Upgrade - 463: Respect the Tripod

Episode Date: June 12, 2023

Jason and Myke discuss their experiences using the Apple Vision Pro and what they're thinking about the product now that they've used it. Also there's a lot of WWDC follow-up, and Jason reviewed new M...acs! And it's all coming to you live from Jason's garage.

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 from relay fm this is upgrade episode 463 today's show is brought to you by express vpn text expander and dark noise my name is mike hurley i am joined by jason snell hi jason hi mike i have a snow talk question for you which comes from Ramon, who asks, what does Apple Park smell like? Well, I mean, it's lots of flowers and stuff. I was going to say it's floral. It smells like outside, whether you're inside or outside.
Starting point is 00:00:36 It smells like outside because they planted all those plants in all those trees, and they circulate all the air sort of through, and then the places we were were basically open to the air because they had opened them up i mean perhaps if you're in a as we were taking one of our golf cart rides i did notice that in further away parts there's just uh just huge swaths of offices and cubicles um right up against the window so they get the light but also it's
Starting point is 00:01:02 sort of like i don't know if it smells like flowers in there. The one place that had a distinct pleasant smell. So where we recorded the last episode was a recording studio based inside of the fitness center, which was across the street from what was being called, I think, like Fieldhouse or something, which is where the Vision Pro demos were, which we didn't know that's what that was on monday when we went up there to record but it was very clear that was what that was right but none of that had happened for either of us at that point right um but the where the podcast studio was is a fitness center and that smelled like a
Starting point is 00:01:40 spa it was amazing in there it smelled so good in there so yeah i i went into the locker room because i had to use the bathroom and the locker room smelled like a locker. It was amazing in there. It smelled so good in there. Yeah, I went into the locker room because I had to use the bathroom and the locker room smelled like a locker room. Okay. Well, that's what, you know, what else would you want? What else would you want? If it smelled like something else,
Starting point is 00:01:51 you'd feel lost. Where am I? Skeuomorphism. I'm looking for the locker room. Smell skeuomorphism. They piped that in. Yeah. If you would like to send in
Starting point is 00:01:59 a Snell Talk question of your own to help open a future episode, just go to UpgradeFeedback.com and do so. Thank you to Upgrading Ramon for sending it in where are we jason snell we are in my office why are we here jason snell well i have a few answers to that question okay one is because you're still in san francisco so we thought we would do a podcast together in person which is our tradition that that is now the tradition yes set after after what was the only good thing of my wwdc experience last year
Starting point is 00:02:26 was getting to record and we've done that i think before when you've been in town or you've stuck around we've tried to do it somewhere in person whenever we're we're nearby we try to do it in person we're inside and not out with the birds this morning because one of my neighbors uh is apparently having uh their roof redone yeah and there were very loud scraping when i started to clean up out there and get it ready to go there were there was were very loud scraping. When I started to clean up out there and get it ready to go, there was a very loud scraping sound and I looked up to discover
Starting point is 00:02:49 five men on my neighbor's roof moving gravel around and stuff like that. We're looking for the summer of fun, not the summer of bad audio. Yeah, exactly. So instead, we are not unprecedented
Starting point is 00:02:59 for Upgrade to have us in my office. And I had James Thompson in my office here before. So it was a little bit of a setup. It's kind of wild. We have a studio audience because Adina is here
Starting point is 00:03:09 and official upgrade video, TikTok video producer Jeremy Burgess here. Yeah, chief video officer. Chief video officer for upgrade, Jeremy Burgess here. Yes, and also,
Starting point is 00:03:20 also with the door open and people in here, dog and cats are roaming freely. That's a little bit wild. Yes. But we'll manage. The studio audience is more animals today than humans?
Starting point is 00:03:32 It depends on whether the second cat will make an appearance. I doubt it. I think it's going to be even. In fact, right now, one cat has left. Okay. So the balance has been restored. Audience two, animals one. Upgradeyourwardrobe.com.
Starting point is 00:03:48 We didn't get to spend a lot of time talking about this last episode because we were at a pressing time limit of a ticking clock the whole time. So we were like getting ready, getting to it. Yes, indeed. We have a selection of t-shirts
Starting point is 00:04:02 available for your perusal. They are only available until the 16th of June. So that is the end of this week. So you have until the end of this week to pick up one of or all three Summer of Fun designs. We have the returning Summer of Fun 2021 design, which is the Summer of Fun artwork. We have the dongle town surf club team making its return and the introduction of a fantastic new design of the thunderbolt dock surf shop thunderbolt dock thunderbolt dock it's a place it's a place it's a dock in dongle town yeah it's right on the water obviously it's a dock i think it's sort of like a wood pier that kind of oh definitely and then
Starting point is 00:04:41 there are shops and one of them is a surf shop. And you see their shirts all over town, as you do with these surf shop shirts. Because people support the local surf shop. Yeah, or visitors to town buy it as a souvenir. Yeah, and you can too, by going to upgradeyourwardrobe.com. You only have a few days left to do so, so we really would love it if you checked us out. This design is very good. I like it a lot, and it's also, I like the t-shirt colors a lot. They are very summery.
Starting point is 00:05:06 Yes, indeed. There's a yellow and a pink and they're nice. And there's a neutral for people who don't want to commit to a color. Yeah, exactly. That's fine. So go check it out right now. This is the last time we can tell you. So if you do want them, you have to go get them because it's done at the end of this week.
Starting point is 00:05:21 And there's upgradeyourwardrobe.com. We also mentioned last time that we were being filmed. The entire episode was filmed last week, which it was. We had some clips that went up on our various channels. Yes. But we also put the entire episode on YouTube. So Upgrade now has a YouTube channel. A YouTube channel, yeah.
Starting point is 00:05:40 We have no plans right now to do this entire recordings of the show. Who knows? Who knows? Right? Because we're experimenting with video. But Apple had a director there who was switching. There were eight people. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:05:55 We record ourselves. Now, we're actually doing it today. I have some tripods. I have a tripod that I've had since the 80s that's being used with an iPhone on it. We're recording this to do our little clips. Is that tripod older than me? When were you born? 88.
Starting point is 00:06:09 Oh, yeah. It's older than you. Yeah, for sure. I must respect my oldest. Yes, indeed. Respect the tripod. And so we're doing that sort of like in our usual way. But the difference is we could turn every episode into a video episode if we wanted to, but somebody would have to direct it.
Starting point is 00:06:28 At least after the fact, you could do a, uh, a multi, uh, until AI becomes a director. Yeah, we could do an AI. Which is like a legit thing that we might do in the future. Well, I mean, having, uh, you could base it even on the, um, on the audio, right? Who's talking, it switches to that one. Although you'd miss some of the, for people who've seen the video clips which we post on tiktok and instagram and on mastodon and we'll presumably start on our youtube channel might as well those little fun clips i edit those and i am actually like editing in funny reaction shot like there's a moment where i say something and you just start
Starting point is 00:06:58 laughing and you're silent but you're you're laughing you do a good job and i want to cut that back in because it's funny like ai is gonna have to advance further in order to do that but i think it could though it could it could because that's a combination of like audio and some kind of facial recognition analysis so and the beauty of it is uh we're sticking with our commitment to not seeing each other other than now when we actually are seeing each other but not not seeing each other when we record so you could still do a video episode of upgrade if you wanted to, that wouldn't affect the audio episode quality, but it's just, it's not on our, on our real to-do list. But it's, we've opened the door now. So who knows?
Starting point is 00:07:35 Who knows? And, and, um, did you notice that, that, uh, John Gruber has been posting little, uh, Tik Tok clips from the talk show? I saw that. I will note one of the funniest things that happened last week which we didn't mention in time so we had all these people right so there were like three camera operators a couple of sound engineers and directors like the whole thing before we start someone came out with a clapper and went upgrade take one and i had to have all of i i sent you a frame yes of right after that where i can see that thought passing through your mind well i had to have all of... I sent you a frame of right after that
Starting point is 00:08:05 where I can see that thought passing through your mind. Where I had to restrain myself so much from laughing because it's like, how many takes are we going to get? And also on that frame, it actually says,
Starting point is 00:08:16 they wrote down, upgrade, take one. Take one. It's on the frame. And that was just hilarious to me. We could have got halfway through and be like, sorry, gang. Take two.
Starting point is 00:08:24 We're going to start again. Let's go start from the top, sorry, gang. Take two. We're going to start again. Let's go step from the top. We messed this whole thing up. We're going to start again. So you can go and get that. I'll put a link in the show notes. If you want to just see what it looked like, it was a really great set that they put together.
Starting point is 00:08:33 And the quality of the image is so good. And they did such a good job directing the thing. This will be done live. Honestly, they shot it in 4K, and our drive wasn't big enough to take that file. So we just did it in 1080. You don't need it in 4K. my our drive wasn't big enough to take that file so so we're we're uh we just did it in 1080 you don't need it in 4k it was uh yeah it was pretty awesome if you enjoy this show and you would like more of it you should subscribe to upgrade upgrade plus you will hear no ads you'll
Starting point is 00:08:55 get bonus content every week you go to getupgradeplus.com and you can sign up this is kind of around the time jason where when we started so we're getting a lot of annual renewals now so thank you so much to people that have stuck around with us for another year we really appreciate you uh in today's episode we're going to talk about the fact that we unexpectedly went to a baseball game yesterday oh excellent we'll talk about that so it was wwc's wwc's done now uh there are a couple of tidbits that i wanted to talk about with you, Jason, that I saw floating around, some things that were of interest to me. One is just reminders in general. Apple was very much leveled up reminders this year. There were two things that caught my eye,
Starting point is 00:09:36 and they're kind of both based around the idea of being able to put sections in your reminders list, so you could have a list, you could have a bunch of sections in it. One of them now is you could create these sections yourself, and then instead of viewing them just have a list, you could have a bunch of sections in it. One of them now is you could create these sections yourself. And then instead of viewing them just as a list, you can view your reminders kind of list as a Kanban board broken down into these sections. Yeah, the reminders notes teams are killing it. They're on fire right now. And so that is very exciting to me.
