Better Offline - An Autopsy of Apple's Vision Pro

Episode Date: February 21, 2024

Apple's $3500 face computer is here, and after spending far too many hours inside it, Ed Zitron has found Apple's vision of the future to be equal parts exciting and frustrating - and a dark omen for the future of tech. He also sits down with the Wall Street Journal's Joanna Stern to talk about her experience as one of the early reviewers of the Vision Pro.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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This Mental Health Awareness Month, tune into the podcast Deeply Well with Debbie Brown if you've been searching for a soft place to land while doing the work to become whole. This podcast is for you to hear more. Listen to Deeply Well with Debbie Brown from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Also Media. Welcome to Better Offline. I'm Ed Zittron.

This is a weekly tech podcast where I break down the ways in which the tech industry, and in particular big tech, is trying to change the future, for better or for worse. And in the case of Apple, a company worth nearly $3 trillion, it's a little bit of both. You see, it took me 15 minutes and two restarts to try and rename the title of the script I'm currently reading you. The Vision Pro, Apple's latest device and their first real new computer since the iPad, released in early February of this year. And it's a 3,500 special computer, which,

to quote Apple's marketing literature, you navigate simply with your eyes, hands, and voice. This device refused time and time again to let me select the part of the document in Google Dogs that I wanted to look and point and grab. Theoretically, I was meant to look at it with my eyes, and then it would go to the place I wanted it to go, and then I'd tap my fingers, and then I'd select it,

and then type things in. That's not what happens, you can probably guess. I assumed at first that this was potentially due to a poor fit, so I pulled the Vision Pro off my head, I adjusted the strap, I put it back on, and I saw nothing, only the Vision Pro showing me the world around me, no menus, nothing was projected on, the one thing this device was meant to do, it was not doing.

This is a bug that's happened to me at least five different times, and this entire experience is indicative of what the Vision Pro is. simultaneously the single most interesting and annoying piece of technology ever made. Practically speaking, the Vision Pro is a head-worn computer that attaches either with a single band wrap called the solo band, which adjusts with a little wheel, it kind of goes around the back of your head and you turn it to tighten it, or the dual loop band, which adjusts with two extremely basic Velcro straps. It feels very un-apple, but it works. The headset itself features a big sheet of glass and metal, but the series of

of cameras and sensors for measuring the space around you, letting you see the world through pass-through technology. This is a fancy way of saying that there are cameras that show you your surroundings, and it's pretty good. Perspective-wise, it feels realistic. You can grab a drink, you can pet a cat as I have many times. Inside, there's even more cameras, and there's two 4K OLED screens. That's organic LED, kind of see it in fancy high-end TVs, particularly ones by LG.

And these OLED screens are how you see the Vision Pro's operating system, which is projected onto the world in front of you. And the thing that actually blocks out the light around you that actually puts the Vision Pro against your face close enough so it works, is called a light seal, and it clips on with a bit of magnets. And it's strange. It's really weird. And it kind of works, but not regularly enough for me to recommend. one would think you could just buy this thing, and you'd be incorrect. You can't just order a Vision Pro. No, no, no, no.

You have to have an iPhone or an iPad with face ID, which is the scanner that allows you to unlock your phone or your iPad, and you scan your face before you can order it so that they can tell you the right-sized light seal, face rest, which is the little cushion that goes inside the light seal, and head strap. Now, you're probably hearing this and thinking, man, I hope they don't get that wrong,

and you're completely right to worry about that. My first scan gave me a light seal that didn't really seem right. So I scanned it again a day later and got a larger light seal, which costs $300. This process sucks, and it's the least Apple experience I've ever seen. It's the hallmark of a product rushed out without any real planning or thought. I had to scrape through Reddit to find out what to do with this thing,

and apparently there is a way of swapping this. I cannot find anything from Apple themselves about doing so. Nevertheless, you scan, you tell it if you have any vision issues, you tell it if you need optical inserts, and then you provide them with your prescription if you do, and then you order the bloody thing. $3,500,000, and that's just for starters. With 256 gigabytes of memory in there going all the way up to 1 terabyte,

approaching $4,000. When you get the device, it isn't small, But it definitely isn't as bulky or awkward as, say, an Oculus Quest or an HTC Vive or a Steam Index, which are all virtual reality headsets. It took about half an hour of messing with it for me to find something comfortable. This thing is not light, though. And you put it on, and you can definitely feel it on there. The solo strap, in my opinion, is useless. It's uncomfortable.

It does not hold it on right. But the dual strap is actually pretty good. Nevertheless, it took me about half an hour of messing around with it to make it comfortable and make it actually feel right. But when you get there, it kind of just works. It's different from every other VR virtual reality and AR augmented reality experience that I've ever had. You put it on, you turn it on, and it powers on. Sort of.

