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You do not need to buy Apple Vision Pro. At $3499 plus taxes before you purchase accessories and add on the aggressive $499 warranty, it is the most expensive headset on the market. Plenty of less expensive options exist: Meta’s Quest 3 and Quest Pro, Playstation VR, HTC Vive. Despite Apple’s aggressive marketing campaign this is a first generation device for enthusiasts, not a mass market hit.

That said, Apple Vision Pro is different, not merely a small improvement on the existing technology. It passes through video of your surroundings so you do not feel trapped in virtual space. It uses AI and cameras to mimic your eye movements on an external screen. It tracks your eyes to serve as a cursor. Where other headsets are an escape from the real world, this headset remains a part of it.

Today Apple releases its long awaited Vision Pro. I have not used one yet, but I have used plenty of VR headsets. This no longer nascent category has found a home in gaming. Suburban teenagers have a large library of content on the Meta Quest. Arcades and museums offer VR headset experiences. So why are we all talking about the Apple one?

Making the rounds on Mastodon is an article sounding the alarm on the rooftop solar industry. The article highlights a few issues:

• Many solar installs either do not work or are undersized.
• Salespeople are fraudulently sighing people up for or pressuring them into loans that are bad deals.
• The cost of sales is making solar overly expensive.

A central tenant of digital transformation efforts aimed at government in the US can be reduced to: “show them the way and they will change.” Code for America tackled this by placing fellows with various government agencies. Folks joined government agencies and tried to do things differently. Yet many times these efforts belly flopped. What’s the issue?

Six years ago Waldo Jaquith, Robin Carnahan, and Randy Hart released “De-risking Custom Technology Projects: A handbook for state grantee budgeting and oversight”. This tome was written for state legislators and agency heads that were looking to fund and conduct oversight on new custom software. Besides recording the current state of the art, the team at 18F wrote a guide to technical project management for non-technologists. On the other end of the spectrum Software Carpentry focuses on teaching academics or others new to writing software how to do so. There is still a need for a guide to commissioning (or not) custom software projects for smaller organizations and middle managers that are lucky enough to receive grants to do so. They’re not trying to compete with Google, they just need to make some pretty good software.¹