Starting point is 00:10:00 So Adina and I use Trello for managing some of our home projects. And I think it would be nicer to use Reminders because we have to-dos sometimes on these Trello things. I feel like it's too heavyweight. But if we could have them as lists but also as a Kanban board, that is fantastic. They call it columns. Yeah. Column view. I had never heard Kanban until a couple of years ago, but,
Starting point is 00:10:25 um, back in the day when I started a Mac user and even the first few years at Mac world, that's actually how we did the whole magazine. There was literally a board with three by five cards. It's part of sprint. And it would move, it would move along the board from,
Starting point is 00:10:39 you know, article not in two pages finalized. So you'll be able to do that now. And remind us reminders thank goodness i just started a magazine yeah easy easy so what i like about that though is it is more than just this thing is done or not done it can be moving through a process so in reminders i like that as an idea of well it's not completed yet but it's moved forward in a stage so you could do that but also with these columns apple is doing machine learning that if
Starting point is 00:11:07 you have a grocery list in reminders it automatically categorizes groceries based on produce type right so you'd be like if you had carrots and apples and meat it would categorize them as fruit and vegetables and some kind of meat poultry in your shopping list for you so it's easy when you're going for the supermarket right so i use any list for a shopping list and it does that right this is a this is a thing but they've like built that in to uh but it's cool to just be in reminders right because that's the idea is that if you're going there then it's sort of going to be vaguely sorted by where it is in the store yeah exactly yeah you're talking about notes the big thing that everybody's excited
Starting point is 00:11:45 about of apple notes is you can now link between notes yes apple notes and this can be done two ways there is a button in the text pop-up menu so if you do like the text selection you can do link to note but also if you type two greater than symbols it pops up the ui now that i like that specifically because that feels like it's very much observing the way that people work, right? Like Obsidian and all of these things have some kind of text command. It's like two open brackets or something. It doesn't do like the wiki style linking in the way of like you can't if you go to one, you don't get a link to go back to the other automatically. But you could do it yourself.
Starting point is 00:12:21 But I just like this is a simple thing. There have been times where I've had a note and like I say, it's like a travel note. I would also like the link to the passport note that I keep in Apple Notes. Well, I could just link those two together and it's just easier to jump between one and the other. This is, I think they've done this the right way.
Starting point is 00:12:38 There were a lot of people that wanted this kind of feature and I was concerned that it was going to make Apple Notes too complicated. Right, but this is the quintessential Apple way, right? everybody's like oh are they sherlocking uh obsidian or things like that it's like well no because they're not going to make it that powerful like the their idea of a power user feature is a couple of greater vans to make a quick link not to build an entire automatic back linking system yeah and who knows where the future goes yeah i could see them doing a shortcut to bring up your backlinks so that you could do that To build an entire. Automatic back linking system. And who knows where the future goes. Yeah I could see them doing a shortcut.
Starting point is 00:13:07 To bring up your back links. So that you could do that yourself. But like this is very Apple. It's like they want to. Okay a couple years ago. I asked them about this. Because I said. Wouldn't it be natural.
Starting point is 00:13:16 To do notes linking. And they said. We like it as an idea. But the question is always. How do you make it something. That they have an idealized user? They're thinking of the general user of iOS. It's like, how do we make it so that the generalized user will find value in it? It's not the same as saying, how do we make it so that we don't want
Starting point is 00:13:40 power users to be happy, right? That's not what they're saying. And their idealized user is not, it's somebody who uses third-party apps and wants a little bit more but they're not necessarily a superpower user i'm sure they've got like a set of users that they think of yeah but the key that they were trying to give us was we're we're thinking about it but we want to approach it in a way that's the right level for us the right level of complexity for our users and this is the result after all that time. Have you heard about the game porting toolkit? I have.
Starting point is 00:14:09 I have heard about it. It's basically crossover from CodeWeavers, which is an open source. CodeWeavers posted a note saying something like, we see that Apple is using our open source tool. Hooray. But I get the sense too that it's sort of like, oh, we got bitten by the open source and Apple has just taken it and is using it too. It's based on wine. So the idea is it's emulating Windows APIs so you can more quickly, if you're developing a PC game or a PC port of your console game.
Starting point is 00:14:36 I love this because I've seen a lot of discourse about Apple not getting games and gaming on the Mac being irrelevant. And, you know, I get it. I mean, there are very few people like Peter Cohen, who I used to work with and used to do Mac games all the time. He knows more about this than I do, but like I have a long track record of seeing Apple sort of say that they cared about Mac games and not ever going anywhere. Like, believe me, I look at this though, and I think Apple putting an effort into, because they've got Apple Silicon and because the horsepower is so good. Yes. Apple putting an effort in saying, you know, Mac gaming may be huge, but what we would like is to make it easy for people who are going to PC to say, well, why don't we also put it on Mac?
Starting point is 00:15:21 And they said at the talk show with John Gruber, they had the perspective, which I thought was good, which is there are more Macs out there than ever. And today, because of Apple Silicon, every Mac that's Apple Silicon is powerful enough to run PC games. So really what you want to do if you're Apple is not evangelize, like make a Mac only game or use metal natively. I mean, those are all great, but those are probably coming from the iOS side. It's can we make it so much easier for you to just commit to saying on Mac and PC instead of on PC? And will they succeed at that?
Starting point is 00:15:58 I don't know, but they might. Or even more, when they say it's on Steam, there's no asterisk anymore. If it's on Steam, you can run itsterisk anymore right if it's on steam you can run it and you can run on the mac and so i've seen some performance uh kind of charts from people that like a couple of youtubers i've seen put some stuff together and there are some games where on the right hardware like on an m2 especially you're hitting more than enough frame rate and this is not actually ported games people that are running this stuff yeah so like these aren't there's still an emulation going right the goal the goal with this kit which i think
Starting point is 00:16:30 is clever is they're using wine yeah to it's almost like well here's where it runs unmodified and then i imagine if you're a developer you kind of triage it and say uh what are the things we need to do to make it shippable on mac and And this is Apple saying, you know, it's okay for you to bring your PC game to the Mac. We're not mad at you if you have aspects of it that are using Wine, essentially, to take your Windows APIs that you rely on and run it on the Mac. We're not too proud about that. It's okay. And our hardware is good enough that we can handle it. And they're doing some work to translate things to metal.
Starting point is 00:17:05 And, you know, that's great. So I think that there's a lack of, well, let me rephrase that. I think there's humility going on here that maybe you don't expect to see from Apple, but for games, you just have to be. I think clearly somebody at Apple has become a realist in saying, we're going to make an effort to make it so that if somebody is making a game for windows, it will be easy to come to the Mac and that our, our Mac market is bigger than it used to be and more capable than it used to be.
Starting point is 00:17:37 And so put those things together. I don't think the Mac's going to ever become top rated triple a gaming platform. Right. But like all they really need, like you said, with Steam, with a lot of developers is just like, oh, there's a path for us to just do a little bit of work and say it's PC and Mac instead of just PC. I think that's the best Apple can hope for, but I think that's actually pretty good. My expectation is there is someone inside of Apple that runs gaming or mac gaming or whatever right and they have been emboldened by the power of apple silicon to finally put together a plan yes that like they are now able to go to their bosses and their higher ups and be like look
Starting point is 00:18:16 we now have power to spare please right can we move this forward and i wonder if they had to get past some not invented here syndrome right which is like they should just use the metal apis why are they using windows why would we encourage metal right like that's the goal but we need to give people the ability to run this is i think it was even in the state you know i did a session about it where they're like they were showing a demo of like okay you're running it in the toolkit but you can see where you're losing some frames so then you can use metal to optimize that particular part of the game and get it good enough to get it good enough to ship and so like that it's like this idea of of you can do both and somebody got empowered at apple to say it's okay right i think that's the
Starting point is 00:18:59 the key there's somebody unlocked something where they're like you know what it doesn't matter if they're using windows apis for some of this uh it matters that it's on the mac stage manager on the ipad seems good now and this is my biggest surprise for wwc because it was a year-over-year improvement where they addressed most of the complaints yeah so just the top level uh obviously federico did a great write-up which i was actually watching him write using stage manager while he was writing it which is one of the great things about wwdc uh windows now have more sizing and placement options so you have more flexibility ever but how big the windows are and where they can go yeah i i had the room my rant about this was why do you give us windows and then not let us put them where we want?
Starting point is 00:19:46 Yeah. And I had somebody say, hey, Jason, that thing where you've got one big window in the center and then another one off to the side, you can do that now. And I tried it and you can totally do that now. And that's what I wanted is like, if I want one window in the middle and one on the side,
Starting point is 00:19:59 I don't want the system saying, what you really want is two windows side by side. It's like, that's not what I want. So you can do that now. You can basically completely overlap one window over top of another which is fantastic it's yeah they they i don't know what i don't know why it took a year but yeah they did it my expectation is the person there is a person who had a very particular view of how this should be done. And maybe that person is not on that project anymore. Because this is fundamentally different. Or potentially there was a designer
Starting point is 00:20:32 who said, this is my vision for it. And now it's in the hands of the product team. And that they were like, yeah, we're not going to do that. There is so much change here that I would expect that there has been some kind of opinion that has had to change. Because realistically, this could have happened before now. Right. I think either somebody left or somebody changed their mind. Somebody was finally convinced that this is what the users want.
Starting point is 00:20:55 There's been some kind of big opinion change. But what I like here is this is an obvious they have listened to what people were saying. I do wonder why they couldn't have done this during the ios 16 beta cycle like i don't know but they didn't but it's done now honestly i think they were stamping on a bunch of bugs right i think that maybe they said why don't we save this feature change for 17 and focus our 16 releases on getting it to be more stable i would have maybe questioned if they decided that during the period that they should have held it they just shouldn't have shipped stage manager
Starting point is 00:21:30 and i was 16 on the ipad if a year later they were actually going to make it what it should have been but anyway this we've had this conversation a million times i think they were midstream i think they were midstream and if you're in january and you're saying well we can do this thing i can see a manager saying why don't we put that in 17 and just spend the next few months fixing more bugs in 16. But one of the things that iPad version of State Manager has that I need to try and confirm that the Mac has
Starting point is 00:21:53 because I want this big time. If you shift click on an app icon anywhere, it opens in your current stage from the dock, from spotlight, and that's something the Mac doesn't do. So like if I shift click an icon on ventura it just opens in its own window and i would like because that would stop my finder problem right where opening finder means i'm in a new stage which doesn't make any sense right so i really
Starting point is 00:22:15 hope that that's on the mac too but they put that on the ipad which is fantastic so uh ios this is something that that we wanted and this was sent to us by Chase. iOS 17 has the option to automatically delete verification messages. So like the two-factor codes, you can now choose that once you've filled them, they're just removed. This also includes, which is now a new feature in iOS 17, email. So I'm assuming you have to use mail. My hope is that maybe if you have your accounts in there,
Starting point is 00:22:45 it might work, but I wonder if mail needs to be open. I don't know. But also, if you get a code by mail, you can now fill it in. I hate codes by mail so much. But it'll also now delete that email. So that's like a great twofer. And one that I wanted to mention,
Starting point is 00:22:59 because I think it's really interesting, because we're talking about standby, and we're talking about FaceTime continuity camera, and how it seemed to appear that at some point in the future now this is all going to come together into a new apple product for the home there is now something called dock kit which is for motorized iphone stands to use if you're using the camera it can now integrate with a dock to follow you around and so apple was building that feature right to ios it used to be like you'd have to open the dji app if you had like one of the dji
Starting point is 00:23:31 things and and then it would use its own facial tracking and it would move itself around and this is just like the idea here is there's a standard api everybody can build motorized iphone mounts you put an iphone in it and it will just talk to the camera and follow you around. And you can set that remotely. And that's pretty cool. This episode of Upgrade is brought to you by Dark Noise. Do you struggle to sleep in silence? Or maybe you just need a hand on focusing more intently with your work.
