The Vergecast - Macs and M3s, shot on iPhones

Episode Date: November 1, 2023

Today on the flagship podcast of spec bumps:  02:21 - The Verge’s David Pierce, Alex Cranz, and Dan Seifert discuss the announcements from Apple’s “Scary Fast” Mac event.  Apple’s ‘Scary Fast’ Mac event: all the news from Apple’s online keynote 27:56 - Becca Farsace joins the show to share her thoughts on smartphone photography in 2023, and if the “Pro” branding can live up to its name.  iPhone 15 Pro Max camera: 1000 photos later, it’s still missing something  1,000 photos with the Pixel 8 Pro: AI, UI, and Pro stuff  52:06 - Adi Robertson answers a question from the Vergecast Hotline. Xreal’s Air 2 AR glasses ship in November in the US 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

Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of SpecBumps. I'm your friend David Pierce, and I am once again in the E. Barrett-Prette-Mood courthouse in Washington, D.C. That's right, folks. I am back at USV-Google. This time I'm here for Student R. Pichai, the CEO of Google. His testimony was on Monday, and we learned some fascinating stuff about the Apple deal, about the things that Google wanted to preload onto iOS devices. There's this fascinating alternate universe that Apple and Google could have gone down. We're going to get into all of that, I think, next to week, we have a lot of catching up to do on some of the trials with SBF and antitrust and some new antitrust stuff happening, lots to get to. But for today, we're going to talk about two things. First, we're going to talk about the Apple event from Monday night, the big scary fast event with all of its new devices and unlabeled Y axes. We're going to get into the new devices, whether they're interesting why Apple chose to do this at 8 p.m. Eastern on a Monday night and a bunch more. Then I'm going to talk to Becca Farsachi from our video team all about phone cameras. We've spent a lot of time this year talking about and shooting with these new phone cameras. And increasingly

on things like the pixel and the Galaxy line and the iPhone, the phones are the thing. Like, that is the reason you buy a new phone year in and year out. It's either that or like your battery dies. So we're going to get into, are phones getting better? Are they getting more different developing their own taste? Or are we getting kind of to a platonic ideal of smartphone photos? It's a super fun conversation. It goes like all over the place, but it's a good time. All that is coming up in just a minute, but I just found the cafeteria in this courthouse after like a lot of days of being here. And that means I actually get to have lunch during the trial. This is very exciting for me. I'm going to go make that happen. This is the Vergecast. We'll see in a second.

Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompt something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data and your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to Retool.com slash Vergecast. We all need to retool how we build software.

Welcome back. All right. They let me out of the courtroom. It was very exciting. I don't have a cold anymore. Let's get to it. Good evening and welcome to Apple Park. On Monday night, Apple held an event that it called Scary Fast. For some reason, in my head, this event is called Spooky Scary, but it's not. It was called Scary Fast. And there were signs from the beginning that this event was always going to be a bit unusual. First of all, it was on a Monday at 8 p.m. Eastern, 5 p.m. Pacific, which is up against Monday night

football. Nobody was invited. It was all virtual. And like we talked about last week on the show, this sort of seemed like Apple trying to flex its muscles in prime time. My theory going in was that either this was going to be one of Apple's sneaky big announcements ever, it was going to like announce it bought Disney or something, or that it was essentially trying to bury an event, which seemed weird because normally when Apple thinks it has news that isn't all that interesting, it just puts out a press release. So I was very confused about what this was going to be. And as you can see, I also had a million theories about how this event was going to work, whether there would be costumes and what we

would see announced. And I was wrong about, I think, just about every single one of them. But we'll get to that. To talk about what did happen, Alex Cranes and Dan Seaford are here. Alex Cranz, hello. Hello. Dan Seaford, hello. Hello. I have no idea where to start. I confess, I'm so confused now, many hours after this Apple event that I'm not sure what to do. But let's just start with the vibe of the thing itself. So, Dan, we got this invite, and it was for 8 p.m. Eastern on a Monday night, and we immediately started trying to decide what is Apple doing here. We had a lot of theories. Now that we've seen the thing, why did Apple do this at 8 p.m. on a Monday night?

I think the strongest theory, which we still really don't know the answer to why they did it on Monday night, but the strongest going theory is it's a testing of the waters to see if they can get the audience and the interest in the primetime time slot for when they do a bigger event that's either the next iPhone or the next iPad event or their spring event, whatever it might be. That's my guess. And I think that in Apple's eyes, at least based on what I've seen, based on the interest on our own site, they probably have the interest to do it. And so going forward, they're probably going to be at 8 p.m. on Monday nights. Dan, this is incorrect. Because we all watched this one because we were hoping it was going to be something interesting and something a little more because it was at 8 p.m. or 5 p.m. if you're on the Pacific time.

There was that little bit of like desire. And then instead it was not just a very traditional Apple event. It was like the most traditional. Yeah. And it just, I do not think it was successful at what they wanted to do. Yeah, people watched it, but are people going to tune in every time? Or did they just like waste it? Honestly, I think that for an iPhone event, they could have it at three in the morning and people will tune in.

I think that's right. I agree with that. The audience probably is heard of say this, but the amount of attention that Apple can pulse, is so much more than basically any other company. And so Apple can do basically what it wants. I will say that they did lean into the fact that it was at night. Like, their pre-recorded infomercial was shot at night. And they were all wearing dark clothes because it was spooky.

The dynamic range on the iPhone that shot it all was incredible. We're going to talk about that in the next segment. That's just, that's for Becca to talk about later. Don't even worry about it. There was lots of, like, cloud or smoke effects. And, you know, nobody wore a costume. I was hoping that they would be a little bit more fun and wear a costume. I was a little disappointed that no one even.

There weren't even, like, little jokey costumes that appeared for a second and then just, like, I was hoping for something. Nobody even had like a jack-a-lantern pin or anything. Right. I have an additional theory for why they did it at this time. Okay. Because I was sitting there last night after the event. It was about 831 because the event ended exactly at 8.30. It was a 30-minute event.

And I was like, why was it at this time a day? because generally speaking, you want to get as maximum, you want to get as many people watching as possible, right? So everybody on the Pacific Coast is watching as they watch right before they leave to work, right? Everybody on the East Coast and everybody in Central Time is watching over, like, dinner because I guess that's what we all did. Yeah, we had people on our staff who were like, I just put my kids to bed in the middle of an Apple event.

What is happening here? I speed ran bedtime last night. I was like, you guys are all getting to bed, brush your teeth as fast as possible. Got to go. I would argue that it wasn't the best time to maximize American views. And so then I was like, I was thinking about it. I was like, okay, well, maybe Europe? And I was like, no, Europe, it's even later.

