Embargo has lifted on Apple Vision Pro headset reviews from Apple's hand picked selection of reviewers (so don't expect anything too controversial). I could link you to each review but MacStories has done that already. The Personas feature is "deeply weird and extremely uncanny". EyeSight "might as well not be there". The floating keyboard is "more a peck-peck-peck scenario with one or two hands". One reviewer's wife "doesn't like this, that I'm so removed from everything" and his son "calls it a phone for my face". However, Vision Pro is a "completely new way to multitask" and "Mac display sharing works really well, and Apple ecosystem tricks like Handoff and Continuity are pure magic in this context". If you'd like to buy one, Kogan is selling them as grey imports, with the usual caveats that entails. I would love to try one out but no prescription lenses is a show stopper for me.
Nine News fucked up and photoshopped Victorian MP Georgie Purcell to expose her midriff and gave her "enlarged boobs" in a social media promo image. Nine apologised, saying "our graphics department sourced an online image of Georgie to use in our story on duck hunting. As is common practice, the image was resized to fit our specs" and "during that process, the automation by Photoshop created an image that was not consistent with the original". Adobe hit back at Nine blaming their software, saying use of Photoshop's generative AI features "would have required human intervention and approval". Adobe is right. Yes, the computer did a dumb thing, but why didn't the person using Photoshop realise the image isn't appropriate and do something else before sending it up the chain for posting?!
You've seen the little warnings under TikTok and YouTube videos or Facebook posts - "the stuff in this post/video isn't true, to get the facts click here" - or something like that. After years of these notices, do people pay attention to them? No, not really, according to fact checking organisations interviewed by the New York Times. In one study done by Google, "a participant scrolled past a fact check shared by a journalist from CNN and dismissed it out of hand. 'Well, who fact-checks the fact checkers?' the user asked". It also doesn't stop people spreading bullshit, as "in the first six months of this year, more than 40 million Facebook posts received a fact-check label, according to a report that the company submitted to the European Commission". God help us.
The Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird on display at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center. (Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum / Flickr)
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