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The Giving-a-Template Edition Monday, June 12, 2023

How Apple’s Vision Pro Could Save Its VR Competitors, by Tim Culpan, Washington Post

With Apple giving rivals a template for how a mixed-reality headset should work, and by providing vendors a guide for making the parts required, the entire industry will get the kind of boost not seen since Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone.

How Apple Can Bring Down The Price Of Apple Vision Headset From $3,500, by Mark Gurman, Bloomberg

The three priciest components in the Vision Pro are its camera and sensor array, its dual Apple silicon chips and the twin 4K micro-OLED virtual reality displays. For a non-pro model, Apple could probably use lower quality screens, either an iPhone-grade chip or an older Mac chip and fewer cameras for lesser performance.

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But there are a few areas I believe Apple will not compromise on in a cheaper Apple Vision. The external screen, known as EyeSight, to show a wearer's eyes, as well as the eye- and hand-tracking system, are as core to the Apple Vision as a touchscreen is to an iPhone. I would expect a cheaper model to keep those features.

M2 Ultra Chip Benchmark Results Reveal Impressive Performance Gains, by Joe Rossignol, MacRumors

More interestingly, the scores reveal that the new Mac Pro should have around 2× faster overall CPU performance than the fastest Intel-based Mac Pro with a 28-core Xeon W processor. This feat is even more impressive given that the new Mac Pro starts at $6,999, while the 28-core Intel-based model started at $12,999, nearly double the price.

Notes

Why Millions Of Usable Hard Drives Are Being Destroyed, by Sean McManus, BBC

There are several ways a drive can be purged. Hard drives can be overwritten with new patterns of data, for example, which can then be checked to make sure the original data has gone. With today's storage capacities, it can take a day or two.

By comparison a cryptographic erase takes just a couple of seconds. Many modern drives have built-in encryption, so that the data on them can only be read if you have the encryption key. If that key is deleted, all the data is scrambled. It's still there, but it's impossible to read. The drive is safe to resell.

Bottom of the Page

I'm buying new glasses. No, nothing to do with Vision Pro. Seriously. My current glasses are scratched beyond pretending-the-scratches-does-not-exist.

Glasses, especially for my old and lousy eyes, are not cheap. But, hey, still cheap than Vision Pro.

(No way am I going to pay for both Vision Pro and extra pair of lens.)

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Thanks for reading.