The initial setup of the Vision Pro requires you to look at your hands, then look at several colored spots hanging in the ether all around your vision, and you tap with your fingers, which you can see with the cameras on the outside of the device. Once that's done, you're presented with a slate of pretty familiar apps, messages, notes, email, and so on and so forth, all things that you would have seen on your iPhone or your Mac or your iPad. When I say you're presented or you see these apps, what I actually mean is the Vision Pro projects these onto the world around you.

They are, it's almost as if they're physically there, but they're not really, it's all computer magic. The screen is sharp, the text is smooth, the icons are rich with color, and they all have a satisfying pop when you look at them, because that's how you really navigate this device. So you look at an icon, you tap your fingers, and then that opens it up. You navigate through pages, say if you're looking at, I don't know, a Google Doc like the one I'm looking at right now, and you pinch and you hold your fingers and then you move them up and down. It feels kind of cool. And this is all done because the Vision Pro can see your hands by your side.

And they can see where you're looking at. They actually look at your eyes using cameras inside the device. Theoretically speaking, you can just use this device with your hands and eyes. Essentially, the world's your desktop. You open Safari, messages, whatever else. You move those windows around by pinching them and, say, underneath everything you're looking at, say a web browser, there's a little dot and there's a little line. The little dot lets you close it by pinching, and the little line lets you grab it and move it around space.

You can have a theoretically infinite desktop space. You can also resize things by looking at the corner of a window and kind of moving your hands up and down. This all sounds quite weird, but when you're in the experience, it's quite accurate. When it works, it's genuinely magical. It's a functional workspace that turns basically anywhere you are into a huge desktop. resizing windows by grabbing the corners, throwing things around. It feels satisfying. It feels futuristic. Apple has, on some level, delivered a consumer-friendly augmented reality experience that anyone can use. It's really exciting when it works. Sadly, that's a load-bearing when.

Now, you may be hearing all this and saying, wow, that sounds amazing, moving things around with my hands and my eyes. How innovative. but what if I need to write an email? The first thing to realize about the Vision Pro is that has the single worst keyboard I have used on a modern consumer device. And remember, Apple once made a keyboard so bad it ended up on the receiving end of a class action lawsuit. I'm of course talking about the butterfly keyboard of the 2015-2020-era MacBooks that really sucked and cost Apple millions to settle. And that keyboard, well, I mean, completely.

Compared to the Vision Pro, that thing's a bloody masterpiece. The Vision Pro's keyboard is so poorly devised, so horribly executed, and so offensively, unfit for the task, that I cannot understand how this device was allowed to launch with it. Typing involves either selecting the keys on the keyboard by looking at them and then pitching, or physically poking at the air like a confused ape, something that Steve Jobs himself once said he did not like, and that's why Matt. books don't have touch screens. It's ill-suited for tasks where you need to precisely select something from a densely packed group of things. It's awkward, it's ugly, it does not work. And it's astonishing that this device launch with this. This is enough of a problem that they should not have put the Vision Pro out into the world. Without a Bluetooth keyboard, which the Vision Pro does support, this thing is effectively useless at any kind of written communication, relying entirely on this horrifying,

airborne poking thing, or Siri, a voice-based assistant, which, as you know from using literally any voice assistant, is a C-plus replacement for the written word. Anyone with a strong accent, a mind by comparison isn't that strong compared to, say, someone from Scotland, they're probably going to drop a few letters, few words and just find themselves deeply frustrated by the whole experience. One might think, of course, now that I've mentioned Bluetooth keyboards, like Apple's Magic keyboard, that this would solve all the problems.

You'd plug this thing in and away you go, you type away, and you'd be like 50 to 75% correct. Look, if I was making this product, if I was Tim Cook and I was putting this bad boy into the world, I probably would have thought, well, my keyboard sucks, so I'm going to make the best Bluetooth experience anyone's ever seen. That's not what Team Cook did. Look, for reasons I cannot ascertain,

the Vision Pro treats Bluetooth keyboards unlike any other device, acting with abject surprise at its existence. You'll turn this thing on, connect it, and suddenly blue lines will appear on random things, on the bar on safari, on a text box in messages. And it isn't obvious what you're meant to do there. You might hit enter, you'd think, okay, this is going to put me in the text box. It doesn't.

It isn't obvious what it wants to do. And at times, it completely freaks out. You'll be typing, and then the screen will start freaking out and selecting different parts or unselecting the place where you are currently typing. My theory is that the Vision Pro is still tracking your hands, as I mentioned it does, as you are typing. This suggests the hilarious possibility that Apple's engineers did not consider the fact that people use their hands to type on keyboards. Writing in a Google document, as I am reading off of now, as billions of people do every day, one of the web's most common tasks is an exercise in frustration.

Sometimes the Vision Pro will arbitrarily decide that I need to move the entire window, or that I can type, but I cannot navigate through the words with the arrow keys, as one might do on literally any device from the last 20 years. Sometimes it will open the software keyboard while I'm typing on the hardware keyboard, getting in the way, physically blocking my vision with a keyboard that I don't want to use because I'm using a physical one, and then I have to close that or move it because sometimes it will pop back up. Similarly, when you use iMessage, so your texting features, you have a lot more problems.

