A Different Way to Be Evil
Casey:
uh john it's time for everyone's favorite corner it is time for random anniversary corner are you excited oh no what's what's worse this or list puns i think those puns are worse oh come on yeah that's that's heartless john oh no no you see how they're worse do you see it now
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Concentrate, people.
Casey:
So on ATP episode 476, dated the 30th of March, 2022, two years ago now, John absolutely blindsided us by announcing he had gone independent.
Casey:
So, John, how have the last two years been?
John:
really is that was that a date yeah that's what i wrote down anyway so i sure hope i'm right john we haven't you learned by now trust casey with any kind of anniversary chances are he knows it better than we do and um trust but verify let me check um oh maybe that's maybe that's when i talked about it on the show is it march 30th you're right because i did the blog post at the same day how's the last two years been
John:
Yeah, you can tell I'm not very into anniversaries because if you had asked me how long it had been, I'd be like, it's got to be over a year now, right?
Casey:
Maybe, right?
John:
I have no idea how the passage of time.
John:
I guess it's going okay.
John:
The only thing I have to think about is like, okay, there was the tax year where I had jobby job income plus self-employment income.
John:
Then there was a tax year where I just had self-employment income.
John:
And I remember those two things as being different because taxes are always annoying.
John:
But, you know, otherwise, I don't know.
John:
We're hanging in there, surviving, doing the thing, paying big college bills, thinking about the second kid entering college at the same time.
John:
The first one is still in college.
John:
It's slightly terrifying.
John:
So, yeah, that's happening.
Casey:
ATP.FM.
Casey:
And you're enjoying life.
Casey:
I mean, I'm not actually here to interrogate your finances, despite what it sounds like.
Casey:
You're enjoying life.
Casey:
You're still happy.
Casey:
You're taking your afternoon siestas every day.
John:
No, not exactly.
John:
I mean, the level of stress is still higher than I would like.
John:
But, you know, I feel like there's an acclimation period to being self-employed.
John:
And I'm still, let's say I'm still going through that period.
Yeah.
John:
What does that mean?
John:
Well, you know, you get used to, I don't know, I guess there was an acclimation period for me essentially having a regular job and self-employment income, which is very hectic, but then eventually it was just too much.
John:
And there's, you know, getting used to the idea that the only income you have is your self-employment income is, I think...
John:
Difficult, like balancing how much how frantically you are trying to work to make that happen and looking for other things or whatever at the same time is I don't know like this.
John:
I would imagine that I would have less stress than I am currently experiencing, but it's still less than when I was doing two things at once.
John:
So it's a bit of net positive.
Casey:
Let's do some follow-up.
Casey:
We have breaking news.
Casey:
We have WWDC lottery results, and I am overjoyed to tell you that for me, it's the same as it ever was.
Casey:
No invite for me.
Marco:
I also don't have an invitation.
John:
And I was also not invited.
John:
Three for three.
John:
How many people did they say it was?
John:
It was maybe 2,000, 2,500-ish.
John:
It's less than half the number that used to be when they had WWDC not at Apple Park.
John:
So it's very few tickets for a very large number of applicants.
John:
So it is to be expected.
John:
So, oh, well.
Marco:
And, you know, I really I can't complain because I have gone to so many WWDCs like I still absolutely love whenever we get a press invitation that that's wonderful.
Marco:
I kind of feel bad taking one of the developer tickets.
Marco:
Because there are so many people who I think deserve it more than I do because I've been to so many.
Marco:
So I'm glad and on a level that I didn't get the developer ticket because I'd rather that go to someone who it's like their first time or whatever else.
Marco:
I hope to get press access because that doesn't take a developer ticket.
Casey:
Anyway, all right, John, you have some feedback with regard to Affinity Designer.
Casey:
What's going on there?
John:
We talked about this in the after show last episode of my struggles with this vector drawing app and how it didn't seem like a bunch of the operations that it had, like they conflicted with each other.
John:
You could do one thing and not the other.
John:
You do them separately.
John:
But when you combine them, one canceled out the other.
John:
And it was about struggling.
John:
Stroking a path on the outside of a shape, but then once it stops being a shape, uh, the stroke moves to be centered on the path instead of on the outside.
John:
And I was finding that frustrating.
John:
Uh, a couple of, uh, people wrote in with possible solutions.
John:
Um, and like I said, it was too late for the actual shirt designs cause they had long since been completed and submitted.
John:
Uh, we're still working on that.
John:
So stay tuned.
John:
But anyway, um, I was curious to know how to do it.
John:
So Marco's suggestion, uh, he used it.
John:
He used the terminology from paint coat, I believe.
John:
Uh,
John:
That will work.
John:
It was just different vocabulary because every app calls it something different.
John:
One thing that was tripping me up in Affinity Designer is there is a thing called Convert to Curves that will take a shape and convert it to a bunch of line segments.
John:
And I was hoping that would do it for me, but it didn't.
John:
But the thing I needed to use was called Expand Stroke.
John:
Yeah.
John:
convert to curves wasn't doing it so yeah what expand stroke does is it takes whatever your stroke is so you got your shape and you're stroking on the outside of the line phrasing when you say expand stroke it takes that stroke and turns it into a funny shaped closed polygon right so basically it draws an outline around the stroke so if you draw a stroke that was just a line it would just like a single line segment and it would be a fat stroke on it that has some you know centered on the line but when you turn it to expand stroke that turns into a rectangle
John:
So that the line that was through the middle is gone and all you have is the rectangle that outlines the stroke.
John:
So expand stroke will do it.
John:
Of course, once you do that, you lose the ability to edit the stroke as a stroke.
John:
So lots of people suggested that when they do it, they always save the stroke in a layer below it.
John:
So if you ever want to go back to the stroke, you can, but you just hide that layer.
John:
There's all sorts of things like that.
John:
So that's one, expand stroke.
John:
Vitor wrote in with a solution using an affinity designer feature that's also in Illustrator by another name called offset path using the contour tool this is important if you want to say you make a path and you want to draw a path around that and you don't just want to like stroke the outside of the line you can actually move that path inside the shape or outside the shape by an arbitrary amount and you can do that to sort of simulate the outside stroke thing because now you control how far from the original path the line is
John:
And so when it recenters itself, if you move it out half a distance, it'll recenter and still be on the outside.