So this is actually a much worse time for Europe because they're all in bed, the sleep, because it's sleeping time for them. So you're cutting up that whole market. So the best I could think was maybe this was for China, where it would have been first thing in the morning, would have been seven, eight o'clock, where we're currently having a massive debate with the country about processors and who builds those processors and this entire event was about processors. So I was like, is there something there? Or was it really just, we want to see if Americans will tune in as they're putting their kids to bed the day before Halloween.

In which case, I feel like that was a weird, weird bet to me. I could see the China argument more for an iPhone event, a Mac event. But it wasn't a Mac event, as much as it was. was a processor event that had Macs in it, right? Sure, but it was the processors that go into Macs. It's not the processors that go into iPhones and most of the iPads. It is like their desktop computing processors. But those processors are just as important. Like the iPhone is obviously more important than the Mac,

but those processors as it compares to the other big folks making processors that go in computers and servers and stuff, just as important. It's a good theory. Yeah, I think, and Apple is definitely going out of its. way to flex itself as a chip manufacturer in all ways. But the only difference is they don't sell the chips. That's what I was just about to say. They sell computers that have the chips.

You cannot go to Apple and be like, I want to run a server farm. Give me your chips so that I can put them in there. They're not competing with Intel and TSMC and the others that are fabricators and also, you know, building server chips and all this stuff. They are building their products, their chips for their products that they sell either directly to businesses or to consumers as a full. fledged product. So like, that's how it is a Mac event. Like, yes, they were flexing about their chips. But the only way to get these chips is in a Mac and there's no other way to get it.

Dan, I need it to be the chip scenario because otherwise we're going to be like doing 8 p.m. Mac events for the rest of our lives. I'm with Dan. I think if you made me bet $50 right now on what time will the iPhone event be next year, I'm going to say it's evening East Coast time. Yeah, because you know what evening East Coast time is? It's not the middle of the workday. Yeah. Like for us, it's our job to watch it. We stopped our whole workday, many work days, to focus on it and to plan for it and stuff like that.

But for most people, it's like you are sneaking it in the middle of your workday. Before I was a journalist, that was one of my favorite things. It was like, middle of the work day. I'd be like, oh, I'm going to take my lunch and watch an Apple event. It's so that Apple can make sure its employees work the whole day and then watch the Apple event. It's really, this is about Apple Park getting its full productive use. All right, let's move on. So I think I agree it was odd, but I also suspect this will not be the last time Apple does this.

But let's talk about the chips. So we got the M3, the M3 Pro and the M3 Max. This is the first time Apple has launched the whole family of chips all at once, which I thought was very interesting. Dan, we were talking just before we started recording and you were saying basically that the story of these chips is slightly more complicated than usual. It's not just kind of the good, better best it has been in the past. Yeah. So the typical rollout for M chips, at least for the M chips, at least for the M chips. M1 and the M2 generations was Apple would come out with the M base model, and then six months,

12 months later, you'd have the M3 Pro, the M3 Max, and eventually the M3 Ultra, and each one would build upon it. So the unique thing here is that the M3, like you said, David, is all rolling out at the same time, but there is some, like, real weirdness once you get into the pro and the max, because not only are there M3 Pro and M3MX, but there's also, like, M3 Pro with a certain number of cores on it, and then M3 Pro with more cores on it, and then M3 Max with a certain number of cores and M3 Max with more cores on it. And that will determine how many features each one of them has and what capabilities it has. So if you want the absolute best CPU, you have to

get the M3 Max with the best GPU, which wasn't always the case in the past. Okay. The way that Apple split the power cores and the efficiency cores is not linear anymore. The M3 Pro has a 12-core CPU on it, and six of those are efficiency cores, and six are performance cores, and then the M3 Max does, like, 12 performance cores, and then four efficiency scores. So in prior models, it was like a linear thing, and you had the same ratio of performance and efficiency cores in the pro and the max chips. But that's upended now. We'll have to see how that shakes out in the real world and what that performance means,

but it is just more stuff you have to think about and consider when you're buying these. I like this because ultimately it's not going to be more stuff for most people listening to this. Because ideally a bunch of people are going to get a hold of these things and benchmark them and you're going to get a better sense of which is the right one for you. But it feels like the company is thinking more as being more thoughtful about their processor design by adjusting the amount of efficiency, of course. Because if you've got the max, that's like the biggest one, right? It's equivalent of the AMD thread ripper or something like that. You don't necessarily want energy efficiency there. Right.

You're buying that for like raw power. You're buying it for raw power, sure. But if you're buying a pro as opposed to the standard M3, because that's the other thing is now the standard M3 is part of the MacBook Pro line. So if you're stepping up to the M3 Pro for reasons, one of those reasons is probably power. And I will tell you from personal experience with a standard M-chip versus an M-Pro chip, I can max out those performance scores on a standard M-chip pretty easily with simple workloads and lightroom and stuff like that. And the extra performance scores in the M-Pro chip allows me to have that headroom where I do not max them out.

Or if I do max them out, it's for a shorter amount of time and stuff like that. If I run a lightroom export on an M-series MacBook Air, that computer is, I can't do anything with it until that export is done. Whereas my M-1 Pro, even a two-year-old M-1 Pro allows me to run an export and do other things. It allows me to do more, quote, professional tasks. But if the new chips don't have as many performance scores, then that might change that equation. but it's hard to say without actually testing all of them. I mean, it's still fairly linear from the regular to the pro. You're right, Alex, that there is still some measure of like good, better, best going on.

It's just that the kind of leap from one to the next is maybe less clear to me than before. What I have a hard time with is seeing where I would want the base chip. Like, why would I buy the entry-level 14-inch MacBook Pro? I guess this is a question we've been asking for a while because the MacBook Air has gotten so good. But for me, it's like, I see why the top end computer here, the 16-inch MacBook Pro, you've got 128 gigs of unified memory, like the 40-core GPU, this thing costs, what is it, like $7,200? Like, hell, yeah.

I see why that computer kicks ass. What I don't understand is this sort of middle ground of everything is more powerful, but not necessarily sort of dramatically so in some ways here. Yeah, I think we should talk about this. base model because this base model is really the new thing in the lineup. The others, the M3 Pro, and the M3 Macs are upgrades of the M2 Pro Nymph. But now we have this base model 14-inch MacBook Pro with the M3 standard ship. And the 13-inch is dead, dead now, right? 13-inch, dead and gone. Okay. Goodbye touchbar. Cranz loves the touchbar. Sorry, Kranz.

I love the idea of the touchbar. Let's be clear. The idea, great. Execution, not so much. Now it's gone. So now the pro line starts at $1,600, which is a $400 price drop. from where it started with the M2 generation. But that $1,600 computer comes with a base M3 chip, not a pro or a max chip. And it's got other compromise in it. It has 8 gigs of RAM for $1,600. It has fewer ports on it. They took away a USBC port, so there's none on the right-hand side.

