The Vergecast - Vision Pro, Galaxy S24: it’s gadget season again

Episode Date: January 19, 2024

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Victoria Song, David Pierce, and Alex Cranz discuss the Apple Vision Pro demo, the Samsung Galaxy S24 announcement, and more of this week's tech news. Watch the video here Further reading: Apple Vision Pro hands-on, again, for the first time Apple Vision Pro demos will include scanning your glasses to identify your prescription The Apple Vision Pro has a ‘guest’ mode for your friends to try it Apple Vision Pro will launch with 3D movies from Disney Plus Netflix’s app won’t work on the Vision Pro Magic Leap’s CEO isn’t worried about competing with the Apple Vision Pro. Apple Watch ban: everything you need to know Apple Watch sales ban restarts Thursday Apple Watches without banned blood oxygen features will go on sale Thursday morning This smartwatch has the tech that sparked the Apple Watch ban Samsung is making a Galaxy Ring  Samsung’s Galaxy S24 and AI event: all the news The Galaxy S24 Ultra is smarter, pricier, and just as big as ever  Samsung’s Galaxy S24 Ultra might fend off scratches just as well as drops Samsung’s S24 and S24 Plus put new AI smarts in a polished package Samsung’s Galaxy S24 is first to be able to upload HDR photos to Instagram Google’s Circle to Search makes visual searches super simple Samsung’s Galaxy AI is coming to 100 million Galaxy phones. Meta’s new goal is to build artificial general intelligence 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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dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello and welcome Verchast, the flagship podcast, spatial computer. The form of computing that is all around you at all times on C-Sair. It sneaks up on you. Yeah. Apple's dream is to have just Eddie Van Halen,

just creeping, creeping. Eruption. Hi, I'm Mila. I'm your friend. David Pierce is here. Hi. I don't know how to follow it. eruption, but here we are. I mean, isn't that, that's the goal

of all computing. The purpose of computers is to make great art and emotional experiences. I strongly believe this to be true. And to do that most effectively, you have to design state of the art 4K OLED displays, micro-o-led displays, 2 micron pixels.

You have to convince the entire music industry to support Dolby Atmos, and then you have to convince people to wear the ski goggles so that Jimmy Page can just creeping, creeping. Think about it. You know, like 20 years from now,

that reference won't make any sense and we'll be like, and then Halsey will be creeping, creeping, creeping. Nilai, I got to tell you none of what you just said made any sense now. So we're starting to create joke. I just imagine today's pop stars in the context of that joke.

Like the point of technology is for Taylor Swift to just creep up on you from behind. Alex Krantz is here. Hi, Alex. I'm just wondering what the shoes situation is like. Do they have to think about the shoes they wear when they creep up on you? Is that part of the spatial audio experience? Yes, it's 100% true that Jimmy Page has to wear very quiet ninja shoes.

The shoes with the toes in Doe vatmos. For some reason, Victoria's Song has chosen to join us today. I'm here, and I don't know why Radiohead isn't doing the creeping. They were. I mean, like Shoe Gaze was. a very quiet form of the shoe i mean like they had to look at their shoes that's the joke that i'm trying to make that's that's what i'm saying because they had so many guitar pedals this is an entire genre of music that was named after nerds looking at their feet and apples bringing it back

that's that's that's where we all right quite a lot happened this week uh actually the real reason Victoria is here is because she and I went and saw the Vision Pro. I saw it for the second time. Victoria saw it for the first time. There's a lot to talk about with that demo. Why Apple gave a whole bunch of the same demo over again to a lot of people. Then Samsung had Galaxy unpacked. They announced the S-24, which is full of AI. There's a smart ring. Fee covers wearables. We've got to talk to her about the smart ring. I got a lightning around. By the way, Mark Zuckerberg just sort of appeared on our website this week. Creeping, creeping. And in announced that the purpose of meta is now to build AGI, which you will recall he renamed the entire company meta to build the Metaverse.

Didn't rename the company this time, but he just sort of appeared and said, Alex Heath, it's AGI now. And Alex said, what? We'll talk about that as well. Can you imagine how cool a move it would be if he just renamed the company like AI Incorporated? Yes. That's all I want. We're not far off. It took me so long to call it meta from Facebook.

It's not going to make it a second leap to AI. be amazing. Incorporated. There's some moves you only get to pull once in renaming the company is one of those moves. Like you got a clock restarts. Yeah. You got another 15 years before you're like, you know what? Actually, Meadow was the wrong name.

But we can talk about all that. Let's start with the Vision Pro. Yeah. Well, and I actually, I think we should start with your experience having this experience, Neil I and V. Because this was a weird hands-on experience. Like we get a lot of these where we sit in a room. somebody gives us a demo of a thing.

But the two of you had this odd experience where, for the first time, this is very strange, and I hadn't really thought about it until it happened. Regular humans were photographed wearing the Vision Pro. And so all over the internet this week, this has become a meme of a bunch of reporters doing the pinchy pinch gesture. And there's been like drips and drabs of information about how this actually went. But I think the way Apple is rolling this thing out and showing it to people is actually really interesting. So can you guys just sort of tell the story of your day with the Vision Pro? V, it was your experience.

So, like, walk us through it to begin with here. Yeah. So, you know, I had read Nelai's write-up of the demo he got at WWDC. So I-Nely's fever dream hands-on. You know, this is my fever-dream's hands-on this time around because literally 24 hours after it happened, I was like, did that actually happen? Or did I fever-dreamed this all up? I wasn't entirely sure.

but I felt like the imprint, the ghost imprint of the Vision Pro on my forehead for a full 24 hours afterwards. So, yeah, it did happen. But, yeah, Nilai was the only one who wasn't pinchy pinching in the photos. Can I, I'm just going to say this very directly. The purpose of this is very clear. Apple wanted to be in control of the first photos of people wearing the Vision Pro. I am fundamentally uncomfortable with the trade that we made here and that everyone else made. Because we went to the thing, they didn't tell us.

they were going to give us photos to walk out with. We did the demo. Demo is really interesting. I'm always excited to see a new piece of technology. There's an enormous amount of new ideas in the Vision Pro to contend with. Fun to look at it again. And they're like, oh, we're going to take your picture. Do you want a photo?

And I was like, yeah. And it didn't occur to me until I walked out of there that Apple took my photos. They selected which photos. They were going to air drop to me. And then they did the same thing for everyone else. So we ran the photos. I think it is interesting to look at pictures of people. in the headset. No one has seen that outside of Apple's marketing before. Yeah. And this has been

kind of a closely guarded thing for seven months now. We really have not seen pictures of people in the headset until now. We have, but it was all like models in a gorgeously lit home. Well, excuse me, Alex. Well, right, we've seen ads of people in a headset. Yeah. Yeah, Neil and I are gorgeously lit models. Like, sorry. Sorry to all the models on this podcast today. All I'm saying is, We were in a gorgeously lit home. Yeah. You were. But there's something weird there, right?

Especially because it's a picture of me. And there's a picture of V and everybody else. There's some assumption there that that is our photo. Right. Right. But it is Apple's photo. It's an Apple's photo of me that they got to pick. And I know, you know, I know a bunch of other people who have this experience.

They were trying to make funny faces. They were doing funny hand gestures. And Apple just didn't give those photos to them. Weird. That's a weird thing. that is part of this. And it's because Apple wanted to control those first set of photos. That's fair. That's Apple's prerogative. It's their product. It's not launched yet. I will just remind everyone, once people buy this thing, all bets are off. Right. And like,

so this is that pre moment where everyone's getting excited about an idea that has a boundary, right? And the boundary is still being very much set by what Apple is saying and doing and allowing to be seen about this thing. And eventually that boundary will disappear. And that to me, that's the, fun part. I keep saying that is actually the fun part. Some dummy is going to try to drive a cyber truck with a Vision Pro on their face. I know what's going to happen. I know the economics of YouTube and I know what that platform rewards. And like that will be crazy and that is totally not contemplated by what it is now. And so you're filling all the space between what you are seeing and the dummy on YouTube driving the cyber truck with Vision Pro with like your imagination, which is the best part of any product. By the way, the same thing is happening to the Rabbit R1 right now.

that is a product that people are paying money so their imaginations can run wild and then the actual product will do something or not do something. Yep. So I just having like worn it once and then worn it the second time and then seen that explosion of imagery, I was like, oh, Apple got what it wanted out of this. It got to control this first set of photos

and some of the photos legitimately look extraordinarily cool. Like the dude from cool hunting in the hoodie. Yeah. Yeah. It's cool. Yeah. I think those were in L.A. I think they did demos in New York and L.A.,

and I'm just going to say this. The L.A. got the better photos. All the, all the, like, we saw our photos and we were like, oh, okay, you know, these are our photo. Yeah, sure. And then we saw the L.A. photos and I was like, excuse me, they have, like, really cool angles and everything like that. I just look like, I'm saying one does not simply walk into virtual Mordor. That is, like, that is what I look like in that thing. But, you know, Nilai was the only one in New York who looked remotely cool because he was just

just sitting there refusing to pinchy pinch. I did not. I love it. There are two things I don't play along with. And if you look at these photos, you can just see that I'm a brat. I didn't do the hand gesture and I refused to tuck the cable behind my back, which did they ask you to tuck the cable behind your back? When do you want to tuck the cable?

And I was like, no, I'm going to hold the battery pack in my hand. And they, what photos are we received? You cannot see me holding the battery pack in my hand. The guy in the hoodie, that cable is running down the back of his hoodie. He legitimately stuck that battery pack down his hoodie just because, like, you can't see the wires. Like, those are immediately the first thing I clocked in his photo besides, like, wow, why does he get to look like Kylo Ren in VR? And I look like I'm telling hobbits that they can't walk into virtual mortar. Anyhow, I don't want to overindex on it.

