Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 06/05 – WWDC And The Apple Headset

Episode Date: June 5, 2023

The Apple headset is called the Apple Vision Pro. It’s more expensive than people thought, but it was maybe more impressive than I expected. Oh, also, a new 15-inch MacBook Air. New OS versions and features. And the SEC is officially suing CZ and Binance. Sponsors: Ramp.com/techmeme Links: Apple Vision Pro is Apple’s new $3,499 AR headset (The Verge) The Apple Vision Pro features an M2 chip, a ton of sensors and a new R1 chip (TechCrunch) Apple announces visionOS, the operating system for its Vision Pro headset (The Verge) Apple announces iOS 17 with Journal, Standby, FaceTime voicemail, more (9to5Mac) Apple Announces iOS 17 With 'Standby' View, Journal App, Siri Changes, and More (MacRumors) Apple unveils new Mac Studio and brings Apple silicon to Mac Pro (Apple Newsroom) Apple’s new 15-inch MacBook Air is the ‘world’s thinnest’ (The Verge) Mac Studio gets its first hardware update with M2 Max and the new M2 Ultra chip (9to5Mac) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the Tech meme right home for Monday, June 5th, 2023. I'm Brian McCullough today. The Apple headset is called the Apple Vision Pro. It's more expensive than people thought, but it was maybe more impressive than I thought it would be.

Oh, also a new 15-inch MacBook Air, new OS versions of all the things and features, and the SEC is officially suing CZ and Binance. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. So, WWDC, Tim did the usual bit about how this will be the biggest, best WDC ever, before handing things over to John Ternis to start things off. The Mac came first. The M2 MacBook Air is the world's best-selling laptop, Apple said, so they want you to say hello to the new 15-inch MacBook Air. At 11.5 millimeters thin, they say it's the world's thinnest 15-inch laptop

and weighs in it just over three pounds. Two Thunderbolt ports, MagSafe, and hey, a headphone jack. For color options, it's got an M2 chip, which they claim makes the new air 12X faster than the fastest Intel MacBook Air, getting 18 hours of battery life. There's a six-speaker spatial audio sound system. You can do up to 24 gigabytes of memory and up to 2 terabytes of storage. That 24-gigabytes number sounds wrong. It starts at $1,299.1,19 for education you can order today. It's available next week. The 13-inch MacBook Air is now $1,000.99, so it got a price drop, and the M1 Air is now $9.99. Also, the Macs Studio is getting an update. The Macs Studio is now getting the M2 Max, which has 25% faster performance than the M1 Max. 50% faster after-effects render they used as an example. But why stop there? Say hello to the M2.

Ultra chip. This is two M2 max dyes mashed together. They say the 76 core GPU is 30% faster than the max, 40% faster neural engine, 192 gigabytes of memory on the outsized outside of what you can soup this up with, 50% more than the max. But the real headline is they went ahead and did it. They announced a Mac Pro. Every Mac Pro comes with this new M2 Ultra. It's got the same chassis as the Intel MacPro, but a lot of the guts got a big upgrade. Eight Thunderbolt ports, six on the back, two on the front. Six open PCI gen four slots. The MacPro starts at, get ready for it. $6,999. It's available next week, as is the new studio, which, by the way, starts at $2,000. So that was all in the first 15 minutes. We got three new Macs announced. They were absolutely ripping through things. And to underline this,

It was immediately on to iOS, iOS 17 to be exact, beginning with a big update to the phone app, something they're calling personalized contact posters. It's integrated into third-party apps. There's also another new feature, live voicemail, live transcription of voicemail in real-time as they are speaking to you. Also, FaceTime is getting messages. You can record messages for people to view later. Lots of changes to messages itself, like location sharing right inside of messages, new search

filters, swipe to reply on any bubble. There's a new check-in feature that lets you start your check-in when you leave a place and then automatically send a message when you get home. If you don't make progress home, it'll check in for you. What else? You can make a sticker out of a live photo. AirDrop has a cool new feature. NameDrop. Just tap photos together to exchange contact info instead of the whole text-me-your-number thing. You can use it with your phone and the watch. You can even tap your phones together to share photos and videos. A new transfer. former model is being used for better typing and autocracked. The keyboard will also finally allow you to use swear words. No more ducking instead of, you know, a new app called journaling is coming later this

