Echo Dot

The email etiquette on display there is abysmal. What sort of subject line is “hey”? Also they’re using email like you use IM.

They’re all absolute savages, this email alone should be enough to convict them. People who type like that are not good people.

Yep and everyone who watched the podcast did it to also prove they weren’t homophobic, and that’s the only reason.

I thought it was very funny that I only even heard about concord existing when it was announced the service was shutting down. I feel like they didn’t know advertising for it

My point is that no one really cares about the cameras because this is a VR headset, it isn’t trying to be everything to everyone. I also don’t really think anyone cares about apple’s “spatial computing” (AR), perhaps if they actually had more applications people would be interested, but they don’t.

Yeah I’m thinking that it’ll be around $500 to $600 for the base model and maybe $550 to $650 for the two terabyte model. After all its upgradable so there’s not really any point them trying to price gouge anyone on the storage.

The general consensus I’ve seen from people is that it will be sub 1K simply because they know it has to be in order to be profitable. The only people who think it’s going to be over 1k seem to be people who don’t actually know that it’s not really a super powerful system, they advertised it as being seven times more powerful than the steam deck, but the steam deck itself is not exactly a powerhouse in fact the switch 2 is more powerful.

You’re paying for the fact that it’s tiny, the fact that it’s not a window system, and for the convenience of just being able to throw some money at someone and have a fairly decent gaming system without having to mock about in the weeds, because a lot of people don’t like that aspect of PC building.

Really I don’t think so. I don’t know quite where you’re getting your prices from because I could definitely build assembly spec computer for under $700, especially if I was building in bulk which obviously Valve are.

I feel like they know that no one’s going to buy it at $1,000.

Yeah but he can’t possibly know that. Valve wouldn’t be drawn on the price so that’s not based on something they’ve said to him that’s just what he personally thinks.

I feel like Valve are more than smart enough to know that a $1,000 headset won’t sell. Especially in the US, internationally they might be able to get away with that price, but even then people are going to be comparing it to the index and asking why the index has been EOLed and replaced with a headset of the same price.

It’s a VR headset so no one really cares about the cameras. The only headset with cameras that are any good is on the Apple Pro which is ludicrously expensive. The quest 3s cameras are fine but you can’t really read a display while wearing it so they’re basically useless for AR stuff.

The Vision Pro isn’t available outside of North America, has barely no apps and doesn’t support gaming, so I don’t know how Apple expect this to become a major product for them.

The frame fixes basically all of those issues, much wider availability although still not global, supports games and it’s basically a PC so you can edit an Excel document in VR if for some reason that’s what you want to do, has controllers so you’re not relying on finger tracking exclusively, and actually has a decent store of content. Oh and the battery is both larger in capacity and more sensibly designed so that it’s actually part of the device rather than this weird dangly thing you always have to have.

The only downside is an inability to allow me to see my office at the same time. It’s not like the vision pro lets you actually keep the laptop display on anyway so being able to see it isn’t a huge advantage.

It would have been nice if it had colour pass through, but I also don’t really care that it’s not present.

Apparently OLED has issues with brightness. VR lenses tend to cut out an awful lot of light (I’ve seen a lot of unhelpful diagrams with lines on them that try to explain the problem) so you need a system that outputs a lot of light or you need to use much more expensive lenses.

My guess is valve had a price point and using the better lenses would significantly cut into that.

It’s worth pointing out that I’m pretty sure the PlayStation VR uses the same lenses. I’ve never had a problem with that so I doubt it’ll be a major issue.

Yeah I don’t get nauseous in VR I don’t know why some people do. The only thing I have noticed is that if there’s a lot of spinning around particularly in ultra wings I tend to fall over.

I actually find that things like the vignette that you get when moving in some VR games actually makes me feel uncomfortable so I always have to go into the settings and turn all that stuff off.

You could say that about any game. If you’re not interested in the game you’re not going to play it for a very long time but that’s not a failing of the concept.

Pavlov is a VR game that I’ve probably got hundreds of hours in. I’ve had four or five gaming sessions because you tend to get sucked in.

It will be interesting to see if Meta have any real response to this. They obviously never expected to have any competition so they got a scummy as possible with it. Now that they actually have competition they’re sort of stuck, their only real response is to become more consumer-friendly, which is basically impossible because of their corporate culture.

Apparently it’s likely smaller than the GameCube was which is pretty incredible.

I’m assuming that d brand are already working on a GameCube inspired skin for this.

Yeah there’s some complication with it where it’s not 100% supported, but I didn’t quite understand because he didn’t go into detail. I got the sense though that it’s a technicality and basically is fine, but officially it isn’t supported.

I’m reckoning about $1,280 all in for the controller, VR headset, and Steam Machine.

I can’t see it being much more than that because otherwise you would be better off just getting your own build and putting Linux on it.

Do you remember the old Xbox controllers that had the attachable keyboard? It’s essentially just that kind of shape. So you would use the controller and kind of ignore the touchpads on the bottom unless you actually need them, then you just move your hand down and use the touchpads for something like mouse control. I doubt the intention is for you to use all of the inputs at once like you would an Xbox or PlayStation controller.

There’s plenty of videos of it on YouTube and the port is not off centre.

There isn’t really any point in comparing this to a games console. There would be no real point valve developing a console because pretty much all of the games on their platform expect to run on a PC so they’d end up having to emulate keyboard inputs as a lot of their library won’t really work with a controller in any logical sense, so they might as well just make a PC.