Starting point is 00:24:03 If any of this is true for you, you need Dark Noise, the white noise app for iPhone, iPad, and the Mac. It has a delightfully intuitive design and best-in-class system integration for Apple platforms. Dark Noise will play soothing, infinitely looping sounds to help you sleep, focus, and relax. Indie developer Charlie Chapman, who I actually spent some time with at WWDC this past week.
Starting point is 00:24:26 Charlie's a great guy. And we were talking a lot about all of the new stuff. And of course, he's getting ready to put whatever he can into the next version of Dark Noise to support all of Apple's upcoming iOS changes. Charlie works incredibly hard to make Dark Noise the best platform citizen on Apple devices. And that's exactly what I'm talking about.
Starting point is 00:24:44 It is loaded with features such as rich shortcut support, highly customizable home screen and lock screen widgets. I look forward very much actually to the lock screen widgets in Dark Noise, hopefully getting some interactivity in the future, so I can play my Dark Noise sounds right from the home screen. Plus AirPlay and Siri support. It has iCloud syncing and so much more. Dark Noise also has a sleep timer to automatically fade your sound out and a unique feature called Mix Audio. This is the really powerful stuff where you can take multiple different types of Dark Noise sounds and mix them together with themselves and audio from other apps such as Apple Music or Overcast.
Starting point is 00:25:20 So you could be listening to Thunder Noise on a plane while also listening to your podcast if that's what you want to do. Dark Noise is free to download today with eight unique sounds, and you can upgrade to Dark Noise Pro to unlock over 50 sounds and build your custom mixes for infinite possibilities. Exactly. Thank you, Jason. That's what it would sound like if you had Dark Noise if you wanted to do that. Dark Noise Pro also includes many premium app themes, custom app icons, including some that listeners of this show may recognize. To download Dark Noise for free today, go to darknoise.app or search Dark Noise in the App Store. That is darknoise.app or darknoise in the App Store. Our thanks to Dark Noise for their support of this show and all of relay fm thank you very much when we recorded this time last week we were kind of pre vision pro we are now post vision we are to catch up gradients on up on this we have both experienced the apple vision pro try on thing thing you wrote a great article i would like to direct people to an episode of
Starting point is 00:26:27 cortex that i put out excellent thank you so much where my goal for that episode uh was to go chronologically through what that entire experience is like i was hoping to kind of try and bring people along with me yeah it was good i mean it's amplified by the fact that um cgp gray is like giggling so excited throughout yeah it's amazing i'm fact that CGP Grey is like giggling. So excited. Throughout. It's amazing. I'm very proud of that episode.
Starting point is 00:26:48 But we have now, not only have we experienced the Apple Vision Pro, it's now been, you know, best part of a week since. Yes. I've been able to get it out of my mind. I've been thinking about it constantly. I keep wanting to reach out to a window and move it. Why not, right? it out of my mind i've been thinking about it constantly i keep i keep wanting to reach out to a window and move it why not right i mean that that that it just felt so natural like oh my god i just grabbed the window by the bottom and and move it and it's amazing it it's i feel like so this is an issue we you know we went to see the talk show and john was having the same problem that i've just experienced now this is a very hard thing to talk about when you're talking about how it makes
Starting point is 00:27:29 you feel right because it is a very personal experience and and it's hard i think hard to get across the challenge is you're talking to people who haven't experienced it and how do you get that uh visceral reaction over to someone else with words because it really is a sensory experience. So it's very hard. I would say, I want to preface this by saying what has struck me the last few weeks, but certainly after experiencing it for myself, that there are two conversations to be had about this product. And what frustrates me is that people want to conflate the two conversations. Because there's what the product is as a piece of technology.
Starting point is 00:28:17 The Apple Vision Pro. The Apple Vision Pro. And then there's the business story, which is, did Apple make a mistake in investing seven years in this? They spent a lot of money. Is it ever going to be successful? Is it ever going to sell millions of units? Are people going to want it?
Starting point is 00:28:32 Is the price too high? All of which are not unreasonable questions. Having a conversation about business strategy, we talk about business strategy at Apple all the time. I think it's really interesting. And honestly, I think the jury's still out about whether this product will find an audience. I've seen some people who are like, oh, just for watching movies, it's going to be a huge hit. And I'm like, single people can watch at a time and it's $3,500. I see people making assumptions in that direction.
Starting point is 00:28:59 I also see people making assumptions and saying, this is going to be a failure. It's already a failure. That's an interesting conversation to have. I think the most interesting conversation to have right now, having seen this, having had it unveiled and having experienced it is the product part, but they're both valid conversations to have. They're different. What I know, and I think what you know, having had this experience, and I know six months before it comes out, it's a wired up demo.
Starting point is 00:29:27 It's only the stuff they were comfortable to show us. Although I will say it was in a much better state than when I touched the iPhone in January of 2007. What I haven't seen out there is a lot if you experience the product or even if you look at the feels like this is Apple very carefully imagining their whole platform and building an incredible piece of hardware and having a vision, no pun intended, of like what this product should be. And it's really coherent. It's incredibly well executed.
Starting point is 00:30:19 Some of the technology is mind boggling. And so I came away thinking this is one of the best things apple has ever created yes which is not me saying i think it's going to be a huge hit and everybody's going to want it and everybody's going to be wearing these things in in two years or something like that i think the jury's still out on all of that i think it's worth having that separate conversation but like i what what frustrates me is when we have these conversations about this really remarkable product and they get short-circuited by people saying, eh, $3,500, nobody wants it, whatever. And it's like, okay, it can be both, right? It can be both.
Starting point is 00:30:59 But if we just look at the tech, it's amazing. I have yet to find a piece that anybody has produced who has experienced this thing who is not universally positive about it. There are questions. I have questions. You have questions. It was not a perfect experience for me. My demo failed at a certain point. And it's heavy. The way that I've described it is,
Starting point is 00:31:20 I don't know if this is heavier than other headsets that I've used, but it reminds me of AirPods Max. They are usable. I wear them, but it reminds me of AirPods Max that like they are usable. I wear them for long, long periods of time, but I know they're heavier than everything else on the market. And this is the same. But like, here's my question to you. Are you happy to pay $3,500 for this thing? It's hard because this is our business, right?
Starting point is 00:31:42 So of course I'm going to pay $3,500 for this. Let's say, well, let me say you're gonna pay that but like you would never write about it like having the experience that you've had do you want to own that thing for three and a half grand like i'll i'll tip my hand and say yes yeah yes this is one of those things where like i know that is so much money yes but it's worth the money like i I have used the MetaQuest Pro, which is basically half the price. Right. This is like 20 times the experience in quality.
Starting point is 00:32:11 I was going to take it from the other angle, which is I've watched a movie on the MetaQuest 2, which is terrible quality. It's super grainy and low quality. But even there, the 3D, having that immersive response to watching a movie or to be in a different place, even there, it's really good. And then this thing is just at another level for all of that stuff. So yeah. Now, this is us talking as technology enthusiasts, right? So for us, it's not too
Starting point is 00:32:43 surprising that we might say yes, but i was like yeah i don't know and then i saw it and i was like oh my god this is one of those things where at that price point where we were talking about it before where i was like that's gonna sting yeah but now i'm i i can't wait let me have it let me have it and like i know it's a lot of money, but it's the price of a computer. It is. Also, I would say, if you look at what a Lisa or an original Mac cost in today's dollars, they were really expensive. A lot of stuff has gotten cheaper because it's in volume and they've really optimized things. This is a brand new thing. It's very expensive.
Starting point is 00:33:20 It is. It is. And it won't. I would even go so far as to say, I don't think it will become successful as a product line if the only way you can get one is to spend $3,500. Oh, definitely. But if you're an early adopter, you know, I don't look at it, and this goes back to my other point about the quality of the product. I do not look at this and say, oh, for $3,500, you're buying a lemon. You're not. You're buying a really kind of remarkable product regardless of whether it becomes, again, the business
Starting point is 00:33:48 conversation. It's a separate conversation. And again, it's like, just experiencing the things that I experienced in that demo, if I spent $3,500 and had no third-party apps, I'd still be happy. Because as a way to watch movies, unbelievable. As a way to
Starting point is 00:34:04 just browse the web and like it's just comfortable and beautiful like we sound mad i know talking about this well i would say ergonomically i think it is a better experience if you're sitting on a couch than using a laptop for example yeah right yeah because you're not hunched over you're not hunched over looking down you're just you're in a relaxed position and yes you have to have neck strength right like that's the thing that we're all going to be building right because i think it might have been underscore was saying it's like how all the f1 drivers they like focus on their neck strength and you see them doing all these like neck exercises you're gonna be doing that you know invest in a good pillow but this is again
Starting point is 00:34:40 it's like why is it like 500 why is it called pro because this is the top end of a product line that we don't know the bottom end of that they can't make the bottom end of right no and like mark german was talking about like 2025 is still the goal and like by that point we'll understand what is the core of the experience right we don't know that yet like what features can you remove because german said the the front facing screen with the eyes is a cannot be removed feature which i thought was a little bizarre but i understand philosophically but like if you look at what apple is pitching this product as their framing is around it not being a um closed-in experience yes And that is, I think,
Starting point is 00:35:25 a lot of what makes this product super good is it's not that closed-in experience. I mean, it can be if you want it to be, but this is the... I know we talked about this last week a little bit, but you've got to think about this. This product does everything that every other VR product does.
Starting point is 00:35:43 Yep. Except when they're talking to developers, then there's all this detail about immersion. Yep. And how you can go from a shared space to basically like a full screen mode, which is like your space, to immersion where you control the whole world, right? They have that capability, which is important.
Starting point is 00:36:00 It's all there, but they don't want to emphasize it. This is an AR first product. And so like the idea of that screen on the front is about making sure people are aware of you you're aware of people and they have all these sensors to allow for that like which is further showing what the future of this product line is to be which is not this closed-in thing i think ideally for them they don't get rid of the eyes now because in future there'll be no screen there. Right? Right.
Starting point is 00:36:28 In the long, in the long term. That is clear. It may be that the eyes are, you know, are not, are not as good or it may just be,
Starting point is 00:36:33 like I said, I think one way to frame it is they just can't make that product yet. And when it, when they can, they will keep as much of this stuff as they can and price it lower.
Starting point is 00:36:41 And it probably won't be $300, right? Even the low end one is not going to be like that. They'll also learn, they'll learn they'll learn they'll learn that like oh we don't actually need that sensor right no that do you need eight cameras rather than 12 like once you've got use once you have data people using these things can you get away with dropping this sensor and dropping that sensor could you you know like for example one of the things that i was told by the product manager by the way did you you go out and speak to the product manager afterwards?
