Do Grasshoppers Have Tongues?
Marco:
So a giant storm blew through here last night.
Marco:
And so I was up all night dealing with it.
Marco:
I'm very tired.
Marco:
I will say, so, you know, a few like systems I had in place ended up working very well.
Marco:
One of those is I have solar panels.
Marco:
and power wall batteries and they back up like some of the outlets and stuff in the house um like you know critical stuff like the fridge and you know a couple outlets couple of lights you know not not the whole hvac system because it would be way too much power for that um but it worked perfectly like we had a huge power outage for well i mean not huge by you know disaster standards it was like a four hour power outage
Marco:
and uh we're perfectly fine um i did learn i don't know if this is a thing i have all my wi-fi gear of course that's backed up because that's the most important it goes fridge and then all of the networking gear and i had a ups on the networking gear as well like the outlet that it plugs into is backed up by the solar battery thing but the i had a ups there just because i had an extra ups and i was like i'll put it up but there give myself a little more time if i need it
Marco:
And for whatever reason, when the AC power switches from the grid to the solar battery backup, the UPS thinks there's been a power outage and doesn't take the power and switches into like I'm off mode and starts supplying power.
Marco:
And the UPS eventually then ran out and died and turned off.
Marco:
And even though there was power at the outlet, like why, what, what happened there?
Marco:
Like, is it not having like the, is it having something like fake grounding or something?
Marco:
Like what could that be undervolted maybe?
Marco:
Oh, that's interesting.
John:
Maybe like if it only outputs like a hundred, maybe like a little, you know, the UPS is super sensitive to having, you know, whatever it expects the voltage to be and the power wall.
John:
I don't know how these things work, but I imagine maybe the power wall actually supplies a little bit less than the actual grid or a little bit more.
John:
I mean, either way, like, you know, if it's not exact,
John:
yeah okay i have a kilowatt thing i'll plug it in next time and i'll let you know okay is there a manual button on the ups you can push to say hey uh power's back start using that because i know my ups's flip out if there's even like a little flicker but they realize pretty quickly that oh power is actually back on now and i can get off of battery and they switch back
Marco:
We're fortunate that we don't actually have extremely frequent power outages.
Marco:
So I'm not really a power user, no pun intended, of my UPSs.
Marco:
Like I hardly ever need to do anything with them.
Marco:
So if there's any kind of like weird options or buttons or gestures or things I could press to fix it, I probably don't know about it.
Casey:
We had, uh, the same storm blow through here yesterday and it, I'm not saying it was quite as bad here as it was there, but it was bad for us anyway.
Casey:
And, uh, we had our power flicker a few times and many years ago, my parents had a Honda inverter generator in a big one.
Casey:
Like, you know, it's, it's on wheels because it's not the sort of thing you can carry.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
And, um,
Casey:
I forget exactly how many watts it is, but it's big.
Casey:
It's physically large, and it can power.
Casey:
It might even be able to power our HVAC, maybe, but that would probably be a stretch.
Casey:
Well, anyways, they eventually put a Generac on their house, and they long-term loaned us this generator.
Casey:
And the power flickered, like, three times.
Casey:
And I'm thinking to myself, oh, do I have to get the generator out?
Casey:
Is this the time?
Casey:
Which is both, like, ugh.
Casey:
And also, yes, this moment has finally come!
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
This is, like, every dad really wants to use the gear that we have.
Marco:
Like, this is just a thing.
Marco:
Like, we have all this gear.
Marco:
We kind of want an occasional need to use it.
Marco:
Like, you know, I don't want to live somewhere with super unreliable power.
Marco:
But, like, it is nice to have, like, one blackout a year where it's like, yes, I get to use all my cool stuff.
Yeah.
Casey:
It's such a pain to get it hooked up and whatnot.
Casey:
We have a bespoke generator hookup right by the fuse box.
Casey:
We have a generator interlock in the fuse box, as you are supposed to do, and blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
But it's just a pain in the tuchus.
Casey:
And so I was mostly happy that we didn't have to deal with it.
Casey:
And the one time I have used it in the several years that it's lived here...
Casey:
The one time I have used it, I forget what the situation was, but we lost power for like an hour.
Casey:
And then you play the game of like, you don't want to put too much gasoline in the thing because it's really not good.
Casey:
I think this actually might be fuel injected, but especially for carbureted things, you don't want to leave gas in there because it'll gum up the carburetor.
Casey:
And so you're putting in like little teeny, teeny, teeny, tiny bits of gas, just enough to keep you going so you don't have to run the generator for 18 hours, you know, after...
Casey:
After the power comes back just to get the gas out of it.
Casey:
It's the sort of stress that dads live for, to your point, but it's still a moment of stress nevertheless.
Marco:
To be clear, your gas-powered version of this sounds awful to me.
Marco:
I know that's a very common thing, but to me... You're so the worst.
Marco:
I know.
Marco:
You're the worst.
Marco:
I'm not even going to argue that right now, but the idea of this using gas sounds horrendous to me.
Marco:
You're right, because all of the stuff you have to deal with.
Marco:
For me, if we have a power outage that lasts 10 minutes, I just have power.
Marco:
I mean, to these handful of outlets.
Marco:
It just works.
Marco:
I don't have to think about it.
Marco:
I don't have to go haul out a thing and hook it up, start it up, dump a bunch of gas in it, hear it all that time, because batteries are awfully quiet in operation.
Marco:
So it's...
Marco:
It's a very different experience.
Casey:
That's true.
Casey:
But the difference between you and me is that if we had like a multi-week outage, I can add gas.
Casey:
You're f***ed.
Marco:
No, I'm not.
Marco:
I have solar topping it off every day.
Marco:
I can go longer than you can.
Casey:
Damn it.
Casey:
I thought I had you on that one.
Casey:
Nope.
Casey:
All right, I'll allow it.
Casey:
Well, what if it's really, really rainy for a really long time, Marco?
Casey:
What then?
Marco:
I mean, there's still light in the sky.
Casey:
Maybe not as much, but there's still light.
Casey:
I genuinely, as much as I'm snarking, I don't know the first thing about how well solar works and anything but bright sunlight.
Casey:
And for all I know, you get like 95% of the power generation, even when it's cloudy.
Casey:
I have no idea.
Marco:
No, well, so in my experience, like, I mean, it depends on the season, of course, like how many just hours of daylight you even have in a day.
Marco:
So like, you know, in January, even if it's a very sunny day, there's way fewer daylight hours than you have like in August.
Marco:
That's true.
Marco:
But just for reference, like on a really great day in the summer, my panels might make like 90 kilowatt hours.
Marco:
And on a really terrible day in January, they'll still make like 20.
Marco:
So it's not it's not like nothing.
Marco:
It's not a ton, of course, but that's a pretty like that's still a decent amount of power considering it's free.
Marco:
And, you know, so so, you know, obviously there's a lot of asterisks on that on that free.
Marco:
But like it's it's substantially easier to get than, you know, having to go get gas somewhere and everything.
Casey:
That's all right.
Casey:
All right, we should probably get this show on the road.
Casey:
Let's do some follow-up.
Casey:
Video Alex writes, I was listening to your discussion on the watch bands breaking compatibility.
Casey:
I think the new bands will most likely be one surface with a clasp or perhaps bracelet style with magnetic section to hold the watch unit to it.
Casey:
Surely a pass-through hole for sensors, et cetera, in the band.
Casey:
The best example I can think of is Swatch has a system like this, or had a system like this, excuse me, in the 80s and 90s, which you can see in this eBay listing, and we will put that in the show notes.
Casey:
I get what we're going for here, but I don't know.
Casey:
This doesn't smell right to me.
Casey:
And I can't put my finger on why.
John:
Yeah, the only reason I can see a motivation for this idea is like, we need more surface area for the magnetic attachment rumor to be true.
John:
So if, you know, people should look at the link that we put in, but it's like...
John:
It's like if you had just a continuous strap that goes around your wrist.
John:
There's no watch on it.
John:
It's just a strap, right?
John:
But that strap, you know, slips through a sort of holder that the watch then magnetically snaps into, right?
John:
And so you have more surface area for the magnets because your watch is magnetically attaching like vertically onto the strap.
John:
The straps aren't pulling on the sides of the watch.
John:
But that's got a lot of things going against it.
John:
I mean, it's difficult not to make that raise the watch higher up off your wrist, which is the last thing that they want.
John:
It really limits the options fashion wise.
John:
You don't want a strap underneath your watch.
John:
And I think I'm not sure how much more surface area we give you unless it clasps the outside of the watch like this watch thing does, which looks really ugly.
John:
So I'm going to put my money against this.
Marco:
Yeah, me too.
Marco:
I don't.
Marco:
So there's a number of problems with this theory.
Marco:
So number one, as John said, it raises the watch off your wrist more so it makes it effectively thicker.
Marco:
You don't want that.
Marco:
And you can see this is all like you don't have this isn't theoretical.
Marco:
The entire rest of the watch world.
Marco:
has gone nuts over the last decade or so for something called a NATO strap.
Marco:
It's exactly this.
Marco:
It's a continuous loop of fabric that goes under the watch, and the watch sits on top of part of the strap.
Marco:
And it does this.
Marco:
It pushes the watch up.
Marco:
It makes it thicker.
Marco:
It's a certain look.
Marco:
It works for certain watches.
Marco:
But all the watches that it works on are thin.
Marco:
And the Apple Watch, the watch body is kind of, you know, medium thickness for a watch.
Marco:
It's, what is it, about 12 millimeters?
Marco:
But then it has the big bulge in the bottom.
Marco:
It's like, you could kind of make it work, but I think it would still raise up off the wrist more than not doing this.
Marco:
And then also, if it's attached by magnets, remember, magnets hold very strong straight on, but very weakly to sideways motions.
Marco:
If that attached magnetically head-on, it would very easily get knocked off the strap with any kind of side impact to it.
John:
Well, the Swatch one that they showed the picture of has like sidewalls to essentially mechanically prevent sideways movement.
Marco:
Yeah, the Swatch one is more like a protective case for the watch almost.
Marco:
Like it goes all around.
John:
Yeah, but if you had sidewalls, they wouldn't need to go up that high.
John:
You just need them to go up high enough to prevent movement laterally, and then the magnets would prevent the up-and-down movement.
Marco:
But see, and see, then I can't see Apple doing that either, because then, first of all, that would kind of constrain how large the watch body is and what shape it is, you know, based on the whatever the strap ecosystem has has been working with so far.
Marco:
And even like the size of the sensor hole, what if they want to change the sensors in a future model of watch, but they won't fit in the hole?
John:
It would be like making a bunch of keyboards for the iPad that needed to be exactly sized for each individual iPad.
John:
It would be nuts.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So, yeah, I don't see them going in that kind of direction.
Marco:
And I think if they did, it would be worse.
Marco:
And that's probably why they won't.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
I meant to bring this up originally, and then it slipped my mind because I didn't put it in the official show notes.
Casey:
I only put it in the ones that we eventually released to people.
Casey:
But anyways, your time shifting was a success.
Casey:
I thought we should call this out that your time shifting, to some degree, if you had just done the standard Marco slash Casey approach of procrastinating, this problem would have solved itself.
Marco:
Yes, I was trying to time shift the Phish concert that had happened.
Marco:
And it turns out they just released the meat of it for free on YouTube for everybody.
Casey:
What do you mean by the meat of it?
Casey:
I'm not trying to be funny.
Casey:
I'm genuinely asking.
Casey:
the meat stick of it, you know, that was a, that was a different show.
Marco:
That was a different, so no, it was, um, there was, there were, it was a concert with three sets and the, the really like, you know, important new year's Eve, like historic segment of it was only kind of one and a half of those sets.
Marco:
And so what they released was that part, like the, the big, like the big story that all the fans have been waiting for to be told in this way for like 30 years.
Marco:
And so anyway, that's,
Marco:
That that is the part that was released.
Marco:
It was not the whole concert, but it was the most important part.
Casey:
Gotcha.
Casey:
Well, anyway, we will put a link in the show notes in case you want to punish yourself.
Casey:
I'm sorry.
Casey:
In case you want to participate in this sort of thing.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So I posted on it like earlier, like, yes, they released it.
Marco:
And I've gotten some amazing responses because like people are going to watch it who have no idea.
Marco:
Because here's the thing, like it it's basically like like an acted out musical that
Marco:
of this whole story that's like ancient fish lore, if you're not a fish fan, this would look ridiculously weird to you.
Marco:
And I respect anyone who's actually trying to get into this as their first experience of this band, because...
Marco:
That's really diving into the deep end.
Marco:
And I applaud you if you could make it through it without just being like, this is weird and turning it off.
Marco:
This is not a great introduction to the band as a result, but it is an adventurous one.
Marco:
So if that's what you're looking for, go for it.
Marco:
But it's going to be very strange to people who are not already like dedicated fish fans.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
OLED iPad Pros could start from $1,500, rising to as much as $2,000 plus.
Casey:
This is according to MacRumors.
Casey:
MacRumors writes,
Casey:
If accurate, these price hikes could make the new 11-inch device over 80% more expensive than the existing 11-inch iPad Pro with LED Liquid Retina display, which starts at $800.
Casey:
As for the 13-inch model, assuming a base configuration costing $1,800, it would be around 60% more expensive than the current 12.9-inch iPad Pro with Mini-LED Liquid Retina XDR display, which starts at $1,100.
Casey:
Oh, Nelly, I'm already really uncomfortable with the potential expenditures in the next couple of weeks.
Casey:
But I mean, I'm not in the market for an iPad right now, but my word.
Marco:
There's a lot of it depends here.
Marco:
You know, a lot of this could be storage tiering where maybe they just eliminate some of the lower storage tiers of the iPad Pros.
Marco:
And so it's not quite an apples to apples comparison.
Marco:
Ding.
Ding.
Marco:
There could be some of that going on.
Marco:
I think it really depends for me whether this is a good idea and whether the market will bear this.
Marco:
It depends a lot on what they intend to do with the next iPad Air model.
Marco:
What we've seen over the last couple of years is that the iPad Air has been elevated by
Marco:
into many more formerly Pro-only features.
Marco:
It is still missing some big ones.
Marco:
Like for me personally, the big thing that's missing is Face ID.
Marco:
So if they can bring some of what makes an iPad Pro down to the iPad Air model, which again, they've been on this path,
Marco:
That, I think, would free up the iPad Pro to kind of let it be higher end components, let it be more pricey, let it serve the high end that is there.
Marco:
Now, that leaves the large question of what high end is there and how big that is and whether this will work or not.
Marco:
But the high end iPad market definitely exists.
Marco:
I don't think it's very big.
Marco:
So it kind of makes sense for Apple to make it a more premium thing, extract more money from the people who are in it.
