Look at It Harder
Casey:
We have some follow-up to do.
Casey:
We have a lot of follow-up to do.
Marco:
So wait, this show that we have our first impressions of actually using the Vision Pros, we're going to be doing a lot of follow-up first, is what we're saying?
Casey:
But a lot of follow-up about Vision Pro.
Casey:
Don't look at me.
Casey:
This is all John.
Casey:
I would love to just cut it.
John:
I mean, I debated putting all the Vision Pro stuff down in the Vision Pro topic section, but these are just follow-ups about Vision Pro before we get to the meat of Vision Pro.
John:
It's all Vision Pro, though.
John:
I mean, technically, isn't everything about Vision Pro follow-up because it's a device that we already talked about before?
John:
No, follow-up is a complicated thing that you still don't understand that I could explain to you at length, but you don't want to hear it.
Casey:
Yeah, we should punish John.
Casey:
We should just do the Vision Pro review right now, Marco.
Casey:
We can go rogue, the two of us.
Casey:
And this will be John's punishment for putting all this follow-up in the beginning of the show.
John:
I should be rewarded because this is high-quality Vision Pro follow-up.
Casey:
Let's start with Christian Selig, who we do like.
Casey:
And Christian writes, it was funny hearing John talk about the, oh, yeah, this isn't Vision Pro at all.
Casey:
We can skip this.
John:
I know, but it's a celebrity.
John:
No, we got to do it.
John:
He mentions Vision Pro in the middle there.
Casey:
Oh, gosh.
Casey:
I am under protest.
Casey:
I would just like everyone to know.
Casey:
Christian, who is not guilty.
Casey:
It's John who's the guilty one.
Casey:
Christian writes, it was funny hearing John talk about the YouTube API this week.
Casey:
As I was playing around with a different part of the YouTube API for a Vision Pro app,
Casey:
There you go.
Casey:
And it got me remembering that back when I started Apollo, without even having to ask, YouTube's API limit was 50 million per day.
Casey:
And I assume that's where that comical 1.8 million per minute other stipulation comes in.
Casey:
After they lowered the limit, they started auditing Apollo annually to know how I was using it.
Casey:
And I used it a fair bit.
Casey:
And shortly after Apollo shut down, I didn't do the audit.
Casey:
And I didn't do the audit.
Casey:
They kept reducing me from 50 million all the way back to 10,000 per day or 0.02% of what I was allowed at peak.
John:
Those were the days.
John:
50 million per day.
John:
Oh, well.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So explain to me how this next piece of follow-up is related to the Vision Pro, John.
John:
Because we were talking about zooming things in on the Vision Pro and how close you can get to them to pixel peep.
John:
This is weak.
John:
The next one is weaker, but still.
John:
You're taking longer than the actual item complaining about it.
John:
Please proceed.
John:
This was about Photoshop, and I was complaining about how it didn't zoom the way I wanted it to, and someone on Thread said, hey, here's a video of me doing it, and it zooms the way you said you wanted it.
John:
And then I sent a video and said, hey, here's a video of me doing the same thing and it behaving differently.
John:
And so then he sent me a picture of his preferences with the preferences that he thought were related to zooming circled in red.
John:
And I said, I have all those settings set exactly the same way you do.
John:
Eventually, I figured it out.
John:
It was the overscroll setting in the tools section of Photoshop preferences.
John:
And the overscroll setting when enabled, it allows scrolling past the normal bounds of the window.
John:
So that was the secret.
John:
If you, like me, want option scroll wheel to zoom where your cursor is all the time, make sure you have overscroll set.
John:
And then Proton suggested another way to do it.
John:
If you press and hold in sequence the spacebar, then command, your mouse cursor will change to a magnifying glass.
John:
And then while holding these keys down, click and hold left mouse button and right drag to zoom in or left drag to zoom out.
John:
That doesn't actually solve the problem entirely.
John:
If you still have overscroll turned off, it still does the bad behavior in some situations, but it's better than nothing.
Casey:
More Not Vision Pro follow-up.
Casey:
Russ writes, I have a Euro 50 coin, and it, quote, 50 euro cent, quote, is stamped onto the face of the coin.
Casey:
And someone, I presume Russ, provided a convenient little image there.
Casey:
Comically, the UK is also stamped in the coin here, which I find funny.
Casey:
But nevertheless, it is a 50 euro cent.
John:
And it's called cents, yeah, which was a topic of much debate.
John:
And also on the previous episode, when talking about the core technology fee, which is 50 euro cents, I said about 100 times 50% instead of 50 cents.
John:
I apologize.
John:
Every time you heard me say 50%, just substitute 50 euro cents or 50 cents.
Casey:
That's what happens when we get older.
Casey:
We're all losing our marbles, all three of us.
John:
Usually when I do that, like the third or fourth time, one of you corrects me.
Casey:
I remember you doing it once or twice.
Casey:
I did it so much.
John:
It was so bad.
John:
I'm like, why do I keep saying 50%?
John:
50 cents, 50 euro cents.
Casey:
Tell me about Vision Pro prescription lens pairing, please.
John:
we were discussing like, why do you have to pair them?
John:
Is this a DRM thing?
John:
Some people theorize that to get Zeiss to be the supplier of these lenses, they had to provide some kind of sort of DRM so that they would be the exclusive supplier and people couldn't make knockoff third party lenses for less money or something like that.
John:
Uh, but now that we all have no much more about the vision pro, it's clear that at least one aspect of the vision pro lens pairing is because, uh, the lenses affect how the device works and, uh,
John:
You know, like the eye tracking, for example, and you need to sort of calibrate the device based on the prescription.
John:
Right.
John:
In one instance, somebody had a like the Vision Pro thought they had a different prescription than they actually had.
John:
Like there was a pairing problem and the eye tracking was all wonky until they got that straightened out.
John:
So it's not just for DRM.
John:
It may be for that purposes.
John:
Additionally, but that whole pairing process is essential for the device to work correctly and track your eyes when you have lenses inserted.
Casey:
Excellent.
Casey:
So I believe John put in the notes, and I love this, there's wider lightning and widest lightning, as it turns out.
Casey:
So over the last couple of days, people have figured out how to eject, if you will, or unpair perhaps, the cable that goes from the Vision Pro battery pack to the Vision Pro itself.
John:
And by the way, I'm so proud of myself because the second I saw that battery and I saw a little black dot, I'm like, that's got to be a, you know, stick a paperclip in and eject that connector thing.
John:
And lo and behold, it was, which is a miracle because if I had talked about it in the show, I would have said, no, Apple would never do that.
John:
But it totally looks like one of those holes.
John:
Well, guess what?
John:
It was.
Casey:
Turns out, although I think I read somewhere, I don't know if we have the, I don't think we have the link handy, but I thought I read somewhere that they specifically said do not put a paperclip in there, that you have to use a bespoke tool.
John:
Yes, of course.
John:
It's a very special tool.
John:
We'll see a picture of it later.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
So anyway, so there's wider lightning and widest lightning.
Casey:
Wider lightning is the connector between the battery and the Vision Pro.
Casey:
It really legitimately does look like a wider lightning port.
Casey:
Man, I cannot speak tonight.
Casey:
What is there, like 10 or 12 pins, something like that?
John:
Yeah, I think it's 12 instead of 8.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
And then apparently it also runs at a higher voltage than standard USB-C, which is different.
Casey:
And then we also got word, I want to say it was Saturday or maybe it was late Friday.
Casey:
I forget exactly when it was, but apparently the developer strap is available for purchase.
Casey:
I actually have one in the house.
Casey:
I haven't opened it yet.
Casey:
And I'd actually kind of like to return it if it turns out I don't need it.
Casey:
But I wanted to order it immediately just in case there were supply issues.
Casey:
So I figure I'm going to do some development without it, see how miserable I am.
Casey:
And if it's actually not bad, then I'll return it.
Casey:
If it's like the watch, I will buy six of them.
Marco:
Yeah.
Casey:
principle uh but anyways the uh the straps so i should back up i'm sorry so the developer strap is you replace the right hand side uh white piece on the vision pro the piece that goes from the the goggly part through and including the speaker and then what eventually gets mated to the band that either goes behind your head over your head or both
Casey:
And that means that the developer strap has to include the speaker all over again.
Casey:
So in the house, I have three speakers for the Vision Pro.
Casey:
You know, one left-hand speaker and two right-hand speakers.
Casey:
But the piece de resistance of the developer strap is behind the speaker.
Casey:
There's a little dongle that has a USB-C receptacle.
Casey:
So you can plug your Vision Pro into your computer and then build and run much easier that way.
Marco:
The whole design of the developer strap kind of annoys me.
Marco:
So Division Pro, one of the less graceful things about it is that you have a cord coming out of the left side all the time running to a battery.
Marco:
Well, if you want to connect it to a computer via a cable for live debugging, your other option, if you want to do debugging with Xcode, you want to build and run on the device to do debugging, you can do that wirelessly.
Marco:
It's regular Wi-Fi debugging.
Marco:
They've had that forever on the watch.
Marco:
In recent years, they've had it for the phone as well and the iPad.
Marco:
And it works fine in recent years.
Marco:
It's just slower.
Marco:
So any kind of build and run cycle you do in Xcode, send this to the device, go.
Marco:
That process is going to take...
Marco:
maybe two or three times longer over Wi-Fi than it takes over a cable.
Marco:
So there's a pretty good reason why developers want to run cables to their devices most of the time.
Marco:
And the cables tend to be a little more reliable.
Marco:
But honestly, Wi-Fi debugging in the last year or so with just iPhone development has been way better than it used to be.
Marco:
So anyway, with the Vision Pro, brand new platform designed from scratch, no cable debugging is supported directly.
Marco:
So we're going to have this cabled battery that runs off one side,
Marco:
with a 24-pin connector and a USB-C port on the other end of the battery.
Marco:
You want to wire it to your computer with USB-C?
Marco:
Oh, you can't use that.
Marco:
No.
Marco:
You have to instead buy a $300 accessory to wire this to your computer for development that has to replace the entire other side arm of the thing.
Marco:
And then you have two cables, one on each side, running out from the back of your headset.
Marco:
It is so cumbersome and it's such a weird decision.
Marco:
Why didn't they just enable this same data connectivity through the many pinned custom connector they made on the battery?
John:
That's the mystery of the battery port.
John:
Why does it have even more pin contacts than regular lightning when all it is doing so far is providing power?
Marco:
I mean, I'm sure there's a small amount of communication pins for the battery to communicate with the Vision Pro.
Marco:
Right, but did you need more pins than Lightning?
Marco:
It's supplying a lot more power than Lightning ever supported, so I'm sure it has to split it up between those pins.
Marco:
But they designed a custom connector with, obviously, probably what it seems like the future in mind, future capabilities in mind with this large connector.
Marco:
And then they have a USB-C hole in the battery.
Marco:
But, oh, you want to connect to your computer USB-C or, you know, through USB-C to the headset?
Marco:
Oh, you can't do that.
John:
You have to have now two cables running out of it.
John:
We still haven't gotten to why this is in this section, which is that the thing that connects that stiff little developer strap to the headset is another one of those things with a tiny hole where you're not supposed to put a paperclip, but you probably totally can.
John:
And what it does is eject the little stiff little things that are on the side of the headset.
John:
And so you can put your developer one in.
John:
And how does it plug in?
John:
It plugs in with an even wider lightning looking thing that is curved.
John:
So it's like curved wider lightning with many, many contacts.
John:
And I think it's asymmetrical.
John:
I think there's more contacts on one side than there is on the other.
John:
What, like one more, how many different lightning looking connectors can Apple make?
John:
This product alone has two brand new ones that we've never seen before.
Marco:
They can't stop it.
Marco:
You know, they stopped making the main lightning connectors on the new phones and now they're like, we're itching.
John:
We got to keep using lightning somehow.
John:
We're hooked.
John:
Yeah, they have all those machines that know how to make lightning connected.
John:
Well, to be fair, the developer strap one is, I mean, it looks like lightning, but it's not like a dead ringer for lightning like the battery one is.
John:
It is the fact that it's curved, the size of the contacts, it's different.
John:
And anyway, that $300 strap, yeah, it's expensive, but it does come with a special Vision Pro logo stamped shiny silver ejection tool that's totally not a paperclip.
John:
That's going to be a collector's item.
Marco:
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Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So with regard to Vision Pro weight, and we're going to talk about this article in the future as well, I think.
Casey:
But there's a very good, I thought it was very good, Vanity Fair article that came out, I don't know, sometime over the weekend, I think.
Casey:
And Richard Howarth, the vice president of industrial design, said, quote, there's nothing we could have done to make it lighter or smaller.
Casey:
Howarth explained, quote, this is the state of the art.
Casey:
I don't know if that's true, but I mean, I'd believe it.
John:
there's nothing we could have done like nothing so here's like my translation of that is if uh if we made it out of aluminum which we're totally going to do and there's no way we're ever going to change that there's nothing we could have done to make it lighter or smaller and that i believe if you look at the teardowns they did a really good job of this thing just lightweight materials if you say it has to be made of a single piece of aluminum that's carved out they did a good job of that
John:
I'm not so sure it needs to be a salient of aluminum.
John:
Could it have been a piece of plastic?
John:
Maybe it couldn't.
John:
Maybe the plastic would melt.
John:
Maybe the plastic wouldn't be stiff enough.
John:
I don't know.
John:
But Richard Howarth is unequivocally saying there's literally nothing they could have done to make it lighter or smaller when the thing is made out of aluminum and glass.
John:
I'm going to give that a little side eye.
Casey:
With regard to peripherals, Vision Pro only works with some Bluetooth peripherals as per a support document.
Casey:
Apple Vision Pro compatibility with third-party Bluetooth devices and accessories isn't guaranteed.
Casey:
If you have trouble connecting Apple Vision Pro to your third-party device, contact the device's manufacturer for help.
Casey:
Good luck with that.
John:
yeah and we've heard in particular this this seems to apply a lot to like mice and trackpads and stuff that basically you can use apple stuff and you try to use anyone else's stuff it may or may not work i heard some people who had some apple stuff that wasn't working with it until they did like you know the firmware update on the apple devices so even within the apple realm you have to make sure your keyboard's firmware is updated by the way if you're wondering how to do that you can google for it but uh like since i use my apple keyboard plugged in at
Casey:
apparently it will never do a firmware update unless it's connected through bluetooth so you have to like unplug it connect it through bluetooth and i think like go to the system settings or something and it will update the firmware and then you can plug it back in oh that's interesting yeah i didn't know that that's fascinating uh speaking of your piece of garbage computer john apple vision pro's virtual display feature works with intel max but limited to 3k resolution womp womp
Casey:
If you have a Mac with Apple silicons, writes Apple, it can appear in Apple Vision Pro at resolutions up to 4K.
Casey:
If your Mac has an Intel processor, it can appear at resolutions up to 3K.
John:
I guess I just don't have enough GPU power in this machine that has more GPU power than any other Mac.
John:
Seems not.
John:
And then related to that, some people were asking because like a lot of reviewers seem to be saying this unequivocally and just getting it wrong, saying like that you can't use the Vision Pro to project the screen from your desktop Mac.
John:
That is not true.
John:
You can't like every if you look at all the Apple documentation and literally I know people who have taken their Mac Studio and projected it into their Vision Pro.
John:
It doesn't have to be a laptop.
John:
Now, when you have a laptop, I think there are some enhanced features like the little floaty thing over the top of it or whatever that you, you know, click into to do the thing.
John:
But even if you have a plain old desktop Mac, you can do the mirroring thing where you see your Mac screen inside Vision Pro.
John:
So don't worry about that.
Marco:
Yeah, anybody who's using screen memory in Vision Pro.
Marco:
So there's the one way to do it where you look at your laptop and it sometimes puts up the little connect bubble above it, as John was just saying.
Marco:
But the other way to do it, which is much more reliable and will show your desktop as well, is if you open up the control center in the Vision Pro,
Marco:
there's like one of the buttons in the control section of it is screen mirroring for the Mac.
Marco:
And you hit that and it just lists your Mac and you just pick it from a list.
Marco:
I have found so far that is far more reliable than looking at my MacBook Pro and waiting for it to say Connect.
Casey:
Moving right along, the Vision Pro syncs data when not in use.
Casey:
And I actually have a little bit of experience with this myself.
Casey:
So there's a MacRumors post that says the battery pack for the Vision Pro also powers Apple Vision Pro when you're not wearing it, allowing the device to sync your mail photos and more.
Casey:
So last night I was using the Vision Pro in the hotel room watching a little bit of 3D Black Panther Wakanda Forever just to kind of try it out and see what I thought.
Casey:
And I left it plugged in overnight.
Casey:
And when I had taken the Vision Pro off to go to sleep...
Casey:
I want to say it was at like 80 or 90 percent battery, something like that.
Casey:
When I woke up, it was at like 30 percent.
Casey:
It's like, wow, what the hell happened?
Casey:
And then it occurred to me, oh, I bet it was syncing stuff because it seemed like a lot more photos were actually on the device than were previously and so on and so forth.
Casey:
And then I read this in the show notes.
Casey:
So I suspect that this is all one and the same thing.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And it's like for something with such short battery life, if you're not plugged in, it's important to actually give it time to like, why don't I see all my photos?
John:
Well, it has to at some point have time to download those photos.
John:
And we know that all of Apple's photos things are afraid to do that unless you're not using the device.
John:
So don't.
John:
reflexively disconnect the power every time you stop using it because then it will never have time to download your photos because you're either using it or it's literally powered off.
John:
Is that the Vision Pro version of force quitting all your apps on the iPhone?
Casey:
Yeah, basically.
John:
I have a story about that a little bit later too, but yeah.
John:
Oh no.
Casey:
Yeah, that's not good.
Casey:
With regard to performance throttling, Apple is trying to get ahead of the gate, apparently.
Casey:
Apple Vision Pro has built-in software and hardware systems that help reduce performance impacts that may be noticed in certain conditions, such as a battery with a low state of charge, a high peak power situation, or a chemically aged battery.
Casey:
The system is automatic, always on, and works to provide the best possible performance.
Casey:
Power needs are dynamically monitored, and performance is managed to address these needs in real time.
Casey:
The system allows Apple Vision Pro
Casey:
to balance and reduce performance impacts as much as possible.
Casey:
The user may or may not notice the effects on device, which may be temporary.
Casey:
Depending on the device battery state and the tasks that your Apple Vision Pro is handling, some examples of these effects might include longer app launch times, lower frame rates, reduced wireless data throughput, screen dimming, or lower speaker volume.
Casey:
If your device performance has been impacted by an aged battery and you would like to get help with a replacement, contact Apple Support.
John:
I feel like they're really covering their bases here.