John:
That was interesting.
John:
I'm not sure I would use that because it might be a little fidgety, but it's good to know because the solution that I thought that was the most interesting and maybe affinity designer only was from Julian Kissman, who suggested using Create Compound.
John:
which is a feature in Affinity Designer where you take a bunch of shapes and instead of like using the Boolean operation on shapes where you take like a circle and you overlay it with a rectangle and you do a subtraction and then the rectangle takes a chunk out of the circle, right?
John:
Those features all exist in Affinity Designer, but they're destructive.
John:
You can apparently put them in a nested layer and essentially do non-destructive Boolean operations, say like this layer group,
John:
Uh, all these layers apply with these Boolean operations, giving you a resulting object that retains all of its flexibility.
John:
So it is like, it's, you know, one object cutting out another object, cutting out another object, but all the objects, it's non-destructive.
John:
All the objects are still in their whole editable form and you're just sort of seeing the union of them.
John:
And that I thought was really cool.
John:
Um,
John:
And like I said, I didn't actually try any of these on the projects.
John:
I had already messed up all of my paths and mutilated them until they worked the way they did.
John:
But I will try to remember all of this for the future.
John:
And by the way, Create Compound is also a place where Offset Path comes in handy because if you have an irregular shape,
John:
Like the example I saw in one of the demo videos is a good one, like a snowman shape, like three balls on top of each other.
John:
They're all stuck together like a snowman.
John:
And if you were to try to draw a big snowman and then a little snowman inside the big snowman, such that when you put the little snowman inside the big snowman, you get like a stroke along the outside.
John:
You very quickly find that the only shape that works with is a circle and any shape that is not a circle.
John:
If you simply scale the shape and put it inside itself, you won't get an even stroke all around.
John:
because that's not the way geometry works.
John:
You instead have to have a specific tool that lets you offset the path.
John:
And so if you use offset path to make your smaller snowman shape, that will work.
John:
And finally, Christian Meyer said, I can confirm that Adobe Illustrator has also treated open shape and closed shape strokes differently for the last 20 years.
John:
For the last 20 plus years, sorry.
John:
So apparently this is a...
John:
uh cultural uh tradition maybe in vector drawing programs but if you don't know it like i didn't it is quite surprising and annoying sounds fun i am glad that you are doing that so i don't have to also because i think i'm just looking for another shirt where i'll get to use my new uh compound uh create compound and expand stroke skills if i don't think and if i don't forget them all between now and the next shirt oh my word all right
Casey:
We got some feedback about real-time OSs and cars.
Casey:
I think this was toward the end of the main show last week.
Casey:
We were discussing, you know, what's real-time OS, what's not, and where does CarPlay sit?
Casey:
Where would this new CarPlay version 2, or whatever they're calling it, where would that sit?
Casey:
And a friend of the show, Sam Abelsamid from Wheelbearings, wrote in to say the typical architecture is that Android Automotive runs in a container.
Casey:
And the real-time OS, usually something like QNX, Wind River, or Green Hill Software, runs in another container with an underlying Linux distro, and all of it is running on a Qualcomm Snapdragon cockpit 8155.
Casey:
The real-time OS controls the instrument cluster display, and in many cases, Android Automotive will project data to parts of the cluster, such as showing Google Maps on the Volvo.
Casey:
The hypervisor makes sure that the real-time OS gets priority, which is required to meet federal motor vehicle safety standards requirements for displaying driving info like speed and warning quote-unquote lamps, which themselves are now usually virtual.
Casey:
We also got some anecdata from a
Casey:
you know, when my infotainment crashes, which seems to be a common thing on cars other than Tesla's, turns out, that oftentimes their, you know, gauge cluster will show a speedometer or sometimes even will continue to do, if I remember this anecdata right, will continue to do like, quote unquote, autopilot or, you know, assisted steering or what have you, even when the infotainment has crashed, which on the surface, I mean, that makes sense, right?
Casey:
They should be two totally different systems, but yet they feel so intertwined when they're all, you know, sucked into that same main display.
Casey:
So,
Casey:
There you go.
John:
Yeah, the people saying that when one thing crashes, the other thing stays up.
John:
That doesn't mean either one of them is real-time.
John:
That just means they're two separate systems.
John:
And it's interesting that the real-time OS is like controlling the cluster, but allowing stuff from non-real-time OSs to display itself into it.
John:
The example they gave you was maps.
John:
But I do wonder how much of the stuff displayed in the instrument cluster is
John:
is coming from a non-real-time OS.
John:
And when that OS crashes, like some people said, like, oh, well, the instrument cluster then displays some stuff on its own, right?
John:
I'm also kind of interested in, like, I didn't quite understand this arrangement of real-time OS and hypervisor or whatever that is like,
John:
I kind of get it.
John:
Like, it's running two containers.
John:
One is running Android Automotive, which is not real-time, and the other is running, like, say, QNX, which is real-time.
John:
And the hypervisor makes sure that the real-time one gets, you know, a reserved slice of those resources so the real-time OS is still real-time and the other thing isn't.
John:
But, boy, it's getting complicated in there, isn't it?
John:
And that also, like, that throws Apple's iPhone thing.
John:
Another thing into the mix goes...
John:
I'm not sure what the status of any kind of real-time subsystem is in iOS.
John:
Apple is not particularly forthcoming with technical details like that.
John:
But it seems to me that what would be happening there is that the iPhone would be projecting whatever it's drawing onto the instrument cluster, which may be run by a real-time OS.
John:
But if Apple is covering the whole thing with – like if every pixel of the instrument cluster is produced by the phone –
John:
Then is the real-time OS simply acting as a video ferrying device until and unless the phone crashes or disconnects, at which point it takes over and shows a cruddy speedometer?
John:
I don't know.
John:
It's still kind of mysterious.
John:
And finally, I did try to look up in the United States Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards to see if I could read the text of these standards to see what does it say about...
John:
the speedometer and warning lamps and everything that would either necessitate a real-time operating system or be well-suited to real-time operating system.
John:
I confess I drowned in the legalese.
John:
There's a lot of words in there and weird language, and there is all sorts of stuff about lamps and stuff like that.
John:
But I couldn't find anything that was like, oh, I can see to comply with this standard of real-time OS is either necessary or would be the easiest way to do it.