Marco:
as long as the people who are not in that market have other models that can serve their needs at their price points.
Marco:
So if they decide to kind of push the air a little bit higher, give it a couple of pro-only features like Face ID, I think that would free them up.
Marco:
And then I don't think this is that big of a deal because there are people who will buy a $1,500, $2,000 iPad.
Marco:
Those people exist.
Marco:
There just aren't a ton of them.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I think these rumors of pricing are always suspect because pricing is the type of thing that Apple can keep very close to the vest, doesn't need to share with anybody, can change to the last minute.
John:
It's even easier to change than things like the name of the product.
John:
So the idea that some other, you know, I don't know if this is a supply chain thing, but anyway, sources far away from the people who are actually making the decision would know about the pricing seems crazy.
John:
Strange to me.
John:
Unless, of course, they're saying, look, we know that these new OLED screens they're going to put in cost X amount of dollars.
John:
And if you just apply Apple's traditional margins, that means the final product has to be this much unless Apple is going to take a hit to their margins.
John:
But I don't think they gave that kind of supporting evidence of like based on the cost of the screen.
John:
these are going to have to be X amount more than the old ones, especially like an 80% price increase.
John:
I know the OLEDs are probably more expensive than the LCDs, but, and they're also probably the most expensive thing in the product because, you know, the SOC for all its importance is much less expensive than that screen.
John:
I still don't think it would justify an 80% price increase based on parts.
John:
So then they must be like, okay, well the parts don't justify it, but then you got to go to Marco's idea of like, oh, they're just going up market and they're just going to make them more expensive.
John:
But how would they know that?
John:
That's definitely the type of thing that Apple would not need to discuss with a large number of people.
John:
So I'm taking all this with a grain of salt, with the only exception being that, as we all know, if you just go to the top storage tier, these things cost as much as a car no matter what, because of Apple's magical fairy dust diamond coated SSD prices.
John:
Right.
John:
And that's, you know, so if they offer this with an eight terabyte SSD, what is the add eight terabyte SSD prices in like twenty two hundred dollars on Macs or something?
John:
That's that's add twenty two hundred dollars to the existing price of the iPad.
John:
So if they offer an eight terabyte iPad, yeah, it's going to be like five grand or something and it's stupid and sucks and we all hate it.
John:
But that could also be the source of this rumor.
John:
So when they come up, someone will go to the configurator and they see the rumors are right.
John:
I can configure this two thousand dollars.
John:
Yeah, of course you can.
John:
Um, anyway, I'm holding on to hope that they don't start at 1500.
John:
I'll still buy it at 1500 to be clear, but I prefer not to, because all I want is that really nice screen and a really nice 11 inch OLED screen is not really $1,500.
John:
And I know there's an entire computer attached to it and a battery and face ID sensors and so on and so forth.
John:
But boy, that's pushing it considering even Apple's own, uh, you know, 27 inch monitor, uh, 5k monitor is $1,600.
John:
I guess that's not OLED, but still.
John:
So.
John:
Here's hoping it's not 1500 to start.
Casey:
Anonymous writes, In my capacity as an AWS solutions architect, I've worked with Apple over the past two years as they leverage several of AWS's ML services.
Casey:
From my experience, Apple has mostly been interested in smaller open source LLMs.
Casey:
In particular, a crucial factor for the Apple teams I was working with was always the token context window, or in other words, how many tokens you can fit into the prompt for an LLM.
Casey:
This makes sense, especially when thinking about multi-turn conversations with Siri, as all the previous conversations fit into the context window in order for Siri to keep track of it.
Casey:
In 2022, the token context windows for open source models was usually about 512 tokens.
Casey:
But as with so many things in the LLM space, we saw massive progress in 2023 to the point where
Casey:
The best open source models, for example, Meta's Llama 2, now have a 32,000 token window, which corresponds to 25,000 words, or between 50 and 100 pages.
Casey:
With regard to virtual assistants and the fact that LLMs are not optimized for correct answers but for plausible sounding answers, one approach that I found very promising when working with customers is retrieval augmented generation.
Casey:
This is the process of optimizing the output of a large language model so it references an authoritative knowledge base, for example, IMDB, the internet, SQL databases, et cetera, outside of its training data sources before generating a response.
Casey:
The Alexa team has been working a lot with this method to ensure that questions like Michael Jackson's age are answered correctly.
Casey:
You can find more info on RIG here.
Casey:
We'll put a link in the show notes.
Casey:
And then finally, with regard to how LLMs work, John was correct with his description of LLMs, just predicting the next word without really knowing where this prediction came from.
Casey:
It's equivalent to me writing an email and then someone asking me where those words come from, to which I would only respond, I don't know, I guess I read a lot during my lifetime.
Casey:
Here's a very good blog post that explains how LLMs and the various parameters to manipulate the probability distributions work.
Casey:
We'll put that link in the show notes.
Casey:
And then just as an addendum, while that post that I just mentioned is almost four years old, it still holds up and explains accurately how LLMs work.
Casey:
David Webb writes, one of the reasons Alexa is so good at general knowledge questions is that there's a whole community of people writing answers for these questions in return for karma points.
Casey:
You can find the Alexa Answers site here.
Casey:
I had no idea this was a thing, and this blew my friggin' mind.
John:
Oh, I had no idea.
John:
Right?
John:
That's the Amazon approach, Mechanical Turk.
John:
Yep.
John:
How do they do this?
John:
They pay a bunch of people not too much money to do it.
Casey:
Oh, well, do they even pay?
John:
Oh, these are really sad things.
Casey:
But do they even pay or are they just doing it for karma?
John:
Well, I don't know what karma points are.
John:
So here's the thing.
John:
These two things go together.
John:
Because talking about the retrieval augmented generation, the idea that you have a piece of software that looks to the side at a database of authoritative information before it goes to the LLM.
John:
uh it's like wow that's a clever we've talked about this before like some way to either constrain or provide additional data uh that is more authoritative than just guess based on your giant soup of knowledge but then the other route is no don't do that just pay people
John:
Or just get people to figure it out.
John:
Like just get someone to look it up and put it, put into like, like essentially how does that, you know, retrieval augmented generation, how does that database off the side get populated?
John:
Just have people putting in answers to questions.
John:
When did Michael Jackson die?
John:
Someone puts that in.
John:
And now that gets, that is part of that authoritative database that the software looks up before it goes to the LLM.
John:
Because that's what you really need.
John:
Like for IMDB and stuff, you've already got that data.
John:
But for just like, what's the thing that somebody might ask?
John:
I don't know, all the U.S.
John:
presidents, their their ages and birthplaces, sports results and popular sports for the past several decades, famous people like.
John:
And so just to generate all those facts and put them into sort of a structured form so you can look aside at that information.
John:
The Amazon approach to that is get people to do it.
Marco:
it's bananas i mean i i'm not surprised as soon as i read it i was like what oh yeah okay but still all right so a selection of questions from this site does white bread have bleach in it what does the name supreme mean and my favorite what's open heart surgery
Casey:
Oh, my.
John:
I mean, see, the thing is, what does Amazon know?
John:
Amazon knows what people ask because they have thousands and thousands of microphones in people's houses that are just listening and people are asking them questions.
John:
And when they don't know the answer, I'm sure they write them off to the side somewhere and, you know, tally them up and smush them all together.
John:
And to find out, boy, a lot of people want to know if white bread is bleaching it.
John:
Let's add that to the list and throw it into the list.
John:
And some human picks it out and writes in the answer that says, you hope not.
John:
Oh, I think I found my soulmate.
Marco:
Somebody asked, what is the golf tournament?
Marco:
How do birds get water in the winter?
Marco:
That's actually a good question.
Marco:
How is Babby formed?
Marco:
Oh my God, this is amazing.
Casey:
Magnets, how do they work?
Marco:
On one hand, some of these are very endearing.
Marco:
Many of them are just kind of sad.
John:
Well, you know, people need answers.
John:
Where does Cupid come from?
Casey:
My word.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Final note.
Casey:
Apparently, everything's coming up Marco.
Casey:
I mean, Milhouse.
Casey:
I mean, Marco right now.
Casey:
Microsoft's keyboards and mice will live on, baby.
Casey:
Microsoft surprised everyone last year by deciding to discontinue its range of popular mice, keyboards, and PC accessories.
Casey:
I don't know where this is from.
Casey:
I apologize.
Casey:
I can't cite the source.
Casey:
But anyways.
Marco:
I think The Verge had a big article about it.
Casey:
Okay, after decades of Microsoft-branded PC hardware, the software giant has decided to focus on the Surface brand instead.
Casey:
Now a unique partnership will see Microsoft's PC accessories live on thanks to Accessory Maker Encase.
Casey:
There are 23 products in total that will be available later this year.
Casey:
We will put a link in the show notes.
Marco:
Yeah, this is great because Microsoft over the years has made some pretty great keyboards and mice, and they tend to make them for a very long time because they tend to not be super exciting.
Marco:
You don't need to change them that often.
Marco:
And people like them, and businesses buy a ton of them.
Marco:
So it's a pretty decent business to be in.
Marco:
It's not super exciting, but it's nice, reliable income for products that they've designed and manufactured oftentimes like 15, 20 years ago, and they're still making.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
It did kind of baffle everyone when Microsoft announced, hey, we're just going to stop doing this after a very long time.
Marco:
We're going to stop doing this fairly low-needs business for reasons.
Marco:
I don't know why.
Marco:
And a lot of people were upset because when you can't get your keyboard anymore, and the downside is my favorite keyboard, the Sculpt Ergonomic, is extremely short-lived.
Yeah.
Marco:
it only lasts like two or three years usually before it dies and you have to buy a new one um so a lot of fans of these keyboards were very upset about this and so now in case has effectively entered some kind of partnership with microsoft where they're not like you know making their own brand new things necessarily they're just basically continuing microsoft's existing manufacturing operations to make these keyboards so
Marco:
They're continuing what sounds like basically the same factories, the same parts, the same designs, same suppliers.
Marco:
It'll just have the Incase branding on it, and then Incase will then, I assume, support these.
Marco:
I guess that's good.
Marco:
I don't know a ton about Incase.
Marco:
They seem like one of those kind of mass, semi-budget brand makers of a bunch of different PC accessories over the years.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
um it's probably not a bad thing you know for the quality of the product or anything it's just a good thing we're going to keep having these you know keyboards and mice that we love so much they're going to keep being made and that's great um and i would love for some you know in some future i would love for one of these thousand different you know fancy keyboard companies that exist to make something that is as ergonomic as the sculpt ergonomic keyboard but no one ever has yes i know about the new logitech one it's not
Marco:
Like no one ever has matched this keyboard.
Marco:
Please, for the love of all that is holy, someone make ergonomic keyboards that A, tilt downwards towards the top of them, not downwards towards the bottom.
Marco:
So that's called reverse tilting.
Marco:
B, have kind of a bulbous peak in the middle of them that then slopes downward to the left and right.
Marco:
That's called, I believe that's called tenting.
Marco:
and C, does not have the giant extended numpad on the right side.
Marco:
That way you have to keep your mouse all the way in New Jersey off to the right side, and it forces your arm to bend out more.
Marco:
Ergonomic keyboards are very simple to make if you follow those three guidelines.
Marco:
No one does it.
Marco:
I don't know why.
Marco:
But anyway, until anyone else does, we can now buy the Microsoft once again.
Marco:
Well, we can soon, rather, buy the Microsoft once again through Incase.
John:
If you look at that article, they list the products that InCase will be making.
John:
I think it's like 23 individual products.
John:
Guess what's not on that list?
Casey:
Oh, no.
Casey:
What?
John:
My mouse.
John:
Oh, no.
Casey:
Come on.
Casey:
I thought it was a Marco Oh, no.
Casey:
It turns out it's a John Oh, no.
John:
Oh, no.
John:
I checked.
John:
Yeah, I'm so disappointed.
John:
When I first saw the story, I'm like, oh, my mouse is there.
John:
I'm fine.
John:
But it's not.
John:
It's the Bluetooth ergonomic mouse, which I think does not support wired connection, which is how I use mine.
John:
So it's the same shape as mine, but then I couldn't use it plugged in.
John:
And I haven't had good luck with the various wireless things here.
John:
So I don't know what I'm going to do.
John:
I mean, they make the Bluetooth ergonomic mouse.
John:
Why don't they also make the Microsoft Precision mouse, which is just the Bluetooth ergonomic mouse, but with a wired connection?
John:
Or maybe what they're calling the Bluetooth ergonomic mouse will also have the wired connection.
John:
We'll see.
John:
I can't tell from the picture, but it's not looking great for my mouse preferences.
John:
And my mouse, kind of like Marco's keyboard, as we noted, aside from all the problems I have with it, the rubber thing on the side wears out.
John:
It gets like a soft, gross spot on it.
John:
So it has a lifetime ticking down on it as well.
Casey:
Sound like great products.
Marco:
I mean, to be fair, I don't think that's that unreasonable for keyboards and mice, which are these very high-moving parts, high-motion, high-usage kind of products.
John:
It's unreasonable for... I don't know how to speak to your keyboard, but I think it's unreasonable for a mouse because... I think I had my original mouse for...
John:
what maybe it's like one or two years maybe it was less than a year but like we have materials for mice that can withstand holding and using it i use mice for years and years and years and they if they just if you make the whole mouse out of that plastic you're fine or if you make it out of a rubber that survived like logitech rubber i've never worn through the rubber on a logitech mouse i'm sure it varies depending on your skin chemistry and which particular mouse you have but like
John:
i'm not doing anything really weird to my house it should last way longer than these last like way way way way way longer like and i feel the same way about your keyboard i use an apple extended to keyboard for like you know 10 12 years and it was fine despite the you know broken off f5 key uh and that was that was the fault of a pocket knife not the keyboard i think your standards are too low for peripherals how's your uh what do you call the apple mouse is there anything wearing off on that one
Marco:
I mean, very slowly, the big long strips of plastic that kind of serve as like anti-skid things, they very slowly develop scratches over time, but otherwise, no.
John:
And you can replace the little Teflon feet.
John:
Like, you can just take those out and put new ones in there that's on most good mice.
John:
But yeah, again, the only reason I'm using the Microsoft one is, one, the scroll wheel feels really good.
John:
It feels the way I want it to feel.
John:
The people have different preferences in their scroll wheels, but I like the way this one feels.
John:
And two, the shape of this mouse is as close as I could get to the shape that I prefer.
Marco:
See, scroll wheels are like transmissions.
Marco:
You know what's better than a manual transmission?
Marco:
No transmission.
Marco:
You know what's better than a great scroll wheel?
Marco:
No scroll wheel.
John:
I kind of like scroll wheels.
Marco:
The magic mouse, man.
Marco:
It gets me.
Marco:
It's like you try to use anything else.