John:
We're just like, it could get hot and run low on battery and things are going to get janky.
John:
yeah you've you've been warned well i mean but to their credit at least the battery is external and so it's very you know it's kind of costly to replace but it's very easy to replace yeah unlike most of their devices where if you have an aged battery you know it it can become very difficult and and the people who have taken apart will have links in the show notes to the ifixit teardown so if you've taken apart the battery pack there's the rating that's on the outside of like the milliamp hours of the or the watt hours of the battery pack right
John:
uh but when when they took it apart and looked at the actual like little black you know lithium ion bat pouch battery they're not pouches whatever they are like the battery packs that are in there um it seems like based on what's stamped on that stuff that the the number that's on the outside of the battery pack in watt hours is 20 lower than the actual capacity so they may essentially be giving you 20 more battery but then lying to you and saying
John:
there's not 20% more battery in here.
John:
Like essentially forcing that battery to never go below 80% charge.
John:
It's basically like three big iPhone batteries inside there.
John:
So that's interesting if they're doing like the, essentially the electric car thing of like, this is how much battery you have to use.
John:
Yes, there's more battery in there, but that's not for you.
John:
Kind of like how SSDs are over-pervisioned or whatever.
John:
And I think that's a really good idea, especially for something with such low battery life as the, you know, two and a half hours for the Vision Pro.
Casey:
John has been on a tear with regard to Vision Pro color reproduction.
Casey:
And I'm not going to handle this.
Casey:
John, this is all you.
Casey:
But I will say that when you started down this path, I was like, John, nobody cares.
Casey:
Nobody cares.
Casey:
You're the only one who cares.
Casey:
Nobody cares.
Casey:
And then I was using my Vision Pro in my hotel room yesterday, the day before, whenever it was.
Casey:
And I was doing the Mac virtual display thing where your laptop is in the Vision OS world.
Casey:
And I looked down at my MagSafe connector, and the laptop was charging at the time.
Casey:
But I tell you what, whatever color that charging indicator was, it was not the orange I expected.
Casey:
So even though in most cases I don't notice this at all, even having watched a modern film on the Vision Pro, there may be something more here than I originally gave you credit for, John.
John:
Well, so here's the thing.
John:
Obviously, one of the reasons I'm evaluating the Vision Pro is because I watch a lot of television and movies, and this is a great television and movie-watching device, so how does it measure up?
John:
And I started down this journey learning that one of the areas where the Vision Pro is behind not just good television sets, but also behind Mac displays, is that the Vision Pro displays, for all their amazingness, which we will discuss in a little bit...
John:
don't even do 100% of the P3 color space, which Macs have done for many, many years, right?
John:
We'll put a link to the show notes to show you a diagram of how big is the color space for like plain old HDTV or the P3 color space or the more modern Rec 2021.
John:
So good televisions like mine
John:
Do 100% of P3 and so do pretty much all good Mac monitors, but they also do over 90% of Rec.
John:
2020.
John:
The Vision Pro doesn't even do 100% of P3.
John:
So for color reproduction, it is not really up to the task of showing all the colors in that Hollywood, modern Hollywood movie as well as a television set.
John:
Probably not a big deal, but worth considering.
John:
This is a first-generation thing, and I was kind of surprised to see that it didn't even cross the bar that good Mac monitors have crossed ages ago.
John:
And this, of course, led me down a journey of display specs, because now people have these.
John:
They're tearing them down.
John:
They're putting them underneath microscopes.
John:
So here's what iFixit had to say about the Vision Pro resolution, as measured by literally ripping out the Sony displays and looking at them in a microscope and measuring them.
John:
Their guesstimate for resolution, and I think there's been official resolution numbers, but anyway, I'm just telling you iFix's guesstimate based on measuring, right, is that each one of the little eye displays is 3660 by 3200 pixels, and that is about 11.7 million pixels per display, which is roughly the total of 23 million that Apple says it is.
John:
And the important thing that they were discussing is like, you know, how good does this display look?
John:
I know we always talk about DPI or PPI pixels per inch when we talk about Mac monitors and retina resolution.
John:
But now once we're talking across Vision Pro and iPhones and all this other stuff, it's the equation changes a little bit because, you know, those Vision Pro screens are like less than an inch from your eyeball.
John:
Like they're really close to your eyes.
John:
So all the stuff of like, oh, a good Mac monitor has to be 200 PPI.
John:
Yeah, that's when you're looking at the monitor from like a foot and a half, two feet away.
John:
What about when it's one centimeter away from your eyeball?
John:
Suddenly what you care about now is not PPI, which the PPI for these screens is insane.
John:
I think it's over like 3000.
John:
What you care about is pixels per degree.
John:
As in, if you look one degree to the right, how many pixels have you just crossed, right?
John:
And there's 360 degrees all around you.
John:
So pixels per degree, PPD.
John:
And the Vision Pro is 34 PPD, which is apparently pretty good for a headset display.
John:
And it's got roughly 100 degree field of view, which is okay.
John:
I think the MetaQuest one is a little bit wider one.
John:
According to THX, the movie people, the ideal viewing angle for movies is 40 degrees.
John:
And the minimum recommended angle is 36 degrees.
John:
So you've got 100 degree field of view.
John:
And if you're watching a movie the way THX wants you to watch it, and like the Motion Picture Association have similar numbers, the movie screen should be 40 degrees in your field of view.
John:
So you shouldn't really be filling your entire field of view.
John:
with the movie screen but you know you do you whatever you whatever feels comfortable some people like to sit in the front row anyway so that led me down the run of doing the ppd calculator for all my other devices i first compared to my ipad pro 11 inch which i watch a lot of stuff on sitting in bed that only has 28 ppd when viewed from the distance that i view it like 14 inches
John:
uh has 3.9 million pixels at which is fewer pixels than than a single one significantly fewer pixels than a single one of the vision pro displays and it has a lower ppd a lower pixels per degree and an 86 degree field of view at that distance right so vision pro wins in terms of resolution number of pixels uh probably everything except for color reproduction because again ipad pros do 100 p3 at the least um
John:
A 65 inch 4K TV from five feet away is 76 PPD and 8.3 million pixels.
John:
So it's fewer pixels by a little bit, but it's higher PPD.
John:
Isn't that a bit close to be sitting to a 65 inch TV five feet away?
John:
I don't know.
John:
I measured it in my house and my couch is kind of farther away.
John:
So I subtracted a foot or two, but like five feet, you know, it depends on if you're in like a, you know,
John:
some people have their tvs surprisingly close where they can actually stick out their feet and almost touch the television but five feet i don't know you can you can adjust it it's okay it's a it's still higher ppd like maybe it's not more than double like 76 to 34 but you know anyway we'll link to the ppd calculator so you can put in the distance because the distance matters obviously so you can put in the distance that your tv is to get out tape measure measure to your couch and then you know put in the distance if you're curious
John:
and that's uh five feet away from a 65 inch tv is a 70 51 degree field of view uh which is still a little bit closer than uh the thx wants it and then finally pro display xdr from two feet away which is about how far i fit sit from my monitor that's 20.3 million pixels which is close to the amount of one of the vision pro displays and it is 100 ppd at a 60 degree field of view so the ppd vision pro is better than an ipad uh
Marco:
uh it's not as good as a tv and definitely not as good as a pro display xdr yeah and i think and we'll get to this later as we talk about our experience with it but um i i look forward in general i look forward to the vision pro display is getting much better and it's interesting because like they are remarkably good in their category right now like they are cutting edge and super high end in their category uh
Marco:
But this kind of gives you some idea of, like, how far they have to go before they're really going to compete on a lot of these specs with professional monitors, like what we get in almost every other Apple product.
John:
Yeah, because they're so close to your eyes.
John:
Like, they're a feat of engineering.
John:
Like, they showed in the diagrams and the videos that we'll link of, like...
Casey:
how many vision pro pixels can fit inside one iphone retina pixel it's like these these pixels are like the size of red blood cells it's they're like they're so amazing because they're so close to your eyes hold on i need i need to just clarify here that's not you being hyperbolic i read somewhere i don't have link handy that no that is legit legitimately an accurate comparison they are roughly the size of a red blood cell
John:
They are very, very, it's an amazing, you know, and it's not just Apple that has these displays.
John:
Sony, I'm sure, will sell them to other people once they fulfill Apple's demand.
John:
And I think the MetaQuest Pro has something close to that as well.
John:
But yeah, moving back from the monitor is a big win.
John:
So like Pro Display XDR is, you know, or essentially any retina monitor, like the studio display, any Mac retina monitor with around 200 PPI viewed from normal monitor distances is better, has finer detail than the displays.
John:
but that's because the displays are just stuck to your eyeballs, right?
John:
So it's still an amazing technological feat.
John:
But yeah, they've got a little way to go to catch up to our plain old monitors.
John:
Indeed.
Casey:
And then we will put a link in the show notes to the iFixit teardowns in video form, and they had at least one news blog post about it, so we'll put links to all these in the show notes.
Casey:
I haven't seen the videos yet, but I glanced at the text in picture teardown, and it was fascinating.
Casey:
I mean, a lot of it I felt like we had seen in Apple's
Casey:
like marketing materials and whatnot, but it's still fascinating.
Marco:
I strongly suggest that you watch at least the part one video because the amazing thing about it is what it takes to disassemble it.
Marco:
Because it really, you know, Apple's been talking about how this is the most complicated consumer electronic device ever made or the most, you know, whatever words they're using.
Marco:
And when you see this video, you're like, oh, wow, that's correct, because there is so much stuff crammed into the Vision Pro.
Marco:
No wonder it's so expensive.
Marco:
Not only are they using very high-end components, but just the assembly alone on this, it must be absurdly expensive, because there are so many parts that are arranged in such crazy custom ways, all in a very small space with probably ridiculous tolerances, like...
Marco:
i can't even imagine the logistics of manufacturing this and so it is worth it is worth watching that part one video just to see all those different parts that are in there and what it takes to actually disassemble it kind of makes me even more annoyed that the xdr doesn't have a camera in it or if it did it would be a cruddy camera when looking how many sensors and cameras and ir sprayers and lidar things are jammed to that tiny device it's a
John:
Only $3,500.
John:
It's a bargain.
John:
One more thing about the teardowns.
John:
One of the more destructive teardown people who just like damages things as part of his whole shtick.
John:
Spent a little bit of time investigating the scratch resistance of the front glass.
John:
And here's the thing about the front glass.
John:
The front glass is a quote unquote glass laminate.
John:
But unfortunately slash fortunately, the top layer of the laminate is plastic.
John:
And that's there, I assume, so that if it shatters, little pieces of glass don't go flying out into the world, right?
John:
Like kind of safety glass type of thing.
John:
But that top level plastic, super easy to scratch.
John:
Like I think it was like between two and three on the Mohs hardness scale, which is not hard.
John:
And you may say, oh, I don't care if there's scratches over my fake eyeballs.
John:
What you care about if there's a scratch over one of the umpteen cameras that are on that thing.
John:
So be careful with your vision pros and do not scratch it.
Marco:
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Oh,
Casey:
Do you want to start with John and your experience with Vision Pro?
John:
Yep.
John:
Mine will be the briefest because I have the least time with this, but it is now a non-zero amount of time.
John:
I did the in-store demo thingy that they offer.
Casey:
I'm very glad you did.
Casey:
Did you do the thing where you just walk in or did you sign up in advance?
John:
i signed up for an appointment and the first weekend it was for sale they wouldn't let you sign up for an appointment so i had to sign up for the monday after the weekend i don't know how long they're going to be doing this in the store but i would encourage everybody hey it's free you get to try vision pro for free you can make an appointment schedule some time to do it uh and you know get while the getting's good right
John:
Anyway, I went to do this just to have some experience with it at all.
John:
The one thing to note about the experience is when they were setting it up, obviously they've only been doing it for like two days.
John:
There's this whole big process that's not that interesting where they measure your glasses and have you scan your face with your phone and do all this stuff.
John:
And then they bring the Vision Pro out with the lenses already in it.
John:
It's all nice and aptly.
John:
And then they have an iPad where the person who's guiding you through it will be able to see what's on your screen, right?
John:
Uh, and that whole process of like pairing, it was like an iPad mini pairing the iPad to the vision pro so they can see and stuff wasn't working.
John:
And I could clearly see that the person who was doing the demo was like, you know, trying to hit a button.
John:
It wasn't working.
John:
And I got to see right off the bat, uh, the, when things aren't working, what do you need to do?
John:
twist that power connector on the vision pro because there's no on off button right you can't just turn it off and then turn it back on you gotta disconnect the power connector and connect it back in uh and uh the person did this a few times uh and eventually called over one of the more senior apple store people to say hey i can't get the thing to pair or whatever right uh and you know what the solution was of course
John:
I learned this from messing with my Sonos stuff.
John:
You learn this by doing it.
John:
I learn this every time I help my kids with something's wrong with their computer.
John:
What is the first thing you try?
John:
They'll spend an hour banging their head against it.
John:
They'll be super mad.
John:
They'll come to you and say, you need to fix this.
John:
And then when I fix it, they'll say, what did you do?
John:
And you know what I did.
Casey:
You unplugged it and plugged it back in?
John:
You got it, baby.
John:
The person needed to reboot their iPad Pro as well.
Casey:
Oh, okay.
John:
Don't just reboot the headset.
John:
Reboot both devices.
John:
Why do I?
John:
Reboot the Sonos.
John:
Reboot the phone.
John:
Now it's working.
John:
Always turn it off and then on again.
John:
Anyway.
John:
that started working so uh putting a thing on my face i had read so much about the comfort and fit of the thing i kind of knew what i was uh going for in terms of like how tight should the strap be where should you feel the pressure i tried to kind of make the pressure even uh between like my forehead and my cheekbones right um they did not offer the dual loop so it's just the single thing only so i got that uh as as good as i could get it
John:
I did notice, and I don't know if this is a prescription lens thing or not.
John:
Maybe you two can tell me, or at least Marco can tell me, because, correct, Marco, you don't have prescription lenses at all in yours?
John:
I actually got the reader lenses.
John:
I'll get to that later, but I've been using them.
John:
Okay, well, anyway, I have the prescription lens, obviously, and I did notice...
John:
a what i what i thought and i continue to think is some kind of reflection of apple store beige you know the apple store beige like the tables and everything right some kind of reflection of apple store beige in the lenses inside the headset at certain angles and there is light like the light guard thing does let light in so there are places where the light is coming in i don't know if that was light coming from like behind me like in the gaps between my like temples you know what i mean
John:
Occasionally, I did see that.
John:
I assume a more controlled lighting environment or a better fit would solve that problem, but I just thought it was worth noting.
John:
It would not.
Casey:
No, I've seen a fair bit of something that's either a smudge, but I don't think it is, or reflective inside the Vision Pro.
Casey:
And this has happened to me fairly regularly.
Casey:
So maybe my fit is totally jacked.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
But I don't have any lenses in mind because, remember, my eyes are trash.
Casey:
But the only way I can fix my eyes are with hard contacts.
Casey:
And so I didn't put any lenses in mind.
Casey:
I don't have any in the house.
Casey:
You know, mine is a vanilla Vision Pro.
Marco:
So for whatever it's worth – so a bunch of reviewers did mention glare issues and some – whether it's glare or flares or both in lenses –
Marco:
That is definitely an issue with even the stock, you know, no additional lenses configuration.
Marco:
But also for whatever it's worth, I'm in kind of a maybe unusual position here that I have some need for reading glasses at certain distances, but not a strong need.
Marco:
So I actually can use the Vision Pro just fine with or without these.
Marco:
So I've actually spent a decent amount of time with both trying to figure out like what, you know, what is best and sharpest and most comfortable for me.
Marco:
So I can tell you for sure there is some flare with the stock lenses no matter what.
Marco:
And then also when I add the reader lens inserts to it, there is noticeably more.
Marco:
Like if you just like look up and down, like move your head up and down, you will see reflections on the lenses with almost any content you're looking at in almost any room you're looking at.
John:
Do you think it's an internal reflection of the screen image, or do you think it's light from outside?
Marco:
I think it's internal reflection, but I could be wrong.
Marco:
Maybe I'll get to all this.
Marco:
I'll do some of this stuff early.
Marco:
I'm glad I went to the store, because I got to try on a few different face shields and pads, because however I was wearing it, there was always...
Marco:
I guess I have an insufficiently sized nose.
Marco:
I'm not sure.
John:
I mean, my nose is plenty big and I still had that gap.
Casey:
Same and same.
John:
Yeah.
John:
it's just the nature of the beast i feel like it was like some people even arguing like that if you did maybe get an aftermarket thing to seal off that part that it would just make the environment even less kind of breathable i know the fabric is breathable and everything but like maybe that air gap actually serves a function but yeah yeah regardless so so there are there are noticeable there's noticeable like glare and reflections on the lenses whether you use lens inserts or not but there there are more of them if you use the lens inserts yeah so they uh the first thing you see obviously after the
John:
eye calibration thing where the little motors move the stuff to line themselves up, is pass-through, where you see the world around you.
Casey:
Oh, slow down, slow down.
Casey:
We should be a little more specific, because remember, not everyone has tried this.
Casey:
So the first thing that happens when you put on the Vision Pro, if it's not yours, or if you haven't set this up for yourself yet,
Casey:
is you see an image that's kind of a representation of the vision pro and it says all right mash down on the digital crown and what it does is it moves the eyepieces laterally inside the vision pro in and out in order to fit your pupillary pupillary distance i think i both said that right and that's correct the distance between each of your pupils the center point of your eyeballs that's what it's trying to line up the things because it really and when it's not lined up you see like a double image and when it is lined up you don't
John:
I mean, you might again, you might have seen this with the eye doctor when they're adjusting the little thing that you're going to look through and you see a double vision until it comes together.
John:
Anyway, that's that.
John:
And yeah, then it turns on the pass through the pass through.
John:
I've seen a lot of videos of people using the pass through.
John:
And obviously now I'm using the pass through.
John:
The pass through is kind of like you're looking through sunglasses indoors when that it's dimmer.
John:
And I think that is a software choice.
John:
That they're making the real world dimmer.
John:
And the reason I think it's a software choice is that when the UI starts coming in, the UI is not dim.
John:
The UI is plenty bright.
Marco:
That is customizable in software and they kind of raise and lower the light level in different conditions intentionally in software.
Marco:
So sometimes it is like just pure brightness, transparent, etc.
Marco:
But if, for instance, you go to watch video content, usually it will dim the surroundings there.
Marco:
There's also some of the environments that you can set are just lighting modifications to your transparent environment.
Marco:
So some of the environments you can set are like, I'm going to be on top of a mountain.
Marco:
But some of them are just like, make my room have fall light or something like that.