year. Your iPhone will automatically make suggestions on what to write about, and you can incorporate a bunch of stuff like music, photos, workouts, and more. As Nilai at the verge said, it basically shows you whatever happened on your phone on a given day and gives you prompts to write about that. You can lock your journal, it's encrypted, it's all handled on the phone, not the cloud. And that new thing that we heard about was also announced standby. Turn your iPhone on its side and it becomes basically a smart screen. So put this on your nightstand or your desk while working, widget-based smart stacks and live activities for weather, calendar, whatever. We think it will make iPhone even more useful in those moments when you set it down. Craig Federigi said,

oh, and Siri is just Siri now. No, hey, Siri needed. And you can now do back-to-back Siri questions. I'm going to throw the rest of the devices, and OS is here to sort of bring some order to this. So let's move on to iPadOS. Finally, widgets are coming to the home screen in iPadOS. Widgets are interactive without having to open an app. And personalization of the lock screen is here. Craig put six widgets on his lock screen, so it looks like you can go widget crazy. Live activities are coming to the iPad lock screen, so track your Uber delivery. Health is coming to the iPad in a major way. whole segment on how PDF support is coming to the iPad, thanks to new machine learning models. iPadOS can identify the fields in a PDF, and this works on documents scanned with your camera.

You can sign with your finger or the Apple Pencil. You can put multiple PDFs inside your notes app. You can sit next to someone with an iPad and collaborate with them in real time. What you draw on your thing shows up on their thing. There's a follow-along feature for whiteboarding. But again, at this point, we were only 45 minutes into the event, and it was on to MacOS, which will be called MacOS Sonoma. New screensavers have come to the Mac that look like the Apple TV aerial screensavers. So I guess that aerial companion app I use is out of business.

But the biggest news is widgets on the desktop, not just in notification center. If you want a widget on your desktop, just grab it and drag it to the desktop. You can even access iPhone widgets from the Mac if your iPhone is on the same Wi-Fi network via continuity. And the widgets are interactive. Again, they sit on your desktop next to your icons. There's a new game mode in macOS to give games what they said was the highest priority of your CPU and GPU, but come on, they're still not really taking gaming fully seriously. They kept teasing, getting serious about games, and they've done that for more than a decade now, right? But no sooner did I type that, then they announced that Death Stranding, Director's Cut was coming to the Mac, which is cool

and all, but wake me when first run games regularly come to the Macs first. Video O'S overlay is coming and can be used in any app like Zoom and Teams. Some Safari news, which blah, blah, blah, though the ability to add websites to your Mac doc as web apps is cool. More interested in the AirPods news, a new feature called Adaptive Audio combines the best of noise canceling and transparency modes. It dynamically blends them to match the conditions of your surroundings without you having to shift between the modes. And if you start speaking to someone, it detects that you're speaking to someone and automatically turns the volume down on what you've been listening to. They claim AirPods switching, the switching experience between devices is faster and smoother now, which,

if true, that would, you know, low-key be the biggest news of the day. SharePlay is coming to the car. Airplay is coming to hotels. We'll see about that. But the big news here is a FaceTime app is coming to the Apple TV. You can use the continuity camera on your iPhone or iPad. This, I've been waiting for this. You can even use SharePlay to watch shows and movies together on the Apple TV. Again, you just set up your device pointed at you, and it does all the work for you without you having to hold it. Then watchOS, watchOS 10. To be specific, the big UI change that was rumored is here from any watch face. You can now just turn the digital crown. To view a smart stack of widgets, there's even a widget that can hold your favorite complications

for you inside of one widget. There were health features, a cycling feature, something that will measure how you're swinging a tennis racket or golf club, a simple mood tracker to help with your mental health, new feature on the Apple Watch that lets you measure how much time you spend in sunlight, and a feature called screen distance, which measures if a device is too close to your eyes. It's for, you know, kids, but also is an interesting thing to announce at the same event that they're going to announce a device where you literally strap a screen to your face on all of the OS updates. Developer betas are available today, public betas next month, release this fall as you'd expect. And then 80 minutes.

