The Vergecast - Apple’s Vision Pro: the headset of the future?

Episode Date: June 7, 2023

On Apple's campus, The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, Alex Cranz, and Dan Seifert discuss the long-rumored Apple Vision Pro that was announced this week at WWDC. Later, Marques Brownlee, Andrew Manganelli, and David Imel of the Waveform podcast join the show for a lightning round of everyone's favorite WWDC announcements. Coming soon: the Vergecast and Waveform team challenge each other to trivia! Further reading: Apple WWDC 10 biggest announcements: Vision Pro, MacBook Air, iOS 17, and more Apple Vision Pro is Apple’s new $3,499 AR headset Apple announces visionOS, the operating system for its Vision Pro headset Apple Vision Pro first look: the mixed reality future is (almost) here I wore the Apple Vision Pro. It’s the best headset demo ever. Optic ID will unlock Apple’s new Vision Pro headset  Apple’s Vision Pro headset will turn you into a digital avatar when FaceTiming Everywhere Apple imagines you’ll use its $3,500 Vision Pro headset  Apple’s new VR headset will feature over 100 Apple Arcade games at launch Disney Plus and VR sports games are coming to Apple Vision Pro Microsoft Word, Excel, and Teams are all coming to Apple’s new Vision Pro headset What’s so ‘pro’ about Apple’s Vision Pro headset? The Vision Pro headset is really Apple’s first TV Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data, in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years, covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds.

dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello, welcome to the Redcast, the flagship podcast of the most complicated consumer electronics products in history, both technically and emotionally, I would say. Yeah, there's been a lot of feelings the last 36 hours. And I've processed this feelings in near real time. You've been through the five stages. I have been through the five stages. I am your friend, Eli, David Pierce is here.

Hello. Dan Seferred is here. Hello. Cran's on the Zoom. I'm here in spirit and totally sober. Very good. So Cranes on East Coast time. We are here on the West Coast doing this Vergecast live from Apple Park in a podcast studio that Apple has set up for folks to use. Disclosure, we're in Apple's building. We're going to say some stuff. Tim Cook might have us arrested.

Yeah. If we never make it out, send some employees. If you hear this slight catch of hesitation in my voice throughout this episode, it's because a number of Apple employees are staring at me. But I think we're going to be fine. I'm so happy I'm at home. It is a big episode where WWC, Apple announced a bunch of stuff, including the new Vision and Pro headset, which we're going to talk about a lot in this episode. 400 operating systems got updates. You can now use your phone to find the Siri remote for the Apple TV, which is another

full hour of the Vurchase coming your way. And then to end the episode, we're going to have our friends Marquez Brownlee and the Waveform crew on for a little lightning round. And also in the feed a little bit later, we're going to have a collab episode with Waveform. Dave, what's going on there? Yeah, so we love the Waveform crew. It's great podcast. And we went to them and were like, let's do something fun together at WWDC.

And they were like, we do trivia. Let's do trivia. That's awesome. So we're going to do trivia. I honestly don't know what it's about. We have not done it yet, and I already think they've cheated. I can't prove this, but I'm confident that they've cheated. If we lose, it's because they cheated.

When I walked in here, someone said, we have the audio for the soundboard you requested. And I thought to myself, finally, someone's giving me a soundboard, and it was their soundboard. Yeah. This episode is going to be trouble. One, I'm very disappointed that other podcasts get soundboards, Andrew. And two, I think they've already cheated. Yeah, I think that's in the feed later. That's a different episode.

We've got to talk about the Vision Pro. So there's a lot going on to WWC. We're going to talk through all the news. Just get through it. This episode is going to be all Vision Pro. And then on Friday, we'll do the Macs and operating systems. But let's talk about everything that happened because it was pretty relentless yesterday. Dan, do you want to start us off?

Tell us to the hardware. Go through all the hardware. So non-Vision Pro hardware. We got three new Macs. There's a 15-inch MacBook Air, which has been kind of long waiting. It starts at $1,299, really aggressive price, 3.3 pounds. It's got an M2, six speakers, 15.3-inch screen. It's basically the same design and features as a 13-inch M2 model.

It's going to be available next week. Probably going to be really popular. But it's big. Ultra in it, and they upgraded the HDMI port to 2.1, most important part. I'm sorry, technically what they kept saying was it includes the feature set of HTML2. Yes, because

HGMI 2.1 is an evolving spec. Let's not forget. So that starts at the same price, 1999 for the M2 Max, $3999 for the M2 Ultra Chip. That's also available starting next week. And then they pulled this one out a new Mac Pro, which is basically a

Mac Studio with PCI slots. It's got the same design and chassis as the old Intel MacPro that came out in 2019, but instead of an Intel chip, it's got an M2 Ultra chip in it. You can get up to 192 gigs of RAM. There's no external GPU support. There's no ability to add RAM after the fact, but you do have six slots to plug in PCI cards, and it starts at $69.99. They're boasting all the afterburner cards you could put in it, right? Yeah, like accelerator cards, SDI cards, a bunch of acronyms that I'm really not familiar with for I am not a professional. But people who use those in professional studios and

and things like that. James Cameron's going to love it. Yeah. Because he can route so many streams of audio. Wait, Alex, specifically what they're saying with afterburner cards is you don't need them anymore because the M2 Ultra is as fast as seven afterburner cards. It already burns the afterburners. You don't need them in. So why do you need PCI? We got to move through this.

I'm going to do a whole hour on the USB 3 port, the old style USBA connector for dongles inside the Mac Crow. That's a full hour coming on Friday. I just want to say one more thing about the Macs though. When we were live blogging WWC, the keynote, and this was all happening really fast. And so Neli is like typing furiously Trying to figure out what's going on and he leans over to me and he goes What was the price they said?

6999. And I was like yeah, that sounds right. And Neli types $69,999 as the price for the Mac Pro Doesn't blink an eye and just presses enter the publisher. He's like yeah, it costs $70,000. Totally fine. It's $20,000 to PCS slot. That's so much PCS slots.

The wheels are 10 grand and here we go. Any other hardware? On the max, that's all of it. All right. So that's a lot. Again, all on Friday. David, talk us through the as fast as you can. the software announcements at Dubdu.

Okay, so this was the first half of WWDC, and they did like 800,000 software announcements in 40 minutes, and I'm going to do all of them in the next 90 seconds. I'm very excited for you. So we got iOS 17, which included a bunch of features for phone calls, including contact posters that you can send when you call somebody. There's a new live voicemail thing that actually auto-transcribes your voicemail, and you can pick it up.

There's a new thing called standby for your iPhone, where if you dock it on a mag-safe thing and turn it sideways, it'll be sort of a nightstand and show widgets and the time. there's no more hey and hey Siri there's a new journal app they improved airdrops so that if you and I are close and we start an air drop thing

and then we walk away it'll actually continue and finish over the internet there's new PDF annotation there's a new improved auto correct especially for swearing which means I don't have to type ducking anymore there's a thing called name drop

where we can bump phones together to share contact information with each other you can do voice and video messages in FaceTime there's a bunch of privacy features to protect you from nudes which are really great then there's MacOS Sonoma again that's a full hour

what you just said is a full hour of the verge cast and literally Apple introduce all of this stuff in about this much time. Then there's also iPadOS 17, which has a lot of that same stuff. It also got the personalized lock screen that everybody got on the iPhone with iOS 16. There's some big stage manager changes that I'm potentially very excited about, even though I hate stage manager with all of my heart. There's a new health app. There's new interactive widgets, which also is coming to iOS 17, so you can do things like tap

buttons or check off tasks or whatever actually on the widget instead of having to open the app. It also got lots of other iOS 17 features. There's MacOS Sonoma, which basically got nothing except desktop widgets that you can pull from your iPhone. Cool, great. It got a name. Great job. Again, a full hour. You're glazing over desktop widgets.

