to defend him without it looking like his account.

I’m not saying he’s even necessarily not an asshole, I don’t know him personally, I just know that things that PC gamers hate on him for pale in comparison to the things anti-trust campaigners praise him for.

You don’t have to “drink the koolaid”, you just have to understand how monopolies and anti-competitive markets always lead to abuse. In this specific case, that would look like Apple and Android’s unavoidable 30% cut of revenue for every single sale.

He does not try to destroy Linux, Epic literally just consistently makes the decision to not actively support a platform that’s probably not profitable for them to actually support, given that most other developers don’t support it either.

He was also the one leading the charge against the Windows Store when Microsoft launched it, out of fears that they would use it anti-competitively like Apple / Google do theirs (and this is long before the Epic store).

You thing he’s an asshole because his company has made decisions that inconvenient you personally, so you think he’s an asshole and all his motivations are thus dickish. Launching quixotic anti-trust campaigns against Apple and Google, the largest companies in the world (that literally dwarf Epic by orders of magnitude), was never a smart business decision, and never a campaign Epic was likely to win. It was a shot in a million to try and use their Fortnite fortune to actually enact meaningful change.

All of which were 100% profit-driven

You’re reasoning for that is:

• more competition and a level playing field will make it more profitable for smaller companies like Epic

which means that to you, it’s literally impossible for any company that’s not an anti-competitive monopoly to try and change competition law, since it will benefit them and then it’s not altruistic, right?

Because here’s the thing about breaking up monopolies and changing anti-trust law to enable more competition: it doesn’t really matter why you do it. It is an objective improvement to the world.

conveniently ignoring Epic’s many sins not limited to the one I personally despise him the most for: killing the Linux and Mac builds of rocket league. Epic bought the studio and nuked the Linux version, no apology.

And Rocket League is still alive and well and widely played to this day, including through Proton on Linux, something that can’t necessarily be said about many other games from its era. You’re acting like if they hadn’t bought Psyonix that Psyonix would still be alive and well and devoted to nothing but Rocket League to this day.

This is of course, based on precisely nothing, but your feeling about PC exclusives on the Epic store, right?

This should not be surprising to anyone.

The literal only reason people think he’s an asshole is because PC gamers got all butt hurt about Epic trying to use exclusive games to get their store off the ground and compete with Steam / consoles.

On the other side of that, he has repeatedly called out Microsoft, Apple, Google, et al for their monopolistic gatekeeping practices, and has spent Epic’s Fortnite fortune intentionally launching massively expensive legal campaigns to get these monopolies broken up, have anti-trust law changed, and set legal precedents that they can’t be so abusive.

Every PC gamer on Reddit and Lemmy praising Gabe Newell and shitting on Tim Sweeney, are quite frankly, insanely ill-informed at best, and flat out single-issue idiots at worst.

The “Tim Sweeney” is an asshole take, is the easiest way to spot the bottom tier of PC gamer.

Guy could have taken his Fortnite billions and built a compound in New Zealand to fuck off to, but instead he literally spent his fortune launching legal campaigns against the biggest monopolies in the world to break them up and actually change competition law going forward, both in Europe and the US, but PC gamers think he’s an asshole because they tried to use exclusive games to get their store off the ground.

Get some perspective on the bigger picture.

It’s literally listed in stack overflow’s section on IDEs, functions as a replacement for an IDE, was architected so that plugins can turn it into an IDE, and is distributed with plugins made by the same company that turn it into an IDE. Insisting that it’s not an IDE in this context isnt helping anyone communicate, it’s just being pedantic.

And yet, the most popular, and desired (and one of the most admired) IDEs that developers use all day, everyday, is built using Electron:

https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology/#2-integrated-development-environment

Yeah, I’m not talking about developing new computer technologies as utter bullshit, I’m talking about the trillions spent on advertising for instance, or social media platforms.

This isn’t really true. It’s kind of true for scientists because by their nature, they work on discovering new things, but even still, the amount we know and understand about say, physics and chemistry, is way way way greater than biology.

Like for physics and chemistry we have a very rock solid understanding of how the vast majority of reactions and interactions that effect the universe at our scale, work. Most of what physicists and chemists are learning these days is at the outer edges of what’s physically possible or studying, there’s very few questions left about common, day to day reactions, those are so well understood that they’re considered engineering and not science anymore.

But that’s not the case for biology. We still don’t understand very basic elementary things about the human body and what parts of it even do, let alone the wider, non human biological world. There is truly more unknowns in biology than the other sciences.

Man, it’s so wild how little we know about biology and how much we as a society spend on absolute, utter, bullshit, instead of figuring out how just the basics of us work.

I know it was never possible before modern computers, labs, and equipment, but we really should have like 1000x the amount of basic biological research going on that we do.

Honestly, the killer application is really simple, but this headset wasn’t quite designed for it (nor is MacOS in general), and that is simply as external monitors.

You know what’s annoying? Trying to use your computer outside, trying to use it on an airplane, or while travelling. Or being in an open plan office with a million visual distractions.

If you’re working in a professional setting where your company is already buying you a giant ultra wide display or multiple professional 27" screens then you’re approaching the territory of a thousand or two dollars spent on each employee, and suddenly a VR headset is starting to look more reasonable as a monitor replacement.

If this was closer to the size of the size of the Big Screen Beyond and just worked as an external display that could let you place as many windows / monitors around you as you wanted, they might actually have a compelling product.

Or if it was cheaper it could be used for gaming.

Or if it had transparent AR displays it could be used for industrial applications like Hololens.

But yeah, as is, it feels like it had a neat idea or two, some really fancy tech, and fell right in the middle of not being that useful for anyone.