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Asa Dotzler

@asadotzler.com

470 followers 530 following 3.4K posts

Sir Robin's minstrel ex-Netscape, ex-Mozilla https://asadotzler.com

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Asa Dotzler @asadotzler.com · Mar 31

I'm blogging again!

I'm gonna get back to it for real this time. Corporate social media is so much worse these days so I'm going back to my roots and making the blog go once again.

Bookmark or grab the feed if you think you might be into longer reads than my posts here.

asadotzler.com

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Asa Dotzler @asadotzler.com · 9h

OpenAI's Chief Apps Bro told employees at a recent all-hands that he was looking into how advertising could benefit users.

A year ago Sam Altman said ads was a "last resort" and "uniquely unsettling." Now he "finds ads somewhat distasteful but not a nonstarter."

They're villains, all of them.

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Asa Dotzler @asadotzler.com · 15h

The first "killer app" for iPhone was the internet in your pocket, web, email, and messaging at your finger tips from anywhere in the world. The second killer app came a year later, the App Store.

Vision Pro had no killer app when it launched 21 months ago, and it lacks one still today.

Asa Dotzler @asadotzler.com · 1d

Snap thinks this is a good look for its marketing video.

Attractive woman with Snap Spectacles sitting atop her head. The glasses are giant, chunky cheap looking plastic that could be some kind of safety glasses maybe.

Asa Dotzler @asadotzler.com · 2d

Love it.

Metroid Prime 1–3: A Visual Retrospective - The Complete Official Guide - Piggyback.com

Developed in collaboration with Nintendo and Retro Studios, this art book showcases concept drawings, sketches, and assorted illustrations from Metroid Prime, Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, Metroid Prime 3:...

www.piggyback.com

Asa Dotzler @asadotzler.com · 3d

I'm once again frustrated with the tech press for missing the real story here. There's plenty of evidence by now that Apple and Meta (and now Samsung) plan for face PCs to supplant laptops and smartphones has been entirely unsuccessful.

The emperors have no cloths. Where are these articles?

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Asa Dotzler @asadotzler.com · 3d

Samsung has released its $1,799 Galaxy XR mixed reality face PC. The company spent 2 years and approx. $1B making it. Samsung will build ~100K units.

Galaxy XR will be the junior version of Apple's 10 years and $33B R&D for a $3,599 Vision Pro face PC with a production run of ~500K units.

Man, 3/4 view with short curly hair and a shapely beard wearing VR goggles constructed of gray plastic straps and forehead cap, and a big bulbous sleep mask shaped goggles with a clear plastic face that's got the mirrored shades look but with a pair of big light colored camera dots visible "behind the glass" that give a cringy cartoon robot eyes vibe. I won't say the guy in the goggles looks like a dork, because this fella's actually got some handsome around the dork goggles. It sort of cancels out in this case, rather than dorky, it's just "odd," same kind of odd as that guy in the Starbucks 5 years ago who had his whole-ass desktop with him. Odd is fine. It's like quirky. I'm down with that. What I'm most certain of is this is not the future of personal computing. At best it's game console scale because no one will use these outside of their homes, ever. The form factor, the ergonomics, the use cases, none of it works as a general purpose PC like our laptops and smartphones so this guy's posing for the magazine and he's doing OK considering the abasement of it all.

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Asa Dotzler @asadotzler.com · 3d

Tim Cook was on Good Morning America telling the most mainstream audience imaginable that this was our next PC, that it could do everything our Macs and iPhones do and more. This is the personal computing future he wanted for all of us.

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Asa Dotzler @asadotzler.com · 3d

I think it started with Bitcoin and blockchain. It was clear even then that Big Tech had no idea what consumers wanted.

By about 2012, most of Big Tech had been financialized, and its executives stopped caring what we wanted or needed to focus instead on what Wall St. and stockholders wanted.

:(

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Asa Dotzler @asadotzler.com · 3d

Ben Lovejoy at 9to5Mac: "Apple wanted to get [Vision Pro] into the hands of developers and early adopters so that it could begin the journey of jointly figuring out how it will be useful."

Apple doesn't ship without a view on usefulness.

It was never a dev kit. It is a failed consumer product.

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Asa Dotzler @asadotzler.com · 4d

mood

Leonard Cohen - Everybody Knows (Official Audio)

YouTube video by LeonardCohenVEVO

www.youtube.com

Asa Dotzler @asadotzler.com · 4d

Anders: Oh my God! Look at that picture over there! There's the Earth coming up. Wow, that's pretty.

Borman: Hey, don't take that, it's not scheduled.

Anders: (laughs) You got a color film, Jim? Hand me that roll of color quick, would you...

