John Carmack just gave his take on Meta's new strategy of providing its headset OS to third-party hardware companies.

Here’s Carmack’s full statement from X:

"Meta already sells the Quest systems basically at production cost, and just ignores the development costs, so don’t expect this to result in cheaper VR headsets from other companies with Quest equivalent capabilities. Even if the other companies have greater efficiency, they can’t compete with that.

What it CAN do is enable a variety of high end “boutique” headsets, as you get with Varjo / Pimax / Bigscreen on SteamVR. Push on resolution, push on field of view, push on comfort. You could drive the Apple displays from Quest silicon. You could make a headset for people with extremely wide or narrow IPD or unusual head / face shapes. You could add crazy cooling systems and overclock everything. All with full app compatibility, but at higher price points. That would be great!

This brings with it a tension, because Meta as a company, as well as the individual engineers, want the shine of making industry leading high-end gear. If Meta cedes those “simple scaling” axes to other headset developers, they will be left leaning in with novel new hardware systems from the research pipeline for their high end systems, which is going to lead to poor decisions.

VR is held back more by software than hardware. This initiative will be a drag on software development at Meta. Unquestionably. Preparing the entire system for sharing, then maintaining good communication and trying not to break your partners will steal the focus of key developers that would be better spent improving the system. It is tempting to think this is just a matter of increasing the budget, but that is not the way it works in practice – sharing the system with partners is not a cost that can be cleanly factored out.

Just allowing partner access to the full OS build for standard Quest hardware could be done very cheaply, and would open up a lot of specialty applications and location based entertainment systems, but that would be a much lower key announcement."

    • @GlitterInfectionEnglish
      2•7 months ago

      They are both policy, both very specific, and you didn’t at all read the link you posted, did you?

      Some things from YOUR link:

      Our advertising platform doesn’t share personal data with third parties.

      Ads that are delivered by Apple’s advertising platform may appear on the App Store, Apple News, Stocks, and Apple TV app. Apple’s advertising platform does not track you, meaning that it does not link user or device data collected from our apps with user or device data collected from third parties for targeted advertising or advertising measurement purposes, and does not share user or device data with data brokers.

      Honestly, I could just quote you literally every sentence from the link you provided because it is 100% contradictory to your statement.

      Apple does not share any personal data with third parties. We make certain non-personal data available to our advertisers and strategic partners that work with Apple to provide our products and services, help Apple market to customers, and sell ads on Apple’s behalf. No Apple Pay transactions or Health app data is accessible to Apple’s advertising platform, or is used for advertising purposes. Apple does not know or make available to advertisers information about your sexual orientation, religious beliefs, or political affiliations.

      Hate Apple for reasons that are real, not for ones you have made up.

      • @[email protected]English
        -1•7 months ago

        The link you posted is not policy, it’s a fuzzily worded overview document. That’s fine to write and share, but it’s not legally binding in any sense.

        “Honestly, I could just quote you literally every sentence from the link you provided because it is 100% contradictory to your statement.”

        Really, and what was my statement? I said Apple’s VR platform is a data collection device and that is simply a fact if for no other reason than that it has to collect data to function. The document(s) you (edit: and I) linked specifies how Apple handles the data the device collects. I fail to see contradiction.

        “Hate Apple for reasons that are real, not for ones you have made up.”

        You’re jumping to conclusions and putting words in my mouth. I don’t hate Apple. It’s just a behemoth with a fiduciary responsibility to its shareholders and any entity like that will not sit on a heap of valuable data for long. They do now (at least, ostensibly, there’s no way for me to know for a fact) because they perceive it to be the most financially viable business strategy. That may change at any time though.

        edit: Also you can disagree without downvoting you know. Just saying.

        • @GlitterInfectionEnglish
          2•7 months ago

          You are making false statements based off of your biases.

          There is nothing “fuzzy” about the language used in the article posted. It is an overview of a bunch of specific legal policy that can be found in more detailed other articles such as here: https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/eyes-hands/

          You are acting innocent when you know the intent behind your original statement was to say that Apple is collecting data that could be used in a nefarious way with its headset. It is not. It has very clear legally binding policies around that in general, and very specific stated policies around that for the device as I linked.

          https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/en-ww/governance/

          It would be easier for any of your open source software you assume tracks you less than Apple to change to steal your information than it would be for Apple to do and get away with the same.

          • @[email protected]English
            0•7 months ago

            “There is nothing “fuzzy” about the language used in the article posted. It is an overview of a bunch of specific legal policy that can be found in more detailed other articles such as here: https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/eyes-hands/”

            I can’t find any links like that in the article you posted.

            “You are acting innocent when you know the intent behind your original statement was to say that Apple is collecting data that could be used in a nefarious way with its headset. It is not. It has very clear legally binding policies around that in general, and very specific stated policies around that for the device as I linked.”

            Now, ostensibly. Like I said, that may change in the future. They’ve decided to use data from their own platforms to do their own advertising. How am I guaranteed that the data I share (and don’t consciously share) will not be used that way at any point in the future? Also, they 100% are collecting data, and lots of it, it’s just that they pinky promise not to use it nefariously right now. edit: And further, there is no way to check, since you can’t know what their code does.

            “It would be easier for any of your open source software you assume tracks you less than Apple to change to steal your information than it would be for Apple to do and get away with the same.”

            Again, you are jumping to conclusions. I have an iPhone, an Apple Watch, a 14" MacBook Pro. Their hardware is great and so is their software integration. There is nothing wrong with realizing you’re handing over your data to a party that might very well use it to it’s own benefit to your detriment in the future (and taking steps to reduce your data exhaust). And that is the difference between proprietary and open source; there is no single party with the same gigantic incentive.