John:
But I'm sure I gave up before I found whatever...
Casey:
whatever regulation is the appropriate one i did find a lot of regulations related to it uh but maybe not all of them so uh yeah i'm glad i'm not making a car and probably so is apple wow uh good news this is our dacia sendero segment and that's a reference for some of you uh air network changed the fix is in the chrome 124 beta john are we pulling our party poppers are we excited what's going on here
John:
well you see the scare quotes around the word fix the document here so uh if you get chrome beta which i did uh it's the chrome version 124 beta that includes this change and what i did was i pulled up gmail which is constantly sending requests in the background so it's a good test case and i pulled up the dev tools and i filtered the output to see only errors and i waited to see if i saw any error network changed
John:
I also, like, repaired my iPhone with Xcode and did all the things to try to induce the error.
John:
And I ran it for a day and a half with that dev tool window open the entire time.
John:
And I never saw error network change.
John:
I'm like, hmm, I think they did it.
John:
But keep in mind, when we talked about the fix and we looked at, like, the diff and how they're doing it, they're looking for a specific interface that is like, okay, if an interface appears and it's one of these and it's an IPv6 and it's a local thing and it's this and it's that and it's that, then don't freak out.
John:
Otherwise, freak out.
John:
so it didn't happen to me in 24 hours of trying but since this fix went out in the chrome beta somebody in the uh the you know bug tracker comment said hey i'm using the beta and it did happen to me and then the person asked can you tell me a bunch of information on your system or whatever and i think it's because their supposed fix is just sort of putting an include list of like look
John:
If this very specific thing happens, ignore it.
John:
Otherwise, do what you normally do.
John:
And I think that's the wrong way to fix this problem.
John:
Because you're just going to be chasing these forever.
John:
It's like, oh, this person had their, you know, HomeKit thing come online.
John:
And this person had something else happen.
John:
Like, who knows what will happen on these people's systems based on network stuff that's happening.
John:
You'll be chasing these forever.
John:
It's better to, I would think, it's better to figure out, look, what kind of changes to the network does Chrome actually care about?
John:
And only flip out when you see one of those.
John:
and ignore everything else so i hope this is an evolving system anyway i'm continuing to run the beta because hey i didn't see it in 24 hours and i did an ab test i had the beta and the non-beta running at the same time both open to gmail and boy it's still there in the non-beta it's just filled with their network change like after a few hours of running the the screen was just filled with their network changed errors you know from top to bottom whereas the other window didn't have in 24 hours so
John:
I think they're making good progress.
John:
I'm not sure if this fix is the right fix, but if this is happening to you, try the Chrome 124 beta.
Marco:
We are brought to you this episode by Squarespace, the all-in-one website platform for entrepreneurs to stand out and succeed online.
Marco:
Whether you're just starting out or managing a growing brand, Squarespace makes it easy to create a beautiful website and engage with your audience.
Marco:
And you can sell anything on your site from products to content to time, all in one place and all on your terms.
Marco:
Squarespace just recently launched a new blueprint system.
Marco:
This lets you start a completely personalized website with a new guided design system.
Marco:
So you start with a professionally curated layout and styling options, and you can build your unique online presence from the ground up, tailored to your brand or your business and optimized for every device.
Marco:
You can easily launch your website and get discovered fast with integrated, optimized SEO tools.
Marco:
So you show up more often to more people and grow the way you want.
Marco:
And for your business, of course, they have flexible payment support and amazingly seamless checkout experiences for your customers.
Marco:
These are simple and powerful payment tools.
Marco:
You can accept credit cards, PayPal and Apple Pay and ineligible countries offer customers the option to buy now, pay later with after pay and clear pay.
Marco:
All of this is backed by their modern fluid engine, the next gen website editor from Squarespace.
Marco:
So it's never been easier to unlock your unbreakable creativity.
Marco:
It's an amazing way to build a website on Squarespace.
Marco:
I strongly recommend anybody needs a website, whether you do or someone else in your life does, and they're asking you, the computer nerd, for how to make a website, have them or have you try Squarespace.
Marco:
You can do everything you need to do in trial mode.
Marco:
It is wonderful.
Marco:
You can see how it is for you.
Marco:
So start that free trial at squarespace.com.
Marco:
When you're ready to launch,
Marco:
Go to squarespace.com slash ATP to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain.
Marco:
So once again, squarespace.com, start that free trial.
Marco:
When you're ready to launch, squarespace.com slash ATP for 10% off.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Squarespace for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
Balal Khan writes, regarding the conversation about multiple monitors, has Casey tried turning the two side monitors to portrait orientation?
Casey:
I find this incredibly useful to have Safari windows open as reference and not need to scroll them, especially useful for dev documentation.
Casey:
Having them in portrait orientation also reduces the impact of head turning significantly.
Casey:
I use better touch tool keyboard shortcuts to move a window to a specific monitor, which makes window management much simpler.
Casey:
So this is one of those things that on paper, 100% could not agree more.
Casey:
I absolutely agree that it makes sense for one, if not all three of my monitors should be portrait.
Casey:
I would make a strong argument that the Xcode designated monitor, which is the one directly in front of me, that should probably be portrait, except then my main monitor is portrait and that feels super icky and weird.
Casey:
And I have briefly tried to do this in the past and I just, I just can't, it just feels so wrong.
Casey:
And I wonder if maybe I like forced myself to stick with it for more than half an hour, if maybe it would get good to me and maybe I would enjoy it.
Casey:
So maybe I should give it another shot at some point, but it just, it's one of those things where it almost gives me the heebie-jeebies.
Casey:
It just looks so incredibly incorrect.
Casey:
Even though, again, for all the reasons that Bilal cited, makes perfect sense.
Casey:
So I don't know.
Casey:
We'll see.
Casey:
Maybe if I'm having a quieter day, maybe I'll mess with myself and turn one of my monitors vertical and see what happens.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I feel like our field of vision, like our two eyes have a place where they overlap, but then there's sort of a place that's exclusive to the left eye, exclusive to the right eye.
John:
Because our eyes are side by side on our head, not top and bottom.
John:
So I feel like our field of vision better matches a landscape display, and I also feel like it's maybe slightly more comfortable to move your eyes side to side than up and down.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And even for things like Xcode, there's only so much code you can take in at a glance, right?
