A friend asked me this morning whether Apple Vision Pro is a good enough substitute for business class airplane tickets.
The short answer is: no, especially not on red-eye flights. It will never be able to substitute the ability to lay down flat and actually have a good night’s rest. The “no” is more qualified for daytime trips. If you weren’t planning on sleeping anyway, you would probably be able to do a lot more on your Mac with an AVP in economy than without one in first class. That qualified “no” turns into a qualified “yes” for shorter flights in business class — say, American coast-to-coast — where you don’t even have the option of laying down flat and even if you did there isn’t much time for sleep even on a red-eye.
Keep in mind that a cross-Atlantic business class ticket is more than twice the cost of an AVP, and once you spend the money on it it’s all gone. You get to keep the AVP, and even use it on land. Ben Thompson has made this point several times on Dithering, and even had an episode called Vision Pro on a Plane. He also noted that the number of people able to afford AVP but still regularly fly economy is small, but not zero. I can confirm, as I am one of those people: I have taken more flights in the first two months of this year than all of last year, and will take many more in the months to come, so the investment was worthwhile. Your own milage may vary.
P.S. I can confirm that you can charge AVP while in use. The battery seems to have been designed for that very purpose, since the UCB-C charging port is on the same side as the cable going to the headset so that you can have two cables on the same side of the battery while it’s in your pocket. And even economy seats have power outlets these days, unless it is a very short flight where battery life wouldn’t even be an issue.
P.P.S. A great thing about AVP is that it isn’t a large electronic device, so you don’t have to put it away during takeoff and landing. In fact, an interesting use case would be for people afraid of flying. I imagine the fear is elevated during takeoff and landing, and wouldn’t it be nice if they could watch a movie at Joshua Tree instead?
P.P.P.S. If you are to bring an AVP onto a plane for purposes of entertainment, one thing to remember is pre-downloading things you are going to watch. It is amazing that we can text and surf the web while flying, but in-flight internet is bad for anything else.
Happy Monday!
For your morning viewing pleasure: How Ireland & Scotland are ruining their housing markets (spoiler: by instituting rent control).
As bad as DC’s government is on crime, at least they know that they only way to combat homelessness and high rent is to increase supply. (↬Marginal Revolution)
🍿 The Holdovers (2023) shows that not making ’em like we used to was a matter of choice not fate. Some people still have it in them to make beautifully shot, perfectly paced, subtly acted movies with a complex message. Here’s hoping it becomes a Christmas classic.
One very good use case for ChatGPT is… actually chatting. Who knew?
I was waiting for someone at a restaurant and had 10 minutes by myself — a rarity these days. Instead of scrolling through one social network timeline or the other, I opened up the ChatGPT iPhone app, and learned that the only Leonardo painting in the Western hemisphere was right at my doorstep. Also learned that there are only 20 paintings by Leonardo and more than 300 by Rembrandt, and a few other tidbits.
Are any of them true? Well, trust but verify as they say, but why should I trust it any less than a random X account? Or worse yet, a non-random threadboy — now there’s a useful word I saw just recently — who posts unsourced graphs and opinions-as-facts.
Now sure, X and other social networks have upsides, like bonding with fellow humans over topics of joint interest. But these are for the most part shallow connections, empty calories for our socialite stomachs. A more stable and sustainable equilibrium for most people, certainly for me, could be real-life interactions for socializing and algorithms for tickling the mind without any pretense that we would be buddies. Social networks try to be both but are not great at either, the same way pickup trucks try to be both a car and a truck but are mostly gas-guzzling parking spot-hogging behemoths, and at the same time the most popular vehicles in the US. So, a perfect analogy.
From this perspective, ChatGPT’s forgetfulness is an excellent feature. It remembering prior conversations would bring it a step closer towards parasocializing, making it even worse than human social networks. I have no doubt that the feature is coming any month now, if it’s not already here. If and when it comes will the the point when X/Threads/Bluesky et al should sound the alarm — or introduce friendly algorithms of their own.
🏀 “The Wizards lost their 13th straight game Thursday night and have the worst record in the NBA, but at least Jordan Poole scored a season-high 34 points against the Lakers.”
No comment, truly.
Three or so years ago I started a blog post draft titled “Twitter as a dark forest”. Unsurprisingly, I never finished it — and now I can delete it knowing that someone has formulated the issue better than I ever could have, and earlier. There is even a book out which, yes, I’ve ordered. (↬Waxy.org)
This morning I learned that one of the many plot lines in the British TV show Bodies has been lifted from real life:
The Tichborne case was a legal cause célèbre that captivated Victorian England in the 1860s and 1870s. It concerned the claims by a man sometimes referred to as Thomas Castro or as Arthur Orton, but usually termed “the Claimant”, to be the missing heir to the Tichborne baronetcy.
It goes without saying that the real-life Claimant was not as successful as the fictional one — this is why Wikipedia makes for better reading than most fiction.
“Maybe that’s why young people make success. They don’t know enough. Because when you know enough it’s obvious that every idea that you have is no good.”
This was Richard Feynman per the James Gleick biography, and he was correct! Biomedicine is now in this position, as I wrote yesterday.
Glenn Fleishman has a new book project on Kickstarter, and it is the easiest backing decision I’ve made in years. I mean, just look at that sample chapter. It’s called How Comics Were Made: a Visual History of Printing Cartoons and here’s hoping it makes it.