into the event. It was back to Tim Cook for a classic, one more thing. It seems that augmented reality is the paradigm they want to go with here. It was video time, and then it was the headset. It looks like ski goggles, ski goggles with a digital crown. In fact, it looks like an Apple Watch kind of had a baby with a face hugger in terms of the design language. And yes, when you're wearing it, people can see your eyes underneath. The name of the device is Apple Vision Pro. This is quoting Tim Cook himself. A new kind of computer that augments reality by seamlessly blending the digital world with the real world. Use your apps anywhere and make them any size you want. Use your apps on an infinite canvas. Interact with it, with your hands, your eyes, and I guess

that digital crown. Spatial Computing, I believe he just called it spatial computing. The demo was given to Alan Die. Again, Apple Vision Pro, unlike Meta's Quest, when you first put the Vision Pro on, you see the real world first. This is not stepping into VR. The apps sort of float in front of you, like the home screen of your iPhone. You can rescale the apps to fill your field of vision or move around to the side further away from you, whatever. But again, you're starting off in the room you're in just with your apps in front of you. Yes, there were countless images of the cable going down to the battery pack sitting in someone's pocket while they're using it. Ah, you turn the visual crown to

gradually move from this initial sort of AR mode into a more immersive sort of VR mode. So you could turn the dial while you're watching Ted Lasso floating in the room in front of you until all of a sudden there's nothing but darkness around Ted Lasso or you're watching Ted Lasso in the middle of an Alpine Forest or something like that. Again, mainly they want you to select things that you're looking at with your eyes, not turning your head, but moving your eyes to look at the things. Select something. The thing sort of moves forward so you know you're selecting it, and then you actually select it by tapping your fingers together. Although you can also use Siri to do stuff. Now, here's the wild thing. If I'm wearing this thing and you walk into the

room, you can see my eyes. They call it eyesight. If I'm watching a movie or something, it occludes my eyes so that you know that I'm immersed in something. But if you were to say, sit down in front of me, your image would come into my field of view, stepping in front of Ted Lassau, I guess, and my eyes would suddenly become clear to you so that you could see me looking at you and blinking and things like that. Vision Pro is always in sync with your Mac or your iPhone, apparently. You arrange apps around like you want. You know, you could put Siri in front, I guess, and I don't know, garage band over here, but they're still emphasizing the real world is there. They showed a guy coming in under a browser to hand someone a sticky note.

at a desk. There were lots of images of people using this at a desk with a keyboard. And so again, this is maybe a monitor replacement more than an iPhone replacement. Magic trackpad and keyboard are usable for input, or you open up your Mac, your existing Mac, and drag your Mac screen into the Vision Pro, which you then would use with your keyboard. You would have a big 4K display right in front of you, as big as you want. And if you want to focus, you dial the digital crown to black out everything but what you're looking at. David Pierce just said what I just said. I forget who it was, who said the Vision Pro was going to be the successor to the Mac rather than an iPhone, and that definitely seems to be the case here. This is a computer monitor more than anything else. I said that, David, although I'm sure I wasn't the only one. They showed FaceTime calls with people's faces floating in front of you, but they took a while to tell us, what do they see? What do they see of me if I have the goggles on? More on that in a second. They demoed photos going through your photo library. It was a nuts. Get as close to the photos as you want. Imagine every panorama you've ever taken on your iPhone.

Wow. Spread out almost 360 degrees around you. And wait, this thing has a 3D camera on it that takes 3D video of your surroundings, which is cool as heck. But does that mean I have to be wearing goggles to take the 3D video of my kid blowing out the candles on their birthday cake? When I watch it back, it'll be cool to see it in 3D, but that means I have to be wearing the goggles while this is happening, IRL. Surely 3D cameras are coming to iPhones soon. They showed videos of people watching movies using the goggles on an airplane, which that does seem like a use case you would want. Use case for you right there. 3D movie experiences like Avatar. They leaned into a lot of 3D stuff, and I bet the 3D experience on this is much better than the TVs that they tried to shove down our throats 15 years ago.

But, I mean, 3D is impressive on the quest, too. They mentioned gaming. and game controller support. They say 100 Apple arcade titles will be available on day one. Bob Eiger came out to demo Disney content, like watching The Mandalorian, but, you know, on a planet, on Naboo or something. True multi-screen sports setups watching multiple games at once or multiple angles. Mickey jumped off of a poster in a room and started interacting with someone standing seemingly right in front of them. Disney Plus will apparently be available on the Vision Pro from day one. So that's what it's like to use this new device. That's what the content you might be able to use on it will be. But what about the design and the hardware deeds? Well, the front of this

device is a single piece of glass that is a lens for eyesight and the cameras. There's the digital crown, but also a button, which you would use to capture spatial photos and videos. Again, those 3D videos I mentioned. It has a thermal design, so there is a fan inside it. It has a sort of textile form on the back for the strap. But it is a modular system. You can take the various bits of it apart. There's a light seal on the front to make allowances for different face sizes. The headband is apparently 3D printed, and there's a third piece in the middle that allows you to change the band size with an adjustment dial or just by swapping the bands out. The lenses were crafted by Zice and they're magnetic, so you can swap them in and out