Marco:
And it just kind of tints the lighting color of the room or makes adjustments.
Marco:
So anyway, that is variable.
John:
If you try one of these on, you're like, oh, the Vision Pro displays suck.
John:
This is so dim.
John:
It's not the displays.
John:
Believe me, it's the brightness is not their their weak point.
John:
So that was interesting to know.
John:
And by the way, I had some friends who also did the in-store demo.
John:
One of my friends said he did this before me.
John:
He did like I think the walk in thing.
John:
Or actually, I think he, yeah, it must have been the day before me.
John:
Anyway, he said, hey, I tried it.
John:
And at one point, they had me going through panoramas, which I'll get to in a little bit.
John:
And I got motion sick and I had to bail on the demo.
John:
And I was like, oh, no.
John:
With just panoramas.
John:
My friend is not known for being particularly motion sick, and he was getting motion sick in the 30-minute in-store demo of Vision Pro.
John:
I hadn't even thought about this in ages.
John:
Basically, the reason I had thought about it is we've seen tons of reviews, all the people who use the WWDC, all the press that went to review it then, the reviews that are on YouTube –
John:
pretty much nobody is mentioning motion sickness.
John:
And then I hear like a day or two before I'm going to do my demo that my friend got so motion sick, he had to bail out of the demo.
John:
And I'm like, this does not bode well for me.
John:
Right.
John:
So I was so afraid.
John:
I even told the person, I'm like, just to let you know, I get motion sick.
John:
So if there's anything you can do to like help me prevent that from happening, and I was already going to try to like not wave my head around like a madman or whatever.
Um,
John:
But anyway, that's my mindset going into this.
John:
So the UI comes up.
John:
I'm struck by the stability of the UI.
John:
Again, I'm pretty sure this is the very first VR headset I've ever used.
John:
But what I have seen, of course, is tons of video of other people using VR headsets like they'll post a YouTube video or whatever.
John:
And I've also seen tons of video of people using Vision Pro when they post their videos.
John:
And this is one of the weaknesses of Vision Pro for marketing.
John:
If you've seen a video of like, this is what the person inside the headset is seeing and everything's shaking all over the place and it looks janky.
John:
Rest assured, it does not look like that when you're in the headset, right?
John:
Because your eyes and brain perform a stability function.
John:
And...
John:
What that means is that, like, when those icons of the home screen are floating over the table, what everybody says about them is true.
John:
I am amazed at how non-jittery crap is inside here.
John:
Whatever.
John:
Windows, icons, things.
John:
And what I mean by that is, like, you're seeing pass-through, you see the Apple Store table, you see the whole Apple Store.
John:
When those icons...
John:
plop themselves in front of you they're like a foot in front of you or whatever over a certain position in the table they do not move from that position in the table now again i wasn't shaking my head around like a madman i'm sure i could jank it up a little bit i'm intentionally trying to go you know but but they don't jitter they don't jump they don't move around they are so incredibly stable and i'm like okay they did a good job with this again i have nothing to compare it to i'm just saying that like objectively with no other comparison other than what is a real circle hanging in front of me look like they looked
John:
very very stable and it's very impressive on the flip side of that is the part where you take your hands and put them in front of anything that is displaying a window a background a panorama their ability to mask out your limbs not hot it is probably the most janky thing that i have experienced inside the vision pro is how it masks out your limbs granted it's a hard problem
John:
But if you want to see something that looks all flickery and cyberpunk, put your hand in front of something.
John:
It is what it is.
John:
It's not a big deal because it really doesn't affect your using things.
John:
And believe me, you're not going to have your arm out in front of you when you're doing stuff, right?
John:
I'm sure the Apple Store people would have told me not to do that if I had done it.
John:
But of course, I already knew not to.
John:
Eye tracking.
John:
This is one of my experiences when I was doing stuff.
John:
I was trying to sandbag a little bit, but obviously I already know how everything works.
John:
Right.
John:
So they're like, do this and look at that and do this thing or whatever.
John:
And one of the things I experienced, they'd be like, OK, just go, you know, see that X over there.
John:
Look at that and close the window and whatever.
John:
And I would look at it and the X wouldn't highlight.
John:
And then I look at it harder.
John:
I don't know what I was trying to do in my brain.
John:
What does that mean?
John:
Like once I'm looking at it, I'm already looking at it.
John:
And they'd be like, yeah, just look at the X and close it.
John:
And I'm like, believe you me, I am looking at that X.
John:
And so sometimes it wouldn't highlight.
John:
And so what I would do in those scenarios is I would look at it and then I would look at it harder, which does nothing and means nothing.
John:
But like mentally in my brain, I'm like, maybe I need to look at it harder.
John:
But then I would just click, which is, you know, the pinching gesture with your hand.
John:
Then I would just tap and it would close the window.
John:
But the X was never highlighted.
John:
So I'm like, so that's how it's going to be.
John:
Basically like, look.
John:
Even if it doesn't highlight, I don't know if it's like the iPhone keyboard where it's like you didn't hit the key you want, but I know you were probably going for that X. So there you have it.
John:
So maybe the calibration was off or something, but there's that.
John:
Second thing is at one point I was watching video, which I'll get to in a little bit, and I wanted to resize the window to make it super big and everything and move it around and stuff.
John:
But the Windows controls weren't there.
John:
Like normally when you look down below a window, you see the little control appear and you can look at it and move the window and you can look at the lower right corner and see the resize thing.
John:
And I was looking in those places and the controls weren't appearing.
John:
So again, I would look at them harder.
John:
And nothing would happen because that doesn't mean anything or doing it.
John:
It's like I'm trying to conjure an orb and run around the line parlor.
John:
It's like I'm thinking in my head, like, look harder.
John:
But no, they would never appear.
John:
And the demo person was stumped as well until we eventually figured out.
John:
It's kind of like...
John:
a mac ui where you have to click before it will show the controls i did the pinch gesture once and then now when i look well and in hindsight it makes perfect sense because if you're watching a video you don't want every time your eyes wander to the bottom of the screen like say it has subtitles you don't want the freaking resize controls to constantly fade in and out as you read the subtitles right and so this prevents that so just fyi a little ui tip there uh and then finally they had me they were having me launch a bunch of apps and one of them was like go to the compatible app section they had me launch an ipad app i think they have everybody launch the same ipad app which is some like uh
John:
Yumly, like DoorDash type service, right?
John:
So it's an iPad app.
John:
It's running in a window.
John:
When I, you know, it had like a tab bar at the bottom of the iPad app.
John:
And when I looked at like the home icon and the star icon or whatever, they would not highlight because it's an iPad app and whatever control they were using had no facility for an idea of anything hovering over it, right?
John:
Because an iPad app might have something hovering because it has cursor support, but whatever control they were using didn't know about hover.
John:
But I could still use them.
John:
So if I looked at the star, nothing would happen.
John:
It wouldn't highlight.
John:
But if I did the tap gesture, it would click the star.
John:
But there were other elements in that UI that did highlight when I looked at them because they had kind of a sheen on it.
John:
So that's an interesting...
John:
you know side effect using ipad apps i'm sure you'll both have much more to say about that when you talk about using mac apps which is something i did not get to do despite asking um one final thing on basic interactions um and i wrote a whole blog post about this we'll link it in the show notes it's about spatial computing but uh from my perspective uh indirect interaction
John:
The Vision Pro does not ask you to go out and grab things for the most part.
John:
There are some things that do that.
John:
You can put your finger out and a butterfly goes on it.
John:
And in those 3D scenes that we were talking about, you can manipulate things with your weird blinky hands that aren't masked out well or whatever.
John:
But in generally, you're looking at things and then you're essentially clicking on them by making a gesture with your hands.
John:
And it doesn't really matter where your hands are, which is an incredible benefit because you do not want to hold your hands up.
John:
You want them to just be sitting in your lap.
John:
It's way more comfortable.
John:
But because we are human beings and we're used to reaching out and grabbing things,
John:
I found myself, even though I knew about this, even though I wrote a blog post about it, I found myself unconsciously
John:
essentially reaching for the lower right corner of windows to resize them and that does not work like you know what i mean i'd be looking i'd be looking at video and i'd be like now i just want to make this bigger and we do it on the max all the time like you're looking at video and you just grab the the lower right corner and you resize it while you're still looking at the video i found myself reaching my hand out to the very real looking lower right corner of the video player and trying to pinch it with my hand and drag it out to make it bigger and i did this more than once and both times i'm like why isn't this working and i'm like
John:
Of course it's not going to work.
John:
That's not how this UI works.
John:
So that was a, I kind of wish it did work that way because that would be super awesome.
John:
But this is another thing that everyone is saying, which is like, you have to get used to the idea that you literally have to look at everything you manipulate, which is not how we work in the real world.
John:
I mean, I hardly ever look at my mouse.
John:
And even when I'm using my mouse, sometimes I'm not looking at the cursor because I know where the cursor is and I'm using it to resize while I'm looking somewhere else.
John:
So that was interesting and embarrassing.
John:
And we were kind of like when I pinched the scroll a paper magazine, pinched the zoom with paper magazine and it does not work.
John:
Panoramas was the next thing.
John:
That's just the panoramas that you take with your iPhone, right?
John:
And they look cool because they wrap around you.
John:
Panoramas, what they show you is something that I found was one of the defining characteristics of this device.
John:
This device will show you the limits of the source material.
John:
Panoramas do not have enough resolution.
John:
And this is like the Apple demo panorama.
John:
So whatever this panorama was taken on, it's the best panoramas provided.
John:
This is not mine.
John:
These are Apple's.
John:
It does not have enough resolution to look really cool, but that's not the worst thing about it because the next thing we did was environments where you turn the little dial and you can be, you know, wherever that place is with the lake and the mountains or you could be on the moon or you can be stuff like that.
John:
And for someone who has never been in VR before this, and this is towards the end of the demo.
John:
This is where we start what I would call the convincing phase of the demo because all the rest of the start is like, oh, you've got windows and it looks real cool.
John:
But if you don't know about the technology involved, it's not that impressive.
John:
Once you turn that dial, you might be thinking if you've never used a VR headset or if you've never used Vision Pro, you're going to turn that dial and it's going to show a big wraparound picture of a mountain.
John:
That is not what's going to happen.
John:
What it's going to show is what looks to you for all the world like a real mountain and a lake.
John:
and it's just 3d like we've all i went to captain eo when i was a kid at epcot i've seen 3d movies it's just showing a different picture to each eye they had like those uh what are they called um things in like the 1900s they would you'd hold up to your face there's stereoscopes yeah there's some some other word for them right showing a different picture to each of your eyes is not a new human technology um
John:
uh what is new i think is showing each eye 11 million pixels the size of red blood cells in front of your eyes and that does actually make a difference the difference between looking at a panorama in this thing and turning on one of those environments is huge and now it's it's probably going to be like i don't know think of anything that happened in my lifetime a color television high definition television
John:
I remember when I first saw a high-definition television that I was super impressed by it.
John:
But being impressed fades and it just becomes a thing you're used to.
John:
That will happen with this as well.
John:
But right now, we're in the impressed phase.
John:
And it was something that I had never seen before.
John:
Like, literally never seen before.
John:
Because when have I ever had that many pixels in front of my eyes without some weird dimming or polarized lenses or, like, flickering thing or whatever?
John:
Yeah.
John:
There is no comparison in any experience that I have ever had of seeing something with that high fidelity in stereo.
John:
And it really did feel very different than looking at a big wraparound picture.
John:
And there's just no way to express that in an ad or a YouTube video or anything like that.
John:
You have to see yourself.
John:
And then they really cranked it up and they were showing like the spatial video from the iPhone 15 Pro and spatial video from the Vision Pro.
John:
I think in that order, because the 15 Pro wasn't as good because the cameras aren't that far apart and the resolution is low and the frame rate is
John:
low the spatial video from vision pro does better and then to top it all off they do what i think was described the people at the apple store have like a script that they're essentially reading from the ipad i think they actually described that as 8k i don't know what that means in this context but the 8k 360 degree spatial video of like alicia keys singing to you or a shark swimming up to you or a rhino and
John:
And again, there is no there's nothing like that that I've ever experienced in my entire life.
John:
It's just two really high resolution HDR images being shown to each eyeball.
John:
But if you've never experienced it, you should.
John:
And eventually you will.
John:
Don't worry.
John:
We all will.
John:
And it will become boring.
John:
And our grandchildren will think it's dumb that we're even talking about it because that's just how the world works.
John:
But right now is not that time.
John:
i urge you to go and try this if you've never tried all the the big janky headset the heavy thing on your face the windows you don't care about any of that just go to see a shark swim up to you in this headset when you see a youtube video of it you'll be like so what is a stupid video of a shark how many videos of a shark that i've seen when you're in the headset it does not look like a video of a shark
John:
it looks like you're in the water with a damn shark.
John:
And I know that sounds dumb.
John:
I know that sounds simple, but take this moment to, if you've never experienced this too.
John:
And if you have like meta quest pro and you experienced this, you're already there.
John:
You were ahead of us.
John:
You're an early adopter, but I have never done this before.
John:
And like, I went into this thinking, I'll try it or whatever.
John:
Uh, just so I have something to talk about on the show.
John:
Uh,
John:
I did not come close to buying one of these things, but I am way closer than I was before I entered that store.
John:
Experiencing this device in real life is very persuasive, right?
John:
Like very persuasive.
John:
And what it makes me look, I was like, look,
John:
This stuff that I'm seeing, it's a bunch of demo stuff.
John:
There's nothing you can get like this.
John:
It's not a big deal.
John:
But you immediately see, like, in the future, there will be content for this.
John:
And the thing will be better.
John:
And it will be lighter.
John:
And the price will be lower.
John:
Like, seeing sports and stuff, it's like just... It is extremely compelling.
John:
And also, the final thing that I'll say is...
John:
Some of the things they were showing where you're like you're in a room with people, you see people playing sports or whatever.
John:
It occurred to me also that media produced like this, like a like a television drama or a movie or whatever.
John:
will be upsetting or compelling compelling slash upsetting in a way that existing media is not probably the same way people felt when seeing something like seeing violence in a movie in you know color right is more upsetting maybe than reading about it in a book because you viscerally feel more like you're there like a war scene with bullets flying over and the audio and surround sound like the the fidelity of the experience can affect your emotions and
John:
Well, I can tell you that the fidelity of the experience of now seeing that in non-janky 3D, where it literally feels like you're there and you can look around, is it feels so much more like you are in the room, like in an upsetting way.
John:
And so if there ever is like dramatic fictional content, which I imagine there will be someday in this format...
John:
for all people like us who did not grow up experiencing this, it is going to be upsetting.
John:
Like maybe in good ways, maybe in bad ways, but like, like viscerally, like imagine if there's like a play that you're watching, but you're on the stage during the play.
John:
Right.
John:
And forget about stuff.
John:
That's not fiction.
John:
Like if you're watching, if someone does like news footage from a war zone in this format,
John:
Like there should be content warnings because it is so much more like you were actually there than looking at it on a screen.
John:
There are limitations.
John:
You can't really move the camera around that much.
John:
All sorts of stuff that would probably would have made me emotions.
John:
But Apple was real smart in its demos where the camera was either locked off and did not move at all, which thumbs up for me, or it moved super duper slowly.
John:
And by the way, once the camera did move, like they had one where it's like the camera was moving like the Apple TV screensavers where, you know, like whatever they're flying is going super slow towards an island in Hawaii or something.
John:
the camera was moving it like like really slow if you've seen that screensaver like not fast at all it moved three inches and i felt like i was like had been dropped out of a helicopter like that you know stinking stomach feeling or like if you've ever done the soaring ride at epcot or whatever multiply that by like 100 and it was moving like a half a mile an hour i can only imagine looking at like going on a roller coaster in this thing or flying in a plane or whatever
John:
It was something else.
John:
And I know this is all tab for everybody who tried this WWC.
John:
Everyone's had it for a week.
John:
I used to think for 30 minutes, who cares?
John:
But all I'm going to tell you is that if you have not ever experienced HDR high res stereo video of literally anything, a stupid bird, someone walking back and forth in front of you, you must do this because eventually your grandchildren will be bored of it.
Casey:
Yeah, you know, just to jump in very quickly, I think it's important to reiterate or perhaps further explain that there's several different things that we're kind of intermingling here.
Casey:
You can watch a 3D movie and I haven't watched Avatar yet.
Casey:
Maybe Avatar is different.
Casey:
But with regard to like Wakanda Forever, which is what I chose to watch.
Casey:
it's still a rectangle that does not take up that much of the available viewport, but there's a depth to the image you're seeing there.
Casey:
That's fairly similar to how spatial video works.
Casey:
It's less rigid on the edges, but there is a viewport to what you're seeing.
Casey:
There's depth within the viewport, but there's still a viewport.
John:
And I have to add, because that was part of the demo that I forgot to mention.
John:
They had me watching the Mario movie, which is a computer.
John:
It's a CG movie, so it's all 3D.
John:
Um...
John:
i felt the same way watching the mirror movie as i did watching like avatar in the theater in 3d only it wasn't as bright uh i don't think the 3d in movies is designed with headsets in mind in other words i think there is less depth like i know that you're talking about the viewport but forget about the viewport pretend there was no viewport just the depth data is not realistic depth data it is more like
John:
I don't know if it's compressed.
John:
There's something about it.
John:
And there's no reason on a CG thing for it not to have 100% depth data because it's literally a computer.
John:
They know the depth of every single pixel in that scene.
John:
So it's not like they have to pick regions like, oh, this was the live action and this is the CG.
John:
The whole thing is CG.
John:
So there's no reason for it to be like this.
John:
But it looked flat.
John:
And it wasn't just the rectangle.
John:
The rectangle didn't help, but it wasn't just the rectangle.
John:
So if you're going in this thinking you're going to, and again, I didn't see Avatar either, but if you're going in this thinking 3D movies are going to look radically different, they won't.
John:
They'll look like they do in the theater, but much brighter.
John:
But that is Night and Day from Alicia Keys.
Casey:
Yeah, and that's the other kind of thing that happens.
Casey:
So there's a different mode, for lack of a better way of describing it, which is immersive, is I think the key word that they use here.
Casey:
And what that is, is you no longer have a viewport, or not in the same way I was referring to it earlier.
Casey:
As you move your head, you are looking around within the scene in which you're watching.
Casey:
So in the case of Alicia Keys, I was talking to Mike over the weekend and he described it, I think, very aptly as Alicia Kings singing at you.
Casey:
But that being said, it is incredible to watch.
Casey:
And you are in a studio, I think in L.A.
Casey:
or something like that.
Casey:
And as you pan and tilt and move your head around, the image that you see is moving along with it.