Again, it is Apple's product. It is their launch. That's how they want to communicate about it. Like I keep saying, eventually people are going to get the things in all. all bets are off. And that's fine. Like, that's the gap. And I, I personally think that this period in between is when people get the most excited. I'm certainly not going to tell people not to be excited, right? Sure. I do think it is, it's just important to note, like, oh, that is, that I didn't take that photo. That photo was not editorially controlled by me. We

were given the photos. And, you know, I'm a huge snob about these things. As everyone knows, all the time, I'm constantly talking about what a huge snob. Disclosure, I didn't take that photo, right? The second piece, and I'm actually, I think this is where the gap between the experiencing it for the first time and me experiencing for the second time, there's some people who've gotten this demo four times now. Apple is basically running the same demo over and over again. They're not meaningfully different than the last time. So the second time I found myself paying way more attention to the hardware.

Like the first time, I was like, oh my gosh, the eye tracking works. That is extraordinarily impressive. Like I'm just, I've got my hands on my sides and clicking my fingers to That just works. That is crazy impressive and this time I was like okay. I'm wearing a headset on my face. I'm Absolutely looking at a screen and I'm wondering what this thing can do and where its limits are and there That second time they were just more perceptible. I still don't know what they are because I was in a totally controlled 30 minute demo loop With like a lot of people watching me and people around me watching what I was watching on their iPads Which is just a weird way to live and kind of coming in and out of your vision and

as they want to, that's always fun. Yeah. Yeah, but the part where it's like you're using the computer and they can see what your eyes are looking at because they're monitoring you on the iPad. It's like I didn't push the boundaries of the Vision Pro in that experience. I was like, yeah, and I'm looking at it. That's a webpage. But it works.

Like that thing still works even when you're trying to perceive the limits of the hardware, which is really interesting. V. I'm curious, how did you, this was like your first blush at it. You had kind of a different experience. Yeah. So like I said, I read your thing about it, but actually experiencing it for yourself, you are not prepared for two 4K screens being zoomed into your eyes and just like your brain trying to like square that. There was like a large part of it where I was like, oh my God, it can actually see where my eyes are going. And like cognitively, that was very strange.

And then, you know, a lot of it I just felt like, you know, they were laughing at me because I kept feeling like turning my eyes. head all around and trying to move through the space. And they were like, ha ha, you know, doesn't it look lifelike? And yes, but also there were parts where my eyes started going into overload. Like overload, my eyes were just darting around all of the places. And that's when I think I started coming up against some limitations that you were talking about, where I realized, oh, this is a screen because, you know, foviated rendering. It's a thing. And if your eyes are going at 20 million miles a minute, it's very hard for it to catch up with you. So there were parts where I was like, oh, I don't understand why it looks so blurry when I'm looking at this one thing.

Oh, it's because it hasn't caught up to my eyes going 20,000 miles a minute because I literally was just going like, like, my eyes hurt after a while because it was going so fast because there was just so many different things to look at and trying to see if like if I look at it a different way, is it going to change? Oh, yes and no. So it's really hard to describe what it's like and what you're seeing in there. But it's very high-res is one thing I can say. I mean, V, that kind of makes it sound like you didn't have a super good time inside of this thing. Like, I think there's an interesting thing for us as reporters where you go in being like, I'm going to ask questions of this thing where like if I'm just like a regular person who bought it, I'm just going to put it on my head and see what happens.

Did you, but like I feel like most people's first experience. like Nelai you were talking about comes away with like the holy shit that was cool and like just the sheer technology the pinchy pinch gesture the eye tracking like you just come away from being very impressed it doesn't I didn't get the read that you came from it sort of blown away by your first experience with it I think it's because I had time to sit with it right it's like when you're in the moment you're just kind of like oh my god I can see the texture of the rock on this volcano that I'm sitting on that is not something I was expecting I was expecting I literally was just like, oh my God, that rock is so textured. Not a thing I was thinking about.

But then, you know, and I think it also has to do with the physicality of the device, the longer the demo goes on, the more aware you are that you're wearing something on your face. Because it's quite heavy is what I'll say. Like I, at the end of my 30-minute demo, I started getting a tension headache because I really did feel it just like pressing on my face. And if you look at the pictures of the journalists and if you look right here where it's, the nose meet like your nasolabial folds is like the correct term. But if you look at that part right underneath the ski goggles, you can see it pressing on a lot of people quite hard. You can see it in my photos and you can see it in quite a few people's photos. So like that was just a thing that

kept bringing me back to the to the fact that I was wearing something on my head and taking me out of like the wonder of all of it. Because there are parts where you're just blown away. Like, it is, I'm a Star Wars nerd. It is kind of cool to be in the Disney Plus app and be like, oh, I'm on tattooing. Ooh, I'm watching a new hope. And that's kind of cool. But then, you know, you think about it for a bit, right? And it's sort of like, oh, kind of come down.

And I'm curious, Neely, for your experience, being the second time around, did it just like wear off that quickly? Because I saw Marquez Brownlee's tweet where he was like, first time, oh, my God, wow. Second time, still cool. And wow, but wow, it's a little heavier. And the third time all he was thinking about was the weight of it on his head. So I'm just curious. I'm so hesitant to say fully formed thoughts about this thing because no one has ever spent time with it without a babysitter ever. And I, you know, this was in our comments and this is like the oldest thing in the world.

And it's on threads. People are like, these reviews are great. I'm like, these are not reviews at all. Like not even a little bit. This is the most highly controlled experience you can have in the best possible circumstances. And yes, some people have had the. experience more than once. So they are beginning to form thoughts. Like Marquez, I think, has had the experience four times. Other people who did the spatial video demos earlier, or I guess late last year,

they've had the experience four or five times. Like, yes, you can begin to form some thoughts, even if you just repeat an experience over and over again. But I still don't know what it's like to virtual screen a Mac into it and try to use this as a computer monitor, which is a thing they really want you to do. I still don't really know what it's like to browse the web in it. And they showed us, V and I both got to open Safari and go to the verge by punching the dumb virtual keyboard that makes no sense, which we should absolutely talk about more. And so I'm just very hesitant to say, okay, this is what I'm beginning to think because that the circumstances are, were so deeply controlled that it's like, yeah, I think the thing's heavy, but I wasn't doing anything like

that immersive, right? I wasn't, we're constantly context shifting, even in the demo. They're like, look at this thing. Look at that thing. Here's an F1 car. Take the wheels off. You're done with the F1 car. Like they're moving you. Yeah, they're just like showing you all the things you can do. It's like taking a tour. You know, it's like, and now look at this. And now look at that. And now look at this. So like just it is hard to sit with any one experience more than like for a hot second because you're getting shepherded through like a tour of what they want you to see. For example, they showed us photos and videos that were shot on the Vision Pro in spatial video. And who am I?

Where am I? I was like, I'm going to evaluate the quality of this camera. And then seven seconds later, we were on to the next thing. And I was like, oh, I have some feelings about this, but I haven't spent any time with it. Right. Like, that's weird. And I just don't want to, like, I'm trying very hard to be careful. But the one thing I will say is, boy, is it obvious you're looking at a screen.

Yeah. Which is the thing they don't want. you to think about. I do have one evaluation question for you, though. Joanna mentioned that she was using a different strap this time, and it felt a little lighter. It was a little more pleasant for her to use Joanna Stern, a friend of ours from Washington Wall Street Journal. Were you guys using the same strap? Like, you're using a different strap this time? No. So, like, it was weird because they gave me the fabric strap, because when you set the thing up, you do, like, the face ID thing where you move your head around on a circle twice, and that supposedly like scans

and gives you an estimate of like the fit for the light seal. And so when I walked into the room, it was ready for me. I did not get a choice as to which head strap I was going to use. And I got the fabric strap. The solo strap, the big. Yeah, the solo strap. They showed me the other strap that Joanna was in some of the other people were wearing, but I didn't get to try it out.

All I got told was that one gives more support, which by the end of the 30 minutes, I was like, I could have used more of that support. Yeah. because my hair was just... Yeah, because that's what you guys used when you tried it out at WWDC, Alien David. Yeah. Yeah.

And that's, I mean, that's true of all the headsets we've tried, right? Like, you're definitely making a compromise between something that looks better and is easier to adjust and put on versus something that ultimately lands in a more comfortable place. Like, the quest, you can either get the one strap or the strap that goes overhead, or you can get the elite strap that's even more. Like, I think all. Ultimately, the answer is probably lots of different versions of this.

And so it's odd that Apple has controlled it in the way that it has. But, Neely, to your point, I think your instincts are good and fair and right, except that there's now a huge number of people as you're listening to this podcast are having to decide whether to spend $3,500 pre-ordering this thing. There are likely to be supply constraints. There's not going to be a lot of them. So for us to just say, oh, wait a few weeks until everybody has it and then you'll be able to get one is actually not helpful. because by a few weeks from now, it might be months from now before you can actually get one.

I feel like the people who are going to spend $3,500 the newest Apple gadget, that money is already committed. They already know. You know, like, I think that, I mean, V is an actual reviewer. Like, the thing that reviews do now in 2024 is not always help people make purchase decisions. Like, sometimes it is. But for something like this, it's actually to put it in a cultural context. almost as much as help people decide whether to buy it. Because there's infinite,

there will be infinity content about it. I don't know that I agree in this case, though, because I think whether you should buy a new phone or not, people mostly know the answer, right? Like, you're going to buy what you're going to buy. And I think if there's something like wildly new and different, we have a responsibility to talk about it. In this case, it's like we've been talking about.

Most people have no context for this thing. They have no experience of it. They have no idea what it is. I totally disagree with you. I totally disagree with you. Okay. Because Apple has been extraordinarily successful making sure people don't talk about this thing,

like a VR headset. And it is absolutely a VR headset. Just look at it. Look at the pictures. There are pictures now. I feel like you just agreed with what I said. People have no idea what this thing is. No, they absolutely do.

There are Quest 2 is everywhere. The Quest 3 is not as popular as it should be. The Quest 2 is all over the place all the time. I have put people in Quest, in our request too that I own and watch them get blown away by how texture the dinosaur is. Like, this is not so out there. So you're saying even people who don't think they know what this thing is, know it more closely than they realize. I'm going to 100% agree with Eli on that because I walked into the going like, I don't know what to expect.

