Will they actually devote the resources to try to pierce the anonymity of those handful of people? Everything we’ve seen about how tech companies operate is that they reach a threshold of “good enough for most cases” and don’t bother trying to optimize the edge cases. Collecting the billions of data points to try to use dozens of analysis techniques, and then having some kind of meta analysis on how to resolve disagreements between models, would be resource intensive beyond their own profit motives.

Someone who wants to defeat gait analysis with a different pair of shoes (heel height and sole thickness and back support affect how people walk), and wears a mask might lose the arms race if the tech companies choose to continue to improve the tech even after it’s already good enough.

I think it’s possible but not inevitable. Especially if there’s a financial reckoning for AI companies soon.

I’m with you.

GoPro obviously found a really interesting niche that they dominated for about 10 years, and POV videos can still be cool for sports and things like that where the videographer tends not to have hands available for actually holding a camera. I think that’s still pretty cool, and glasses can be a useful form factor for that general use. I’m all for making camera ergonomics better.

But the AI assistant stuff and the attempts to make them part of the actual day to day (both by attempting to making them fashionable and socially normalizing a camera pointing at everything all the time) is obviously a bad development. Even if we implement countermeasures (re-normalizing masks in public, making lighting terrible for digital cameras, etc.) it wouldn’t be a symmetrical effort.

Good article for pointing out that specific rocket math. The optimistic tone of that article, though, is very much a product of its publication date of February 2020. The space programs have suffered major technical, financial, and political setbacks since then, and the geopolitical moment doesn’t really lend itself to megaprojects like moon missions.

Also fiddly controls.

Education and enterprise still have a need for a lot of group-managed laptops. Not all of them will be power users, either. Some of them won’t even have sophisticated IT departments (thinking about elementary schools and the like where their IT needs might not run very high).

I agree that we’re probably seeing the waning days of the casual laptop user who administers their own system as an independent device. Everyone will either be further up the enthusiast/power user ladder or will have switched to phones and tablets.

I’m glad the MacBook neo is only 8gb. That means they have to support it as a usable low-end target.

This is huge. Apple has traditionally supported its laptops for at least 5 major OS versions and 2 more years of security updates, so they’re essentially telling us that the MacOS version they release in 2034 will not require more than 8GB of RAM to function is gonna be a good thing for all users, who will mostly presumably have much more memory available.

I switched to Macbooks specifically for the 11" Air. I do wish they’d bring that form factor back.

Macbook build construction (ever since they’ve moved off the plastic entry level Macbook to all aluminum for all their models) is really solid but not necessarily rugged. The hinges and ports seem to hold up better than a lot of other devices from HP and Dell or whoever, but some models are more susceptible to drops, dust/sand, moisture, etc., than the solid construction would lead you to believe.

So it depends on use case. I think they hold up very well to normal indoor use, for many years, but might not be the ideal device for clumsier people or those who might be routinely using it outdoors or in more rugged environments.

I think TouchID isn’t a priority for them, but looking at the supported M1 and M2 devices and features, it seems like it could be a daily driver. It has things I never got to work on my first Linux laptop (webcam, microphone, speakers, suspend, keyboard backlight, wifi, bluetooth), although it’s 2026 so those are basically all expected. No thunderbolt, touchID, or display port alt mode, though, does make it a step behind MacOS, with some doubts it’ll ever fully catch up even on this 5-6 year old hardware.

Still, these were very popular devices, so I think they’ll stay on the used market for a long time. I might pick one up if it’s cheap enough.