Starting point is 00:37:07 Yes, I talked to Bob Borchers. Did you? Yeah. I spoke to somebody else who I'd not met before, who worked on the team. And I found that so difficult to ask questions after having that experience. My brain was like just full. And I just was really struggling to ask things. I was reminded of when I had my original iPhone demo, which again, it was like six months before it came out.
Starting point is 00:37:31 And they handed me the phone and wanted to have a conversation with me about the product while I was using it. And they would ask me questions, or I would try to ask them questions. It was like, blah, blah, blah. That's what I was like. Because I was so focused on the product this was a little bit better because at least i got to do the product and then talk to them but yeah even then they knew they knew that everybody was coming out there a little dazed and amazed and yeah exactly it was kind of funny as hands like is everybody doing this like and it's like yeah everybody's doing this but one of the things
Starting point is 00:38:02 that we were talking about was uh the fact that the they have an infrared flood illuminator in this thing so you could use it at night well maybe that's the thing you wouldn't have in a cheaper model right right oh yeah so you got night vision yes these are night vision so you could use them in the dark and it would still catch all of the finger movements which i will also say hands up like i was like i didn't think this was going to work right the eye tracking and the hand control because the quest or at least the quest 2 everything else doesn't work that well
Starting point is 00:38:29 I was playing with the quest 2 in a back bedroom here and it was at sunset and at one point the quest 2 was like it's too dark now I can't use you can't do this anymore but before I tried this thing I was like I'm not sure if they can make this work oh they've made that work I'm still not sold on the gaming story the idea of showing like oh hey just play a playstation
Starting point is 00:38:49 controller that's not immersive you've broken the immersion i my gut feeling is that they will have an mfi essentially program for controllers that will work with the vision pro if you want precise gaming i don't think they're going to make it themselves but i think they will make that uh spec that's available for people who want to build essentially like meta quest hand controllers or sony hand controllers for this thing they also again imagine if they if they announced that last week they would be first off it's muddying the message um it is saying something they don't offer and they're highlighting out like a a limitation they're taking the focus away from their hand tracking prowess which they're very proud of
Starting point is 00:39:37 so i would expect they would like people over the next six months to make hand tracking focus games like that's what they would prefer yeah because and look i'm not particularly opposed to it as such because maybe it allows for a different type of game to be made i think they'll also talk to developers of existing vr titles and say can you can you do this here well let's try to use our tech and that will indicate whether how highly they have to prioritize letting third party hand tracking or third party input stuff come to it because yeah if you can't i mean if you can play beat saber by just holding up your hand and and waving it around you probably could beat saber is what you could do and like you could even if you wanted hold on to something probably and it wouldn't
Starting point is 00:40:21 you know if you wanted to but beat saber you is the biggest game and that is probably the easiest to bring with hand tracking i would think so but there are a lot of experiences that wouldn't translate but maybe it's not important maybe like this is maybe what we're going to learn but but i can also see them saying okay um there is a certain percentage of these games that are super intense and for those you buy a controller and and you you don't have to it doesn't have to be a playstation controller it can just it can be a hand a special vr controller and here's our api for that yeah yeah but you know gaming was an asterisk in their kind of presentation as such like they were focusing more on like something we didn't speak about too much and it's a phrase that i'm trying to like integrate into my lexicon the same as vision pro which i keep messing up is spatial computing yes
Starting point is 00:41:09 that's how they focus this it's not a vrar device as such it's a spatial computer yeah spatial computing is the idea of having windows in your world that you can see and interact with whilst also still being able to see past to the fireplace in front of you to be able to have this huge window up and look down and read what's on your ipad like the idea of these i don't want to say ambient because it's more active but it's like this idea of there is computing just occurring around you that you can bring your mac into this world they did confirm by the way it's one screen one screen for the mac which i do think is fine because of the way it works i was always imagining that maybe if you use the mac that was all you could use but if you can use the mac in conjunction with uh the the
Starting point is 00:42:02 vision os apps and i really hope they have some kind of great continuity stuff where you could drag from the Mac to... Oh, yeah, right. You feel like they've got to be able to do that. Makes sense, yeah. At that point, that works great for me. You have a huge screen for your Mac, and then all of your other apps around you.
Starting point is 00:42:18 It's a little like working with a Mac where you've got an iPad next to you that's got some stuff on it. I mean, in the long run... Supercharged. In the long run, I would love the idea of being able to bring up a mac and have it show you like the other spaces i have no doubt that there'll be a developer that will make that up yeah i just i think that at some point apple will need to well we'll if that's going to happen that apple will do it and i think
Starting point is 00:42:39 that could be very interesting i also have that moment where i think to myself at some point maybe this thing will just run the mac on it i mean they don't have the capability to do that right now they're obviously pushing this thing to the limit um when they have spare power in the future right like right then yes in theory it could do that but maybe hey maybe they maybe we won't care about mac os maybe not maybe vision os is the future right like we don't know right now i definitely saw a take that said this seems like more almost more like a mac replacement than anything else and i think that there's something to that yes i think it's not for everybody but you could almost view it as being somebody and i i
Starting point is 00:43:19 forget who there's so many so many takes lots of takes uh somebody said it's almost like a really smart display sure and there's something it is that it's a lot of other things too but it is that and if working like okay we're in my office here i i am a person who works leaving the animals aside for a minute if it's possible uh i am working alone all day in an office. I could see a scenario where instead of having my studio display, I used a virtual display with the Vision Pro. I'm not saying I would do that. It would be a thing that I would definitely test. When I review this, presumably next year, that would be a thing that i would test but i could see it as a possibility of having that you know it wouldn't be the same if i was uh we're you know interacting i
Starting point is 00:44:11 think one of the challenges here is that it is a still a solitary device even with the pass-through and they they pushed it a little bit but like the bottom line is lauren and i are not going to be watching movies together on this thing because you can't uh you'd have to buy two and then they would and then share play and stuff like that it's a it's a single user experience in that way but i have a lot of my time that is single user when i'm focused on my work and the idea of being able to work in my office or drop it down and be in an environment but have my macs and have apps and and do all of that kind of thing i i can see that as a potential use case. Not necessarily the use case,
Starting point is 00:44:49 but I can definitely see it as a possibility extending my Mac. Still using my Mac, but having it be a part of a larger thing. And the hotel rooms and airports and stuff like that where it's like you don't have the room and you don't have your setup.
Starting point is 00:45:03 That's also really interesting. We don't know what it's like to use for an extended period of time. you don't have the room and you don't have your setup, that's also really interesting. We don't know what it's like to use for an extended period of time. We don't. Because I know that if I use any VR headset currently for more than a couple of hours, I don't feel great. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:45:14 And while this was very comfortable for that half an hour we used it, you know, I left it feeling strange, but I think I was just overwhelmed. Mine, for the record, mine was not comfortable the entire time. I had intense pressure on my forehead the entire time. I couldn't get it to balance.
Starting point is 00:45:31 I didn't get to sit just right. I think my light shield thing just didn't fit my face. And everything I did with the, I adjusted all the straps and everything, I could not get. Now, I've had that experience with the MetaQuest too, where it's like, eventually I figured out exactly how to put it on.
Starting point is 00:45:47 But also they're going to have more of these shields. They emphasize that they only have a few sizes right now and that there are going to be more sizes. And that's what the Face ID scanning does. The reason you do the scanning, I talk about that. They're trying to do a... They will have a range of the light shields
Starting point is 00:46:02 that go inside, which is what makes contact with your face so the way it's going to work is you're going to go into the apple store and one of the things they're going to do is they're either going to scan or you're going to use the apple store app to scan your face and it uses that to say oh you should use the you know i don't even know what they're going to call them size eight yeah uh like the apple watch loop band yeah exactly and then that'll be the one and they'll probably have them around for you to test
Starting point is 00:46:26 in the store. If you order it online, you would just use whatever they recommend and have it come to you. I don't know if you... They said that you will be able to order it online.
Starting point is 00:46:37 But you don't have to go pick it up? No, what they said is that it'll be in the Apple Store app. You'll scan your face in the Apple Store app and it will use that to set your order.
Starting point is 00:46:46 Do you know how the prescription lenses are working from a store perspective? I think, okay, so legally, at least in the U.S., and this is only in the U.S. for now, prescription lenses are a medical device, and so you have to have, it's just like how I got my Quest lenses from a third-party optical store.
Starting point is 00:47:04 So you won't buy those from Apple. So you won't buy those from Apple. So you don't buy those from Apple. You buy them from Zeiss or from a Zeiss-like retailer that stocks them. And you will present them with your valid prescription. And then they will sell you the lenses. This is why I think if I try and get one of these early, I'm going to need to get contact lenses. Because I don't think Zeiss is going to accept my filthy British prescription. Again, or you're going to have to just
Starting point is 00:47:28 come, you're going to need big American optometry buddy. Yeah, but someone's going to need my prescription. You've got to find your eye double. Okay, I'll work on that. Work on an eye double. We'll work on that. Post it on the internet and say, here's my eye prescription. Who's a close match? And they'll volunteer to do it. David in the Discord has
Starting point is 00:47:43 a good question that we should specify here, which is is it-user or like an iphone and ipad the answer is it is a little like the mac in the sense that you have a user and then there's a guest user yes that you can say now i i look at this and i think guest users okay but like you could probably get more couples to be willing to buy this thing if you could have two users instead of a temporary guest user is basically like it's your friends trying it on it's install try on it so you don't have to recalibrate because they it saves all of your settings and then you put it in guest mode and then it it does the calibration and do the whole thing yeah so you can do that so if your friend comes over and wants to try it the lenses that you put in as well are magnetic yeah so you could have your lenses you could have
Starting point is 00:48:28 your partner's lenses and then the guest mode could just be set to that one person like yeah it's not an impossible thing i do think that like this is a device which is complicated for multiple people to use even though it's so expensive it would be nice if it could yeah yeah i i agree i just it's one of those things where i could see that you might have this like we're going to share this one and it's it's at least what apple says now is that's not going to be the case there's sort of you and then if you have somebody who wants to use it you can put it in guest mode for them and that person would have to recalibrate every time because i bet that's just how guest mode works i would think so so i had a few extra details that i picked up throughout the week developer kits are going to be coming yes uh
Starting point is 00:49:09 i heard that too it is unknown when or how fully featured that just apple have just said there will be developer yeah so the way it's going to work is they're going to do a thing where there are various cities around the world cupatino london munich shanghai singapore and tokyo you're on it uh where developers are going to be able to go and work with the hardware in an apple location you schedule your time and all of that but yeah it sounds like after that when there are more of them available they're going to do it's going to be like the other developer kits have been where you're going to be a developer you're going to apply and it's not going to be a random thing right they're going to look at what your apps are or what you what app you say you're building they're going to make some judgments and they're going to approve people to get it it's going to be a limited supply but that there will be
Starting point is 00:49:56 developers who will be able to get these because obviously they want that to be the case and um i have a theory which is in some of the videos at WWDC, there is a little dongle up at the connector, the magnetic connector up at the top of the, it's by the pods, the audio pods. Why do they have to name that? Audio pods? Pods.