Casey:
It is a fully immersive image, and it's as far as the eye can see.
Casey:
Now, there is eventually an edge to it, but it's as far as the eye can see, you know, when you first start it.
Casey:
And then as you look around, you can eventually get to the edge, but it's all around you.
Casey:
And in the Alicia Keys thing, I watched a bit of that more than the demo.
Casey:
I watched maybe a third of it or something like that.
Casey:
And as you're watching it, you can see that there's these white pieces of furniture.
Casey:
They're almost like obelisks.
Casey:
And there's five of them or something like that stationed throughout the studio.
Casey:
And come to realize those are the 360 cameras, because over time, and they don't show this in the demo, they switch between these different points of view.
Casey:
And in every one of them, you can turn your head left and right.
Casey:
And the sound, which you haven't mentioned yet, John, but the sound coming from these AirPods, it is not as good as AirPods Pro, at least.
Casey:
But it is astonishingly good.
Casey:
And also the surround, the faux surround is astonishingly good given that you've got these two ear pods that are solid, you know, a couple of centimeters away from your ears.
Casey:
It is very, very good.
Casey:
But anyway, so yeah, there are these immersive experiences.
Casey:
I watched the Alicia Keys one.
Casey:
I watched the, I think it's called Highline or something like that.
John:
Yeah, the tightrope walking one.
Casey:
Yep, the tightrope walking one.
Casey:
And then there's a dinosaur one.
Casey:
And I think that might have been all I saw.
Casey:
But they're incredible.
Casey:
They're just mind shatteringly good because it's like you are in that scene.
Casey:
You are there in a very different way for me, anyhow.
Casey:
in a very different way than spatial video.
Casey:
Like spatial video, you can say, oh, yeah, that's about what it looked like, isn't it?
Casey:
That's kind of similar to what it was like.
Casey:
Whereas with immersive, you're frigging there.
Casey:
It's absolutely unreal.
John:
Spatial video is another example of showing limitations of the source material.
John:
It's definitely in the iPhone where it's like, I think it's like 1080p, 30 frames per second or something.
John:
It's not high resolution.
Marco:
Well, it's not that much better from the Vision Pro.
Marco:
I think it's actually roughly the same specs.
John:
Like, it has better spacing.
John:
Right, but the Vision Pro has the cameras farther apart.
John:
Like, the cameras are eye-width apart, and I feel like that does make a difference.
John:
Or it could have also... I mean, Apple is providing this media, so I didn't, you know, whatever.
John:
Maybe they just had better lighting conditions for the... Like, the one I saw was the birthday one where they put the cake real close to you.
John:
Those were not nearly the experience of seeing the shark swim towards you in the water or whatever.
John:
But I saw that and I said, we need to start shooting janky iPhone 15 Pro video of my kids right now.
John:
Even though it's going to be janky, it's not going to look as good as the cool stuff.
John:
But like, look, it's better.
John:
It's literally better than nothing.
John:
We have an iPhone 15 Pro.
John:
The cameras are too close together.
John:
The frame rate is too low.
John:
And still, we should shoot some of it.
John:
Not all of it.
John:
We should still take regular video at 4K and everything, but I want to have some of this.
John:
So that was convincing enough to let me know.
John:
Unlike live photos and portrait mode and other stuff that Apple introduced that I have no interest in, I'm going to do this if my kids will let me.
John:
I won't tell them I'm doing it.
John:
Um, even though I know this is the worst version of this is ever going to be because it is more emotionally connecting than seeing a flat photo in some cases.
John:
Right.
John:
And so I want to have both.
John:
I'm going to have high quality flat photos.
John:
I want to have good high resolution video and audio.
John:
And I want to have some of this.
John:
Spatial 3D stuff.
John:
That's why I think when I look at this, my mind just shot forward and I'm like, this is going to be so boring to my grandkids.
John:
This is just going to be something that's in the world.
John:
Just like high-definition television is not something my children think about at all, but I was so impressed when I saw the first high-definition CRT television.
John:
Like, wow, it looks like it's real.
John:
That's this moment for me.
John:
And the sports stuff, it's not going to replace everything in the whole world, but it's compelling enough that
John:
As soon as someone people see this, they're going to say, I will make a place for this in my life, just like we've all made a place for television and the Internet and computers and all the other things that we have that we don't use 24 hours a day and don't assume our entire lives.
John:
But we make a place for them because they do something that nothing has done in the same way before or don't do it as well.
John:
Right.
John:
So this is.
John:
you know showing a high resolution high resolution picture to each eye i feel like is the obvious next step in visual stuff and we've been trying to do it for ages and this is not the first vr headset and i'm sorry if this sounds stupid for people who've been using their meta quest for years and years and already know all this but this is my first experience with it and just so happened my first experience was with these insanely high resolution screens and a really solid like coherent experience
Casey:
With regard to the demo or, well, pickup experience, I had an 830 appointment at the local Apple store, and our Apple store is tiny.
Casey:
All the people that work there are extremely nice, and I really enjoy them in the rare occasions I go in and chit-chat with them.
Casey:
But they refer to themselves as, like, you know, the Wild West, because this is not the Fifth Avenue store, which I was in yesterday yesterday.
Casey:
This is not the Soho store, which I walked by yesterday.
Casey:
You know, this is not the Grand Central store, which you and I were in a couple of months ago.
Casey:
Like, this is a very tiny store.
Casey:
And I thought, well, I'll just show up early because, you know, they never turn me away for iPhone stuff.
Casey:
They're not going to turn me away now.
Casey:
And I walk in.
Casey:
I say, hey, you know, I'm early, but I have an 830 appointment.
Casey:
And they said, wonderful.
Casey:
We'll see you at 830.
Casey:
I said,
Marco:
oh really okay yes never never tell them the time of your appointment just say you have an appointment for whatever it's worth like i also went to a very small like long island store to pick mine up my appointment was at 2 p.m i showed up at about 8 30 because i like i had something to do later in the day and so i show up i'm like i hope they'll take me like i don't think they even know what time your appointment is for i think they just know your day so you just give them your name and never tell them the time
Marco:
Well, because I mean, because I showed up and, you know, because my store was also kind of the Wild West could be going to because Long Island is the south of the north.
Marco:
It was empty.
Marco:
Like there was not only was there no line, there was almost no one in the store.
Marco:
This was only 30 minutes after they had opened on launch day.
Casey:
So the funniest thing about the store was as I'm walking up to it, and like you said, Marco, it was mostly empty.
Casey:
I mean, it was busy for 8.30 in the morning since it doesn't typically open until 10.
Casey:
But given that it was the launch of a brand new Apple product, it was effectively empty.
Casey:
And as I'm walking in and I see off to the side...
Casey:
Oh, that's funny.
Casey:
They had all the bollards or whatever you call it, you know, the like line management stuff.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
Casey:
It was all still on the cart they used to bring it in and out, but it was clear they were prepared for a line that never showed up.
John:
When I was talking with the Apple store person who gave my demo, they offered the same exact thing because I was commenting on how many people in the store and they said, yeah, on launch weekend, we had the line thingies set up and we just ended up taking them down because we didn't need them.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Because for all, you know, because we were like you're saying, like we were planning on this to be like an iPhone launch in our minds.
Marco:
But, you know, you don't realize the scale of iPhone launches.
Marco:
And then, you know, when they're now launching this brand new thing, that's just a totally different scale product, you know.
John:
People don't even know that they want it, and also they do know it's $3,500.
John:
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
Casey:
So I go in, they tell me, and they're very kind about it, but they basically say, look, you're not to wait.
Casey:
So I'm chit-chatting with another person that was waiting for an 8.30 appointment.
Casey:
I'm chit-chatting with some of the Apple people, whatever, whatever.
Casey:
At 8.30, they say, okay, you know, it's demo time.
Casey:
And I'm like, okay.
Casey:
And I kind of wanted to get a marketing demo, but it seemed odd to me.
Casey:
Like, I've already bought the frigging thing.
Casey:
Like, why am I doing a demo?
Casey:
And I think the reality of the situation, which I figured out after the fact, based on talking with a couple other people that went to other stores and my own store and just piecing everything together, I think they wanted to do the demo in part to show you, like, how all this works, but also to do a fit check.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
But apparently you could have opted out of the demo if you're really forceful about it.
Casey:
But they would all but force you to do a fit check, to like go off to the side, try on an example of a Vision Pro with the light shield and whatever that your app says you need.
Casey:
And they would take a look at it.
Casey:
And then if you pass the fit check, then they'll give you your device and off you go.
John:
I think that makes perfect sense.
John:
They've got you there in person anyway, and they don't know how well this whole face scanning thing is working for people who are doing it at home.
John:
So yeah, it makes sense.
Marco:
Yeah, for whatever it's worth, I actually did exactly that.
Marco:
I opted out of the full demo because I knew I'd already had some time with it with the lab.
Marco:
I attended a lab.
Marco:
And then I also knew that like, you know, I was going to get at home and just play with it all the time anyway.
Marco:
So I'm like, you know, I kind of knew like, OK, they're going to go through the press demo.
Marco:
I've heard this press demo a thousand times.
Marco:
I've seen the video of the of the actor going through it.
Marco:
They posted a few days earlier.
Marco:
Like, I don't need to go through this again.
Marco:
But the staff at my store was extremely nice.
Marco:
and extremely accommodating and again there was not a lot of other people there so they had a lot of time to to deal with me being weird and so i i did just the fit check i didn't have the full walk the demo they i just did the fit check and you know you go through you do the eye setup uh and you kind of just see how it feels and see how it sits on your face and everything and and i actually had them bring out a couple of different cushions as i mentioned earlier so i i went through a process of trying a couple different combinations of things but they were they were delightful and i was out of there probably in 20 minutes
John:
Speaking of fit, though, is one thing I've had to mention when I took the thing off at the end of the demo, there was sweat all around that thing.
John:
Like the little that they when they give you the in-store demos, they put kind of like a I don't know, some kind of like one of those tissue thin things like that you put on a public toilet seat or whatever.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Around the it's a tasteful Apple one.
John:
Don't worry about it.
John:
But anyway, they put some removable stuff around the squishy face cushion thing.
John:
And I for sure sweated straight through that.
John:
i didn't think i was sweating that much when i was in it it didn't feel like i was sweating um and i can't judge comfort in a half an hour though i will say that it i did not really like for as someone who doesn't like airpod pros as they go in my ears i'm not a big fan of having that thing strapped to my face not because it's heavy but because it presses against my face not a fan but i also sweat way into those little thingies that i never did get motion sick i didn't have any problem with that
John:
but i was in an indoor controlled environment i wasn't overdressed like uh and i didn't even realize i was sweating until i took it off i'm like oh there's some moisture evaporating on a big ring around i felt like i should apologize for them for sweating through the thing but i guess they'll just take it in the back peel the thing off and you know if you're gonna do one of these demos maybe go now yeah
Marco:
No, I asked them about the logistics of how are they doing stuff between people and everything.
Marco:
And they basically just said they just have this whole process they go through in the back of sanitizing everything between each person.
Marco:
Because it would be a little cumbersome and wasteful to have every single person get a whole new eye cushion just for sizing.
John:
Yeah, no, they're $30 each retail.
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
So they do have a set of ones that they reuse and they just clean them somehow.
Marco:
And the implication was it was fairly involved.
Marco:
Yeah, it's like at the bowling alley where they spray in the shoes.
Marco:
Same thing.
Marco:
Wow.
Marco:
And then what's interesting is like the one they bring out for you to test the fit with.
Marco:
That's not the one that you walk out of the store with.
Marco:
They have the set of them that they test the fits with.
Marco:
And then they make sure your box has the right stuff in it and send you home with that box.
Casey:
Yeah, which actually that's a perfect segue because when it eventually becomes my turn at 830 or 835 or whatever, I go and I sit and there's somebody there with, I think it was an iPad mini, which is what John was talking about, which is, you know, going to mirror what's going on on the Vision Pro that I'm using.
Casey:
And I explained to them, oh, look, you know, I've done the lab testing.
Casey:
experience and i can't tell you anything about it but i can tell you enough that you know it i can do the eye tracking you don't need to tell me about all that can i just do like the the video related portions of the demo you know the get me through i don't need the window management stuff just give me the good stuff and dude was totally chill i was like yeah absolutely no worries
Casey:
It took something like half an hour for me to get my bespoke Vision Pro to try.
Casey:
This isn't the one I bought, to try.
Casey:
And it does come on a delightful little platter, which is very, very cool and looks neat.
Casey:
But they bring it out.
Casey:
It took forever for them to get me mine.
Casey:
And I think reading between the lines based on what I overheard and what I was able to glean from the Apple employee...
Casey:
it seemed like our particular store only had a couple... I'm filling in some blanks here, but only had a couple of light seals in each size, or the light seal and the cushion or whatever in each size.
Casey:
And it seems like every damn person that was doing a demo at 8.30 or 8.30-ish at the store I was in all wanted the same one.
John:
Size 11 men's shoes, yeah.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
And so what ended up happening was there was effectively a queue just to get...
Casey:
a light shield or whatever the heck it's called.
Casey:
I always get it wrong, but, uh, to get the, the, the shield or in, in cushion that I needed because everyone else was using it at the same time.
Casey:
They were starting to get, not with me at all.
Casey:
They were super chill with me, but they were starting to get pretty frustrated about the fact that it was taking so long and it did.
Casey:
And it was, it was not a delightful experience.
Casey:
Like the, the store people made it as great as they could, but it was not great.
Casey:
Um,
Casey:
Anyway, so I do my demo and then I, you know, go and I ask for, you know, I'd say, okay, I'm ready to pick up my device.
Casey:
And then it took like a solid 20, 30 minutes for that to get put together.
Casey:
And I didn't realize at the time, and Marco, I think you said so just a moment ago, but what they're doing is they're filling this gigantic box with the particular components that you need.
Casey:
And then they're sealing it in the back of the store.
Casey:
So the good news is, you know, they're not making you like unbox it and do a fit check with the one that you bought.
Casey:
You know, they're doing this all...
Casey:
with fresh stuff in the back, like you had said, Marco, but it took for freaking ever.
Casey:
I walked into that Apple store at 8, and I think I walked out at 10, or something like that.
Casey:
It was bananas how long it took.
Marco:
Yeah, and keep in mind, too, like, you know, this was day one, the morning.
Marco:
Oh, immediately at the beginning.
Marco:
And, like, the retail logistics of this are...
Marco:
so complicated like yeah absolutely and and again like you mentioned like the people are the retail staff largely at apple stores is delightful like they're they they they hire very well they train very well it really shows like the the people at apple stores are always the nicest people and and you could tell like they are that that first day you could tell they were like a little bit running around with their heads cut off because it was just there was so much you know new logistical stuff to deal with yep i couldn't agree more
John:
And they were, you know, I noticed when they were going through the thing, I was on the third day and they were still like going through the scripts, you know, learning the parts of it.
John:
Like they hadn't done this a lot.
John:
And I was shocked when I went there.
John:
I went there at 1030 on a Monday.
John:
I think it was.
John:
And I'm like, what are all these people doing?
John:
The Apple store.
John:
Don't these people have jobs.
John:
Because I thought I'd be the only one in the store.
John:
Who the heck is going to the Apple store at 1030 on a weekday?
John:
Right.
John:
But they were doing like six Vision Pro demos at the same time.
John:
So they may not have got the couches, but they apparently got enough Vision Pros to run a lot.
John:
That's all there was in the store was just like one sad person who had a broken computer and then just a phone or whatever.
John:
And then just Vision Pro demos as far as I can see.
John:
And speaking of the little tray, like, you know, there's a special tray, of course, there has to be that exactly fits the Vision Pro that they bring it out to you on or whatever.
John:
I'm told, but I think someone said this on Mastodon, that if you are at one of the fancy stores that has the new like colorful benches that you sit on for Vision Pro, that there's like a little like a nightstand or a little like a desk arm thing, like a place where they put the tray when they bring it out to because you're not at a table.
John:
You're sitting on kind of a bench.
John:
There's a place where they put the Vision Pro on the tray.
John:
And according to this person, the tray has magnets in it and there are magnets in the place where you put it.
John:
So it will always be exactly correctly centered and aligned on the thing that they put the tray down on.
John:
that's unreal it's really important that you're during your i mean i the only thing i can think of is maybe they don't want you accidentally knocking the tray off or something but yeah they're they're thinking everything over there uh do you think apple might be the world's leading consumer of magnets could be i don't know i don't know are they recycled magnets i don't know oh i mean probably they're just iron but they're not just iron
Marco:
oh yeah right all the rare they're all the rare earth magnets yeah now they're yeah magnets what's interesting too like speaking of magnets before i forget this one little nitpick um that the vision pro hardware design has the light shield and then the pad on the front of the light shield both attaching to each other and then the headset via magnets and
Marco:
the way you would naturally pick up this device yeah i think in many cases you would pick it up by the light seal apple clearly knows this because they tell you so many times the correct way to pick it up with like two fingers what you basically pick it up by like the nose bridge and the top center of of the actual you know you pick it up by the aluminum part
John:
yes and you can tell because like one time i did accidentally pick it up a little bit by the light seal and it just popped right off i'm like oh yeah i think they calibrated it to the magnets to be weaker so that you don't that you literally can't pick it up by the light because if they had if they're like oh they should just make the magnet that's just asking for an accent i think they made them as light as they could no but but the problem is you can pick it up by the light seal and then it will fall down
John:
Really?
John:
The thing was so loose that I felt like you couldn't even lift it up from it.
John:
Those magnets are not strong.
John:
Maybe they need to make them even looser because it's not like it's under compression when it's on your face.
John:
So it's not like it really needs much to just be positively aligned.
John:
But yeah, they need to make it so loose that it is literally impossible for you to pick it up by that because it is going to come off.
Marco:
no i think they need to have that just attached via latches like there has to you know have a release button somewhere like have it be mechanically attached have both pieces not magnetic because the number of people who are going to drop and break their vision pros because of that i think is going to be substantial and that that's a that's that's just a bad design like that that should really be more physically secure i mean people will pick it up by the strap and you can't pick it up by the strap i guess
Marco:
Yeah, but trust me, there's going to be a lot of broken vision pros because people pick it up by the light seal.
Marco:
I guarantee it.
Casey:
All right, so that was my in-store experience.
Casey:
It was not stupendous, but like Marco had said, it's the beginning.
Casey:
It was early in the day.
Casey:
I was set up for failure head to toe, top to bottom, but that's okay.
Casey:
I did get to use it a bit over the weekend.
Casey:
I did some demos for friends, and that mostly went okay.
Casey:
But most of my exposure to the Vision Pro, because I've had such a busy weekend and then a few days when I was in New York, a lot of my exposure was over the last couple of evenings before bed and on the train.