And the more I spent time with it, I was like, oh, I've used a bunch of Apple products before. Actually, this feels quite familiar. Like, I kind of do know what I'm using because, like, you have the digital craft. on the Vision Pro. I have worn every single Apple Watch since the Apple Watch series 2. So that was super familiar. And then on the other side, there's a flat side button that you use to take spatial photos and video. That's just the side button from the Apple Watch.

Like everything inside the experience as well, it's like launching launch pad on your Mac. If you've used Apple products, you kind of know what it's like. It's just Apple, but make it VR. That's kind of what the Vision Pro is. I point out, by the way, you should read that as a compliment to Apple's designers, right? They took this very esoteric concept. They took the best of their concepts from other products. They married them together and they made it all seem very obvious.

Apple at its best, like that's what that company is good at. But I'm saying just conceptually, if you have worn another VR headset, and I'm confident that people listening to the show have worn other VR headsets. We have been covering these products for a decade. Right. There's a decade of context for this thing. Sure. But then how do you explain the fact that Apple is giving people 30 minute demos in a store in order to be able to do this? Like I just don't. Because no, no, I know this because not everybody has used VR headsets. They are really like in if you don't have access to one, if you don't have a friend, if you don't have a friend who works at the verge, you probably don't have access to one. You probably haven't tried it.

And so for a lot of people, this will be one of their first experiences with VR outside of like the horrid. horrible experience you see at a mall or an arcade. And it sounds like it is probably one of the best VR experiences that you guys, that everybody on this call has experienced, including like those was it the varjo that's like a thousand $1,500 headset. Talk about things people have no experience. You know, the varjo. That's the only one I've used.

I don't use any other headset. Yeah, this is better than that. I can say fairly confidently. It's just me out there using my varjo. But it is like a lot of people probably. they understand VR conceptually. They might have used like a garbage version. And Apple is hoping that their version is so advanced,

is so much improved that it's something different. I don't know if that's true. I haven't tried it. I don't know if that's true. It sounds like so far from every one of you get your experiences, it's better, but it's not like, well, we don't even need to call this VR anymore,

which is what Apple very much wants us to all hope. I so do not by the premise that most people understand VR conceptually. I just don't. No, I don't think they, I don't think they do. I agree with you there where I think like people probably understand conceptually this is a VR headset, but also don't understand conceptually what VR is. Wait, let me try. Let me try. I don't know if I'm going to be successful. Let me try. Okay. I think people understand VR headsets. That's where I disagree with David. I think Ready Player One is a movie that Steven Spielberg made.

Like that's a real thing that exists. People understand it. You can, Meta sells these things every Christmas. people buy VR headsets and they play games. A few people do. A few people. 40 million, 40 million, I think. Quite a lot in the scheme of things, right? Like, we've talked a lot on the show about how supernatural is the thing that drives the most meta quest sales to women and people over 40.

Like, sure. That's a growing business for them. So much so that the FTC tried to stop them from buying it. So, like, there's just a thing there that is interesting, right? There is some acknowledgement of the product category by one. by some larger group of people. And it has been around for a long time. And there is culture built around it, like Ready Player, one of other things.

Then there's Apple saying, this is not a VR headset. This is spatial computing. This is the future. It is, you know, one of the things that I'm curious to think about when we actually get these things outside of control is like, what is the delta between a $400 Quest 3 and a $3,500 Vision Pro? It is impossible to know right now. Like you have to just like sit there and look at both of them and experience both of them and find out.

It's the varjo. It's the varjo. The thing right in the middle is the varjo at $1,000. But you know, the quest line is basically a mid-range Android smartphone on your face. The Vision Pro is an M2 processor on your face. They are different. They're going to have different capabilities. Are the screens meaningfully different?

I don't know the answer to these questions. But Apple's positioning this thing is not competing. with the Quest 3. And the thing that jumped out at me in these demos is how few of them were actually AR, right? Like the Disney Plus app, they're putting you on Tatooine. They're putting you in the Avengers Tower. Those are straight up VR experiences. It doesn't matter what room you're in. When you watch a spatial video that you, I brought in some spatial video that I shot of Max on my iPhone 15 Pro, you can watch it or you can put it in like a theater setting. And I was like watching like video in Holly Akala.

Like, and it was awesome, right? Like the thing they do in that demo, uh, you're watching a video and it will take this, the highlights of that video and reflect it under the clouds below the mountain. It's so, it's like so cool. Still 100% a rendered VR experience.

Like, I'm like, where's the AR? And they're like, here's a full size F1 car in the room with you. Just rip off the car. The wheels off the, the alpha Romeo. Yeah, they're like, here's an Aston Martin F1 car in Jigspace, which is a cool app.

And it's like, well, one, okay, so I need a room that's big enough to hold a car. And then I'm going to look at this car. What now? Where's the stuff? Like, where's the thing where you're augmenting reality, where you're creating computing in space? I would point out Apple's also not calling it an AR headset. Right, they're saying spatial computing. Apple's trying to invent this other thing that currently means nothing.

Well, it has some sort. of definition, right? It's been around for a minute. Apple is spinning. One, I just want to correct, I said MetaQuest 2 sold 40 million headsets. I'm wrong. It sold 20 million as of 2023. So half of that. All right. So my argument's a little weaker than it was before. Sorry. Sorry about that. 20 million people have tried it at least. Probably, I mean, we could say up to 40 if you count like the virtual boy and the Quest one. David's like, no, we're not doing that math. Reviews. Putting that aside, just putting that aside, how many people have tried iPhones? How many people have tried Macbooks? Like, what I really think Apple is selling here is the Appleness of it. Like by calling it, you know, Apple always does stuff. It's like, they give a different name for something that we already know by another name. So by calling it spatial computing, they're just going like, oh, but Apple's doing it now. But let me just, can I, 20 million is, I understand. It's not everybody. The Xbox one as of September 2023 has sold.

3,3 million units, and there's not a person on Earth. You're like, do you know what an Xbox is? And they're like, what are you talking about? Yeah, because we've had video game consoles for 40 years. And you've had VR headsets for a decade. And no one has tried them. 20 million people. Six months after Atari came out, you think everybody on Earth knew what a game console was? Maybe. I mean, look, they made the movie The Wizard about the first I just, I think like, A, I think the way Apple markets its products at the beginning has next to nothing to do with what those products ultimately are. Like, if you go back to 2007 in the

iPhone, 2010 in the iPad, 2015 in the Apple Watch, like the way they talk about those products is nothing like what they became. It just isn't. And so I think I posted, after you guys posted your pictures, just being like saying basically if Apple can make these things cool to wear in public. It'll be the marketing coup of the century. And I got, I mean, dozens of replies from people being like, Apple's not marketing that way. I was like, I don't care shit what Apple is marketing it with. Like, five minutes after that thing goes on sale, somebody is going to take this thing into a coffee shop and go on a run where. And that's like, that's how this stuff works. You buy it, you do whatever the hell you want with it. And I, like, we have so few answers still about what you're going to

do inside of this thing or how you use it or what it's like, or if it's a better monitor than my monitor. Now, David, that's not true. We're going to have Fruit Ninja. Disney Plus. We're going to have Disney Plus. Like a wealth of opportunities. Fantastic. Yeah. I will say that I do think they expect people to take it out into the world just because when I was getting my demo, like one of the use cases they were talking to me about was like, you're going to be on a plane and you're still going to be able to interact with your stewardess when she asks you for whether you want to drink or something. I'm dying to wear this thing on a plane. I've never wanted to do anything more. I'm going to go on like a status run just to collect my whatever horrible new system Delta is doing now and wear this headset. And you're going to have to charge it six times.

So we should talk about that. This is a stuff that is legitimately new and like honestly like a little silly and like in the best way. So you're in a VR experience and we should just call it that. you're in a virtual environment inside the headset. If someone walks up to you and you look at them, they just sort of fade into view. And then you can see it. It's really weird. It's odd.

In this, actually, this very funny moment in my demo, I was like playing with this, right? Because I'm sitting on a couch, there's people around me, the Apple people are around me. And I forget that they're all watching what I'm doing. So I just kept looking at them to make them fade into view. And eventually one of them was just like looked up in me. Like, what are you doing?

I was just staring at them. He'd be like, are you, are you going to appear? And they're like, and then they appeared and they were looking at me. How similar is it to that moment in Lord of the Rings where Gandalf just slowly appears from the whiteness in front of? It's kind of like that. Like I just, the thing that came to my mind was like Casper, the friendly ghost, just very slowly ghost of VR future coming into your periphery.

And it's very strange. Hello, Devin Sawwell. They're kind of semi-transparent and just floating in the middle of a volcano. Yeah. It's weird. But then, like, viewing it from the outside because, you know, we can't see ourselves. Like, I think the photo is the only, like, concept that I have of what I look like in that thing. But we did get to see another person using it and get a look at eyesight.

And that was just, I'm still processing what eyesight looks like. That's the eyes appearing on the front of the display. And so the reason we weren't able to do that is to do that. They've got to create what's called a persona for you. This is your virtual head that will appear in FaceTime calls. I don't know. That's the only way to describe what it is. And then that virtual face, when you are in the headset and you start talking to someone,

your eyes show up on the front display of the headset. It's fancy Googly eyes. Like, we get it. It's weird. It's weird because it's obviously a. render of eyes. And it's like a render of your eyes. Yeah. So like when you blink, it blinks. When your eyes are open, they're open. Did you try to make eye contact with the person who was giving you the demo? I have never stared in another person's eyes the way that I stared into that person's eyes.

And they were virtualized. And I was like, are you looking at me? Because I'm looking at you. Huh? It's, it's weird. And like, there's different cues that happen with eyesight. So like, if they're looking at you, you can tell they're looking at you. But if they're not looking at you, at you, but their googly eyes are looking at you. You can kind of tell because there's like a blue flash that comes up. And that's supposed to signal to you that they're not focusing on you. They're doing other things within the headset. And if they're fully immersed, you don't see the eyes at all. It's just like that shimmer that appears. Creating all new ways to be rude to someone at a bar. Yeah. But Apple's marketing says no one's going to take it to a bar, Eli.