One might think that this would be a simple case of looking and then baby tapping and then typing. What actually happens is that Vision Pro has a minor histrionic situation, unable to tell whether you'd want to use the Bluetooth keyboard or the on-string keyboard, or even if you want to text. I really cannot make it clearer. It is very difficult to just look at a place and then start typing and then send a message with a Bluetooth keyboard. This is a three and a half thousand dollar item. It should be easy. This is the easy stuff. Look, look, look. While this may seem petty, I just want to be crystal clear.

The Apple Vision Pro, Apple's first new kind of computer in some time, is incapable of simply letting me type words into a document without experiencing some kind of mental breakdown. The user interface issues on this thing are remarkably bad. They suggest this company simply did not test it in real world cases. It feels as if they rush this out. Apple, a company that redefined the computer several times over and likely will several times more,

has managed to launch a $3,500,000 device that at its basic level cannot let me type words on a fucking page. And it's astonishing that this company would launch a product so utterly ramshackle in its execution. It isn't clear why, for example, I cannot simply type in this document, check my text, and then immediately return to the same document without the Vision Pro either failing to let me start typing

or dropping my cursor into the middle of the page. Look, these are bugs, obvious, ridiculous bugs. And Apple has shown an utter loathing and disrespect for their customers by shipping this device with such obvious flaws. And there are plenty more, too. On taking the device off and putting it on again, as I mentioned on the intro, about half the time, it'll simply not load the user interface, forcing me to do a hard restart of the entire device.

I've had multiple times where the eye tracking simply didn't work, selecting stuff I was clearly not looking at. Apple has also rushed ahead without a full app ecosystem, relying on compatibility with, and I quote, millions of iPhone and iPad apps that really aren't that compatible with it at all, including chat app signal, which requires you to take a picture of a QR code to connect to your account. Note that there is no way to take a picture of a QR code

that's inside a device that you're looking at with your eyes. It's just sad. It's really sad. You can't launch something with a facsimile of Slack, a workplace piece of software used by millions. But don't worry Microsoft team fans, you're supported. The basic building blocks of an app ecosystem are not in place here. There's no YouTube app, though YouTube has mentioned that they might build one. Netflix? No app.

It feels as if Apple just thought, we'll just get this shit out there. Who cares? And as I've mentioned, while there's technically Bluetooth keyboard support, Apple has done such a lazy, half-fast and thoughtless job with it that it's barely an improvement over their regular software keyboard unless you can make it work. And that is, that's an unless. As I've mentioned, there's technically Bluetooth keyboard support,

but Apple has done such an awful, lazy, half-fast and thoughtless job with it that it's only somewhat of an improvement over the software keyboard. This is the easy stuff, as I've mentioned. Another podcast from some SNL, late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman, help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel,

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or wherever you get your podcast. So while writing this draft, while putting this together, I had quite a few problems with focus. I would pick the thing up, put it on. It wouldn't look right. I'd readjust and I could kind of get it right, but it just didn't feel consistent. Sometimes I'd look and it wouldn't look at the right place. For example, when you open the device and you have to enter your passcode, sometimes it just wouldn't accept where my eye was looking.

I'd look at the top right corner. It would look in the middle. I called Apple support Couldn't get through to anyone I'd book a call, talk to someone for five minutes They're gone Hang up on me This was within a week of the launch of a device

That made Apple half a billion dollars Nevertheless Many of the problems I ran into Were a result of poor fit I want to be clear how inexcusable it is That a major tech product One that made a company Hundreds of millions of dollars in a single day

can be shipped as poorly as Apple has shipped the Vision Pro. To try a different-sized light seal, an essential part of this device, is $300, and the cushions that go inside the light seals cost an additional $30 each. I got really lucky. I found someone with exactly the same issue as I had on Reddit, someone with exactly the same sizes. I scanned my face on the day and I got fitted for what Apple calls a 21W. The person on Reddit also had this problem.

they tried a 23W. It was better, but a trip to the Apple store ended up with a 23N. When I tried it, this was exactly what I needed. The Vision Pro was now very consistent. Every time I put it on, it was pretty good. Things mostly worked, because that's the Vision Pro experience. Now, these numbers are of course all nonsense and based on some kind of internal calculus that would have made Steve Jobs take a hostage. Had I not spent hours trying to, to work out these issues and spending 90 bucks on different eye cushions, I would have assumed that the Vision Pro was just kind of awkward if you didn't put it on right. It turns out it's meant to feel a certain way every time, and in many cases, I think people would simply return it than correct