Casey:
But I'd like to save that until after, Marco.
Casey:
You've mostly covered your pickup experience, but what have you been doing over the last few days with this thing?
Marco:
So I want to start just with the eye setup.
Marco:
How does it look?
Marco:
What's the physical reality of this?
Marco:
So again, with the disclaimer that I do have prescribed need for reading glasses for things that I hold close to my face.
Marco:
It's less than my arm distance, but it's not that much less than my arm distance.
Marco:
And it's a very, it's a minor, it's like a 0.75 reader prescription for that distance.
Marco:
So it's, it's a fairly minor and light reading prescription.
Marco:
So that being said,
Marco:
The Vision Pro, I cannot really get it to look very sharp most of the time.
Marco:
And I've heard a couple of other people say this or say similar things.
Marco:
So I think it's not just me.
Marco:
Somewhat it might just be like the limits of the displays.
John:
Which parts, when you say not sharp, like give me an example.
John:
I see that and it doesn't look sharp to me.
Marco:
Where I notice it most is actually in the immersive video content.
Marco:
And so I'm not sure if it's a limitation of the resolution of the content or if it's the device.
Marco:
But also, I've had similar issues with the Quest headsets when I've tried them.
Marco:
The main issue is like stuff in the center of the screen is fairly sharp.
Marco:
As I look at things more towards the edges of my field of view, it's less sharp.
Marco:
And there's also a lot more like color fringing that I see along the periphery of the view.
Marco:
And again, so I don't know how much of that is the optics that everyone sees or how much that is just my eyes.
John:
Is this with or without the lenses in it?
Marco:
So I've tried it both ways.
Marco:
So I got the Zeiss Reader inserts that are for that range, the 0.75 to 1.25, I think.
Marco:
So I got those, and I've used it about half the time with those and about half the time without those.
Marco:
And every time I swap them, I go and recalibrate everything and go through all that just to make sure I'm giving it the best possible chance.
Marco:
I've tried both straps, different tightness levels, both the regular cushion.
Marco:
And in the box, they gave you a regular depth cushion and like an extra deep.
Marco:
It's like the W plus or the N plus cushion.
Marco:
And the Vision Pro once yelled at me that my eyes were too close.
Marco:
Once I inserted the reader lenses, it said my eyes are not too close.
Marco:
I think my glorious eyelashes might have been hitting the glass.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
You don't want that.
Marco:
And so it says you should really use the W plus cushion.
Marco:
So I switched to that.
Marco:
So I've tried a lot of different combinations.
Marco:
And again, I've done as much like recalibration and adjustment and everything as I possibly can.
Marco:
And it's hard for me to get everything to look sharp.
Marco:
But it's close enough now that like...
Marco:
The native UI elements, the windows, the text, that kind of stuff looks sharp enough.
Marco:
It looks pretty sharp.
Marco:
Where I have issues is, again, the periphery of the view and a lot of the immersive video content.
Marco:
That's a little bit tricky for me.
John:
speaking of sharpness and the video content one of the things that i did when they were showing one of the first quote unquote 8k whatever immersive videos is i looked all the way to my left to see essentially where the horseshoe of the viewport ends like if you can imagine like a billboard in front of you wrapped around you in a u shape you can if you look all the way to the left find where the edge of that billboard is like an
John:
Same thing if you look down in front of you, you can see where it essentially intersects with the desk that's in front of you or whatever.
John:
Anyway, I made it a point of looking at those intersections, and I think two things were working for me here.
John:
One, the pass-through is another example of this device being limited by the source material because the pass-through cameras are not up to...
John:
the resolution on these displays like they it looks kind of potatoey um because i think it's just because the cameras aren't good enough right uh so whatever fine um it's more important for it to be in sync as it is but then when i looked at the edge the edge of the big wraparound billboard the edge of that billboard of whatever alicia key's room or whatever the thing was in
John:
was so razor sharp i must have stared at it for amount of time that the demo person was like why is this person looking don't they realize the action is happening in front of them i looked at the like rounded corner and razor sharp edge of this giant billboard that was wrapping around me i'm like how can that be so sharp and i'm looking for chromatic aberration right i'm looking for the things you're talking about
John:
It was so razor sharp.
John:
And it may just be because the background was the pastor was potatoey and dim, whereas Alicia Keys was being fed from a file that's on the device and did not have to deal with the go through the camera.
John:
But it looked so sharp.
John:
So like I cut myself on it.
John:
I was like, I cannot believe the resolution of this thing.
John:
On the other hand, when I was scrolling Safari, I'm like, yeah, this text is, you know, this text could be better.
John:
Like my XDR looks, Safari looks better on my XDR, but whatever the hell they're doing with the HDR video and the edge treatment of that thing, thumbs up.
John:
So I guess whatever sharpness problems you were having, because if you think about periphery, I'm turning my head, but I'm also turning my eyes, mostly because I was kind of embarrassed to be looking literally to my left when Alicia Keys is in front of me or whatever.
John:
i think i was looking at the edge of the the tiny screen while also looking at the edge of that thing and sharpness absolutely did not suffer and also i never noticed the foveated rendering i also never noticed um which obviously was happening every time i look anywhere but i was never able to catch it some people said they've been able to catch it but maybe i was just too wowed but i i never caught it like following my focus and rendering you know what i mean
Marco:
I mean, so on some level, I am kind of relieved to hear that it's not a problem inherent to the hardware.
Marco:
On another level, this sucks because I can't get it to look as good as it's looking to you.
John:
I mean, people have said that they've seen chromatic aberration and people who have like analyzed it like by machine and not vision.
John:
It could just be my vision is too crappy to notice it.
John:
But I stared at it for a while.
John:
You couldn't not notice the level that I'm seeing.
John:
Maybe it's because my regular vision is not as sharp as yours.
John:
Right.
John:
And it's just it's it passes the bar for me or whatever.
John:
But people have like there's a tremendous amount of processing going on with that image that these people who are like analyzing it, but like shoving like a camera up to the thing and fooling it into running.
John:
You can see all the tricks that it's doing.
John:
But whatever tricks it was doing, those tricks worked on me.
Marco:
Well, I'm glad.
Marco:
I hope at some point there's a version of this that I can see very sharply, as sharply as you seem to be seeing it.
Marco:
Because, again, the rest of my eyesight is, as far as I know, perfect.
Marco:
I'm 20-20 for everything else, just like I'm 41.
Marco:
I need reading glasses for things I'm closed now.
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
So I don't know what it is.
Marco:
But, again, I've had the same problem with the Quest headsets I've tried.
Marco:
Hmm.
Marco:
Oh, well, we'll move on because, you know, this sounds like it's just a me problem, which, again, is frustrating.
John:
Does it get worse over time?
John:
No.
John:
Like if you're in it for an hour?
Marco:
No, it stays exactly the same the whole time from beginning to end.
Marco:
Oh, all right.
Marco:
Anyway, so otherwise, like, you know, comfort and fit-wise, otherwise, I have...
Marco:
Not any real problems with it.
Marco:
I haven't used it for a whole movie yet.
Marco:
I haven't had time to watch an entire movie beginning to end.
Marco:
Maybe after a long time, I might start to feel the weight.
Marco:
So far, for me, comfort-wise, it's fine.
Marco:
I would love it to be lighter, of course, like everyone else, but I can deal with it.
Marco:
I've tried both straps, the little two-strap version and the big fancy singular solar strap.
Marco:
They're both totally fine for me in different ways.
Marco:
Neither one of them seems to have any major problems on me, so that's good.
Marco:
I mean, it's probably, you know, I have neither hair nor makeup, so that helps, I think, with all the strap issues.
Marco:
But otherwise, like, that's been fine.
Marco:
Moving on to the TV and movies a little bit, you know, I was just saying, like, it was actually fairly difficult for me to watch the, what you're describing, like, the 3D immersive videos that have, like, the 180-degree field of view.
Marco:
because... Two reasons I think I've had trouble with them.
Marco:
I watched Alicia Keys.
Marco:
I watched The High Line.
Marco:
I think there was one more that I watched.
Marco:
Oh, the dinosaur one with those weird bird dinosaur things in the sand.
Marco:
The problem... I have two issues with these.
Marco:
Number one is that...
Marco:
What they're shooting looks like a 3D scene that you are freely in and can look around because it's the 180 degree field of view.
Marco:
But it was still shot with cinematic cameras in a cinematic style.
Marco:
And what that means is there is shallow depth of field very frequently because that's how things are shot on video.
Marco:
And that's partly optics.
Marco:
It's partly a creative choice.
Marco:
But there are certain things in the video that the filmmaker chose to make in focus in each scene and certain things that they didn't.
Marco:
But if you're looking at a scene that takes up your entire field of view and that you feel immersed in, I kind of feel like I should be able to look around the scene and look at anything.
Marco:
And what I'm looking at should be naturally in focus the way it would be if I was there looking at it.
John:
I meant to mention that a lot.
John:
The most convincing 3D ones I've seen.
John:
And I also think their environments benefit from essentially having a really narrow aperture in camera thing where the depth of field is huge, which that means is that
John:
Things are in focus one foot from you, two feet, five feet, 10 feet, all in focus because the aperture on the camera is very narrow and the only light rays of light that go in it are the ones that are sort of linear.
John:
But anyway, like that works best for exactly that reason, because unless it's not clear where it tracks where you look.
John:
but the as we've discussed at length in the past the focal distance is always the same and yeah it knows where you're looking but it does not currently change the focus like you could have like a light field video or something that could change the focus but that's not how this works right so when you're looking at the video you look at that blurry part it is never going to not be blurry it is it's blurry in the video it's a h265 compressed file it's playing for each of your eyes and that video you're looking at you can look at it all you want it's going to be exactly as blurry as it is in that encoded video file
John:
And the environments, like, by the lakeside type thing, I think part of the reason they look so amazing is they've somehow taken it so that, like, everything is in focus.
John:
The dirt on your feet is in focus.
Marco:
Well, those environments are rendered.
Marco:
They're not video.
Marco:
Yeah, there you go.
Marco:
That's why.
Marco:
Like, our friend Steve Trouton-Smith, like, found, like, it's all, they're all, like, you know, I think they're, like, you know, reality 3D whatever scenes.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So, the reason why the environments look so good, because, and if you think about it for a second, it makes sense.
Marco:
In those environments, you can shift your head around a little bit.
Marco:
You can shift your head left, right, in, out.
Marco:
And the view of the environment, you can kind of look around the edge of the rock that you're next to or whatever.
Marco:
Which you can't do in recorded 2D video.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
So it kind of has to be a 3D rendered environment or have some other kind of ridiculous.
John:
Or some other kind of composite.
John:
I don't actually know how they're doing it.
Marco:
Yeah, but whatever it is, the environments that you can set as your background, those seem to be just 3D renders of very high quality.
Marco:
So maybe they captured it with some really good cameras and then modeled it after.
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
But those are renders, not videos.
Marco:
When I'm actually watching videos, I find that I have this problem a lot where what I'm focusing on is not what they focused on, and it kind of breaks the illusion for me and makes me feel like... I almost feel like I'm getting eye strain trying to watch it.
John:
Yeah, that's also one of the problems with like the Mario movie was it's a similar type of thing.
John:
There's like shallow depth of field in a particular shot or whatever.
John:
And it looks 3D ish, but it's the same thing.
John:
You know, if you watch any 3D movie in the theater, it's exactly the same problem.
John:
If you if you decide that what you're interested in is something that is not in focus, it will never be in focus because it is just one flat video.
John:
And, you know, there are technologies that allow.
John:
you to focus on different ports like the light field camera things that have like a million lenses and you take one photograph but then you can put different areas in focus and this is not portrait mode where it just blurs crap it's different than that it gathers the light information for all those different depths of field and if you combine that technology with a technology that is not in the vision probe but that facebook has done a lot of research into which is hey when we know where they're looking change the focal distance you could achieve what we're you know what you get what maybe our great-grandchildren will get which is
John:
wherever i look when i refocus my eyeballs i can see the blurry things like that that is technologically within our reach but it would cost you know twenty thousand dollars and still kind of be janky so apple kind of hit the sweet spot here where it's like fix focal distance uh the stuff that looks best is the stuff that's in focus and every everywhere uh and if you look at something that's not like that uh it'll be like watching you know avatar in the movie theater where yeah some things are going to be out of focus don't spend time staring at them
Marco:
yeah and so for whatever it's worth so like a 3d movie like avatar like that kind of like before i had watched it in the vision pro i had never seen a 3d movie ever anywhere not in the not in the theater not on some weird tv from ces to 15 years ago like never so i i was looking through like you know what's available and it turns out um the uh the three most recent star wars trilogy movies episode seven eight and nine those are all available in 3d i know i like them hey it's just i don't i don't want to hear it i like them i and you know what i like all three of them
Marco:
And screw you.
John:
Anyways.
John:
No, that's not what I'm groaning about.
John:
I love the first one.
John:
The third one is bad.
John:
But anyway, it's because it's the 3D, right?
John:
So here's the thing.
John:
CG movies, like I said, could, in theory, have perfect 3D because it's literally a 3D scene in a computer and it knows the depth of every single pixel.
John:
But for live action movies that are quote unquote shot in 3D, especially older ones, they would not cheat, but like, yeah, they use a stereoscopic hammer for this, but the background plate is flat and they could end up having that kind of like effect that you get in like, uh, what is it called?
John:
The, uh,
John:
disney animation thing where you have multiple uh multi-plane stuff parallax yeah parallax right um and so it can sometimes look like you're looking at a diorama like some 3d things on top of a 2d plane that's behind a 2d plane i again the mario movie i don't know why it looked like that that must have been a choice they made to sort of flatten out the 3d and to make it look more like a you know a bunch of parallax uh 2d animation but
John:
older especially older 3d movies i don't know if it's a star wars movies in particular because i haven't seen them in 3d but especially older 3d movies that are from sort of the dawn of 3d that are not avatar caliber and not all cg can look a little bit like you're looking at a toy box with a bunch of paper cutouts that are stacked in front of each other which is cool but it is not the full 3d experience but anyway you think the full didn't the star wars movies didn't look like that to you
Marco:
So I only watched a few minutes of Force Awakens.
Marco:
I didn't have time to watch the whole thing.
Marco:
But I was pretty impressed by how it looked.
Marco:
Because I had heard that complaint about 3D movies in general.
Marco:
If it has that problem, it wasn't enough for me to notice it.
Marco:
But again, this was only over a few minutes.
Marco:
But I will say, my experience of watching the 3D Star Wars movie in the regular movie rectangle that's floating in a fixed space...
Marco:
optically speaking, that was way better for me than the fully immersive 180 degree video views.
Marco:
I didn't have the sharpness problems that I have with the 180 degree videos.
Marco:
I didn't have as much weird issues with me focusing on things that were actually soft in the video.
Marco:
I didn't have any of those issues when I was watching 3D Star Wars.
Marco:
I think, for me personally, this is a much more compelling device for movies, for regular movies or 3D regular movies, rather than
Marco:
the filmed immersive video but that being said what i like better than both of those is the rendered environments that you can sit in you know and have your podcast playing in or what or you know put in your notes document or whatever i love those environments and i really hope apple continues to add more of those on a regular basis i would i would absolutely love more of those same when i came out of that store i said national geographic should be selling packs of these for 25 they will make a bazillion dollars like just the environments like you
John:
Because this is a consumable... You're wondering what the beer drinking app is for the Vision Pro?
John:
It's this.
John:
Those environments, and again, if you're thinking like, what is it?
John:
It's just like you're looking at a big picture of mountains around you.
John:
No, that is not what it's like.
John:
I cannot tell you how much that is not what it's like.
John:
If they sold packs of those, I would be throwing $5 to $1, $10 to $1.
John:
and what is the cost of this some fancy camera equipment or 3d you know thing like like there there is you know making one of these good is probably costly but a good 3d artist can probably do it and oh boy i i would spend so much money on those because they are so compelling to just sit there you're like so what do you do like you just turn it on and then you're there like yeah that's it that's literally it
Marco:
That can be it.
Marco:
You can just sit there or you can open up windows and work there.
Marco:
And then it's like you're working on a mountain or whatever.
Marco:
And yeah, I am with you.
Marco:
That is possibly my favorite thing to do on Vision Pro is just go to those environments and just hang out or do something simple.
Marco:
Like that...
Marco:
That, I think, is a huge market for Vision Pro is kind of just transport me to a nice place and make it seem as realistic as possible.
Marco:
I don't need there to be a story happening around me.
Marco:
Just bring me somewhere nice, kind of like a virtual vacation or virtual tourism or even just, again, almost like a meditative space could also be useful here.
Marco:
There are so many great applications of that, and that is extremely compelling when you're in the Vision Pro.
Marco:
That is by far my favorite immersive type of experience.
John:
And the little dial that fades it in, they do that in a smart way.
John:
So there's kind of like a semicircular cutout in front of you.
John:
So I've seen a lot of people online who are basically like, oh, so I pick my favorite immersive environment, right?
John:
And I dial the little dial so that I can still see everything on the desk in front of me.
John:
So like there's a little semicircle in front of them where their desk is visible and pass through where they see whatever it is they have in front of them.
John:
And then the immersive environment appears and they basically dial it in so they can interact with the stuff that they need to interact with.
John:
But everything else is, you know...
John:
the moon or like uh you know whatever that lake is at the side of the mountains i even saw some person who was using it on a rowing machine and they wanted to be able to see like the i don't know some stats or screen that's on their fancy rowing machine but also feel like they're on like a mountain lake type thing or whatever again i wouldn't recommend wearing this for exercise that was the point of this video was like can you use it for exercise but the way they've implemented immersive environments and the way they allow you to dial it in is not just like how much do you want
John:
It is literally dial it so that you can do all the things in the real world with your real hands on your real physical surfaces that are in front of you while also getting to experience the immersive environment.
John:
And then, by the way, when you dial it all the way to like 100%, you have arms and you have hands, but you do not have a body or feet or legs.
John:
So just be prepared for that.
John:
When you look straight down, you will see the dirt below you.
John:
You will not see anything, but you will see your flickery, poorly masked arms and hands.
John:
It's kind of fun.
Marco:
Another very useful benefit of that kind of partial environment view, as you were saying, like the oval in front of you is environment.
Marco:
That's very useful if, for instance, you're in a place physically where whatever is immediately in front of you might be distracting or prevent windows from showing up correctly.
Marco:
So if you're trying to get work done with some windows in the space and there's, say, an airline seat directly in front of your face or maybe a very distracting or busy background –
Marco:
You will often want to dial that in partially just to have something that you can like a solid or solid ish background that you can you can do work against.
