The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Reactions to Apple’s new vision (Friends)
Episode Date: June 9, 2023Homebrew project leader Mike McQuaid joins us to weigh in on Apple's big Vision Pro announcement. We also hit on our favorite (and least favorite) non-AR things from the WWDC 2023 keynote....
Transcript
Discussion (0)
It's already been a big day, but we do have one more thing.
Welcome to ChangeLogin Friends, a weekly talk show about spatial computing.
Thanks to our partners for helping us bring you great developer pods each and every week.
Check them out at FASI.com, Fly.io, and Typesense.org.
Okay, let's talk.
So we are here joined by Mike McQuaid with homebrew what's up mike hey i'm going good thank you thanks for having me on guys it's been a while it has been too long which is why we're
so happy to have this new format where we can just invite old friends on and talk to them yeah
no it's nice to nice to come here it's good timing as well with WWDC recently. Lots
of interesting, spicy things to talk about. We were joking in the homebrew maintainer Slack
yesterday about how it's generally our time of year to be like, what is Apple going to break
this time that we have to desperately try and fix in the next three months before everyone complains?
Right, right. Well, you probably don't find that out on Monday, though, so the
keynote goes out, but that's like the
big consumer retail news.
But the developer news
kind of trickles out throughout the week. Isn't that
the case, usually? Yeah, but also
I think they've landed one of the
developer betas for macOS Sonoma
already. So we actually,
one of our maintainers fixed some
stuff and made a release yesterday so that Sonoma could work. Wow. Sonoma could work at a very high level. I not immediately
like fail on startup when you run Homebrew, but. You're not declaring full support, but you
probably think it's going to work. Yeah. What are some of the things they tend to break when it
comes to new OSs? I mean, you had the major change from obviously intel to m1 or m2 or just the apple
silicon world right that had to move where homebrew actually lives in the the file system what's
typically breaks i mean it could be any number of the things we rely on really like we use the mac
os sandbox so sometimes when they change stuff there then we need to like work around things. It's sometimes like API calls or like Apple will tend to as well, like make the really big changes they want to make with like Xcode and like map those to like Mac OS versions as well.
So it might be the compiler all of a sudden starts doing slightly different things or giving slightly different output, it might be that they have deprecated the system Ruby
and then finally they're actually removing it.
Or all these types of little things
that you often have a bit of advanced warning for,
but require work.
Yeah.
Right.
Why the move from slash user local to slash opt?
This was an Apple Silicon thing,
and I had to do it on an install thing but i don't and i had to do
it on an install but i don't know was there like did they push you guys out of user local or was it
like easier to have to install at the same time what was that change about yeah it's interesting
because we we sort of debated a few different approaches around that because i mean there's
been some people for like literally since day well not literally day
one but probably not far off day one probably literally since day 30 or 100 or something in
homebrew sure who hate that homebrew isn't user local because they're like that's not what it's
for other stuff uses it too you just kind of jank it up with stuff and so there's been that sort of
like gentle pressure for a while that like this is not the best place to put homebrew.
Maybe you should go somewhere else.
But then I think the big one for us was when they released the first M1s,
you had Rosetta, which could run old homebrew very well.
If you were happy on your Mac, just running x86 code, well, x86-64 to be pedantic,
and you were fine with all that, and you wanted to buy an m1 mac and just keep doing things that way say like you know you're just using it to run cli tools
like you're not using it to like generate code that needs to be embedded in an application of
a particular architecture or whatever then yeah you could just continue to use user local then. And well before we had decent ARM support,
that continued to work for you.
But all our binary packages, well, most of them,
require you to be in a particular location on disk.
So if we built the binary package for user local,
you can't randomly install your Homebrew somewhere else
and have that binary package work.
So we were like, well,
we have these kind of three problems of A, we don't have binary packages for ARM yet at all.
B, some of the big stuff that we really need to make a lot of binary packages, like in the,
I think it was a pretty long time before we had Java working at all. And like lots of stuff
relies on Java. So if you don't have any Java
support, then you can't do a lot of things. And then see this kind of desire to like be able to
actually run two homebrews side by side. So you could have the ARM stuff, maybe if you're building
stuff locally that you kind of care about, but you can have a separate homebrew installation
that lives away by itself that you can install everything and that all works.
And to be able to as well, like for us developing, to be able to kind of have some sort of migration path between the two and stuff like that.
So that's what sort of ended up with the two separate locations.
And it's worked pretty well from that perspective there, I think.
And I think literally the only downside really, other than just you know i still occasionally get confused
as to why i go to user local and all my homebrew stuff's not there and i'm like oh wait no no i
moved that right but yeah the other minor one is like that some tools don't have user local
almost like built into their default kind of search paths but i guess like homebrew is big
enough and established enough now that like
homebrew in a lot of cases has just got added to those default search paths for these other tools
where when it was originally created like that wasn't guaranteed that that was ever going to
happen so some other installers have been using the home directory so like asdf will have like a
hidden asdf folder a lot of tools now that are installing things.
Did you guys consider that versus slash opt
as just like make it user local to their home directory?
Yeah, so that gets you back to that binary package problem
I mentioned earlier.
I guess what we could do is we could do that
and mandate that everyone uses the same username,
which sounds like an amusing joke,
but that's actually what we do on Linux.
So on Linux, it's under home Linux brew same username which sounds like an amusing joke but that's actually what we do on linux so on
linux oh really yeah it's under home linux brew because the linux homebrew port which is now
rolled into the the main project but was originally called linux brew when they started it was kind of
from a scientific infrastructure perspective and they found it was actually quite easy to get
system administrators to just create their user and give everyone on the system permissions to that user's home directory more than it was to create some
other random directory on disk like under opt or user local or whatever so we effectively have like
three different locations that are like my gosh the homebrew defaults where binary packages are
built depending on what platform and architecture and things you're on. Fun. Indeed.
Fun, fun, fun.
Well, that's as long as I can go without bringing up the big topic.
Yeah, I was like, I want to go one more layer,
but it's bearing the lead, Jared.
It's bearing the lead.
Yeah, let's not do it.
So yesterday, as we record this, this is Tuesday morning for us. As we record, yesterday was Apple's WWDC keynote,
as everybody pretty much knows at this point.
And we were watching it live in our Apple Nerds channel,
as we do, and just commenting as we go.
And about 80 minutes into that keynote,
I posted this all-caps message that said,
Show us the VR thing. I'm getting bored.
That's kind of what we've been doing so far.
Shortly after that, Apple unveiled this Apple Vision Pro
new product, but they never actually did show us the VR thing. They said Apple Vision Pro will
introduce us to spatial computing. So in the same way that Mac introduced us to personal computing
and iPhone introduced us to mobile computing, Apple Vision Pro will introduce us to spatial computing.
They said augmented reality is a profound technology.
I believe that augmented reality is a profound technology.
And they said it's the first Apple product
you look through, not at.
It's the first Apple product you look through and not at.
I thought that was interesting.
They never said VR.
They never said Metaverse that I heard.
They didn't even really bring up video games,
or maybe I missed that part.
But they're talking about augmented reality.
I just love your guys' reaction to that
because, Mike, we were talking about VR in our channel,
and you have opinions about VR,
but this is not pitched as a VR thing.
They never said VR.
They said augmented reality. They said you look right through it, which this is not pitched as a VR thing. They never said VR. They said augmented reality.
They said you look right through it, which is technically not true, but I guess conceptually,
they want you to have this idea of looking through these goggles and seeing the world,
even though you're seeing a digital representation of the world that's right in front of your face.
So what do you guys think about that? Yeah, I thought that was interesting as well. I had a
similar realization kind of this morning. And I think it's, I guess it's like AR is kind of more social and kind of human, I guess,
was the vibe that they were going for, at least it felt like from their pitch, where
it's a lot more kind of blended with your existing computing.
Whereas AR, sorry, VR, like the thing I kind of love about it, like particularly during periods in which, you know, when I was during COVID lockdowns, when we had a three month old and a two year old who was potty training at home.
Like I find it incredibly relaxing to just shut out the entire world in my VR headset and like go to another place.
Right. And you have no peripheral vision.
You can't see anything else like you can press a button to get like a really sort of janky sort of ar where am i in my room
just so you don't walk into things sort of view but like this idea that you're completely put into
another space and that was i guess i felt i was expecting they were going to go down that route
and that feels like the metaverse route and that feels like not at all what they were doing like yeah i think it's interesting for sure
yeah what do you think adam well the metaverse route really removes the real world the augmenting
obviously keeps it so it's not like escaping reality it's more like blending realities which is what augmented reality really
is right yeah yeah it's not what i was expecting them to do even from a safety standpoint right
like that you can still see your surroundings whereas with you if you got like the oculus
rift on or whatever it's called these days i can't even keep up with the direction of it i've
got quest is that what it's still called or was it the old name there's the meta quest meta quest
meta quest pro there you go uh there's a two and a three. I know the three,
they're about 500 bucks. I just hear these things. I've used one, but maybe Mike, you have more
because you've been purchasing different VR things. The point is though, is when you put
those on that you can't see the rest of the world. Like you can fall over things. You can
break an arm. You can break your TV. You can smash things.