the homework of a company with $250 billion in cash in the bank. I, of course, was doing this review, so I had to get it right. It's also ridiculous that I had to, and it's ridiculous that Apple does not have a way of checking whether the fit is correct. The way the Vision Pro is meant to work is it's meant to go on and feel good immediately. You're not meant to shift the bugger around. That's what I found out only through my own experimentation. Apple has made very little efforts to make sure you are using their device properly. This is not a, to quote Steve Jobs, you're holding it wrong issue. This is a you have deployed your launch wrong, Mr. Cook, issue. It's a complete disgrace that a company, as large as Apple, could ship a product, one I add,

that costs several times more than most people pay for rent, requiring such a precise fit and then trusts these measures to a phone's face scanner. The difference between a correct fit on a Vision Pro is the difference between the clarity of a 720P screen, so the kind that you would have seen from televisions 15 or 20 years ago, and a 4-ray screen like you'd see on most televisions today. And there's very little out there to tell you what Wright feels like. If Apple was a responsible company, they'd demand customers come in to pick up their vision pros and get fitted by an Apple genius when they did so.

Instead of doing the expensive, important hard work of building, say, satellite fitting appointments or perhaps a thorough remote fitting appointment, Apple would rather burden an indeterminate amount of customers with an inferior experience. Imagine if you got your laptop and you opened it up and sometimes the resolution was wrong. Or maybe your iPhone came and just a quarter of the screen didn't work. And these were all basic settings that had never been put in. This is the level of fuck up that Apple is made with the Vision Pro. And I think it's important that consumers are aware of this.

Look, I don't have any data on this subject. But based on even a cursory glance at social media, there are so many people. who do not know if they're getting the intended experience with Apple's Vision Pro. I spent days with this device feeling uncomfortable and trying to make it work in a predictable, reliable manner without success. I did try and schedule a call with Apple's support, but when I did so, I spent five minutes giving them the most basic information about my device, like my serial number and all sorts,

and things I'd already tried. At that point, the specialist dropped my call, dumped me back on hold, with a chirpy voice telling me, that a specialist would be right with me in a few minutes. After 10 minutes I hung up. To be abundantly clear, this was a call I scheduled with Apple several hours beforehand. It's also important to add that Apple does, allegedly, have pop-ups that are meant to warn you of a poor fit of the Vision Pro or issues with eye tracking.

They never appeared once, and I simply assumed that Apple had really not quite worked out how to make augmented reality work yet. And what's really frustrating about this whole thing is that Apple was really, really close to doing something quite marvelous. I wanted to give you listeners a little more perspective on the Vision Pro, so I reached out to one of the leading tech reviewers in the country. Joanna Stern is the Emmy Award-winning personal tech columnist at the Wall Street Journal, and was one of the founding reporters at The Verge, another major consumer electronics website. She reviewed the Vision Pro for the journal, and I thought it would be great to get her views. Joanna, thank you for joining me. Anytime. Where else would I be? Well, maybe that's a good question.

Do you plan to use your Vision Pro past the review period? I do. I think I, you know, I think I've had it now, okay, two weeks. What days today? I'm very prepared for your podcast. It's Wednesday the 7th. Okay, so I've actually had it for two weeks. Today at 5 o'clock p.m. in one hour from now, I will celebrate my two week anniversary with my Vision Pro review unit. And we will be together.

And, well, I won't go there. In the augmented world. In the augmented world. And so I will say I finished the review about a week ago, and I have used it for two things since. I will also just caveat saying, I have been sick and I've been very nauseous without the headset on. It's just the sickness that I seem to have come down with. So for the last two days, I've just been like, I didn't want to go near that thing. But when I recover, I plan to put it back on.

But the two things I've used it for, one is working. So I don't have the best monitor at my Wall Street Journal office. I know shocking. It was such a glowing intro you did for me. But leading technology columnist has crappy monitor is really the headline here. And so I've been using the headset to just work. I have a very good setup in there with my three different monitors or virtual monitors. And I've kind of arranged it the way I like it.

I think I'm actually quite productive in there. And the second is I've been watching in it. I've been watching Beef. Have you watched Beef? I've not. No? Yeah, it's a crazy show. It's on Netflix.

And I watched the last two episodes in there. So what was the fitting experience? So you, I assume, got it straight from Apple. Did they do any kind of fitting experience with you? They did. But it was very similar to the fitting experience that anyone else goes through, which was on the app. Really. That was the, you know, I enrolled my face. I did the sort of weird head turns looking at the phone. It then gives you prediction of what size you're going to be. And that was all I really did. No special. No special. They actually nailed it, though?