I'm like, this is my dream. One full hour of desktop widgets, please. You've never seen a story for me as long as the one I'm going to write about desktop widgets. Fair enough. There's also watchOS 10, which has a new smart stack of widgets, which shows contextual information that is supposed to be personalized and based on what you're doing. Cycling workouts, new features for hikers.

There's some new mental and vision health stuff. And there's a bunch of new watch faces, including Snoop. which Apple always gets really excited about, and I absolutely don't care at all. They really made a big deal about Snoop. It was like Snoopy and live stickers were the things they spent the two longest amounts of time on. I'm like, I think you missed what people actually care about here.

Snoopy's a legend, all right? TVOS 17 got one new feature. My dude was a fighter pilot. He's in the greatest generation. Eli, I have things to do here. Not have time for Snoopy right now. TVOS 17 got exactly one new feature that matters. FaceTime through continuity camera on the Apple TV,

which means you can do FaceTime calls and Zoom calls and all kinds of stuff using the camera on your iPad or iPhone, which I think is very cool. There's a bunch of other little stuff like AirPods improvements, including a tap-to-mute thing on the mic on the AirPods that I'm very excited about. All of that is in beta this summer. It's all shipping this fall.

That's the new software. It's a lot. And like I said, on Friday, we'll go through all that news and great detail. If you were just listening to that. Especially widgets. You know there's a lot of Vergecasts in there. Confabulator stands rise up.

There's a lot of 2008. It doesn't happen. It's very 2008. And this old man is extremely ready to talk about it on Friday. But we got to spend this hour talking about the Vision Pro. Yeah, I think that's right. Because I think it is deserving of a full hour. So where to begin?

Apple has been spent six years pointing iPads at things in showing us augmented reality demos. People walking around on stage holding up iPads showing couches. And I looked. AAR kit was announced at Dubbeda almost six years ago. Wow. So six years of, hey, look, look at this chessboard on a table.

My God, at Nike a couch. Have you ever seen one before? And this is their moment to actually ship a true AR consumer product. That is the Vision Pro. It's very clear that this is the first thing they're shipping that is an AR consumer product. There's a number of catches to that statement. I said it very clearly in that sentence.

And then if you unpack sort of all of what that means, you end up with, well, you can't actually build one of those yet. Right. It's almost impossible to build an AR product at Apple quality. So they made a series of what I would call enormous compromises to build the Vision Pro, which lets you experience what they would like to build, but is not yet that thing. Right. Well, it's a funny thing because on the one hand, the whole pitch was to not make sacrifices. Like, as we've seen from the hardware, they did the best thing you can possibly do, and it costs $3,500. because that's what it costs to do this stuff now. But on the other hand, it involves tons of sacrifices.

It doesn't look the way they want it to. It's missing a lot of the features that they're going to want it to have over time. Like the long-term vision for this is very clear, and this is not that. Yeah. It doesn't look the way they want it to? No, I mean, I thought they always wanted it to look like ski goggles. Well, so, okay, so to be clear, we've all seen it in person. You guys have seen it.

Dave and I actually got to wear it for a while. Alex Heath got to wear it for a while. I would say that I spent a long time waiting for my demo, just sort of menacingly hovering around the ones that were in the lobby, just like taking in the hardware. So it's like a beautiful piece of hardware. It's a beautiful set of ski goggles, just sort of taking in the shape of the glass on the front

and the amount of Apple engineering it takes to produce that piece of glass at scale and ship it with Apple tolerant. Like someone worked very hard on this thing. For a long time. for a long time. Like, there's just going to get around it. Like, the sort of technical execution of this thing,

there is but one company that can do it at consumer scale and it's Apple. It was very funny. There were a ton of people on Twitter the last two days, like changing their bios to say that they worked on Division Pro and tweeting, like, oh my God, after eight years of working on this, I finally get to talk about this thing that I've been building. It's very, this was like, this was a moment in a big way. There's 4,000 people that worked on just the curve of the glass, right?

Like, it's like, I'm just guessing. But what they want to build is glasses. They want to build C-through. And we know this because Timi Cook has said it over and over and over again. He said it to Walt Mossberg ones. It's got to be this. And he pointed at his glasses. And so this set of ski goggles that are much more like a VR headset than a pair of glasses is a compromise, a stopgap on the way to the end of the vision.

So when I say it's like the most complicated consumer product in history, I really do mean that literally. Like the product itself enormously complicated. And we could just spend hours talking about specs. and how it works. And then there's the emotional component of, this isn't what anybody wants. Right? Whatever he wants is a pair of glasses. And this is the thing you build to let developers start building apps so that as you continue coming down the hardware cost curve and the hardware capability curve, you're ready for that moment when you can just put on a pair of glasses. I kind of want to ask you about that because over here on the East Coast, where none of us

have seen it in person, we've not experienced it. We've all just seen like the pitch. And most people I know weren't sold on the pitch. No one's been sold on the pitch. Very few people are like, wow, yes, I got to go get this. But increasingly, everybody I've seen who's actually seen it and touched it and used it is like, I get the pitch. Do you guys get the pitch? Like, does the pitch make sense for you? Are you, are you on board? I mean, that's kind of the question, right? Like, this is this is what I feel like we've spent the last 24 hours talking about is, I think that Apple at this moment in time really wants you to think of this as like a gadget and to care about the display specs and the process. processor speeds and the way that it works and like evaluate it like you would a smartphone in 2009, right? Like we're way back in the early computer days where Walt Mosberg was like telling you about processor speeds. And that's a matter, right? And we're still in this phase where it's like we made a screen that is better to look at

is like a truly real and relevant thing in this world. But then there is the very separate question of like, is this a thing anybody wants and what is it for? And I think it's very easy to do this demo and think like, oh my God, this thing works so well and not get to the second part of the question. But I think what you're talking about and where this gets really emotional is the second part of that question. Like, do I want this in my life? Is a very different question than like, is this any good? Right. By the extremely clear answer to your question is no one knows. Yeah, that's fair. Like I wore it, I pushed,

it's me. So like you have 30 minutes and it's like, we're going to 37, right? That's like how it goes. And I'm going to push all the buttons. I got in trouble, like, wandering around the room. But we basically got around 30 minutes on Rails, like a very tightly controlled demo, and the people giving us the demo had iPads so they could like watch what we were doing in the headset. And they were telling us what to do. That demo worked really well. The experiences inside that demo were great. They were showing us what they wanted to show us.

Great. You take that thing out of that room, which was perfectly lit for the capabilities of the device, perfectly staged for that demo, and you take it into a crappier, darker room. And I'm just going to go out on a limb here and say most people's homes are full of crappier, darker rooms than the one Apple built to demo the headset. I don't know the answer to that question. You get closer to a wall. Like Apple kept talking about how you're going to use it at work. If you look at all of the demos, the people are standing up at desks with nothing in front of them.

They look like the design studio. They're very rarely sitting down. So there's like a million questions for like, how is it going to actually work in practice? Right? I don't know the answer that question. So it's like, can I tell you that I buy the pitch? No, I can tell you that I put the headset on. And we, Alex, you and I've talked about the Quest a lot on the show.

Like, I'm a Quest 2 owner. I have a unit of a Quest Pro that every now and again I just frown at some disappointment. I have a PSVR 2. I love my PSVR 2. I think that's a great headset because the GPU is sitting on the floor connected by a cable. This thing is, like, blows most of them away. Right. Right.

And I'll just hedge on the PSVR 2 because it's just a very different product. But this thing is great. Like the display is so high resolution. The video passed through is incredible. The latency is so low. The demos they gave us were just really great. Yeah. And it's just hard because it's not the thing anybody wants.

What they want to show you is augmented reality. And the truth of the product is you put on a headset, you're looking at two displays. And then through those displays is pumped feed from 12 cameras and a depth sensor and all this stuff with very low latency to make it appear as though you're looking through the thing. That's what Tim Cook said. Yep. So first Apple product you look through and not at. Which is a good line, by the way. Great line.