Sure. No one's going to do that. They're 100% going to take it to a bar. Eli specifically is going to take a tool. I'm going to be hammered in this headset 24-7 on a plane. I live in the sky now, everybody, just flying around wasted. I'm dying to see two people in two headsets try to communicate to each other. Like, just think about the enormous amount of signal processing that needs to take place in order for those two people to make eye contact. Right?

You've got to put on two headsets. They both have to capture a virtual depiction of you. then it has to take a real-time video of your eyes, process that into a 3D model of your face, display that on a front screen, which is then captured by a camera in the second headset, which then has to re-render that into reality to display to someone else's eyes,

which are in turn being captured and displayed on a 3D rendering of that. And it's like, you could just take the headsets off, but I'm dying. I'm absolutely dying to make this happen and just be like, this was a lot of work. So like, if we were in the room, room and we were both wearing the Vision Pro and talking to each other, would we just like

materialize and each other's screen well? And would you be wearing the headset on the screen? Would we be wearing the headset and would I be seeing you wearing the headset with your eyesight on in my screen? That's just like breaking my brain. Or would it be the digital avatar? When I say these were tightly controlled 30 minute demos, what I mean is I asked to have that experience and I was met with almost dead silence.

Nope, that's just not a thing that we're going to let. I was like, okay. Like, I understand. Like, eventually, I keep saying this. Eventually, people are going to get them. We will get a review unit by hook or by crook. And we will spend time with this thing, asking some questions right now that fill the gap between everyone's imagination and reality.

And that gap, I'm just going to keep underline it. That gap is magical. Like, that's the fun part of, like, liking technology. You're like, you can imagine what these things can do. and the reason I keep pointing at VR headsets is like there's actually something you can ground these experiences with that exist today at scale. They might not be as good, but the gap between, I have a Quest Pro sitting here, the gap between a Quest Pro, which we did not give a good review to and the Vision Pro, that's the thing to evaluate. It's not, here's a magical new experience. No, that's a headset.

You can look at the pictures and you can say, okay, this is a VR headset that contains a lot of ideas. is about the future of computing, for sure. But it very much has some of the limitations that are inherent to this form factor, like, for example, having to be on your head. Like, that's just a limitation of this form factor that is easily comparable to everything else that's ever been in this form factor. I think one other question I have is, like, with the experience, like, we're grounding it in VR headsets that we've had, right? But the thing is that most of, like, 900,000% of my experiences in regular, regular VR headsets is gaming, and there was not a single gaming demo to be had in the Vision Pro. So that's kind of one thing that's been in the back

of my head is just like, okay, the obvious use case for VR is gaming in this point in time, but I don't think we've heard a lot about gaming in the Vision Pro. We've heard about it, like as entertainment and some sort of productivity platform, but are, I'm not a lot of I really going to do that? Well, Meta bought all the good gaming companies for people. That's real. So that's part of it. And then like we're getting Fruit Ninja and I have no doubt fruit ninja is going to have

you with a virtual sword cutting the stuff yourself, right? It's going to be pinching. I'm going to be pinching the fruits. Pinching the kiwi. But like that's what I, because I was looking at that too because that's what I care about. No disrespect to everyone who wants to have all of their meetings in a room with everybody wearing a headset.

You cannot wait. I want to spend $3,500 on a sick gaming headset. I don't, but. It's called the Vargo and, uh, tovile-hour, Alex. Oh my God. I'm going to go get a Vargo, the best experience. I love that we're getting away from the pronunciation of that product. It's a little bit every single time we say it.

It just gets, we get a little further away from it. Virgo. That's actually the name. I love it. Yeah, it's the Virgo headset. It's the, it's the Vigo Mortonstein. All right. This is as much as we know about the Vision Pro.

We got, we did get to see the Disney Plus app. There is some other drama. Netflix is not going to make an app for this thing. That news broke this week. They're just like, use the web browser. That's fine. That's weird. It sounds like app developers as a whole have not rushed to this platform yet, which is fine.

The platform doesn't exist yet. I wouldn't expect a bunch of app developers to be ready to ship on day one. But there are some big questions about what this thing is for, how it actually works. It's $3,500 to get one. You have to go, you have to either go to a store or upload your prescription after scanning your face. Like there's a lot of steps between now and lots of people having them. And I think there's just a lot of caution in the middle of all of that. Yeah.

And I think for the funny position Apple is in right now is it's having to reckon with the fact that it's Apple. And it's very hard for Apple to quietly launch a product. But fundamentally, this is like a public beta of a thing, right? Like Apple does not think this is the. final version of this. It's not what anyone believes is going to be where we're headed at overall in a decade. And this is the kind of thing that like Snapchat would call like the next rev of spectacles and still be like, this is just a fun thing we're messing around with. And Apple, because it's Apple, has to come out and say, this is the future we've solved

everything. This is perfect. And it just puts you in a funny position as a marketing enterprise. Here's a question I'll leave everyone. Because again, we, none of these were reviews. Stop calling them reviews. Drive me bananas. People actually have to review them, whether it's us or whoever, whatever reviewer you trust. Like, whatever independent reviewer you trust to spend a lot of time with something and give you an opinion, go trust them. I hope it's us. You know, we try really hard.

But whoever it is, the question that's going to be embedded in all those reviews is, if Apple thinks the future is AR, which Tim Cook has said over and over and over again, and then this is a simulator of an AR device, which is kind of the framework that I'm just going to start. start with, right? This is a simulator of the thing they want to make. Well, then showing us all these VR experiences, having a light seal, blocking you off from the real world and putting you on top of the volcano or an Avengers Tower. That's not AR, right? Those are VR experiences. And there's a real tension in this product between the things a VR headset is inherently good at, especially when you spend all the money on it. And the AR simulator, it might wish to be. And I truly do not know how they will pick those paths. Because if you just want a pair of glasses

or you just want a pair of contact lenses, which is the end state that they have talked about in the past, wow, you're not going to be able to block off flight and put everybody in Avengers Tower. So, like, how do you get from here to there if everything good about this product is VR? I mean, that's the same challenge that Meta's facing, right?

Who said the same thing, AR is our future, this is where we're going, all of this stuff is just a step on the way to AR. I think they're just, I think meta is just more open about this than Apple is. I think Apple is in the exact same place meta is with only their high-end headset is going to probably sell better and perform better. But otherwise, I think ultimately it's very similar space of we're not there yet. The technology doesn't exist. The things we want to do to make AR cool isn't possible yet.

So we're going to do the, we're going to do a really good VR headset because that's the way you start to normalize the stuff that's going to be necessary. for AR. But Apple's much quieter about it because they want us all to think that they've created a new form of computing when everybody knows they just made a really cool VR headset. Well, no, if you listen to David, no one on Earth has ever heard of a VR headset before. That's definitely what I said. That's right. Ultimately, this is the first VR headset anyone has ever tried on in the history of the universe. Apple actually invented the term VR just this. No, I think ultimately what all these companies seem to be saying is that VR is a feature of AR, right? Like, those two things are not mutually exclusive.

And ultimately, you want both. But the thing we can do right now is pretty good VR. There's not much evidence yet that we can do pretty good AR. And I think, I think to Alex's point, like, meta's pretty open about that. Some of the other headset makers are pretty open about that. And Apple, just by virtue of the way the company operates, is not allowed to say it's bad at anything. So instead it's going to keep imagining new futures that it has invented, even as it goes through the same stages as everybody else. I feel even though we had demos and we played with this thing again, I'm just going to keep repeating this.

And we should move on to talk about what's going on with the Apple Watch and the Galaxy Ring. Yeah. Because we do have V here. But we don't know anything yet. Even the people I know who've worn this thing five times, they don't know anything. We have to take these things outside of Apple's control. we have to try to wear them on airplanes and behind cyber truck wheels. Can you imagine the cyber truck wiper on this thing?

Do you think the cyber truck wiper moves too fast for the Vision Pros cameras? I'm dying to know. There's a whole other thing that happens when a product is actually released that is the important thing. And that I'm just going to keep everybody focused on that because you cannot know right now. And that, to me, is utterly fascinating. Like, it is kind of the best moment because anything is possible and everyone can have all dreams they want. And then you're going to put on the headset and your weird rendered eyes, you're going to look into the eyes of someone you love. And you're going to be like, am I still cool?

And there's going to be an answer. If you ask that question, no. This is what I do with every piece of new technology. I just look at someone directly in the eyes and say, am I still cool? And that person has always Becky. And she's always like, he never were. All right. Very quickly, let's talk about what's going on at the Apple Watch, which is somewhat simple, I guess. It's banned again. Yeah, it's banned again. It's banned again. So, you know, it's just been kind of a back and forth where this is really funny again because usually I think Apple is so used to winning that the fact that it's losing a lot against Massimo right now is just kind of very fascinating to watch just because so earlier this week, Bloomberg was suggesting that, you know,

Apple is going to drop the blood oxygen feature from the watches in order to get around the ITC ban, and that basically U.S. Customs and Borders was like, yeah, that works. That's cool. That's totally awesome. But that wasn't confirmed, right, at the beginning of this week. And then yesterday, basically, we heard that the federal appeals court was like, yeah, we're not going to extend the stay on this ban. So starting today, 5 p.m., bans back on. You can't sell this stuff.

And then, you know, late last night, Apple was like, ha ha, guess what guys? We're going to sell versions without the blood oxygen feature. So that's how we're getting around that. Those went on sale today. So that's currently where we're at with the Apple Watch ban. And it's just like just pay Massimo. Like, you could just end this. You could license this.