I think mine fits pretty well. I mean, it's really interesting because now, so the first week I had it, I really couldn't show it to anyone that was part of the agreement with Apple and couldn't really let other people wear it. And then after the embargo broke and we were able to start sharing this, I had a lot of. lot of colleagues want to test it out. By the way, I'm convinced that's how I actually got sick because they were all breathing in my face computer. And when you put it on them, like, you can definitely see this thing does not fit them, right? Most people, it's mostly men and they have big heads and, you know, literally and figuratively. And they come out of like the demo that I've done with them with like a giant red stripe on their head, like it looks like they've gone scuba diving. And I don't have that. I just don't have that. I mean, in the initial hands-on I did with Apple in June at WWDC, I actually did have that. I had that like red mark across my

forehead. And, you know, thinking back on it, it was probably because they hadn't figured out the fitting situation. So when I got mine, I had a horrible experience. My first four, five days with it, I scanned with the app five in the morning and the day you order it and scanned my face and it gave me 21W. I then immediately was checking like Reddit and people were saying, oh, I got that, I don't know if this is right. And then when it came out, I put it on. I'm like, this is not.

This does not feel right. So I got a 23W based on a Reddit post. And I just, every so often I put it on and it wouldn't feel right. It wouldn't be in focus. The eye tracking wasn't working. I just assumed it sucked. And then scraping through Reddit more,

I found someone else with the same size situation. They said, oh, by the end cushion. size. And it was night and day. And it just feels to me like this is a massive supply chain issue that Apple is not considering. Or is it that they got the sizing wrong when you first did it? But that's what I mean, though. It's the supply chain of the actual scan. It almost feels like they should not be relying on it. I don't know if you've heard of anyone else. I'm not even trying to load a question here. Have you heard of anyone else having this problem? I haven't. I haven't. I mean, that's good.

I mean, so, you know, and they have the two. And so it was the, it's the light seal is what you're saying, the different size. It was the light seal and the light seal cushion. Cushion, yeah. Yeah, so, and I have two cushions because, or maybe they, everyone gets two cushions, but they say you should use the bigger light seal cushion if you plan to use the lenses, the prescription lenses. I don't know if you have those.

I don't. I also only got one, one cushion with mine when I bought it. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I actually think that I had the extra cushion because I had the lenses, too. Right. Which is a little comelier. And the thing is, when it's working now, it's great. But I feel like the real elephant in the room is the keyboard. The keyboard is just astonishingly bad.

Yeah, yeah. Steve Jobs, I'm surprised he didn't come out of the grave like an angry zombie over this one. It's awful. I mean, I assume it's a place that they're definitely looking at how do we make a typing experience better there. Yeah. I think that, like, you know, could they, would swiping, you know, sort of the swipe input. Kind of like gesturing in the air, almost. Exactly.

Would that be better, probably? Maybe. Right? It's just so weird because the experience feels cool, but then you get to the common way of entering text into stuff. which is very common, and that you should be able to do on anything. And it's just, it almost doesn't feel like an Apple product. I know. And I don't know if you've had this too, or it's like, you can't touch type on that, right?

Oh, no. You want to like look down. You have to look at this virtual keyboard, but then you're looking up to see, you know, where your text is going in and is it going right? And they have like a little thing above the keyboard where you can see the text as it's typing out. But it's, it's, all of this to say, it's just not now. And I even showed in my videos like, thank God for a real keyboard and you can pair it with Bluetooth. So it's like the killer accessory for this is actually a, you know, $99 keyboard that I was going to sell you.

One thing I loved in your review was when you said, you can have all of this for the Lolo price of like $5,000. And you have the MacBook Pro, the keyboard, the this and that. It just feels like the experience is not complete without that keyboard, in my opinion. Yeah, I agree. I agree. I mean, I think it's fine if you're like going to just type in one show, right? and you're like, okay, let me go to Netflix and type in beef, that's fine. Or you can use voice to do that.

But when you are really trying to do something in there, like you're trying to type an email or I've actually been writing. Like a ton of my stuff I've been writing in there. I wrote the 4,000 word script for the full episode on the Vision Pro. I can't write on a laptop sitting down. I have to be at a desk. Otherwise my rat brain doesn't focus properly. But I was able to sit on the couch and write this just sitting there.

And that's remarkable. but I find the focus parts remarkable. I think that's, and some people have been remarking about this on social media and various think pieces, but the irony of this being the killer computing platform for just 2D, basically notes or documents, right? Like, that's what we have gotten. The future is actually just big floating documents in our sky. Well, to that point, do you think that this or a device like this is the future? So, I mean, look, that's where I kind of took my review.

And now I've had some distance from it and been able to reflect. And, again, also just thinking about where does this going to fit into our lives? That was the number one thing I wanted to answer in this review was, okay, they've made this crazy piece of technology. How are we going to use it in our daily lives? And it just seems natural, especially when we have these new pieces of tech, you know, whether it was iPhone or smartphones or tablets, etc. are like, we're going to try to do the things that we did on other devices first. Right. That makes sense, right?

We're going to try to work on it. We're going to try to watch TV and videos on it. Like, we've been trying to do that with all of our personal tech. And so when it comes to, like, changing those things, sure, but like the future for me and those things, like, we are still going to have a good future writing documents on our computers, right? Right. Like the whole entire AI vision right now is to make that easier, working easier.

