The Chaser Report - The Cul-De-Sac at the End of Technology

Episode Date: July 2, 2025

Apple has just announced its new glasses technology, and Charles and Dom are as excited as a teetotaler at a winery. Find out how enshittification is everywhere, and what the REAL products to look froward to are. Less screens, more buttons! Luddism is back on The Chaser Report!---VOTE OPTICS FOR A LOGIE: https://vote.tvweeklogies.com.au/Follow us on Instagram: @chaserwarSpam Dom's socials: @dom_knightSend Charles voicemails: @charlesfirthEmail us: [e-mail] CEO’s Super-yacht upgrade Fund: https://chaser.com.au/support/ Send complaints to: [e-mail] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gadigal Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to The Chaser Report with Dom and Charles. Charles, the world is a dark and confusing place with the decisions breaking hourly that I don't understand. I find confusing. I find scary. I find upsetting, Charles. We're looking through the news trying to work out what we should do. If only there was a source of clarity, Charles, if only could filter out all the bad stuff and see clearly, only the things we want to see.

If only there was a new way of seeing the world, Charles. Can you give me a new way of seeing the world today? Well, it just so happens, Dom, that I can. Because I'm here to sell you on the new Apple glasses that are going to come out later this year. Oh, building on the huge success of the Apple Vision Pro, what could possibly go wrong? Well, maybe we should ask Siri. Siri, what could possibly go wrong? Oh, it doesn't work.

The answer is Siri Yeah More of that After these Thank you for your patience Your call is important Can't take being on hold anymore FIS is 100% online

So you can make the switch in minutes Mobile plans start at $15 a month Certain conditions apply Details at Fizz.CA Does you always say hi Siri I had to make mine say hi Siri because occasionally the word Siri comes up otherwise. Oh,

my, it talks to me all the time whenever I'm not talking to it. The only time it doesn't respond, it's actually quite unusual for it to not respond. It's when I'm talking to it. That's the thing that it gets really confused by. Hey, Siri, what has Charles done to you? I do a pretty mean robot.

That's just incoherent. So the point is, Apple, yeah, as you say, doubling down on the Applevision Pro has decided that they have to go after the Rayban market. Have you seen the Ray bans by a meter? Yes, I have. I've seen them a bunch of times.

I have actually put them on in stores once or twice. Oh, really? Did they work? I couldn't get them to work at all. In all of the places that were at the airport, there's a demo at the Broadway shopping center, I put them on and just was baffled at what they were supposed to do. But it seems to me that if you want a creepy camera in the corner of your sunglasses surveilling everyone around you, that's the product of your dreams.

Yes. I think what they're supposed to do is, When you're looking at something famous, like, I don't know, Starry Night by Van Gogh. I thought you're going to say, like, yourself, the Star of Optics. Yeah, or me, the Star of Optics. And you say to it, hey, what am I looking at? Then it's supposed to know what you're looking at. Yes, based on what you're pointing at.

And it can record video, you can take calls, you can listen to music. The thing I can't do, which is obvious, but was sort of what we were expecting futuristic glasses would be able to do, is overlay images. So you can actually have a little pop-up bubble. No, no, it doesn't change. There's no screen in the sunglasses themselves. It's not overlaying with augmented reality or anything like that. It's just a pair of glasses with the camera and speakers in it, as I understand it. Oh, how boring.

Yes, well, that's exactly. No, I thought the Raybans were actually like sort of welcome to the future style. Well, they're welcome to the future in that they have Bluetooth and that they're not very good. Right. So they're very much on brand for us. Oh, look, I will double check just in case I'm wrong. But Apple are going to release. And remember, Apple didn't have on their product roadmap until five seconds ago the idea of releasing glasses this year, right?

Right. They're obviously in a panic over the fact that everything they release is shit. Well, yeah, I mean, Apple intelligence is a total disaster. Yeah. And so what they've decided to do is double down on these glasses thing. But like the Rayban, I thought the Raybans were instantly better, but it's exactly the same thing, which is they don't have any, it's not a screen, it's just glasses. and it's just going to be basically the ability to talk to Siri while there's a camera attached, right? Yes.

But the whole point is that I want to know what the ads are going to be. More importantly, the introduction video of these glasses. Because my entire experience of Siri is you stand in front of Starry Night. You can clearly see Starry Night. Siri will be able to clearly see Starry Night. And you'll say, hey, Siri, what am I looking at? And it will say, I've found some web results. Please check your iPhone.

It's now interrupting you. Please check your iPhone to find out. Just to be clear, yes, that's what I'm talking. My summary of the meta product was correct. It's a camera. The thing that I didn't mention that it can do, which is the worst thing, is live streaming. So you can just walk around surveilling people and transmitting it to the internet without them knowing. That's one of my favourite YouTube.

channels is live streaming of somebody's glasses by a creepy man. Yeah, yeah, fantastic. Yeah, it's really cool. But the other point that my son mentioned the other day is apparently Siri can only recognize really famous paintings. So it's only paintings that you already know. That's very funny. That you'll be able to, like, you can't say, oh, that must be a Jasper Knight, you know.

