The game plan is the same as the game plan for the Mac, but they’re going to run it in a fraction of the time because they already have the playbook. Apple’s not in the business of “intentionally taking a loss,” Apple is in the business of slowly iterating products into platforms over strategic time spans. That’s exactly what they’ll do here.

The OLED displays are severely supply constrained; I doubt Apple can produce more than one or two million in 2024. With so few units available, there are more than enough dyed-in-the-wool Apple fans and die hard VR geeks with $4k to burn to guarantee that it will be sold out until 2025.

This first million will create an ecosystem for the platform in the form of third-party software and enthusiast communities. The successful launch will entice more suppliers to make the OLEDs, increasing availability and reducing cost. That paves the way for a sans-Pro Apple Vision for $2,500 sometime in 2025 or 2026. The cycle repeats: more users, bigger community, more evangelists, more word of mouth, more software, cheaper components, and then Apple ships Apple Vision Air in 2027 or 2028 for $1,500. Then in 2030, Apple Vision Air 2 comes out but the original is still for sale at $999.

Now we’re looking at Apple’s standard good/better/best product matrix that they use for the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Mac, and we’re also looking at a relatively Mac-like price range starting at a grand but with options running well above $5k.

The original Mac sold for $2,495 in 1984 which is about $7,000 adjusted for inflation. Apple’s kicking this new platform off for half the entry price. No one knew what the heck the Mac was supposed to be for in 1984 either, but the entire desktop computing paradigm was forged in its image. We’re now looking at a second Mac.

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Ken Kocienda, the engineer who led the team that created the original iPhone keyboard and predictive text system, wrote a book titled “Creative Selection: Inside Apple’s Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs.” So there’s at least one real engineer for you who speaks highly of Jobs.

They aren’t nameless. They write books and go on podcasts, their thoughts on Jobs are available to us. Plenty of them praise Jobs for driving them to do their best work.

Right, I said it’s “not bad,” hardly a ringing endorsement. It had some good ideas and concepts but it also has a lot of flaws, which is why it’s quite unfortunate that it’s the best Discovery ever managed.

It’s not false advertising because it did everything it was advertised to do in the introductory demo when it went on sale six months later. Google is the one faking their demos.

Right? Put Lorca on the front of my list to round out all four seasons. The outsiders carry the cast.

My problem with season 4 wasn’t that it was slow, but that it was uninspired and by-the-numbers. I had worked out that the DMA was a “stepping on an anthill” situation by… episode 4, maybe? 5 at the latest. So then I got to watch one of the oldest tropes in sci-fi unfold for 8 more episodes, played completely straight. Yawn.

I’d rather watch the B-plot from S01E06 of Babylon 5 to experience that particular story again. That way I’d be done in an hour.

Yes, exactly. Season 1 knew what it wanted to be. When it was over, I remember thinking “alright, not bad, I’m excited to watch this show grow the beard.”

But it never did. In retrospect, Season 1 is the strongest season the show had to offer. Each subsequent season got a little worse as plots got more confusing, themes got more muddled, and no breakout characters emerged to carry the show through an abundance of narrative turmoil and worldbuilding strangeness. But above all else, seasons 3 and 4 are just boring. I don’t care about the crew or their mission. The most interesting characters are consistently the outsiders: Pike, Vance, Rillak. I’ll be watching season 5, but mostly out of a sense of obligation and morbid curiosity.

As much as I like SNW, it’s still not quite the show I’ve been waiting since 2005 for: seven curious officers on a ship called Enterprise set in the mid-25th century. I worry that SNW has robbed us of the opportunity to see the classic formula set in the immediate post-TNG era… even though that seems to be what season three of Picard was explicitly setting up.