So what I was trying to really look at is like, we're going to be the things that are just going to break out of the mold of the current things we do on these devices and where will it be better. And this is where I kind of got into this cooking situation, which has gone viral. And just for listeners, if you haven't seen Joanna's review, she is able to place, with the Vision Pro,

you're able to place timers above things. So while cooking, she made a, what was a pasta dish, I believe? Yes, yes. And so this has become the running joke, like, well, did you not know you could also set multiple timers on your phone? And did you not know? And Colbert, you could maybe pipe the audio in here. He's now being making fun of me on his late night show saying, well, what else would you do?

Buy two ovens? I think Colbert needs to not throw so many stones in glass houses with how deeply unfunny midnight is. But that's a separate podcast. I think that whole thing has really annoyed me as well. Not because I'm particularly defensive of Apple, but it's like, you're going to do that kind of thing about a new device, there are so many, you could have sat with the Oculus Quest and done the same thing. Oh, I can work out while wearing a headset. Well, I can also do that without anything. I can just do jumping jacks. You can make that kind of thing.

Sure. And actually, here's a good question. Do you think that this is going to make people more antisocial? Because that feels like the weird meme I'm seeing that's like, oh, this is shutting people off from the world. Yes. So just let me finish it answering the first one because I feel like I didn't do it great. No, it's my fault. I was going on now. But my point in that review, and maybe I haven't articulated this well, I've seen a lot of analysis of the review, which thank you everyone for spending time reviewing the review. But the point was to show things that aren't the typical things, the things that could bring this into the future and that actually make things better and change the way we use these devices.

And I felt that that situation with the cooking really illustrated it. Here is a real life thing you're doing. It's better to actually have this headset on than use your phone because you don't have to hold a phone and cooking with your holding a phone or, you know, even touching a phone in the kitchen is a pain. Everyone knows that. And on top of that, it was just blend, this idea of blending the virtual with the real really, really stuck out to me there.

Like I have a physical thing. It is this pot of pasta. It is boiling. And I see a digital interface over it. And I'm not saying that. It needs to be every use case. But that is where I felt like, okay, I can see the future. So that is how I'm trying to answer the yes, I think this is the future.

We still need to have the use cases and the apps to prove out what those things are going to be. The thing I, and you kind of glanced at this in the review, but I understand why this wouldn't have come up. but it's it feels like the apps are not there though like very basic apps are not there YouTube being the obvious one and there is by the way a 499 YouTube app that people are hyping

as a replacement it's a goddamn web wrapper that developer should be kicked off the app store anyway but like Slack isn't there Signal isn't there yep very basic thing Slack is there but they're there as an iPad app and it's horrible

it's horrible I mean I didn't even have time in the review, but like, there was a couple places where I was cursing because you cannot select. I mean, this is the issue with putting the iPad apps in. They weren't, they were created for touching, right? So you actually, when you're using the Slack app in the Vision Pro, you want to bring it closer to you and then actually tap in the air versus using the pinch, you know, using the pinch gesture. But no, absolutely. And look, we've seen already momentum this week with YouTube saying they're going to create and more apps coming. I mean, chat, GBT, B.T announced, like, There's going to be some momentum and we're going to get some of these apps.

But what I'm more interested in is like, what are these going to be these ideas of these apps that we don't have right now that don't run our computers? I agree. We have to have those other ones because, hey, how do we work in there if we don't have Slack? I mean, how do you work without Slack? It's impossible. I'm just joking. I don't really. I'm a major Slack user, but would happily use anything else to work.

So I think those things will come with time. But on the isolation thing, I think that's, so that is the number one reason I have not picked it up more. And I think might end up being part of, you know, what happens after this first wave of real big interest. It doesn't feel like something I'd ever use around a person. Exactly. And I live with a person. I don't know about you. I live with my wife and I live with two kids.

So I live with like a lot of things at a dog. And there's a lot of things going on in here. And I had this situation this weekend. I was like, I'd love to watch another episode of The Beef in here. But my wife is sitting right here. I'm going to put this on on the couch and she's going to do what? Right? And then you start to think like dystopian like, oh, what if we both had them?

And we both sat here with these on looking at the wall. Eh, I don't, even if that was an amazing experience, is that what I want to do on Saturday night? It doesn't feel particularly intimate. No. No. No. Like when I, when mine arrived, I was with my fiance and I played with it, but I put a hard cap on when I'd stop because it felt strange using it with another person around. It just did.

It felt very much like rejecting anyone around me. Like I, even with pass-through, it felt kind of strange. Well, and the pass-through thing, while they've done a lot more than the others, right, to put put some screen on. the front. Like, it's all kind of bullshit. Like, nobody really knows that you're looking at them. If I had, like, a dollar for every time I asked, hey, can you see my eyes in this? Yeah. I had the same thing. And the answer was always no. Right. The answer is always no. And you're constantly asking. It's just like, please stop asking me if I can see your eyes. Like, I cannot see your eyes. Oh, the persona thing is awful as well. I just, why bother with that?