John:
It's good that you don't have to scroll, and I guess it's good that the console on the bottom can take up room and stuff like that, but I still feel like I'd rather arrange things side by side than...
John:
top to bottom unless there's a case where i really do need to see like if i need to see two vertically stacked pages in something that's going to be printed like in print layout or something like that but again that's kind of the origin of like back in the old days the the mac had like a portrait monitor that you could put one eight and a half by 11 page on at like wussy weird resolution uh and then they had a two page monitor which could fit two pages side by side uh but i don't think anyone ever wanted a monitor that could fit two pages top and bottom
Casey:
um although i've seen you've seen that we talked about this in the show once like uh square monitor literal square aspect ratio monitor that's super weird is that a thing well yeah there's i don't think i'll be able to find one to put find the link to put in the show notes but somebody in the last year come out with like john was saying i believe it was a square aspect ratio but it was designed to be effectively two uh landscape monitors and i think did it did it have a hinge in the middle or something like that i forget exactly what the situation was no the one i'm thinking of was actually kind of small it's like a weird small square monitor
John:
No, never mind then.
John:
But anyways, it's weird that way.
John:
Yeah, no, I don't object to the portrait monitors, but I think it does definitely take getting used to it at a certain point that become really silly.
John:
I think we talked about this when we first got our XDRs, but the Pro Display XDR can go into portrait mode, and I turned it in that direction when I first got it, and it's hilarious.
Casey:
Does it hit your ceiling?
John:
It feels like I need to get a stepladder to reach the Apple menu.
Yeah.
Casey:
Goodness gracious.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Simone Rizzo writes, regarding your idea for an Apple ID verification via a quote unquote real ID, passport, etc.
Casey:
My guess is that Apple may not want to have this option for privacy reasons.
Casey:
If the quote unquote backdoor of moving ownership of an Apple ID is technically possible, it might be used by governments by law or judicial order to transfer ownership and obtain private info.
Casey:
That's a good point.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So this is what we talked about last time.
John:
You're saying like, well, an ultimate safeguard of someone steals your Apple idea or whatever.
John:
If you had previously verified with your government ID that this belongs to you, you could like get it back.
John:
And, you know, the technically minded were thinking, well, wait a second.
John:
How would Apple give it back to you?
John:
Apple doesn't have any power over your Apple ID.
John:
They don't have a secret backdoor that they used.
John:
And it seems like making the system would have to give Apple a secret backdoor.
John:
Well, yes and no.
John:
There's a way you can do this that is more secure and less secure.
John:
The less secure way is, hey, Apple has a master key to everyone's Apple ID.
John:
Who does this?
John:
That's not great.
John:
We don't want that because then Apple could get a subpoena and get access to your stuff without you even knowing it, right?
John:
The government could force them to do it and Apple would have the power to do it.
John:
And Apple could say, okay, well, if that user...
John:
uh you know signed up for this system of verification and showed us their passport then we do have a key to their stuff but if they didn't then we don't right uh but the slightly more secure way to do this and i say slightly uh is to instead when you do the id verification like you go to the thing and you show them all your ids and you prove that it's you or whatever what happens is that they would put
John:
essentially an unlock key in like the secure enclave on your devices, like iCloud synced, you know, end-to-end encrypted, iCloud synced, so that all of your devices in the secure enclave, there was a key that Apple could get, but only if it had access to your device, right?
John:
So if the government came to Apple and say, we need to unlock this person's thing, here's a subpoena, and they'd be like, Apple can truthfully say, we can't do that.
John:
The only place our Apple key exists is on their device, right?
John:
And we can't reach out and get it off of the device, right?
John:
It's locked inside their device or whatever.
John:
Maybe we'd have to be locked in a device with a backup code or whatever.
John:
Anyway, I say it's slightly better because at least Apple couldn't do things behind your back, but only slightly because the government can just come to your house and take your phone.
John:
and force force it to open with face id and do all i i read a story recently where the fbi raided some person's house and the person answered the door with their phone in their hand and their phone was unlocked at the time they answered the door and the fbi yanked it out of their hand so now they had the person's they had the person's unlocked phone oh my god this is so many loopholes with like yoink yeah no we didn't force you to unlock it but we got it and now it's unlocked so
John:
Yeah, so having having the keys only on your only on your individual devices and the secure enclave in a place that Apple can't get at it remotely means that Apple doesn't have a master key back at headquarters, but it doesn't actually protect you that much more.
John:
But yeah, this is the tradeoff between convenience and security.
John:
And I think it's a tradeoff that I personally would make.
John:
And as long as it's opt in and only the people who care about this would have to do it, I would give Apple the ability to unlock my Apple ID for me.
John:
I would give them the key.
John:
They can keep it in their headquarters.
John:
And, you know, that just to save my butt in the future, if I prove that I'm me.
John:
Right.
John:
Because I trust Apple to do that.
John:
And I would prefer that to like totally losing access to everything associated with my Apple ID in an unrecoverable way.
John:
But lots of other people wouldn't prefer that.
John:
So there would be, you know, that's that choice is up to them.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And with regard to Apple IDs, Eric writes, Apple IDs are not required to be email addresses.
Casey:
I still use an Apple ID like quote unquote Jay Smith, and I hope I don't have to change it to an email address if the rumor about Apple accounts turns out to be true.
Casey:
I thought this was still legacy accounts.
Casey:
I thought that they were still allowed to do this.
Casey:
It's just that Apple really
John:
really really encourages you not to but yeah we'll see what happens in the future yeah the reason we all forgot about this is because developers were literally forced to not do this so everybody that we know everybody that we know had to change all our old like non-email address apple ids if we wanted to continue to be apple developers like you could not log into any of apple developer stuff which you needed to do to do stuff like release apps on the app store right so i avoided it for a real long time but there was just no way eventually this was years ago there was no way around it uh
John:
But I'd forgotten about, hey, if you're not an Apple developer, and I guess if you never touch anything that makes you change it, that you just continue to just use your phone or whatever, you could have an Apple ID like Jay Smith and still exist.
John:
Wow, that blows my mind, but I guess they're still out there.
Casey:
And then finally, for follow up, Ben writes, is iOS podcast transcription Apple's first real attempt at heavy cloud computing?