Starting point is 00:50:18 Why not just speakers? They're ear pods or air pods or pods. My only criticism at the moment is that the vision pro has too many brands inside inside of it sure they they over buzzworded this product oh yeah yeah eyesight and yeah there's too much stuff going on um they're they're running wild there so um the there's a dongle in the videos that is uh it looks like it's power and usb out and people are like, what is that? Because that's not how you're supposed to charge it is up at the headset. You're supposed to charge it down at the battery.
Starting point is 00:50:50 And my theory is it's for development. That's how you get data out as well. My theory is you tether it to a Mac when you're developing software and that the ones that they're, I mean, maybe not, and maybe it's just a developer unit inside of Apple, but that's my theory is that,
Starting point is 00:51:04 that, that probably what's going to happen is this thing is going to run uh a beta version of vision os but maybe limited um but that's what it's going to be and maybe not maybe i mean it's out there now this is the thing of like uh so i was talking to underscore about this who by the way wrote a wonderful article and put in the show notes today about kind of like why he is going to be a developer for this and like what that means and i just thought it was like he calls it a developer's view of vision pro which i just really like that as a framing he is committing to be there day one and so i think it's worth reading if you are thinking about this to kind of see where he's
Starting point is 00:51:37 coming from but he was you know saying about like well the apple silicon developer kit was a mac mini with a chip inside right that was never a shipping product right how final is this going to be but they they hadn't announced any products when they did the developer kit right whereas this product has been announced my guess is that it's going to be a uh it's going to be pre-release hardware that they're going to have to return but that it will and there's a question of whether they will just limit what the os is capable of because the stuff's not ready and you know everything's going to leak right like everybody's gonna who gets one of these somebody's gonna have a friend who's gonna get it to the verge or whatever right like all that stuff's gonna happen so they're gonna contain it a little bit but i do think it will be basically what the final hardware is going to be
Starting point is 00:52:22 barring a little bit and maybe even maybe even required it to be tethered to the final hardware is going to be barring a little bit. And maybe even required it to be tethered to the Mac that is attached to the same developer account that has Vision Pro authorized and then they do it. Neither of us had great experiences with the Faceline personas.
Starting point is 00:52:40 Mine was buggy and I didn't really like it very much. Mine was the uncanniest of valleys i thought i was and i was one of those people who was um optimistic about it because after the keynote i heard a bunch of people who were like oh oh that digital persona oh and i was like i mean even on the the episode we did last week i was like you know we'll see we'll see and then i saw it and i thought no no it is this looks like a person but they're not and they're moving their face but not quite in a human way and i really it looked like a video game like they look like a video game character yeah and not quite
Starting point is 00:53:18 right yeah like which is how video game characters exactly it's like the eyes there's just something in the eyes that isn't right mine was was broken. At one point, the eyes moved in different directions. I didn't mention cortex, but I remembered when talking to someone about it. The special persona I was talking to, I don't think had any hair, but not in like this person was bald, in that the
Starting point is 00:53:38 skin just cut off at the top, and there was no hair. There was clearly a connection issue for me with that part but in the state of the union they did something apple very rarely does they showed something they're working on which was spatial personas right so the idea that like there is a future version of this technology where these people will look even more realistic and have like volume to them. And will they be out in the world instead of in a box? Well, there's no box around them.
Starting point is 00:54:09 Okay. So it looks like that you could kind of like just have them hanging out, but it's still just a disembodied head. Because that's the one thing that surprised me that I thought was kind of weird was that not only is this persona not great, but it's in a FaceTime window? Yeah.
Starting point is 00:54:24 I'm showing Jason an image from the Max Rumors article that's in the show notes. This is in the State of the Union. So they're like in a portal kind of hovering. They're kind of like, they're still just hanging out, right?
Starting point is 00:54:34 It's still just like head and shoulders hanging out and this person has a hand where they're pointing. But they're like in a place. But they're kind of like fading, you know, you can kind of,
Starting point is 00:54:42 but apparently they have more volume. Right. Clearly this is, you know you kind of right apparently they have more volume right clearly this is you know one of those things that they wanted to show but is not ready to ship and i wonder if when it when the thing ships will it be like this or will it be like who knows how quick will they get there i think also that they're absolutely going to let you create an avatar that's like an emoji they just didn't want to show it i an avatar that's like a Memoji. They just didn't want to show it. No, because it's not impressive. It's not impressive.
Starting point is 00:55:10 This is their impressive new technology for this. And the truth is that, yeah, after having seen it, I would probably choose to just use a Memoji instead. But they've got to start. And maybe in the future, it will look good enough. But right now, it didn't work for me. Yeah, I agree. Anything more on the Vision Pro today? Obviously. Oh, oh boy we're going to be talking about this constantly i wanted to say
Starting point is 00:55:31 briefly about the dinosaur experience that happened at the end yeah i thought it was really funny so i think because i was a little late getting up i sat there watching as the big dinosaur came closer and they're like you should get up there and interact with a dinosaur. And I walked up toward the dinosaur and I ended up inside the dinosaur. Okay. And it kind of like, it kind of like grayed out. And I realized that I was kind of like,
Starting point is 00:55:55 and I was like, you had a failure too. I did have a, I had a dinosaur failure. Uh, and then I didn't experience, I feel like I was too close. And so it wasn't really reacting to me anymore.
Starting point is 00:56:04 Also, it was a big dinosaur and I didn't want to interact with like I was too close. And so it wasn't really reacting to me anymore. Also, it was a big dinosaur and I didn't want to interact with it because it could kill me. They told me to get up basically as soon as that start. And so maybe they learned from your experience. Maybe they learned, yeah, because I got up too late and I got too close and then it popped out. That's a shame because that was the most impressive part of the demo for me. It was that dinosaur walking into the room and I was terrified of it. And that was like, oh, yeah, in this part, we've gone past the i can't tell what's real anymore kind of stage which is really what you want and to be able to deliver that kind of experience in an ar
Starting point is 00:56:37 environment not in a vr environment was very impressive i think that's why it's so impressive is that you're in what you perceive to be a real space and then there's this thing in there that's unreal i think my favorite moment was the sizzle reel of the 180 degree immersive video because as a a sports guy especially it was just like this is i mean it's so much closer to what's going on. That dunk and the ground ball in the baseball game. Like, oh, that was just really good stuff. And then the other stuff, I mean, being up on a cliff and looking down, you know, deep down into the cliff and all that. That was also very impressive too.
Starting point is 00:57:19 The sports part was the most impressive part of that. Because it didn't have the kind of like you know it starts with like alicia keys is singing at you and that just doesn't feel real because she wouldn't do that yeah you know but the sports thing they're doing their thing they're not paying any attention to the camera and so you just feel like you're just hanging out and watching a spectator there and like i think that there is a big market in that i i agree i think that that's going to be one of those places if they can do it and there's some technical questions there because right this is all baked in after and And the question is like,
Starting point is 00:57:47 is it only from one perspective? Can you switch to different perspectives? How do you, can you stream it live? Cause you know, is that, and what's the quality if you stream it live? Because you're going to have to compress that video. You've got stereo. So it's got to be two images. What's the frame rate? What, you know, what's the resolution? what you know what's the resolution i have questions about like if i can i get that in my home and stream it live ish you know even if it's like a delay of 10 seconds or 30 seconds or whatever i've got lots of questions but if they can make that into a product an mls might be the thing that they try oh i'm sure they will um and it's not going to be everywhere it's going to be like maybe there's a an mls game that is going to be in 3d immersive starting you know next season when this thing is
Starting point is 00:58:31 shipping and maybe there's um a friday night baseball game that is in there because they're probably only going to have a limited number of cameras that they can even shoot this with and you could do it at concerts too absolutely music. Like music still works. And that's the Apple Music experience too, right? In the demo, you're just in a recording studio of Alicia Keys. It's like,
Starting point is 00:58:50 that doesn't feel right. But you could like just put one of these down at a Ed Sheeran concert and you're at the front row and now you're just watching it and he's doing his thing. Yeah, I would have loved to have...
Starting point is 00:58:58 All of this is like, it's such a smart move because it's like, for sports, I would pay more than what the pay-per-view costs, but not as much as the tickets. And now you've got this middle tier to charge people pay more than what the pay-per-view costs but not as much as the tickets and then you've got this middle tier to charge people but like if you know pay-per-view is ten dollars tickets 100 i'd pay 50 to have this immersive experience where i feel
Starting point is 00:59:14 like i'm actually sitting and watching the game immersive on yeah and for a concert immersive on demand yeah like you know i can't make the concert i'm too far away or i can't make that day but you can you know two days later you can watch that concert and it's like you know i can't make the concert i'm too far away or i can't make that day but you can you know two days later you can watch that concert and it's like you're in the front row that would be great infinite ticket sales right it is there is like they're usually you're bound by the size of the stadium well everyone that couldn't have got a taylor swift ticket could watch it in immersive video right instead if they wanted to right and it's going to be a different experience this is a thing that came up in a couple of places
Starting point is 00:59:45 and I think it's worth talking about. The difference between watching clips of Avatar and watching the immersive video. And the difference is I think 3D movies on this are going to be amazing.
Starting point is 00:59:57 Yes. Because it was. Avatar, I mean, is the perfect example because James Cameron's been a 3D, like he cares about 3D at a level that
Starting point is 01:00:04 almost nobody else in the movie industry cares about. Most 3D movies are shot in 2D because it's way easier to shoot in 2D and then they are processed into 3D and they can still be very impressive, but they're, you know, James Cameron is like at the forefront of this. He really cares about this stuff. So that was great, but it's also a movie. Not only is it in a rectangle, but, you know, I'm going to get back to my old film class in college, right? It's cuts and framing. It's the director chooses what you see. They choose the camera angles and the cuts and the framing, and it all goes into the storytelling of the decisions by the director.
Starting point is 01:00:40 The immersive stuff, it's like you're there. um the immersive stuff it's like you're there and i think that that's interesting because like i i watched the last concert film i watched was there's a 1975 concert on amazon prime video it's great um from there it's i think madison square garden on their on their latest tour and it's fun but if i were watching that in immersive from the front row i wouldn't get the cuts you know it cuts to the audience it cuts to close up on maddie healy it backs up and shows that it shows the drummer it's like the director is showing you what the director thinks that you should see in that moment and if i was watching the immersive video of it i would be at the front of the stage and i could look where i wanted. And it's not
Starting point is 01:01:25 necessarily a better experience. It's just a different one because now I'm the director. If I am amazed by the fans bouncing next to me, I can watch the fans bouncing next to me whenever I want. Or I can look up on stage and look at Maddie or I can go over and look at the saxophone player or whatever at any time, like when I go to a real concert right it's just different and i and sports will be like that too and again ben thompson said something that i thought was great which is like the difference is i'm just sitting courtside and if and there's no technology in my way i'm just there and if i want to see what the score is i look at the scoreboard yeah and like that says it all there's no overlay with the score anything the point is, I look at the scoreboard. Yeah. And like that says it all.
