(From the photo caption) "Bill ... with his iphone prototype"
Nope. That's a Sony Magic Link, built by Bill (and others, myself included) during his time at General Magic. I feel General Magic is another one of Bill's endeavors that isn't widely understood or appreciated.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28838332
Not to be confused with General Magic, which wasn't a money grubbing fraud from day one, which didn't put on the most ridiculous obnoxious unenlightening cocaine addled TedX talk in the history of the universe, which didn't post fraudulent obviously impossibly fake demos to youtube falsely claiming "Just another day in the office at Magic Leap", which didn't have a toxic nepotistic bro culture that excluded and belittled women, that didn't settle a huge lawsuit for sex discrimination against the one woman they hired to fix the "pink/blue problem" but then rebuffed and ignored, that didn't burn through billions of investment dollars producing nothing of value, which didn't blatantly rip off many people's original ideas in their unoriginal invalid fraudulent patent applications, which didn't publish an astounding but physically impossible video of a whale leaping out the gym floor and splashing down while hundreds of children not wearing AR headsets were somehow magically able to perceive it and clap and cheer and say "WOOOAAAHH!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8J5BWL8oJY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbpqwUUfMAQ
https://x.com/fernandojsg/status/1017411969169555457
Magic Leap gave magic a bad name (and was the biggest disgrace of the entire AR industry, even spectacularly worse than a certain Google Glasshole publishing a nude selfie of himself in the shower), while General Magic truly was the good kind of magic.
But what do you mean about the whale? I know they hypnotized the kids with some Magic, but the whale really did Leap out of the gym floor. That's where they got the company name! I saw it with my own eyes, in that YouTube video.
And don't expect me to believe that Rony Abovitz is not a real astronaut, and those were not real apes, and that was not a real space fudge monolith. I can taste right now, in my virtual mind!
About the shower glass guy... I knew him when he was a camera salesman at LZ Premiums in San Jose. I used to go there when I lived nearby, just to eye the merchandise and compare prices.
Eventually I bought something there - a huge Manfrotto tripod with a fluid head. I can still see the smile on Robert's face when he brought it out: "this guy finally bought something!"
PS: Hello fellow Jaunter! Was it big and strong enough to support a Jaunt VR camera? Did you manage to nick one before they shut down? ;)
Few seem to have put it so succinctly. Although your text recovers completely after being fully compressed to "from day one" ;)
Magic Leap gave Nova a bad name and Ft. Lauderdale a worse name but visitors should know better than to be sold their own dream.
Exactly the thing I was advising yachtsmen against when I was a teenager.
Back in the Everglades there never were that many legitimate sources of income so different cultures had long developed different ways to survive in that type of climate :\
Small-town resort coup on SV that one.