So it's really basically set up like a MacBook Air, except with an HGMI port and an SD card slot. I mean, there's all kinds of little things like that. It's not fully, like, Thunderbolt 4 certified in its ports. And again, I just want to say this again one more time for emphasis. It's $1,600 and it has eight gigs of RAM. Yeah. That is ludicrous. Like, that should not be allowed.

Apple should be ashamed of itself for trying to sell that to people. And, like, Apple's line is that unified memory is more efficient and you don't need as much. But my retort to that is you can hit swap very easily on an 8 gigabyte. Oh, yeah. I've done it. We've done it in testing. I hit swap on my 16 gig Mac all the time. And you do notice when that happens.

And then if 8 gig was all anyone needed, why are you selling 16 gig and 24 gig upgrades for $200? Anyways. So now you have this computer at $1,600 that is right next to the price of the 15-inch MacBook error that has a larger screen, a lighter chassis, thinner design, all that stuff. It's a little bit cheaper. But the question is like now you have even more of a confusion of like, what do you go for? Like if you wanted prior to this, if you wanted the good pro computers, you started at $2,000, you got a faster processor and work capable. more ports, all the whole nine yards, and you got the great display and all that kind of stuff. Now the main difference is the screen and an HGMI port.

I mean, that's often been the big difference between the MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro. Like, historically, that was the primary difference, was not the processors, but the display. And people were like, yeah, I want to play more for prettier display because... So, like, I think that makes a lot of sense. Honestly, I think this positioning makes sense because it's saying, look, if you care just about lightness, and good battery life, go get one of the two airs or maybe wait until they release the M3 version of those airs. But go get those errors.

And then if you actually want a better display, if you want the good display, then you can get better battery life and similar speeds for similar price and get the MacBook Pro, the base model. I think that theory made a lot more sense to me like six years ago when the air's screen was pretty crappy. Yeah.

It's now you're going from a lot. like very good screen to even better screen, which is again, like, I think Apple would be happy with the outcome of this conversation being most people should still buy MacBook Airs. Like, I think most people still do buy MacBook Airs, and that's all fine and good. To me, it's just like the MacBook Pro is sort of inexorably moving towards being the Mac Pro, I think, that it's just going to get higher and higher and higher end. But Apple cannot let go of this idea that they're like, we have to have one that is under $2,000. And it's like, just don't.

Just get rid of it. It's the air. It's fine. The theory for the longest time was that they kept around. that stupid 13-inch MacBook Pro, because this is, quote, a theory that businesses will only buy a computer if it has Pro in its name, and they don't actually care about the specs or whatever, and so they want the cheapest one that has Pro in the name. And so now the cheapest one with pro in the name is $1,600. It's up from $1,300 on the 13-inch model. I would argue that, like, that makes sense.

It's a much better computer. And that is who's buying this. So it's like almost not even a consumer pitch. And you can see that in ways where, like, you don't get the new color option, which is not really a color. but you don't get that option on the base model. And you, like, if you buy the 16-inch model and then you do upgrade the RAM, you're at $1,800 or $2,000 at that point, you might as well just buy the better processor and all that stuff.

Ooh, we're ignoring one thing. The airs all come base 256 gigabytes of storage. The pro comes base 512. That's a fair point. Sure, but the airs start at $1,100. Yeah, but so they basically spin the same amount to boost the storage. Not quite. You don't get there. You get close to it, but it's still cheaper. You get close enough that you're like, ooh, if I spend $100 more, I get a prettier display too kind of deal.

You get a smaller display, and I would argue that that customer that really cares that much or is looking at a 15-inch MacBook Air is looking at that because it has the bigger display. And that actually matters more to them. Then why would we compare it to the 14-inch at all? Because they're in the line up there. This is modern Apple, where it'll always be where you're at one point and you're like, Well, if I just spend a little bit more, I get more. Oh, now that I'm here, I'm at 1600. Well, shoot, I really should get that 16 gigs of RAM because I'm spending almost $2,000 for this computer already. I want it to last a few years and stuff like that.

Oh, now I'm at $1,800. This is how you step your rationalize every single step. And every single step, the profit margins are bigger. And so, like, this is modern Apple. And this is how it goes with everything. Okay, we talked about the 8 gigabytes of RAM and that's very offensive. I do want to talk, like, I'm still just thinking about that 256 gigabytes of storage minimum on the air. That's just, that feels as bad as eight gigabytes.

I don't think that's as big of as a problem as some of these other constraints on the pros. For one, the air, if you think about how people use computers these days, they are living in a browser. Most of their life lives in the clouds. This is spoken like a man who doesn't hoard his data. I hoard data. My computer has a terabyte drive. I've got seven terabytes of drive plugged into it. Do not talk to me about hoarding data.

I pay an ordered amount of fees for cloud storage in the terabytes of range. But if I think about like a typical consumer buying the MacBook Air, a student or someone who's just looking for a home computer or whatever, most of their life is living in the cloud. They are living in a browser and things like that. There aren't, they aren't storing a lot of stuff directly on their drive. They don't even know what files are. Exactly. So I don't think that's a problem on the Ares. When the Ares first launched, there was a lot of controversy about the speed of that storage.

I don't think that's a problem at that level either. But once you add a pro to the name, and once you step up to these price brackets, that is where all of these considerations do matter and make differences depending on the workload. If you're buying the pro computer and you're saying, I'm going to be editing images and video, I want to be a creator, I want to pursue this and stuff like that,

you will quickly run into these walls if you stay with the base model. And that's just the reality of it. Yeah, my guess would be that the kind of consistent choice for a lot of people here is going to be the 14-inch either pro or max, depending on the person. But like the 16-just feels like it's so much bigger and more expensive that you're going to lose some people. It's also just a big machine. Like, it's a big computer. Yeah, you're pushing almost five pounds of that. Yeah, but I think as the, as the like, you know, creator tool for people with expendable income, the 14-inch with the pro and the max, if it benchmarks the way

we probably expect it to based on all of Apple's unlabeled graphs that's, that's, say it's faster. Do you see the one where it was just like image processing, 2x? And just like, what is that? That's nothing. You just said image processing 2x, like that's with a swoopy line. They did have labels for the graphs, but it's very, very small and like just a shade lighter than the background. The y-axis is relative performance. It said relative performance. That's nothing. Just don't even put words there. Just draw lines floating out in space. Look, I used to do this too. I would make charts and it would just be like, people don't care about the actual speed.

They just want to see big number. And I got yelled out a lot for it. But I just think the M3 Pro, I just specced this out while we were talking here. And you can get the 14-inch MacBook Pro with an M3 Pro, 18 gigs of unified memory, 512 gigs of storage, blah, blah, blah, $2,000 on the dot.