Marco:
It's like, oh, I got to click this thing.
Marco:
Like, what year is this?
Casey:
See, the funny thing is, so I am a Magic Trackpad user for the last several years.
Casey:
We've been over this before, but I was one of the last people that I knew to use a Magic Mouse.
Casey:
And the thing with the Magic Mouse that got me was not the scrolling and the inertial, excuse me, scrolling, which I agree with you, Marco.
Casey:
I'm not arguing not a bit.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
what got it got me on the magic mouse which i guess you can do this with some of these like mx master mice or whatever but you can do the two fingers side to side or maybe no i'm sorry it was two fingers side to side go forward and back that's what it is on safari and three fingers side to side is what i was trying to say to go through different virtual screens which i think i'm the only one of the three of us that does that but you know to go through different spaces and so it's the lateral two and three finger things that really kept me on the magic mouse for years and i don't
Casey:
remember what the impetus was for me to go to the trackpad i think i just wanted to give it a shot and then ended up really liking it um but i've been all trackpad i think since my imac pro if i'm not mistaken it's been a fair bit of time now there's a lot more room on a trackpad to three finger swipe sideways i mean doing that on the surface of a mouse is tight
Casey:
Or maybe, I'm sorry, maybe it's wrong.
Casey:
Maybe it's one finger left and right.
Casey:
I forget.
Casey:
It's been so long since I've used Magic Mouse.
Casey:
I have one.
Casey:
I just haven't used it.
Casey:
In fact, I think I have my iPad Pro's one, but I use them so rarely.
Casey:
But whatever this situation was, it was like one or two fingers to go back and forward in Safari.
Casey:
I wanted to say it was two and then like three to do spaces if memory serves.
Casey:
But again, I might have that wrong.
Casey:
And if it's wrong, it doesn't matter.
John:
If my Mac Pro came with a Magic Mouse, it's still in the box.
John:
I think it came with, it must have come with one, right?
John:
I don't remember.
John:
Yeah, it was, it came with a keyboard and I'm using the keyboard.
John:
So yeah, the mouse has got to be in the box.
Casey:
Well, it could have come with a trackpad.
Casey:
Oh, I think you could have optioned one or the other or I would never have optioned the trackpad.
John:
Although now I have a trackpad.
John:
We finally found my wife's old trackpad.
John:
We were cleaning up in the office and now I have this trackpad sitting on a desk in front of me.
Casey:
I'm so sorry that you have to be that close to a piece that's similar to a laptop.
John:
Yeah, I don't know what I'm going to do with it.
John:
They're hard to store because they're a little wedge shape.
John:
I'm like, maybe should I try to use it?
John:
Should I just put it on my desk?
John:
I don't know.
John:
It's just sitting there now.
Marco:
You try to store it in a stack and everything slides off slowly.
John:
It's paired to the computer.
John:
I moved the cursor with it and I'm like, okay, never mind.
John:
Do grasshoppers have tongues?
No.
Casey:
Are we back on Alexa?
John:
This is like, what is it?
John:
Yahoo Answers?
John:
What's the definition of watering?
John:
Yeah, the origin of how is Babby formed?
Marco:
What's the difference between couch and sofa?
Marco:
That's a good question.
Marco:
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Casey:
Apple announced that the Vision Pro is going to launch on February 2, and you'll be able to order it on Friday the 19th.
Casey:
Apple, I'm very surprised, is continuing to be kind to these coasters with an 8 a.m.
Casey:
introduction time, which I am here for.
Casey:
I am very appreciative of that, whether or not I end up ordering one.
Casey:
Basically, it will be available at all United States Apple Store locations, and it will also be available online.
Casey:
It's unclear to me, and I don't think it has been made clear, whether or not you must pick up at a store, which was a rumor that we heard for a while.
Casey:
You can get lenses for it.
Casey:
You can get reader-style optical inserts for $100.
Casey:
I presume that's $100 for a pair.
Casey:
I actually don't know.
John:
Yeah, it's interesting they didn't say that, but it does say plural, so I'm going to say pair.
John:
Yeah, reading glasses lenses are very cheap.
John:
Or in Apple land, they're $100.
John:
Yes, everywhere else it's like $5.
John:
You can buy them at a drugstore for $2 or from Apple for $100.
Casey:
And then if you need full-on prescription lenses or optical inserts, excuse me, that's $150.
Casey:
Again, the assumption is for a pair, but that isn't absolutely stated, so we're not sure.
John:
And that is actually, quote unquote, inexpensive as compared to the ridiculous system we have in the U.S.
John:
for actual prescription lenses that you buy.
John:
Some people were discussing this online about the pricing for the prescription lenses in particular.
John:
We're thinking if you were to buy glasses, plain old glasses at a regular glass store in the U.S.
John:
and you had prescription lenses and you got those lenses for one hundred fifty dollars.
John:
They're going to be the cheapest lenses the place has to sell to you.
John:
So they're not going to be the super fancy high index, you know, plastic where they'll make the lenses thinner or whatever.
John:
Probably less of an issue because inside a headset and no one's looking at them anyway.
John:
But I do wonder...
John:
what material these are made out of and what the index is high index is like how much does this bend the light for the thickness right and so if you if you have really bad vision like i do uh to get something that is my correct prescription and it's not high index plastic the glasses are incredibly thick you talk about coke bottle glasses but they're it's such a another one of those things that makes sense to older people maybe not younger people
John:
uh coca-cola used to come in glass bottles and if you cracked off the bottom of the glass bottle the glass in the bottom was thicker and if you had really thick glasses people would say you had coke bottle glasses because they look like really really thick glass stuck in them i did i got them once one time when i was a kid my parents got me non-high index plastic glasses they were so thick they were like a centimeter thick it was ridiculous looking just huge massive every time you see like
John:
glasses frames in the store or like a model wearing glasses, they're always wearing them with these lenses that are like wafer thin, right?
John:
But when you have actual bad vision and you don't use high index plastic, the lenses become thicker than the glasses frame very quickly, like five times thicker, not just a little bit thicker.
John:
So it's no longer like, oh, look at this person wearing these glasses with probably no lenses in them at all.
John:
They look fashionable.
John:
They don't look fashionable when a centimeter thick piece of plastic is in the middle of each one of them.
John:
Anyway.
John:
I'm interesting to see what kind of material these $150 prescription lenses are made out of.
John:
And again, maybe it makes no difference inside the headset, but I have to think thickness might be some factor because some people are using this headset with no lenses.
John:
There's people who are blessed with very good vision.
John:
And that means the screens like these lenses are an additional thickness between you and the screen.
John:
And I don't know if you have very long eyelashes, are they going to brush against the prescription lenses because they're so close to the screen?
John:
And maybe you two can answer these questions, but you can't talk about it.
John:
But we'll find out in a little bit.
John:
Anyway, I'm mostly happy with these prices because even if it's per eye, $150, it's still less than I was fearing they would be.
John:
So I guess that's good.
Marco:
I wonder, too.
Marco:
I mean, first of all, like, you know, the prescription lens industry is famously like very inflated.
Marco:
But I wonder, too, like they there's so many things that like, you know, reasons that you would get higher end prescription lenses that wouldn't really matter inside the Vision Pro.
Marco:
You know, you mentioned thickness like, you know, a lot of I would assume a lot of the reason why thin lenses are in fashion is, first of all, because they look better, like fashionably wise.
Marco:
Second of all, because they're lighter weight in here.
Marco:
Neither of those things is substantially significant, you know,
Marco:
And also, all the different coatings you can get, like the anti-glare coating, anti-scratch, all these different coatings they try to upsell you on with prescription lenses, none of those are really in play here.
Marco:
They wouldn't really matter here or be necessary.
Marco:
So maybe the combination of all those factors means that it really is not that expensive to give you prescription lenses.
John:
So the two things that I think are so factors, like I said, is distance, how much space is there for a really, really thick lens.
John:
Right.
John:
And the second thing is like sort of the sidewall dimension, like the thicker the glass is, the bigger the sidewall and the sidewalls are not really participating optically.
John:
Right.
John:
except in so far as light may enter the lens and bounce off the sidewall and come back to you.
John:
And you don't want that light.
John:
Like, especially since the sides of lenses are often not like the lenses themselves are clear and polished and everything, but the sidewalls are kind of like smoky.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
Like that, if,
John:
I know from experience having worn those glasses that were way too thick that with, there were the not high index plastic, those thick smoky sidewalls often were sort of in my peripheral vision.
John:
And I felt like light would like light them up, like it would light up frosted glass and that you probably don't want even inside a headset.
John:
So we'll see.
Casey:
All right, so the Vision Pro comes with a solo knit band, which I think is the big thick thing that they pictured most often that goes around the back of your head.
John:
Yeah, it's like a catcher's mitt on the back of your head.
John:
Exactly.
John:
I think it was the only thing in the original, like the launch video and all of the launch artwork for the headset with the exception of maybe one image.
John:
It was that one big single strap that goes behind your head and gets really wide when it goes in the back of your head.
Casey:
then it also has a dual loop band which apple says gives users two options for the fit that works best for them or i guess between the two bands is that the hermes version that goes around your head twice it's one uh it's one above your head and one behind your head right and then uh there's oh that's what the two options they're talking about are one is the solo right i have these names one is the single strap band and one is the one with two straps right yeah right
Casey:
And then it also includes a light seal, two light seal cushions.
Casey:
I guess, what are the differences between them there?
Casey:
So the light seal is the big thick part and the cushion is the part that's actually pressing against your face?
Marco:
Yes, and I can tell you probably why.
Marco:
As the father of a child who has used a VR headset a lot, very heavily, the part that squishes against your face gets really gross and stinky.
Marco:
Cool.
Marco:
So it's good to be able to replace those easily.
Marco:
I wonder if they're machine washable.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Goodness.
Casey:
Who knows?
Casey:
Uh, so yeah, two light seal cushions in Apple vision pro cover for the front of the device.
John:
I saw that.
John:
I saw that people have like patent filings on it.
John:
And I'm like, this is interesting.
John:
I wonder if they'll ship this.
John:
And lo and behold, a few days later, uh, you know, a cover for the front of the device, like the front of the device, I know there's a screen there and it's made of glass and it shows your eyeballs or whatever, but it really doesn't participate much in the process of what you see as the wearer.
John:
So I guess you're, you're covering the screen.
John:
So yeah,
John:
So people can get a scratch-free view of your virtual eyeballs?
Marco:
Well, will it operate with the cover?
Marco:
Or will the cameras shoot through the cover?
Marco:
Are there openings for all the cameras?
John:
I'm assuming this is for storage and transport.
John:
Yeah, that's what I thought.
Marco:
Yeah, that's what I assume.
Marco:
Because for a cover to actually have it be operated through, you'd have to have openings for all the cameras, all the vent holes, the digital crown, all the different parts of it that are required.
Marco:
They probably are not doing that.
Marco:
It's probably just a cover for storage.
John:
Yeah, that would be like a screen protector, but this has a cover for the front of the device.
John:
I'm kind of picturing like the weird bra they have on the AirPods Max.
John:
Yeah.
John:
But for this.
John:
Yeah, because that went so well.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Well, similar, because like, again, if I'm going to transport this, something that merely covers the screen on the front is not doing the job of making this transportable.
John:
The whole rest of this ungainly thing is still out there flopping around, right?
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
yeah and it's and that's part of you know that's one of the big um i think restrictions and challenges on this whole design they've gone with of having the outside be a screen like again look at every other vr headset the outside is just a flat piece of plastic with some sensors on it and apple's like no this is going to be a single giant piece of glass that'll show some creepy version of your eyes through it and you know it's i mean it's a bunch of trade-offs for sure and one of the trade-offs is uh well it's more expensive and bigger and much heavier and everything else
Marco:
Another one of the trade-offs is that it becomes much harder to transport.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And then you get a free, for the low, low cost of $3,500 plus, polishing cloth, which is very exciting.
Casey:
You get a battery, which is compulsory to use the device, a USB-C charge cable, and a USB-C power adapter.
Casey:
So that is what's in the box, which, to be honest, is not an insignificant amount of stuff.
Casey:
I mean, that is a fair bit of stuff.
John:
I saw some rumors and discussion, again, based on patent filings or whatever, of other possible strap options, including some of the straps that they show in their PR photos.
John:
have that little um i don't know little pod that has the speakers in it that fires this the sound down into your ears but of course if you've decided that you're going to use your air pods or something with it rather than using those speakers you don't need those pods anymore so and like we saw uh when this thing launched these straps are actually made up of two portions one is kind of a stiff portion that connects to the headset and two is a
John:
like the loose sort of strappy thing that goes around your head, that you could replace the stiff portions with ones that don't have the speaker pods in them for a sleeker, lighter weight thing.
John:
But it seems like that's not a thing that they're shipping, it was just something they considered during the design.
Marco:
But overall, this is actually pretty well accessorized, it seems, like right in the box.
Marco:
And this is just one of the wonderful things of it being a brand new product line.
Marco:
You know, like originally the iPod came with like the dock and the cable, all this other stuff.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And then as the iPod line went on, it became, you know, cheaper and cheaper.
Marco:
And there was a lot less stuff in the box and more stuff you had to buy separately.
Marco:
Same with the iPhone.
Marco:
The iPhone used to come with more stuff in the box than it does now.
John:
Like a charger.
John:
At least this comes with something you can charge it with.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
So at least like, you know, right now we're still in the really early part of this.
Marco:
And so they're going to give us all the accessories.
Marco:
But I bet in five years, you know, whatever Vision line products are out then, you're going to see a lot less of this stuff coming with them.
John:
I mean, the most glaring one are the straps.
John:
Because it's like, okay, one of these straps is probably going to quote unquote win.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
Like I know people's heads are shaped differently and everything.
John:
But...
John:
Like them shipping both the straps is kind of like we couldn't figure out one strap that worked the best for everybody.
John:
So here's to good luck.
John:
Like and obviously the one with the top strap should help a little bit with the weight because it literally goes over the top of your head rather than having to pinch the thing against the front and back of your head to keep it from sliding downwards.
John:
But they're still shipping the single one.
John:
So it's like, it's not even like, you know, the thing weighs the same no matter what.
John:
Is it just, is the single strap one just for people like me with big noses who can support the weight of this?
John:
But you really don't want the weight to be supported on your nose.
John:
So I don't understand.
John:
Like the two straps being shipped here is kind of like,
John:
they're just throwing up their hands and like, it's $3,500, we can afford it and we couldn't figure it out.
John:
I have to think that the correct strap is probably neither of these.
John:
It's something, it's an evolution of one of them.
