He started off talking about how Vision Pro is not an open platform like MacOS and then he focused on how his productivity use case couldn't be realised because of lack of multiple screens. But he failed to draw the link between these.
Ultimately the upside of an open platform is that you can know with certainty that eventually literally any common need or deficiency it has will be addressed by the open market - if you are desperate enough you can pay and do it yourself. For example, when people didn't like Microsoft's desktop updates they created an entire alternative desktop shells. And there are now something like a dozen of these, some of which are / were commercial products. In an open platform, anything not addressed by the platform owner simply becomes a market opportunity for a third party developer. Of course, there are lots of downsides, but this is the upside.
But Apple's choice here to ship VisionOS as a fork of iOS and more importantly as a completely locked down system means that his ultimate conclusion is "maybe Apple will fix this" and alludes to hints of rumours they might do it. But this is what we are reduced to - disempowered, we simply hope that our overlords will have mercy on us, their interests coincidentally aligning with ours long enough that they do what we want. Or you buy into a competitor, but this just gives you a choice of tyrannies, not actual freedom.
None of this matters if you think Vision OS is a niche or a dead end. But if you actually buy into the idea that down the track this is the ultimate future of all computing, then it should be very concerning to be completely disempowered over it. I actually love the idea of a truly "spatially" aware operating system and I think eventually this is indeed where computing will go. So that is why I'm both excited by and very concerned about the direction Apple has taken.
Isn't that a little naive and idealistic, though? I love FOSS software as much as the next HN user but, for the vast majority of it, it only does the most basic tasks possible and, with few, rare exceptions, gets abandoned or obsoleted when the developers decide that it's not worth their time to work on it anymore. The market can't and won't solve every issue/need/deficiency that people have and, even with your example, the number of issues that every single one of those desktop replacements had dwarfed most of the benefits that using them had. For the vast majority of people that aren't tech nerds like us, the "locked down system" is preferable because it gives an incredibly consistent, polished experience for 99% of the use cases people need it for at the expense of the ability to customize it to your heart's content.
It's the same situation as the loss of headphone jacks and removable batteries. Some of us care deeply about those things but, antithetically to the point you've made, the market has decided that those things are no longer important to the vast majority of people.
> I love FOSS software ... the vast majority of it, it only does the most basic tasks possible and, with few, rare exceptions, gets abandoned or obsoleted when the developers decide that it's not worth their time to work on it anymore
This is just as true of paid, closed source software. And when it gets abandoned, you can't fix it if it's important to you.
> For the vast majority of people that aren't tech nerds like us, the "locked down system" is preferable because it gives an incredibly consistent, polished experience for 99% of the use cases people need it for at the expense of the ability to customize it to your heart's content.
I think that macOS is a great example of a system that is closed enough that a non-technical user will get the polished experience they're looking for, but allows technical users to get under the hood and customize it to their needs. Of course, it isn't open enough for some people, but it is open enough for a great many very technical people.
>This is just as true of paid, closed source software. And when it gets abandoned, you can't fix it if it's important to you.
It's not true of most paid, closed source software, though, while it is true for most open source software. At least in the former, the money people pay for the software directly contributes to its longevity and sustainability.
To be clear, not advocating for FOSS here, in fact almost the opposite, I want the full force of capitalism to be free to solve these problems without arbitrary barriers erected by big tech gatekeepers.
Ultimately the upside of an open platform is that you can know with certainty that eventually literally any common need or deficiency it has will be addressed by the open market - if you are desperate enough you can pay and do it yourself. For example, when people didn't like Microsoft's desktop updates they created an entire alternative desktop shells. And there are now something like a dozen of these, some of which are / were commercial products. In an open platform, anything not addressed by the platform owner simply becomes a market opportunity for a third party developer. Of course, there are lots of downsides, but this is the upside.
But Apple's choice here to ship VisionOS as a fork of iOS and more importantly as a completely locked down system means that his ultimate conclusion is "maybe Apple will fix this" and alludes to hints of rumours they might do it. But this is what we are reduced to - disempowered, we simply hope that our overlords will have mercy on us, their interests coincidentally aligning with ours long enough that they do what we want. Or you buy into a competitor, but this just gives you a choice of tyrannies, not actual freedom.
None of this matters if you think Vision OS is a niche or a dead end. But if you actually buy into the idea that down the track this is the ultimate future of all computing, then it should be very concerning to be completely disempowered over it. I actually love the idea of a truly "spatially" aware operating system and I think eventually this is indeed where computing will go. So that is why I'm both excited by and very concerned about the direction Apple has taken.