Go ahead, Mike.
You've done this, I'm sure, right?
I was going to say, you guys who are on video,
for the benefit of the podcast listeners,
I'm pointing to a very slight discoloration
of my wall behind me,
where I think I literally thought
I was crowbarring a headcrab or something
and just punched my hand straight into my wall.
Right. I didn't manage to destroy my uh my vr controller in the process but yeah there's that's definitely a thing and it
i guess some people can see that as in some situations that's the appeal and in some
situations it's really not right well we're talking about the positioning really is like
the positioning not in the metaverse so it's's really about that. It's like not versus. It's more like, how did they pitch this when meta is so well known with acquiring Oculus, MetaQuest, etc. The whole name shift from Facebook to meta.
Was about the metaverse they didn't say vr and i had a a great pun a world-class pun uh thanks to silicon valley the tv show because there's a
a slight spoiler uh in there there's a an acquisition of a vr company because they have
to have this big old hooli con keynote essentially everything falls apart they had to make a last
minute change they acquired this vr company to make their keynote good and long story short he says who others excited i know vr like that's
a world-class pun right so there was no vr uh mentioned at all augmented reality even spatial
the word spatial to me is pretty cool because it's like all the design stuff in there was
very touchable they did a great job from a design standpoint so spatial design augmented reality that's the good
stuff i think i think they went the right direction really and they have the whole app store and all
the apps that came with it whereas meta was really recreating the unknown right they were really
trying to pioneer the future or what they perceived as the future. Right. And it was not appealing because it's not relatable.
You have Safari inside this thing.
That's kind of cool.
You have your apps in there.
It's kind of, you already know what it does and how it works.
So you can kind of like pull up your calendar.
Yeah, it's familiar.
Precisely.
You know, messages there.
It's like putting some of your apps that you're used to inside of iOS or macOS right there
inside of this thing.
I don't honestly know though if I want
that as much. Maybe I'm just
the guy who's ready to escape sometimes.
And I should say,
the pitch is augmented, but if you notice,
they have this digital crown, which they stole from the watch.
They put it on the top of these goggles
and you crank this crown and it changes
the size of what is being presented.
And you can go full VR mode, it seems like.
It's just not what they're talking about.
Because a lot of their pitch was entertainment.
And it was like, look at these big movies you can watch right in front of your face.
But they're inside this AR, but they're also putting a screen inside of augmented reality.
But you can crank that screen up to full size size to where there's nothing else to see.
So I think they get there,
they're just coming at it from a different angle.
It reminded me in some ways,
it's funny you mentioned the Apple Watch,
it reminded me of the Apple Watch keynote as well,
where I can't remember what I thought at the time
when I saw it,
but I definitely remember being somewhat underwhelmed, right?
Because they pitched it as a particular type of device
that i didn't care about yes it was a fashion thing a lot of it was fashion yeah it was it
was fashion it was apps it was all this type of stuff whereas for me like i love my like health
and fitness measurements right and i sent a thing from my apple watch today to my wife where it's
like my resting heart rate i had a fever over the weekend and i sent her like a thing and i was like
spot when i was sick right and you can see my resting heart rate's normal and at the
weekend it tanks up and then slowly gets better and then like there's a weird thing like even
today where it's like today's the first day my resting heart rate is kind of back to normal
and almost like psychologically being like oh like maybe that means i'm better now like i might go
and do my spin class this week like it it feels like it's providing almost like
metrics data that i might use in like an ops role right but on my own body measurements like and
that was not pitched at all right and it felt like what they were doing yesterday was throwing out
like 20 use cases and like 10 of them will be flops right 10 of them will it would just be bad and one of the
ones to me for example like like reading about the resolution stuff like that the idea that i'm going
to do my work on these things like and these kind of floating windows in front of me instead of
using monitors for any like meaningful amount of time like i'm not going to say that that won't
happen but they made a big deal about like 4k per eye right put your face right up to your 4k monitor and see how impressive that is right
if you let the 4k monitor completely fill your peripheral vision that's not actually a lot of
pixels right it's a lot of pixels when it is you know a foot like half a meter away from your face
but it's not a lot when it's that close and we have other vr headsets already that
will do that sort of resolution and like people already do not find them sufficiently high
resolution enough to do that type of work all the time right like it's going to be annoying compared
to a 4k monitor unless you're in a situation where you need their kind of like i need to just have
like 500 windows all around me that i can kind of turn my neck around and look around and all this
type of stuff but on the flip side the some people thought it was slightly dystopian but maybe i'm
enough of a nerd that i thought it was awesome like the idea of like being at your kid's birthday
party right and like putting this thing on and taking a 3d video which you can in then one two
five ten twenty years watch back and put yourself effectively in like an almost like vr fixed
viewpoint 3d yeah i mean because for me like i buy the new iphone every year because i have
young children and i want to capture their temporary likenesses in as high a resolution
as i can yeah because i look back at those memories and like, yeah, I love looking back at pictures from my kids.
I'm with you,
Mike,
on that one for sure.
Cause for me,
I have the,
I think you do too,
Jared,
you have the photos widget placed somewhere in your phone.
And like every day I'm getting some memory and I'm a,
I cloud believer because I got my photos in there and they're doing a great
job of like reminding me of my life.
Now the thing is though,
while that's amazing, this is the ultimate new dad camcorder kind of situation right like this is like remember dad's back in the day it is you got the dad with the camcorder who looks like a doofus
basically yeah but the memory is captured so you've got that memory and that's you sort of
sacrifice you know maybe your ego for the moment but i don't know if i want to wear that i want
the artifact after mike but i don't want to be the dad wearing this headgear during my kid's birthday
like i want them to remember me just as much as us remember that memory right so i think this is
temporary the actual video of the guy you know like you're not going to be like hold on don't
move i'm going to go put these goggles on you know like none of us are going to actually do that
unless we're going to be the camcorder dad and And because we, we can see the future use of it. I think that's temporary.
So like the recording side that does look dystopian. Like I'm looking at this real world
thing through goggles that show me a digital representation of the real world thing.
Minority report had that.
Yeah. But I think the actual, the playback is what we want. And so that's what we all agree on.
And so I think like 3d recording is going to come to the iPhone, right? Like you'll be able to record 3d on some other thing and then watch it back on
these goggles and get that immersive experience. For now it's like just a weird place where it's
like, it also records. Where's the robot? Put those goggles on a robot that has infinite charge,
never dies. I'll let my robot wear that thing on my behalf and it's fine because like
rosie can do that that's the name of the i believe that was the name of the robot and jet in the
jetsons right like rosie believe oh yeah rosie so give me a rosie i want a rosie is there any girl
out there who can resist the charms of a solar powered alloy chassis with turbo driven schematics
and led eyes a robotic maid maid named Rosie changed the jet.
Well, speaking of infinite charge, I mean, there's so many indicators that this device is just not, I mean, the price, of course.
But, like, the device is not going to be ready for regular consumer usage when it ships.
It's going to be for enthusiasts, developers, business people, and that's about it.
The ultra wealthy?
Yeah, ultra wealthy, of course.
But they just buy everything, don't they?
So everything's for them if they about it. The ultra wealthy. Yeah. Ultra wealthy, of course. But they just buy everything, don't they? So everything's for them if they want it.
Two hour charge and you got to have a battery stick in your pocket.
I did watch a video this morning, the hands on, because they let some YouTubers get access
yesterday.
Yeah.
I think Omalek had a hands on with it as well.
I didn't catch that though.
Who'd you see?
This is Sarah Dietschy, I think.
Rhymes with peachy. She saw it and she wore it, a YouTuber. And she said, there is a reason why
the battery pack is not on the headset because the headset is heavy. It is very heavy. I think
a lot of initial reports said, oh, we're going to put the battery pack. So it's going to be
lighter than a quest, lighter than, you know, any headset out there. They did that because it would just be too heavy if the battery pack was on the headset. So with
that out of the way that it is heavy, it will be uncomfortable on your face for probably more than
an hour. So that was kind of a bummer to hear, but she did say that the actual 4k display kind
of against what you're saying there, Mike, I don't know what's the truth, but she said like, it's spectacular.
The eye tracking is insane.
So you do a setup that takes one or two minutes.
The digital crown is essentially your home button and you have all of your
apps on the home screen and you just look at whatever you want and then you pinch
to select if you're scrolling through photos or a Safari, you basically pinch
and then scroll and the clarity of say a Safari tab, you're scrolling through photos or a Safari, you basically pinch and then scroll.
And the clarity of say a Safari tab,
you're reading an article is so good.
The words are super crisp.
And I honestly felt more excited
about the productivity elements to it
than even the entertainment.