I don't know what they were thinking. I know it's this, to describe for the listeners, it's, it's, you scan your face using the Vision Pro, and it spits out a 3D clone of your face that is not flattering, I should add. Yeah. And it mimics your facial actions. If someone FaceTime videos you during your use of the Vision Pro, I just don't, I know why they did it,

but they shouldn't have. Yeah, I think, look, I hit on this really hard in my review because I had not laughed so hard. I don't remember the last time I laughed so hard. When I saw my persona, I was like crying of laughter. I think it's the funniest thing I've ever seen. It just doesn't look like me. And then I would call people and they would be laughing and they would say,

never call me again looking like this. Like, and maybe mine was worse than others. It seems like to be the case. Oh, I have no neck in mine. I refuse to show it to anyone. Yeah. I mean, look. Most people look bad.

I just look like I look terrible. I'm another level of bad in mine. So it makes me look. So I used to be about 100 pounds heavier than I currently am about $1.90 right now. It makes me look like I weight 300 pounds, which is not great for my self-esteem, I should add. But it also looks strange. Yeah. It looks very weird.

It looks strange. And look, there's a lot about they didn't want to go the root of what meta had done, which would make us look like cartoons. So they're trying to make us look more realistic. And maybe eventually they get there. And they've slapped the beta label on there just to make it clear, like, we are not done building this thing. I get why they couldn't ship without it. Like, how are you going to ship? We've just spent...

I actually can answer that. Memoji. The Memoji works fine. No one is going to expect you to do a video call while wearing this bloody thing. So do the Memoji. Make it fun. I agree. You know, and that's there for the taking.

Like, our iPhones already have emojis that are, like, mapped to our face. Like, it works. I think they didn't want to go the root of meta. Like, they didn't want to be competing with, like, Mark Zuckerberg cartoon face. you know, like, they saw... And the irony is that they also released an incomplete product that kind of sucks. So, who's laughing now? Probably Mark Zuckerberg?

I don't know. Right. But, I mean, look, on the other hand, we just spent 10 minutes talking about working in this thing. So how are you going to release a device for working in this day and age where you should be working at your home office and you can't video call on it? Like, you had to have something. I don't know. I find the whole thing quite confusing. I think you could even just have a still image of the person that would do this.

same job. That's true. I don't know why they didn't do that. So I only got two more questions for you. Do you think that Apple rushed this out? No and yes. Did they rush this particular version out?

No, it actually, like, it works really well, right? Like, there are some small bugs, and I'm sure maybe you've... I don't know. Selecting on like even Google Docs is extremely broken. Like, basic things like that don't feel like. But that's not design. So that's where, that's the design issue, right? Like, that's, can you navigate the

whole web with this, the way this is designed? The only reason I push back on that is, you're right, the whole web, but Google Docs, what billions of users, it just feels, the reason I ask is, because to me, at least it feels rush, because they didn't do their due diligence with other developers. Keep going, sorry. But then there's the flip side of, hey, these developers need to feel, and I believe Google will come along once they see, oh, wow, look. we're really seeing X amount of people for X amount of time working here. We should probably do something, right? Microsoft did it.

Microsoft has apps in there. They have almost all of Microsoft 365 in there. So, like, they're making a bet before it's ready. I think also Microsoft has nothing to lose because they don't have their own headset coming. They've sort of abandoned that. Yeah, HoloLens is kind of dead in the water. Yeah. But look, I think, so this particular version, we all know this is, you know, this is the first generation.

actually called it times, is this negative one generation? Should this have sort of been, you know, as people have called it, a dev kit and all of these things, it's certainly not a mainstream product. Right. The question, like, really is should they have waited five years? Right. And would Steve Jobs, as everyone would be saying, would he have waited the five years? Would he have said, okay, we've got this so we can do this now, but we need to wait five more

years until we can slim down this and we can make this and we can do this? And that's actually my final question for you. How do you think Steve Jobs would have done this? I was asked us on another podcast. I think I keep thinking about, well, it's funny, what you said before, you know, you put it on wrong and, or you didn't put it on wrong, but you had some issues with it, right? And there's the famous Steve Jobs quote, you're holding it wrong. Yeah. Right?

And so what he said. But also Steve Jobs hated touch screens on laptops because he didn't like poking the air. Yeah. Yes. And here we are. But like what he have said to you, you know, you're wearing it wrong. And to me, too, because sometimes I'll put it on and it's like, you know, it's not aligned exactly to my eyes. And so if I look at something, it's slightly off and then I've got to like change it a little bit, right?

Right. And would he have been okay with that? Would he have said, nope, we've got to wait. We've got to wait a number more years to get this right, to get all of these things right into a thing that people would wear. Or what if he looked at it sort of like, we've got to get it out there. I don't know. I don't feel like he was a got to get it out there guy. It just feels like a very different Apple experience.