Casey:
iMessage, Apple Music Mail, etc.
Casey:
are all massive, but not compute intensive.
Casey:
All the other cool stuff like photos, metadata, spotlight, news aggregation seem to happen on device.
Casey:
If I'm not missing anything, this seems to be a good low stakes test for cooler AI stuff to come.
Casey:
That's a really good point.
Casey:
I didn't think about that.
Marco:
The more we've learned about the podcast transcription that they're doing, this is not just them running a whisper model and calling it a day.
Marco:
Because even that would be substantial for the amount of data that they're processing.
Marco:
Believe me, I know from experience.
Marco:
Because of course, immediately upon launching this, I thought, oh boy, I have to do this now.
Marco:
I have to match this feature in Overcast.
Marco:
And so I've looked into like what would it take to match this feature in Overcast?
Marco:
I already have the knowledge of which podcasts are subscribed to.
Marco:
I know when new episodes come out for each one.
Marco:
So I could theoretically do something like this.
Marco:
But they're not just running Whisper.
Marco:
From what I gather, they seem to have bought a company that was working on podcast transcription a few years ago.
Marco:
This is like a few years long effort, it seems.
Marco:
And they're doing a lot of very specialized processing.
Marco:
It isn't just a basic transcription model that's like off the shelf.
Marco:
They've customized it like crazy.
Marco:
And they seem to be running a whole lot of this stuff all on their server.
Marco:
So first of all, good on them.
Marco:
That's a great feature for accessibility and navigation and everything else.
Marco:
And for me to congratulate Apple Podcasts on a new innovative feature does not happen that often because they are a direct competitor.
Marco:
And the whole reason I made Overcast is because I didn't like Apple Podcasts very much.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
They did a really good job on this.
Marco:
There's no ifs, ands, or buts about it.
Marco:
I cannot fault them for anything they've done here.
Marco:
It's really impressive.
Marco:
And for the time being, I can't match it.
Marco:
And I don't know when I'll be able to, if ever, but this is going to be just Apple Podcasts is going to win with this feature compared to Overcast for the foreseeable future.
Marco:
And so to answer the question, yeah, this actually is a surprisingly big deal for Apple to be doing this much server side advanced AI type processing.
Marco:
I don't know if there's really any other efforts they've undertaken that at least have such visible results.
Marco:
So, yeah, this is new.
Marco:
And it is, I think, you know, because this is very specialized to podcasts, keep in mind the scale we're dealing with here.
Marco:
We are not dealing with content that's being created by every iPhone.
Marco:
So, you know, if you think about like, oh, would they ever run like, you know, photo recognition server side?
Marco:
No, because think about the data volume of that, even if you can get around the whole privacy and encryption angles, which you can't.
Marco:
But even if you could, like the data volume of every photo ever taken on every iPhone in the world is way bigger than podcast episodes that get released.
Marco:
So this is a big step, but I wouldn't necessarily extrapolate it to much else that Apple could be doing server-side in the near future for their other products because most of their other products, the area of use of this kind of computation would be so massive that we'd be talking about a whole different ballgame.
John:
We talked about this when we were talking about Apple potentially licensing Google Gemini or ChatGPT from OpenAI.
John:
And it's like there is sort of a difference in difficulty.
John:
So Apple has many things that are iPhone scale.
John:
iMessage is the example I gave last time.
John:
iMessage is iPhone scale.
John:
A lot of iPhone users iMessage, surely billions, right?
John:
And there's a lot of traffic on that.
John:
But computationally, ferrying the messages around, even though they're like end-to-end encrypted, most of that is done on the end devices anyway, and dealing with the key management, it's not that big a deal.
John:
It's shuffling bits around some small, fast computation on optimized hardware.
John:
That's it.
John:
Something like transcription is not like that, which is part of the reason it's untenable for Marco at this point.
John:
It's not like, oh, I'll just run a one or two second little job every time an episode comes out.
John:
It's going to take you longer than that.
John:
It's going to take a lot of CPU time to do, you know, for a unit of podcast listening time.
John:
uh and the the ai stuff we were talking last time about how much uh how does inference which is like when you ask an ai model a question how expensive is that compared to training and training is obviously more expensive but how much more expensive is it but like setting all that aside comparing the cheapest thing in this sort of large language model world which is you know inference comparing that to shuttling an imessage from one user to another it's
John:
the deal doing the lm thing has got to be so much more expensive in terms of how many cpu cycles do you need so the question uh you know bring this up with the transcriptions like has apple ever attempted anything at iphone scale that is computationally difficult that is not just moving bits around sending small packets of data from place to place even things like you know iphone you know uh
John:
the iCloud photo library and stuff, you take a picture, a bunch of computation happens on your phone, but then when the picture's done, it's just a bucket of bits that they shove up into like S3 or whatever they're using on the back end, right?
John:
Computationally, not expensive.
John:
But all this large language model stuff, the stuff that can't run on the phone that uses really large, large language models that has to run on a server...
John:
or podcast transcription i'm not sure apple is equipped or prepared or has invested enough to do that type of computation at iphone scale so podcast scale is less than iphone scale as marco just pointed out so this is a kind of a good start for them and maybe maybe i'm forgetting something maybe there is something that apple has been doing that is both computationally expensive and also at iphone scale but nothing is occurring to me right now so this is a good point by ben
Casey:
All right, moving on.
Casey:
I don't, John, do you really need me for this one?
Casey:
Cause this is basically Mac pro corner, isn't it?
John:
Well, it's Mac studio corner.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So there's been some theorizing going around that there is no ultra fusion interconnect on the M three max, or at least none that we can tell.
Casey:
So John, can you remind us what this ultra fusion interconnect is in the first place and why it's relevant?
John:
Yeah, so when we were looking at the M3 and the M3 Max came out and we were looking at die shots, pictures of the silicon die of the M3 Max, and those are those rainbow-y looking pictures with lots of little tiny features, looks like a city from a view from above, right?
John:
We were looking at the layout of the chip.
John:
And what I said at the time was, well, if you look at the M3 Max and you look at the M2 Max and the M1 Max, the layouts are pretty similar in terms of where the big rectangular blobs are, where the major structures are.
John:
The structures themselves are different.