A deeply funny C line of this story is that Massimo added a new board member this week. And it's Bob Chittak, ex-Discuit. It's fantastic. He's going to make it tech. It's pretty good. He, since leaving Disney, has, I think he was always bald, but he's gotten more aggressively bald than a particular way. The photo of him, it's like he's joining Massimus Ward is like, oh, Thanos is on

the board now. Like, that's very much the vibe. It's pretty good. This is just a, right, the ban is still temporary because Apple has an appeal going. And the hardware is still in there. It's just not accessible by the software. And Vee, your point is always. always been like this is the least useful piece of the Apple Watch. It is. It is the least useful as

of right now piece of tech in most smart watches, to be quite frank, because like what are you using blood oxygen for, right? In COVID, everyone was all on pulse oxymeters because you could tell whether, you know, your lungs were working, whether they were breathing. But the thing that people have to realize is that these are not FDA cleared pulse oxymeters, right? They're wellness gadgets. You are taking a spot check at any given second as to how much blood oxygen you have in a second. You have to sit there for 15 seconds still. You can't move for it to tell you what this estimate of your blood oxygen is. And for the vast majority of people who are not having any kind of lung issues or whatever, if you're healthy, 99.9% of the time is it's

going to be over 95 and you're going to find out I don't have to worry about anything. The other use case for pulse oxymeters within these smartwatches is to tell you whether you have breathing disturbances at night. So you're just going to get an average in the morning of what your SPO2 level was. And for 99% of people who are healthy, you are going to see that it's either above 95%. You're good. Or it's going to be below that and you're going to be like, oh, I'm a side sleeper, so it messed up. Therefore, I can't really trust that. Because if you are a side sleeper, it is going to tell you that it's lower.

Like, Garmin's tell me regularly that my SPO2 level at night is 91%, which is that's, that's, like, you should be going to the hospital if you start getting to those levels. So it is not really all that trustworthy. The only thing is, like, in the mid to long term, these companies are looking at pulse luxemeter's as a way to detect sleep apnea. The only company that's remotely close is Withings. And even they're not saying it's sleep apnea, right? They're saying breathing disturbances, which may indicate at some point that you may be inclined to sleep apnea. So maybe you should go to a doctor. So it's really not that serious of a feature right now.

It's just not. So keep buying the, if you were planning to buy a watch, the Apple Watch, you can still just go buy it. You can still go buy it. It's fine. The SC is not impacted. And, you know, it's really funny because whenever I recommend products, for most people I say, you're going to be fine with the SC. it's totally good for you. And they just have FOMO.

They just want all the stuff. It's cool looking. Yeah. What if I need to light up an 80 decibel siren in the middle of woods? Come on. S.E can't do that. No, no, I can't do that. But neither can the regular Series 9.

It's only the ultra that's going to be doing that for you with it. I know you have the ultra. I know you have the ultra. You also got to try the actual Massimo smartwatch at CS with the features. So they're calling it the freedom, which is just like... Are you serious? That's a middle of... Yes, it's called the freedom.

It's 46mm, it's a big chunky boy, and they told me like a bazillion times, so I have to say it, it's an early prototype. It might not look like this when it comes out later this year. But, you know, it's kind of the... They were very much telling me that they're putting out a smart or smart watch. So this is a smart watch that's going to have timers. It's going to have notifications. It's going to work with your phone more fluidly. it's going to have a better app experience. It's going to have health tracking experiences,

which sounds an awful lot like an Apple Watch, right? So they keep telling me that the reason they're putting out this watch is so that it can tout its sensor accuracy, because all these companies be out here, according to Massimo, with sensors that are not accurate, that are not giving you the actual results that you can trust, but they're going to give you the health results that you can trust, and it's going to be smarter. So, you know, you sit there and you're like, So you're trying to kill Apple, right? This is the Apple Watch killer. And they're like, no, this is, this is about us.

This is about us and our sensor accuracy. And, you know, of course, they have to say that. But you just look at this thing and you're like, I see you are coming for the consumer wearable space. And they're not the only medical tech company doing that. You know, at CES, I saw Movano. Movano is a medical tech company. And they're coming out with the smart ring that has also got, you know,

they're in the last stages of FDA clearance for their particular sensors. in the past, I've seen medical tech companies come out with, like, Almron. They had a blood pressure smartwatch at CES. So it's not the first time that the medical community has been like, we can try hardware. We can make that work. Yeah. But it's just very interesting, given the backdrop of the Apple Watch band that Massimo's out here and like, hey, we got hardware too. Well, speaking of rings, there was also the big Samsung announced that they're going to do a smart ring now.

Is it going to be as cool as ORA and Mavano? and everybody else hopping in the space now? Well, the cool thing about the galaxy ring is that they were like, hello, we're here. And then there's a ring, and it's spinning in space, and there's stars on it, and it looks gorgeous. And they're like... The video was sick. If you haven't seen the video, you should go watch it. The little, like, reveal video of it is pretty badass.

Very cool. And then they're like, and we will give you no details. Yeah. And I... You know, I was looking at that. I was like, okay. But also, this is clearly going to be a sleep tracking or a competitor just, because, you know, at CES, and I wrote the story at CES, there were a buttload of smart rings.

More smart rings than I've ever seen in my life at CES at all different price points, at all different, like, feature sets. So for Samsung to come out here and be like, yeah, we're also getting on the smart ring train. I think this is the year of the smart ring. I really do. And, you know, it's one thing to go to CES and say, Mavano. Nobody, unless they read my work, nobody knows what Mavano is. If I say Zep and a Mosfit or a Maze fit, this budget thing that has basically replaced Fitbit for that market, they're coming out with a smart ring. People are going to be like, okay, you wearable nerd, sure, sure, you're saying. No, no, this episode of the British House, we got Vargo, we got Movano.

I want to call out Shelley. It's a DIY smart home company. We're just named little companies. Yeah. So, you know, like if I say that there's a bunch of small companies out here that are putting out smart rings, this is going to be a thing. people are going to be like, okay, V, Pat, Pat, you know, you're a wearable nerd. Of course, you think that's going to happen. So for Samsung to come out and be like, hi, guys, we got a galaxy ring.

I'm just super vindicated in my seat over here, just going like, yes, see, I told you. I told you smart rings are going to be a thing. This is a thing that people are really thinking about. And it's because there's a huge segment of the population that is really mad that they have to charge their smart watches if they want sleep tracking. So the obvious answer here is that you have a smart ring, which is going to be more accurate for that anyway, because the bottom of your finger is more accurate for heart rate tracking. It's more accurate for blood oxygen tracking. And the battery is going to last longer than your Galaxy watch that lasts maybe two days if you're really good about battery management. So I really think that this is their answer to that.

Also, just from a market perspective, the wrist has been claimed. Yep. You cannot replace the thing that's on many people's wrists. So you're like, let's try fingers. There's that. And I'm just curious because the one thing at CES that stood out to me was a maze fit with their ring was just like, this is going to be a standalone. But also, it could be a companion wearable for your wearable. So it's going to work with their smart watches.

And I think if Samsung really wants to be smart about it, they'll do the same. They'll be like, okay, this is your smart ring. and it's going to work with your smart watch. We've spent the last two years working really, really hard on the sleep tracking. My graph of the wearable success formula, it's just 15 more axes just sprouted off that graph. I was diligent and I didn't say anything about the Vision Pro and the graph, but now we're like, we got wearables on top of wearables. We need exponents in this thing.

I'm telling you, this is where we're headed because not everyone wants. wants a wearable that's going to be, you know, an extension of their phone, right? A lot of people who are going for the smart ring, they don't want the notifications. They don't want their kind of, I think it's the next evolution of the fitness band, which is like RIP. It's gone. The smart watch has devoured it completely. I'm telling you. So the dorkiness cost is going down the curve.

See? And then the cost cost is low. Smart rings, we're up in the upper right, depending on how they look and whether or not you have to refer to them as the galaxy ring, which depending on who you are, is either a huge positive or a huge negative. From like the one person who I saw online who got to see the actual prototype, it's supposedly very light. It supposedly looks nice.

We'll see the render. It looks like an aura ring, but make it galaxy. So we'll see because a lot of people will look at an aura ring and be like, oh, that looks really cool. And then other people will be like, that is so chunky. Get it the F away from me. Absolutely not. But, you know, on the design front, I think smart rings are starting to evolve a bit.

I saw the EV ring. It's very cool. It has a little gap up top. So when you're bloated and you can't get your ring off, it can still come off. That's, I'm just saying, Samsung, that's right out there. You can copy that and make the galaxy ring next level. Well, that's the galaxy ring to power by AI. All right, speaking of AI and Galaxy stuff, me, we've got to let you go.

We've got to take a break. We've run way over in the first segment. That's how we're doing today. Vee, thank you so much for coming on. We're going to take a break. We're going to back and talk about the rest of Galaxy Unpacked and the S-34. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Shopify.

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Phones. Phones. So it's fascinating that Samsung chose to do the Galaxy event a week after CES. Is it? It's fascinating. Google showed up at the Samsung event more assertively, I guess, more loudly than they did at CES. Yep. Yes, that's true.

Just quite a lot of dynamics there, right? Yeah. Samsung can attract a bunch of attention without CES, so it makes sense. But Google put a lot of its AI features in the S-24 this year, which is really interesting. Yeah, empowered by the Google Gem. right? Like the large language model that a lot of the generative stuff is going to be doing is Google Gemini, which I don't think is surprising. I know some people were like, why wasn't it chat GPT or Microsoft, whatever Microsoft is doing? And it makes sense Google makes Android. They work closely together. Why wouldn't they use the people who are already doing this stuff in their own phones? Google and Samsung also desperately need each other to compete with Apple. Like neither one of them can beat Apple on their own. They've both tried and both have failed. And the way to do it is together. And it's working pretty well.

But my big takeaway from this event is I am super, super bearish on the future of the pixel now. Yes. Same. Google clearly believes Samsung's phones are the flagship Android phones now and that it should treat them as such. That was my vibe too. I just want to point out that Samsung strikes so little fear into Apple's heart that Tim Cook refuses to pronounce the name Samsung correctly. What does he say? He says Samsung every time.

Every time. And I can't tell if it's a dis. I can't tell if he just doesn't know. Just go listen to him say it sometime. That's a dis. Tizen has caused no fear in this man's brain. Like you can do the EEG and you're like, Tizen and just nothing lights up. He's like Tizzen?

