This is literally it. In fact I'd posit that when we start being able to easily translate animal communication we'll probably stop being able to stomach eating them.
By your own logic if the Vision Pro is on the border of acceptability, and it's here, now, is it really going to be THAT long? To get to the endgame, sure, but things are only getting better and cheaper, and what intermediate steps will cross that threshold? Yes it takes a long time for the Meta glasses category to fully merge with the Vision Pro category, but moving either one just a little bit towards the other will be incredibly useful and accelerate the process. Also, regarding the "bleeding edge" comment, obviously that's true in many respects, but iirc there ARE a few industrial headsets out there that, for way more money, beat it on some isolated core specs like panel and passthrough resolution (who knows about overall quality; I suspect the Vision Pro is better or equal with lower specs per Apple's MO). There are also other other form factors developing right now, like I suspect that it won't be long before we see some very compelling version of the minimal Bigscreen VR style goggles with the addition of cameras tethered to a Steamdeck-type device that you can hide in a bag (if not pocket).
Galloping furiously through the forest on my trusty steed, intent on intercepting the courier agent before it arrives in the next town with my 2AM texts to my ex...
I think it could go either way, honestly. As far as modern efficient e-mailing goes, it will simply be nice in many ways to have floating apps in the room instead of windows on a monitor, once the comfort/productivity tradeoff improves. But also, maybe when I open a real letter, my glasses recognize it as a letter, scan it into my library and blow it up into a floating virtual page, with or without OCR, maybe with additional context and history. Maybe I can choose to open a UI to respond digitally, or maybe it physically points me to my paper and pen. I can do any combination of writing a real letter or a virtual letter and sending it digitally or using the oldfashionedletters.com plugin to send out 100 cursive wedding invitations supported by whatever digital back-end is activated when the recipients' glasses detect reception of the letter. Point is, there's a unification of both approaches and they each gain new superpowers.
You're talking about novelty wearing off, but I think that might just be the difference between good and bad skeuomorphic design. Your email scenario is definitely a plausible thing that someone would make right now, and it would absolutely suck and die, but maybe it's just part of an experimental trend that will exhaust itself like that period in the 90s when every new cd-rom you'd pop in would autolaunch a unique, horrendously ugly and confusingly skinned UI that looked like it was straight out of a Cronenberg movie. It suddenly becomes easy to make a bunch of dumb shit and it takes time to see what sticks, and there's a lot of silliness on the road to best practices... but they ARE buried somewhere in there, we DO eventually get to a fundamentally better way of interacting with computers.
> According to the rhetoric of the time, we would be living in a world of internet "fast lanes" right now if net neutrality didn't pass.
Anything remotely resembling this existed almost a decade ago in a very different landscape, and what you're saying isn't even really reflective of the reality at the time. The vast majority of reasonable people were talking about what would gradually happen if the concept of net neutrality was totally thrown out; in the interim both sides have constructed more nuance, there is more public awareness, more partisanship, and thus different goalposts being fought over.
Now we have a ruling that the FCC can't limit state net neutrality law, because Verizon was literally fucking THROTTLING FIREFIGHTERS DURING A MAJOR WILDFIRE. Less "fast lane," more "death lane." ISPs know that the current environment won't tolerate their unchecked fantasies.
They have a new fantasy where they want a fee from high bandwidth platforms like Netflix and YouTube, because suppisedly they can't deliver what they already charged consumers for. More likely because there's a lot of money moving about and they want a bigger slice.