And I think it's like three or four times
what resolution that the MetaQuest currently has.
Maybe that's enough enough but she's
like incredibly impressed with that and was like this is the future but it just it's gonna hurt
and that's kind of where a lot of these things are i think it depends on the content a lot on
this stuff like i think for movies and stuff like i think the resolution doesn't i mean you know like
a 4k movie looks great right but like when we were watching 1080p stuff it looks pretty like you know, like a 4k movie looks great. Right. But like when we were watching 1080p stuff, it looks pretty like, you know, you weren't watching Lord of the Rings and 1080p being like,
Oh, I can see the pixels. Oh, this film's ruined. Like, right. I think it's all relative. And I
think like video content and like gaming experiences, whatever I think lend themselves
to that kind of blend. But I think it feels like reading text on a non-retina display now is just
like, Oh yeah. Like, Oh, why would I go through that?
I guess I can't imagine write code, say,
spending a long day looking at text for significant periods of time.
I would do that in a headset.
But Mike, what if you weren't writing the code?
What if you weren't writing the code?
What if you were...
Watching it code.
Conjuring the code through voice and llm behind it that you
know knows homebrew through and through knows it better than you do yeah all this good stuff and
all you're doing is watching the code really yeah just got chat gbt to generate the 95 right
5 catastrophically wrong code for me um but i guess it's funny because like you know again like on the weight right like i i
have my nice meaty valve index here and like that's more than twice the weight and like even
by default and i actually bought more weights to add on the back to kind of counterweight the thing
and it makes it feel better like it might when my kids play around with it like they don't have
their necks like getting crushed forwards by it and stuff like that and it's funny because like on the comfort
side i would agree like that that you don't want to be wearing that for hours and hours and hours
but like it's interesting to me to see for i guess a mass market appeal that something like
dramatically lighter is still like too heavy wouldn't be comfortable exactly i kind of wonder
whether that's just something where i don't, like Apple are good at making things smaller and
lighter. Right. But like at the end of the day, like wearing something reasonably heavy on your
head, like even like a big pair of headphones, like some people would just find a big pair of
over the ear cans uncomfortable to wear for a few hours. Right. And you're right. You're not going
to get like a vision thing with built in headphones headphones that's going to be lighter than a pair of cans.
I imagine down the road, you know, you're probably looking at something similar to what Adam's wearing right now, which is like thick rimmed glasses.
And all the tech can fit into those glasses, you know, kind of what the Google Glass wanted to be.
And so at that point, like you could, and depending on battery life and stuff, you could just wear these things all day long it goes back again to the vr ar distinction because you don't want to augment
your reality for just like you know 45 minutes it's like wearing your apple watch for half the
day you're like i'm missing out on the other half of the day's steps but to escape reality right to
have a vr moment to watch a movie for two hours or to play a game for an hour i know some people
play games for hours upon hours upon hours but that seems more feasible even for like the heavy headsets that you've been buying, Mike,
like I'll put up with it, but for, you know, 18 hours, it's going to have to be lighter and
smaller. And yeah, like you said, Apple's good at these things over time. We'll see if it gets
there. Yeah. Did you see the movie ready player one mike i didn't actually i've had a bunch of
people particularly in the vr space who've said oh you i basically haven't seen any good films
since my kids were born really i wouldn't call it a good film it's a great film but not a i don't
know it's good or better than great i don't know hold on let's stop it's not good but it's great
please tell us more well you got ro Robert Zemeckis behind it.
Pop culture references galore, which is always,
that's a classic right out the gate, you know?
I see.
It opens up with a quintessential rock song from, I believe, the 80s.
I can't remember the name of it in this moment.
But did you see it, Jared?
No, but you talk about it a lot.
So I feel like I know something about it.
Right.
Well, I'm not going to talk about the movie necessarily, but more or less reference it,
because this Vision Pro looks almost identical to the film.
And there's even, during those cut scenes and montages and demonstrations they showed,
there's even this one where the person holds them out and then puts them on,
and that camera sort of swoops around, and you see through them.
That is literally shot for shot,
angle for angle from Ready Player One.
So they stole that or it was an homage?
It could be an homage.
They could have licensed it.
I don't know.
I'd love to know the legalities there,
but like it was exactly like Ready Player One.
And Ready Player One is all about escaping,
but it's not what Apple went.
But the point I'm trying to make is like,
if you've seen that film,
these goggles, Vision Pro look almost like shape wise identical and you can see through them.
So there's a lot of like inspiration. Like you've got, what was the thing called from
Star Trek? I'm not a Star Trek fan, unfortunately. That was like the iPhone.
Yeah. The tricorder. Tricorder.
Tricorder. So like that predated the iPhone.
So like there's science fiction meets,
you know, future reality.
So at some point we dream about it
and then they're like,
well, that's actually really possible
if we do this, this and this.
Digital crown that, speakers here.
And, you know, on our iPhones today,
we have all those cameras in the front
to do face ID and whatnot.
Like they've already got a lot of the tech in place. You know don't know if it's what's the material of this thing is it aluminum
like the rest of their gear according to them a singular piece of three-dimensionally formed
laminated glass flows into an aluminum alloy frame that curves to wrap around your face
aluminum aluminum good aluminum indeed yeah so like no i was gonna say i think that's the
interesting thing about it as well say i think that's the interesting
thing about it as well because i think the other thing that may help bring the price down is right
now that thing has so many freaking sensors on it right like it's oh yeah like i think it's like 15
cameras it's got the iris reader on the inside it's got that screen on the outside to like show
you the eyes of the person inside because the creepiest part you need to see that
yeah like it's got all this stuff like when you're apple size right you can build loads of things
yeah throw them at the wall right and see what sticks i don't think that's a bad thing either
i'm not yeah criticizing that mike's dog lucy makes a cameo here shortly don't worry she only
sticks around for a minute
or so and her second cameo near the end of the show is totally on point i'm not criticizing that
i'm jealous because you know i'm co-founding a startup nowadays where we have the exact opposite
problem of like grand visions and lack of resources yeah and right now like 1.4 people to actually build them um but yeah like
it's interesting and i it wouldn't surprise me if that's what ends up bringing the price down
is that they can have a the non-pro edition or whatever it just doesn't have the the screen on
the front right because no one turns out no one cared about that and even like you know we've
been talking a lot about the ar vr thing and arguably this is a device where there's been a few devices in the past in this
kind of space i would say all of them are primarily vr or primarily ar and this is the one that does
seem to be like it is being described as an ar device but it's definitely one that seems equally
competent at both right i think it was the Microsoft HoloLens.
I never actually used one in person, but that was a lot more of an AR thing.
Like the Valve Index I've got here, it has two like basically black and white cameras
on it for doing really limited AR of like, you know, am I going to step into a wall without,
like it does like when I get too near to a wall it shows like a green out sort of
matrix style outline of like what i'm near or whatever so i can kind of see and step out the
way and all this type of stuff they could have gone right let's take some really high-end cameras
in here and make an amazing ar device and build amazing ar games but they decided to not do that
they decided to go the vr direction so it does make me wonder whether if apple decides
to go full ar they can probably throw away a bunch of the kind of vr side of things and make something
that might look a bit better because that's the other reason why they're ski goggles and not
glasses right is if you want to do vr and you want to have that level of immersion you have to be able
to block out all of the light everything else exactly but then on the ar side if you want to
do that you're going to have to have a lot more high-end cameras and you have to be able to maybe do some of the kind
of eye tracking stuff and things like that i guess that was another interesting thing we've not
mentioned as well it's like there's no controllers that's another distinction between all of the vr
kit it's all like hand gestures eye gestures all this type of stuff right as opposed to these like
physical controllers
and stuff like that.
And that's going to be another thing
that it's going to be interesting to see
how well that goes, right?
Yeah, they didn't show us how you calibrate it.
Like with Face ID, you got to do that weird head motion
to, you know, teach the thing,
it's your, you know, your face from all angles.
So they didn't show any of that calibration stuff.
So it was probably like-
So Sara Dietschy said there's like one or two minutes set up.
Okay.
It's like a two minute eye calibration.
She said the eye tracking is spectacular.
You look at the thing and it focuses the context.
If you look on this Safari tab, it's going to switch tabs.
And she says it works pretty much the way you'd expect it to work very, very well.
She didn't talk about the hand gestures to me
because there's like downward-facing cameras that are looking at your hands.
And as you pinch and stuff with your hands, just the air, air and that's the other aspect so it's eyes and finger motions which to me kind of looks
like the person in the demo in the video is like having a mini seizure you know as they sit on
their couch and their hands are like shaking in weird ways but i guess we do all kinds of weird
things you know like talking to the air with our airpods in our yeah in our head i guess the idea
that you can use one of your existing input devices as well you can use your keyboard or mouse on your mac or
your game controller or whatever but like i mean it's definitely again in comparison to like the
actual hardware i have like the valve index has kind of some of the kind of better controllers
and like they have these ones that you put your hands inside and then it has finger tracking so
when i do like this,
I can see in a game, say,
like my fingers move around because it knows where my fingers are
all relative to the controller.