John:
And I think having real people buy this thing and use it and
John:
you know complain about it people with different hairstyles and different size and shape heads and different tolerance for pinching in different places and different size skulls because again this you know you can get a different face shield for this but it doesn't come in different widths it doesn't even come in two different sizes like the apple watch it is the size it is and they do the best they can to make it conform to your face but if you have a really really wide head or really really narrow head there's only so much you can do and it's ditto with the straps so
John:
This is definitely sort of an experimental kind of like, let's see what sticks.
John:
Here's two straps.
John:
Good luck.
Marco:
You know, it also might just be that the last thing they want is for someone to dislike the product based on some fairly avoidable comfort issue.
Marco:
They're really putting themselves out there with this.
Marco:
They're launching this whole new thing.
Marco:
It's a massive risk.
Marco:
And you know there's going to be a whole bunch of people who get it and try to
Marco:
you know, try to make YouTube videos about how much it sucks, whatever.
Marco:
It's like, you know, they're trying to cover their bases.
Marco:
They're trying to, like, make sure, you know, we don't want anyone to go through the process of spending $3,500 plus on this thing, going to the store, getting themselves fit for the shield, getting the prescription optical inserts and all this other stuff.
Marco:
Like, this is quite a process to get this thing, you know, made for you and fit for you, only to then discover, oh, it's kind of uncomfortable.
Marco:
So that's probably why they're including both straps.
Marco:
Like, give people all the options.
John:
i mean i mean that's gonna happen no matter what though like that's the thing about this because they haven't like how many people have ever worn this in the entire world you could probably put them in a pretty small theater not many people have ever used this and now you're going to sell a million of them in a year you're going to very quickly find out okay this part of this strap pinches uh this percentage of people and the bands are too wide or too narrow or tilt down too much or not enough like uh
John:
They could do all the testing they can internally, but you're only going to find out once this.
John:
And it's inevitable that it's going to be uncomfortable.
John:
Like it's I know from again, from wearing glasses, glasses frames can be uncomfortable.
John:
That's one of the main things that I use to choose my glasses frames and also one of the reasons I'm wearing glasses frames that are older than my children.
John:
is because I find a lot of glasses frames uncomfortable.
John:
And yes, I know with glasses frames, you can bend them and put them into little hot beads and try to get them all lined up and do all these things.
John:
But the combination of like durability and comfort and which frames work rest on your face with your nose and your ears and everything else,
John:
It's a very personal thing, and it's extremely difficult to find something that works, especially if things that get strapped to your head.
John:
Even, you know, shopping for things like ski goggles, which are kind of similar to this, and they have the advantage of you probably wearing a hat to cushion the strap going around your head.
John:
So, yeah, I think they're probably doing the best they can, but I look at all these straps and I'm like, these cannot be the final form.
John:
I mean, obviously the real solution to this problem is make the headset smaller and lighter, and I hope they do that, but...
John:
Judging by their love of that stupid aluminum frame and curved glass front, I'm not sure what kind of progress they're going to make on that in the next year or two.
Marco:
I bet the front screen is the first thing to go in future revision of this product.
Marco:
On a cheap model, you know?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I'm sure there's going to be a Vision Air or something like that.
Marco:
They just put stickers there with eyeballs on them.
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, and it'll be because, you know, aluminum is much lighter than glass.
Marco:
So if they if if the front of it becomes mostly a flat piece of aluminum with some cameras on it or whatever, like that would actually be a significant weight savings.
John:
They should really make it out of plastic.
John:
I think there's there's more of an excuse to use the AirPods Max because headphones at least get banged around and your head could hit something sideways.
John:
But honestly, this thing, what is this going to be banging into?
John:
Hopefully nothing, especially since they always want you to be seated while you're using it.
John:
They never show you like a plain beat saber.
Casey:
But that's during use.
Casey:
You still got to get it places if it ever leaves your house.
John:
Oh, just put it in that little cover.
John:
That'll totally protect.
Marco:
Honestly, John, you're right.
Marco:
Like, I mean, honestly, both the AirPods Max and the Vision Pro should probably be made of more plastic than they are because that would make them both lighter and that would significantly improve comfort.
John:
that's why i keep hoping that apple will get into like carbon fiber or something i know it's not feasible we're always looking for like how about something that's lighter and durable but is not metal and carbon fiber fulfills those things except it's extremely expensive and annoying to manufacture and has also also some other advantages but it's like if you're going to stubbornly refuse to do plastic is there some other material that you feel okay about using i don't know magnesium like titanium
John:
Yeah, I guess.
Marco:
Yeah, we'll see.
Marco:
Also, keep in mind, too, one of the major reasons they would want to save weight is to then immediately spend it by putting the battery inside the headset.
John:
No, they don't want to do that.
John:
I mean, they don't want to, but I think they need to do that at some point.
John:
Yeah, I mean, so what the other people do is they put the battery behind your head to try to balance the weight in the front, but it's still weight.
John:
It's not great.
Marco:
Well, and even that, like, you know, like the Quest 2, well, yeah, because now Adam got a Quest 3 for Christmas, so now I have some experience seeing both of them around the house.
Marco:
Like, all of those headsets have internal batteries to the front of the headset also, but they now offer, like, extended battery head straps that have more battery on the back of the head.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I can see Apple doing something like that down the road, maybe.
Marco:
But I think step one is get the price down of this product.
Marco:
And then step two is get the battery inside of it.
Marco:
And so I think any advances they're going to have and any changes they make to eliminate weight or size should be spent then going towards those goals.
John:
yeah maybe i'll have to see what this battery is like in real life to see like what kind of weight are we talking about because we know the battery doesn't last very long as it is so you know i think it's just like a uh we talked about the uh the iphone uh mag safe backpack is the uh like a magnetically attached backpack strap imagine an actual backpack that a human could wear with two straps yeah
John:
And it had a huge battery in it and you could be in your Vision Pro for 48 hours.
John:
Oh, someone will definitely sell that, I'm sure.
John:
Be very healthy.
John:
Talk about a stinky cushion.
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
Wow.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So Apple also noted that the Vision Pro is designed with the environment in mind with 100% recycled rare earth metals, excuse me, rare earth elements in all magnets and 100% recycled tin materials.
Casey:
soldering, and gold plating in multiple printed circuit boards.
Casey:
The frame and battery enclosure contain 100% recycled aluminum, and the light seal and solo knit band are each made with over 70% recycled yarn.
Casey:
The Vision Pro meets Apple's high standards for energy efficiency and is free of mercury, brominated, I hope I pronounced that right, flame retardants, PVC, and beryllium.
Casey:
The packaging is 100% fiber-based, bringing Apple closer to its goal of eliminating plastics in all packaging by 2025.
Casey:
Kudos to them.
John:
yeah pretty cool yeah they've been pretty good effort here like we talked about the watch is like the one product that was totally carbon neutral and everything it's like they're you can tell like there are some parts of it that they still couldn't do not everything is 100 recycled but they're trying as hard as they can here to use recycled materials in all the places where they can which is good it's interesting that the solo uh knit band is 70 recycled but the double loop band no recycled stuff
Casey:
Well, I'm sure some of it – well, I would assume.
Casey:
I shouldn't say I'm sure.
Casey:
They would have listed it.
Casey:
Yeah, but if it was only like 10%, I don't think they would have listed it.
John:
I mean it kind of makes me think that the original plan was, hey, this one strap is going to work for everybody.
John:
And they eventually learned late in the game, as in two years ago.
John:
hmm yeah i know we thought this was going to be the strap because if you look at these two straps look at the one they show in all the pr things the single one with the big catcher's mitt and then look at the double strap and the double strap is like is that a prototype or is that the final it doesn't have that apple look and it would make sense that they spent all this time making sure they could make what was going to be the one and only strap make sure can we manufacture that with 70 recycled yarn blah blah
John:
And then, you know, I said, like I said, late in the game, as in a year or two ago, they said, we need another strap.
John:
This one doesn't work for enough people.
John:
Can we slap some of the other real fast?
John:
Fine.
John:
But we can't do the recycled stuff?
John:
Fine.
John:
Just ship it.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So we also got some more Vision Pro info.
Casey:
The Vision Pro, this is from Bloomberg, will be equipped with 16 gigs of RAM, the same amount of memory that was included in the Vision Pro development kits distributed by Apple last year.
Casey:
wish i could have got one of those uh german says that youtubers and members of the media selected for reviews will meet with apple on january 16th for a handle hands-on experience with a follow-up meeting to take place on the 23rd to go over the device's features a second time reviews are said to be published at the end of january uh i will be the uh the canary in the coal mine and say i did not get invited to this so
John:
I also did not get invited to this.
Casey:
So John, you're going to go?
John:
No, but the interesting thing about this is, and they've done this with Vision Pro already.
John:
So like Gruber, for example, like saw it when it was launched and then they also called him back to have him like look at his, you know,
John:
photos in the spatial video thing and stuff like a bunch of people have done that right the whole idea of like uh we're gonna have media see this before everyone else fine that's normal but having them come back twice i think is especially for this product because they're gonna you know meet with them on the 16th and give them a hands-on experience and i'm assuming they're gonna send them home
John:
with devices and then they'll come back on the 23rd.
John:
And I think coming back on the 23rd is where they're going to hear from the people who said, I tried to use this, but it's hurting my head here and this is fogging up and blah, blah, blah.
John:
And I think I got the wrong prescription because that's the second for Apple to get good reviews.
John:
Essentially, that's a chance for them to address the concerns that are only going to come up when the people take these things home and try to actually use them for extended periods of time for real work.
John:
And that I think I feel like that January 23rd thing is essentially the the fitting, you know, the final fitting.
John:
OK, how did this work for you?
John:
Did we give you the right face shield thing or do you need a different one?
John:
Did that strap work for you?
John:
Which strap did you like better?
John:
Tell us more about why.
John:
Like all of that, that that is really kind of doing everything they can so that.
John:
you know 50 of the first wave of reviews isn't just i was a little uncomfortable because i don't think it fit me right but oh well the 23rd is a chance for apple to fix that and say okay you did pick the wrong face shield try this one try the bigger one try the smaller one i'm guessing the 16th is a preview because pre-orders open a few days after that and they want people to talk about them so that people will pre-order it and then i'm guessing no one gets review hardware until the 23rd maybe i mean i if if what i said is not what they're doing it's what they should be doing
Marco:
Well, they should be inviting us.
John:
Right.
John:
Well, no, but like, honestly, like I think the having a second round where you hear people's complaints is so much more important.
John:
Like if they have complaints about like software or bugs, you can't fix that.
John:
Right.
John:
But if it's about complaints about fit, it's like you can fix that.
John:
We have different face shields.
John:
I can, you know, give you suggestions on the strap.
John:
Tell me what problems you were having.
John:
Maybe we had them, too.
John:
We can help you with them.
John:
It's not like when people get an early thing and there's a bunch of bugs in it, what are the marketing people going to do?
John:
They're like, oh, we can't fix that software before this launches.
John:
So just, oh well.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And then Apple released an ad for the Vision Pro, which they call Get Ready.
Casey:
And the general gist, it's only 30 seconds.
Casey:
And if I were to paint you a word picture, it's basically a bunch of movie characters either putting on helmets or face masks or things over their eyes.
Casey:
And
Casey:
um i had forgotten about this but a lot of people pointed out that this is very much in the vein of the hello iphone ad which was a bunch of people answering the phone from movies and saying hello you know how can i help you what's up etc etc and very very spiritually similar between the two i thought it was a good ad i mean i it's not making me run up and you know get ready to order a vision pro immediately but it was a good ad
John:
The thing I like about the original iPhone ad is the only people who remember that ad were people who are paying attention to the iPhone when it was launched because that was the launch ad for the original iPhone.
John:
And that means it was just a bunch of Apple nerds because everyone else is like, oh, Apple's coming out with the phone, whatever.
John:
But people weren't.
John:
that interested in the iPhone anymore than you're interested in the Mac or anything else at that stage.
John:
And I guess the iPod was out there.
John:
Disagree.
John:
That's not how I remember it at all.
John:
No, I know there was lots of hype around the iPhone, but like, look at how well it sold in the first year.
John:
And it's not because they couldn't make enough of them.
John:
People were not that jazzed to get an iPhone.
John:
It's like, that's an Apple thing.
John:
I like my iPod, but I also like my current cell phone and it'll be fine or whatever.
John:
I strongly disagree.
John:
Yeah, I don't remember it that way.
John:
Well, Casey didn't even remember the ad and he is an Apple nerd.
John:
I think if you ask the average person on the street, do you remember the original iPhone ad?
John:
And then ask the same question of like, do you remember the original Mac ad?
John:
You're going to get very different answers.
Casey:
That's not a fair comparison at all.
Casey:
Why not?
Casey:
Because, first of all, the Mac ad was during the Super Bowl, and I don't recall when the Hello ad was.
John:
I think the Hello ad did get a lot of airplay, but I think people are like, eh, yeah, that's that Apple phone thing anyway.
Marco:
No, I mean, I remember the time span from January to June.
Marco:
January was the announcement, and then it was available in June.
Marco:
That time span...
Marco:
Everyone was buzzing about the iPhone for six months.
John:
Everyone in our world.
Marco:
Yes.
John:
No, I disagree.
John:
It was mainstream.
Marco:
It was everywhere.
Marco:
Everyone was buzzing about it for six months straight.
John:
But they didn't buy it when it came out because it was too expensive.
John:
And who wants an Apple phone?
Marco:
No, no, that's a lot of it was like, you know, waiting till your contract was up on your current phone or whatever, because that was again, that was a very contract based buying period.
Marco:
Everybody had like one or two year contracts on their phones.
Casey:
And also AT&T sucked at the time.
Casey:
And in America anyway, you had to have it on AT&T.
Casey:
And I remember that was not going to happen for years.
Casey:
And then eventually, both for my own purposes, I didn't want to do that.
Casey:
And then eventually I decided I lusted after and wanted the iPhone so badly that I'd be willing to try AT&T.
Casey:
And then I had to sell Aaron on it because we were and are on a joint plan.
John:
Why'd you have to sell Aaron on it?
John:
Everybody loves the iPhone.
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
the level of hype it had and buzz around mainstream audiences was way bigger than what the vision pro has now oh i agree i think they're both i think they're both similar i think you're misremembering the iphone because the iphone is now the iphone but back then it was like apple's trying to do a phone and people aren't sure how well it's going to do but anyway it's coming out people nerds are excited about it and it's interesting but it's also just kind of a curiosity and off in the corner because the real cell phone market is nokia or whatever and
John:
It took so long to turn people.
John:
Just look at the sales figures.
John:
Look at the sales chart for the iPhone.
Casey:
No, but you're misconstruing two different things.
Casey:
The iPhone was crippled when it was new, which at first sounds like I'm agreeing with you.
John:
But so is the Vision Pro.
John:
It's $3,500.
John:
Tons of things you can't do with it.