You are super looking at this product. Like the reality of this is you are looking at screens, right? And I don't have to tell. Like, you can evaluate a screen. You can evaluate the quality of a camera that is projecting an image to you. I can tell you with dead certainty that these cameras, because of the amount of processing and almost no latency that they're allowed to have, there's some compression going on here, especially in low light.

So the people in the room, sometimes they would be in shadows or like they would have less light projected on their faces just as they moved around. And I could see the details go away. Okay. Like, is that the end of the world? Like, how do I evaluate that in 30 minutes and tell you if I buy the pitch to wear a headset on a computer instead of having a television? I just don't know the answer to that question. But you're still like, you're hyped still for this product. Like I think what I saw after this event was everybody was like, this is a $3,500 VR headset.

Why am I going to ever want that? But it seems like people who are actually experiencing are like, no, it almost makes, like, we only got saw it for 30 minutes, but it almost makes sense. I know exactly why it's a $3,500 VR headset. Because it's really good displays, right? It's just the displays. Yeah, yeah. That alone is more expensive than basically. No, no, it's not just the displays.

It's the displays, which we should talk. We should talk about the specs a little bit. It's the displays. We should, yeah. It is the incredible video pass-through. It is the mixed reality tricks they are able to pull off. And it is the fact that it has an M-2 and an R-1 shipping. in there. And like, I don't know, I opened Safari. I said, I'm going to go to the Verge. They said,

that's going to take a long time. And then I looked at every individual letter on a keyboard and tapped my fingers together. And we went to Theverge.com and I read the website. And it was Safari, right? Like it's a like the quest two, this is what the joke we keep making. It's an Android, it's a mid-range Android smartphone on your face. This is a MacBook on your face. They're radically different in terms of their capabilities. Oh, wow. That's a good way of putting it, actually. And I think, Alex, I think the thing that you're sensing is that there's this overwhelming feeling that a lot of people are having that like, oh, it's actually possible to do this stuff well. Like, we've not seen anyone do pass through like this. We have not seen anyone do latency

like this. Like, yes, it's very expensive. Yes, it was an incredibly controlled demo, but it's like the, we have proven the point that at some level and in some constraints, it is possible to do this very, very, very, very well. And I think a lot of people had never seen it done well before and were sort of blown away just by that fact. And again, that's the very beginning of a very long story about whether the Vision Pro is a good product or a good idea. But that is the thing that I think a lot of people have reacted to is like, oh my God, the pass through isn't bad. It's actually good. Yeah, talk about the specs. Go through the spec real quick, and we can talk about why the pasture is good. Sure. Okay. So it's a pair of ski goggles. It's just straight up, absolutely.

Like Joanna Stern, our friend at the Wall Street Journal, did a video ahead of this where she actually talked about it using a pair of ski goggles and it is I mean shockingly close to what this thing actually looks like like she nailed it she just bought ski goggles it's just those but anyway so it's about what is it a little less than a pound yeah so I mean the most important spec is the battery is not connected to that we're gonna get to the headset itself a little less than a pan yeah so the headset weighs a little less than a pound and it's basically in three parts so you get the the actual headset itself which is metallic and relatively thin and small and curved and then there's the thing that they call, or is that the light seal that is this sort of customized thing that goes around it

and around your eyes. And then there's the strap, which they call the headband, sure. And there's one that goes behind and there's one that goes over. And that's essentially the thing that you wear. It's plushy and relatively comfortable. It was kind of heavy on my face. You had an okay time. I think I strapped it down harder than everybody else. You just really yanked the stuff. I mean, it's a thing you have to wear in your head. Ruined your hair. They took fitness when you walked into the demo area. So none of this is final. They got months to go. But they were like, here's an iPhone.

You look at an iPhone. You did something like Face ID where you turned your head in a circle that figured out what lights you'd use. And then you turned your ears to it. Yes. Which works great for me. It did not work for David, apparently. It just, like, didn't understand that my right ear was an ear for a while.

Your right ear, I've been meaning to tell you. Yeah, I had no idea. Today was the day I discovered that I don't need glasses, which is very exciting to discover. And my right ear is just a disaster. It's never been great. We all talk about it behind your back. I'm sorry, David. So, scan your ears, and that adjust the spatial audio for it.

So you go, but that's a very quick fitment process. If you had glasses, they have a partner in Zice, and Zice will put prescription lenses. And it only works for myopia. It doesn't work for, like, I have astigmatism. It wouldn't work for me unless I'm wearing contacts. Interesting. So I have contacts, and I did not get to the astigmatism question. We were just like sent in there.

But I think like these fitment issues, just given the circumstances of the demo, that's like a real wait-and-see. Yeah, for sure, along with oh so many other things. But, okay, so anyway, so then inside the thing, it's powered by some combination of the M2 and the R1 chip. The R1 chip is new. There are 12 cameras in the headset. There are five other sensors. LiDAR pointing down.

No, that are points out. LiDAR points out. I are pointing down to find your hands, other things. There's a 4K display in each eye, and that is essentially, you know, that's what you look through the whole time. There's no controllers. You do all the control.

with your fingers. And your eyes. Because there's sensors and cameras looking at your eyes. Right. Yeah, it's eye tracking and hand control are like the two things

that are happening here. And that part is fascinating. We should talk about it. I don't think there are any other super meaningful specs. Like it's bonkers how much stuff is in this headset. It gets hot, right?

Like I was reading, I was reading that because it's got the M2 in it, it actually gets kind of warm and it like vents the air basically over your eyeballs. Everyone thinks it's fencing down at your nose,

which I don't know why everyone thinks that. It goes up. It goes up. It goes up. It goes up. It goes up. greater design on the bottom that makes you think that's where the air would go out, but that's where the air goes in.

But it's sucking the air up around your nose and then shooting out your forehead. I don't know, I mean, everyone had like slightly different demo experiences. We haven't all compared notes. I just read all the coverage. I took it off and I was like, oh, the top of this is hot. Other people like Joanna and Lauren, I think, were like, the thing got hot. Like, they could feel it. So people just had different experiences inside of these demo units.

But yeah, the heat goes out the top. And it has a fan that drives that air air. And we just, no one had enough time to sit around thinking with the fan. Yeah. I was like, this dinosaur. Like, you're the dinosaur. Tell me about the fan. Like, what are the fan curves?

Can I adjust the curve of the fan? Yeah. But that means that the fans aren't like, oh, man, that fans really. Certainly not. No, yeah, it certainly wasn't a problem. I did skip one spec, though, which is the battery. Yes. There's no battery inside the headset at all.

There is a thing that attaches to basically your right temple with a long, cable that goes down to a battery pack that felt to me like about the size and weight of an iPhone, maybe a little heavier. I was like the anchor battery packs they use. Yeah. Like the 10th of 1,000. And that thing gives you two hours of battery. You can also

plug the battery pack into the wall. So you don't plug the headset directly into the wall. You plug the headset into the battery pack which plugs into the wall. And then you just have power forever because you're plugged into the wall. Here's the most crucial question that came up at the verge offices when we were all watching this.

What do you do if you don't have pockets? Like, is there like a clip? Get some pockets. Yeah, that's your answer. No, there is no place to put it at this moment in time. Whether there will be like an accessory ecosystem where you can stick it to the back of your head or something. $50 for a clip. Or like is there, maybe there's going to be a lanyard.

You can just like hold the battery around your neck. Yeah, it just doesn't seem like anyone is anticipating that you're going to be far from a chair. It's a very stationary device. Yeah. I think that's right. It's two hours on battery. Yeah. And if you have to walk somewhere with it, you like walk holding the battery in one hand.

I can see people doing their laundry while wearing this. That's true. Wait, I would have come to that because that's like the other part of this, right? That's like the emotional. We're going to show you the dream that we think we're enabling. Yeah. But we're still just on like the thing. Right.