It's $1999. I suspect that one is going to be the one that most people do. Because you're going to start with the base one. And like you're talking about, Dan, and just slowly step your way up to that anyway, that's the one I think Apple wants to sell you. If history follows what happened with the M1 Pro and the M2 Pro,

that's the one that's going to be in stores at Best Buy and BNAG and all this stuff, and they are going to discount it by $200 when they put it on sale. And then at $1,800, you have a hell of computer for $1,800. And I think a lot of people can be really happy with it. And they should not get the $1,600-based model. Have you seen the space black one? Alex and I were both very excited about this place black one. It's so pretty.

Yeah, it's space dark gray. I'm not going to quote, exactly, but Jason Snell over his six colors had a really great line about it in his piece. You should go check it out. But him and I were kind of talking about it yesterday. It is just a darker version of space gray. It is not really black. So if you have in your mind that this is the return of the black book, which was that black plastic MacBook from the mid-2000s, this is not it. It's still gray. It's a shame. Never mind. I don't know what to say. It's another shade of gray. They are claiming that this annotization is like supposed to be more resistant

into fingerprints, and I did slap my palm on it and smear my fingers around on it to try and see, but it was hard to tell if they actually remained or not. I think once we have it in use and see if it's any better than the midnight, because the midnight grossed up almost immediately. This might be slightly better. Let's talk with the IMAQ for two minutes, which I think is as long as the IMA deserves. I started out when Apple announced the IMA, which is literally just the same damn computer, but they took out the old chip and they put in the new chip. The end. No new accessories. No nothing. Still lightning keyboard. board. I was outraged by this. I'm still kind of outraged by this, but I also now understand

this. And what I think it is is Apple believes that there are people who buy iMacs, and that's a very specific set of person. And what they are going to do is they're going to take their 11-year-old iMac that they bought that runs an Intel thing and no longer gets software updates and is basically falling apart. They're going to replace it with this one, and they're going to be very happy. And I think they're right. And I think that is like a sad way to think about the iMac line at this point in time. But I think that's where we are. The IMAQ was always there, though. There was like the bit of time where the IMAQ was used by kids and teens.

But for the most part, it's always been like your parents' computer that they keep in their computer room because they're the ones that still have computer rooms. Yes, it served the role as the shared family computer or the home computer. And I would argue that at this point, that is an increasingly shrinking audience and does not exist for the reality of most modern families or modern homes. People have moved on to personal devices, whether they're Chromebooks or laptops or iPhones or tablets or whatever. So it makes sense to me that they are not throwing lots of investment at the IMAX, like David said. We don't have an IMac Pro because the Mac Studio exists and the Mac Pro exists, and that serves those customers better because they can swap out that computer without having to deal with

the whole thing. And the audience for IMAX, which we all know, is you go into a spa or a fancy doctor's office or whatever, and they are sitting there on the desk as they're checking computers at the reception. Or your kitchen, according to Apple. While you cook, you just hang out on your IMac. Same. Yeah, I can't wait to read divorce notes of like the husband insisted on putting the IMA in the kitchen. So they got to, the wife was like, this is invading my space. But yeah, that's the reality of it. So what we got is, you know, I'm glad that they didn't completely ignore the IMac like they have for two and a half years, that they did put a faster chip in it. But everything else is exactly the same. It would have been great to have, you know,

USBC accessories because I would have happily replaced some of my older accessories. These prices are goofy. If I'm reading this correctly, the base model IMAQ doesn't have USB ports? It has two instead of four. So the base model, this is the same as the M1 generation, it has two USBC ports on the back. If you upgrade the processor to the higher bin version or whatever, it jumps up to four. That's goofy. It's goofy.

All right, we have spent now exactly as long talking about the event as the event was itself. So we're done here. This event deserves so more. Thank you guys. Dan, I'm assuming we will have reviews of these at some point in the hopefully not too distant future. So stay tuned for that. Stay tuned. Yep.

Thank you both. We've got to take a break. And then we're going to come back and we're going to talk about cameras like iPhones, which shoot events sometimes at night. We'll very back. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Every thriving successful business has to start somewhere. A good place to start is a relatively simple question.

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there was this little notice on the stream that said the event, had been shot on an iPhone, an iPhone 15 Pro Max, I think, and edited on a Mac, which is impressive, given all the dark shots and swoopy drone stuff and the huge empty rooms and the tricky camera moves, it was a pretty good flex from Apple. But how big a flex, really? That's the question for me. The event was shot on an iPhone, but as we saw in some of the behind-the-scenes footage, it was an iPhone plus like a room full of giant lights and a bunch of drones and gimbals and much more. They didn't just like put the phone in video mode and pointed at Tim Cook. You know what I mean? And I don't mean that as a dig. That's not how anyone ever shoots anything professional. And this is still really cool. And actually, one of the things I thought was interesting was one of the folks who produced the event said that it was remarkable how not different it was to use the iPhone. Here's a clip from the behind-the-scenes shot. We're able to get the same complex shots on such a small device similar to how we would do any traditional camera. We're on cranes, do.

All these drone shots. Drones growing up. This all raises a question we've been kind of asking all year. How good are smartphone cameras really? Have they gotten so good over the last 15 years that we've stopped noticing the ways they keep getting better, but they continue to be mind-blowing? Are they going to be as good as or better than big pro-level cameras anytime soon?

We've been made these grand promises about the evolution of smartphone cameras. Where are we on that road? To figure that out, I grabbed Becca Farsachi. who has been running around all summer and fall, taking photos and video with all of these new high-end smartphones, and we're going to get to the bottom of this. Becca, welcome back to the Vergecast. Thanks for having me.

Let's talk cameras, because you've been doing tests of really the iPhone and the pixel are the two I'm most curious about. And I think the biggest question that I've had over the course of this year is, where are we in smartphone cameras? I feel like we've been on this trend of like smartphone cameras are getting really good, really fast,

better every year. They're eventually going to be as good as pro. cameras, just you wait, and I feel like that idea has really aggressively plateaued for me the last couple of years. But then Apple comes out and they're like, it's the most pro whenever you can, you know, use video out through USBC, this is a pro camera. Where are we in smartphone cameras? Okay, a question for you. When was last time you were impressed with the smartphone camera? Like truly like blown away impressed. I think the cinematic mode on the iPhone was the first one in a long time. It had been a while before that, but the cinematic mode on the iPhone was a

that I was like, holy crap, this takes a thing I couldn't do before and works. I can now all of my like awful video walking down the street now looks passable. But just in terms of like the photos I get out of a phone, it's been years. Okay. Talk to me about cinematic mode. Do you still use it? Occasionally, it's one of those things that I use when I remember to turn it on. Okay. Which I think is the problem with a lot of phone cameras is they have a lot of cool features that are six swipes away and thus I don't use them.

Yeah. And that's something about the Pixel 8 Pro. and the pixel 8's camera system that I will talk about in a bit. Interesting. Cinematic mode. Okay. And that basically, cinematic mode applies a blur effect to the background of your videos. It makes them look a bit more what some would call professional. It came in the iPhone 13, I believe, maybe just the pro.