John:
It's like it'll run iPad apps.
Marco:
No, a lot of people are saying with the Vision Pro, I don't even see why I would want that.
Marco:
Whereas the original iPhone, it was like, okay, next time I get a new renewal on my contract slash when it comes to my carrier, I'm jumping on that.
John:
bingo bingo i think you have to look at the sales number and see that that's not the way it played out i think you're you're a misremembering history and thinking the iphone was always a hit that everybody wanted and it wasn't it took a while to convince people it was mostly a curiosity to have lots of hype and i think that's exactly like division pro it's a curiosity that has lots of hype will division pro prove itself like the iphone we'll see
Casey:
I think we are all perhaps misremembering because I could not disagree more with your characterization of what it was like in 2007-ish.
Casey:
And especially, even if I were to take your incorrect memory as fact, I would say that the moment anyone put their hands on a smartphone, immediately it clicked.
John:
But they hadn't when the ad aired.
John:
That's my whole point.
John:
Skepticism.
John:
Skepticism about the iPhone.
Yeah.
Casey:
Well, but again, I mean, yes, I think there was a degree of skepticism, probably more than I'm giving it credit for, but certainly a lot less than I think you are remembering.
Casey:
I don't think people were near as skeptical as you seem to believe they were.
Casey:
But even on top of that, I think I agree with Marco that it was more about, wow, that sounds cool.
Casey:
But A, I've got another year and a half left on this phone.
Casey:
B, it is very expensive.
Casey:
And C, there's no frigging way I'm getting on Singular or AT&T or what have you.
Casey:
Because they suck.
Casey:
And I mean, I cannot overstate at the time.
Casey:
Now it's very different.
Casey:
In fact, I would say even a few years into the iPhone, it was very different.
Casey:
But at the time, Singular and AT&T both were terrible.
Casey:
God, were they terrible.
John:
that's the reason people weren't as interested once they heard it was it was AT&T only and or singular only or whatever and it's just like oh it's a curiosity whatever it wasn't we were everyone in the Apple world was insanely hyped about it anyone who had touched it loved it tech nerds were totally into it but look at the sales look two years later people's contracts are up it's 2009 wow look at those sales they're better than they were in 2007 but they're nothing like what they would become no one's arguing that it did that it sold massively the first year we're not saying that what we're saying is that there was huge
John:
huge buzz that's what i'm saying people people were and it's not because people were like oh i want to get one the second i can they could and they didn't they chose not to buy it right because of other circumstances i don't think it was because they were unconvinced it was because of other other circumstances around it yeah i don't think it's like oh i wish i had one but they're not on my network i know that's exactly what it was for me that was a huge part of it what are you talking about that was a massive part of it that's why you could you could see the sales spike every time they would add a new major carrier the the sales spike for for this thing was the iphone 6 when they finally made a big phone
John:
Oh, my God.
John:
No.
John:
Anyway, the point is, when that ad aired, people were not like, oh, I can't wait to get an iPhone.
John:
Nerds were like that.
John:
But even among nerds, not everyone got one because they were expensive and it was AT&T only.
John:
So the ad aired and people were not like, oh, my God, it's that phone.
John:
Everyone's going to get it because everyone didn't get it.
John:
Look at the first year sales numbers.
John:
Look at the second year sales number.
John:
So when the ad came, people were not dying to get it.
John:
And unlike the original Mac ad, they weren't intrigued by a mysterious thing they didn't know anything about because they'd already seen the introduction.
Marco:
I still think you're 100% wrong, but the Vision Pro does not have anywhere near the level of mainstream interest and hype as the iPhone did.
Casey:
Concur.
Marco:
I think it's going to be a much slower launch, and given manufacturing and supply realities, that's probably fine.
Marco:
I saw a few people on Maston over the last couple days refer to it almost like launching a dev kit as a product.
Marco:
that's actually a pretty good analogy because what we're going to see over the next year with division pro is basically very low sales numbers.
Marco:
It's a budding market.
Marco:
It, the, the initial buyers are going to be largely early gadget adopters at the high end of the market and then developers and people who are going to, who are getting it for some kind of testing or development role.
Marco:
And we're going to see the, the app and content market.
Marco:
I probably very slowly grow over time.
Marco:
So yeah,
Marco:
It really is kind of like a tech preview that they're selling.
Marco:
It's so early still.
Marco:
And the mainstream consumers, I think, are going to have relatively little interest in jumping on this yet.
Marco:
The price, obviously, is a massive thing holding it back.
Marco:
All the different physical limitations and awkwardnesses of it, I think, are going to keep it small for a while.
Marco:
But it doesn't need more than that right now just because, again, they can't make more of them
Marco:
anyway so like it's going to be a huge hit it's going to sell out it's going to be back ordered you know i'm going to try to order one on day one i think it's going to be very difficult to actually get like early delivery on it i'm sure it's one of those things where like you like refresh the app store the apple store app over and over again until the time comes around and then all of a sudden it's like oh 12 weeks out 18 weeks out 24 weeks out like it's going to be that kind of thing but there is no comparison to the level of consumer excitement for the vision pro compared to the iphone
John:
I think it's pretty good in Paris.
John:
But anyway, my point.
Casey:
Oh, my word.
Casey:
My whole point.
Casey:
Can everyone tell him how wrong he is, please?
Casey:
Please write him right now and tell him how wrong he is.
John:
Don't ask for people to write in because you're not going to like what they say.
Casey:
Anyway.
Casey:
Oh, oh, that's fire.
John:
Because people remember.
John:
So do we.
John:
People who are not in the Apple tech nerd sphere remember Apple people being excited about the phone, but them going, yeah, whatever.
John:
I'll check it out later.
John:
Anyway, my point is when people see this ad.
John:
A, they're not going to remember the Hello ad, just like you didn't, Casey, and you were kind of into Apple stuff at that point, right?
John:
They're not going to remember the ad that's echoing.
John:
I did.
John:
It seemed ridiculous to me that anyone who was in the Apple world would not remember it, but experience has shown that talking to people, lots of people didn't remember it, right?
John:
So they're not going to remember that the Hello ad.
John:
When someone sees this ad on TV, they're going to be like, what is this?
John:
What they're going to say to themselves is, oh, yeah, it's that Apple headset thing I heard about.
John:
And then they're going to forget about it.
John:
And then in 15 years, when we say, hey, do you remember the launch ad for Apple Vision Pro?
John:
They're going to be like, no.
John:
It was just like the launch ad for the iPhone.
John:
You're like, the launch ad for the iPhone?
John:
The what?
John:
Nobody's going to remember these things because it's not a proven product yet.
John:
That's the whole point.
John:
People don't have it.
John:
People haven't used it.
John:
It's not a proven product.
John:
And so when you put out an ad like this, it's memorable to people like us because we're super hyped about it because we're super big Apple followers.
John:
But unless it is like,
John:
a big artistic statement or a tease that everyone was curious about, like the 1984 ad, it's not going to stick in popular culture's mind.
John:
So that's why I think this ad is a good, a good match with the iPhone ad to, you know, to basically be a copy of the same ad, but saying instead of people in movies picking up phones, it'll be people in movies putting things over their eyeballs.
John:
All I'm saying is kudos to Apple because I think you appropriately calibrated this ad to be a match for the iPhone.
John:
And of course, Apple's hope is just like the iPhone.
John:
This is going to be a huge head and we'll see about that.
John:
But that the parallels are obvious to me, both in the ads and in my expected reception of the device.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
We'll see.
Casey:
I don't know anyone personally that is amused by the Vision Pro that isn't a tech nerd, like a true up and down tech nerd.
Casey:
And I think a lot of people are casually interested.
Casey:
And I think like amongst my peer group, for example, I think the assumption is I will probably get one amongst these people.
Casey:
And I'd actually like to talk to you two about that in a minute.
Casey:
But the assumption is I'll get one.
Casey:
And I think every single one of them will, figuratively speaking, line up to try it.
Casey:
But I don't think that any of them are even for a fleeting moment considering buying one.
Casey:
I think they are at most like, oh, I wonder what that's like to use.
John:
No, it's way more expensive than the iPhone was, obviously.
John:
And talking about the dev kit aspect of it, all VR headsets, all things that you strap to your head that put screens in front of your eyeballs, they all look like and essentially behave like, not dev kits, but like
John:
things that are tech nerdy in a way that is beyond normal what a normal person expects to endure right i mean it's usage it was used in jokes for movies for ages oh you put these big headset on with screens in front of your eyeballs and yes people do vr gaming video and that is kind of nerdy uh anything this big a big ski goggly screen thing that goes in your eyeballs um
John:
has not penetrated to the point where like AirPods, they start off weird and then very quickly, oh, everyone just wears AirPods, it's fine.
John:
Again, Apple hopes that's what will happen with this, but at $3,500, it's not gonna happen, right?
John:
But right now, this entire product category is a weird thing that tech people do.
John:
it has not graduated to a thing that everybody does or a thing that normal people do.
John:
And, you know, I'm not sure this is the product that's going to put it over that line, but certainly at the point now when it hasn't even launched, everyone is just looking askance at this entire product category of like,
John:
remind me again why i'd want to strap that to my face because they haven't tried it so apple hasn't had a chance to prove to them why they'd want to and and then the people who do use them are like okay well can i play my favorite vr game on it no all right well i'll just stick to my meta whatever
Casey:
I'm very surprised that they didn't do some sort of keynote to just remind us why we should be excited about this.
Casey:
And this ad, the Get Ready ad, I don't debate that it's a good ad, but it did not make me think, yes, I can't wait to do blank in my Vision Pro.
John:
It's for people who are already anticipating it.
Marco:
Well, I wonder if they're kind of holding back a little bit on how hard they push this to consumers yet because they know it's kind of a tough sell to most consumers right now.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And it gives them, it gives, like I said, it gives them breathing world to breathing room to work out the issues.
John:
Maybe they still got the straps wrong.
John:
Maybe there is an issue with again, condensation or breathability or something like whatever the first year, like stories about the design scripts they did or whatever.
John:
Don't overhype it at this point.
John:
Like,
John:
under promise over deliver have have this be a year where you work out the kinks figure out what works and what doesn't figure out what people want to use it for see what this deal is with the app ecosystem like apple has the breathing room to just spend this year doing that which is why an ad that is aimed at people who already are anticipating this is good it'll get those people excited it'll let them it'll be echo of the other ad but it's not
John:
It's not overhyping it to people who don't even know what it is.
John:
I think they will show this like during big football games or most people will not pay any attention to it.
John:
Or if they know anything, I'm like, oh yeah, I heard about that headset thing, whatever anyway.
John:
But it's not like Apple Vision Pro will change the way you live your life, right?
John:
It's not saying that in that language to regular people.
John:
It's not making that promise at all.
John:
It doesn't even show the product, right?
John:
Or maybe the very end it does, I guess.
John:
But it's...
John:
It's definitely kind of a an ad for the people who are already sold.
Marco:
I think, too, like the the initial batch of reviews is probably going to be all over the place.
Marco:
They're not going to all be universally positive because we know like gadget reviewers, tech reviewers, tech people on YouTube.
Marco:
We know price is super important to those markets and it's super important.
Marco:
And like anytime somebody releases something that's very expensive in a market, that's like the headlining theme of all the reviews.
Marco:
well, it's nice, but it's really expensive.
Marco:
And so we're going to keep hearing that.
Marco:
That's going to be most of the reviews early on is, okay, I tried it, it's cool, but it's really expensive.
John:
It's accurate.
Marco:
It is.
Marco:
So again, that's why I think they're going to actually try to kind of low play it because they don't want...
Marco:
every consumer in the world to get the impression this is just some expensive thing they don't need so again like I think they're going to play it a little more slowly give it time to develop its ecosystem which is not going to happen in the next three weeks like just give it time to develop the ecosystem over a year maybe more give it time for them to maybe get a version 2 out there that can maybe get a little bit lower in price and then we'll start seeing them pushing it harder and harder over time but I think it's going to be like kind of a slow ramp up to that level of promotion
John:
I know we're getting off on a tangent here.
John:
I know we've talked about this before in the past, but as we approach launch day and as I see, you know, developers who are like submitting their apps or thinking of submitting their apps, I'm getting more and more of a terrible feeling about what the state of the app ecosystem is going to be.
John:
Oh, it's going to be bad.
John:
Like, and I was thinking about this the other day.
John:
I had mistakenly thought for a moment in my mind,
John:
Oh, people can just use their Macs through it because it's got that screen, you know, the thing where you can see your Mac screen inside the thing.
John:
And but but the thing I had in my mind was like.
John:
This product would almost be better sold as a display for a Mac or as a or like you'd have a Mac built into it, like a little like the motherboard of a MacBook Pro, like a little container with the battery or whatever, like like that Mac apps, like the, you know, Mac apps that need a really big screen that have multiple windows and stuff like that.
John:
That is actually the best use case for this with no software until and unless an app ecosystem can build up around it.
John:
I know instead they're saying, well, it's iPad apps.
John:
You can run your iPad apps on it if they allow you to do it and blah, blah, blah.
John:
But iPad apps seem to me...
John:
I don't know, like I've never had a dream of this iPad app would be better if I could have it on a bigger screen or if I could have, you know, multiple copies of like because they're just so they're so focused on a single screen.
John:
And yeah, you've got slide over and split view and stuff like that.
John:
But Mac apps are the ones that you want to have a million different windows and big things out in front of you and everything like that.
John:
But this is not a Mac.
John:
And, you know, it's trying to be its own platform.
John:
And in the meantime, it's like, well, I can run some iPad apps if you want.
John:
And just that first year, like especially with Apple's general inability to foster a healthy app ecosystem on anything except for a device they sell billions of copies of makes me worry a lot about not so much the hardware and does it fit on people's faces and everything like that?
John:
Because that is going to be a problem, but that can be worked out.
John:
But like once all that's worked out, what do I see inside this thing?
John:
what software do I want to use inside it?
John:
And I keep thinking Mac software, Mac software would work well in there.
John:
It's, you know, the next version of this could be the best screen you've ever had for your Mac.
John:
Really complicated.
John:
Lots of windows using a mouse and keyboard in front of you that you can see because you can see your keyboard through the transparency mode thing, or you can touch type or whatever.
John:
Like,
John:
I don't know.
John:
Maybe I'm entirely wrong considering I've never used one of these things, but I'm really worried about what's going to be inside that headset.
John:
And, you know, and if it's a $3,500 really good movie viewer, then it's kind of like me buying the OLED iPad to watch TV on it.
John:
I mean, it's a use case, but I'm not sure it's going to be that common.
Marco:
I would suggest don't preset expectations in your mind too much beforehand about how you might use this device before you've actually used one.
Marco:
I think it will surprise you in a few ways.