And like I think the thing itself is just like fascinating for what it is. It's a very cool gadget. And I think that's kind of like to your point, Alex, about like the people that are seeing it in person and getting to touch. and stuff like that, they are kind of wowed by the gadgety factor of it. And it's a very nice, polished, cool-looking, sci-fi VR goggle headset. And if you look at the VR goggles

that we've seen beforehand and you look at this one, it's very clear that this is like a level above in terms of finish, polish, and design. Price. And I think that is part of what is driving a lot of like the kind of like the ooh wow kind of reactions on the ground

that don't translate, necessarily in pictures over the internet. I'll give you two examples that, like, blew me away. One, like an idiot, I just, like, tried to pick up my phone and use it while I was wearing it. Right? Because you have the past through. I'm looking at the pastoral.

It's just like, I'm in the room with people, and I just, like, reached down, saw my phone, picked it up, and started using it. And, like, there is not another pass-through headset experience where you can just do that. Right. And I was just, like, unlocked it. Again, you're looking at a camera feed on a screen,

so I could see the IR Illuminator or the face ID blinking at me. Oh, that's cool. Because the cameras pick up IR. So it's weird, right? It's like, so it couldn't do faces because I was wearing ski goggles. But it unlocked with my watch because I'm safely in the walls of iCloud. Okay, here's a real question that I actually mean seriously. So one of the features that the Vision Pro has is that it'll show your eyes on an external screen so someone can see that you're paying attention to them.

Do you think face ID will unlock on your face? 0%. You got to have a watch. Or the headset's going to be. it's got retina scanners. It's got to do the depth sensing. Maybe it's like, but I'm saying,

can you unlock your phone with your headset on? Right. Like the reverse of the watch unlocking the Mac. Right. This is the Mac on your face unlocking your phone.

That's exactly because it'll off you. But by the time we're ages away. But I just started using my phone. In full color, open, like navigating my phone, open notes app, started taking notes.

They looked terrified because I was taking notes. And like, as I went through the demos, I just kept looking down and taking notes. Just like just straight up incredible. Like from a, a pure technology standpoint.

That's also a big, like, user experience deal. The question is always, like, what do I do when I need to pick up my cup of coffee, right? And that's, that passes the coffee test. But the coffee test, like, you can, like, get, like, ment, like, neurologically, you can get used to, like, a slight delay between your brain and your hands. Like, it's weird. So, like, coffee is, like, you pick it up and you're used to it. This is, like, the phone is reacting real time to my fingers, and I'm navigating the phone.

It's, like, all working, and I perceived nothing. And the, yeah. Right, and it had, it had the dynamic range in the, camera and in the display to show me my phone display at the proper exposure while the room was in the proper exposure, which basically no camera can do. Because usually it would blow out your phone. Yeah. So you could see all the text.

I mean, I would be interested in like to mention, you mentioned earlier what it would work like in a dark room. You were in a well-lit demo space. It's bright in there. For sure. Yeah. But I'll just figured it out. Like, that's just like straight up incredible.

that worked. I've never seen that work in any other product. And then the other one that really got me was they put me in a VR theater. They forced me to watch Avatar way of the water. Apple has made me watch so much Avatar these past two days. I've seen more of that movie than I ever intended to see. And I'm in the theater. And I raised my hands and asked about aspect ratios like you do. And I can see my hands because they broke through the VR immersion. So it just knew my hands were in the air and it's like these are your hands. It wasn't cartoon meta quest hands. It was like your hands. It was just my hands. And then the person next to me started talking and she just faded into view, breaking the immersion. That's cool. And it's like, oh, that's sick. Like, just all of that was like, I can't believe any of that just happened. This computer on my face figured all of that out at once.

It's playing a 4K movie and what appears to be HDR. It's resized the pixels of that movie to whatever weird aspect ratio cinema situation that I figured out. It's identified my hands. It's broken those through in real time. Pass those over the video. It heard another person talking, figured out her outline, massed her and brought her, like, and just doing this on my face.

That's crazy. And by the way, we weren't plugged in for any of this, right? There was running off the battery for all of this. No, it sounds super impressive. Did your eyes appear? Do you know if your eyes appeared when you, like, when she talked to you? None of that works.

Yeah, I know. The eyes didn't appear. We couldn't make our own avatars, which Apple calls personas for the FaceTime stuff, but we could see other people's. There's a lot of this stuff that is clearly not finished. Like one of the theories I've heard,

and this is just a theory, but it makes a lot of sense, is that one of the reasons the Apple executives weren't wearing them is because the eye stuff on the outside is not ready yet. And yeah, a lot of that stuff is not finished. That was one of the things I wanted to see

was like what somebody's eyes look like because I have a lot of questions about that. But yeah, we didn't get to see that stuff. So that's the hardware. And I don't want to discount, like, that is a lot of hardware to enable these experiences. Yeah.

The big question, I think, Alex, this is the split between the people who just looked at what they saw and the people who experienced it. People experienced it are like, wow, that's a lot of hardware. All right, like, that's cool. Like, I love a gadget. Then there's like, do I want any of this? What is it for? So we should take a break and come back and talk about that aspect of it because that's where things start to spiral, I think, in wild and exciting ways. All right, we're going to take a break.

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Gramerly.com. That's Grammarly.com. Okay, we're back. So we talked to the hardware. We put it on our face. We looked at the stuff. What was your favorite demo? I think for me it was the second sort of movie thing that Apple showed, which is I also saw

the avatar demo. I've actually seen the movie. It's very good. It lasts substantially longer than the Vision Pro's battery, which I think is great. But then they did a thing where they showed immersive videos is kind of what they call it. And this is the kind of demo you see on every, on every headset ever, right? They're like, here's the 360 video.

You can turn your head and there's more video. It's one of those things that is like the most standard tech demo of all time for these headsets. So it was like watch a basketball game from above the backboard or soccer game from behind the goal. You can see some rhinos, just like being rhinos. And it's all this sort of big, wide panoramic video. And it was the first one of those that I was like, oh, this is not just like a tech demo of how you can move your head. This is like a cool thing

that I would actually watch. And that was the moment it really sort of turned for me from like, oh, the fact that this is better changes what it's for to me. Right? Whereas like I would watch Avatar

on that thing in the way that like there's absolutely no chance in hell. I'm going to watch a three hour movie on the meta quest. Yeah. Don't you that. But I would watch, I would spend time just sitting on my couch

watching something. Like, what does that mean for me as a person? We should talk about right now. But that was the thing that jumped out to me is like there's actually something to this kind of filling the world around me with content that I can actually get behind. Yeah.

Yeah, I thought it was, you both wrote these hands-ons after seeing this thing. And that was really interesting because David, you talked about how this is just the TV. They finally made the TV. David stole my headline. I'm really upset about it and I kind of don't know. Full disclosure, Neelai provided the headline. It was like, this is a really good headline. We should run it.

And then he was really mad after we run it. That it wasn't crazy. Yeah, the story published in Neal, I was like, damn it, I should have run that headline with my name on it. Nilai, you talked about how like you, it kind of felt lonely in a way. And I thought that was a really interesting tension because like, yeah, as a person who lives alone, sure, this sounds great for me. I don't have to have a TV ever again. I can just have this and wear that. But if you don't live alone, this would probably be a not great experience to watch all your content on.

Yeah, I don't want to get too philosophical in Apple's podcast studio. It's a weird place to get deep. Tim just kicks the door in. Yeah. At any moment, Tim Cook is going to have me arrested. It's weird to not be looking at the same stuff as other people. Right? To be perceiving reality and have it to be objectively different reality that you know is different reality than someone else.