I think it started in the pro and has since worked its way down. Yeah. And it like stabilizes things as you're walking. It just feels. Add a little bit of a color look. Yeah. And so all the things where you're like I want to walk through something as I'm taking video and it used to just feel jumpy and bad.

It smooths it out in a way that, like, I will actually watch those videos later. Cool. And that's a software. Yeah. That's software. Yeah. Okay. So really, you weren't impressed with the camera.

You were just impressed with software that this company added. Yeah. Okay. That's fair. Hardware side of things, it is very slow. But the way I look at it, like, I think, you know, you entered this question kind of comparing them to, you know, standalone cameras, cameras that have interchangeable lenses or that we only use to take photos.

And there's just really no comparison to me because the experience is so, different. Okay. Like, when I pick up a smartphone to take a photo, like it feels like I'm picking up a brick and I'm pointing it at someone and they know the etiquette, they know what to do. But when I pick up, like, a camera that's made to take photos, it feels different. I feel like my purpose is to only take photos and the person who's standing in front of me all of a sudden is a lot more nervous. And so they're two like very different things. So now if we talk about just phones and their cameras, do we think that they are progressing meaningfully? Maybe like every three years.

Okay. Every three years, I feel like if you look at like the iPhone 12 and you compare it to the 15, there is a big difference in quality. That's fair. I would know because I use an iPhone 12. Nice. But if I look at the 14 to the 15, no, you're not going to notice a difference. Right.

And I guess that's fair. I mean, that's like the upgrade cycle of a phone now, right? People are keeping them for three, four, or five years. So if you're feeling that upgrade every time you actually upgrade your phone, maybe that still counts. But I just can't let go of this idea that for, I don't know, the last, say, eight years, we have been told it's sort of right around the corner where your phone's photos are going to be passably the same as what you get from a DSLR or a Fuji Street camera that people run around

with for thousands of dollars or whatever. I love the Fuji Street camera. This is what I call that. There's a million of them and they're all X1, whatever. They're just the Fuji Street camera. But I just don't feel like we're getting closer to that at this point. I feel like we're teaching these cameras to do new things on smartphone, which are cool. But just in terms of like how my photos and videos look, I don't necessarily feel like I've gotten much closer to, I truly won't miss my camera in a while.

Okay. Back to your point about like forgetting to turn on cinematic mode. There are settings. Let's talk about the iPhone for a moment because I think it actually, I do think the iPhone 15 pros camera comes close in some ways to some standalone cameras. But you have to be willing to click some buttons. Okay. And I don't think you're going to be that person. And I don't think phones are like, I don't think they're trying to have you pick it up

and like take the photo that maybe you imagine that a standalone camera takes. Right. You have to like go in and tune some things, right? Which again goes back to your point about like the object itself. Like you just have all that stuff one thumb movement away when you pick up a big camera in a way that on your phone it's actually like buried in. settings menus. Yeah, buried in settings and also not one thumb. Yeah. My God. I mean, these things are huge. Like, I had tiny hands and reaching across the screen sucks and I'm less likely to push

buttons that are across the screen. So let's make them small. Okay, so like, what would, what do you do on the 15 Pro to get there? Oh, I'm so excited. Let me tell you about it. Please. So there is like a 48 megapixel mode, right? And you can turn that on and you can take a photo like I find faces. It's going to find faces. It's like it loves faces. And if you are, say like five feet away from somebody and then the background is like far beyond them you'll actually start to get some depth like some some like natural depth because the sensors are actually getting bigger and the lenses are bigger and you know like real camera things are starting to happen and so much of that is physics like you need space for those things real physics yeah can i explain it well

some days i know big sensors good big sensor good bigger lenses good got that um sometimes more megapixels, fine. Yeah. But yeah, you're starting to get like some real depth. I especially notice it if I if I turn on like, you know, raw photos, 48 megapixels, blah, blah, blah, and I flip the camera around and I take a photo of myself with the main camera, like that distance from like, I don't know, maybe that's two feet on me, that, like, I'm going to actually see depth. And you can compare that to like, you know, some of the lower end Sony cameras. Okay. And it's like not terribly far off, you know, something that has. has like a smaller sensor, like an APSC sensor.

Like, it's looking pretty good. And the colors are really nice. I mean, Apple has always kind of had a really great color science. And so it's just like, for me, I love like a little bit more blue. And so like denim, oh my God, the way it reproduces denim. I'm just like, wow, I'm going to wear this denim jacket every day. So, all right. Well, what else?

I feel like to me, the thing on the 15 that has actually been the biggest improvement is the fact that you can now do portrait after, which goes back to your point of like, I don't have to remember the thing anymore, I can just take the picture and figure out what to do with it later, which is a weird, like we like to talk about what is a photo. There's like a weird philosophical question behind all that, but just like leaving that aside, it's nice that I don't have to sit there and go, oh, I have two seconds to get this like cute photo of my dog doing a funny thing. I don't have to swipe it to portrait and then try to, it says like back up, you're too close and then I have to, and I've just missed it. Now you just take the picture and it does the thing.

Sometimes, but yeah. Yeah. But I wonder how much we can put that. in software. Because like you spend a lot of time. One of my favorite things is to be in the Verge office and just watch you or someone else on the video team set up a camera. Because it's such a good reminder of like there's so much time of just you hit a button and then you look at the screen and you look at the histogram. You're like, that's not it. And then you hit more buttons. And it's just like there's work that goes into doing this stuff that all these companies are trying to abstract out on your phone. I wonder how possible that is ever going to be. And if the if the answer is just give people more knobs,

now we're back to the user interface for that on a phone is just never quite going to work. I think it can get really good. It can get really good. And I see a world where, you know, the iPhone starts suggesting more like try portrait mode on this. So it's like even more like you're not thinking about it. I mean,

Google has proven time and time again with their camera systems that like software can do a lot. True. And there is an amazing amount you can do in post. Oh my God, an amazing amount if you feel like digging and then also manipulating it. But I do want to, I mean, flat out software can do a lot.

I don't know where we're headed. I don't have an answer for like, oh, yeah, in 10 years, like all of our photos are going to have this great blur and it's going to look more natural and the cutout's going to be better. I don't know. That's what I love about my job, is that like I get a new product and I get to be like, oh, did this happen this year? But back to like the what is a photo.

Like, I love this question. I love thinking about it. I think about it a lot. I don't think phones, like, really take photos anymore. I mean, they take photos. but like they're manipulating so much of the color. They're like, I mean, and then now you can like change anything you want. Like you can take a photo on iPhone and put it in Google photos and change everything.