Marco:
I mean, I would love to watch TV shows at it, but $3,500 is a lot.
Marco:
Yeah, but, you know...
Marco:
I, frankly, I don't see that Mac use case being that big of a use case.
John:
I mean, I don't mean the one that they're shipping, which is like screen sharing with the Mac.
John:
I mean like Mac apps running on the headset.
Marco:
No, yeah, I know.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And, you know, I can imagine a future version of that feature where Mac windows actually get broken out and can free float in the space.
John:
And maybe I'm describing wrong.
John:
I don't mean like Mac windows with like the stoplight buttons and all that stuff floating in front of you.
John:
I mean like...
John:
What's the way I said?
John:
Mac style apps.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
Like the correct donor, the correct donor platform for apps on the Vision Pro is not the iPad, but it's instead the Mac.
John:
So that it just because the limitations of iPad applications, like the fact that they don't even have the concept of Windows.
John:
Vision Pro has Windows.
John:
I know they're not quite.
John:
windows but like it has individual floating things that's its whole deal it's got the ornaments and separate accessory windows and you don't have to lay things on top of each other you can just put it next to it because you can turn your head a little bit and there's more crap over there that's a mac paradigm ipad doesn't work like that so i'm thinking like native vision pro apps that are essentially vision pro-ified versions of the mac apps not vision pro-ified versions of the ipad apps but again i haven't used either one of these things so i'm just speculating
Marco:
I think you'll be surprised.
Marco:
When this comes out, when you do at some point somehow use one, I think you'll be surprised.
Marco:
And so again, I strongly urge people, don't make too many assumptions about how you might use this until you have a chance to actually use one.
Marco:
And if that means that you can't justify paying $3,500 for it up front without knowing quite how you'll use it, that's understandable.
Marco:
You probably shouldn't jump on the pre-order then.
Marco:
Leave more room for me, please.
But...
Marco:
But it's a very different device and paradigm than most people have ever used before.
Marco:
So when the Apple Watch came out, or especially before anybody had actually used it, when it was announced, everyone was kind of assuming they would use the Apple Watch much like a tiny iPhone.
Marco:
And then we got the Apple Watch, and anybody who tried that was very quickly disavowed out of that notion because it was a terrible tiny iPhone, but it was really great for other things.
Marco:
People thought the iPad was basically a giant iPhone, and they would use it just like a giant iPhone.
Marco:
I mean, you kind of can, but it's better if you use it like an iPad.
Marco:
It's kind of its own thing.
Marco:
Even like the Apple TV, when the Apple TV, the one with apps, whatever generation that was that added the apps, when that was first announced and shown off, everyone's like, hmm, maybe I'll do some computing on my TV.
Marco:
That didn't really pan out that way.
Marco:
Instead, we do other things with it.
Marco:
This is going to be the same kind of thing.
Marco:
We are trying to project onto it the paradigms we already know from devices we already have and have used and saying, okay, well,
Marco:
I'm going to use this like a giant Mac.
Marco:
It's like, well, you might, but probably not.
Marco:
There's probably going to be other ways you use it that are, that are like it there.
Marco:
You know, you're going to use it like you're going to use a vision pro.
Marco:
You're not going to use it like any of the, any of the platforms because it's very different from all the other platforms in so many different ways.
Marco:
So don't go into it saying like, okay, well I can justify this because it'll be like a really big monitor.
Marco:
And it's like, yeah, well, I mean, maybe you might do that, but go in with a more open mind and
Marco:
it might go a different direction for you.
Marco:
And until everyone has these and you can try them, you can see all the video reviews, you can see what kind of apps come out for it and everything, don't make too many assumptions early on.
John:
I mean, that's the whole thing.
John:
Apple needs to get enough people to write applications that are for this.
John:
But I'm saying in the meantime, in the meantime, Apple's stopgap is in the meantime, people can use iPad apps like in their announcement, which I think maybe we'll get to if we keep going here.
John:
So like, oh, it has a million apps.
John:
What they mean is a million people have said, yes, you can run my iPad apps on your thing, I'm assuming like.
John:
Because how do they know how many apps?
John:
So they just opened up submissions the same day they put out their press release.
John:
We haven't even opened submissions for the Vision Pro App Store yet, but we know there'll be a million apps.
John:
Why?
John:
Those are iPad apps.
John:
That's their stopgap.
John:
That's their way of like, you get this.
John:
What can I run out besides the built-in apps?
John:
Well, you got a million iPad apps that you can run.
John:
And that's not what we want you to do with it, but it's something until those apps start shipping.
John:
So it's up to Apple to foster an ecosystem that makes people make actual native vision per app.
John:
So what I'm saying is I think the correct donor platform for the StopGap apps is...
John:
more it would be better to be the mac because those apps are designed to have multiple windows arranged maybe not all around you but arranged all over the place but but we'll say maybe just multiple ipad apps is exactly fine as a stopgap but i would think if you if anyone i mean i know because of the api things that's not how it works but
John:
someone porting a complicated app, Final Cut Pro for Vision Pro.
John:
Should it be, should you start from the iPad version of that app or should you start from the Mac version?
John:
You're making a native Vision Pro version, but which version should you start from?
John:
And I think you should start from the Mac one, but they certainly won't because of the API differences.
John:
So that's a whole other kettle of fish.
John:
But spiritually, I feel like the canvas provided by the Vision Pro is so much more expansive than the canvas provided by the iPad.
John:
It makes me think more of the Mac.
Marco:
Well, I think there are some critical differences, though.
Marco:
As a lot of the VR bloggers and stuff have pointed out, the density of the displays and the sizing of them, I would think about it more like TV screens than monitors.
Marco:
You look at computer monitors, they're very dense.
Marco:
You look at them much closer up.
Marco:
TV screens are big and beautiful, and you look at them from 8 or 10 feet away, maybe, and it's a very different way of using it.
Marco:
Imagine if computing was really fast and easy on an Apple TV, and you had an infinitely sized screen on the Apple TV, but you're still sitting on the couch looking at something six feet away.
Marco:
When you look at how windows are laid out in these VR headsets, the distance they're simulating of how far in front of you they are, relatively how large they are, and you look at things like the density of the displays, like how many pixels they actually have, it's nowhere near the density of computer monitors.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
I would be surprised if when people actually use these, if they ended up actually wanting Mac-like density of controls and density of text and things like that.
Marco:
I think what we're going to want is going to end up looking kind of halfway between iPad apps and Apple TV apps.
John:
yeah well with the current density you're right because you know it's 4k per eyeball but as we talked about when these initially launched uh your floating window does not fill your entire field division probably so you're not even getting a 4k screen which is it's you know it's it's an achievement that they've apparently achieved the uh text legibility that they have but it's not 200 pixels per inch four feet from you not even close and it'll probably be a long time before we had that kind of hardware
John:
I don't know how long.
John:
Well, they make good advances.
John:
But yeah, but the initial version isn't.
John:
So I mean, that's why a lot of these screenshots, they do look like Apple TV apps, like viewable from six feet away, big, chunky controls.
John:
But they do also have lots of accessory stuff floating around.
Marco:
Yeah, they do.
Marco:
That's why I mean, it isn't there is no like direct paradigm like, oh, it's just like a big iPad or whatever.
Marco:
You can't say it's just like any of the platforms.
Marco:
But I really think it's going to end up being more like a combination of iPad plus Apple TV than Mac anything like I think the sizing and the density and everything is all wrong for the Mac.
John:
I mean, if we had displays that could support it, though, it would be great for doing Mac stuff in the same way if you had three Pro Display XDRs in front of you, right?
John:
If you had the density in that device to support the actual resolution of three Pro Display XDRs at arm's length around you, that would be amazing.
John:
And people would love it because it's smaller and hopefully cheaper than three Pro Display XDRs.
John:
And you don't need to connect them with cables.
John:
But that's not this generation or product.
Casey:
Yeah, I do understand what you're saying, though, John, that the Mac does at a glance seem like a better donor platform.
Casey:
But I think I have to come down on where Marco is in that I think we're going to end up in this kind of weird and I don't necessarily mean bad, but just maybe unusual halfway world between like iPad and Apple TV, like Marco was saying.
Casey:
And I expect that.
John:
That's another reason why TV applications, like as in watching actual movies and television shows, is great for this because you're not going to notice the resolution deficit because it's television.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So with that in mind, we've been talking and kind of glancing off the discussion about the app ecosystem and whatnot.
Casey:
So I've been thinking a lot about...
Casey:
what I want to do with regard to this.
Casey:
And history says, I will be the first to tell you, I'm starting right out and telling you history says I'm going to pre-order one because I'm a sucker and that's what I do.
Casey:
Of course you are.
Casey:
But I'm, I'm trying to, I'm trying to be rational about this, which is not something I'm typically capable of doing.
Casey:
And I'm probably wasting everyone's time by even talking about this because I'll end up ordering one.
Casey:
But like, I don't think coming back to our, uh, conversation a little while ago about like, did people really want an iPhone?
Casey:
Like sitting here now, uh,
Casey:
I don't know if I want to spend $3,500 on one of these.
Casey:
Starting at.
Casey:
Starting at.
Casey:
As a consumer.
Casey:
Now, this is with my consumer hat on.
Casey:
I have not yet put on my developer hat.
Casey:
But as a consumer, I don't know what I would use this for that would justify $3,500.
Casey:
Like, that is a tremendous amount of money.
Casey:
A truly tremendous amount of money.
Casey:
And...
John:
And for people who are saying, oh, you buy laptops like that all the time, you know what you're going to use the laptop for.
John:
Like it's not a speculative use case.
John:
You know you're going to get out of the box and you know exactly what you're going to use it for.
Marco:
I mean, just for the point of comparison, though, John, how much is that really nice TV that you like?
John:
I know what I'm going to use that for, too.
John:
That's what I'm saying.
John:
Like this is speculative because like it's not so much the price because I'm preempting people who are going to say you're complaining about $3,500, but every computer you ever buy is more than that.
John:
yeah, but we all know what we're going to do with the computers or the television.
John:
We know exactly what we're going to do with them.
John:
We know how well they're going to do it.
John:
And we know we already have something that we're doing, and this is going to be a better one.
John:
So we plunk down that money for those easily.
John:
But for this one, I think Casey's question is apt, which is like, if I wasn't a developer, even though it seems like a cool thing to get for $3,500, what am I going to do with it again?
John:
Like the fear is you get it, you try it, you try the few pieces of software for it, and then it's $3,500 thing sitting in the corner of your room.
Casey:
Right, exactly.
Casey:
And I think in the defense of expensive TVs and expensive computers, whether or not Marco or I change computers like underwear, which I don't think either of us does as much as I give Marco a hard time, and I certainly don't think I do, but...
Casey:
That being said, any of the three of us could use any of the computers that we've bought recently for years, years and years and years.
Casey:
And sorry, that implies that you are literally incapable of using a Vision Pro for years.
Casey:
That's not what I mean.
Casey:
But my M1 MacBook Pro that I just recently got rid of,
Casey:
I did not need to get rid of that.
Casey:
I chose to because I'm a sucker for space black and I'm an idiot, but I didn't need to, I could have held onto that computer for another, probably two to maybe even four years, which would have made a sum total of what, four to six years of in service, which for a laptop, I know how much you hate, we hate laptops, John, but like for a laptop, I think two to somewhere between four and six years is a pretty good run.
Casey:
It's not, you know, it's not a humongously long run, but,
Casey:
But it's not a bad run by any stretch of the imagination.
Casey:
Your TV, when did you buy your fancy pants non-plasma TV?
Casey:
That was what, two years ago, a year ago?
John:
2022, I think.
Casey:
Okay, so it was almost two years ago.
Casey:
And what's the likelihood you're going to replace that TV in the next two years?
John:
Very low.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
Now, you might choose to do it in a couple of years because there's a technology that you're really jazzed by.
Casey:
Very doubtful.
Casey:
Understood.
Casey:
But I'm saying we could elect, one could elect to replace these things, but I don't think it'll be compulsory.
Casey:
Whereas with the Vision Pro, I am less convinced that it will hold up for much more than two years.
John:
It's like a Series Zero watch.
John:
It's the first worst one.
Casey:
Right, exactly.
Marco:
Hopefully, it will be the worst one they ever make.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And if they do any kind of significant turns in the course they're taking, like, for instance, if they did get rid of the front-facing display or things like that, if they were able to integrate the battery into the unit...
Marco:
There are like some turns that they might be making with subsequent revision of the product that will make this one feel and look really old within probably a much shorter time than the useful lifetime of the next one that will come out just because it is version zero.
John:
Don't buy the Apple Vision Pro edition.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Some advice.
John:
It's not going to hold up.
Casey:
So as a consumer, it's hard for me to justify spending $3,500.
Casey:
And funnily enough, the thing that I think most strongly makes me want this as a consumer, again, we'll talk developer in a second.
Casey:
But as a consumer, I think the thing that I'm most interested in for this is if I could put aside the fact that I'll look like a total doofus wearing this thing.
Casey:
If I could bring this to, like, a library or Wegmans or, you know, a coffee shop or what have you, and if I could not care about what I looked like, which I don't think I'm capable of, but in this fantasy world where I don't care what other people are thinking as they're looking at me, I guess I'm always in the completely, you know, what do they call it, the experience where you can't see anything around you.
Casey:
Immersive.
Casey:
There it is.
Casey:
I'm always in the immersive experience.
Casey:
I can never see the people that are looking at me like I'm an idiot.
Casey:
But anyway, the thing that I think is most appealing about this to me is having a 4K version of my laptop screen wherever I go.
Casey:
And that strikes me as though it would be
Casey:
extremely cool because then I can have my 4K laptop screen right in front of me and I can have maybe the iPad version of Slack off to the side.
Casey:
I can have an iPad version or Vision Pro, strictly speaking, version of Safari off to the other side.
Casey:
And now I've got one heck of a nice workstation that I can bring pretty much anywhere.
Casey:
And that does appeal to me.
Casey:
I don't think it appeals to me for $3,500, but it appeals to me nonetheless.
Casey:
And so as a person who
Casey:
I want Marco to buy one and I want him to tell us what he thinks.
Marco:
Well, you know that'll happen.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
And I want like a local friend.
Casey:
I don't have one in mind, but just, you know, I want one of my local friends to buy one.
Casey:
A local friend with the same shaped face as you.
John:
Yeah.
John:
The same prescription.
John:
Well, no, you can snap in and out the prescription lenses, can't you?
John:
Oh, yeah.
Casey:
But no, I take your point though.
Casey:
You know, I want a local friend to get one so I can play with it, but I don't know that I want one for me yet.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And I'm not saying that's forever, but I don't know if I want one for me yet.
Casey:
So all that in mind, now I put on my developer hat and everything gets real muddy real quick.