Marco:
So that's it's also very useful for that.
Marco:
So anyway, love the environments.
Marco:
Please expand the environments.
John:
Speaking of airline seat.
John:
Remember our question from back then is like, well, what are you going to do with an airline seat when the airline seat is two inches from your nose?
John:
But you want the movie screen to be 10 feet away from you.
John:
The answer in Vision Pro is they just draw 10 feet away from you.
John:
And you would think that the the sort of disconnect of like, but that's impossible or whatever.
John:
Uh, it does look weird sometimes, but usually because they dim the background so much and because the vision pro content is so much more compelling and HDR, like I did it with the, with the semicircular thing.
John:
The semicircular thing was three feet past the Apple person who was sitting next to me, but it was drawing over them.
John:
right it's like it's like a z uh a z index problem like in a video game and it's like well wait a second if it's five feet past them how can it be drawing in front of them and the answer is your your brain just eventually accepts it because you look at the shiny bright pixels right if you look at the edge it doesn't make any sense but so you know the answer to like if you're watching a movie on a seat back in front of you and the screen's going to be two seats up it's just going to draw over the seats
Marco:
And it will look like you're looking through the seats and they're not even there.
Marco:
And here's your window.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And if you look at the edge, it'll be like, this doesn't make any sense.
John:
How is it cut off or whatever?
John:
But like, because, you know, it's all fake and it's a screen, it mostly works.
John:
I don't know what else they could do.
John:
I didn't know what they were going to do.
John:
I didn't know if they were going to try to like forbid it or try to whatever.
John:
And the answer is they just draw over it like and it mostly works out.
Marco:
So let's talk productivity.
Marco:
This is not going to be a productivity device for most people.
Marco:
Text input is terrible, and it will probably always be terrible.
Casey:
I don't know if I agree about the productivity in a broad sense, but yes, could not agree more.
Casey:
It is infuriating how bad text entry is.
John:
You're talking about without a physical keyboard, obviously.
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
And I think that is fair because many times... I mean, look, I have a physical keyboard.
Marco:
I have a Bluetooth keyboard I bought just for this.
Marco:
I don't always have it with me.
Marco:
And there's lots of times when you will need to enter text on the Vision Pro directly for some reason, whether you don't have the keyboard or it's not right there or it's not working or whatever.
Marco:
Text input is very bad.
Marco:
Now, some of this can be tweaked a little bit here and there, but I think a lot of it is just inherent to the physical realities of what you're doing.
Marco:
So this is never going to be, I think, as good of a text input platform as, say, a Mac.
Marco:
or even an iPad with a keyboard.
Marco:
Because what you don't realize with text input, text input is not just typing.
Marco:
It's also things like moving the cursor, selecting things, moving text, cut, copy, paste, all the different stuff that you do with the text as you're working with it.
Marco:
So a combination of typing and all of that other stuff.
Marco:
And in the vision environment, it is rough.
Marco:
Even with a keyboard, a keyboard makes it a lot better, but it still doesn't make it good because still all of that manipulation stuff is still all pretty rough.
John:
This is going to be a problem for a lot of people.
John:
And by the way, I mentioned that you have arms and you have hands.
John:
one thing you don't have is a keyboard because it does not even attempt to mask it out.
John:
So if you dial that environment in so it's taking up where your keyboard would be, you'll see your hands.
John:
You won't see your keyboard.
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
One other kind of inherent problem that I've had so far, and I think some of this will get better over time and some of it won't, is that the eye tracking and gesture-based system
Marco:
In my experience, and a number of viewers have mentioned this, it is not super reliable.
Marco:
It works well enough in the sense that most of the taps that you do and most of the places you look with your eyes will be correct.
Marco:
But there's a very huge difference between most and all.
Marco:
When you are operating precise PC and Mac input devices, keyboards, mice, trackpads, they're all pretty precise and they're all extremely reliable.
Marco:
Butterfly keyboard accepted.
Marco:
But, you know, we're past that error now.
Marco:
Thank God.
Marco:
So part of the reason why the butterfly keyboard was so infuriating was that even if it would make an error like, you know, 0.1% of the time, it turns out you type keys a lot.
Marco:
And so that would add up and it would actually be very annoying or very destructive to your workflow if you had even even that tiny of an error rate.
Marco:
The Vision Pro is trying to read all these kind of real-world squishy analog inputs that you're doing with your hands and where you're looking with your eyes and trying to create a very reliable input method from that.
Marco:
And they've done a really good job with what they can do, but the...
Marco:
the physical reality of that is that that's never going to be as precise and as reliable as the other input devices that we're accustomed to in the pc world so i have found personally some of this i think is is habits that i can improve as i learn to use the device better for instance john you mentioned this earlier that like like when i look at an eye target in vision os i will look at it
Marco:
And I will begin to do the tap gesture with my fingers.
Marco:
And as I'm doing that, I am moving my eyes to the next thing.
Marco:
And then I click the wrong thing.
Marco:
Because by the time my fingers actually reach each other, my eyes have actually moved slightly over on the way to the next thing I'm doing.
Marco:
I haven't realized it because it's just subconscious.
Marco:
I think, look, click, move.
Marco:
And
Marco:
It takes a while, and everyone's reporting this.
Marco:
It takes a while for you to realize as a user, like, wait, no, my eyes are the pointer, and therefore I have to keep looking at this thing until the tap is registered.
Marco:
Then I can move my eyes.
Marco:
And that is very different from any other computing device we've ever used.
Marco:
So that both slows me down, and combined with the squishy analog factors, it increases my error rate.
Marco:
So I'm frequently clicking the wrong thing.
John:
And it's not just the fact that you have to keep looking at it.
John:
Like remember those heat map things where they're like, let's see where people are looking on this web page so we can optimize it or whatever.
John:
One thing is that you'll realize that I realized when I was doing like menu selections.
John:
It's not just that I have to remember to keep looking at the thing.
John:
One thing that apparently I do and I imagine other people do is, hey, when a menu pops up with a bunch of different choices.
John:
uh even though i know the one i want is whatever i scan them all and even when i'm about to select the one like i would see my selection going up down up down up and it's because i'm realized i'm looking at what all the choices are as what if i was doing this on the mac the menu would come up and what would happen is my cursor would make a beeline for the one that i want to click while my eyes scanned all the other options especially if it's an app that i've never used right and envision pro that is not
John:
helpful because your selection in the menu of seven items is going top bottom top bottom top bottom and you're like but no i just and it's like you don't realize that your eyes essentially scan things to like you know let me especially again using an app for the first time what are all the options while i'm going because i said now go into that menu and select the whatever and i'm going and i'm selecting but i'm also scanning them all and it's like conflict because you don't you don't your eyes are for scanning but now your eyes are also for are also the pointer and they can't be both at once
Marco:
along with a few other physical and design considerations, that I think is the biggest hindrance to me so far whenever I've tried to do productivity work with this, whether it's just basic email or notes or even Safari, YouTube, all this other stuff.
Marco:
There's so much stuff where...
Marco:
i i'm kind of trying to bounce between different windows or or do something in an app and that eye tracking uh mechanic gets in my way and creates a lot of a lot of error so first of all i can i can strongly encourage developers out there as you design for vision os undo please support undo it is very important because i think this is especially as people are new to it i think it's a it's a it's gonna have pretty high error rates of input um but
Marco:
more generally with productivity tasks too, so you have pretty rough text input, you have kind of coarse-grained and kind of not great reliability on pointer input.
Marco:
That hurts it in some areas.
Marco:
What I think also hurts it is kind of accounting for that and accounting for the space you're in.
Marco:
The controls and the layouts in Vision OS for productivity apps, everything has to be very chunky and fairly low information density.
Marco:
It feels a lot like I'm using apps on my Apple TV, but with more advanced input and larger screen space.
Marco:
I wouldn't want to do certain kinds of work this way.
Marco:
What we're accustomed to in the PC and Mac world is high resolution, highly precise, highly reliable inputs and outputs.
Marco:
And that's not what we have here.
Marco:
We have a lot of other advantages here, but those aren't among them.
Marco:
And so the design of the apps that we use has to be totally different on Vision OS.
Marco:
And there's different designs that feel and work better or worse than others.
Marco:
And what we are accustomed to with most productivity apps in the PC platforms is, again, very dense things made for very precise mouse pointers and stuff.
Marco:
And that just doesn't work in Vision OS.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
everything in vision os has to be very similar to like a very blown up ipad design for instance one of the one of the questions i had early on with um with like all of our friends who got press time was i asked them all in june like hey how is scrolling especially vertical scrolling because so much of app design in the modern world based on phones is based on lots of vertical scrolling i i had suspected that it might be clumsy on vision pro and now that i've been using vision pro i can tell you for sure
Marco:
It works, but yeah, it is clumsy.
Marco:
You're not going to want to be browsing a social feed by vertical scrolling constantly on a Vision Pro.
Marco:
It's tedious, and it's not nearly as nice or direct or reliable as doing it on a phone screen.
John:
Yeah, I mentioned that in my blog post, which I wrote the blog post, obviously, before I'd ever used Vision Pro and also before I'd read any reviews or seen any review videos and stuff.
John:
And so I intentionally...
John:
tempered what i said to not be too sensational or adamant but in my heart i knew everything that marco was saying i'm like this is totally how it's going to be but i'm like hey you haven't tried it don't don't come out and say it's definitely going to be this way you don't know so if you look at what i wrote like in the last few paragraphs and the things that i say i say them in a nice way but what i'm trying to say is like
John:
This is not going to be like flick.
John:
I think it did.
John:
They make the comparison flicking your thumb on your phone to scroll.
John:
And I and I also gave myself a hedge.
John:
But I said, this is also not going to be like 1984.
John:
And I grab my mouse and I grab a menu.
John:
Right.
John:
Because the directness of that connection, even though it's not direct, you're on a mouse, the mouse is on a mouse pad and the cursor is on your screen.
John:
It's sort of mechanically close enough that within five minutes, my eight-year-old mind, I was grabbing the file menu with my hand, right?
John:
And as I try to explain without going on too much in my old man mode, grabbing things with your hand is something we learn to do from birth because it's important to live our lives and feed ourselves and navigate the world.
John:
Seeing something and grabbing it with your hand –
John:
we're all really good at that because we have to be because we have bodies and we live in a world and to the extent a computer interface can take advantage of that it's awesome and it feels efficient the phone even better we literally we see the thing we want we touch it with our stupid meat fingers flick scrolling with your thumb on the phone
John:
just such a beautiful combination of like of real spatial computing we already know how to do all that stuff with our hands they make the images on the screen pretend like they have inertia and it makes sense to our little monkey brains right and and it is just so satisfying and
John:
pinch scrolling in vision os is not that and same thing with the resizing that you have to look like that you can't just grab the window we're real good at reaching out and grabbing the corner of the window and yanking it but that's not how vision os works it might someday but today it does not and so it it kind of reminds me of like
John:
very often when I use my phone or my iPad, if I have to do something complicated with my computer, I feel like I'm using my computer with mittens.
John:
Like, I just need to get to my Mac.
John:
Even if it's just like to get arrow keys and to be able to, you know, just text manipulation and I got to have three browser windows and I got to, I have a file that I want to save this and I want to convert it to this and I want to put it into this document and I want to put it in this folder on my website.
John:
And then like, it's just so much easier to do it on the Mac because I feel like my hands are in there, in the Mac with like these high fidelity interfaces of the keyboard and the mouse.
John:
And you'd be like,
John:
That's not direct manipulation.
John:
You're using a thing down there and your screen's up there.
John:
It is so much more direct than the quote unquote spatial computing of the Vision Pro because the Vision Pro does not ask us to manipulate things with our hands the way we manipulate a keyboard and a mouse.
John:
Now, yeah, you can use a keyboard and a mouse.
John:
with the vision pro and as i said in my article it could be that the full solution is really hey this screen tech combined with plain old boring a keyboard and mouse but trying to use the vision pro without a keyboard without a mouse without a pointer just using your fingers gesturing in space where they where they never ask you to grab anything and by the way if you were to grab it it wouldn't be there because it's not real unlike the mouse and keyboard which you can feel it is so much less efficient less direct and less quote-unquote spatial than
John:
moving a windows moving windows around on your mac with a trackpad or mouse it doesn't mean that it's bad and the screen obviously as i said in in the post vision pro can do things that the mac absolutely cannot but being really efficient for doing like text editing or moving files around or even just resizing and moving windows which you know i love to do the vision pro has a long way to go there
John:
It doesn't mean that it's bad or doomed or whatever, but I do kind of feel like your impression, Marco, obviously you use it way longer than I have, and I'm glad to hear.
John:
That's what I imagined it would be like if I had one of these in my house and had to use it for an hour.
John:
I felt like I would feel like what you just described.
John:
I use it for 30 minutes.
John:
Again, I don't want to come down too strongly on it.
John:
I was mostly wowed by the visuals, but like...
John:
like if if trying to trying to do stuff on my phone or my ipad it's like wearing mittens trying to do stuff in vision pro is kind of like wearing a straight jacket or with one arm tied behind your back or maybe sending messages to someone and asking them to do it wow like it's amazing that it works at all but i cannot imagine trying to do any of my computer stuff in that environment i
John:
that's before even getting the stuff that you were talking about with with information density because again i didn't have enough experience to know if that's like just apple's apps or if it's you know like it's whatever but like even setting that aside just i don't feel like my hands are in there doing stuff in the same way that i do on the and even on like the ipad and the phone like that's as direct as you can get i see stuff i push my finger on it i move my finger like that becomes so second nature and feel so efficient right up until we have to do anything involving text editing
John:
which again is a separate issue but like the way you mentioned text setting i feel like that on the software keyboards on the phone and the ipad and i can actually touch those unlike the one in vision os which you can't actually touch because it's not there and and on the you know on the the spatial design front too you know
Marco:
Everything optically, as we've discussed both earlier this episode and also in previous episodes, it's all kind of optimized for that like 1.3 meters away from you focal distance.
Marco:
And the whole system is designed around that, of course, because if you have a lot of stuff that's much closer than that, you do risk getting eye strain from VAC.
Marco:
Again, as we've discussed.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
If you think about it, you're using all of these apps at greater than arm's distance away.
Marco:
And so the design of them is very big and chunky also.
Marco:
And you are limited... When you're having things be that far away naturally, and...
Marco:
Again, if you put everything closer to you, you're also not only risking eye strain, but the displays aren't actually high resolution enough to make that look very good a lot of times.
Marco:
Anyway, so you're going to be operating mostly at that distance.
Marco:
Things are going to be placed at that radius around you by default, and you're going to be operating mostly that distance.
Marco:
Well, with the information density of the apps, even if you set them to their smallest setting, it's kind of like a display size setting for how big content should be.
Marco:
Even at the smallest setting...
Marco:
apps and windows are huge so while you have the whole room around you and the whole space in front of you and everything to place them you can't actually fit that much on screen or rather in your viewport you can't actually fit that much without having to like turn your whole body around different parts of the room but like if you're just going to face generally forward and try to fill you know whatever like 90 ish degrees that are ideal for you to be looking at
Marco:
you're not going to be able to fit that much on screen.
Marco:
And if you make things smaller, the distance that they are placed away from you, it will start to look too small, and you'll start to have to squint to see things.
Marco:
So this is an environment that is not made for a lot of information-dense and control-dense apps.
Marco:
That's what productivity typically requires.
Marco:
So I'm not saying that...
Marco:
Nobody will be able to get their work done on this.
Marco:
That's not true.
Marco:
But I think as a general purpose work device, this is not what most people are going to want.
Marco:
There's going to be certain fields, certain types of productivity where it's going to be amazing.
Marco:
But it's not going to be what most people consider productivity work on computers.
Marco:
That's not great on this.
Marco:
Again, and this is not to say that there's no use for this.
Marco:
There's tons of great uses as we've gone over.
Marco:
But I think Apple having focused on entertainment for this first generation of this product is very wise because on the entertainment front, it's excellent.
Marco:
And on the productivity front, it's really not.
John:
If you want a distraction free writing environment where you just have one text editing window in front of you, like there's all those apps that did that on the Mac, like, oh, we'll we'll fade out all your other windows or we'll hide them all or whatever like this.
John:
It's perfect because what you can have is one pretty big window directly in front of you.
John:
And if you're just writing text and you want that distraction of your environment and you want to be on the moon and you just have your text editing window and you have a physical keyboard, you're off to the races.
John:
That is your productivity environment.
John:
But when Marcus's productivity, he's like, what if you're like doing something on the ATP CMS and you're editing HTML and BBEdit and you've got a web browser window open to preview and you're making images in Photoshop and then you're saving them and then you're putting them in the folder and then copying them into the Git directory and making directories for the file and then you're going back and reloading and then you've got Docker running, right?
John:
Like that's too much.
Marco:
not even it doesn't even have to be that complicated even just like if you're gonna have like four apps open where you're like moving data between them like even if it's just as simple as like you know notes email photos and a web browser like that this is you know it doesn't have to be like a nerdy developer workflow to run into problems here even regular like office work and email and stuff like that you will you will hit these these issues and it's again it's not that you can't do it you'll feel less efficient
John:
yeah and i think you will very quickly go back to doing it on a pc or even an ipad like i think you'll find that a lot better you'll feel less efficient you'll be turning your head and or rotating your seat much more than you thought you might uh and it will like it's it's again it's why i'll do a certain amount of things on my ipad and my phone but at a certain point i get frustrated and i just get up and leave the room get off my butt leave the room and walk to my mac and then it's like it just it's like ah
John:
It's like flying.
John:
And you might be saying, oh, it's because you're old and you're used to the computer or whatever.
John:
That's not it.
John:
That's what I try to get in the spatial computing post.
John:
The efficiency of humans doing things increases to the degree that we can leverage abilities that we have essentially innately, like the ability to find things with their hands and feel them and move them around.
John:
And the farther we get from that, the more remote we are from that, the more we feel like we're steering a thing that's steering a thing that's moving a thing.
John:
uh the less efficient it feels because then some part of our brain is is being is working on that part of it whereas when you know when you're using your phone which is the newer device to you know to so that it's not just because i'm old and used to max the phone is the newer device and yet flick scrolling how many people have you had to teach to flick scroll people pick that up faster than they pick up like breastfeeding like it's just like it's just
John:
It's, you know, that was referencing a thing of, like, intuitive interfaces from, like, Tognazini interfaces or whatever.
John:
Like, Tognazini, I always get his name wrong.
John:
The interface had to be intuitive.
John:
And the idea is, like, they don't have to be taught.
John:
You just innately know how to do them.
John:
And the counter saying to that back in the 80s was the only thing that's intuitive is the nipple.
John:
Like, what thing do you not need to be taught?