So like these to me aren't like let's stop like asking ourselves like what is a photo? Like I mean. First of all I will never stop asking that question. Go ahead. Keep asking. And I'll fire me if I stop asking that question. No, somebody described it to me relatively recently, which I thought was really interesting. What we're doing with our phone cameras now is to photography what. like the cameras spinning around on top of the Google Maps mapping things are where they are like,

they are fundamentally data collection devices. Yeah. And then you can do all kinds of interesting things with the data. Google uses it to map roads. It uses it to get street view. It uses it to find places. It uses it for AR and Google Maps like all this stuff. Technically what it is capturing is video.

Yes. But the point of it is not the video. The point of it is the data inside of the video. And they're like, that's just what our phones are now. They're collecting a bunch of data about their surroundings that you then manipulate. to be whatever you want. I was like, that's a cool way of thinking about it. That is fundamentally not photography.

But it is a really interesting way of thinking about what happens when I hit the button on my camera. Well, let's also think about what you're taking photos of. I mean, I'll tell you what I take photos of. Like, receipts. You and denim jackets. Me and denim. Yeah, the top, number one is me and denim.

Number two is receipts. Number three is like, I'll just like, oh, I want to remember this restaurant. Let me just take a photo of it because that's quicker. Like, I'm not really taking like. photos. I mean, I'm collecting data, as you're saying. And so, like, I don't have this big problem around like, oh, our phones don't take photos. It's like, I just need it to like collect information, you know? And like, and then I'm going to send that information to my friends and they can see that I, I don't know, went swimming and it was really fun. And that's just data

to them too on me. Yeah. Andrew, our producer, was saying to me before we started that we're still in this phase where if you shoot something on a smartphone, you always say you shot it on a smartphone that like every magazine cover nobody talks about the camera that they use but they'll always tell you that they shot it on an iPhone. I love this. I do too. And it's, and it's so true. And it's like, I could name you the movies that Steven Soderberg shot with an iPhone. I could not for one second tell you what camera he uses when it's not an iPhone. Right. And that to me goes to either we're just doing different things with different goals or phones are not getting anywhere near the realm of the other stuff because the camera shouldn't matter.

Disagree. I think if everyone actually knew cameras, like I would love to know what every magazine cover is shot on because I know cameras. Everyone knows phones. So, of course, if you tell them, oh, it's shot on an iPhone, it's like, they know what that is. If you told them it was shot on, like, a Nikon Z9. That's true, but I also think part of it is, like, it's still such a novelty that you can take a cool photo on a phone.

And what they don't show you is that you have to do twice as much lighting and work way harder to get that photo to look good on a phone, such that it will exist on a magazine cover. But I just think it's still like, oh, my God, you can take a good photo with a phone. And to me, it's like until we're way past that where... Wait, but do you don't believe that? Are you still at that point where you're shocked that you can take a good photo on a phone? No, but everybody is.

You think they are? It's still such a novelty that you can do something cool on a phone. Can we pull the audience? Marquez Brownlee started a whole new YouTube channel where he shoots stuff on his phone. And part of the schick is I'm shooting it on my phone to prove that you can. And it's genius because then he's also just like testing the phone at the same time. Oh, it's great. He did it all extremely well and very smart.

And he just like sits next to cars and stuff. films himself doing selfie videos. Great job. But it is, we're still at the point where, like, I can do this on my phone is like mind blowing to lots of people. Yeah, interesting. I would love to hear from folks if you agree or disagree with that because I don't know, like, I remember Casey Nystad was shooting videos and like, I don't know, on his like Samsung Galaxy S7 or something. And like that I was like, whoa, that's crazy. But that was like six years. No, that had to be more than six years ago. That had to be like eight years ago now. So I guess that novelty is like gone to me. Like it's there's no doubt.

you can take a good photo on a phone. That's fair. And so then your point of like, are we going to get any better? It's like, yeah, marginally. But like we can already do all the things that we want to do on them. Yeah. So then the bigger question for me that I get a lot is like, why would I buy a standalone camera? Like, I really believe that people think that their phone cameras are good enough.

And so then I ask them, like, well, what do you want to do? Like, what do you think a camera can give you that your phone isn't? Right. And it's always experience. And that's like where I base all of my, like, review. use around is like what is the experience of holding this thing what is the experience of using this thing like that's what it is for me because we can all take a good photo i even have oh i should have brought that i have the first iPhone right nice and like the camera on it i love it takes good photos like and what is

good mean okay they're exposed well enough sure you can see things well enough like the color's fine it's kind of in focus but the experience is so fun and like there's just Yeah, so like, yeah, phones will get better. But, like, I think everyone believes that what they have in their pocket is actually pretty good. This is my point. You're grading on a curve. We're still grading phones on a curve. Like, it's because they're phones.

Like, you're not replacing your professional gear. You still carry 11 pelican cases every time you want to shoot something. No, I carry one pelican case, and it's got a lot of stickers and it's very cute and we love her. What do you talk about? I don't even have, I don't even have hands for that. There's like a van that follows Becca around every time you go to shoot something. Boy, I wish. If anyone wants to drive that van,

is it has that van. Hit me up. Okay, let's switch gears a little bit just before we have to go. I'm curious about the differences between the iPhone 15, and I guess specifically the iPhone 15 Pro, which is like the camera-e-eatist camera, and the pixel 8 pro. And we were talking about this on the show a couple weeks ago that like we sort of settled into a place where those two companies

and Samsung to some extent too have different ideas about photos. Yeah. But everybody had kind of settled into their lane. And it's like we'd gotten to a point where I think, You could fairly reliably look at a photo and guess which company made the phone that it captured. You've spent a bunch of time with the pixel and the iPhone over the last couple of months. Is that still the case? Are they kind of in their own lane about what their photos should look like? I think we are all coming together to the most collective we think this photo looks good.

Interesting. Okay. I really do. We do this fun thing. I do this fun thing. And then I see who will take the bait. When I'm doing these photo comparisons, I basically start the edit. Here's some like video jargon for you or some background on my process. I start the edit before I even start the script because like I just take so many photos. Like I really take over a thousand photos. And then I put them all next to each other in the timeline and I sit there and I watch a blank timeline. Sometimes I put music in just for fun.

And I just like watch the slideshow happen. And then I screenshot it and I send it to people. And I'm like, okay, these are three different phones. Tell me which one's which. And like I would say one person always takes the bait, and that's Viren, my boss and co-worker. He's like a photo person. He can't even, he can't even tell anymore. Sometimes I can't even tell.

Sometimes I'm like, oh, wait, I forgot. Let me go look at the file names. Interesting. Like, we are really coming to like the point of like this is what the most people think is a good photo. And that's what all of the North Star for all of these companies is. So what are the characteristics of that? I'm assuming it's a little extra saturation everywhere. We love dynamic range.

Oh my God, we love dynamic range. Like the number one most, we love dynamic range. Yes. Let me see the sky and the ground. Let's do this. Yes. Yes. And the shadows, like the man lurking in the back.