That's like an older Southern person does. They always like to be like, oh, I just forgot the name. Is that how you're supposed to pronounce it? And they never, they refuse. to learn. Yeah, it's very good. Anyway, but I agree with you, David. That's my way of saying, I agree with you. Like, it needs to be the combo platter. Yeah. And I think Apple, there's a lot, you know, between Apple and Google and the search deal and all this stuff. But on their own, I think Apple's like, what? And that's, they are both still very reactive to Apple in that particular way. But we should

talk about the S-24, because it is meaningfully ahead of the iPhone in certain ways. Yeah. And this will almost certainly be the Android phone of 2024. Like, it's wild to say that the second week of January, but I think we can fairly confidently say. At least in the United States, this will be the benchmark. Yeah, because they don't, they don't do the note, like the note isn't kind of the big landmark anymore for them. It is, it is this S series. And so we got the S-24,

which is, continues to be kind of the smallest one. It's small, it's 6.2 inch display. Like, that's enormous. But, and then there's the S-24 plus, which is 6.7-inch display, and then the S-24 Ultra, which can't have

the same-size display. So it is 6.8 inches. Way bigger. Just, yeah, just a tiny, tiny bit bigger. Same with the batteries. Like, the S-24 is like a 4,000 mill-a-amp battery, and you're like, okay, cool. And the S-24 plus is 4,900. Cool.

And then just a little bit bigger, the S-24 Ultras at 5,000. And big cameras here. Like, I'm curious for you guys, you guys geek out, you in particular, Eli, geek out about these cameras a lot more than I do. The backside of the S-24 and the S-24-plus is both a 50-megapixel-wide camera with a 12-migixel ultra-wide and a 10-machsyl 3-X optical zoom and the 30-X space zoom. So you're getting kind of the same camera package in both of those. And then the S-24 Ultra is totally, it feels totally different.

It's a 200-machshel-wide, same ultra-wide, same tele-zoom, but then a 50-migel tell a 5x zoom instead of the space zoom, which like, that feels cool. And that's the one, so one of the things that Samsung said about that zoom camera is that because they took it from the S23 Ultra, which had a 10x zoom, they actually took it down to five, but because they upped the resolution so much, what Samsung claimed, at least to Allison Johnson on our team, is that you'll get more image quality at 10x zoom just because you have so many more pixels to play with, even though you're doing digital cropping. And digital zoom is not a thing. It's just cropping your photos. And everyone should know that. But the thesis, at least, is that

you're still getting higher image quality just because it's capturing so much more light in the 50 megapixel sensor. So I think that the math of that is fascinating. And I'm really curious to see how that stacks up in reviews. But the cameras are nuts. So I think there's the math and there's also just the caution to the wind AI processing that Samsung is doing. Why will those photos look good? Because Samsung's like, make him look good. And the AI is like, your wish is my command. Here's some shit I made up.

What is a photo? Moons everywhere. This took longer than I expected, honestly. I was really impressed with Eli. I was like, I should have like a little clock timer. Well, we'll come back to that because there's one particular, what is a photo rabbit hole that we should fall down. But there's a bunch of other AI stuff here going on.

Yeah, yeah. Google powered AI stuff. Yeah, there's a ton of stuff. Like they're going all in on translation, which was for the longest time, that was a really cool pixel feature, was that you could kind of translate things on the fly and transcribe things as well. And that's coming to the Samsung, the S-24 lineup. And then on like the image side of things, there's a lot of photo editing that you're going to be able to do now. You can just like circle something and it should get rid of it, kind of that Photoshop demo we see all the time,

now on the S-24, which is both cool and hilarious. because people were like using it to circle out like watermarks. Yeah, Samsung's own attempt to make you know things are AI copyright or AI generated was to put a watermark. And then you can tell the AI to remove the watermark. It's beautiful. Perfect. No, no, it's beautiful. Those are like the things that I was particularly excited about just because I love to not have to open Photoshop anymore.

The longer I can go without opening it, the better for me. I was the one that really got me was the idea of being able to make 120 frames per second. slow motion video out of anything. This is the rabbit hole. Oh, is this your rabbit hole? This is the rabbit hole. Oh, I thought the rabbit hole was going to be the thing where you can, you can move the horizon on a photo, and it'll fill the edges instead of having to crop the edges

when you take your, like, you take a rectangular photo and you turn it a little to correct the horizon. You're going to have these empty spaces in the corners. The S-24 will generatively fill those corners to make it still feel like a rectangle. Yeah, but I can do that in Photoshop. Like, I definitely never, ever done that in Photoshop. Alex, we have had the, can you do this in Photoshop and does that negate all of this argument? Yes.

So many times. And I think that it does, but we have to let Neel I have this. No, filling in the edges is like, whatever, because the edges are usually not the subject of your photo. Right. So like, am I lying about whether there's a little bit more water there? Maybe I'm lying, maybe. Who cares, right? A little more ball.

What is it? This is so much more, like, blaze than you were about the pixel eight. I've been beaten down, man. I can move someone over. on a bench, that's outrageous, but there's more water over there? Yes, they keep moving the line. Levels of outrage. This is nuance.

Real time nuance is being developed. Also, I do think that's not a photo. It's just not, I'm trying to gin someone up into an outrage cycle over, there's a little more water. Even I can't do that. But, all right. I took 50 frames and I made all the people look at me in a way that never happened. It's still dangerous territory to me.

Yeah. The ultra slow motion, the most dangerous territory because now this thing is generating entire frames that never happened right entire frames and creating a video a slow motion video which people are

more attuned to thinking is real than any watch this back in slow motion let's see what really happened and every other frame is a lie right if you go from 30 frames a second to 120 frame slow motion over the same duration Boy, that's a lot of frames that never happened.

And Samsung's like, yeah, we put a watermark on it. And then you can be like, yeah, I get rid of the watermark. It goes away. Like, this is, when I say this is the what is a photo apocalypse, like this is more apocalyptic what is a photo shit. I'm going to throw a wrench in this because the TV companies, weren't they already doing a lot of this already? Yeah.

This is just what interpolation is. Yeah, just making up friends and sticking them in there. Only it's now the people who are like, we're going to invent the moon. Wait, wait, it really depends. Like, there's a lot, there's a lot of different ways TV companies have done this. The dumbest way they've done it is like three, two pull downs where you have a refresh rate on TV of 60 hertz or whatever, and you're throwing 24 frames for second content up there. And you just double the frames.

Right. You do three frames of something and two frames. That's a three, two pull down. Like, that's fine. You're just showing sort of double the frames to match a refresh rate. Then there's a little bit of the AI upscaling that is occurring on TVs right now. Fine. That's weird.

But there's something else happening there that is not this thing where you're like, I'm going to capture this video or I'm going to insert any video into this editor and it will now create a slow motion video. It will actually generate outside of real time other frames. Whereas a TV is like, I'm going to play back this video to you. And in real time, in an ephemeral way, I will throw away this data when I'm done with it, create new detail or create frames in the middle. Like there are very few TVs in the market today

None I think that you can just feed a video signal to And it will create a slow motion video And claim that that is a correct solution So is the difference for you one goes real fast and one goes real slow The difference for me is this thing generates files That you can then pass around as information Whereas a TV is just doing different display tricks In theory if you scroll frame by frame through one of these 120 frames per second videos

You will land on a series of frames that never existed in the world. Yeah, you will land on a series of moments that are entirely generated. Right. And you will not be able to trust those moments. And that trips over some line that, like, it takes the eyes from this photo and the eyes from this photo and the eyes from this photo and puts them all into one photo, because that's where all the eyes looked best.

Like, that at least is those pixels were real and captured and existed in the world. Putting them together is one thing. But with this, you're actually creating something, no pixel. of which was captured in the real world. Yes, 0% of those pictures were captured. I'll just give you an example. It's the NFL playoffs. Was it a catch, right?

Like, here's a real thing that, like, people argue about all the time. Was this a catch? And what do we do? We crop in, we need slow motion. And now we're like, we're going to let a computer decide whether that ball hit the ground.

Somewhere in the middle. And it's going to have to guess where a football went, which is not following a normal trajectory. I feel like that's not going to happen. Why not? Wait, well, I'm sorry. Football fans are going to like, like literally.

I was not convinced until you said that example. They're going to hold up their Samsung phones to the TV, capture the video of the replay, and say, make this slower. And they're going to post that to wherever and argue about a bunch of fake images. Yeah, but are they- Literally fake images. Also, but there's going to be a ref who's going to have a very fancy camera. That's wrong.

Those rest are not. Do I trust in reps too much? That's like just one example. I'll just, it's the lowest stakes example, although given the prevalence of sports betting, also a very high stakes example right now, America. That's just one thing. It's an election year, right? What if, I don't know, Trump stumbles over some stairs or Biden stumbles over some stairs or appears

to stumble over some stairs and a bunch of people on either side want to take video of that and then create a bunch of fake frames where it looks like they stumbled more than they did or they slow it down. And as we know, things in slow motion appear way more dramatic than real time. and you send that out, and now you have a slow motion video, many of the frames of which never happened. Like, that is the apocalypse because people are inclined to trust slow motion video to say what really happened.

In here, there's nothing. There's no, all the stuff we've heard about content authenticity, like, whatever. Samsung's like, what, you can just do it. No watermarks, no cryptographic signature, none of this other stuff. Like, it's just to hear some AI stuff. and just had like heedless. And when I keep saying what is a photo apocalypse is here,

it's like, oh, it's this stuff. Yeah. Where actually the end state is no one trusts any media because they all know how easy it is to generate anything. And then now you're, that's a really weird place to end up. We're getting there really fast, I think, too.

I've, I've just consistently been amazed by how quickly just in my own life people are adopting that sort of reflexive skepticism of like, oh, this is a picture. it's probably fake. It's like the burden of proof is now like prove that it's real, not proof that it's fake. It's very strange.

Right. This is a deep fake. This is just a thing people argue all the time. It feels bad, but also at the same time, if it means we never have to see the shark swimming in the highway water ever again. Oh, you will. It's not that people aren't just going to hit like on social media or there won't be grifters.