John:
You don't need to teach a baby to breastfeed, which is not really true if you've ever had a baby.
John:
But anyway, that was the idea.
John:
Nothing can ever be intuitive as in you're already born knowing it.
John:
But our genes are nicely designed to let us learn to manipulate the world around us with our hands eventually when we stop being useless little babies.
John:
And that's because the ones that did that less well didn't pass on their genes, right?
John:
So we're all here in the 3D world with our meat bodies.
John:
And...
John:
Seeing things with their hands and grabbing them and manipulating them is something that we do not need to spend much mental energy on once we reach a certain age.
John:
And almost everything in Vision Pro is not like that.
John:
One thing that is like that is looking around in wonder at the amazing things we're seeing.
John:
We're great at that.
John:
But doing the gesture to scroll with the little pinchy thing...
Marco:
so far from flick scrolling through twitter with your thumb so far from that yeah um so you know kind of building off the productivity um limitations and trade-offs here with you know you know sizing and density and everything it leads me into max screen sharing this is the feature where you can project a max screen into vision pro give it a large screen make it you know 10 feet wide or whatever well you know whatever you want to do with it um
Marco:
this is i know this is an area that a lot of people thought and hoped that that would revolutionize their life and i think it's kind of getting mixed reviews and i think there's good reason for that um in my experience i i did this for a few hours the other day trying to just get get some work done on my mac uh in this mode where i'm in the vision pro looking at a large screen that is that is being projected from my laptop because i was some i was away from my main office so like this is perfect and
Marco:
I can like I'm staying at this house for a little while.
Marco:
I'm like, this is great.
Marco:
I can just have my laptop and not bring my XDR because it would be, you know, large and cumbersome to do that.
Marco:
And I can just have my laptop and I'll use a screen division pro.
Marco:
Perfect.
Marco:
I'm not going to be doing this very frequently.
Marco:
It's just too blurry.
Marco:
Everything is blurry.
Marco:
Everything.
Marco:
And part of this, I think a big part of this is, as we were saying last episode, that they're rendering the Mac screen down to a lower resolution to send it over the wire, or over the wireless screen.
Marco:
to be displayed so you have some loss right there where you know whatever the high res Mac screen that I have on my MacBook Pro that's being sent at it's being rendered at a higher resolution virtually then shrunk down to the 4K display stream to be sent to be displayed inside a virtual window
Marco:
On a device that is simulating this window being shown, but showing it to your eyeballs with around 4K of pixels each.
Marco:
So there's a lot of scaling and reduction of detail going on in this process, in this pipeline.
Marco:
And I have found that at the default setting of basically the simulated 5K amount of space, it's really pretty bad.
Marco:
If you push it one resolution step down, which gives you basically 1080p at 2x, that is better.
Marco:
It just makes everything larger.
Marco:
And that fixes one big problem in the sense that you can then push it further from you virtually.
Marco:
You can push it back to the ideal distance of 1.3 meters.
Marco:
Because...
Marco:
When I did it for a couple hours the other day, I had the regular default 5K resolution and I positioned it closer to me the way I would position a screen that size.
Marco:
And I got massive eye strain from doing that for a couple hours.
Marco:
I felt awful.
Marco:
My eyes were exhausted.
Marco:
I think this was me experiencing VAC.
Marco:
I put it too close for the focal distance thing.
Marco:
This is VAC.
Marco:
Now I get it.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
So what I have found is that if I'm going to do the Mac monitor, the right way to do it is to leave it at that 1.3 meter default distance.
Marco:
and to have it be larger in the Vision Pro, like scale the window up so it's large so that the detail works at that distance, and also have it set at the simulated 1920 resolution, which is the one step down from default.
Marco:
And what this results in is a still kind of blurry, fine-performing window that is not that much higher resolution than the screen in my 16-inch MacBook Pro.
Marco:
It's only like a couple hundred pixels more.
Marco:
What I ended up creating was a very complicated...
Marco:
limited, still blurry setup that is only marginally better than my laptop's built-in display in screen space.
Marco:
And so to me, that is just not worth it.
Marco:
There's too many downsides.
Marco:
There's too many gotchas.
Marco:
There's too many what-ifs.
Marco:
And also the reality is having carried both the Vision Pro and my 16-inch laptop in the same backpack, it's heavy.
Marco:
It would have to be...
Marco:
really great to have that be worth it and for me this is just it's just not worth it i hope in the future if the vision pro gets much higher resolution screens down the road which i assume it will eventually i mean it might be a while but if the vision pro can like you know get you know the the 2x version of what it has now you know basically 8k screens in each eye or whatever whatever that would be
Marco:
I think there might be enough resolution at that point to make the Mac pass through like really good for my standards.
Marco:
But the way it is now, it is just a very, very cumbersome way to get a very blurry screen of your MacBook Pro.
Marco:
And it's just not worth it to me.
John:
and it's not just the fact that it might be blurry it's like the the dream of having a big monitor whether in real life or a virtual one is that you can see more stuff like that it is higher resolution like the xdr isn't just the same resolution as a studio display but bigger it has more pixels and that means we can see more stuff right and in the mac retina world there's whatever the standard ppi is 200 and change or whatever uh adding more stuff it adds more information but what you're forced to do is take this virtual 4k window and make it
John:
no more information dense possibly less information dense than your actual laptop screen and at that point the size of the window no longer really matters except for ergonomics and maybe not having your head looking down at a laptop having a look across you're not getting the benefit that we want of like i can have a really big screen because when we say that with a mac like i have a really big screen it's like now i can have more windows and you say that because you got more pixels but you're not getting more pixels no matter how big you make that window it's
John:
2x a 1080 screen and you're not you're not getting any more information so the dream of having a big monitor is not being realized and at that point like you said you could just look at your laptop screen which is going to be sharper it's maybe again maybe ergonomically less good because you know sort of looking down at your laptop that's attached to the keyboard is a one of the many reasons the laptops are bad uh but and envision pro like
John:
you know you separate that the keyboard is down here by your hands and the laptop is ergonomically directly in front of you and that may be better but it's not like what people want out of the experience is like i can't have a big mac monitor with me all the time but i can have this and this is a big mac monitor and no it's not a big mac monitor it's a mac monitor it's not that big and you know currently
John:
uh those of us outside apple can only have one of them supposedly internally they have a thing that can show two mac screens which would i think help a little bit because then having two 1080 screens that's definitely something you don't have with a laptop i can't remember with you but honestly i don't know how much that would help in my because like to avoid the my what i think is my vac problem
Marco:
I have to make the screen so big because it's simulated further away.
Marco:
It's far away.
Marco:
I don't even know if I would necessarily have a lot of comfortable room to have two of them in my field of view at once.
Marco:
The way it feels comfortable to avoid VAC, it almost feels like you are using your computer on a large TV.
Marco:
If you ever wired it with HDMI to a big TV, it feels a lot like that.
John:
uh and so i i don't i don't know that would solve my problem i mean i mean i i don't know how people use dual monitors all the time anyways i don't like the head turning which is why i like the one big monitor but yeah i would imagine you have to turn your head and at least because again that is another advantage that the vision pro has that a laptop doesn't or is that you don't have to take up physical space with it so if you do have
John:
two monitors you can have one over there and one over here and you just turn or swivel your seat and now you've got double the information both equally dense which is better than just one again you can't even do that now although like the rumor is inside apple you can do it but someday we might be able to but yeah i think the solution to this is probably eventually going to be resolution i suppose so but we're not quite there yet
Casey:
All right, so that's actually a really good time for me to jump in because I have thoughts about Mac virtual display and just generally thoughts about the device.
Casey:
I am not going to say that anything you've said is wrong or incorrect, particularly for you and the way your eyes work and so on and so forth.
Casey:
Comma.
Casey:
Comma.
Casey:
I love Mac virtual display.
Casey:
I have admittedly used it very briefly.
Casey:
I have not had a two hour session with it.
Casey:
So consider your source here.
Casey:
It has been very brief sessions here and there, but it has been incredible.
Casey:
I think some of the difference and some of the reason I'm so excited about this is because I willingly chose a 14 inch laptop.
Casey:
I don't have a 16 inch laptop.
Casey:
So I have considerably, I think it's considerably less screen real estate than you do.
Casey:
Additionally, I just happened to be traveling, which is not too dissimilar from what you're working with, with your, you know, temporary housing and all that.
Casey:
But I was in a hotel room.
Casey:
You know how often it is I have a nice 4K display in a hotel room?
Casey:
Friggin' never.
Casey:
Literally never.
Casey:
So I thought it was tremendous.
Casey:
I loved that I could make the screen hilariously large.
Casey:
Yes, that does mean I need to move my neck and twist my head and move my head around in order to see everything.
Casey:
Don't care.
Casey:
it was all gigantic.
Casey:
So no matter how bad my eyes are, and that's not a, I really don't think that I had problem with crispness in terms of the device.
Casey:
I think it's just because I need things to be a little bit bigger because I'm old and because I have terrible eyes.
Casey:
Um,
Casey:
And so anyways, I could have a physically gigantic 4K resolution screen right in front of me.
Casey:
And then I can put the Vision OS Slack on one side of it.
Casey:
This is what my blog post was about, you know, right before it came out.
Casey:
I can put messages on the other side.
Casey:
I can put Safari above or, you know, further to the side.
Casey:
I can put a freaking video.
Casey:
I can watch Wakanda forever.
Casey:
I keep picking on that because that's when I watch it.
Casey:
I can watch Wakanda forever off in the corner.
Casey:
Whatever, man.
Casey:
I've got infinite canvas, baby.
Casey:
I can put whatever wherever.
Casey:
And it is great.
Casey:
The other thing is, holy flipping crap.
Casey:
How does universal control work as well as it does?
Casey:
It is not perfect, but it is astonishing how good a job it does.
Casey:
Because what you're doing, universal control, means you can use your Mac's keyboard and your Mac's mouse to control things even within Vision OS, just like you can with an iPad, right?
Yeah.
Casey:
Doing that with the keyboard is not that remarkable.
Casey:
Whatever.
Casey:
That stands to reason.
Casey:
If you're looking at a text field and you start typing, okay, put the letters in there.
Casey:
Fine.
Casey:
However, the pointer is so good.
Casey:
And the thing that's good about it, of course, it's just a mouse pointer.
Casey:
It looks like an iPad pointer within one window.
Casey:
You look at another window, there's the pointer.
Casey:
Sometimes, usually, you can go between windows.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
It's in 3D space.
Casey:
I don't know how.
Casey:
I guess I am looking, I guess, and maybe that's what it's doing, and I'm attributing to magic what's really just my own gaze, but it feels like freaking magic.
Casey:
It is so good, and that's extremely important because what you were saying a little while ago about needing considerably less information density is
Casey:
I think in terms of visual, not acuity, but in order to see things, for me, I don't think I necessarily need less information density in order to see and read and whatnot.
Casey:
Where the information density becomes a problem is when you have a lot of controls that are not spaced out very well.
Casey:
The perfect example of this for me is basically any iPad app that's running on Vision OS is
Casey:
In particular, things like Slack.
Casey:
So if you think of Slack, and I don't, as much as I love to slag on Slack, I don't think this is really a Slack being garbage issue.
Casey:
I think it's just that it's a hard problem and Slack has not been designed specifically for Vision OS.
Casey:
But if you're trying to choose between like the icon of the Slack you're on all the way in the upper left or the home DMs activity, I'm looking at the Mac version, but I think it's the same on iOS or Vision OS.
Casey:
in order to get my eyes to correctly focus the one i want it's like john was saying way earlier i need to like look harder or look past where i think i need to look and i think it's because all of these different buttons are just too close together there's just not enough space between them and even though the eye tracking is astonishingly good at least i mean i have nothing compared to you but it is astonishingly good but still i think there needs to be more or less density more space between these different controls the
Casey:
But if you have a mouse, you can mash that bad boy right on the icon you want because it's a little blob hovering right over the icon you care about.
Casey:
And so I freaking love it.
Casey:
I was on the train coming back from New York, and I had Wakanda Forever over to the side.
Casey:
I had my Mac screen in front of me.
Casey:
I was balancing our checkbook because it just so happened that our statement came in.
Casey:
Well, first of all, I'm doing that in complete and utter privacy because my Mac screen is black.
Casey:
Second of all, I now have considerably more real estate, so I can put my little – it's not Quicken.
Casey:
What is it called?
Casey:
Banktivity, who I think sponsored way back when, but I'd been using the app before that.
Casey:
I have Banktivity on one side of my screen.
Casey:
I have the PDF of our statement on the other side of the screen, and I don't need to be showing anyone how rich or poor we are.
Casey:
Nobody's looking over my shoulder at my credit card statement or checking statement or whatever.
Casey:
I can do all this in a big, huge window –
Casey:
that's kind of in the seat back in front of me, which is a little weird.
Casey:
Um, I could do that all right there.
Casey:
I have, I have a 4k, an LG ultra fine 4k on the train.
Casey:
That is amazing.
Casey:
I cannot wait to be that frigging loser.
Casey:
That's using this at the library or Wegmans or whatever.
Casey:
I don't know if I have the gumption to do it yet.
Casey:
I was thinking maybe I would like rent a little meeting room and I would be the only, or, uh, you know,
Casey:
reserve a little meeting room at the library and I will be the only one in there and maybe I'll face the wall.
Casey:
So it's not too obvious, but it would be so amazing to have this at the library.
Casey:
I'm so excited for it.
Casey:
I am so pleased with how Mac virtual display and universal control work together.
Casey:
It is amazing.
Casey:
And it blows my mind.
Casey:
Again, my eyes are different.
Casey:
I haven't used it for two plus hours straight.
Casey:
Maybe if I did, I would change my tune.
Casey:
But from what I know today, it's amazing, and I love it.
John:
One thing to note about you saying how you set up, like, oh, here's my Mac screen in front of me, and then here's the Vision OS version of Slack to my left, and here's the Wakanda Forever movie over here.
John:
This is one area where we'll definitely benefit from advancements here.
John:
The field of view, like I said before when I was talking about the specs, is only 100 degrees.
John:
And so when you were saying, oh, look, I can have all these things, you have this here, this left or right or whatever, you have to end up turning your head to see those.
Casey:
Oh, yeah.
John:
On a big Mac monitor, those can all be in front of you.
John:
And why is that?
John:
Because our eyeballs have better than 100 degree field of view.
John:
That's fair.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Like there's lots of people on YouTube trying to show the reviews like, oh, it looks like you're looking through goggles.
John:
Like you don't notice it that much, but the field of view is limited, right?
John:
It's limited because the size of the screens, like they're not four by three ratio.
John:
If you see the screens when they're yanked out of it and they fix it, they're almost kind of square, right?
John:
They're not 16 by nine.
John:
They're not wider.
John:
You know, they're a little bit wider than they are at all.
John:
Right.
John:
And they they combine to give you a field of view that is narrower than you expect.
John:
So you will end up having to turn your head more.
John:
And it's in this case, assuming the information density is all right.
John:
It's not because like there's not enough like it's because your vision is narrowed.
John:
It's like, you know, if pretend there's nothing in the headset, you rip everything out of the headset, but you still put it on your head.
John:
It's not exactly like that, but it's pretty close.
John:
Like your field of view is narrowed and that makes you have to turn your head and that makes you have to use the ability to put things in space around you.
John:
That combined with the resolution things that Marco was complaining about mean that what you could get away with having all on one screen in front of you, even a 4K screen, all in one Mac 4K screen in just native vision OS apps, you might have to arrange arrayed out alongside you.
John:
and have to end up turning your head because of the field of view.
John:
Although that brings up one more point that I've already heard people complaining about.
John:
I haven't heard either one of you mentioned probably because you don't work like me, but you can layer windows in Vision OS.
John:
You can put one in front of another.
Marco:
Oh, you don't want to.
Marco:
You don't want to though.
John:
But you probably don't want to because as I noted, it does not feel like your hands are in there like they are on the Mac, or at least it feels like that for me.
John:
Like on the Mac, to bring a window to the front, there are caveats and asterisks on this, but you can click on places in the window and the window will come to the front.
John:
So Envision OS, as far as I know, I didn't get to test this.
John:
You can't just look at a part of the window and tap your fingers and it comes to the front.
John:
Is that right?
Marco:
I don't know if that's right, but I so I have ended up with layered windows here and there and it is cumbersome.
Marco:
at best.
Marco:
It is not something I recommend.
Marco:
Think of Vision OS as you're inside of a sphere and you can stick things on wherever you want along the sphere, but you don't want to ever have things overlap each other.
Marco:
It's terrible.
John:
It's kind of weird, though, because I wrote about this in my thing.
John:
There's a...
John:
uh the mac has overlapping windows right but and they have they have always since the beginning had some kind of like little drawn shadow to like make it look like one is in front of the other but if you were to like take the world of the mac and like rotate it sideways and look what i think the both the visual and mental model we all have is that those windows are pretty close together like the total depth of like having three windows is not one foot between each of the windows they're like they're within millimeters of each other they're stacked on top of each other but
John:
more like pieces of paper would be on a desk.
John:
Imagine that desktop metaphor, right?
John:
So yes, they're magic pieces of paper where if you tap one that's behind, suddenly that piece of paper jumps in front of the other one, but they could be literally touching despite the huge deep drop shadows that Mac OS draws in them, right?
John:
Where in Vision OS...
John:
you don't have to imagine it's literally a 3d space and you could probably take a ruler in the virtual world and measure the distance between them but it's so weird that like i mean some of us certainly me are comfortable having tons of overlapping essentially pieces of paper on our mac screens but when you have four of them and vision os and there one of them is in front of the other ones it's like oh
John:
Oh no, I can't figure out how to deal with it.
John:
And I think part of it is because you don't feel like you can reach in there and manipulate them.
John:
Like you could papers on desk and like we all do windows on a screen.
John:
But I think the other part is that just the window management controls are meant to keep you at a distance, right?
John:
You have to look, you have to activate them.
John:
That's the only way for the move things.
John:
There's no,
John:
real title bars to speak of, or like, you know, window control widgets are differently arranged.
John:
Like it's not, it's not set up to like the whole Mac, all of the Mac interface is like, look, the window Chrome, we've got window control widgets.
John:
We've got a title bar.
John:
We used to have scroll bars back in the day.
John:
That is the window frame.
John:
There used to be an actual literal window frame before they got rid of that in Mac OS 10.
John:
And then all your content is inside it.
John:
And those frames, we have ways to manipulate them.
John:
You can grab them.
John:
You can move them around.
John:
You can use utilities.
John:
And like vision OS is like,
John:
you're not going to be doing a lot of that.
John:
You can, you can grab the bar on the bottom and you can move them.
