The nature of free market is competition. And the nature of competition is to get more profit out of less people. It means longer hours, more focus, less complaint, less life. You think new technology is gonna save the poor workers coz it boosts productivity? Only temporarily until everyone has it. Then It's the same game all over again, pushing out new features, new compaigns, re-org, transformation around the clock.
Once one player in the market starts to work the longer hours, it's guaranteed to spread to every corner. Coz you need to up the game and catch up with the competition.
Cell on my phone contributes like less than 10% of total battery consumption. The most goes to screen and cpu. So there's limited improvement for 5G in this. But for IoT devices in which comms use most of the battery, this could be significant. However, it's debatable whether spending on billions of dollars on a regional 5g network is an optimal solution for a more durable IoT infrastructure. In my understanding, there should be a more economical way to build an efficient IoT infrastructure since most of them don't need that much data speed.
I agree with your point on power consumption and agree that probably doesn't warrant the investment.
I don't work on cellular infrastructure, and don't even work on IoT anymore, but I could imagine that as far as IoT infrastructure is concerned, it might not be that any specific devices need a large amount of throughput to provide their services, but that the aggregate of a potentially very larger number of devices needing access to data services could test the throughput of the collective infrastructure, and redesigning that infrastructure to be able to have more throughput could be key, not to a future with some magical usecase of some specific types of devices, but to a future with a much larger number of simple networked devices working in concert to make the world more efficient in the aggregate.
That said, is the timing right? I don't know. It does kind of seem like it is driven more by politics than technical necessity.
I'm thinking Rift S has an awkward position. It's not a gen 2 for those who already jumped in for Rift. So no buying there. It doesn't lower the bars for those who hasn't jumped in as neither headsets or graphics cards are getting cheaper. Then where is the market share?
Maybe a trade-in program could work. For the rift owners
they get the upgrade for a discount. Then for the newcomers, certified pre-owned Rifts for a low price.
I guess Rift S has lower manufacturing cost because it can
share some parts with upcoming Quest. The same tracking, the same controllers. And since they are already heading in that direction, personally I'm curious to know the possibility of combining Quest and Rift S, or PC and standalone VR. My guts tell me it's possible. I'm excited about the idea of two in one VR, with which I can watch a movie in bed before sleep, or show it to friends at their places', and plug in a PC to play a full blown action game. Two headsets and two sets of controllers are really too much for these purposes. I don't mind two libraries of games/apps though. Windows 10 and XBox One are already sharing content. It should be possible for VR too.
I'm from the dev team of Payscrypt. I know our product is still pretty rough. We want to release early and listen to honest feedback. So here I am. Any thoughts are greatly appreciated.
Once one player in the market starts to work the longer hours, it's guaranteed to spread to every corner. Coz you need to up the game and catch up with the competition.
Endless grind.