Hey! They're famous. And also, how often do you use that? stand in front of a painting and not have a little card next to it, saying exactly what it is. Like, what's the use case? Do you think that if you, wearing any Apple glasses, could look at a picture of Edvard Mook's The Scream, that incredibly famous artwork, and say, what am I looking at, Siri?

Siri would say, this is essentially the board of Apple, given the failure of Apple intelligence. Is that what I'm imagining? Yes. I think what they're going to do is they're actually going to double down on the power of having on your head the ability to have Siri tell you to unlock your phone. I reckon that's going to be the primary feature. Yeah, because you can, I mean, you can do that with your AirPods. Yeah.

Have it just to explain not what's going on. But you can do it with your watch. You can't express that ignorance, but it can't do it with your eyes. It can't have no clue what you're looking at with that sense. Do you ever walk along with your AirPods in and go, and it reads that a message to you? And then it says, would you like to reply? And you say, yes. And then they say, it says, well, you'll have to unlock your phone for me to be able to do that.

And you go, what's the fucking point of anything? Like, why the fuck do you ask me that question if you can't actually do it? And also, I've already given you permission to unlock my phone. I've got my fucking watch on that unlocks my phone. Why the fuck do you need to also have me unlock the phone? Like, it's so stupid. It's such a stupid company. That you just shut it down

It's like sort of capitalism It's just like get rid of it It's over Well Charles If you think If you think of the ambitions of Apple It's really impressive They've got they've got the watch

They've got the ears This is the eyes When are they going to have something for your nose When are they going to have Siri in your nose Smelling what you smell Not being able to identify it successfully No but you make a very good point Charles But what we're saying now

I think it's fair to say is... And I know we've talked a lot about this, but I honestly think that when the history of this period is written in the tech period, it is going to be the history of inshittification. I think the Corey Doctra is a word.

Which keeps coming up in so many parts of life. There is no need for another iPhone. The current iPhone does everything you possibly want it to do. Yes. There is no need for another Apple Watch. There's no need for other airports. What product can they sell?

There's literally no point in any upgrade to any of our devices anymore. But the point is that, of course, there's other things that can be done with the world, right? Like technology hasn't ended in 2025. No. It's just that Apple is incapable of thinking of what that next step is and has a ruthless business model that stamps out any ability for smaller companies to come up with that idea and circumvent the Apple machine. They'll buy the smaller company and then destroy what does. Or they'll just, or they won't buy it and just copy the function. They'll Sherlock it.

And arguably, Siri is exactly there. And this is why... Well, it was. That's why it's Siri. It was bought from a company called Siri. Yeah. And it was good, apparently, before Apple took over. Maybe for its time.

Yeah, for its time. Thank you for your patience. Your call is important. Can't take being on hold anymore? FIS is 100% online so you can make the switch in minutes. Mobile plans start at $15 a month. Certain conditions apply. Details at fizz.ca.

The Chaser Report, news you can't trust. The point is, Janice Varifucus, has that book about techno-futalism. And his whole point about this is he sort of almost takes incitification and looks at why. Why is this sort of happening at every turn? And his argument is essentially that we don't have capitalism anymore. But the whole argument that actually, well, the reason why eventually we'll have better products is because capitalism always needs to sort of use technology to get better. Like that's actually, the actual driving force of capitalism is new technology sort of means

that old capitalists get replaced by new capitalists. And he's all point is actually, we now have a sort of Rontier class of, you know, you know, feudalistic style companies that so dominate and monopolise that they're not actually doing it out, they're not making their profits out of innovation, they're making their profits out of the fact that they own the entire market. Yes, protectionism. And can do what they like with it. But feudism isn't bad, yeah, because they have these.

I mean, we used to talk about walled gardens. They're now these sort of giant strongholds that you can't possibly penetrate into. I mean, thinking about this in terms of Microsoft, because if you are in any sort of corporate job. I mean, you and I use Apple stuff for creative stuff because you're going to have to. But if you have any kind of corporate job at all, even in various parts of the Australian government, you're dealing with Windows, you're dealing with Microsoft. There is no way around it.

And they just glom on to every other thing. So, you know, for a period during the pandemic, we were using Zoom. It was quite good. No, Microsoft fucking Teams has destroyed that, which is the worst program imaginable. Yes. And they insist that you use all of the Microsoft stuff for every possible thing. and every single stupid bit of it is now being re-branded with co-pilot and they're trying to wedge AI and everything.

I write any email on my Outlook app on my phone. And Copilot goes up and says, I see, I see you trying to write. It's like clipy. Like, can I rewrite the email for you? No, you can't because you will make it shit. You will make it worse. Go away and stop creepily surveilling my outputs. And it doesn't work.