To be like, I'm looking at a dinosaur and there's two people in the room who are not having that experience is fucking weird. Right? It's just weird. You're like, I'm having all these feelings about what's happening to me. And they're like, huh. you know and like taking notes about you or whatever they're doing like that's weird watching sports unless it's a playoff game i like to do with other people playoff games is very lonely very isolated experience right like just these you're supposed to watch james cameron does not want you watching

avatar at home by yourself he wants you in the theater tom cruise is out there like trying to have christopher nolan assassinated so you can get the iMac's theaters like there's just something about spending time with other people and literally looking at the same thing at the same time that is like the human condition and this thing puts you way away from that right

where the answer is both of you will be wearing the headset which is super weird like and that's the that's the only answer that exists right now and I just think like there's a lot there's another 10 years of verge coverage and like I know what we're doing

for the next 10 years right this thing but right now it's like it's meant to be like a MacBook display that you wear on your face that's David's Engel right they made an Apple TV for your face Basically, yeah. I mean, Dan, I'm curious what your thought was because there's like, Apple made the case basically that it's a, it's a productivity device. So you can like array a bunch of screens on your desk. It's a content capture device, which is basically they have these sort of like 3D volumetric videos and photos you can take. And it's an entertainment device for watching stuff. These are three things I know you care very much about individually and together. I do. Yeah. I'm curious what it all kind of made you feel. I think of those three, the content capture is a non-starter. Like I, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the demo taking a picture of my kids wearing a goggles, my wife would just literally leave me. You're not going to do that? I don't foresee myself doing that. I think that the first one,

the productivity thing, is kind of interesting if it is done well. I do not think that I could wear that thing for eight to ten hours a day and like not just boil my eyes, trying to like blog and read articles and stuff like that. But the idea of having like an infinite canvas in front of me that I can like put as many windows as I want and stuff like that is kind of intriguing. And then I think, you know, like you were saying, you would watch Avatar on it. And I think that like if you are alone, maybe on an airplane, that is like an area where I do not want to be watching the same thing as other people next to me. So the airplane, okay, first of all, one of the best airplane experiences I've ever had my entire

life is when the Baywatch movie went viral on like a long flight, like cross country. And like one person started watching Baywatch. And then all of the people started watching Baywatch. It was just, I've never seen. seen anything like that in my life. Aside from watching the Baywatch movie, with the rest of my 737 flight mates. The other reason the airplane one is, it's just the Baywatch thing. That's the only thing I care about. The other reason it's fascinating to me is that's the one where you are definitely in VR.

Yes, you would be in a full of the air environment. And there's a reason they did not show the airplane demo from the perspective of the wearer. They showed the person sitting on the plane wearing the headset. But that is not a mixed reality or an augmented reality situation. And I don't think that like even watching it at home, you wouldn't really want a mixed augmented reality situation if you're watching a movie. The whole point is to be immersive, right?

Otherwise, just watch the movie on a TV where it's there in front of you and you probably already have it, right? This is where I think the form factor of the thing, which is a VR headset. Yep. We can just be honest with each other here. They're all looking at me.

That's weird, man. But the form factor of the thing leads them into places where the desired product would not take them. Yeah. So the desired product is augmented reality glasses. You can never put a light seal around you and block out the world and say you're on the top of a mountain watching avatar. But this thing lets you let's you do that. And I think you have to make the case for it, you have to say, well, there's big screens in front of you. And that's weird because if you keep stepping down

the curve to where they want to go, eventually they're going to ship you a pair of glasses and they will not be able to do that. And I don't know how that goes. Right. Maybe what everyone wants is a bunch of virtual displays to run safari and a movie and a FaceTime call instead of having physical monitors. That's my dream. Or maybe what we want is actually augmented reality. And that is like I just don't, again, half an hour on the device. I couldn't tell you the split.

But that seems like a very challenging, right? If the goal is augmented reality. Right. The augmented reality would be like you're wearing the glasses, but you are watching your TV. And then what are the glasses doing around your TV? And what I mean by the plain example specifically to make it clear is if you do the big screen on a, if you're sitting, imagine sitting on a plane, and you're like, I'm going to do the big TV in augmented reality. Where's the screen going to go? Right. If you project it on the

seat in front of you, you have a hundred inch screen two inches from your face. Yeah. That's bad. If you put it four rows ahead of you, there's just a bunch of seats between you and your TV. So like you're saying, the only correct thing to do there is just occlude everything else. Yep. And sort of disappear into a thing where the screen just fills your view. And that just is a VR headset. Yeah. I think it's the right call for that place. Like, that is what I would want to do. I don't need to see the other people or the seats. But you cannot do that with a pair of glasses unless you have a bunch of glasses and accessories, right?

So that's just like a fascinating, like form factor, like result. What if the plan is to keep it as goggles, though? And the goggles just get smaller and smaller until you're wearing, like, welder goggles. And then welder goggles are the new hit thing. Those glasses with the things on the side, like the, like Mad Max? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, everybody just looks like that. When I think of Tim Cook's greatest ambitions, I think of Mad Max classes.

Tim Cook secretly extraordinarily steampunk. Those like wraparound Oakley's would do it too. Some blades. Some blades. I bet Kred Federigi has some steampunk in him. That's just my... I saw him playing Black Sabbath on a triple-headed guitar. But that's weird, right?

Like this VR form factor. Well, I think that, like, yes, you are totally right. But if they came out with this and you couldn't, with the form factor that they have today, that they are releasing, and you couldn't do what David just described of going into full VR. People would be like, why can't I just go into full VR? I'm wearing a VR headset. And I can see that, like, for today, for this product, for what it can do, for the capabilities it has, that is an experience that makes sense.

If we get to the point where AR glasses, like you're talking about that do not have the occlusion and things like that, maybe that experience just kind of fades away, or the track divides and we have goggles for that experience. And we have AR glasses for, I don't know, knowing your name. birthday and phone number. I got to look at you. So I, as the virtual house listeners well now, the killer app for glasses for me is being able to know faces and names.

And if I could just remember these people's names, I would be the most powerful politician in America, vote to tell. I cannot, and thus I will host the show for a opportunity. Apple doesn't show any of that. There's none out there. And there's a whole stack of problems to do that, the worldwide facial recognition database being the first one. But Apple didn't show any of that.

They didn't show hardly any augmented reality, apart from the very fact of displaying screens in space, which is a challenging augmented reality problem. Right. I don't mean to denigate that. But the things that they've been showing us for years, there's a chessboard on this table and you're going to play chess on it. Not there. The only augmented reality demo, I think we actually got was the butterfly and the dinosaur experience landed on your finger. Right. Yeah, you held out your finger and a butterfly sort of flapped through the room.

room and landed on your finger. And I'm told it didn't land on everybody's finger, but I think that's a lie. I think it laid out of it. I think they're like, you all that your finger, it may land on you. And I was like, oh, am I special. Yeah. But I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think the, this, I mean, I

know, I know, like, this butterfly is it has to make the case for a device that exists right now and cost $3,500. And Apple is not the kind of company to come out and say what like Snap has been saying for years, which is like this is the very beginning of a very long road. We don't expect anyone to buy this one. We're going to make menu anymore. Like look at this cool vending machine, right? Like that's not a thing Apple does. So what they have to do is say here is the best thing we can do right now. It's very expensive. You should totally buy it. You should totally make apps for it. But also you and we both know that we're on this long road to somewhere that is not only better. It's not like an iPad that gets like faster and bigger and the, battery lasts longer and that like slowly changes things over time it's going to be fundamentally different in its final form and so they're trying to sort of explain where we're going but also convince you that where we are is worthwhile and that's really hard to do simultaneously and i think like the thing we talked about in the run-up to this was that the whole industry was out there

like desperately waiting for apple to like explain to the world why you need one of these things and i think of all the things that we saw that's the thing that fell sort of the most for me was that just I didn't come out of this being like I know exactly what this thing is going to be useful for for lots of people they did make one argument that tracked right into your your thesis your piece with an excellent headline a totally original headline you did not so do you want a co-byline I can put this I can put your name to it just like every other paragraph headlined by nilai Patel I'll just put it right great and this was in the keynote right there was Mike rockwell who said yes it's a big number but imagine you're buying a big screen TV and a sound bar and and

And all this content, all this, just imagine all the screens you're buying. That would be $3,500. Assuming you buy exclusively. And the second half of that line is, and it doesn't do nearly as much as this. And so, again, the point that they're making is,

like, this is very much a consumption device. We have not yet gotten to, right? You can just run Safari on it. And I did open Safari and, like, scroll through text. And it looked great, right? Like, you can just use this as a monitor. The resolution is high enough. You can mirror your Mac to it

and get a Mac display on it, unclear what the resolution will be because your Mac has to support it and the headset asks, like, that's some wonky questions. They didn't demo that for us. They didn't see that stuff. You can make a FaceTime call in it

and send a 3D avatar to someone else. Like, you can do a bunch of this stuff and I think what everyone has caught up in is the form factor of it. Because if they actually produced the glasses and said you could do all the stuff, we'd be like, that's pretty rad. But it's a VR headset.