Right.
But I'm not having to actually like hold the thing.
It's like sort of attached in this weird,
if anyone's on the podcast,
you can go and look that up.
You can see how your hand sort of fits in,
sort of like a glove.
And again, it's the thing where,
I guess moving on to kind of gaming stuff
as well they had a slide about gaming where i think they showed it something like their 11
kind of launch games but i don't know i love apple and i love games but i think for like people who
would describe themselves like as a gamer and play like triple a big budget games like apple's not a
meaningful gaming platform right it's like something where you know if you're
someone who plays a game for a couple of hours every year you can get enough stuff that you could
play a game on your mac or whatever like that's fine but if you want to do such serious gaming
on your mac like you're in for a pretty sad time and like in some ways like that here are our launch
titles like these kind of 11 things like the fact that you can fit them on a slide is yeah
like it's very apple like in a good and a bad way right because it shows like we've carefully
selected these like 11 beautiful representations whatever one of the games is one that i have
played in in vr i guess it's almost like like, our drinks menu in our restaurant has 11 drinks on it, right?
Across all alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks,
we've selected 11 of the nicest drinks.
And it's like, well, I don't like any of those.
Well, okay, don't come to our restaurant.
Go to the one next door where the drinks menu has 200 instead.
Yeah.
And that's the sort of Apple take it or leave it sort of way
that like to me shows that they're not, again, certainly I think a lot of people thought that this was going to be like, primarily a gaming device. And that's very much not what they're doing. Like, in some ways, I find it interesting that they had any mention of gaming at all, because it seems to be so not what they're going for. Let's flip the script a little bit though. Let's not look at it from a,
I've got a Valve index and I kind of know some things like you do.
Think of it from a game developer standpoint.
What do you think game developers
are thinking about this?
Like if you're in that space
and you can make things for brand new,
I mean, we have to recognize
this is sort of a brand new world,
a brand new computing platform.
What do you think game developers are thinking?
While there may only be 12 in this launch, and you got to start somewhere.
11.
Well, 11, sorry.
I was going for the baker's dozen.
Actually, it's 13.
Sorry about that.
Either way, I want more.
What do you think, Mike?
What do you think the game developers are thinking?
What do you think about this paradigm?
Because I'm thinking you could do some really interesting things, what do you think the game developers are thinking? Like, what do you think about this paradigm? Because I'm thinking, like, you could do some really interesting things
with it, not in the typical gaming way, potentially, even. Like, what do you think
they're thinking about? I'm friends with some game developers, but I've never worked in that
space. But I think, I think the interesting thing there is, like, even PC VR gaming, right? The
long-running joke about it has been it's kind of a niche within a niche right because i have for reasons due to not wanting to reward scalpers and all this type
of thing i have like a you know one and a half k dollars ish graphics card in my machine that
sounds like a small jet engine in my house it's ludicrously overpowered. Like, and I have, as I said, like all my VR set up that
required me to physically drill things into my walls to Mount my VR stations. And, you know,
I guess the point I'm making is like, you went pretty far. It's taking it pretty far. Right.
Right. Enthusiast. But even all of this stuff, you're probably talking less than half the price
of division. Right. Right. So I think that's the thing. I think if you're targeting talking less than half the price of the vision, right? Right. So I think that's the thing.
I think if you're targeting as a game developer,
you would need to be targeting like either multiple platforms,
in which case you're somewhat limited in being able to do really intriguing things
just for the vision alone,
or you're targeting it thinking this is going to become a mass market device
when they bring the costs down or whatever it may be. Or you're doing it as this is going to become a mass market device when they bring the costs down or whatever it may be.
Or you're doing it as some interesting proof of concept that kind of buys into another platform, whatever.
But imagine how it is right now where it's like, say, like Sony has announced the PS6 or whatever, and they're going to release it in 2024.
And it's going to cost you $3,500.
And you can only buy it in North America,
like people would probably not be rushing out to build stuff for that and really excited
about that.
And that's the opposite of the direction that console gaming seems to have gone, where it's
more and more commodity hardware.
It's more and more like kind of incremental changes and not these kind of big bang revolutions
and stuff.
Massive paradigm shifts. shifts yeah i think the
potential is huge like i think like you could do some really really interesting things i think
particularly with the kind of the vr ar blend there that i've looked for a long time for games
that will use the even very limited like ar kind of functionality my vr headset just because i think
it's sort of an intriguing idea to sort of like combine those two spaces but I don't know it just seems like it's so expensive right now that it
would be hard to see that I guess the thing I could maybe see like rather than games it's like
for high-end training or whatever like flight simulation or the type of thing where basically
almost like conference tickets,
right?
Where the idea like of, again, now that I'm actually like a co-founder somewhere, you
notice the fact that like, oh, this conference costs like two or $3,000.
Like that's actually quite a lot of money when I can't get my employer to pay for it
for me.
Right?
Like I'm probably not going to pull up my credit card and spend the price of like a family
vacation on going to a conference like for sure and i feel it could be the same in reverse here
right where am i as a gamer gonna like buy one because some launch title looks really great like
no but like if if i my employer can get more than 3.5Ks worth of value out of it, and it's dramatically better than some of the alternatives there,
then yeah, I wouldn't imagine that would be particularly hard
for people to justify.
If you could kind of tap into that sort of market, I guess,
like high-end training for whatever.
Yeah.
Such a small, well, maybe not a small market,
but such a specific market
where you almost have highly specialized devices
where Apple is not known to be open API.
They're not known to be not literally open APIs
in the open API.
You get what I'm trying to say.
You can program for it, but you don't have full access
like you do even on a Mac.
You have a lot more access to the system
in iOS devices,
tvOS, etc., iPadOS, and now VisionOS. I got to imagine these highly specialized things
require certain APIs that you may not have access to. And you're going to spend a lot of money to
get into that ecosystem. And you sort of have to follow where apple may allow you to go because they're in control of the keys the kingdom so specialized that's a highly specialized spot for sure well i
do think like when mike you held up that controller like that thing screams video games right like
just like you have buttons you have d-pads you have joysticks etc and the fact that there is nothing like that, it's such a more of
an iPhone kind of a thing, right? Like it's an Apple thing to be like, well, we're gonna have
cool new games that you're gonna use your fingers to, you know, manipulate the air and play. And
it's like, that's going to create a certain type of game. Just like the iPhone, you know, the single
pane of glass created a certain kind of game that was different than other kinds of games. And I feel like they had a huge opportunity. They had so much interest, and still do,
of just people using these things to create a gaming platform that just blew everything else
out of the water. And they just did kind of what they did to podcasts for many years,
was just ignore it. They just let it go. They didn't provide the developers what they need
to really have a different monetization option.
So everything went in-app purchase.
Everything went Candy Crush.
And it ended up being like these very shallow, addictive,
but ultimately, I guess, unsatisfying games
that ended up ruling the iOS platform.
And it's probably similar, I would guess,
that eventually would rule this thing
unless they actually get dedicated to it early in order to provide developers game developers what
they need to make better games and I just don't see Apple ever like you said Mike I just don't
think they care about it that much they're gonna have their 11 games they're all be beautiful and
very hand-picked and but ultimately you're like, well, I get bored of 11.
In fact, I only like three of the 11, and now what are we going to do?
Hello, friends.
This is Jared here to tell you about Changelog++.
Over the years, many of our most diehard listeners have asked us for ways they can support our work here at Changelog.
We didn't have an answer for them for a long time,
but finally we created changelog++,
a membership you can join to directly support our work.
As a thank you, we save you some time with an ad-free feed,
sprinkle in bonuses like extended episodes,
and give you first access to the new stuff we dream up.
Learn all about it at changelog.com slash plus plus. You'll also find the link in your chapter data and show notes.
Once again, that's changelog.com slash plus plus. Check it out. We'd love to have you with us.
Let me give you a scenario. You're in the doctor's office, right?
You're there waiting for your next turn, right?
You're just there for a random checkup.
You're good to go.
Okay.
And, you know, somewhere in the room, you got,
now you currently have like an iPhone talk
or somebody's on the phone talking super loud in a waiting room.
It's just like a non-social norm, right?