This is the thing that's so extraordinary. They've completely captured the entire business market globally with products that are absolutely terrible at everything except locking you out of any alternative. The only thing they do well is make it impossible to use any third-party product at all. So you're completely trapped in that ecosystem of crap using Dell or Hewlett-Packard

and whatever awful machines that they make or Microsoft's own machines. And they're all terrible. They're all absolute turds and they redesign the interfaces every six months so that they're confusing and don't work. And just when you think you've mastered the last annoying, hard-to-use version of out-euvre

look, they completely change the interface and wreck it again. And what has now happened is that Apple have looked over at Microsoft and gone, that's the future. That's how we're going. Like the Microsoftization of Apple is almost complete. Like if you look at the latest updates that are coming out in September with the Apple iPhone, like all the sort of glass thing, it's just, it's just there's no taste to it. No, it's just ugly.

All the menus and settings now. are not done as sort of fancy UI interfaces, but they're all just, they're exactly like Microsoft. It's a list of things that you've got to look at. It's getting closer and closer to that sort of nerdy command line interface that you have, Microsoft. There's no elegance at all.

But there is one device, one new device, which works really well, which I think is the future. I think we should use for everything. Podcasting, writing, everything you'd possibly do. And that is the Nintendo Switch 2. Actually, they've just made it better in every way than the Switch 1. Right. And immediately it does only play games.

So if you want to do anything that isn't playing games, such as edit this podcast, you can't. But maybe that's a good thing, Charles. Maybe what we need is a device that simply doesn't try to do everything. It doesn't try and cludge your AI in every single thing that you do. And maybe if your life requires you to do anything other than playing games, you should stop doing those things and only play games and not worry about anything else at all. I think it's a better way, Charles.

Yes. And I think actually, to be honest, I reckon that is going to be the future of devices because it's so monopolised and Apple takes such a hefty cut out of every, you know, software person that tries to make an app for the iPad or the iPhone or whatever. What is actually going to end up happening is we'll end up with a whole lot of sort of little devices that are very bespoke and just for one particular thing. That do less. Isn't that?

And that is simple to use because, yeah, my phone has become an absolute nightmare to use. My laptop, my dad, all the different things. Even the iPad, the new version of the iPad turns it from an elegantly simple device into essentially a Mac. Yes. Which in one sense is very advanced and quite impressive at last. It has all these functions that can replace your laptop computer. But it also makes it annoying to use and difficult to use. And oh, and Microsoft's up in its guts as well.

It's impossible to do anything with it anymore. So, yeah. Whereas, you know, I've got that thermometer over there. See, I've got a little electronic thermometer. Yeah. It's got two buttons on the top. And you can just program it to do two different things, right? Just whatever you want.

And so I've programmed one of the buttons to turn off all the heaters in the house. One of them to turn on all the heaters in the house. And it's like, it's the simplest thing in the world. There's no, it's like literally a black and white. I'm looking at it. It's like an old style. LCD display. But Charles, just wait till I upgrade.

it with artificial intelligence so it doesn't work anymore so that it tries to guess what you're trying to do gets it wrong yeah and doesn't work but you but you don't have to open an app there's just two physical buttons and it's got two functions and that's all i need every smart home device like because i've got smart home stuff it's all terrible or it's all these different platforms they're all incompatible and they're all crap the only device in my entire house that works there's one device and it gives me i mean the nintendo stuff well not we're standing i want to get into that but there's a we just moved house and the new house that we moved into has the best device when you walk down the stairs into the basement there is a wall mounted button that opens the garage

door that is all that it does that is all that it does but can you say open no you press the button you press it remotely opens the garage door and it works every time and it doesn't need to shut down to update itself did you have to do get the kids to do a bit of a training course so that they understood that how the device works. They just know if they touch it, they're in big trouble. I'm the only one who's like adults only ladd. But it's one button that opens and closes the garage door. We don't want anyone breaking it.

No. It's the only device that actually reliably works. So I think if the people who invented that could invent everything else, I think I'd be on board. I really honestly think, I know we've talked about it a bit, but I really think Luddardism has a really strong case. You're like, I just think, Let's just back out.

This is a cul-de-sac. We've reached a cul-de-sac in terms of technology. Yeah, let's just go back and start again. All the evidence is screens are terrible for you. Maybe we're just less screens, more buttons. Yeah, well, when they can invent a device that you can speak to like a human that will do what you want it to do without a million annoying apps that don't work, then I'll be interested again. Until that point, I'm just going to sit there and open my garage door.

That's all I'm going to do. But how will people listen to podcasts without sort of fancy phones? It's a price I'm willing to pay. We are part of the Iconoclast Network, and on the weekend, we're going to have our second ever weekend edition. So if you want to see it, remember to subscribe to our premium version, wherever you get your podcasts. We're part of the Oconiclass Network.

Catch you tomorrow. Thank you for your patience. Your call is important. Can't take being on hold anymore? Fizz is 100% online. so you can make the switch in minutes. Mobile plans start at $15 a month. Certain conditions apply.

Details at fizz.ca.