Like the Quest Pro is not a good product and you should not buy it. True. It is exactly, I think it started $1,500. It's exactly the $1,500 version of this. And now they've dropped the price to $2,000 just like get them off the shelf. Like, you can see exactly the $2,000 difference in quality and ambition between these two products. But in terms of what meta says about what the Quest Pro should do, it mirrors your laptop with a variety of clunky software dongles.

It shows you a bunch of workspaces, right? That was the thing that went viral with the Quest Pro, right, was here's four monitors in front of you. Yep. Yep. That's the same thing. Yes, 3D personas in FaceTime, which we should actually talk about a little bit more. They're very neat and worth examining. Mark Zuckerberg's like, here's some cartoon shit.

You may have legs. You may not. But it's still just like talking to each other. You can really see that difference between like a company that's been doing hardware for 30 years, 40 years, and a company that does social media and just pivoted to hardware like four years ago. Yeah, and look, meta is, there was a disastrous startup called Magic Leap, which we've talked about all on the show. They've hired a bunch of those engineers. They've acquired a bunch of those patents. Like, these are ideas that have been around for a long time.

Ronnie Abramovitz, the Magic Leap CEO. I think he was tweeting, like, this is a greatest hits reel of every VR demo for the past 10 years. And I think that's, that's right. Like, we've seen a lot of these experiences before. The basketball one is, like, a perfect example of this. I cannot tell you how many times I have been told that I will put some of the best. something on my face and sit court side. Yeah. Oh, constantly.

Like, endlessly. This ships, like, you can watch YouTube pilots and, like, spin around with a mouse if you want to. You can do this today. Apple invented a new video format called Apple immersive video, which it will not tell you the specs of. And apparently has a proprietary new camera developed to shoot an Apple immersive video, which it will not talk about. I was like, you made a new camera, and they're like, yes. An MBA is totally going to buy one. Tell me anything about it. No. Why are you going to ship it? I don't know. Like, but they concocted these demos at like the highest level of their own ambition to make sure they were great.

And so this is the best executed riff on like all these are very familiar ideas. But the ideas are inherently familiar. And that little like gap between is this what's going to make me buy it? Is this what's going to make me spend even more money? Like that's what that's why the developers have it now. Right. And I think that's the like we're on this funny spectrum from you have the meta quest where it's like tech demos that are not real things that anyone would do in their life. This demo was like, okay, this, you've made

just these basic things so much better that it's not just like you made my computer slightly faster. It's like you've, you've actually changed the set of things I am willing to do on this device by making it this much better. Like, I would watch an NBA game like that. It's kind of a weird camera angle you can't see very much, but if you, sitting courts at actually kind of sucks. But if it's as good as we saw in the demos, right? Like every sentence we say on here should be if it's proceeded by if it's as good as we saw in these incredibly controlled on Rails demos. I opened the notes app and I got yelled out about it. We don't know most things about this.

But the thing after that is still, is this worth the price to you? And I think overwhelmingly the Crest Pro is like, well, it's not very good and it's not very expensive. So no, I don't want it. And this is now we're getting to it's pretty good and very expensive. Is that something? If those use cases appeal to you. Because I think one of the other things to Alex's point, that a lot of the kind of shruggy reaction I've seen

is from a lot of people who are expecting VR experiences and want to use it for VR experiences because it has that incredible hardware and displays and things like that. And it's not doing gaming, and it's not doing flight simulators, and it's not doing racing simulators and all these things that are like really high-end VR experience

where there is an audience that will pay $4,000 for a headset to make that better. But like this is a self-contained, a MacBook on your face. It's not probably powerful enough to run flight simulator or any of those, and you can't plug in your GPU on the floor. Also known as a PS5.

Also known as a PS5. My good old 4 GPU. Battery in one pocket. GPU in the other pocket. Let's go. Or a PC gaming rig or whatever it is, right? And so there's kind of like that audience who has been in this world for a while

has been watching the development and the tracking and they see this as like, oh, this is the next leap in the technology, but we can't use. it for that because Apple's kind of gating it to the use cases that it wants. I mean, look, I'm one of these people. I got a four GPU situation. I'm with you.

Here my people. You've kind of big. Like, that is a tiny market that has accomplished very little. How big is the market that will spend $3,500 on this? I think it's also a teeny tiny market, but I think Apple's ambitions are way bigger than Apple doesn't need this thing to make money. For a long time. If Apple's like, we've got to pay for this whole program, Tim Cook is going to be like,

I don't make it 35%. You know, it's like it's over. They can just do it. And like very few other companies in space, save for meta, have that ability. Yeah. And I think that's just a part of the dynamic here is like we're thinking through.

As Apple's just going to stick with it. Even Microsoft, God bless the number of commenters in our hands-on posts who are like, The HoloLens did it. My friends, the HoloLens came out eight years ago who was flop in Microsoft acts the entire division.

You can keep typing it, it doesn't matter. It did it. The kin did it first. I think the next nine months, I think, are going to be fascinating. And Apple has done this before, like announce a product way before it launches. And typically what happens is a lot changes in that time. Because developers start to see it.

They start to use it. They start to have ideas. They start to build stuff. Apple changes stuff as they, you know, as things move along and time goes and people start to see it. And it's out in the world. And so like you said, there's a lot of stuff we haven't seen it. absolutely I would bet my life that Fitness Plus ends up being like a meaningful part of this thing.

And we haven't seen any of them. Right. So this is, they showed us meditation. They did one minute meditation. Again, a very odd thing to do with other people in the room, especially when the voice is like, be grateful. And it's like, I don't know, man. I'm pretty grateful, like generally. Maybe not in this situation.

But supernatural exists. Alex and I both use it on the Quest 2. It's a totally fun experience. It sells a bunch of Quest headsets. That's why Facebook bought it. They bought it out, notably from under Apple, who also wanted it. And I know for a fact that it is a killer app for that platform, which is both companies wanted it. And the median supernatural user is a woman over 40, right?

And that is, that's how you grow a platform. Fitness was a very real killer app for the quest. And I don't mean, like, fitness for women over 40. What I mean specifically is, like, you go attract a demographic that is not inclined to be an early adopter of a bleeding-edge gadget. You show utility to a huge thing, and you expand your user base by providing utility to, like, average consumers, right? Apple has not shown. And at $3,500, I don't think they need to. But Fitness Plus is the thing that gets them there.

I think so, too. Yeah. So, yeah, that was actually Adi's theory, too, is that that's going to be the killer app for it. It's, like, fitness. Because I believe we saw, you guys saw, like, there's stabilization bands, right? To, like, there's, like, a third strap to put on it, so it'll stabilize and stuff. And this is something that like, yeah, you can imagine having somebody running alongside you. You can imagine having yourself jogging alongside you so you can keep pace with yourself.