John:
That's not muddy.
John:
Your developer hat is you need one because you're developing an app for it at the end.
John:
Well, but for what income?
Casey:
Well, so it's both sides of this, right?
Casey:
So on the one side, yes, I agree with what you said, John, that I'm going to have, I don't know if I'll have it on launch, probably not at launch day, but I will have a version of Call Sheet that works.
Casey:
reasonably well, hopefully, on the Vision Pro.
Casey:
And I think it makes a lot of sense in the Vision Pro, because if you can have, and I've had people write to me and confirm that this is possible, because I genuinely, truly do not remember it from my experience at the lab.
Casey:
If it is possible to have a non-immersive video player, then you can slide call sheet right next to it, which people are telling me that's possible.
Casey:
You can slide call sheet right next to it, and you can be looking at a video and looking at call sheet at the same time.
Casey:
Mind exploding.
Casey:
It's amazing.
Casey:
And that sounds really cool.
Casey:
And it sounds like it would be a really great idea to have it there.
Casey:
And it would be very useful to have it there.
Casey:
Additionally, as the chat room is pointing out, if by some miracle I can get it there for launch and it isn't a pile of garbage, which are two big ifs, then I could maybe get Apple to feature it or have, you know, reviewers feature it.
Casey:
I mean, imagine if iJustine gets a copy of this and somehow stumbles upon call sheet.
Casey:
I don't know how that would happen, but just for the sake of discussion, then suddenly I'm having my Widgetsmith moment.
Casey:
I don't expect that, but you never know.
Marco:
on a platform that has no users.
John:
Yeah, you can't have a WidgetSmith moment on a platform worth a million users.
John:
Sorry.
Marco:
Even WidgetSmith won't have a WidgetSmith moment on this platform for some time.
John:
No, you can sell to 100% of the user base and you're still not there.
John:
Exactly.
Casey:
And the problem is, and I was actually, I had a monthly FaceTime with James Thompson, friend of the show, James Thompson, who does pCalc among many other things.
Casey:
And he and I were chatting this morning and he pointed out to me a really good thing, which is so obvious, but I hadn't thought about, that
Casey:
Even if CallSheet arrives on the Vision Pro, and even if I can get it to the point that it's not embarrassing, even despite those things, it's the same skew as it is on iOS, on iPadOS, on macOS.
Casey:
It's all universal.
Casey:
It's all the same skew.
Casey:
So a lot, maybe even all of these users, have already paid me.
Casey:
I've already gotten the money from them.
John:
Why is it necessarily the same SKU?
John:
You can make a dedicated Vision OS version.
Casey:
I could, but I don't plan on it.
Casey:
I mean, I could.
Casey:
I absolutely could, but I was not planning on it.
John:
No, you totally should.
John:
Why wouldn't you?
Marco:
But you would have a shared subscription model.
Marco:
You can have the same bundle ID and have it still be running native, but you'd have to submit it to the Vision Pro side of the App Store separate.
Marco:
That's the only thing that has to be separate.
John:
Yeah, I mean, I feel like universal apps where you write one app and it runs on all the platforms, you can pay for it once.
John:
Customers love them, but as a single indie developer, it's economically unfeasible, I feel like.
Marco:
No, honestly, it depends a lot on how much work you have to do from your existing code base to support this new platform.
Marco:
And that's why I think we're going to see a lot of people doing what I'm going to be doing, which is I'm going to permit my iPad app to run for a while.
Marco:
And I do intend to have a native version of Overcast for Vision Pro.
Marco:
I'm not going to make it anywhere near launch day.
Marco:
So for now, iPad version, and then we'll see.
Marco:
Very similar in a lot of ways to if you have an iPhone app and you want to make it run on the iPad.
Marco:
Well, if the iPad is going to be a huge part of your market, maybe put a lot of time and thought into that.
Marco:
If it's only going to be kind of an accessory part of your market, you don't have to do everything custom for the iPad.
Marco:
You can just let the phone app run on the iPad with minimal modifications, and maybe it won't be ideal, but it'll be fine.
Marco:
That's something we can do here.
Marco:
This platform is going to have very low sales volume for a while, so it's not going to be able to financially justify huge investments of custom work for it for an existing app necessarily, unless there's a really big market for it on this.
Marco:
And as mentioned last time, I don't think I have a big market.
Marco:
I think Casey, yours is bigger than mine, so your calculus will be different than mine here.
Marco:
But
Marco:
When I bring Overcast to Vision OS, I have some ideas on how I can do it and the experience I want it to be like.
Marco:
To be honest, they're all pretty simple ideas that will require a bit of a more limited experience than the full everything app with every single feature crammed into whatever window size I can get it crammed into.
Marco:
I'm looking at a very different design, but it would be a lower effort design for lots of reasons.
Marco:
That's going to be easier to justify because this platform is going to have no users.
Marco:
basically for a while and so but you know so what you're saying casey is like there is a clear market for you to bring call sheet to vision os with a native app that uses the same ip as your ios app um and much or most or all of the same code even um yeah i don't know how much effort it will be worth for you to like invest two months of development time into it that is probably not worth it oh no at least at this point no i don't think it's worth it at all
Casey:
And I guess the question I'm really asking both indirectly and now directly is I think I should put a modicum of effort into it to the order of like two weeks, not two months.
Casey:
And I think that's fair.
Casey:
But I don't know if I even – I think putting two weeks or so of effort is fair.
Casey:
But do I really want to spend $3,500 worth of money or leaving aside the effort?
Casey:
Do I want to spend all that money just to get call sheet on here?
Casey:
Like I don't know if it's – because I don't think I'll recoup.
John:
Well, it's not worth it for the two-week effort.
John:
But I think, I mean, aren't you visiting a future where you would spend more than two weeks to make an actual really good Vision OS version of your thing to be alongside the video when people are watching it?
Casey:
Potentially, yes.
Casey:
But I wouldn't be justified in doing that unless I felt like I was getting some sort of financial return from the effort.
John:
Well, what you're getting is a first mover advantage or you'd be early in the market.
John:
No, the first year you're not going to make that money back probably.
John:
But year two or three, you're already there.
John:
You're the one that people know when they read the reviews.
John:
Oh, if you're watching movies, you want to watch a thing.
John:
IMDb just has a shovelware port of their iPad app and it's terrible because she looks OK.
John:
Like you're getting in early in the hopes that you'll you'll be the de facto look things up about the video that I'm watching in a vision pro.
Casey:
So I think from a developer's point of view, even though I don't particularly want to spend $3,500 on this, particularly after spending a whole pile of money on this laptop, which I probably shouldn't have done, I think I'm sitting here now, I'm leaning towards buying one.
Casey:
And then the other thing that I need to consider is I actually have a third hat, which is the one I'm actually wearing right now, which is as a podcaster.
Casey:
And
Casey:
I think it would make for much better programming on this very show if at least one, preferably two, or in a perfect world, three of us have one of these to play with.
John:
Well, I have a solution to that, by the way.
John:
It's called Apple sends us review units.
Casey:
If only, John, if only.
John:
You don't get to keep them forever.
John:
I'll talk to Gruber about that.
John:
Define forever.
John:
On an infinite timeline, Gruber will return all his products.
Casey:
Yeah, exactly.
Casey:
No, I mean, I agree with you that I'd love a review unit.
Casey:
But ultimately, you know, for better or worse, I can continue to whine and moan about this.
Casey:
But ultimately, it seems clear that we are not on Apple's radar in that capacity.
Casey:
And so I have to just understand.
Casey:
I can't wait for that to happen.
Casey:
So I have to understand.
John:
That's not going to happen.
John:
Don't wait for it.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
So I need to take matters into my own hands.
Casey:
And I think as a podcaster and as a developer, two of the three hats that I'm wearing say, I should probably try to pick one of these up.
Casey:
Now, I haven't talked to the family CFO yet, and I have a feeling they might have some conflicting opinions about this.
Casey:
But sitting here now, it seems like, and I still made a final decision, but it seems like it's probably prudent for me to get one so that this way I can make call sheet as good as can reasonably be done.
Casey:
Because I can tell you,
Casey:
I don't think it's unfair for me to say that spending the day in the lab gave me a lot of useful feedback.
Casey:
And I'm saying just from myself.
Casey:
In using the app, it was incredibly useful to experience it on the actual platform as compared to the simulator.
Casey:
And the simulator is very good for what it is, but having experienced it on the actual device...
Casey:
gave me all sorts of clues and ideas and things to do that I never would have considered had I not had the thing on my face.
Casey:
And I don't think Apple would be grumpy at me for saying that.
Casey:
So in so many ways, I think I'll probably also be lining up on the virtual queue on a week from Friday or whatever it is and trying to put my hands on one.
Casey:
And I will probably get the cheapest one they will possibly sell me, which is still a damn fortune.
Marco:
Yeah, I would call it the least expensive, not the cheapest.
Casey:
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
And it's funny because I seem so morose and down on it.
Casey:
And I actually don't mean to.
Casey:
And again, now I'm getting into dangerous territory because I don't want to talk about what happened at the lab.
Casey:
But there is a lot about this platform to be very excited about.
Casey:
And I think Marco was hinting at the same earlier.
Casey:
There's a lot to be excited about here.
Casey:
It's just I find the price so off-putting, which...
Casey:
It may sound nuts, but I think of myself as a relatively frugal person.
Casey:
And I know, especially in the last six months, some of my expenditures may indicate otherwise.
Casey:
But generally speaking, I don't enjoy spending money just for spending money's sake.
Casey:
And I really try to be prudent and frugal with my expenditures.
Casey:
And it's so much money.
Casey:
It's so much money on what seems to be a hope and a prayer.
Casey:
And that's the thing that just freaks me out.
Casey:
I can tell you there's a lot of potential in this platform.
Casey:
And again, now I'm starting to get into dangerous territory again, but there's a lot of potential in this platform.
Casey:
And I really hope that between Apple and third-party developers, it gets realized because there's a lot there.
Marco:
I think, first of all, like...
Marco:
However much we want to hem and haw about the price will not matter at all because if there's any truth whatsoever to the rumors that they can only make, say, a million a year, there's enough rich people in the world who will jump on this that it won't matter what the YouTubers say and what we all say about the price.
Casey:
That's an interesting point, yeah.
Marco:
If they can truly only make it in relatively small volumes, there are enough buyers out there who will buy it at that price.
Marco:
It won't matter.
Marco:
So, you know, setting that aside...
Marco:
For a developer's point of view, I think your suspicion is correct.
Marco:
You will not make $3,500 in sales on this platform in all likelihood in the first year.
Marco:
It seems very unlikely.
Marco:
And so again, gauge your level of effort accordingly.
Marco:
For us in particular, I think it makes total sense to buy it just because, again, this podcast is a big part of our careers and jobs and income, and so we need it just for that, honestly.
Marco:
Even if none of us had any other use for it other than to try it and talk about it, we should probably all get it just for that purpose alone.
Marco:
nerds like us are going to try to somehow rationalize this price because it's cool but you don't need to rationalize the price it can just be cool there are concert tickets that are this expensive and people pay them because it's cool and they want it like that's it that's enough of a reason sometimes but
Marco:
We can try, again, try to justify it.
Marco:
Whatever you need to do, justify it, justify it.
Marco:
That's fine.
Marco:
But many of the buyers of the Vision Pro, especially in this first year, are going to be people who are buying it because they think it's cool and they want it.
Marco:
They don't need to say, well, I'll be able to get my work done or I can fund it with my development.
Marco:
Nope, you don't and you can't.
Marco:
It's just cool and you want it.
Marco:
That's okay.
Marco:
As long as you can lose that amount of money and not harm your family as a result or something or not get yourself into debt.
Marco:
If you can afford it, it's okay to spend money on things that make you happy and are cool to you.
Marco:
That's all it needs to be.
Marco:
And there's enough people in the world who can spend that money who will do it just solely for those reasons.
Marco:
They'll be fine.
Marco:
They'll be sold out and backordered the entire year.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
Doesn't matter if we think it's too expensive or if some YouTuber with the O face on their thumbnail says it's too expensive.
Marco:
Is this really worth it?
Marco:
You know you're going to see a thousand of those.
Marco:
And the answer will be they're going to say it's not.
Marco:
All the commenters are going to say it's not.
Marco:
And you still can't buy one because they're back ordered.
Marco:
So it doesn't matter.
Marco:
Enough people think it's cool that they're going to sell all of them.
Marco:
Now, whether there is an app market for you as a developer, that's a different question, of course.
Marco:
It's so hard to step around lab experiences here.
Marco:
So I'll make an analogy for something I can talk about because I had no pre-release access whatsoever.
Marco:
The iPad.
Marco:
I was running Instapaper at that time.
Marco:
That was my app.
Marco:
And the iPad came out.
Marco:
And as you recall, because we remember previous Apple product launches and their hype cycles, John, as you recall, the iPad was announced a few months before it was available.
Marco:
I believe it was announced in January, came out in April, something like that.
Marco:
So during that time, we had the SDK for it so we could run the iPad simulator, exactly like we have the Vision Pro today.
Marco:
We had the Vision OS simulator, but we don't have the hardware yet as developers.
Marco:
So just like that, we had a few months where we had the simulator for the iPad, and we could get our apps ready for the App Store and get them there on day one.
Marco:
Great.
Marco:
So I did that with Instapaper.
Marco:
We did all sorts of things.
Marco:
We made cardboard mock-ups so we would know how big the iPad was in our hands and print out the screenshot on paper at the exact right size of the iPad screen so we could see, like, is this big enough?
Marco:
And all of that
Marco:
it felt like we were really preparing for this platform.
Marco:
And then I remember I got the iPad on launch day and I launched into paper on it and I use it for like five minutes.
Marco:
And I was like, this is all wrong.
Marco:
Everything I had done for months with the simulator and with paper mockups and cardboard and everything, it was all immediately upon using the real hardware.
Marco:
I'm like, oh yeah, this is not a good design for this.
Marco:
This doesn't work.
Marco:
This is different.
Marco:
This should be like this.
Marco:
It was so clear to me.
Marco:
that the design I had made based on the simulator and guesses was just not right.
Marco:
I had the same feeling when I ran the app that I have in progress for Overcast on the Real Vision Pro.
Marco:
Everything I thought about the design of how it should be was wrong and bad.
Marco:
I would strongly suggest to anybody who actually is going to take this seriously as a developer, like if you really want to make a Vision OS version of your app that it's not just your iPad app running in a window, if you're actually using like the native controls, you want it to actually be a first class Vision OS app, even not even be a third class Vision OS app.
Marco:
You need the hardware.
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
It is so different than seeing your app in the simulator.
Marco:
I have done zero further development on Overcast for Vision OS after the lab because I learned in the lab, oh, I'm wrong about everything.