John:
You can grab the little thing in the corner and move them around, but it just seems like it's not, it's not made to make it really easy for you to shuffle those papers around.
Marco:
And I think also a huge limitation there is just the precision of the eye tracking.
Marco:
The design of the system apps is pretty good to kind of help conceal how coarse-grained I think it actually is.
Marco:
You don't have super fine pointer accuracy with the eye tracking.
Marco:
A lot of the mechanics of operating...
Marco:
overlapping and stacked windows requires you to like oh let me get this pointer between these two and get you know grab this edge of this one yeah just snag the corner of a window yeah and that's i think envision os things have to be larger and more you know more chunky than that and so that's one of the reasons that doesn't really work i think it's like the ios keyboard where it's it it's trying to like average like
John:
Well, where do we think?
John:
Like, I know where you did tap, right?
John:
But where do we think?
John:
And if it has to make that choice and you're trying to snag the corner of some window that's poking out from behind another one, the right bet is you were actually trying to look at the upper right corner of the front most window and not, oh, what he was actually trying to do was was snag that little piece of the window that's poking out.
John:
I snag pieces of windows that are poking out all the time.
John:
That's how I use my Mac all the time.
John:
But like that's if you were to guess like if you just had an average probability cloud based on where you're looking, which I imagine if there was like a debug mode, you could see like the actual like giant point cloud of where your eyeballs are racing all over the place.
John:
And it has to average them together and kind of guess like the iOS keyboard.
John:
Yeah.
John:
But what do they mean to look at?
John:
It's always going to guess the top right corner of the front most window.
John:
It is never going to guess the two pixels of the window that's behind it.
Casey:
No, the Mac virtual display stuff was great.
Casey:
I really, really like the idea of spatial computing.
Casey:
Maybe it's a gimmick and maybe I'll get over it quickly.
Casey:
But again, on the train and I think in the post show, we're going to briefly talk about my training experience because there's a couple of funny things that happened.
Casey:
But yeah.
Casey:
But on the train, at one point, I was watching the movie, and to my right-hand side, I put, you know, Apple Maps watching myself, you know, come down the East Coast so I could see where I was.
Casey:
Off to the left, I had messages just so I could see, you know, if anyone was trying to send me a text or whatever the case may be.
Casey:
And it was amazing.
Casey:
Yes, I do have to turn my head a bit.
Casey:
That doesn't seem to bother me as much as I guess it bothers you, John, but it was amazing.
Casey:
And I was doing this privately.
Casey:
I was doing this in a tube that was not in the air, but that was hurtling down the eastern seaboard at anywhere between 20 and 120 miles an hour.
Casey:
The technology is amazing, and I can't believe that I can do this.
Casey:
And broadly, I think...
Casey:
we've mostly covered all of the the kind of different aspects of the vision pro um the spatial videos are very cool i will be taking them more frequently i don't think it's going to be like john had said quite a bit earlier on i'm not going to do every video that way but having some moments like that are really cool i am a sucker for the panoramas i do not argue that they need a lot more fidelity but nevertheless i am a sucker for them i think they're really neat and
Casey:
Um, the 3d movies in the sense of like Disney plus 3d movies, I think I said earlier, you know, you get a 3d viewport.
Casey:
That's neat.
Casey:
I would probably choose a 3d movie for the vision pro if I had the choice, but if I didn't, you know, I'm not going to miss it.
Casey:
Um,
Casey:
I agree with what Marco was saying about the environments.
Casey:
They are extremely cool.
Casey:
I purposely didn't use them on the train because I wanted to see if people were staring at me, and we'll talk about whether or not they were later on.
Casey:
But I briefly turned it on toward the end of the journey when I knew I was about to take the whole Vision Pro off.
Casey:
And suddenly you are somewhere else.
Casey:
And it is truly incredible.
Casey:
And like John had said earlier, take all my money.
Casey:
National Geographic, Apple, I don't care who you are.
Casey:
Take all my money.
Casey:
Give me all the environments.
Casey:
Take all my money.
Casey:
Because I don't need to go on a great occasion if I can just go to Mount Hood or, you know, Shenandoah National Park or whatever the case may be.
Casey:
Take all my money, please and thank you.
Casey:
Well, not that you haven't already, but take more of all of my money.
Casey:
They're very good at things.
Casey:
Yeah, they're very efficient.
John:
They're basically consumable.
John:
Yeah.
John:
we would all pay five dollars for one of these even just like i don't even know if it's look cool five bucks take it like it's like paying five dollars to go to a place and you're like well what if you go there and it's boring it was only five dollars like it is that is a money-making machine if you can produce compelling ones of these and let alone when eventually someone makes a game of that fidelity that you're in in the headset that's more difficult because the beautiful thing about the environments is you're sitting still which is ideal and
John:
Once things start moving around and, you know, there's anyone who's played VR games knows the difficulty of the virtual world coming in conflict with your physical world and you walking into walls or hitting your coffee table and stuff like that.
John:
But sitting still in the middle of one of these places is like the platonic ideal of like, look, you're in the sweet spot.
John:
Sell me these things for five dollars.
John:
Make a million bucks.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
So all in all, I don't think it's for me to make a judgment statement about whether or not this thing was worth $3,500.
Casey:
Sitting here now, and ask me again in a month, and ask me again and again in a year, but sitting here now, is this a necessary purchase for me?
Casey:
Leaving aside that I feel like I needed one for this very moment of talking about it.
Casey:
Is it a necessary purchase?
Casey:
No.
Yeah.
Casey:
Do I really want to spend $35 plus $100 on it?
Casey:
No, not really.
Casey:
But it is so cool.
Casey:
And, you know, how lucky are we to be alive right now that this is what's being released?
Casey:
And yeah, everyone keeps saying, and I think half jokingly, half seriously, this is the worst that the Vision Pro will ever be.
Casey:
And that's true.
Casey:
But it is freaking cool.
Casey:
And it is...
Casey:
Freaking amazing.
Casey:
And I am so thankful and lucky that we get to experience this.
Casey:
Not, you know, we broadly, we, the three of us, I'm so thankful for it and so lucky that this is what's going on.
Casey:
And I don't think this is going to become the Accidental Vision Pro podcast, but we're probably going to have to season of it for the next few weeks because, oh my word, there's so much to say.
Casey:
There's so much to capture.
Casey:
There's so much to process.
Casey:
There's just so much here and I'm so excited.
Marco:
You put it very well because there's so much on this platform.
Marco:
We still haven't talked really that much about pretty large areas of it.
Marco:
I still haven't really tried any games.
Marco:
There's not that many to start with, but I still haven't tried any games.
Marco:
I still haven't watched an entire movie.
Marco:
I didn't talk too much about photo and video consumption and stuff like that.
Marco:
There's still so much to talk about here.
Marco:
Personas.
Marco:
Oh, gosh, you're right.
Marco:
That entire thing.
Marco:
We're going to be covering this over a few weeks.
Marco:
We're obviously running a little long tonight, but this is going to be a process that we cover over a few weeks, or probably months more likely.
Marco:
I don't want to have to end on a negative note because I said the productivity angle wasn't very good because whenever something new comes out, we try to wedge it into what we already know.
Marco:
I've ranted about this before, but I'm going to do it again because it's important.
Marco:
When the iPad came out, everyone said, we're going to stop buying computers.
Marco:
This will replace them.
Marco:
For some people, it might have.
Marco:
For most people, it didn't.
Marco:
And that's fine.
Marco:
Now we have another thing.
Marco:
When the watch came out, so many nerds were like, oh, my God, this phone I have right now might be the last phone I ever buy because I'm just going to do everything on my watch.
Marco:
And then it turned out, no, we all still have phones, but some of us also have watches.
Marco:
And that's what this is.
Marco:
When this was announced but not yet out, and we were all trying to make plans of how we're going to rationalize purchasing this device by saying, we're going to get all of our work done on this.
Marco:
We're never going to have to buy a big Mac again or whatever.
Marco:
I think that's wrong, but that doesn't mean it's a failure.
Marco:
It just means it's for other things mostly.
Marco:
There are some people who do all their work on iPads and don't buy laptops anymore.
Marco:
But most people who need laptop-style work still buy laptops to do it.
Marco:
There are people who are going to be able to do all their productivity work with the Vision Pro.
Marco:
But I think most people with productivity work are going to choose to do other things instead.
Marco:
But the Vision Pro can do a whole lot of stuff really, really well in different areas.
Marco:
That, I think, is extremely exciting.
Marco:
Again, even if I could just be transported to those environments and just sit for a few minutes, that's amazing.
John:
It's like the iPad.
John:
Like we were saying, the iPad has to be better at some things, and one of the things the iPad is better at, it's like, oh, sitting on your couch and casually scrolling the web.
John:
You could do that on the laptop, but the iPad does that job in a more pleasing way.
John:
The Vision Pro is exactly like that.
John:
A lot of things that you can do on a Vision Pro and on a Mac and on an iPad, some of those...
John:
the vision pro does them the best right and i would argue looking at 3d video clear winner like the other ones can't do it at all so thumbs up right and i had a tv that used to be able to do it and it sucked so right it's like you're there's a competition among all the devices in your life of like yeah i can do this here i can do this here or i can do this here but which one makes me want to do it on it and you know that you know the ipad is perfect a perfect example of like
John:
aren't you doing things that you could also do in your phone and that you could also do in your mac why are you choosing to do them in the ipad you're like well the ipad screen is bigger than my phone but it doesn't have a keyboard attached and i can sit on the couch to do it and it feels more comfortable and it's like all these nuanced reasons but that you find yourself like what do you choose to use your ipad for versus what you use your phone for versus what you use computer for people will naturally gravitate to wherever they are most comfortable doing that thing and
John:
That's just with a bunch of rectangles that are screens that are different sizes.
John:
They're not even that different from each other.
John:
This is so different that the things that it does well, and there are things that it does well, it basically has no competition.
John:
There is no other thing that you own, unless you own other VR headsets, that can do this stuff at all.
John:
So I feel like the place in the ecosystem for devices like this
John:
Like it's well carved out.
John:
The fact that the iPad could find a place when there was a rectangle that was slightly smaller that did all the same things is a testament to how easy it will be for this thing to find a place in people's lives once it doesn't cost $3,500 and weigh a ton.
Yeah.
Marco:
All right, thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace and Trade Coffee.
Marco:
And thanks to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join us at atv.fm slash join.
Marco:
And we will talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Because it was accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
Accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter.
Marco:
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-G Marco Arman S-I-R-A-C USA Syracuse It's accidental Accidental They didn't mean to Accidental Accidental Tech Podcast So long
Bye.
Bye.
Marco:
I got to hear a train story.
Marco:
What was it like using this on a train with people who could maybe see you?
Casey:
So on the way up, I was in business classes, as we discussed in the bootleg and may or may not have discussed in the release version of the show.
Casey:
And there were not a ton of... Well, there weren't a lot of people on the train anyway, but there weren't a ton of people.
Casey:
And my understanding before I went on the journey was that it is... The travel mode or whatever... I forget exactly what it's officially called.
Casey:
I think that's what it's called.
Casey:
Okay, so travel mode is...
Casey:
it wasn't clearly stated as far as i could tell until in the last couple of days or maybe i just discovered it in the last couple of days but it is not really travel mode it's plane mode it's called travel mode to john's point but it's actually plane because we already have something called airplane mode
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah, exactly right.
Casey:
And so I talked to a couple of people on the inside who indicated to me, yeah, it might work on the train, but probably not.
Casey:
And so I tried it initially on the way from Richmond to D.C., and that's relevant because at D.C., you stop for a while, and I'll explain why in a minute.
Casey:
But I tried on the way from Richmond to D.C.,
Casey:
And you go into control center and, or maybe it's the thing.
Casey:
No, it is control center.
Casey:
You go into control center because there's like something before control center.
Casey:
I don't know what they call that, but then there's control center off of it.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Anyways, you go into control center and I, you know, tapped on the little airplane because I was turning on airplane mode.
Casey:
I didn't realize until the return trip that, no, you idiots.
Casey:
That's the turn off all the radios mode.
Casey:
I don't know what I was thinking.
Casey:
I don't know what I was thinking.
John:
Were you looking for travel mode or was in your brain, I'm looking for plane mode?
Casey:
I think it's because it was in my brain.
Casey:
I knew that I didn't want to turn off the radios.
Casey:
I don't want the traditional definition of airplane mode, but because I was just convinced and tunnel visioning on airplanes, I...
Casey:
tapped or, you know, pinched on airplane mode.
Casey:
And I saw the radios turn off, but I still just didn't think twice about it because I'm a frigging idiot.
Casey:
And so I put the thing on, right.
Casey:
You know, I was able to do that and it was getting kind of upset that I forget exactly what the dialogue says, but like tracking, tracking failed or something like that.
Casey:
And things are not going well.
Casey:
And then I, you know, put it, I turn on the airplane mode, which again, as I later realized was not what I wanted.
Casey:
But at this point in the story, I don't realize that yet.
Casey:
And sure enough, like windows are bouncing all over the place.
Casey:
I'm to some degree bouncing all over the place.
Casey:
Like it is, it's not great.
Casey:
It's not great at all.
Casey:
I think I had the thing on my face for a minute and a half, two minutes.
Casey:
And I was like, well, that's that.
Casey:
Well, we get to D.C., and the way trains work here, or down here in Virginia, is that in Virginia, the travel train, the people train, actually travels on train tracks that are owned by the freight train company.
Casey:
So not only that, but the freight train company has no need for electric trains because to my limited understanding, I don't know if they would work as well.
Casey:
If I'm wrong, it doesn't matter.
Casey:
One way or another, there's a diesel locomotive pulling the Amtrak train south of Washington, D.C.
Casey:
And then when you're in D.C., you stop for like half an hour.
Casey:
Well, they literally switch locomotives from diesel to electric.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I knew this going into it.
Casey:
I knew it before my trip to Marco, you know, it's all fine.
Casey:
It's no big deal.
Casey:
Well, once we get to DC, we're stationary.
Casey:
So I'm like, hell yeah, I'm going to turn on, you know, a movie and I'd start, you know, Wakanda forever.
Casey:
And we're there for 20, 30 minutes and we go to take off.
Casey:
And again, I think that I have travel mode on.
Casey:
I don't, but I think I do.
Casey:
So we go to take off.
Casey:
And I don't know if you saw the Casey Neistat video, but he was on the New York City subway and he was sitting with his back to the outside of the car.
Casey:
So the car is moving laterally from his perspective.
Casey:
And when he took off, the screen just stayed behind.
Casey:
You know, he just went through the center of the subway car and stayed behind.
Casey:
It's very funny to see.
Casey:
I don't know if he had travel mode on or not.
Casey:
I really don't.
Casey:
But
Casey:
When we took off, immediately I went through the screen because the screen was in front of me and the screen stayed still as I went through the screen.
Casey:
It was hilarious.
John:
You could have turned around and looked at the back of it, which would have, I guess, been entirely white because they don't show the reverse.
Casey:
It would have been entirely white, yeah.
Casey:
But immediately I took the Vision Pro off and I was like, well, that's that.
Casey:
And honestly, I was really disappointed because I really wanted to be able to use this thing on the train.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
in no small part because I had six and a half hours to do something.
Casey:
And it would have been great to watch a movie or do whatever.
Casey:
And outside of the time that they're switching locomotives, there's AC outlets right at the seat.
Casey:
So I mean, I have infinite battery power for all intents and purposes.
Casey:
I was really genuinely kind of bummed about it.
Casey:
On the way back today, I was doing the same thing.
Casey:
I'm like, you know, let me try it again just to see.
Casey:
And I did this.
Casey:
I forget when it was.
Casey:
I don't recall if I did it in D.C.
Casey:
or sometime before.
Casey:
But one way or another, I decided I'm going to try it again.
Casey:
And I look at Control Center and I'm like, wait, what the hell is this?
Casey:
Like goggles with like other like ray or like goggle ripples off of it.
Casey:
And I tap that and it says, oh, travel mode enabled.
Casey:
Son of a gun!
Casey:
I screwed this up!
Casey:
I didn't even realize!
Casey:
So this whole time on the way up, I probably could have been using the Vision Pro, but I didn't because I thought I couldn't because it was janky as hell.
Casey:
Well, the reason it was janky as hell is because I'm an idiot.
Casey:
So it was not perfect.
Casey:
You know, things were dancing about a bit.
Casey:
Like, John, you had said early on in your review that the home screen was just locked into place.
Casey:
And I completely agree with you.
Casey:
things were not locked into place as this train was jostling, you know, rumbling down the track.
Casey:
And I don't think it was bad at all.
Casey:
In fact, it worked better than I thought.
Casey:
But at that point, I realized, well, holy smokes, I can use this thing for the remaining, you know, two to three hours of the train ride or whatever the heck it was.
Casey:
And so I was very happy about that.
Casey:
But I really was bummed and remain bummed that, you know, I couldn't use it the rest of time.
Casey:
But to get back to your question, I
Casey:
I think one person walked by and gave me like a double take.
Casey:
But other than that, nobody seemed to give a crap.
Casey:
And I was very surprised because I expected everyone who walked by was going to be like, what is this idiot doing?
Casey:
Look at this guy with his fancy goggles.
Casey:
Wasn't he cool?
Casey:
Nobody cared.
Casey:
I don't think a lot of people noticed, but nobody cared.
Casey:
And
Casey:
I was very surprised by that.
Casey:
And it actually made me feel a lot better about the idea of using it anywhere.
Casey:
Am I going to go to Wegmans where it's just like a cafeteria area and sit there and use it?
Casey:
Maybe eventually, but not today and not tomorrow.
Casey:
But I genuinely think the way I'm going to ease myself into this is, you know, renting or I keep saying renting, reserving because it's free, you know, reserve a room at the library and
Casey:
And probably face the wall because I don't want to call that much attention to myself.
Casey:
But that's a way I can ease into it.
Casey:
And I really think this will be a very powerful tool for me to use anywhere other than home that I want to get work done.
Casey:
But it was a truly hilarious moment watching the screen go through my body as we took off from D.C.
Casey:
northbound.
Casey:
I couldn't help but laugh when that happened.
Casey:
It was very, very funny.
Marco:
All right, John, how long do you think it takes Casey to use it at Wegmans?
Marco:
I say one week.
John:
yeah i mean so i'm of two minds i think he'll get over the embarrassment quickly but i'm wondering if he will tire of its utility in the same way that you kind of have for productivity tasks yeah so that's that's the conflict but yeah i think i feel like you'll i not a lot of people are going to have these for a while but like i i think i i think as you said on the train fewer people care what you're doing than you think
John:
right yeah like in general have nothing to do with vision pro just like whatever