Like, if we could get to a place of pure skepticism where that stuff faded, fine. But this stuff is already out there. I'll give you an example during the Kyle Rittenhouse trial, which was in Wisconsin, so I paid attention to it. Kyle Rittenhouse, his lawyers argued that some of the photographic evidence could not be used because the iPhone has AI in it. Right. I think we cover this on the show. And they won.

The local prosecutors in Kenosha, Wisconsin were not ready for that argument. Surprise, surprise. And they were just like, yeah, we're going to exclude this evidence because we're not ready to have a bunch of experts come in here and say, what is a photo? That's years ago. This happened years ago. And now we have Samsung phones that can take any video and interpolate frames that never happened. What are you going to do when that stuff hits a courtroom?

What are you going to do when that stuff when there is like dramatic amounts of money in sports books on the line? And you want to claim that the refs are rigged. Like there's no responsibility here. Like we're just past the point of no return with what is a photo? Because the answer. for a Samsung video is like, these are not, these are not videos that you can trust.

Right. No, I think you're right. And I do think we're pretty clearly past the point of no return on this. And I think we have to figure out what the next thing is, right? Whether it's a watermark, whether it's the cryptographic stuff you're talking about, like, we've been threatening to do the metadata episode for forever. And like, that's the thing. Because it, we're long past the thing where you can straightforwardly trust every single thing that you capture just because it's light projecting onto sensors, right?

Like, we've been past that for a long time. And I think I, this strikes me as, like, I take your point about the football example, which I actually think is a really good one. Like, a ball is moving unpredictably. Literally the camera is going to guess where it went and it's going to get it wrong sometimes. And that's bananas. But I don't know, this doesn't strike me as like an entirely new field of scary stuff in this way. I kind of agree with Nilai in that it does feel like the the bar has been raised on like

this or lowered. The bar has moved significantly in one direction or another depending on your point of view and that it's now so, so much easier to make fake stuff with your phone. Like this phone, the S-24, sure. It's put Photoshop in your pocket in a way that wasn't there before. And Photoshop has often been like that's been a massive tool for misinformation. since its inception. And now anybody can go and they can circle something and get rid of it or they can film something and have a computer decide which way the ball goes. And that just wasn't possible before this.

So it's like really cool stuff. I'm really excited about it from like a personal perspective as someone who likes to make stupid things horrified for it on like a society. Yeah. I also think one of the debates we had around the pixel was there where the sort of ease threshold is because I think, and this is where the Photoshop thing comes in, right? Just because you can do complicated things in Photoshop, it changes it when it is just a button you can press in the camera app on your phone. I think we all agree on that. Yeah. And the thing about this one is it's,

it's going to be just complicated enough to do what you're describing Neelai that I think that might be the reason it bothers me less. It's like, not only do you have to shoot this video, you're going to then have to run it through this process to get you the 120 frames per second thing. you're going to have to find a frame that looks good that was generated, which it usually won't because if you shoot something at 120 fan from a second, each individual frame usually kind of looks like shit. And then you're going to have to take that thing isolated out and then go do something with it. And that, that to me is like more steps than the pick somebody up off a bench and move them over

there, that that second thing actually alarms me more just because it is so simple and straightforward to do that people will do it and a lot. But that's spoken from someone who probably doesn't have like a thousand dollars writing on the next Green Bay Packers game. I don't gamble. I spend all the money on limousines. You know, there's people out there. Who knows who those folks are? But there is like, like, I think the incentives are low enough, probably going to be a low enough for a lot of folks.

Or high enough for a lot of folks that that little extra effort isn't going to be as big an impact for them. And we're seeing the same thing with deep fakes, right? Like deep fakes were something that we kind of could be like whatever. it's it's hard to do and it's gotten so much easier to do a deep fake now. Oh yeah. Do a really good one that that misinformation potential has really skyrocketed it. And it feels like the S-24 brings us to that place in a beautiful package brought to you by Samsung.

That was my Tim Cook impression. That's good work. I think you have to have a sung harder. Samsung, sorry, Samsung. It's like people who say TV. I'm just telling you go listen to it. other little bits and bobs AI wise of the S-24 line Google is bringing a bunch of Gemini model stuff to it

you can now circle stuff to search on the phone which is finally finally used for circling I love that it called Allison out like she tried to get she tried to like cheat it and she's like aha try a picture of like this fake plant you're going to tell me it's real and it's like that's a fake plant it costs $9 and she's like rude

Dude, Google Lens is really good. Like, it's a remarkable part of Google search that I feel like doesn't get talked about as an AI product in the way that it should. It's really good. And they now have the multi-search stuff where you can take a picture and then ask a question about that picture. And the example they gave is like you take a picture of a backgammon board and say, how do I play this game? And it'll figure out that it's backgammon and then use Gemini to tell you how to play backgammon. That stuff is cool. Yeah.

And that's real like future of search stuff. And that's where also the circle search comes in. You're like, oh, I see this bag in a video that seems cool. Circle the bag. Send it to Google by the bag. What's interesting to me, all the generative AI stuff here is either image editing, which comes with its own obvious philosophical dilemmas, or it's like sort of LLM stuff, right?

Like search for something. It'll talk to you about it. There's magic compose and all this stuff in here. The middle piece that Samsung was kind of reaching for with Bixby is not here. Right, which is what we saw with the Rabbit R1 at CS, where it's like, you're telling your phone to do something and it just like does it. And if you will recall, Samsung's attempted differentiation with Bixby, its voice assistant, whose name sounded like a dog wearing shoes, was that you would be like, set some settings. And Bixby would go, like, set some settings for you in a way that Siri and Google Assistant kind of can't. And it's striking to me, they have not closed this loop on that phone.

Because that's what you would expect. Because it wasn't just Rabbit we saw this with. Like a lot of the TV companies were like, we've got AI in our TV. Oh, really? What does it do? It makes your picture prettier. Figures it out. And so you'd think Samsung would do this.

And I'm kind of like, is there something happening with Google and the relationship with Google that's like kind of restricting that? Or is it just they haven't gotten there yet? I think it's just harder work than people reckoned with. Like the idea that I could tell my phone to whatever, turn on Bluetooth, doesn't seem that. hard, but it is actually, it's a leap beyond just understanding what Bluetooth is, right? You have to have a different kind of access to my system and a different kind of access to the tools and the stuff that I actually want to do. And this was the problem with a lot of these things that have come out. First, the tech sucked. Right? Like they had it built in the right direction, but it wasn't very good.

And now we have LLMs, which are much better at understanding what you mean, but are not connected to the metal in the same way. And I think the next phase of this is to put those two things together, right? Like, Google has made a lot of noise about Gemini being built into Android more and more over time. And I'm sure that's coming. But right now, Jam and I is like built into Google photos more than it is built into Android. And so the next phase of that is to just pull it down a level in the stack.

But that's just, it's harder work than it seems like it ought to be. But it is sort of surprising that no one has really gotten there yet. Yeah. And I just haven't closed this loop. It's like, I want you to play this. song. It's going to like click around and Spotify for you. Yeah. This is the device where that actually makes sense. The rabbit, I think, captured a lot of imagination, but that's still what it is doing. Yeah. Yeah. Clicky wheel. Right. What if I just

still had my big screen and great camera? And it could still do that for me. Yeah. I'm eager to see that one closed. Okay. We should take a break. We are just way over. It's just ridiculous show this week. We're going to take a break. We're going to come back with the lightning round. And then we're going to go for another hour or so. We'll be right on. Support for this show comes from Whatnot. Whether you're selling online or out of a storefront, you already know the challenge. You're simply hoping for people to find your listing or waiting for them to walk in. But What Not flips that.

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Claude today at cloud.aI slash vergecast. That's cloud.aI slash vergecast and check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude.aI. slash vergecast. All right, we're back. It's time for a lightning round. I will tell you, Smeg, the obscure refrigerator company that Kranz called out last week, did not sponsor us this week. So now we're just going to name some other companies as we go. I'm going all in on Iowa, which was like a stereo company. Oh, I like that. I didn't know they were around anymore. That's the Sony subbrand. Yeah. Do they get spun off? I don't know if they spun off, but they were, they had a big presence at CES. And Liam and I both were like, they're still around? That was my first stereo. It's a big moment for us.

Well, I've now clicked on a button labeled Iowa Legacy. Oh, they spun off from Sony. Literally, when you click on Iowa Legacy, it says, our company has no association with Sony Corporation. Well then. So you guys, like, come on, get your name out there. Hit us up. Yeah, Lightning Round, sponsored by It Could Be You, Iowa.

Very precious about, you know, disclosures and all that sort of thing. This I will sell. Except in the lightning round. Except in the lightning round. We will sell it to anyone. First come, first serve. All right, Kranz, what's your lightning round? So CNN had a major restructuring this week, and normally that doesn't feel like a Vergecast thing.

But a lot of this restructuring was because they realized people use their phones a lot and they're not watching cable TV as much. And that's a vergey thing. So they are combining all the different news apparatuses or news operations. So that means their digital operations. their TV operation and their streaming operation are all going to be combined into one big mega operation and then they're going to have a spit off of like

what are the other places we can advance ourselves and also we got to figure out the phone that seems really important we should put CNN on phones it's pretty good it's just bundling and unbundling yeah give a few years in every newsroom is going to start to be like we need specific teams for each of these but what's our vision pro strategy like that's we're headed back down

that road before too long. I'm sure of it. So there's some context here. One reason that CNN has always a verge story is that the modern CNN is owned by Warner Brothers Discovery. A company that came into existence from the merger of Warner Brothers and Discovery, surprise, Warner Brothers sold to Discovery by AT&T, a company that used to own CNN. That was cool. They could have had it on the phones. AT&T bought all of Warner Brothers in a pitch that they described as cool. a vision deal. And the vision was that they would preload garbage Warner Brothers apps

onto mid-range Android phones in AT&T stores. This is true. I'm not making this up. Anyway, they sold it to, they sold, they got conned into making a gray scale 4-3 Justice League by Zach Snyder. They sold the whole kit and caboodle to Discovery who installed this guy Chris Licked, who was supposed to revitalize CNN. I would say that was a disaster.