Marco:
And I need the hardware to know that.
Marco:
And I need to develop whatever I'm going to develop for it.
Marco:
I'm going to need to develop it with the hardware.
Marco:
So I have totally paused Vision OS development of Overcast until I have a Vision Pro.
Marco:
And I strongly suggest for all developers out there, if you are going to take this platform seriously and try to make a good version of your app, don't even bother doing it now.
Marco:
Do it when you have the hardware and definitely get the hardware.
Marco:
You're going to need it.
Marco:
You're not going to be able to make a good app with simulators alone.
Marco:
You just can't on this platform.
Marco:
It's too different.
Marco:
It's way too different.
Marco:
You don't even realize how different it is if you haven't had the chance to go to a lab.
Marco:
So if you intend to have an app on this platform, you need the hardware period.
Marco:
So don't even worry about the cost.
Marco:
Just consider it a cost of developing an app for this platform.
John:
Unless you're making the Vision Pro beer drinking app, in which case just do it in the simulator.
John:
It'll be fine.
John:
I'm sure they'll get right on approving that in the app store.
John:
It's an impulse purchase.
John:
People will get it because they want to try something fun on the Vision Pro.
John:
Your app will stink for the reasons Marco stated, but it doesn't matter because you've already got their money.
Casey:
All right, so then finally, Apple has some Vision Pro app submission advice.
Casey:
And there's a bunch of interesting things here.
Casey:
Some of which, I don't know, I'm really giving some serious side eye to.
Casey:
But, you know, John, you put an image in the show notes here.
Casey:
It says, don't tilt or distract from your app window.
Casey:
Don't depict cluttered surroundings.
Casey:
And don't show foveated rendering.
John:
Those are the screenshots that you would submit for your app.
John:
Like, hey, here's my app in action.
John:
And they give an image to show all the don'ts, which I thought was hilarious.
John:
So first of all, the tilting, I mean, okay.
John:
I mean, I do wonder if they're actually enforced this, but it's like, you should know this from past conversations.
John:
A Dutch angle.
John:
Okay, so it's tilted, right?
John:
But the second one is the one that's getting the most play.
John:
Don't depict cluttered surroundings.
John:
As someone pointed out in Mastodon, it would take me a week to get my house to look this uncluttered.
John:
This is their example of cluttered surroundings.
John:
It must pain Apple's set dressers to try to make cluttered surroundings.
John:
They're like, I guess we can put an extra item on the coffee table.
John:
And it's like, oh, it hurts me so much to do this, but here's an extra item.
John:
Instead of just a plant, now there's a plant and a book.
John:
And oh, on the floor, on the floor is an item.
John:
What item?
John:
I don't know, but there's an item on the floor and it's open.
John:
And someone put their jacket on the table.
John:
I can't look.
John:
I can't look.
John:
It's too cluttered.
John:
This is like the neatest house you've ever seen in your entire life.
John:
Do not depict cluttered surroundings.
John:
So ridiculous.
John:
And then the final one is weird to me.
John:
Foveated rendering is when you render the part that the people aren't looking at at lower resolution.
John:
Is it even possible to grab screenshots in the Vision Pro with foveated rendering?
John:
I thought the screenshots were always everything rendered at full res, but maybe I'm wrong.
John:
Maybe if you capture a video feed of it, maybe it would follow your gaze.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I mean, I guess you could simulate it, but why would you do that?
John:
But yeah, no, you can't use foveated rendering if you don't know where people are looking.
John:
The whole image has to be rendered at the complete resolution.
Marco:
yeah and and ultimately on the um on on the clutter angle i think that actually might slightly hinder the product in because no one can have that no one has that environment yeah who like who who is working in an environment that is uncluttered enough to have all these windows floating on top of it i guess you could just send simulator screenshots right
Marco:
And yes, the reality is for App Store screenshots, that's what everyone's going to do.
Marco:
They're just going to use simulator screenshots.
Marco:
But for actual use of the product with windows floating in space when you're not in an immersive environment, I think that's actually going to be somewhat of a limiting factor.
Marco:
Because Casey gave the coffee shop example earlier.
Marco:
I mean, first of all, I would never wear this in a coffee shop.
Marco:
I feel guilty wearing AirPods in a coffee shop.
Marco:
So this is way out of my comfort zone.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
If you're actually going to be computing in it, you're probably going to want to be in the fully immersive mode almost all of the time when you're out in the world.
Marco:
And even in your own house, probably much of the time, it's like, my office is not that clean.
Marco:
Where am I in my house that is that clean?
Marco:
Never.
Marco:
Anywhere.
Marco:
And I think most people don't have a space in their house that is...
Marco:
anything like what apple shows in the simulator as like possible good environments for the vision maybe in a model home if you go to visit a model home or something or yeah or like an empty museum as one of them i guess maybe but it's a very uh ideal view of the world that i think does not reflect people's actual houses and offices very well
John:
indeed so they continue don't break apple vision pro over two lines okay guys this this is hilarious okay so the name of the product is three words with spaces gmail apple vision pro like if i put that text somewhere in my description which we'll get to in a little bit but it's this thing they're actually going to allow thank you so much apple um
John:
I can't control if it's over two lines.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Non-breaking space, baby.
John:
Yeah, can you use non-breaking space?
John:
Apple, AMP, NBSP, Vision, AMP, NBSP Pro.
John:
Well, then why don't they just say that?
John:
Is that what they demand?
John:
Or are they just saying don't break it over two lines?
John:
They don't say it should be Apple Vision Pro with non-breaking spaces between all the words.
John:
And even then, non-breaking spaces that, you know, if it's rendered in some context, it doesn't honor them.
John:
Then it's such a demand.
John:
I'm sure Apple doesn't want them broken up, but it's like, OK, Apple, then you don't break them up.
John:
I can't control what you do with my text.
Marco:
Also, like, I think it is...
Marco:
They have their work cut out for them if they want people to use all three of these words.
Marco:
Because that's what they say in their guidance.
Marco:
It's Apple Vision Pro.
Marco:
It's not just Vision Pro.
Marco:
It's Apple Vision Pro.
Marco:
Everyone's going to call it Vision Pro.
Marco:
No one's going to call it Apple Vision Pro.
John:
Well, I mean, this is in text that they can audit, right?
Marco:
Yeah, but when they launched the Apple Watch, no one just called it Watch because that's too generic of a word.
Marco:
And so if they would have called this Vision just by itself, Apple Vision,
Marco:
maybe they would have stood a chance of people calling it Apple Vision or not just Vision.
Marco:
Yeah, people would have called it Apple Vision with no space then.
Marco:
Yeah, right.
Marco:
But by calling it Apple Vision Pro, Vision Pro by itself is uniquely identifying enough in this time and place that everyone will just say Vision Pro.
Marco:
I think that's going to go right out the window.
John:
And there were people pointing out that some Apple stuff just says Vision now, just says Apple Vision or Vision.
John:
I think even their navs just says Vision.
John:
So...
John:
there's apple itself is is trying to do the generic term to essentially make room for the fact that there'll be a non-pro someday
Marco:
yeah ultimately i mean maybe they should have they should have actually called it apple vision you know just to get to kind of like lay that groundwork better because now when everyone's gonna be calling it vision probe without the apple for you know however many years it's the only product in the lineup and then once they make one that's not called pro at the end they're gonna have to like we're gonna all gonna have to like retrain ourselves to start saying apple in front of it where we weren't saying it it's just it's it's a mess on their home page by the way apple currently has the apple logo no space
John:
vision space pro well we aren't allowed to do that right exactly i mean in all fairness they also style watch and tv that way yeah yep also anyway continue with the last of these uh casey because they're all fun uh this one drives me freaking party and it's consistent at least they're consistent across all their products
Casey:
It reads as follows.
Casey:
Don't use the article the before Apple Vision Pro.
Casey:
It's not the iPhone.
Casey:
It's iPhone.
Casey:
It's not the iPad.
Casey:
It's iPad.
Casey:
It's not the Apple Vision Pro.
Casey:
It's Apple Vision Pro.
Casey:
I don't know why this drives me nuts.
Casey:
I should let it go, to be honest with you.
Casey:
But it drives me nuts that they don't do this.
John:
And that's like, I'm going to say, oh, that's recent.
John:
Yeah, it's recent in the past 25 years.
John:
People always just talk about software being available on the Mac.
John:
But these, you know, in the past several decades, that software is available on Mac.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
Oh, it drives me bananas.
Casey:
Uh, don't refer to Apple vision pro generically as a quote unquote headset.
John:
Good luck with that.
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
The phrase, the phrase Apple vision pro can't be included in your app name, but it can be included in your app description.
Casey:
Oh, well, thank you.
Casey:
Thank you so much.
John:
Oh, thank you.
John:
Hey, you can't put the word iOS in your Mac apps description or we'll get rejected, but we're allowing you to say the name of our product in your description.
John:
Oh,
John:
Not like it's like Macbeth or something.
Marco:
It's so generous to allow us to tell our customers what platform this runs on.
John:
Exactly.
John:
You know, updated for future versions of macOS.
John:
Don't mention macOS.
John:
We don't want people to know about it.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
And then you should refer to your app as a spatial computing app.
Casey:
Don't describe your app experience as augmented reality, AR, virtual reality, VR, extended reality, XR, or mixed reality, MR.
John:
Even if it's one or all of those things, don't say it.
John:
Don't say it.
John:
We can say it.
John:
Apple can say it, but you can't say it.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Oh, God.
Marco:
What a... Oh, these are very... They're very Apple.
Marco:
These are very... They're very Apple.
Marco:
Persnickety little things that are, I think, a little bit optimistic on how people talk.
Casey:
This is one of the parts of Apple I do not care for.
Casey:
I understand the motivation here on their end, but just chill out, you guys.
Casey:
Chill out.
John:
I mean, it makes sense to give the context again here.
John:
These are app submission guidelines.
John:
You in your regular life can call it a headset all you want.
John:
We call it a headset on this program all you want.
John:
Apple would prefer us not to, but in the end, they have no control over it.
Marco:
They would prefer us to just call it headset.
John:
right but but when it comes to the app store uh that they do have control over and they will reject your app if you put like vision pro the apple vision pro in the name of your app like new you know flappy birds for apple vision pro and that's the name of your app rejected well probably not because someone's gonna let it go through because they didn't read these guidelines but anyway to the extent that any app store stuff is applied consistently that's the one thing that they can control uh meanwhile everybody in all their reviews is going to be
John:
Vision OS when it's the first word in the sentence and you're not supposed to do that.
John:
We're going to be calling it a headset.
John:
People are going to be mentioned in AR and VR and there's nothing Apple can do about it, but somewhere some Apple marketing person will have a single tear roll down their cheek as they read those reviews.
Casey:
And then very, very quickly before we go, Apple is going to offer Vision Pro demos at its retail stores for regular people.
Marco:
Apple writes... Do you mean Apple Vision Pro demos?
Casey:
Sorry, yes.
Casey:
Which one of you failed me in the show notes here?
John:
That's The Verge.
John:
The Verge failed you.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
Starting at 8 a.m.
Casey:
on Friday, February 2, we invite you to sign up for a demo of Apple Vision Pro at your local Apple store.
Casey:
Demo times will be available Friday through the weekend on a first-come, first-served basis.
Casey:
We can't wait to see you there.
Casey:
Interesting.
Casey:
And it implies, by the way, and I think The Verge said this, that it's only the first weekend, which seems bananas to me.
Casey:
But maybe that's the story.
Casey:
I don't know.
John:
They'll be sold out after that.
John:
It is probably quite an ordeal to provide those demos, like time per person, how much staff, how much handholding.
John:
It's really a big time sink to run indefinitely.
John:
I don't know if it's just going to be the first weekend, but it seems like a lot.
Casey:
We shall see.
John:
I only have one more question.
John:
How tall is Egypt?
John:
Someone will answer that and then they'll get Amazon Karma for it and then you'll be able to ask your little cylinder in the house.
Marco:
Was Superman real?
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
Yes.
John:
Superman's alive.
John:
Why is there a past tense?
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsor this week, Trade Coffee.
Marco:
And thank you to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join us at ATP.FM slash join.
Marco:
And we will talk to you next week.
John:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Because it was accidental.
John:
Accidental.
John:
Oh, it was accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
John:
John didn't do any research.
John:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
John:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss.
Marco:
M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T.
Marco:
Marco Arment.
Marco:
S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
They did it.
John:
I have one more Vision Pro tidbit to smuggle into the after show, which I forgot to mention we were talking about it before.
John:
I know I talked about it in Slack as well, but I'm still curious.
John:
what the actual focal distance is.
John:
If Apple provided to you, you can't tell me if they settled you in the labs.
John:
But anyway, as we discussed in the past, we all, at least I still think that it is a fixed focal distance inside the headset.
John:
What is that distance?
John:
Is it one feet, two feet, five feet, three feet, eight feet?
John:
And I ask again because I'm an old person and I want to know what prescription I should tell them.
Marco:
I think it might even be like in the HIG somewhere, like in the design guidelines for Vision OS apps.
Marco:
It might be stated there.
John:
I mean, I think I think they talked to like the default distance of windows that are floating in front of you and that you assume that's also the focal distance.
John:
But it seems like a tech spec.
John:
Like the reason I bring it up with the demos is when you sit to the demos, like we said, when we talked before, they're going to say, OK, well, what's your prescription?
John:
I'm like, tell me the focal distance.
Marco:
I would ballpark it as like whatever, like in a typical like living room, like whatever you would use to watch your TV.
Marco:
That's probably what you want.
Casey:
I was going to say the same thing.
Casey:
My TV is kind of far away.
John:
I just I just want to measure.
John:
I'm trying to help you out.
John:
I know.
John:
I know.
John:
But it seems like it seems like it shouldn't be.
John:
They're going to have to ask people that.
John:
Right.
John:
And that they're they're going to find out when they give the people the lenses.
John:
They're like, oh, it's still blurry.
John:
And they're going to give them different ones.
John:
And it's just like, just just tell us the distance.
John:
Oh, my God.
John:
What does a princess mean?
John:
What is the focal distance of the Apple Vision Pro?
John:
No, the.
John:
Why don't you put that in the Karma question?
John:
Someone will answer it.
Marco:
Do you want that answer, though?
John:
Yeah, sure.
John:
They'll, you know, someone for Amazon Karma, someone will break into Apple Park and find out the answer.
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
How many cups is three eighths cup?
Casey:
I think we've created a monster here, folks.
John:
You could ask that to one of your cylinders.
John:
I thought they'd give you the right answer.
Marco:
Well, now it doesn't know because I'm so dumbfounded by the answer.
Marco:
Apparently, so was the Alexa system.
Marco:
And it also can't answer this and is asking people for answers.