Starting point is 01:02:05 There's no overlay with the score or anything. The point is that you're there. So I feel like the immersive stuff is going to be really interesting because there are some choices to be made. But what it isn't is they could do a 3D version of a soccer match and maybe they will. But what I think they're also going to try is this immersion thing where it's like you're now at, you're, you're now at a really good seat at the soccer match or you're right behind the goal at the soccer match or whatever. And maybe you can choose where you are. I think that would be interesting.
Starting point is 01:02:33 Cause it might get a little boring. If you're in one place, maybe you, maybe you flip around where you are and you can choose that, but like, it's just different. And it's going to be interesting to see what happens with that because Apple,
Starting point is 01:02:44 with all of its ties to the entertainment industry and to the sports industry now, Apple can make this stuff happen. This episode is brought to you by our friends over at TaxExpander. When you work in a small team, every moment counts. Every keystroke counts. You don't want to be wasting your time finding video conferencing details that you've got to send to your client you've got to call with in two minutes. You don't want to track down the same FAQs from the company website to answer to support emails. These are the kinds of things you want directly at your fingertips so you can get your work done faster. That is why you need TextExpander.
Starting point is 01:03:18 With TextExpander, you can access what you want to type the most with just a few keystrokes, allowing you to work faster and eliminate repetition so you can focus on what matters most to you. TextExpander's powerful shortcuts and abbreviations streamline your team's work. All you have to do is type a short abbreviation and TextExpander will do the rest for you. You can build and collect your most commonly used phrases, messages, URLs, and more right within TextExpander and choose your chosen abbreviation
Starting point is 01:03:43 and they will be with you wherever you type. You can customize the snippets by having them automatically add in dates, fill in the blank fields, timestamps and more to make sure you keep personality and individuality in the communication that you're sending. TextExpander is available on any device that you use across any app that you use on Mac, Windows, Chrome and iOS. And with the sharing features, you really can make sure that everyone's on the same page. If you have things that your team needs access to, you can all get the most up-to-date information just by activating one of those snippets.
Starting point is 01:04:14 If repetitive typing is getting you down, you need TextExpander. Check out TextExpander today at textexpander.com slash upgrade, and you can get 20% off your first year. That's textexpander.com slashcom to say goodbye to repetitive typing. Our thanks to TextExpander for their support of this show and RelayFM. You have had a busy week. I just got more tea, by the way.
Starting point is 01:04:37 I know. I watched Jason. We just took an ad break. I feel bad. Normally you don't know that I've left you when you're reading the ad. I feel bad. Normally you don't know that I've left you when you're reading the ad. Well, also, I feel like you're getting the typical gladiator experience that I'm through, where I have to sit here the whole time. Need more liquid? Can't do it. Need to use the bathroom? Ain't happening. Mike sits here in this chair for the entire time every week. You know, you can literally take a break at any point. I will not. This is the way I am. Sometimes it just keeps me alive. You've been busy this week because you have also had to review not one, but two Macintosh computers.
Starting point is 01:05:12 Yeah, you know, normally I would have spent the rest of the week after we had our couple of days in San Jose. Normally, Dan Morin and I would spend the rest of the week scouring the videos on the website for tidbits. And that didn't happen this time because I spent all of my time with a Mac Studio with an M2 Ultra processor. M2 Ultra. And a 15-inch MacBook Air, which is actually right in front of you right now. I can see it. I mean, it's big. I saw it.
Starting point is 01:05:43 What is that? Starlight? Yeah, that's starlight i mean i also saw one of i saw this and i had the demo experience in the hands-on area um i mean there's nothing to say about okay i had to write two reviews yeah of products that are you know not that surprising the newest thing in it is that we hadn't seen the m2 ultra before and the answer is the M2 Ultra is faster in the same way that the M1 Ultra is faster than the rest of the M1s. But it's not much of a surprise.
Starting point is 01:06:10 I mean, this isn't a huge difference. Does this Mac Studio have more I.O.? Or was it just the Mac Pro that got more I.O.? It's just the Mac Pro. Okay. So obviously the chip is capable of having many, many, many, many more Thunderbolt ports on it, plus a bridge that takes it to many, many, many PCI cards.
Starting point is 01:06:27 And they're just using the standard Mac Studio. So on the Ultra, you get the, what, four USB-C in the back, plus two in the front, plus there's USB-A in the back. And a Thunderbolt, right? Or sorry, yeah, Thunderbolt. They're Thunderbolt in front and back. And on the Macs, they're Thunderbolt only on back
Starting point is 01:06:43 and they're USB on front okay so there's a lot of io anyway but they didn't change any of that really the big change in the mac studio is the chip is an m2 instead of an m1 i said in my review if you've got an m1 mac studio you're fine yeah it's it's you know it's m1 to m2 it's incremental i don't think anybody we've been saying this all along. If you've got an M1 and you look at the M2 and like, well, should I update for the speed? That is not a reason. It's faster.
Starting point is 01:07:11 But like the people who should buy this are people who, and I said this in the review, people who are still on Intel, people who maybe have an M1, but it's like a lower end model, like a Mac mini or something like that. And they want more power. Or it's people who like saw that2 Macs and said, I'm going to get the MacBook pro. And I know multiple people who have a MacBook pro tethered to a monitor and mostly just use it as a desktop. And I'd say, you know, the Mac studio is nice and you could sell that MacBook pro and buy a MacBook or buy a Mac studio instead and put it on your studio display. So yeah, anyway, it's, it's that, oh, and the big, the big news that all the Mac nerds want to know, which is, is it quieter? And the answer is yes, it is quieter. It is quieter.
Starting point is 01:07:57 I, so the test for me was when I was reviewing the M1 Mac studio, I had it out on my desk and I, I did, I was not testing for noise. And I thought to myself, what's that sound? And it was the fans on the Mac studio. And when I put it under my desk, I didn't hear them anymore. And that's where my Mac studio lives now. But with the M2, I put it on my desk and listened for a fan and I didn't hear it. And the only way I could hear the fan is either to turn it around 180 degrees. So I was listening to the back of it or to go around to the back of my desk and listen, there is a fan noise there, but it is quieter. That's the best way I can quantify it is it's quiet enough that if I, if it's on my desk and I'm in front of it, I can't hear the fan. And that fan noise is consistent.
Starting point is 01:08:38 I was trying to, I think it'll crank up if you really blast the gpu and the cpu i tried uh to blast the gpu and it it didn't get any louder so it's just and then i had my m1 over next to it it's actually over there you can see it uh my m1 mac studio and i could hear it from my chair even though it's over by the wall now so it's it's it is appreciably quieter if that was the thing that was freaking you out about the mac studio is that the fan noise was a bit too much um they fixed it and i apple confirmed that like we made some changes oh so to the to the cooling system they wouldn't say what they were they wouldn't quantify them in any way so the best i can tell you is they're quieter and i couldn't hear it in a fairly quiet room um with it facing me so the fan is pointing out the back that was enough to hide the audio
Starting point is 01:09:27 hide that that hissing sound um and that's not true of the m1 so it's definitely quieter than the m1 the fact that this product exists the second version has sold me on it being my next computer ah because it's not going to go away now i think and that that was my worry of like was this just a stop gap and now like they just don't need it anymore like we weren't sure right but now yep i mean really this is the mac pro this is the mac this is the mac pro now the mac pro so that's one of the things that i hit in my review was um it's always been that the mac pro has been the highest end mac and it may be again, right? There were those rumors that they were working on like a four chip version of the M2.
Starting point is 01:10:10 And then they killed it. And it isn't going to happen. And so the Ultra is two Maxes put together. It was extreme. Yeah, I mean, I think Mark Gurman kind of made up a name for it. But the idea was that they were going to use that Ultra Fusion technology to connect four together. And then that didn't happen. It could happen in the future. if it does too much it might be well this is the thing it could happen and if it does happen it'll happen on the mac pro not in the mac studio yeah but i think um
Starting point is 01:10:36 the truth is that for at least for now the mac studio with the ultra chip and the Mac Pro are identical. They're identical in every way that is about the chip. They're identical in GPU configurations and RAM. They're identical in performance. Only the IO is different. Only the fact that you can put PCI cards in there and that there are more Thunderbolt ports out. And the fact that it's huge and expensive. Separate the two so if you want the fastest Mac money can buy and you don't need that extra IO you can just buy a Mac studio and you get
Starting point is 01:11:10 it so the Mac studio is um I think what I said in the review is still the champion it's a co-champion now but it's still the champion um and I like that about it and so I I think that's a reason for people like you to be like okay I I view that as being Apple thinks most people should not buy the Mac Pro. Even if they need maximum performance, they should just buy the Mac Studio. The way I think of it now is like the Mac Studio is the Mac Pro. The Mac Pro is like the specialist Mac. Because it really is like, do you need PCI expansion? Like that has to be internal.
Starting point is 01:11:44 Right. Right. And since graphics and ram are taken out of the equation now it is just about all it is it's storage it's networking and it's these specialized io cards that are used in audio and video and we saw it i mean they they exist there are people who spend seven eight nine thousand dollars per card and put five cards in there and they're doing scoring of an orchestra and it's better to do it on one computer than three and now they can and like that's all great right but it is so specialized it's like realistically i don't know how long that even exists as a thing like thunderbolt yeah can handle this well i have had that thought which is i wonder if in the long run the answer is
Starting point is 01:12:22 you make some modifications to the max studio that'll and you sell a breakout box that does this because the max studio can do all those things too right you would just need a chassis with pci cards and a thunderbolt cable yeah that's or realistically or several yeah i'm sure that there are specifics and I'm bungling, but that's all it is. Or they can make a special connector that was for their special box, and then they don't even need to sell a Mac Pro anymore. Honestly, I think they're amortizing the cost
Starting point is 01:12:56 of designing that brand new Mac Pro enclosure, and they might as well do it. Oh, yeah, yeah. And they got the rack-mountable version, and it's pretty, and they're very popular. It's a statement. They're making a statement with it yeah and there's nothing wrong with that but and i i people who are upset about mac pros not having the graphics
Starting point is 01:13:11 expansion and all that i think we all knew this was coming i don't think it's necessarily forever i think it's possible that they would try to bring some of that back down the road but i think it's not likely um i think this is probably what it is. And, you know, the fact is Apple can't they can't scale like PCs can in certain ways. At the same time, their argument is they have chosen a different path and that Apple Silicon Macs have diverged from the priorities of Intel PCs in lots of ways. And this is the path they have chosen and you know if if apple has not ever been afraid of leaving some people behind along the way yeah it's like look if if apple seems to be okay need to make a mac to train machine learning models they don't have to do that they don't the pcs can do that and then max can use
Starting point is 01:14:25 the output yeah i had a funny funny moment where there was a demo of the mac pro and they were talking about using um nuke and they were going to do it's very impressive uh machine learning model uh where basically an artist was going to rotoscope um hundreds of frames and they they they drew 20 frames that were representative of the whole motion. And then they built a machine learning model and outputted all the frames. And so you get their point there was that you can use machine learning to further the creative process. So there's like an actual artist who does the hand drawing. And then the machine learning expands it so they don't have to draw every frame. Because they have the neural engine.