Lovell: Oh man, that's great!

Typically oriented so the Earth is shown above the Moon, the original photograph, and the photographer's preferred orientation, has Earth to the left of the Moon and that's how the photograph is displayed here. The Earth is sliding around the Moon rather than rising above it.

William Anders' world-renowned photo features a blue and white marbled Earth centered against a black sky and tilted slightly to the right with its left hemisphere illuminated. The right side of the image is framed by a gray moonscape with dramatic textures of craters and bright ejecta streaks, a bumpy horizon slicing across the the black beyond.

Asa Dotzler @asadotzler.com · 4d

Though this frosted glass look is an improvement over clear glass, and hopefully a signal of progress to come, the better solution for readability remains the accessibility setting for reduced transparency. While you're there you can flip the reduce motion switch turning off garish UI animations.

Asa Dotzler @asadotzler.com · 4d

TrendForce analysis suggests 9.6M VR headsets were sold last year. Its estimate for this year is 5.6M units.

This decade of VR is over the hill and winding down. We're in for another VR winter. Maybe the 2030s will see better attempts, less corrupted by Big Tech greed and hubris.

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Asa Dotzler @asadotzler.com · 4d

Apple has relented. The latest iOS 26 Beta includes a toggle for "Liquid Glass," its magical new design language that puts fashion ahead of function at every turn.

Soon users will be able to disable most of that accessibility nightmare with a frosted glass alternative that's far less terrible.

iOS 26.1 Beta 4 Lets Users Control Liquid Glass Transparency with New Toggle

With the fourth betas of iOS 26.1, iPadOS 26.1, and macOS 26.1, Apple has introduced a new setting that's designed to allow users to customize...

www.macrumors.com

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Asa Dotzler @asadotzler.com · 4d

The most popular Meta Quest VR game, Batman Arkham Shadow, bundled with Quest 3S and free for any Quest sold in the last year, cracked 1M players.

For comparison, free to play Fortnite has ~650M players, and for paid games, Grand Theft Auto V has ~200M players.

VR is failing at it's best use case.

Asa Dotzler @asadotzler.com · 6d

mood

Cracker - Low

YouTube video by CrackerVEVO

www.youtube.com

Asa Dotzler @asadotzler.com · 7d

Months ago, someone on the other platform told me Firefox didn't happen until 2005 because his "Grok" search told him so. When I said I was the guy pulling the trigger on that release, he told me he didn't care and trusted the bot. Grok noise was the final nail for me, and I deleted the account.

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Asa Dotzler @asadotzler.com · 9d

I wonder how people who care about their faces, hair and makeup, would deal with a boss telling them this was a required work PC.

Woman with long hair pulled back tight adjusting the Vision Pro goggles and head straps.

Asa Dotzler @asadotzler.com · 9d

Apple is clearing its backlog of Vision Pro components with a small production run that includes an updated SoC and head strap. The new head strap, which looks more functional than the original fashion strap, ads considerable weight.

Vision Pro 2 comes in at about twice as heavy as Meta's Quest 3.

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Asa Dotzler @asadotzler.com · 10d

20 years ago, and 11 months after the Firefox 1.0 release, Firefox reached 100 million downloads.

(In 2005 the internet was 1/5th as big, so 100M downloads in a year was exceptional.)

3 years later, Firefox set a Guinness World Record for most software downloads in a day, over 8 million.

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Asa Dotzler @asadotzler.com · 10d

mood

SOUL SACRIFICE - SANTANA

YouTube video by i7 studio

www.youtube.com

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Asa Dotzler @asadotzler.com · 10d

I'm still here :D

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Asa Dotzler @asadotzler.com · 10d

agreed. the first was fun, the second a slog.

Asa Dotzler @asadotzler.com · 10d

Meta spent tens of billions of dollars, TENS of BILLIONS, trying to make VR happen. 6 years after Quest VR goggles debuted, the top 5 titles are all stalled below 3M monthly active users. Even at its peak 2-3 years ago, Quest never had more than 10M total actives, and is probably under 7M MAU today.

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Asa Dotzler @asadotzler.com · 10d

What happened to Apple's quality control.

Aluminum is Apple's specialty. It has more experience in milled and anodized aluminum-wrapped consumer products than anyone, ever. And this is what it ships?

Slowing innovation and multiple failed billion dollar bets are concerning, but this is shocking.

Two orange iPhone Pros held next to each other. One is orange as shown in marketing photos. The other is only orange on the glass back but the aluminum is pink, or certainly far less orange and into natural pumpkin bordering on grapefruit.

iPhone Pro in orange but only the glass back remains orange while the aluminum is pink copper, bordering on a rich mauve.

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