I want him to. And I would think that everything, you wouldn't want it to be too colorful, but you'd want it to be like 3% extra colorful. I don't know. You tell me, what are you seeing? You know, I think the dynamic range is actually interesting because I think there's like a pendulum, right? I think companies really swung out on the dynamic range. And it was like all of a sudden everything was not believable, which is funny that like... Yeah, like sometimes things are dark.

Yeah. Which phones forgot for a while. Yeah. Like I see shadows and that's okay. And so I think we're now like coming back to like more of a middle ground there. I think, you know, white balance is really important. You know, more so there's some like focus things happening. Like people do like a little depth of field.

You know, people do want things to be a little out of focus. Properly exposed, but that's been good for a long time. But the big thing is the white balance. that used to be the differentiator between like Google and Apple. You know, it was like the iPhone was always warmer and the pixel was always cooler. And now we're seeing the pixel kind of like realize that it was a little too cool and come towards Apple in that way. But it does feel like the competition has always kind of been chasing Apple and continues to. And I find that where their photos have been consistent throughout cameras, the, you know, pixel has changed more and has adapted more to that style.

Okay. So you think we're headed. towards a much more like coherent version of what a smartphone photo looks like. Yes, because, you know, much like we don't label magazines with like what camera took them, like, on Instagram, like, you don't know what everyone's phone, who's everyone, you know, what phone they have. And I think people want to, like, fit in on Instagram, right? So you want the photo that looks good, but also it doesn't look too different from everyone else's. And, you know, maybe if you're an iPhone user, you want to, like, call out your Android friends and your Android friends just want to live in peace, all right? They're doing fine.

Just leave them alone. Fine, all, shut up. We don't care that we're green. That only affects you. Wow, that's kind of deep, actually. We're going to come back to that another time. It's fine. So what about the, like, pro experience of doing this?

Obviously, Apple made a bunch of noise about this is a pro camera. Yeah. Having used these things kind of within an inch of their life, like, is it, does it feel more pro? There's more stuff to do, but I would not say that's the same thing as being a pro camera. No, I think, you know, obviously pro is like marketing. It's like a way to say this is the best phone, but they can't call it. like the iPhone 15 best max. Parentheses, the good one.

Yeah. I wish they would. The better iPhone 15 Pro. The bigger, better. Yeah, that would be incredible. The smaller, not so good. I mean, it's good. Never mind.

So, I mean, all of that's marketing, right? And I was talking to some folks at Google at the event, and I was kind of picking their brain on like pro tools and pro this and pro that. And, you know, Google with a pixel 8 pro, pro, didn't say, this is for pros. Whereas in the iPhone 15 pro max, they were like, like, this is for pros. And Google's kind of stance on it was like, you know, if folks who are professional photographers come to the system, they will have tools that they recognize in their

professional workflow. And that's cool and that's great. And they're like, and they honestly said to me, but we find that most pros don't. Like, you know, they pick up a phone because they know that it's like the easy thing and they're not trying to work with it. And I haven't spoken to Apple about this. So I don't know where they stand on it. The thing is they label everything pro, but then they don't give the pro tools.

which it's like, okay, like, that's fine because we've established that, like, pros aren't maybe using the system for their professional work. Sure. But it does just kind of, like, baffle me. And I think it's just because they want people to buy apps and pay for things, you know. I think that's right. And I do think there's potentially more interesting stuff to come on the third party side. Like, what we've seen from the third party camera apps in the last few months has been really interesting. Yeah.

And there's potentially a lot more to do there. And I want to shout out all the developers there. Like, I did feel bad when, you know, I made this whole, like, thousand photos with the iPhone 15 pro and I went to the Descent. and it was sick, and I drove in sand for the first time, and I'm addicted. I just want to, like, who, whip through the sand. Anyway, and in that, I was like, you know, Apple, if you want to get pro-cramma, you have to have, like, pro-controls. And I didn't really mention and shout out all the folks who, like, have built pro-controls

for the iPhone. And there's many good ones that I wish I could list off for you right now, and I can't just pull them out of my brain like that. But there's lots of folks that are building really good tools if you're interested in that. And I think it is cool that there is like a marketplace for those people to make what they love and do what they love. Yeah, totally. All right.

We have to go. But before we do, you have to tell me only one answer. Okay. What is the best smartphone for taking pictures and video right now? Oh, my God. Okay. Can I tell you what it's not? No.

Oh. Okay, well, it's the first-gen iPhone. It's gorgeous. It has like a film it quality. It makes the cutest noise. It's really slow. And she's just so cute to hold it. in your hands and everybody's like, oh my God, what is that? And then you get to open the camera

and take a photo and everyone is just like amazed. And it warms my whole heart. It's a great bar trick. I've been doing it a lot. It's actually a really good answer. I'll allow that. I was not going to allow that when you started talking and now I will allow that. What if the future of Polaroids is just like first-gen iPhones? That they just like make a comeback as the new retro camera that everybody's obsessed. And they're going to sell them on Urban Outfitters where they're selling in the iPod. And Urban Outfitters is going to make a killing. Becca, this is going to happen now.

You just did this. And I'm going to be so upset with you when this happens. No, you're going to love it. But also, I will buy it. It's the greatest experience. Get them on eBay while you can, everybody. All right. We've got to take a break.

Becca, thank you, so much. Yeah. 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

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Let's get to the hotline. As always, the number is 866-Vorge11, and the email is Vergecast at theverge.com. We love all your questions. Call us, email us, bring us the weirdest thing you can think of, and we always try to answer at least one on the show every week. This week, we have a question about VR and AR and XR and mixed reality and all these new things about glasses on your face. So I grabbed Adi Robertson, who knows this space better than anybody.

Addie, thanks for being here. Hi. This is about our. product that of the people at the verge only you and I have used so far. So I'm just going to play you the question and we're going to go from there. Sounds good. All right, let's do it. It's from Peter. Hi guys. This is Peter, long time listener, first time caller. I love what you do, but I'm at a little bit of an impasse. I'm a big proponent of the future and of the potential for spatial computing. I love this idea of the Apple Vision Pro headset and I'm excited to try it out. But I recently saw a really

good review of the X-Real glasses, formerly called N-real glasses, and I think you guys were talking about them recently, too. And I can't help but wonder if this really is something that captures 90% of the use cases that I'm, particularly that I'm going to use the Apple Vision Pro for at one-tenth of the price and much more convenient form factor, no battery, much lighter, you can pop it in your pocket. I really feel like we need to think about this. And this might be closer to where we're heading than the big, heavy Apple Vision Pro. Thoughts? Thank you. I love this question, but I want to know right off the top what you think.