Starting point is 01:15:02 That's very cool. However, in the demo, at one point, they said, now I'm not actually going to train the model here because that'll take a couple hours. And I thought, ah, there it is. That model training happens on the GPU, and even on a Mac Pro, they can only have whatever it is, 70-odd GPUs.
Starting point is 01:15:22 And the fact is, that training would probably not happen on that mac pro right that training would happen on a pc that's packed with gpus and they would do the training there in less time and you're right apple doesn't have to there's this moment that i think people get to where they're like aha and for that you need to use a pc and it's like you know what apple should not be in the business of filling every ecological niche. They really shouldn't. And we could argue like,
Starting point is 01:15:48 oh, but they're going to lose this market. It's like, well, they've lost a lot of markets. There are a lot of markets that Apple is not in anymore and they're not getting them back. And it's okay as long as they're serving the markets that make sense for Apple. And this is a case where- Model training is like a finite thing that not every user is going to need,
Starting point is 01:16:02 even the pro users. Like once enough models have been created, you just use the models that exist. I don't think that into the future, everyone's going to be training their own AI models. You're just taking advantage of what is they are created to be used for what you need them for. But the technology can change as well. And the way these things could be trained could end up being different in the future. We don't know right now, but I don't believe that Apple should make a Mac Pro for this very one specific purpose. I don't think that's something they have to do. And I know that there are prominent people out there who we know and have been on the show who talk about the idea of GPUs for gaming and things like that. The truth is, it's not really a relevant
Starting point is 01:16:42 market for Apple. It just isn't. No, I i mean we spoke about it already they're trying to find other ways to bring gaming to the mac and it will work it will work perfectly fine yeah but the idea i mean i think i think what apple silicon has done and you can disagree with this or not but in terms of whether you think it's good but you can't dispute that it's true is by focusing on apple silicon they are focusing on Apple Silicon, they are focusing on design choices that they made that involve the mobile space, right? It started as an iPhone, went to the iPad, they've modified it. But like a lot of those design choices
Starting point is 01:17:13 that make it so good preclude it from behaving in the way that a traditional Intel PC would. Apple has chosen this path and they've benefited from it. And part of that is saying, we're not going to be profiling like an Intel PC in these ways. And you just have to deal with it. And they've made their decisions and it's benefited them, but it will leave things behind where you're like, but what about more GPUs? And they're like, I wrote a piece a while ago. I can't remember how long ago now, but basically what I said was, is it worth it? If you think about Apple's whole chip design, you know, there's people down in the bunker with
Starting point is 01:17:53 Johnny Scrucci. If you come to them and you're like, you know what? I know that you've gotten all this way because of your integrated GPUs and memory. But I want to sell the least popular Mac in existence. And I want you to make a special custom thing that throws everything that you've done up to now away so that I can have GPUs for a very tiny fraction of the people who will buy the least popular Mac in existence, which is the Mac itself,
Starting point is 01:18:23 our smallest computing product line at the moment. Like, how could they ever motivate the chip design team to change all of their philosophy for this tiny part of the Mac Pro? Like, I just don't see it. I mean, it's not like, I mean, it's incredibly powerful still, though.
Starting point is 01:18:46 Like, yes, you could tune it differently, right? Oh, man. But it's still incredibly powerful. So many GPUs on that Ultra model. It's just, it's wild. But like that, the Apple Silicon chip ethos and the power per watt
Starting point is 01:18:58 and all of that that they're focusing on has enabled them to make a bigger version of what I think is the best laptop apple's ever made which is the m2 macbook air right so you also have the 15 inch i do there you know this is the best laptop but it's a bit bigger and like yeah now there is a product in the lineup for people that want a bigger screen if you've used the m2 macbook air like you say you've used it but it's just a bit bigger now a chip is a chip is a chip. And in the Apple Silicon era and a computer is a computer like this is a MacBook Air.
Starting point is 01:19:30 It is. I mean, Mark Gurman said this weekend that they actually planned on releasing them both together and they just couldn't do it. And so a year later, almost we get we get this other one. And then the M3 versions will come in 2024. So the 13 inch is going to be around for longer than it would typically. Right. But it's not, but it's going to be-
Starting point is 01:19:48 Sounds like that's just the M3 is sliding until early next year. Because they've had all this stuff kind of in the bottleneck. Right. But the fact is, I mean, this was the most difficult review to write because there's very little to say about it.
Starting point is 01:20:01 It is the 13-inch MacBook Air, except at 15 inches. And most of what I have to say is Apple clearly thinks that there's a switcher opportunity here because 15-inch laptops are very popular on the PC side. I think Apple finally realized that while there are some people who will pay $2,500 in order to get a 16-inch Mac laptop, there are a lot of people who will either just begrudgingly get the 13-inch or will say, well, just forget it. I won't get one. Or we'll buy a 15-inch Windows laptop because they
Starting point is 01:20:32 just don't care. They, in that keynote, really hammered on the idea of switchers, that there's a market there for them. There are people who bought the 13 who are going to be like, oh yeah, I would much rather go up to the 15 on the air and yet it keeps everything else about the air it is just that m2 macbook air it's just a little wider and has a bigger screen and it's got a and it's a little heavier because it's it's bigger and it has a little more battery but it it's just to counteract powering the screen it's the same battery life it's the same computer just you can get it in 13 or 15 it's an incredible computer for 1500 yeah it just is and it's a hundred dollar difference if you spec them another thing The same computer, just you can get it in $13 or $15. It's an incredible computer for $1,500.
Starting point is 01:21:05 Yeah. It just is. And it's a $100 difference if you spec them. Another thing that I noticed is that that $1,199, formerly $1,299 model, that's the one that has the two GPU cores shut off. And that's the one that has the cheaper power adapter. When you go up, when you start to build to order and you get them to match the difference between the 13 and the 15 is a hundred dollars yeah i said 1500 but it starts at 1300 yeah i was looking at the wrong part yeah so 1199 or 1399 uh it is so what is it yeah it's the same specs at the hundred so for if you want the same specs as the 1399 1515, you get the 1299 13-inch model.
Starting point is 01:21:47 So basically, you want a bigger screen, it's $100 more. That's essentially what it is. Unless you get, they've got the cut rate version that they got down to 1199 that used to be 1299 of the 13-inch model. That's typical Apple, right? They've got the sort of like super lightweight version 15 inch they're not they're not selling it that way there's no uh reduced core 8 gpu smaller uh power adapter in the box for the 15 inch you just get the good one it's just storage is the difference between the two and you can and you can um also power adapter thing it's just like it was on the built order higher end models of the 13 inch you can you can choose you either get that um two usbc adapter or you can get the one that's got more power with one plug and it does fast charge and you can choose but that's not new that's actually was there last july too it was just the the big difference is just that they
Starting point is 01:22:40 don't have the reduced cost version as the base model that's it i mean it's a cool computer man i mean that yeah that's it it's like everything i think my summation of my review was like look just go read my review of the m2 air from last summer because it's the same computer and it's great and i bought one and i love it and i spent you know a year with it and i love it and this is that but bigger yep these laptops are so popular um it only makes sense really to have another version of it. It makes sense. Why not make an even smaller one?
Starting point is 01:23:07 Let's just go wild. The MacBook Air is a product line all on its own. It's devoid from its original branding. Zach's pointing out, yes, 1099 is the base model. It was 1199. Now it's 1099. That's the one that's got the two fewer GPU cores and the worst charger for that.
Starting point is 01:23:24 It'll probably be a couple of years away now, and then that $999 will go away, and this will be $999. No, they're headed in that direction. But yeah, bottom line is, this was my Macworld column last week. I was basically like, hey, the Mac announcements were all really boring, and I think they were huge. I actually think bringing the 13-inch down $100, their most popular laptop being $100 cheaper is huge news. Putting the 15-inch model on top of it, like, I just, anybody who's been in that position where they're shopping for a Mac laptop
Starting point is 01:23:53 and they look at like, well, it would be nice to have a bigger screen. It costs what? And yeah, some people buy the MacBook Pro, but like, you don't need the MacBook Pro stuff if you just want a bigger screen. It just used to be that was all you could do. And now you don't.
Starting point is 01:24:07 So yeah, if you want the bigger screen that's brighter and has the ProMotion display and has more IO and it has more powerful processors, there's a whole list of things that that MacBook Pro gets you. But if all you really care about is you want something bigger than a 13-inch screen, now this is here. I think it's going to be big. Is the 13- inch 999 on education yes i see that's amazing yep that's just a yeah i will say it again in front of me now 13 inch
Starting point is 01:24:33 macbook air is the best mac i think ever it's pretty great like it is the most perfect balance of portability and power that i've ever experienced and like what they have been able to pull off with apple silicon to enable this is unbelievable and now that they've done a similar thing in in the macbook the only thing i don't like about the 15 inch macbook air the keyboard deck looks weird with no speakers it looks like just an expanse so i'll tell you as somebody who doesn't use a macbook pro but has always used a MacBook Air, it doesn't bother me at all. But all the MacBook Pro people are like, oh, that's space for the speakers. Because it's still firing them out the back and against the screen because that's the MacBook Air design.
Starting point is 01:25:15 But in all the MacBook Pros, they have grills. It's like a visual thing, I think, as well as a helpful thing. But yeah, it just looks like the keyboard just looks so tiny in the space. Yeah, that is because they've stretched out, they didn't stretch the keyboard, they just stretched out the laptop to be wider. And so it's just metal there. Don't perforate
Starting point is 01:25:36 your own MacBook Air. Try not to. This episode is brought to you by ExpressVPN. It is so easy to have multiple streaming services the cost of them can add up, which is why it can be good to discover ways to make the most out of your existing subscriptions. Quite often, streaming services have thousands more shows than you think because you're not seeing them all, but depending on the country that you're based in. What you see on Netflix where you are is completely different to what somebody may see
Starting point is 01:26:00 in Italy or in England or anywhere else. Using the ExpressVPN app, you can change your online location. ExpressVPN has 90 countries, over 90 countries to choose from. So when you run out of stuff to watch, you can switch to another country and unlock new shows. Like, for example, you could watch The Lord of the Rings on the Turkish Netflix or Back to the Future on Canadian Netflix. If I want to watch It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia when I'm here in the US, I can change over to UK Netflix and do that. It's as simple as tapping one button and changing my country, refreshing the page or reopening the app and you're ready to go.