John:
There's different cores, different amounts of stuff, different GPU cores.
John:
The things are different, but they're laid out very similar.
John:
And both the M1 and the M2 Max were constructed so that you could take two of them, stick them end to end, and make an either an M1 or an M2 Ultra.
John:
So when the M3 Max came out, we said, well, this M3 Max looks just like the M1 and M2 Max.
John:
So probably they're gonna take two of these M3 Maxes, stick them end to end,
John:
and you'll get the M3 Ultra.
John:
And the thing, when you stick them end to end, the thing that connects them is that Apple's branded UltraFusion interconnect.
John:
It's a silicon interposer that lets them weave together these two chips into a single Ultra chip.
John:
So my expectation for the M3 was it'll be the same thing as the M1 and M2.
John:
And what that also meant is probably there won't be any kind of M3 extreme that's like four of them connected or whatever.
John:
It just looks like just like the M1 and M2, you'll be able to stick two of these end to end.
John:
so somebody posted on twitter in chinese which is a barrier for me to understanding this um a picture of the m3 max die and if you compare to the m1 and m2 max and if you compare them and the m1 and m2 max pictures at the bottom of the die you see this like long strip of
John:
that is that ultra fusion silicon interposer thing it looks kind of like the pinout very tiny pinouts and like a little thing that you slide into a slot but it's just anyway it's just a bunch of little a strip of little connectors or a strip of little contacts those are all the wrong words because this is microscopic stuff but anyway there's a strip on the bottom where you connect them end to end except the m3 die shot does not have that strip at the bottom
John:
now did someone just crop it out of the m3 max picture i don't know you can't tell and the the chinese text translated by competing translation things google translate and like the the twitter translate thing were like uh there is a wiring layer and then in parentheses although wiring layer peeling is not listed on x and the other translation is with wiring layer all the wiring layer peeling is not included in x and
John:
I don't know what that means, but some people like MacRumors and a bunch of other like MaxTech or whatever took this ball and ran with it and said, M3 Max has no silicon interposer.
John:
M3 Max doesn't have Ultra Fusion.
John:
And they spun that out to mean that two M3 Maxes will not be stuck together to make the M3 Ultra.
John:
And in fact, what will happen instead is there will be a new chip called the M3 Ultra that is not the Max at all, but a new chip entirely.
John:
And what they were saying about this new chip based on some other vague rumors was that
John:
The M3 Ultra will just be one big standalone chip, not two of anything stuck together.
John:
And that one big standalone chip will not have any efficiency cores because it doesn't need them.
John:
It's a desktop only chip.
John:
No efficiency cores, only power cores and a bunch of them.
John:
So if you can imagine the M3 Ultra being like a bigger chip than the M3 Max with all the efficiency cores removed and that new space taken up by just having the power cores.
John:
And then if you take two of those Ultras and stick them together, you would get the M3 Extreme.
John:
Which would then go in the Mac Pro.
John:
I want to believe this rumor.
John:
But basing it on an image posted in a language I can't understand on Twitter where someone might have just cropped out the interposer is not reassuring to me.
John:
I just wanted to talk about it now to say, hey, hope springs eternal.
John:
And despite the rumor we had a while ago that nothing good will ever happen to the Mac Pro until after the M7, which I keep reminding myself, who knows?
John:
Maybe there's a possibility.
John:
WWDC, presumably...
John:
the new mac studio and maybe new mac pro will be announced i would love to see an m3 ultra chip that is not two of anything stuck together that had no efficiency cores that had only power cores and i would love two of them to be stuck together to make an ultra in the mac pro that would be super cool so fingers crossed for the wwdc that i'm currently not going to be able to attend in person
Marco:
This is the kind of thing I would love for this to be true, but I can't imagine that they're doing enough sales volume of these very, very large chips to make it worth custom engineering to make a custom chip.
Marco:
I hope that's wrong.
Marco:
I would love to be proven wrong on that.
Marco:
But so far, the amount of effort they have shown so far for these very high-end chips...
Marco:
is not large let's say um and so i just have doubts but that being said if you look at the m3 series the m3 keep in mind this is the first time that the m3 pro and max are actually fairly different chips that you know in for the m1 and m2 pro and max the pro was basically a chopped off version of the max that chopped off some of its gpu cores and maybe had some disabled cpu cores you know for binning reasons
Marco:
But the M3 Pro is a totally different and custom design compared to the M3 Max and the regular M3.
Marco:
It's closer to the regular M3, but it's still a very custom design.
Marco:
It is not just one of those with something chopped off or disabled.
Marco:
So they are, with the M3 line, expanding it to more unique designs.
Marco:
So maybe this has some merit and some promise, but I bet they sell a lot more pros than extremes or ultras or whatever.
Marco:
So I don't want to get my hopes up too much on this because it seems unlikely to be leading to anything that we actually want.
John:
Yeah, some of the other vague things that are making people hope about this is that in addition to the M3 Max being separate from the Pro, the M3 Max is also substantially beefier than the M2 Max was.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
In terms of, like, if you look at the scale, like, you have a small, medium, large, where, like, the M3 Max has lots of stuff in it, and it's more powerful, like, comparatively.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And, like, for example, the M3 Max is contending with the M2 Ultra in many benchmarks, right?
John:
Just one Max compared to the M2 Ultra, which is not the thing that you saw with the M1 versus the M2.
John:
The M2 versus the M3, a single Max competing with the M1 Ultra or M2 Ultra.
John:
So, not in GPU benchmarks, I guess, but...
John:
the m3 max does look beefier and i believe the the whole like no efficiency cores rumor was based on some kind of source code leak thing somewhere maybe again can't lend too much credence to these things but that makes sense to me uh both for the mac studio and for the mac pro uh those computers are never going to run on battery you hope
John:
if you're running after your ups so efficiency cores may not especially a huge number of efficiency cores it's just it's just wasted it's wasted silicon right not that the efficiency cores are bad or anything but if you want to make a powerful machine like the mac pro that that case is huge efficiency cores are probably not uh a worthwhile use especially if you have like six or twelve of them a worthwhile use of your silicon space right
John:
That said, I kind of feel like no efficiency cores is too few.
John:
12 may be too many, but zero may be too few.
John:
But then I kept thinking, like, okay, but what would be the point of them?