Now flip the script and say okay now affordable years
down the road whatever even today whenever this thing's available somebody's sitting next to you
with this vision pro on their face and you can kind of see their eyes or whatever you can just
right maybe you hear nothing from them because maybe i don't even know i don't know if it makes
sound if it's just for you or if it's for everybody else they can hear it but just imagine them going
to town on a on like whatever it could be it could be candy crush they could be like uh they could be safariing they could be photoing they could be
do whatever they want you know like just imagine that scenario like you see somebody sitting across
you with this vision pro on their face in in a social setting which is totally possible fully
immersed in tetris yeah what are you thinking well obviously i just i'd steal their wallet
that's the move for sure i mean
it wouldn't have anything in it because they've bought an apple vr that's right they're broke
you gotta steal the goggles if you're gonna steal anything of value i don't know it's funny because
with a lot of the vr stuff like you've seen some of those transitions for games as well i've seen
this with my kids as well like fruit ninja they're like the iphone game they have a vr version that my like five-year-old really likes where you physically have two actual swords that you use to
cut fruit coming through the air and stuff and it i think that's the fascinating like paradox with vr
stuff is that it is you don't need instructions or tutorials for most games because it's immediately obvious like you can
put someone who's not even a gamer in and within seconds they know because it's what you're doing
in the space and whatever but on the flip side you have this problem which a small minority of
people have with like existing games so i had a flatmate at university college who couldn't play
first person shooters because they made it motion sick right and i'd be like you're just making that up that's that's not true and
i saw him and i was like oh that's actually a thing right yeah but with vr like that affects
a lot more people in a lot like some people just can't really handle vr games and certainly like
vr where you have like motion and stuff like that like if you're sitting in a moving car in vr i
played a lot of vr i don't get motion sick in real life and stuff like that like if you're sitting in a moving car in vr i played a lot of vr i don't get
motion sick in real life and stuff like that but that will make me motion sick and i need to stop
right and some of that is like programming some of that is just like essential like how your brain
works and you know it's tricky because i think that's the other thing that could stop this going
for gaming at least going super duper mainstream it's like you just can't necessarily
build something that everyone's brain and vision system and stuff like that can handle
i guess one of my biggest fears though of all of this is that like this whenever apple releases
some big visionary product like this i think of do you guys remember the legendary like
slash dot comment from commander taco 2001 yes about the ipod no wireless less space than a
nomad lame lame right yes he still isn't living it down exactly and you just i can just imagine
like everything we've said in this conversation today brought up in five or ten years where
everyone just wearing their goggles 24 7 and they're just like you guys are such fools you knew nothing right what would
come and how we'd all embrace our apple goggles the lore inside could be enough at some point but
like i just come back to current i don't know would you call that user experience to be how
you wear it i think it's more like inside the thing it's more like uh just experience generally
it's a it's a headset right who wants to wear a headset for several
hours at a time i barely want to wear these headphones and i'm up you do mike mike does it
gosh he's playing his games so like i again i'm with you to an extent i would put on the headset
and i've played the vr games i feel like an old person right now i've played the vr i love i've
had a lot of fun uh even with groups you know because like you're watching the person they're
acting a fool and uh you can get them to cast up onto a tv so you're kind of seeing what they're seeing it's
not exactly the same but you're actually there with them to a certain extent and it's a riot
like it's not isolationist like it can be a communal experience which is really cool but
that's for a constrained time period and i'm not gonna wear anything for all day long on my face
even that like the thing that makes it social is the fact that the person in VR who's actually
getting to play right now when everyone else is not able to play looks like a massive dork,
right?
Like that is the bonding experience is like you're having the time of your life and you
look like a loser while you're doing it.
Right.
Right.
Oh my God.
It's hard to see that almost like mapping to like a Fortune 500 boardroom, you know?
Well, maybe it would.
You know, let the boss use it for a while.
You can all laugh at the boss, you know,
while they're doing their thing.
Yeah.
Here's Jared coming in on their Vision Pro.
Hey, Jared, how you doing?
And they're augmented, basically.
Speaking of that, they have this FaceTime feature.
Like how does that work?
Because you can FaceTime
inside of Vision Pro
but if I'm on the other side
of that call with you
right?
I'm seeing what?
Because you have goggles on.
Am I seeing just your eyes?
You're seeing Zuck.
You're seeing Zuckerberg man.
It's the persona thing right?
Like they had
it's like this
Okay so that's more metaverse.
Yeah it's almost like
this little like fuzzy avatar thing. I think they had a little bit of that during the demo i didn't okay i might have
missed that part yeah yeah seems not ideal but you know again we are seeing what we've seen yesterday
but you know this is going to be a product that iterates apple is so good at just relentless
iteration just year after year small incremental changes that after five, ten years, it's amazing.
I mean, the iPhone 4 and 5, those models compared to the original iPhone, it's absolutely astonishing how much progress they made in half a decade.
Yeah, if you have the original iPhone or the the three four five and now what the 14 you see
the progress in the iteration and i think that apple's the kind of company that would not get
into the ring unless they can do some damage essentially they can do something with the
platform and even if it's a niche for a while that's probably okay for them because that's why
it's priced so high so they can go down from here.
You can't go up.
If you came out at like,
you know,
five 99 and eight 99,
maybe that's a harder selling point for them.
They're not going to get in the ring unless they could do something.
That's for sure.
That's the kind of company they are.
So they've definitely made everybody pay attention to spatial design,
augmented in,
if not VR,
then,
you know, augmented reality, reality ar something that uh box
founder aaron levy said and this just sort of like kind of goes back to some things you said
jared about uh sarah dichi he says just got to try the apple vision definitely wild hand and eye
tracking is basically perfect instantly understandable ux the graphics are incredible
and the setup was seconds so that gives you like a good base like even wherever it could go it's
got an incredible you know easy setup it's not kludgy it's not hard so all the things you can
improve on it over time will only get better the weight the size you know whatever it might be
maybe they introduced controllers next year hey now we have
these controllers making now you're happy and by the way we can give you like these coin-sized
just slap them on your wall sensors rather than having to drill you just tape it and it's there
and it's infinitely powered by i don't know gravity or something like that you know so you've
got you know you know in a year's time maybe you can have a couple of years time,
you can have brand new paradigm shifts in this platform
that make it far more appealing.
I think that's interesting.
I guess the thing is, I keep forgetting this myself
because I get so overexcited.
But, you know, my wife has seen me
falling over enough Apple product launches
that she was like, yeah, but didn't you always say
that you shouldn't buy the first generation
of new Apple stuff?
Because the second release is always like, fixes all the really big problems. And I was like,
yeah, yeah, you're right. Like that for me is like that combined with the price. I think Apple
are again, really lucky with their customer base because a ton of people are going to go out and
buy this, right. And give them really great feedback on what the second iteration of the
device should be. And when they do make a
device that's half the price a third the price whatever like what the mass market needs that
device to be the other thing that occurred to me while you were talking adam is just like
just the demo they did yesterday i mean they're so good at like these types of demos it's kind
of absurd like and when you look at the head start that meta has had here i'm like i mean
basically meta have been like gaming and this weird second life metaverse thing that like everyone
just like literally laughs at right whereas apple before they were even ready to show the headset to
anyone they have like 20 integrations right like in demo, and they've got a bunch of launch partners on board
and they've got Disney on board.
And like, you know, they're just,
I mean, obviously it's an early product,
but it's an early Apple product.
And like the level of polish.
Right.
I've seen various memes today about like,
how Zuck must be feeling after that keynote yesterday.
But like, yeah, I mean, it's.
I'd be excited if I were him.
It's not good, right?
If you're a company that's like betting on the metaverse
and someone who's not even in this space
comes along and like does this,
like it reminds me of when the iPhone came out, right?
And all the phone companies were like,
I literally remember speaking
to a high level Nokia executive
about six months after the iPhone came out.
And they said, we're not worried.
They're not a phone company.
Like, and it's like, well, now you're not a phone company.
Right.
It makes me wonder whether we could say the same sort of thing with VR, Metaverse, and
AR and whatever, where it's like, you just didn't deliver a good enough product.
And someone else has taken their time, delivered something good, and
your lunch could well be stolen
yeah well it's interesting about this time around is that apple has announced and shown their cards
but there's no pre-sale there's no you know get it here it's a year away i mean they're saying
it's next year that's a long time period i remember the first iphone i think it was six
months announced in january shipped at the end of june something like that. I think the Apple Watch was maybe another six months, maybe three quarters of
a year. I can't remember exactly. Yeah, good point. I don't know North America as well.
Yeah. And, you know, prohibitively expensive for consumers. So three things that they don't
normally do. They're definitely changing their playbook slightly. I wonder why they felt like
they had to get it out there a year before they're actually
ready to ship. Was it pressure from something? I know that the rumor mill had been swirling for
years. They said that they've been building the technology for a decade, but I think I heard
they've actually had a dedicated team earnestly working on this for seven years. So I mean,
that's a long time to work without ever shipping something. Maybe it was like,
we got to ship something. They're still shipping but they're at least they're showing
it's interesting to think about why now well one thing insider did say a headline at least we can
potentially agree on is apple sure kicked meta's butt today right that's their headline that's
their headline and they say apple finally released its new headset
monday it sure seems a lot better than meta's headset if the marketing is to be believed
but does anybody really want to put something on their face like this and mike you raise your hand
you say yeah so i guess the answer is yeah if i were zuck though i'd be like you know what i'm a
little worried because they're good at hardware they're're being Apple. But at the same time, it's like,
here's part of the Fang mafia, basically,
throwing their product into the ring
to say, let's go to battle.