to account for different prescriptions and vision and the like. They, many, mention the battery pack and that the battery pack will get you two hours of battery life. What about the screen? What are you looking at? It's apparently a micro-o-led Apple Silicon backplane, 7.5 microns, 23 million pixels across both displays, total full 4K resolution, wide color, HDR, spatial audio. Vision Pro uses something called audio ray tracing to map your room and the surface is in it to make the sound match the environment that you're in when you're in the goggles. Downward cameras are used for hand tracking. LiDAR is used to sense the space around you. You have eye trackers on the inside to, again, track your eyes and what you're looking at.

There are 12 cameras on this device in total, five sensors and six mics. The chip powering this thing is called the R1. It's based on the Apple M2 chip. The R1 eliminates lag, apparently. Streaming new images to the displays in 12 milliseconds, which is eight times faster than the blink of an eye, apparently. Ah, here's how the FaceTime will work. The headset, when you start it off, sort of like when you scan your face for Face ID, you scan your face for this thing, and it builds what they called a persona that you can use virtually in FaceTime, so that while you're wearing it, your face is animated, and it's a 3D avatar, but it's much, much better than the Avatar's Zuck's Wii-style avatars. It's not perfect, but it's much better than anything I've seen anyone else do.

But also, this was a demo video. We'll have to see how it feels in real life. The OS is called VisionOS. What does that mean for developers? Apple announced a new app called Reality Composer Pro for developers. They showed some augmented reality stuff. Designers collaborating in real space, in real time. I bet there's going to be an explosion of meditation apps. But they also showed Microsoft apps like Word and Teams. and name-checked Zoom. But the key is, they said, thousands of iOS and iPadOS apps will be available from day one as long as you're cool with those apps just floating in front of you in your field of vision. Unity is also coming to the Vision Pro. You can use Adobe Lightroom with your eyes and hands.

There's a new authentication system called Optic ID, which scans your iris, so the data is encrypted, it never leaves your device, it works with Apple Pay, and before Zuck gets excited about, you know, tracking what you look at, this is a quote just now from Apple, Apple. Where you look stays private. Apps and websites can't see where you're looking. Data is run through a separate process. And only when you tap your fingers do they know what you've clicked on. They say the Vision Pro has 5,000 patents related to its development, but here's where the rubber hits the road. It starts, starts at $3,499, which was more than most people were thinking. And they did say starts, so I guess you can soup this thing up with what storage?

It's available, they said, early next year, but when it is, you can get a demo and personalize your fit in the Apple stores. And that was it. It was almost at exactly two hours, maybe two hours and three minutes. I can't wait for the first reports of the hands-on from the event to trickle in, probably starting right now. Final thoughts, think about this. If this is the Apple Vision Pro, the high end, which we knew, someday, stands a reason we'll get the Apple Vision, right? maybe a Vision light as the intermediate step, but to be clear, Apple Vision is the name of this lineup of this new platform. Finally, today I'd be remiss if I didn't try to squeeze this in because it would lead the headlines on any other day. The SEC has officially sued Binance and CEO Chang Peng Zhao, otherwise known as CZ, accusing the company of mishandling billions in customer

funds, lined regulators and investors, and more. Quoting the New York Times. The Wall Street regulator said Binance had been mixing billions of dollars in customer funds and secretly sending them to a separate company called Merit Peak Limited, which is controlled by Binance's founder, Cheng Peng Zhao. The charges included misleading investors about the adequacy of its systems to detect and control manipulative trading and about its efforts to restrict U.S. investors from trading on its unregulated platform. Regulators said in the civil lawsuit filed in federal district court in Washington that Binance and Mr. Zhao, quote, enriched themselves by billions of U.S. dollars while placing investors' assets at significant risk, end quote. The nation's top securities regulator filed 13 charges

against Binance and Mr. Zhao, better known in the crypto world as CZ. The SEC is taking action a little over a month after the Commodities Futures Trading Commission filed its own civil enforcement action against Binance and Mr. Zhao. The CFTC is seeking to bar Mr. Zhao from doing business that falls under its jurisdiction for life. The agency also wants to permanently banish Binance from the United States, end quote. All right. It is currently 3.15 p.m. East I just finished typing the script. Time to head into the booth. Let's see how quickly I can have this out to you. Talk to you tomorrow.