I would never do that. This was John Porter's suggestion. This embodied, disembodied ghost of yourself. That's glass. I'm telling you, this is glasses stuff. This is not ski goggle VR headset stuff. Right. But I think that idea of like having a fitness coach, having that fitness like even more intimate than it already is with supernatural than it already is.

with Fitness Plus and its current, like, incarnation would be really, really compelling as particularly for those people who are already spending $2,500 on a Peloton, right? Yeah. Like, oh, $3,500 and I get a personal coach. But I think the open question here is going to be, how do you control it, right? Like, Beat Sabre as a fitness application, supernatural as a fitness application, you're holding controllers to do those things. Yeah, you will look like a dumbass with this, just doing like.

Just crotch jobs. Just pinching your fingers. We'll see. I mean, like, there's a universe of potential third-party accessories and, like, it's so early. And now that this is out, we're going to start to see that stuff trickle in a big way over the next nine months. Oh, without question. Yeah. All right, we should take a break.

Yep. We'll come back with Marquez and do what? Yeah, it's going to be great. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts, but time and resources are limited. Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates takes up valuable time you could be giving to your customers. That's where LinkedIn Hiring Pro comes in.

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We're back. And boy, do we ask this special guest. The waveform crew is here. Welcome. Thank you for having us. Thanks for having us. David. Andrew Marquez.

We're here. I still have this David. Hi. D1. I feel less good now. We've like, we've improved David. You're D.A. And now.

D prime. D prime. I like that. That's good. DMAX. We got to stop it. Dan Sieberts here. Cranz is here.

David D1 has promised me that he can execute a lightning round. Look, dude, you called me DP2 for a decade. This is better. This is better. Look, David Pogue talks shit about us at a CES keynote one time and he's dead to me. So we're good. All right. David is promised he can run a lightning round.

Okay. So the way we're going to do this is we have five categories about things that got announced. We went really fast through all the news. So we're going to just very quickly go through the stuff that like we thought was coolest and best and most interesting. And the way this is going to work is we're just going to go down the line. So David, you're going to go first on all of them. Alex, you're going to go last on all of them.

Yeah. And Alex, if you ruin it, I will be furious with you. point in your knowledge. You too, David. Don't mess this up. I promise I will probably not ruin it. Okay, good. All right. So the five categories are the just straight up coolest thing announced. Oh, and I should say the one rule is you can't just answer to the Vision Pro for any of them. You have to pick a feature or a thing. You can't just, that's like Apple things. Like, no, you can't do that. The thing you're most likely to use all the time, big or small, the thing you care about that no one else cares about, which is the one I'm most excited about for everybody. The tiny small thing that you are needless

excited about and the most I can't wait for the next version new feature. Sound good? Everybody good? Ready to go? All right. David, you go first. The straight up coolest thing that Apple asked. Okay, I really like the name drop feature. Now I can just tap your phone to everybody else and it just kind of sends it across. This is a startup that Apple killed

in 2008 and they finally Sherlock. I love it. Do you know, like delayed Sherlock? Yeah. That makes it even worse. It's rough. All right, I like it. Andrew. I like how if somebody comes into your vision in the VR headset, that you kind of like pops into in front of a window. So you can actually tell someone's in the room with you.

The thing where it just like fades in. Yeah, it's nuts. Quite a movie. Love it. My guess. Huge fan of the 8K aerial video screensavers in MacOS. Very good. And I just pulled those from the Apple TV.

Well, they shot new ones. They got new ones. They shot new ones. That's why it's so cool. Okay. Yeah. Are those going to the Apple TV also? I believe, well, they talked about on Sonoma,

but I think they'll probably also put those on TV. Okay. They are, sneakily, the best thing about the Apple TV is the screensabers. Fully agreed. Apple is actually the master putting a feature on one platform and then like five years later putting out of the platform. That's true.

All right, mine, I'm just doing dad stuff. It's the automatic deletion of verification codes for messages, which is a straight up Android feature. Yeah. But I'm happy about it. And in mail and messages. Yeah. Great news.

All right. Because I really uses Apple Mail. Dan texted me right after and he was like, I'm done with MimeStream. Back to Apple Mail. No way. No way. Mine was the sports example in the Vision Pro that Disney did where you. you can just layer a bunch of different games from different channels all in one place,

and you can click through your favorite teams to see what's going on. Love that. Dan, what you got? Automatic grocery list sorting and reminders. Let's go. Wow. It's possible I have that for another category. I love it. That is the single coolest thing that Apple is.

It is the coolest thing that I've announced. I got blown away on the dad category. They didn't even announce it. I had to read it in the press release and the list of things that we did not get time for. Spectacular. Alex, what do you got? The Hotel Airplay Collaboration. where you can airplay your stuff in a hotel.

Another hot 2008 feature. They announced that like the year after they announced airplay. And I think hotels are finally like, all right, we're done with USBA ports. We finally got rid of the 30-pin iPodd. I was going to say every hotel at the iPhone, the I home dock. Yeah. They can announce that feature every year for the next 20 years. It'll never come out.

Have you ever been to a hotel? It's going to be great. It's going to be great. I believe in it. All right. That's good. All right. Next category, starting with you, David.

the thing, big or small, that you are most likely to use all the time. Transformer-based autocorrect. Very good. All the time. That's the answer for all of us, I think. Yeah. That was their big, like, generative AI mention. They said twice, they said anything about AI, and it was, they said transformers twice.

Yeah, they were effectively like, yeah, all of you, chat, shePD is cute. We own the keyboard. Yeah. Yeah. So much better. I love it. Andrew. Annoyingly, the PDF iPad stuff I'll probably use quite a bit.

As boring as that is. Unbelievable enthusiasm for 80s. Cheers. I was going to say. Really good. Yeah. Rorish from the crowd. For me, it's the faster media engine encoding in the M2 Ultra specifically.

We do back-to-back exports a lot, and I'm just going to enjoy that a lot. You're a deeply on brand. I'm sorry. It's what I do. I do it a lot. Lots of renders, yeah. What do you got? Airtag sharing.

Not stalking my wife is an important to improve. in iOS 17. Together you can suck someone else. Yeah. Like, she has the car keys right now, and she's like, how do I turn this off? Because it's like someone is following you. All right.

All right. I like it. Mine is the live voicemail answering machine again. It's possible I'm never going to answer another phone call. Like, I'm just going to screen every phone call for the rest of my next. This is my answer for another one. Okay. We'll come back around.

That one's hilarious. Dan, what do you got? So I'm most likely going to use automatic. grocery list sorting and reminders. I sense a theme. Did you pick that for everyone? This is your vision. This is your vision pro.

I guess we will find out. Oh my God. I will kick you off this podcast. I warned you I was going to make everyone really mad. Alex, what do you got? Dan, you're going to have to redo that because my plan is also to say that it's the hotel. You're not. If they do it.

Can you tell why Alex and I work together so much? Here's my question for you. Okay. What comes out first? the full car play integration they announced last year they're not talking about this or hotel airplay Apple makes a car or hotel airplay

I'm going to bet the field cyber truck all right let's keep going next category the thing you care about that nobody else cares about okay there's an iMessage update where if you have a group message and there's iPhone users and Android users you can still use iMessage features

so shut up yes they didn't talk about So if you have one Android user in the chat, which is always Marquez in your chats, right? Hey, it's me. They're not going to ruin it for everybody else, and then they'll crowd up on you and tell you to get an iPhone. Tell your mom to get an iPhone. But it's actually a feature.

It's at the end, it's like, get an iPhone. It's just a little reminder. I'll have a miserable time, but you'll all be okay. Yeah, so the Android users will probably not see anything that you're doing, and it will be very confusing, but for the iPhone users, it will be more enjoyable, I guess. I mean, anything that gets rid of the so-and-so liked a message thing is a victory. This is the official Dieterbone Memorial RCS mention.

Yeah. It's done. All right, moving on. Andrew. standby mode and specifically how it can tell the MagSave Chargers in different places in your house and how it changes up kind of the views that you have on each of them. That's really cool. I'm dying to know how it figures this out. What?