It just deepens the pot, really.
Like, it's going to be the future of something.
Who wins doesn't really matter.
I mean, will Apple take over the entire market share?
I don't know.
Android's still out there.
There's still tons of Android users.
Just because Apple's out there kicking butt and taking meta names doesn't mean that meta
can't still find a way to make their own place.
And maybe they're focused on immersive, true VR, which is quite different than this.
But if Apple gets this right in this augmented space, like you said before,
Mike, it's not a far stone's throw to get into the VR space too. Like if they conquer this and
rule this, they can have two products, Vision Pro and Vision VR, you know, they can divide the
market. It is interesting. They shipped with a pro like in the whole concept, like they're
announcing the Vision Pro. Right. And like normally you announce a product and then you kind of come out with the pro line i mean that's been their
style right but maybe they're just like this thing is so expensive we got to call it the pro i don't
know that could be a dirt that's how i read it and also just like what i was saying earlier about
like the number of sensors and like the amount of functionality this device has is like unnecessary
for some of the use cases right i actually really wouldn't be
surprised if you end up essentially with the pro this is why they don't let me work in branding
whether you have something like a vision ar a vision vr and then the vision pro could kind of
do both of those things right and has essentially all of the sensors and all the chips for both
devices and instead the other two devices are like a third of the sensors and all of the chips for both devices and instead the other
two devices are like a third of the cost yeah what about the vision pro max when are they gonna come
out with that that's just if you've got a really big head yeah well i guess somewhat sliding into
that concept you know people wear glasses and so this is something like what about adam he's got
glasses are those just for fashion or are those actually corrective?
These are corrective and fashion.
Okay, so you got corrective lenses on over there.
And the thing's expensive as is, but they have a solution for glasses wearers.
They partner with some sort of a lens company.
Zeiss.
I didn't pay close attention.
Zeiss, okay.
The most well-known lens maker in the world.
Okay, of course Apple would do that.
You can buy lenses for your goggles
or they fit them perfectly.
I don't know exactly how it works.
But so like if you have bad vision,
you're paying even more, right?
You got to have the corrective lenses
added to your goggles.
So that's interesting.
Yeah, and this one doesn't work with old versions.
So now you're going to get new lenses
and you're trying to sell your exact prescription on eBay.
Trying to hawk it. What a world, right a world right what a world you can't swap lenses because they've been like you know sealed
into the thing because that's the way apple does it where are you we all most excited i've got a
most excited myself where i would put down some dollars for this not at this price point but i
would put out and maybe i don't know it would be to combine this kind of thing with what I already have.
I was saying in our Apple nurse chat,
by the way,
you heard Jared mentioned at the top of the show,
we have a Slack.
You can join it.
Change law.com slash community.
It's totally free.
Hang with Mike,
me,
Jared,
and many others.
Whenever WWDC happens and other things,
but I would combine vision pro with an existing home theater setup.
So if I could take, I mean, and maybe you already have your screen and that's super cool.
But if this thing is to be believed and it is that cool and I can immerse myself,
imagine if I can watch a movie as if I'm hovering over the earth, right?
The augmented reality around me, you know, my reality is sort of like,
is there still yet to some degree if somebody walks in?
But I'm hovering above the earth or I'm kind of hanging out in the universe.
And I've got this just massive screen in front of me.
And I've got a banging sound system around me literally there.
So I don't have to listen on, you know, headphones or whatever the Vision Pro offers in terms of
audibility.
I can use existing high-end, super awesome audio and this thing to just
make the experience different. That might be something that's pretty cool. It is still a
niche because I mean, how many people have bang in home theaters? Not many people,
but they are people who shell out lots of dollars. And just to give an example,
I bought a 120 inch screen. This is not a TV. This is just a screen to project onto recently.
More than $3,000 for this thing.
Oh my goodness.
Yeah.
3,500.
You could have got a vision pro.
I could have gotten,
yeah,
I could have gotten a vision pro.
I could have gotten a vision pro,
but so you got people like that that are willing to spend that kind of thing.
I mean,
you could build your own,
but it's not as good.
I mean,
it,
yeah,
I won't make excuses for why I justified the expenditure
but I did
$3500 for you know
this just screen to project onto on the wall
so I mean
people will pay for experiences
I mean for me as well
I'm currently sporting
a nice pair of
Apple AirPods Max
I have AirPods, AirPods Pro and AirPods Max,
and I use them all in different situations.
Oh man, you collected them all.
But like, yeah, like the, the Max, like they're so expensive
and I really weighed it up for a long time,
like whether I would get them.
And I was like, okay, I'm going to indulge myself.
Would you buy them again?
Yeah, in a heartbeat.
They're absolutely incredible. That's the thing. And i think like that's part of the thing that makes me think
with apple on this on these cases right is that the funny thing is for me is like the pairing
when you were talking about that adam like i kind of want what you want but almost the opposite and
i do have a pretty nice surround sound sound system at home and stuff like that but whenever i watch
like tv or movies right now like it's generally when my kids are sleeping right and if i watch
some like it'd be quiet war movie or the game of thrones finale like i'm quite an audio influenced
person i'm a sort of pre-children musician all this type of thing right so for me like i i love
the idea of being able to watch like lord of the
rings or some other big epic battle scene with my airpods max on over my ears like my vision on my
face have this enormous cinema screen have it like absolutely blasting into my ears and i'm not
bothering anyone else right yeah and i could do that in my house when my kids were sleeping i
could do that on a plane that was the other case that i could see if i was doing a lot of business travel like i had done in the past i'm not anymore
really but if i was traveling like long haul every month or so people would drop almost half that on
really decent noise cancelling headphones right so like the idea that like it's the best possible
way to watch a movie on a plane like people would do that right
or be able to work on a plane like if you can have all your desktop in front of you like yeah
it's not as nice as your 4k display but slapping the stewardess accidentally as she walks by because
you're you're pinching in zoom oh i didn't mean to pinch you just trying to pinch safari that's
terrible i wasn't i didn't pinch you on purpose you get yourself you know thrown in jail for that
that's right.
Actually, the plane is the most compelling moment.
When would I actually use this?
For me, it's none of the real-life moments that they demoed.
It's literally like when I see them on a plane and thinking,
what do I want to do when I'm on a plane?
I want to just tune out everything around me and have some sort of distraction. And for me, that epic movie with the spatial audio right there in your ears,
it blacks out everything else.
I go full VR mode and watch a movie for two hours on a two-hour flight.
That to me is like, I would like to do that.
I want to go to there.
But that's pretty much it.
Everything else, I don't even like to have.
I'm watching a movie on my iPhone, holding it here.
I set it on my leg.
I put it on the table in front of me.
I'm always like,
is this person next to me watching? Actually, I watched Game of Thrones one time on a plane for
like a few minutes and it was inappropriate. And I was like super embarrassed, you know,
because you have to like tell the person like, no, this is Game of Thrones. This is not soft
core, you know? And they're just not going to hear you on that. So I don't like that experience
on a plane. I would love to just tune everybody else out and be able to have an escape.
Yeah,
that's true.
This would make it totally private.
No one else can see what you're seeing.
And yeah,
that's exactly where I would want to do that.
And I would even say when they get the price point down,
if they can just make it about immersive viewing of any sort,
maybe not,
you know,
interacting like a game,
but immersive viewing,
anybody that has the tiniest apartment
would totally drop some down on this.
Because if you can skip buying a TV for 500 bucks, 300 bucks,
and fill the rest of it up with the remaining amount
with the expense of buying this,
and you have immersive viewing,
then maybe, and you live alone potentially,
and you only have cats.
This is getting more and more niche.
But either way, you don't have the ability to install a screen or you know
it's not really feasible to put a big old tv there or something like that all it really requires is
maybe internet and and battery that to me is interesting that's the other thing like even
if it is feasible to get the screen you know know, like we've, I've been historically limited by previous houses and by my lovely spouse on like how big our TV is allowed to be for sure.
And now we're in a place that like, we could have a redonkulous size TV. And once you start to get
really big OLED TVs, like you're definitely stepping above the vision pro in terms of a
price point, right? They're expensive for sure. sure like so i guess that's another thing is that like if they can nail the
experience such that like it is actually a cinema like movie theater uh like experience then yeah
again maybe that's compelling right like if you're really into watching stuff like you have one more
nail in the coffin of the current kind of
cinema movie theater industry post COVID. Well, I mean, there's usually only one person
maybe who really enjoys the biggest of big TVs. I mean, everyone else will endure it if they have
to, but like there's usually one person vying for the biggest experience, the most expensive things.