John:
I guess for heat, maybe, or I don't even know.
John:
Like, you don't really care about the power.
John:
It's not like you don't care about the electricity your Mac Pro takes, but...
John:
One efficiency core, you know, ticking away, doing some trivial job versus one power core ticking away in the grand scheme of the power envelope of a Mac Pro.
John:
You're not going to notice that.
John:
Right.
John:
So I don't know.
John:
I'm intrigued by this rumor and I'm anxiously anticipating a new hardware WWDC.
Casey:
So with that in mind, if you'll permit a slight tangent, what is your vibe check on replacing your Mac Pro?
Casey:
I mean, last I remember you saying anything about it, which as we've already covered, my memory is garbage.
Casey:
But last I remember is you were going to keep on keeping on until you don't get macOS updates anymore, and then you'll start thinking about it.
Casey:
But what's your current thinking?
John:
Yeah, I'm still probably going to keep holding out until I don't have OS support anymore.
John:
Or I can smell not having it.
John:
I'll know that I don't have OS support before that OS is released, right?
John:
And then I'll make a decision.
John:
I suppose something could be released at WWDC that's so compelling that it would just make me want to get it.
John:
And it might even be just like, you know, an M3 Ultra Max Studio or something, right?
John:
Because maybe I still wouldn't bother with the extreme because there's still the whole question of like,
John:
the gaming situation and what good is a giant gpu like that but you know never say never but right now i'm still gonna keep holding out with this mac pro for as long as i can
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
It seems like everyone's getting a little bit of antitrust pressure because apparently Microsoft has decided to do what they've already done in the EU and split teams off from Office.
Casey:
So reading from The Verge,
Casey:
A company spokesperson told Reuters it was making the change to its business chat and conferencing app, quote, to ensure clarity for customers, quote, after already doing so in the EU last year.
John:
So the background for this, for people who weren't working in jobby jobs in the past five to ten years, is that Slack came out.
John:
And Slack was one of those sort of backdoor work items, kind of like the iPhone was, and Macs in some cases, where...
John:
Employees start using it without the blessing or knowledge of management just to help them do their work because Slack was free.
John:
People could download it on their computers if they were lucky enough to be able to install software on their work computers, which many people are, especially developers.
John:
And so they just started using Slack.
John:
And then eventually enough people used it that, look, our employees love Slack and it's helping them get their work done and they're more productive.
John:
We should get a license for Slack.
John:
And they would go to Slack and they would buy a license and however many seats they have to pay for for their company.
John:
And yay, the company is now using Slack.
John:
And employees are enjoying it, and they're using little emoticons underneath there.
John:
Not emoticons.
John:
Emoji reaction things and making custom animated rainbow dancing parrots they can put under messages.
John:
And they're making all sorts of channels about the Frisbee club at work.
John:
And everyone's loving it.
John:
Slack is great.
John:
Having lots of fun.
John:
I lived this.
John:
It was a real thing.
John:
It was like IRC, but for people who couldn't use IRC.
John:
And it was fun.
John:
And everyone was using Slack.
John:
Then what happened was Microsoft said, we don't like it when other people pay somebody other than us for their office software.
John:
So Microsoft created Teams, which is a terrible, terrible Slack clone that everybody hates, as well they should.
John:
It is a very bad program.
John:
And what they said is, hey, company that's currently paying for Slack, you're already paying us for Exchange and Office because everybody is, right?
Yeah.
John:
So why are you bothering paying Slack?
John:
Because Slack is kind of expensive.
John:
Why don't you just use Teams?
John:
You get it for free with the thing you're already paying for.
John:
You're already paying for Exchange.
John:
You're already paying for Office.
John:
Guess what?
John:
Now you get Teams.
John:
No additional cost to you.
John:
It just comes free as part of the thing you're already paying for.
John:
And that caused pretty much every company that has anybody who's in charge of finances to stop paying for Slack and force everyone to change to Teams.
John:
Because they'd say, how much are we paying for Slack per year?
John:
How many millions of dollars are we paying for Slack every year?
John:
I can just cross that line item off the budget and I just save this company $1.5 million per year.
John:
And all I have to do is tell everybody, hey, you were using Slack, now you're using Teams.
John:
And this happened to me personally.
John:
And when it was happening to me, I complained to it by my friends and they all said, yeah, this is happening to me too.
John:
And so everybody said, all the employees were like, but we don't want to leave Slack.
John:
We love Slack.
John:
What about all our chats?
John:
What about this?
John:
What about that?
John:
All sorts of employee feedback sessions.
John:
But in the end, the CFO would just point to $1.5 million per year versus zero.
Yeah.
John:
and that was an unstoppable force that met the very movable object of employee dissatisfaction and so slack was phased out teams was phased in and the wailing of the masses who are forced to use teams which was and is incredibly buggy and was and is a pale shadow of slack happened across the entire universe and apparently and i didn't even know about this because i'm not paying too much attention after i left my jobby job in the eu they said that seems like anti-competitive behavior
John:
where you're using market power in one realm, like your office applications or exchange server or whatever, to gain leverage over another market, which is the market for these communication apps.
John:
Which, by the way, it totally is.
John:
Well, so I talked about it on Macedon a little bit, and a couple of people asked questions.
John:
I said, well, wait a second.
John:
How is Slack or Teams...
John:
separate from quote-unquote office because office includes like excel word outlook powerpoint sharepoint uh you know exchange server trigger warning yeah like but all like and but you're saying so
John:
Quote-unquote office software is one market, but things like Teams and Slack are a different market.
John:
And what I said to the person I was trying to say, I'm like, Microsoft would love for you to believe that all of these things are just quote-unquote office applications because office application is a flexible enough term to encompass anything anybody makes that is remotely useful to someone who works in an office.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And the fact is, historically, we have allowed this to go on to the point where Microsoft Office and the Office suite of applications or the 365, whatever they call it now, encompasses way more than it already should.
John:
But that's not a reason to say, OK, but they're allowed to do this to literally any other thing that, you know.
John:
So Slack had a product that people were using because they liked it and they charged people money for it.
John:
And Microsoft came in and said, we will leverage our existing market power to
John:
to essentially push you out of the market with a free application, Internet Explorer style, because free is better than paying.