But now they have a new guy, Mark Thompson, who used to be the CEO of the New York Times. He led the big digital transformation there. He hired another executive from the Times. And now they're going to figure out phones. Yeah. It's not like super encouraging that in his memo announcing this big restructuring and their need to focus on phones was he said, I don't think anyone's yet cracked the code on how that translates, truly translates to a new, to a great news experience. That's not kind of what you want to hear from the guy who's like,

we're going to fix things with phones. But he seems to also recognize that he hasn't figured it out yet and he's working on it. So I don't know. I like the honesty. I appreciate the honesty personally. I'm excited. Like, given what he did with the New York Times app, that's honestly one of my favorite apps that I use on my phone pretty much daily, I'm willing to see what happens.

I'm curious. CNN is weird because CNN is on one hand wildly successful. digital. Like CNN.com, however big you think it is, it's much bigger than that. CNN.com is huge. But it doesn't feel sort of crucial

in the way that some other news sources feel crucial. Like the New York Times is in a really good job of making itself like central to the universe. And I think if I'm Mark Thompson, that's probably... Wait, let's thought,

they don't need to know that you feel that way. All right. They're fine. They're doing fine on their own. but and I think the idea that they feel like no one has cracked mobile devices is really interesting because I also kind of feel like that's true everybody just built apps and you can have good apps and push notifications are the best thing anybody has found to get people in but like I now get a push notification from New York Times every time anyone on earth dies it feels like and we're just

in this weird place of like what is the push what is the poll what is the experience supposed to look like is it just a list of articles whenever I open the app like I'm I think it's cool that they're coming at this from the idea that no one has solved this. And the answer is not just like send more push notification so people open our app more often. I don't know what the answer is either, but I think it'll be fun to watch. I mean, if they improve on what AP News does where it sends you a push notification and then you click on it and then they're like, we don't have a story up yet. Here's our front page. Oh, perfect.

My favorite experience with a push notification for news. I'll be happy. Like the bar is kind of low. I think if they put some thought into it and do something cool. Yeah, and especially CNN has gone through this weird thing where there was CNN Plus, where they were going to do a whole big streaming service that died immediately when the Warner Brothers Discovery thing happened. What was it? Was it around for like a couple of weeks? It was around for a week.

Yeah, it was like, it was like a week. And then it got, Zazlov was like, this is stupid and got rid of it. And then now there's CNN Max, which is on Max, the streaming channel. And it has all the things that were CNN Plus was like, we think you'll really like the CNN brand. and we're not going to carry anything over from the channel. Jake Tapper had a book club on CNN Plus. Like, sure. Right.

I don't think that was going to work, but I wish we had gotten to see a little bit more of it play out. CNN Max is like, we're just going to put like CNN on your TV. And I appreciate that as someone who cuts the cord. That's fine. Good. But I think the idea of like,

we're just going to stream a cable channel to your phone and that'll do it is also not the answer. And I think every content company is going to have to come up with some version of that answer. And they're having to do it very quickly. So I think CNN coming at this from like, we are a gigantic digital presence, how do we turn that into TV money? It's going to be really interesting. And I have no idea what it looks like.

Same. All right, David, what's your lightning round? Mine is, so Apple and Epic have been fighting for a very long time. The Supreme Court just declined to hear it. I promise we're not going to talk about this for a long time. So basically what happened is that, that for all intents of purposes is now over. Apple has to allow developers to link to other places that people can pay for apps. But what Apple did is put in rules that say, even if you do that, we're now going to collect

27% of what people buy when they click on the link and go pay you somewhere else instead of 30%. And so all the people who are mad about Apple's 30% tax are now predictably just as mad about Apple's 27% tax when you pay for something else. And it's gone into this fascinating place where it's like Apple has always, said, we don't think this is just a payment processing thing. We think you're paying us 30% for all of the other things that we provide and all the other people who make these apps. At this point, you're paying the money for the right to have an application on their phone. Yeah, no, that's basically right. And Apple would not say it quite like that, but that's basically

the argument. It's our phone. They feel very strongly it's their phone. But all these companies from Epic to Spotify to, you know, everybody else in this coalition for app fairnessmatch.com and all these other folks, they are equally pissed. And so we're just going to have this same fight again with slightly different rules, which is now instead of paying in an app and giving Apple 30%, you pay on the web in an app and you pay 27%. And that is just going to start this whole fight all over again. And I think it's fascinating. Oh, yeah.

So Epic is going, just to walk through the procedural nightmare here. There was the trial, which we covered. Apple won almost all of the claims, except the one California state law claim that basically made their anti-steering provision illegal, the thing where you can't tell anyone else that you can go buy stuff elsewhere. Apple appealed that, Epic appealed that. They got all the way to appealing the Supreme Court, which said, no, we don't want to, we've got other things in our minds. The Supreme Court, ladies gentlemen. That means the case is over, and this one ruling that Apple lost, you cannot have this anti-steering provision. exists and Apple is basically doing what you would call malicious compliance, right?

They have found a way to comply with the letter of the law and absolutely not its spirit by doing this 27% thing. If any purchase happens on the web within seven days of someone clicking that link, you have to audit it. It's crazy. And so Epic is mad and they have said they're going to go back to the trial court and say, this is not what you intended to have happening. Like this cannot be the outcome you anticipated when you wrote that ruling and we'll see what happens. malicious compliance is exactly the correct way to put it it's it's delightful it's so petty it is

ridiculous look i i get that there's like lots of money involved here and but apple is like doing they're doing some stuff that is dangerous for their reputation yeah with apt to developers here with with these games and i oh there's something there's something there's something there's dangerous well and that's happening while like the the whole hey thing that became a fiasco what two summers ago is that was a mini fiasco again this time because Apple rejected Hayes calendar app. There have been rumblings that an antitrust case against Apple is coming sooner rather than later this year. Like the the smoke is pretty ugly when it comes to the Apple versus developers fight at this moment of time. Yeah. We'll see. And it's going to get there we're going to get a

lot more fairly quickly. Which is not great when you have a giant new totally like architecture that you're trying to get people to adopt. Yeah. and develop for. Probably not the best time to piss off all your developers. And by the way, the argument for app developers has always been,

yes, the phone is very valuable. We are the ones who made it valuable. Right. Yeah. Like there's an app for that is a real way that they market the phone. Yeah. We'll see.

Okay. Mine is, I just want to call out Alex Heath interviewed Mark Zuckerberg on the site. That published literally today as we were setting down to tape this episode. Zuckerberg's thing is Beto's pivoting to building AGI, artificial general intelligence.

he's doing that pretty obviously to make sure that meta can compete for talent this is like the thing that all these companies are thinking about that all the hottest talent in the industry is going to go build aGI somewhere or the other and meta wants to be in the game and i just want to call this out um he part of their cell is he's like we have more invidia h one hundreds than anyone they have 340,000 invidia which is nuts and i just think it is incredible we've arrived at a place where the CEO of a company like Meta is like, we have more GPUs than anyone else. You should come work here.

Come play with my GPS. I think that's pretty good. I just, there's a part of me that's like, that's the funniest part of this whole story is part of the pitch is like they've got, they've got more GPUs. We got so many GPUs in this office. You've come right over.

Yeah, pretty good. But you should read the whole thing. There is, you know, Alex rightfully pushed back. He said, look, you just changed the name of the company to meta. Zuckerberg's answer to this. is like it's not the huge change. It's that in the virtual world to connect with other people, maybe you'll be talking to AGI's in virtual characters. I don't know, man, you can go read it yourself. Well, you need to talk to somebody in there and there's not a lot of people.

Yeah, here's a quote. I don't know how to more unequivocally state that we're continuing to focus in reality labs in the metaverse. They're still spending $15 billion a year on it. And Zuckerberg sees the future in which virtual worlds are generated by AI and filled with AI characters that accompany real people. So ready player one. That tracks for me. I really, don't think that is a justification from Zuckerberg. I mean, it's a small one, but I don't think, I don't think the company's saying, we're in on the metaverse and then saying we're in on AI means like a hundred and eighty degree pivot.

To make the metaverse work is going to require a huge amount of really sophisticated AI. I don't know if it involves Tom Brady playing a character who will talk with me in a messaging app. But like, again, I think a thing I've been saying a lot is like, we need more. terms than just AI. We call everything AI and actually AI is a million different things. And having a lot of GPUs you can use to do stuff is going to be pretty useful in the Metaverse. I'm going to start putting how many GPs we have in our checklist. There's like five. It's so good.

1440P. You're going to like it. I agree. I just think the idea that the top line is not still a metaverse is really interesting. Oh yeah. To build a great Metaverse, we need to build basically AGI is a coherent story. We're doing it now is like, there's a little bit of flip floppy. Oh, totally. And he is definitely saying, we're an AI company that is also building the Metaverse,

not we're a Metaverse company that is building AI in order to get there. And that's like, that's the thing you say because the Metaverse has been real bad for your stock price over the last couple of years. And because Apple's about to put out the Vision Pro. Yeah. Which it feels like the next turn. Like,

it's, if you thought we talked to the Vision Pro, so much today. Just wait until we actually get one. Yeah. And we surround ourselves with Iowa speakers and smeg refrigerators. Yeah, when does this thing go on sale? February 2nd? Uh, February 2nd. It's coming. At some point in the near future, we're going to have a lot more to say about this, and I'm sorry in advance. All right. Please send us an email if you think people have heard of VR headsets before. You can address them to David at theverge.com. We would love to know at verge.com. I will respond with Nilai's credit card numbers so you can buy him a vision pro.

That'd be great. If someone wants to stand in line from me or whatever, that'd be amazing. That's it. We have quite a lot to talk about next week. There's just a lot going on. The year is fully kicked off. So we've got to wrap this one up. We'll be back next week.

We'll see you. That's where Chast is back in. And that's it for the Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866 Verge 1-1. The Verge cast is a production of the Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. That's it.

We'll see you next week. Thank you.