And in my whole household, it's usually me. My wife's like this size TV is perfectly fine. And I've moved on to projectors and screens versus
TVs because I went big. As I mentioned, my screen is 120 inches diagonal. So that's like
way bigger than most TVs you could buy at a feasible price. Although I did disclose how
much I pay for the screen only so there's that either way you know
you can drop the dime on this thing because you got one person maybe in the household who's really
wanting the more immersive version of it you know so maybe you get a typical tv or a common tv
for everybody else and then you get the vision pro for the one person who's like you know what
I want to hover above the earth and watch a film i love the mental
picture of like having like a 20 inch tv that everyone is watching perfectly happy with except
for like michael adam who's just sitting there with a vision pro on their face watching it on
like the virtual with the biggest smile ever yeah the virtual biggest TV in the world. Yeah, all by himself.
So there were, believe it or not,
there were other things announced at this event.
We've been talking about this the whole time.
I was going to say, Jay, we're deep on Vision Pro only.
We can stop here, or maybe we can hit on a few things.
Maybe let's just talk a few highlights from each of us
on the other things mentioned,
because they are shipping some new hardware, 15-inchbook airs the mac studio gets an upgrade mac pro for the first time with apple
silicon by the way talk about banking uh starting at 69.99 seven grand starting price on that so
you know that's not the actual price you're going to pay when you uh land one of those as well as
ios 17 updates a bunch of stuff,
iPad OS 17, new Mac OS.
We don't have time to go through everything,
but what were some highlights for you guys
from this event? Looking forward to
things that are actually shipping
either right now or soon.
For me, a bizarre one
that really stuck out was
the family sharing for iCloud
Keychain. I'm sad to say that I have
fallen out of luck with one password. I was a one password fairly early adopter. I've like got all
my family using it and all this type of stuff. And I just, in the last year or so, it's felt like it
is annoying me more than it helps me and stuff that used to work is not working anymore and
whatever. So yeah. So like, it's one of those things where i'm
kind of like if i can use the defaults and if i can use apple's built-in stuff i generally try
and do that so for me like the icloud like family sharing of passwords like that's the one thing
that was my super hard blocker for being able to like potentially move myself and my wife or even
like my parents over to using iCloud keychain instead.
So for me, that's pretty compelling.
I'll need to give that an investigation
of whether I can migrate over.
The issue with 1Password is it's not native,
and it's never going to be native.
I mean, it's native to the platform.
I guess, actually, it's not now.
It's less native now because now they're on Electron. Exactly. it's going to be always a third-party application obviously unless it gets acquired
by Apple the problem for me Mike and I want to believe in that world is that I have things that
aren't only in the Apple ecosystem and so for those reasons it makes me want to have a robust
not first party because I'm not only in the Apple world. And I store other things in there
like credit cards and driver's license and just other sensitive information that I would not want
to have to put on an encrypted disk or in a password protected file with permissions or
whatever. That's to some degree more harder to share because I can't share that. So I want to
believe in that. If they can do what they can do first party, but also give me Actual one password type of things store my driver's license in there
You know store my credit cards in there share them with my wife and other family members or whatever
That would be and I guess I kind of do that already with like purchase sharing to some degree like wallet or whatever
If they can kind of make that more
In the apple world
But also let me have things that are non-Apple in there
and an actual application to control it,
then I'd be in it with you.
I like the idea of the sharing,
but that's why I've never really bought into the
Apple first party ways,
because I need more than it gives.
I've heard this said,
I think maybe Jason Snell wrote about it,
but what they really need is an actual passwords app.
You know, like a first party.
Because it's in there. Like it's part of the settings. It's super weird when I have to like show my parents that, yeah, you can just get your passwords out there. Like how I'm like, well,
I just swipe down and search for passwords and it's had different names throughout the years,
throughout the versions. And so it's really just an unknown feature for so many people.
If they had an actual app, just like they have a wallet app, have an app called Passwords with all this stuff centralized,
I think that would go a long way
for people realizing
how good their password offerings are.
Because they have,
I mean, you can do one-time passwords,
you can do all kinds of stuff inside there,
but people just don't know about it.
So they should do that.
I just used my first passkey today
with Home Depot.
I actually enabled Home Depot
to have a passkey
to allow it to use
the device, the website to use either my thumbprint, which I'm not using, or my face ID.
So that's first passkey user literally yesterday. Yeah, GitHub's passkey support is pretty good,
actually. I think they maybe even shipped after I left, but yeah, it works pretty nicely,
actually. It's just whenever you would have been prompted for 2FA,
like you just get prompted for your biometric information and it's synced between all your devices using iCloud.
And, you know, if you need to log in on a Windows machine,
it can't be like your only like secondary authentication or whatever.
But yeah, it works pretty nicely for another one.
And yeah, I think I enabled on my Google account as well.
So it will similarly do that instead of prompting for my 2fa code or
spamming my youtube app on my phone that is a kludgy experience it's secure 2fa with like a
verify or authenticator i believe it's called is secure but it's not convenient yeah it's like oh
gosh let me get this otp out real quick and it's just not cool i gotta remember it and then if
you're like in a social
setting you can potentially be fished quickly yeah because i don't know about you but i can't
remember six characters without like somehow saying them out loud either my brain or literally
out loud to myself i might whisper it like 603 452 it's like you know i gotta do that to some
degree to like remember that six digit number okay Jared, what about you? What's something that stood out to you for this one? Find my Apple TV remote already.
Come on, people.
Finally, they're breezing through the Apple TV portion,
and they announced that you can now find your Apple TV remote
from your phone when you lose it,
which we lose ours constantly.
And I've long said they just need to put an AirTag in that thing,
just build an AirTag into the Apple TV remote. What's interesting is this just seems like a software upgrade. Like
they didn't say, and you have to get a new Apple TV remote, or I don't know if it like makes a
noise. It was also fast. I'm sure I could go back and watch it again and see exactly how it works,
but somehow I'm sure it makes a noise or it locates. And so, yeah, you know, you got your
Apple TV between the couch
cushions or your three-year-old takes it downstairs to the other TV for some reason and leaves it and
you lose it for days upon days. No longer going to find that sucker. So that, I mean, it's small,
but like quality of life improvements. Did you guys see how this is going to work? I didn't see
it. All I know is it's like just with a new tvOS, it's going to work now.
It's like, what?
Why did you guys wait so long?
I thought it was going to be like the hardware literally didn't exist inside the remote.
So you have to upgrade your remote to get the findable one.
I figured they would do that eventually.
And this new Apple TV has a findable remote.
Is the remote Bluetooth or is it IR?
It's Bluetooth.
Well, then that means it's already there, right?
You can just beacon to the Bluetooth
with your phone or your network.
That's why you have that allow applications
to search your network thing.
Yeah, but does that give,
like how do they know where it's located in the room?
Does Bluetooth provide that?
Oh, that's true.
Yeah, I guess spatially.
True, man.
They're tracking my stuff already.
If any of y'all know how they're doing this,
holler at us because I would love to know.
But I don't actually care all that much
because as long as it works,
I can find my remote,
life's going to be good.
I'm excited about the completion
of the Mac transition to Apple Silicon.
That's what I'm excited about.
Just being done.
I'm sure you are too, Mike.
I'm like, no more surprises.
Okay, we got some OS surprises once every two years.
Let's have no more hardware surprises
or any other chip surprises that you can't navigate around.
You know what that means?
Which I knew this day would be coming
from basically the day they announced the M1 chip, right?
It's like counting down the days
until there is a macOS release
that does not support Intel anymore.
You should run a sweepstakes or something for the listeners of like how how many more releases do we get after sonoma before if
you're on an intel chip you can't upgrade right oh probably two more three more maybe i'd say yeah
i think about that sort of ballpark as well like i would be surprised if they killed it off like
next year or whatever but like it'll freeze you to a certain OS, yeah.
Are they still selling Intel
based anything?
As of this, no. The last one was this Mac
Pro. They were still selling it. When did they sell
their very last Intel?
So as of yesterday or maybe
Sunday, they may have sold a Mac Pro
that was Intel. With laptops, they've not been
selling Intel like MacBooks
for two years plus probably now.
It was funny how much of the ecosystem
had not woken up to this.
I definitely saw a few times
where some companies ended up
with slightly unpleasant situations
announcing that, oh, we will support
doing this on M1 in a few years.
And be like, oh, everyone who buys
a new Apple MacBook today
cannot run your stuff anymore.
Had a slightly faster turnaround once one of their internal developers pointed that out to them but the uh
m2 ultra which i heard in the chat was everyone could say mk ultra which is a mind control thing
mk is mind control yeah there's a really good movie uh i think it's called kill room if i
recall correctly if you haven't seen that film and you like the idea of mk ultra and not so much the idea of it but like just storylines around it
what about the manchurian candidate wasn't that also about mk ultra the manchurian candidate
well i would say kill room's better though than that movie okay yeah manchurian candidate was a
really good movie too though okay but just not as good as kill room pick which one you want yeah
watch both jared you know this why choose one we can watch both that's true watch
them both m2 ultra and now i guess pci expansion i won't need it myself but you know anybody who
needs like massive amount of mvme storage you can get carrier cards pci expansion cards which i
think is pretty cool you can have 30 some terabytes of
NVMe storage. So if you're doing like, I don't know. Right. That's where I fail. I can't even
hypothesize what you might be doing, but you have extreme needs. Well, there you go then. You can do
that with the Mac Pro. I think that's kind of cool that they left it because they could have
abandoned it. I mean, not many people need PCI expansion, but when you have a device with a $7,000 starting price tag,
you should probably keep that, right?
