Google Glass was awful. It never quite took off — and for good reason. It was bulky, unintuitive, and it made you look like a Glasshole. It gave AR glasses a bad name, but Intel aims to change all that with its new Vaunt smartglasses.
Dieter Bohn over at The Verge got an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at the next-generation smartglasses, and it’s hard not to get excited about their potential. These are, first and foremost, glasses. They’re just regular old prescription or non-prescription glasses you would wear during the day and charge at night. There’s not a computer attached to your head or some weird bulky attachment to your existing glasses.
Just look at these things. Without the serial numbers on them, you’d never notice someone wearing a pair and just walking down the street — or attending a meeting in the office.
The computing power comes from your smartphone, which the glasses connect to over bluetooth. The Vaunt glasses use some impressive technology to beam a few limited notifications into your field of view. They’re not designed to constantly ping you with Twitter updates or emails — the display is intended to offer context-sensitive information like directions, an incoming phone call, or even a restaurant’s Yelp rating.
Let’s take a step back for a second, these are pretty limited use-cases and that’s to be expected. Think about the first generation iPhone, what it was — and wasn’t — capable of right out of the box. There were only a handful of Apple-designed applications. In time though, it grew into the massive ecosystem we know today. As Intel’s Itai Vonshak points out, there was no Uber, Lyft, Instagram, or Snapchat when smartphones first hit it big. Those came later, and that’s what Intel is banking on here.
They intend to roll out the first set of real AR glasses for real people, and see what happens. That’s the thing the budding smartglasses market has been missing — an actual product. Not a concept, or expensive headpiece like the Magic Leap, but a pair of AR glasses with some basic functionality — something people would actually wear everyday. Put them out there, see what people end up doing with them, and most importantly, find out what people want to do with them.
Intel will be start up an “early access program” later this year.
The absolutely absurd idea of putting a touchscreen display on a mouse isn't exactly new. Turtle Beach already did it with its Command Series MC7, which features a 2.25-inch control screen. But apparently, even that wasn't ridiculous enough for Arctic Fox Technologies. Its new Super Mouse looks like someone took the chunky old Atari ST mouse, slapped a touchscreen and scroll wheel on it, and called it an upgrade.
The result is a rather unusual-looking mouse that is now on Kickstarter, starting at $199. And as ridiculous as it looks, some of its features are genuinely intriguing.
Apple is less than a day away from launching its highly anticipated OLED MacBook Pro with a touch-sensitive screen. But it appears that the upgrade is going to cost a pretty penny. According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple is reportedly eyeing a starting price of $2,899 for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, while the 16-inch version could start at $3,399 in the US.
"At $2,899, the 14-inch model would mark the highest starting price for a new MacBook Pro model, surpassing the $2,799 Apple charged for a 17-inch version introduced in 2006," says the report. The report claims that Apple is targeting a minimum price hike of $400 for its upcoming redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.
I've spent a good amount of time digging into the spec sheet of the new M6 MacBook Pro (14-inch), and for all intents and purposes, this is a classic Apple "chip and connectivity" refresh. It's not a full redesign. The chassis, Liquid Retina XDR panel, speakers, ports, and battery, all of them carry over unchanged.
However, the M6 brings more cores, stronger on-device AI, higher memory bandwidth on the larger configs, and modern wireless. Here’s the practical rundown of what actually improved, and whether those gains are worth your money.