Okay. So I just have to caveat. A, I'm assuming we're talking about the N-real, or sorry, the X-Real airs, not the X-real lights. That's correct. The X-real airs are the new headset. And I am also going to only be able to talk about this from really a theoretical perspective, haven't used the Vision Pro, have just played a bit with the new X-real glasses. I think it depends on what you see 90% of the use cases as being, that Apple has all of this sort of you'll be able to do situational things kind of promise going on,

that the idea is that it can sense your surroundings to some extent, that it can pin things to your desk or your wall, or it can give the illusion that it has actual virtual objects in your real space. And that is a thing you will not get at all with the new X-Real headset. That is purely, it's like imagine you start. a tablet up in front of your face and the tablet was always there. And the tablet was also slightly transparent, especially in light. Those are the downsides of X-Real. The upsides is that, in a lot of ways, I agree with you. A, you have a thing that is not tied to Apple's ecosystem

or to a bunch of X-R developers making things. That it's really just you plug it in, you see a screen in front of your face. It's incredibly convenient. B, that you can see everything else. Actually, you're not passing through a video feed, which is just kind of almost inherently going to be lower resolution and an inferior experience to the real world. And see, yeah, they're kind of surprisingly comfortable even compared to the older X-real glasses. And I haven't tried the Vision Pro, but it's, it's a big thing. Yeah, it's less comfortable. I can say with great confidence. Okay. So yeah, I really think people should be giving this a look. I'm not necessarily clear that it's a super viable product yet, and I haven't had a chance to seriously review it. But I am similarly optimistic about it.

I think X-Rail is a really interesting company. I agree. And I think your point about it depends of what 90% of your use cases are, is really right. Because the thing that X-Rail has done for me is make it very clear that the Vision Pro's idea of a $3,500 device that essentially puts a bunch of computer monitors in the air, and you'll sit there with your mouse and keyboard and use a headset to be a bunch of monitors, that is going to be, if not, like, totally commoditized very soon, then, like, not worth $3,500. Because that's fundamentally what the X-Ril glasses are, right? Like you said, they are just computer monitors.

Imagine plugging any device you have into a monitor that just floats in front of your face. So if that's your use case, X-Real is pretty good. I don't think it'll be as good as a lot of the stuff that Vision Pro is doing, but it does the job fairly well. To me, the biggest downside of these glasses so far, and really a lot of these sort of plug in play of products is just the interface. Like holding up my phone while watching something through the X-rail glasses.

It's cool because I can just like lean back and watch on a big screen. But I'm still navigating on my phone, which means I'm constantly looking down at my phone and kind of losing the thing. Whereas, you know, the Vision Pro and the meta stuff has native interactions and it feels like you're in a space as opposed to this much hackier feeling thing that is the glasses. So again, it's a much less elegant system. But if the goal is like I need more. screens in front of my face while I sit at my computer. Like X-Ruel's pretty close.

I think it also, a phone is kind of the worst way to interact with it. That's true. I was using it with the steam deck. And the steam deck is basically just, I'm holding a controller and I can see the screen in front of my face now. And so it's just- I did it with the switch for a while for the same reason. Yeah. Pretty much just like using a console. Yeah. And in that case, it's very good. So I think in general, like we're both pretty bullish on this kind of glasses, right? I think, is Xreal even like doing anything sort of unusual or are they just sort of first in this space? You've been paying attention to these like wacky manufacturers of AR glasses longer than I have. Like is, is XR doing something special? My sense is that they are just ruthlessly

conceptually efficient. Okay. That their first glasses were a bit more in the, they have cameras and you can play sort of AR games and you can pin things sort of to the floor. And they completely cut that. There's no cameras in the new glasses. It's just a thing that sits there. It doesn't give any illusion of interacting with space. But that also means that they can be really light. They can be, I'm not going to say normal looking, but more normal looking. And they can be comparatively really cheap.

And I think that they really have actually just figured out there's a thing maybe we can make people want to do with this. And we're going to deliver the best experience of that we can. Yeah, I said on the show last week that I'm super intrigued by this race between companies like meta, which are basically saying we're going to take various stylish glasses. Start with essentially audio and then try to figure out how to add more screen stuff to it. And companies like XRAL who are like, we have a screen, it looks kind of silly in comparison to like the RayBans meta is selling, but it has a screen and we'll figure out how to do the rest of it later. And those two companies are sort of running at each other from opposite directions and it's

going to be interesting to see what happens. And then I think like the Quest and Vision Pro stuff are just like all the way off in a different dimension. And I think it's not impossible that the simpler stuff is going to end up being way more appealing to way more people. I would not bet on that yet, but I don't think that's out of the question. Yeah, I think pass-through has just really inherent limitations. I know that there are cases that it's very good for. There are specific things it's very good for. But as a really casual consumer device, it is not the thing I'm the most bullish on. Yeah, that's fair. So $400 for X-rail glasses, again, we've only used them a very little bit. Like, strikes me as a lot to spend.

they're a little bit of a novelty, but compared to, you know, whatever, $3,500 for the Vision Pro next year, which isn't even shipping yet, I guess, I guess, it's a good deal. It's more than 10% is fun for 10% of the price, I guess. I don't know. Yeah, I think that if you think what you need is a really versatile, albeit imperfect screen that goes pretty much anywhere with you and that has a level of privacy, if you're, I don't know somewhere you don't want people to see what you're doing, and that you can just really, as far as I can tell, plug into most things you own pretty easily, it seems like a good early adopter thing. Yeah, my main use case so far has been sitting here in this chair at my desk, like feet up on my desk, leaning back, head sort of slightly upwards with the glasses on playing video games with the controller in my hand. And like you said, it's an excellent setup. The screen's not amazing. Neither is the switches. It does the job. Yeah. My biggest problem so far is really just that you have to angle them precisely to not get some really heavy blur at the bottom of the screen. I've spent a lot of time moving the nose pads around to get them just so. And I eventually can get them there, but it is a fair amount of work. You're right. Yeah. It's way better than the original, like the lights, but it's still, I think, the biggest drawback to them. Yeah, that's fair. All right, Addy, thank you as always. Appreciate it. Yeah.

All right. That's it for the Vergecast today. Thanks to everybody who's on the show. And thank you, as always. for listening. There's lots more on everything we talked about from Becca's thousand photos series to all of the Apple coverage on theverge.com. We'll put some links in the show notes, but read theverge.com. It's a good website. As always, if you have thoughts, questions, feelings, or other costumes you wish Tim Cook had worn, you can always email us at Vergecast at theverge.com. Or keep calling the hotline. 866, Verge11. All your thoughts, questions, ideas, everything. We love it all. And we do, like I said, one hotline question every week, so keep them coming. This show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James.

The Vergecast is Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Nelai, Alex, now, will be back on Friday to talk inevitably more about Apple, plus Sam Bankman-Fried, Google, and all the other stuff happening in tech. See you then. Rock and roll.