Starting point is 01:26:33 This means that you're not needing to pay for extra streaming services to watch new stuff. I'm traveling right now. I've been doing this constantly. We were doing it just last night. Idina was like, I can't see the show on Disney because we have the hulu shows i was like oh just quit that open express vpn and the hulu shows will show up on our disney plus very simple to do this is a no-brainer if you want to get more shows and save money while you're at it go to expressvpn.com upgrade at less than seven dollars a month express vpn pays for itself and so much more. Don't forget to use the upgrade link so you can get three extra months for free. That's e-x-p-r-e-s-s-v-p-n.com slash upgrade. Go to expressvpn.com slash upgrade to learn more and sign up today.
Starting point is 01:27:18 Our thanks to ExpressVPN for their support of this show and all of RelayFM. We now move into some Ask Up ask upgrade questions if you would like to send in questions of your own go to upgradefeedback.com and you can do that mike asks mike how bad did your cheeks hurt by the end of monday just caught up on instagram and you were beaming ear to ear in every picture i had just the best day. Best couple of days. It got only better with the Vision Pro thing. My WWDC experience was basically perfect. Couldn't have been happier.
Starting point is 01:27:52 I think I saw somebody ask me, I had people ask me, I had obviously such a terrible time last year. Did this make up for it? Yes. It made up for it. I've gotten to the point where I'm pleased I missed WWDC last year because my first WWwc was the introduction of a brand new platform yeah and i got to use that platform not many people in
Starting point is 01:28:11 history get that opportunity and i got that so i feel very grateful yeah is that asks is the virtual theater in the vision pro better than the real thing or just something different better than the real thing because the way projection systems work at theaters that show 3d it what they're doing is they've got two images so they make you put on glasses who knows where those glasses have been so you're already wearing something on your face right and then the glasses are polarized so what they're doing is they're projecting two images left and right eye but they use the brightness of the projector so it's half the brightness so in most cases 3D projection
Starting point is 01:28:49 will be dim and unpleasant and this is not that this is full brightness and it makes a difference it really does and you are sat in the prime position which is not a thing you get we're going to see Spider-Verse tomorrow which I'm very excited about I haven't seen it and we're going in the get. We're going to see Spider-Verse tomorrow, which I'm very excited about.
Starting point is 01:29:05 I haven't seen it. In the cinema that we're going to, we're like on the end of a row, because all the middle seats are taken. But if I was watching at home with my Vision Pro, I'd be right perfectly in the middle. Brian asks, the Vision Pro's strap looks like it'd get in the way
Starting point is 01:29:22 of using AirPods Max. Apple didn't design a headset that can't work with their best headphones, right? Well, I mean, Brian, got to tell you, the best headphones are the AirPods Pro, and it won't get in the way of those. Yeah. I use the AirPods Max and love the AirPods Max. But the AirPods Pro, clearly what this thing's designed for, and it will give you a better experience. No, it probably wouldn't work. The strap probably wouldn't work.
Starting point is 01:29:44 you a better experience yep no it probably wouldn't work the strap probably wouldn't work but as i was told and i think you were told too apple's fully expecting many people to make many different kinds of straps this is going to be a connector that people will be able to use oh interesting i didn't hear that that's what they said to me is like we expect third parties to make straps for this headset because i asked them specifically about the fact that i had the overhead strap and i didn't recall that in the keynote. Right. They said to me it was in the keynote, but really it was in like one tiny shot. But all of the imagery just show the back strap, which you can use it that way,
Starting point is 01:30:12 but you get, they said, you get additional comfort over longer periods, they believe, by using the top strap, but the straps aren't final. But they expect many companies to make many different types of straps for many different types of comfort levels. Because it's just a connector like the Apple watch effectively they think it'll be like that one
Starting point is 01:30:28 okay jerry asks noting that the new headset is the vision pro what do you imagine a vision non-pro to be do you have any thoughts on what apple could compromise on it's the quest big question gonna be a question of the next year or more. I mean, Mark Gurman's newsletter this weekend did have some discussion of this. I was surprised by some of the choices that he said. But like he said, the eyesight thing is going to be on all of them. At least they think that right now. I mean, they may change as this goes. But I think they could compromise on, they could have fewer sensors they could not be made
Starting point is 01:31:07 of aluminium it could be it could be you know cheaper it could be bring your own uh speakers it could be um lower resolution could be yeah that would suck though i know i know this is going to be the really hard part it is like what do what do they pull out of it it's going to be very difficult it may be that it's a lot like this one but cheaper because it's two years later and that there's a new thing at the high end that could also be it right that like the cheaper version is just it's just this but they might vision pro 2 they might use cheaper materials that's that's a possibility i i think what's going to happen too is they wanted to get their best foot forward here and so um imagine coming out with the the cheaper one they made it a problem for future
Starting point is 01:31:54 apple yeah to deal with that's right future apple will have to we'll have to work this out by all accounts they're working on that product um And so they have to figure that out of like, how do you make a cheaper one and then also the next generation one of this? Yeah, it's a good question. We're going to be playing that game for a while now. And I think once it ships, they're going to get a better sense and we're going to get a better sense of what are the core parts of this experience that really can't be downgraded. And what are the things that you could get away with parker asks will the glasses like the prescription adapters be required for people who are near-sighted it makes sense if you're farsighted you would need something but since the screens are basically on your eye i don't see why
Starting point is 01:32:39 someone who is near-sighted would need additional lenses i don't know what i don't know i'm not an optician right and so that's why i needed them they did the scanning my expectation is if you have no if you are nearsighted i don't think nearsighted means you can see near but you can't see far wait let me rephrase it because i get yeah i I need glasses for things far away. Yes, me too. I think if you need glasses for things far away, you're going to need the prescription correction. I think if you just need glasses for reading, I think you'll be okay.
Starting point is 01:33:13 I think you'll probably be okay. I had somebody ask me the other day at a user group thing that I did, how do they make it so that you can, basically it's like these things are right in front of your eyes. How do they make it so that you can, you know, basically it's like these things are right in front of your eyes. How do they make it that way? And why do you need vision correction for that and all that? And my answer was that think about surround sound speakers and you've got seven speakers everywhere around you. And then, and then Apple says, oh, you can just put these AirPods in
Starting point is 01:33:41 and it'll do surround too. And there are a lot of people are like, oh, but it can't, it can't because of the seven. But you think about it, you only have two ear holes, right? So your brain is doing the processing. You could, if you, I'm not saying that Apple does this, they do sort of, but like, if you can have a sophisticated enough system in your ear holes that can make it sound like there are a bunch of different speakers or things in a bunch of different places so that your brain reacts the same way. You know, the seven speakers positioned around your room is cheating. It's still cheating. It's not putting sound everywhere. It's putting sound in seven places.
Starting point is 01:34:18 And then they come through the room into your ears and your brain processes them. It's like that. This thing's right in front of your eyes, but what it's doing is they've got that whole lens system that's in between there. It's like those multiple-stack lenses. Exactly. And what they're doing is they want the light,
Starting point is 01:34:33 when it passes into your eye and hits the back, to be as if it was light from the world, even though it's not. That's the trick. And the better the lenses are and the higher quality the images and everything that goes into that they are making your eyes see light from uh as if it was coming from distance and as a result you got to focus like it's coming from distance and i know that's a it really is a thing that is a head scratcher, but that's the idea here is that your eyes don't know where that light is coming from. All they know is that the light hit the back of your eye. And if Apple can emulate light from the real world hitting your eye, but it's light from their screens hitting your eye, then your brain can't tell the difference and your eyes can't tell the difference.
Starting point is 01:35:23 your brain can't tell the difference and your eyes can't tell the difference because there's no like we don't have lidar scanners in our bodies that give us a distance back right we just interpret distance based on the light that passes into our eyes and hits our retinas so uh if you can fake it then it's like it's real and rich asks do we know what the accessibility story is with the vision pro so i looked into this there was a session about accessibility for how that could work and there's a few things that they're doing one is called pointer control so instead of using eye tracking you use your head wrist and index finger to do the tracking on the headset so like rather than your eyes looking around and choosing the interface you can kind of put your hand up and it looks like kind of like i don't
Starting point is 01:36:10 know like a magic wand that you're aiming towards the interface and you can select it that way they have something called dwell control which is on screen options for the interactions rather than using your hands so you would use eye tracking to look at a thing and then look at a place which allows you to select. So you'd like select and then look here. And if you just hold for long enough in a certain place, it will activate it. So then you're driving just by vision. Yes.
Starting point is 01:36:36 They also have support for guided access. So this is their new one app at a time simplified UI thing and voiceover support. Right. That's the thing that they didn't show that I think is one of the missing pieces here is somebody was asking me about like how and they didn't they didn't want us to do this like how do you go to a specific website in safari and there's that keyboard and you can type on the keyboard theoretically either with your hands or actually by looking at the letters and just tapping but i had that thought which is like or you use your voice right like or you just your voice. And we had no examples of that because, again, they don't want to show that right now.
Starting point is 01:37:07 It may not be ready, but also that's not the image that they want to put out there is that they've got full voice assistant support that will let you do stuff like that. But I'm sure they will. Thank you to everybody who sent in a question. If you'd like to send in one of your own, just go to upgradefeedback.com and you can send that in. Do not forget the merchandise that is available until the end of this week. Go to upgradeyourwardrobe.com.
Starting point is 01:37:33 Choose from a selection of designs for the summer of fun, including the Dongletown Surf Shop Tee. If you would like to send us feedback, follow-up or questions, go to upgradefeedback.com and you can do that. You can check out Jason's work. You and
Starting point is 01:37:46 Dan, I know, are very busy right now over at sixcolors.com. You can hear Jason's shows on The Incomparable and here on RelayFM. You can listen to my podcasts here on RelayFM and check out my work at cortexbrand.com. You can find us on Mastodon. Jason is at jsnell on zeppelin.flights.
Starting point is 01:38:01 I am at imike on mike.social. You can also find the show as at upgrade on relayfm.social where you can see video clips uh alongside our tiktok and instagram accounts where we are at upgrade relay on both there will be some fun clips of us in person we mentioned earlier we have chief video officer jeremy burge i'm just gonna call him jason burge i'm looking at both of you right now and that's confusing there's a comma in there
Starting point is 01:38:27 Jason, Jeremy, Burge, they work on this together you can find those on Upgrade Relay so we'll have some fun clips of us being together in person today, thank you to our members who support us at Upgrade Plus and to our sponsors, the fine people over at ExpressVPN, TextExpander and DarkNoise
Starting point is 01:38:44 hang on a second. I declare the summer of fun to have begun! Summer of fun! See you next time. Bye. you

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.