It lacks, it's almost fun in the way it lacks it. But when it's, I feel like in a, like it's kind of funny, I guess. It's not really fun. But it feels like also the format of the Vision Pro really emphasizes the problems. When something goes wrong in this environment, it's so claustrophobic. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Well, and I think also if what we know to be true, and I think Nilai Patel's review on The Verge did a really good job of this, is what we know to be true is what Tim Cook sees the vision of this being, right?

He sees a vision of us really an augmented reality type of glasses where we can see the real world and this digital overlays are there. But to get there, they had to make a lot of sacrifices in the here and now. And so now we have a VR headset that's trying to function as an AR mixed reality headset, but it really is a VR headset. And again, what Steve Jobs would say, nope, we're just going to wait until we get there. We're going to wait five years. We're going to wait 10 years. I don't know. Joanna, thank you so much for joining me.

Anytime. I'll love to see your persona soon. Oh, God. I will be hiding that from the world. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guide, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends, me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman, help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel, help an acapella band with their between songs banter. There's that worst singer in the group?

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of this comes together to just make it impossible to recommend the Vision Pro in its current form. It's too expensive. Its experience is too variable. The supply chain and infrastructure to get this thing fitted is too thin, and the developer community is just far too sparse. Without a Bluetooth keyboard, it's claustrophobic, frustrating, and unproductive. With one, it becomes a highly customizable and consistent desktop space that I can pop up wherever I am.

The pass-through feature gives me as much awareness as I need of the world around. me as I'd like, though not to the extent I'd ever use it in public. I can move around, I can close things and resize things with tiny gestures, and when it works, it looks and feels very cool, and it's far more natural than an iPhone or an iPad, or a MacBook, I guess. When it works, and with the right fit, it's much, much more consistent. Looking and pitching at menu options feels great, and you can sweep and move through apps and website like a weird little wizard. When it works, I have more space to work with than my regular setup, which is a 48-inch curve gaming monitor on a massive L-shaped desk. But that's when it works. And if you're one of the

hundreds of thousands of people who bought this, perhaps you're listening to this and thinking, oh, it's not meant to be this bad. And it isn't. But how are the hell you meant to know that? Because Apple certainly hasn't tried to make that the case. Apple has not put in the time, the energy and the thought to making this the launch it deserved to be. I truly believe the Vision Pro could be something revolutionary. It needs to be smaller. It needs to be $2,000, if not $2,500 cheaper. It needs to have the apps.

But when it works, it really is something new. It is something I will be using a lot. It is something that I think could change how we consider computing, how we consider the spaces we work in, and the ways we work in them. and indeed if Apple actually respected their customers, if Apple had the love for their customers that I believe they used to have, this wouldn't be a problem.

None of this would be. And I just don't think they care enough. And I can't say it's worth $3,500. Despite its warts, I really do plan on keeping my Vision Pro. And I'm going to use it a great deal, particularly when I'm traveling. But for the price of a Vision Pro, I can get a brand new MacBook era, a 15-inch one, a terabyte iPhone, and still have hundreds of dollars left to spare. While I love the immersive nature of this whole thing, there's nothing it does better,

and there's plenty of things it can't do at all. There are few reasons why the Vision Pro should have shipped in such terrible shape, other than the fact that Apple needed to show double-digit revenue growth to board investors. Apple has done very little work to confirm that the very basic parts of the internet work with any reliability, websites that you'd expect to be perfect like Google Docs, like Google itself, like Twitter even, are just not ready for this, and Apple clearly didn't reach out to any of these providers to make sure they did. The app ecosystem marvels the iPhone App Store when it first launched. The problems I've experienced with the Vision Pro are annoying.

They're frustrating. They're getting away of an experience I really wanted to enjoy and may indeed enjoy in the future. and it's not clear if there are a result of bad quality control or the limitations of hardware and software. It really isn't obvious. But the problem here is pretty simple. The Vision Pro is an intriguing and exciting look into the future. Except that future is one where a near $3 trillion tech firm ships us beta hardware with alpha software and hopes that we'll thank them for the privilege of helping them fix it.

I've been Ed Zittron. Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Mattosowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at Mattisowski.com. M-A-T-T-T-O-S-O-S-K-I.com. You can go to betteroffline.com to find more episodes, find my newsletter, Where's your Ed app? Or even shoot me an email at EZ at Better Offline.com.

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Another podcast from some SNL, late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel help an a cappella band

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On the Radio 831 podcast, join us, Sanjana Basker and Tyler McCall, as we unpack all the trending tropes, fuzzy adaptations, book talk drama, and celebrity love stories with hot takes and sharp guests. Each episode digs into what these stories reveal about desire, fantasy, identity, and how we love now. Listen to the Radio 831 podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Joey Dardano, and on my new podcast, Hope from a Hypocrite, I'll be changing lives, helping people in need with thoughtful solutions.

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