Just for the enthusiast.
You can get two vision pros for that much.
I mean, come on.
Does anyone else have a least favorite feature
that was announced yesterday?
One that you're dreading?
Oh, good question.
Good question.
Mine was them changing the Hey Siri to to being just siri because i have
maybe it's the scottish accent but i have a dog called lucy and a wife called lindsey and when i
say either of those things all my devices particularly lucy like when i'm angry at my
dog for doing something disgusting i'm like lucy then like all my devices are like oh like oh i
think you're asking for me like yeah they all already think that i'm asking for siri so i look
forward to funny every time i say my dog's name every apple device spamming me yeah that's a good
one so while you're talking siri i should close the loop on my prediction from a few months back
so i went on record when we had simon willison on the show i think that was llm's break the internet While you're talking Siri, I should close the loop on my prediction from a few months back.
I went on record when we had Simon Lewis on the show.
I think that was LLM's Break the Internet. I think this year's WWDC, which is usually in June, end of May, early June,
I think Apple's going to have an answer to what's all been going on.
I think they can't afford to do nothing for much longer.
My guess is they're going to have some sort of either like upgraded Siri or Siri replacement that will be LLM powered.
And I think they almost have to at this point. So I think it's coming. I think they're just
waiting. I agree that they got some serious constraints around the way it needs to work
and how good it has to be in order to keep their brand intact. But I think they're going to have something to announce.
And I have no idea.
It just makes sense.
And they totally didn't.
They did mention transformer-powered autocorrect and transformer-based dictation inside of
the keyboard.
Those are like, I was waiting for the large language model keyword, and they never used
it.
They did mention transformers a few times,
but Siri didn't get touched except for taking the hay off the front.
That was pretty much all they've done there.
So Siri is still useful.
I was wrong.
I thought they would step up their game in that way.
I'm sad you're wrong, honestly.
I really wish they would just make Siri more intelligent.
Yeah, Siri's really bad at this point.
It's kind of embarrassing. So bad. It's embarrassing bad at this point like it's kind of embarrassing like how
it's embarrassing it almost feels like the siri like when you compare siri to something like
i know it's got the voice recognition part as well but like when you compare siri to like chat
gbt or whatever nowadays it's like what we were saying earlier about like meta and you know how
zuck must be feeling right now like it's just yeah like series imagine trying to use siri for
like the stuff that you try to use chat gpt for right it's embarrassing right like it's a nokia
compared to an iphone back in whatever it was 2007 like it's a phone company yeah it feels like the
tough conflict there is like apple's approach to ai about being very privacy focused, very on device as much as possible.
Maybe that just means you can't do AI well, right?
Like compared to the like privacy invasive,
we're wrong 1% of the time approach.
Like I kind of respect them for that if that's the case,
but yeah, I still just wish it was a bit better.
It seems like we're moving to a place
where Apple's on device stuff is really going to pay off. It just wish it was a bit better it seems like we're moving to a place where
apple's on device stuff is really going to pay off it just they're just sleeping on it because
the ability to take these large models put them on your device right pre-trained and then fine
tune and do inference on device just makes to me a lot of a sense uh in terms of least wow moments
like when i'm going to go to the bathroom i don't really care that this was announced but i honestly don't care that it was announced was new app journal i just went to the
bathroom oh that's a bummer i just don't care about their journal app i don't journal i don't
want it i don't need it it's going to go into a folder or whatever you call that thing and never
be used again but that's just me adam what about you least favorite and then we'll call it a show
well i want to layer on one for you with that so day one is a pretty well known well designed
ios mac os native application i believe i don't think they're on other platforms i could be wrong
it's no actually it says android ipad and mac so maybe they're on android i think the journaling
is a good thing i was not excited about it but it's kind of cool that it might be native
just like freeform i think for me i kind of cool that it might be native,
just like free form.
I think for me, I kind of go to sleep anytime iPads mentioned,
cause I'm not an iPad user and I see some of the things they're doing there.
And I'm like,
that's kind of cool.
But every time I see myself wanting to use an iPad,
I think it might be consumption.
But then I'm like,
I got this big phone so I can just like sacrifice some pixels for this
experience.
I know Nick Nisi in the chat said that he primarily uses his iPad for consumption.
And I'm just like, you know, in every case, shape and form, if I was a digital artist and I use the Apple pen and I used specific things that the iPad enables for an artist, then I'd probably be excited about the iPad.
But I'm not.
So I'm not. So I'm not. And so for me, anytime I hear iPad things,
I just think like, I just wish they would make a super inexpensive internet device that my kids can use in the Apple ecosystem. It wasn't 500 plus dollars or more. Like that's just so much
to show it to a kid. But, and you do want to give them, you know, these fun things and stuff like
that on trips, especially on trips. Like we're taking trips all the time. It the time it's like gosh when we're driving let's give them something to do so they
can you know i'm not gonna buy them a vision pro so ah you stole my joke sorry about that mike he
you set us up and then you stole the joke well that's how it goes that's my least favorite thing
though is anything ipad related just because it's to me me, iPad for me in particular is just a, give me a smaller form factor, a kids-focused device that is affordable for parents that has privacy features.
That's something I'd be excited about.
I like the iPad for what it is, but not for me.
Closing loop on day one.
I said, doesn't Microsoft own that?
I was wrong once again.
Owned by our friends at Automatic, owners of things such as WordPress.com, Tumblr.
That's right.
PocketCasts, other cool...
Matt Mullenweg's just building this really interesting software conglomerate.
What do you call it when you have disparate products?
I don't know.
He just owns a lot of cool stuff.
Yeah.
Well, Paul Main should really get some credit there
because Paul Main drove that from day one.
Thank you.
No class puns.
And then I think they partnered with Automatic,
which just made it a good acquisition,
but they're still separate from what I understand.
Owned by Automatic, got the resources,
but still very much operating as Bloom Built LLC,
if Google's correct.
So Paul Main is behind that.
But one that, you know, help people take notes.
Great for forever, basically. Great for forever,
basically. Great for forever.
All right, let's wrap it right here.
These have been our WWDC hot takes.
A lot of Vision Pro hot takes.
We'll see how well they cool off
over time.
Hopefully better than Commander Taco
on the iPod.
We'll see. Time will tell. Mike, thanks for hanging
out with us and chatting. Always a joy. Where's the best place folks can connect with you on the internetod. We'll see. Time will tell. Mike, thanks for hanging out with us and chatting.
Always a joy.
Where's the best place folks can connect with you on the internet?
Thanks, dudes.
Primarily, probably Mastodon nowadays.
I'm mikemcquade at mastodon.social.
There we go.
But yeah, also my everything's linked and I've got some writing and stuff like that
on my website at mikemcquade.com.
You'll probably have to look at how to spell my lovely surname,
but that's the best place to find me.
We'll leave that as an exercise for the listener.
Of course, the links are always in the show notes,
so you can click through there as well.
All right.
Anything else, Adam?
Let's try to spell McQuaid.
I don't know how to spell McQuaid.
How do you spell McQuaid, Mike?
Real quick.
M-C-Q-U-A-I-D. Okay. I thought I was right. Okay. Mikemcquade mike real quick m-c-q-u-a-i-d okay i thought i was right okay
mike mcquade.com check it out that's it all right y'all we'll catch you on the next one
there you have it our apple vision pro hot takes what do you think let us know in the comments we'd
love to hear from you. There's a
link in your show notes for easy clicking. We have Matt Reier queued up for the next change
log in friends. The topic is still to be determined, but we better come up with one soon
or he'll show up and want to just play his guitar for an hour. Special thanks again to our partners
fasty.com, fly.io, and Typesense.org.
And to Breakmaster Cylinder for bumping out the best beats in the entire biz.
If you dig the stuff we're putting out, share the changelog with developers you know.
Tell them we have the software world's best weekly news brief on Mondays,
deep technical interviews on Wednesdays, and this talk show on Fridays.
They'll thank you later, and I'll thank you right now.
We appreciate you spreading the word. All right, that's it. This one's done. But let's talk show on Fridays. They'll thank you later, and I'll thank you right now. We appreciate you spreading the word.
All right, that's it.
This one's done, but let's talk again real soon.
But this is for like those ultra high-end film studios potentially
or somebody who needs like extreme IO
or they need infinite amount of M2.
MVME.
Jeez, I just got a frog in my throat.
MVME, M2 drives and that kind of thing.
You should say that again because it sounds like you're crying.
Just clear your throat and say it again.
Doesn't it sound like you got choked up?
Yeah, gosh.
I was crying about M2.