I didn't say it. I didn't do it. All the Macsafe chargers have a handshake with the iPhone. So it's like device by device. That's cool. I'm into that. All right, Marquez, what you got?

The ability to interact inside of a widget in iPad OS and just check a box and not have to open the app to check the box. You're going to get a tick-tick widget. It's about damn time. It's so, it's, it's about. Marquez, Dan and I are like America's three weirdest to-do list app people. So this is very exciting. We're going to start a podcast later where we just talk about this feature.

It's going to be 19 hours long. It's going to be. All right, Neela, what do you got? Mine's super wonky. It's going to be the vertrastity of all. They announced the ability to pin web apps to the dock. That's mine. That's also mine.

That is the end of Electron apps on the Mac as long as those apps support Chrome. This is like an hour of wonky VergeCat. There's like 10 people on this thing. Like make an hour show about this one feature. You're my people. I love you. But Apple's coming for Electron. It's good.

And battery life will. go up in some way, and then down as Chrome finds a way to make features exclusive to Chrome. So that's mine, too. No reaction from the group on this one. None. You've hit the- It's specifically something no one else cares about. That's the whole question.

Two-thirds of our audience just turned off the show. Yeah. No, I said the same thing. Man, he got you. I said the same thing because I think this is Apple's way of trying to get around all of the App Store regulation is to be like, look, you can turn web apps into apps. So you're like deeply cynical about it. They're like, screw you, you're up.

And I'm like, Apple's making the web better. Yeah, they're like, what is an app if not an icon? All right, we got to move on from this deadly silent. Dan, what do you got? So the thing I care about that no one else cares about is definitely. If you say girls for this hour, like, Alex, what do you have? If you say Hotel Airplay, you're not getting the next one. I'm ruling you out of the round five if you say Hotel Airplay again.

Dan's already out. You can say it. This is the last time Dan will have. I'm going to say it because it is. There it is. Like, if it actually has. happens. I got to say the waveform crew showed up on our show prepared and ready

to go and the Vurchase crew is like hotel airplane grocery lists. Yep. All right. Two more categories. We're doing this really fast. The tiny small thing that you are unnecessarily pumped about. Okay. Apple Fitness Plus now has a workout schedule so they can like get you to do an entire

week's work of things so I don't have to keep subscribing to things for one month for free and then canceling them. That's good. That is tiny and small and good. I like it. Andrew, what do you got? In the hiking activity on watch, there's an auto waypoint for the last time you had to sell reception. That one rules. I thought it was really, really useful, yeah. And then they have the

SOS one for the last time. Yeah, yeah, as well. Anyone's reception. Also good. Yeah, that was awesome. Mine is the Mac Pro. Tiny small thing. Yep. Okay, cool. I like it. Just as a little thing. The fifth PCI slot. Screw the sixth one. The first four of Busters. Number five.

The sixth one is a compatibility slot in case you have even older cards. Like, that's how Apple's thinking about this product. It's very good. Neil, what you got? I also pick the voicemail transcription The iPhone but specifically what I'm excited about is how much of a straight up hack it is It's an answering machine app on your phone Your phone answers the call for you

Listen to the person talking transcribes it and saves it it bypasses the carrier voicemail Is this not what call screening is on the pixel? It's same thing but it's just such a hack like it's so funny that they're like Screw it answering machine visual voicemail? No, we're doing that for free. Yeah, is it's just a little bit It's like great. Yeah. But yeah, this is exactly as called transcript, but it's, they're playing it as voicemail, which makes it much more like an answering machine, which I think is hilarious. It's very good.

They should put up like the tapes. They should go back to skeomorphic and put up the tapes. Animation. Yeah. I like it. Mine is that now in Spotlight Search, if you search like Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, it'll pull up a toggle and you can turn it on and off in the Spotlight Search. Yes.

I didn't know that. I like that. Tweaking settings. And you can launch shortcuts from Spotlight Search now. Big fan. Dan, what do you got? Never mind. You're out.

I will no longer have to say, hey, Siri, when I'm adding things to the grocery list and reminders. That means I get to do the bits still? Oh, God. No, moving on, David. Last category. The most, I can't wait for the next version, new feature. What do you got? They have not added group competitions in the Apple Fitness app forever.

That was my. And I really want them to add it. So I guess it'll come in iOS, whatever the next one is, 17. 18? 18. I don't know. I watch OS 11. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Hopefully. Yeah. Let's hope. It's that. Andrew, what do you got? You know, I was going to say grocery list, but then he stopped the bit,

so I couldn't even, like, combo break her, so I don't know what to do anymore. But, like, contact cards. Like, when they do the personalized contact cards in the future, I'm just waiting for, like, Marquez to knock on the phone screen as he's, like, like, like, animated. Like that. Memoji ones, because they're going to do that at the same time, for sure. Or different ones for different people.

Yeah. Yeah. They suggested in my briefing you could give, like, a fake contact card to people. Because, you know, you can choose, you can choose, like, a, my, cell phone number or my email address or whatever and then a representative from apple was like or a fake number and I was like that's a great idea I didn't even think about that I mean that's the most important one like you get those people who just really want your phone number and you're like leave me a little we should hang out something exactly finsta of contact post I just give everybody Alex's number it's fine

oh that explains a lot I'm just gonna I'm just gonna second david's group competitions yes please yeah it's good I picked watch OS 11 is a concept assuming that some some updates will be made. Okay. Given that no updates are made. This is the biggest update they've ever made, despite not making very many updates. Snoopy.

Yeah, sure. Let's go. But he sits on the clock. Greatest generation. Yeah. Greatest generation. That's horrible. Mine is with the new contact posters where something comes up when you call somebody else.

I want to have several of those so that I can have one where I'm doing like really rude things for just when I call Neli. And one for other people. And that's, I want lots of those depending on who. call. I like that. So as we all know, Siri works wonderfully. So I know that when I don't say, hey, Siri, and just say, say Siri now, it's not going to work. How do I keep getting played by this? Alex.

You get to go last. Okay. It's the face scanning for your vision pro mask. Like, the next generation of it, presumably I'll be able to wear a mask and scan that and then make it, like, talk for me. So I never have to show my face in public again. I think that's cool. She's going out with like the full glitter at 95 in the head. No, no, I've got like a giant Ewok head.

You have a Dyson zone on the bottom. The Dyson zone. Vision Pro on the top. You're good to get. All right. Can I add one with this one? We've got these people here. Sure.

We have to ask with a Vision Pro. Uh-oh. Give me five word vision pro reaction. Touching stuff with your eyes. Nice. Well, that was good. That was quite. That was fast.

Off to dome? I really just meant short. I didn't know that you were. I'm not going to do it. No, this is the bit now, five words. You got to do it. Oh, you actually just been short. Yeah, I just meant short.

Oh, sorry, I'm good at haikus, I guess. I'm very impressed, my man. Thank you. I feel like it needs a rechargeable or a swappable battery pack. That was like nine words, dude. Double battery. Give me more battery packs. Give me more battery packs.

I really did not mean for this to become what it's becoming. No, I got five words. Don't worry. way sharper than I expected. Yeah. I mean, the displays are amazing. Yeah. That's what I got.

We just did an hour on Vision Pro. Do we need to do more words? This is so many words. No one needs 15 more words from this group of people on the Vision Pro. All right. It's just a TV haul. That's it. That's a Vergecast.

Apple is going to arrest us at any moment for what we did to their podcast studio today. Thank you, gentlemen, for joining us. We've got a collab episode with the waveform crew doing trivia. That's also in our feeds. that out, really excited about it. That's it. That's for chest. And that's a wrap for Vergecast this week. We'd love to hear from you. Shoot us an email at Vergecast at theverge.com. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Marino. Our editorial director is Brooke Minters. That's it. We'll see you

next week.