John:
And while I do see why that's bad and it happened to me and it didn't feel good and it does feel anti-competitive, if you look at it from a logical perspective, what you say is, okay, but also I see other things that happened in the past that Microsoft did that were also bad.
John:
And I agree with that.
John:
Like, how did we let them draw a line around everything that is currently in Office 365 or whatever and say that is one market?
John:
I think that is the result of doing this same thing multiple times in the past and getting away with it.
John:
That's not a reason to let him get away with it again, but it is kind of perverse.
John:
So the reason I put this line item in here is like, okay, uh, EU did this thing and Microsoft is saying, we're going to do this for the whole world.
John:
EU made us split it out and charge money for it separately.
John:
Right.
John:
And now we're going to do it for the whole world.
John:
And this, this of course made me think of Apple, uh, in a couple of different ways.
John:
One, uh,
John:
self-regulation we've talked about this about apple many times apple the regulators are coming for it people are upset governments are upset how about you voluntarily do something to head them off of the past and apple's like nah i'd rather not become they're basically like make me make me do it well you know pass the law win the lawsuit like
John:
You know, come and make me.
John:
I'm not going to preemptively do something in the hopes that we'll keep you away.
John:
And this looks like Microsoft saying, oh, the EU made us do it.
John:
Maybe the US is going to make us do it.
John:
Why don't we just preemptively say, look, we already did it in the EU.
John:
Why don't we do it everywhere?
John:
It's kind of like if Apple said, you know what?
John:
Sideloading everywhere.
John:
The EU is making us do it.
John:
So we're just going to make it global.
John:
Apple has not done that.
John:
And arguably, Apple's also not done that in the EU either.
John:
But we'll see how that turns out.
John:
Right.
John:
So there's that one thing.
John:
But the second thing is I look at this and I say.
John:
Microsoft doing this now is like, OK, we use this strategy to push out Slack for years and we got away with it.
John:
Now that we've essentially won and Slack has been pushed out.
John:
Yeah, sure.
John:
Fine.
John:
We'll make it separate.
John:
It's like if you let Microsoft do this for, I don't know, five to ten years and they push out the competitor and, you know, hurt that company so badly that they essentially like all the companies that were going to use Teams simply because it's free.
John:
By now they have like they like the only ones still holding on to Slack are the few companies that can bear to see that line item or maybe they don't pay for Microsoft Office or whatever.
John:
Like, you know, it's like closing the barn door after the horse has already left.
John:
And so this is when I look at this, I'm like, do you see Apple?
John:
There's a different way to be evil.
John:
If you do the anti-competitive thing and get away with it for long enough, then you can, quote unquote, self-regulate.
John:
The first time you're forced to do this in any jurisdiction, all the EU forces to do it.
John:
Now we'll self-regulate and do it globally.
John:
Aren't we a good company?
John:
That is so much of a better, more shrewd strategy than what Apple is doing from my perspective because you get to have your cake and eat it too.
John:
They got to crush slack, right?
John:
They got to replace it in all these places.
John:
And now they also presumably will head off antitrust about this specific issue in any other country because you know what?
John:
The EU made us do it and we're voluntarily doing it every place else.
John:
That is just genius.
John:
Evil genius, but genius.
Marco:
I mean, Microsoft's really good at that.
Marco:
And Microsoft has also seen what the DOJ can do.
Marco:
They have been directly affected by it.
Marco:
And we can quibble about whether the big DOJ Microsoft case in the late 90s, like what that actually did or accomplished.
Marco:
But the reality is Microsoft had to deal with it for a long time, and it was a huge pain in their rear end.
Marco:
So they know what the DOJ can do.
Marco:
The difference here is that I think Microsoft, when they're doing things that are blatantly anti-competitive, they know it.
Marco:
Whereas Apple, I get the feeling still that Apple's upper leadership, and honestly many people in the company, but certainly the upper leadership, they are so convinced that they are completely entitled to do what they're doing.
Marco:
I don't think they even see the possibility yet that they could be wrong and that they could be forced to do other things.
Marco:
Even now that the EU has just forced them to do other things, you know, I still think, you know, Apple is still going to fight it tooth and nail.
Marco:
They're still going to never change their minds about what they are entitled to do.
Marco:
And I think it will take, you know, similar to what Microsoft has now, I think it will take a new generation of Apple leadership before we start to see them play better ball with regulators.
Marco:
I don't see that happening with the current leadership.
Marco:
And
Marco:
not only just like Tim Cook in particular, the current generation of leadership.
Marco:
Everyone at the Apple SVP level who is over, say, age 60, which is I think most of them, or at least like 55, there's like a one generation of Apple power that's really in right now.
Marco:
I think they will all have to go and be replaced before there's even a chance of the current entitlement culture being a little bit more pragmatic with the environment they're in now.
John:
I mean, that happened to Microsoft, too.
John:
Uh, and Nadella was like, I have a new idea about how Microsoft can be.
John:
And I feel like Nadella has also has a new idea of how to deal with regulation, uh, with this, you know, self-regulation after already getting most of the benefits of being monopoly.
John:
And by the way, I think don't quote me on this.
John:
You can read the article in the notes to find out the details, but I believe part of the thing of breaking it out separately, it was like all the companies that are currently getting it as part of their contract for office, their price doesn't change.
John:
So it's only, like, for new customers going forward, like, not only did we get all those wins and push Slack out, we're going to consolidate them.
John:
Because if they went to all those customers and say, oh, and by the way, now Teams costs an additional $1.5 million per year, the employees would say, hey, wait a second, that was $0 on the budget just went to $1.5 million.
John:
Can we just give that to Slack instead?
John:
And they would be much rejoicing.
John:
But that's not what they did, I think.
Casey:
Yeah, I don't know.
Casey:
As Marco said, or both of you really, I really wish that Apple had taken the initiative to self-regulate because I genuinely think if they showed even an ounce of – I don't know if contrition is really the word I'm looking for – but if they showed an ounce of responsibility and –
Casey:
conceded even the littlest bit that, hey, maybe we should pull back a little on our entitlement, which I know we've covered it a million times, but I'll say it again.
Casey:
I couldn't agree with Marco more that they feel entitled.
Casey:
And so if they had shown even just the teeniest bit of willingness to give on this, I genuinely think that there would be considerably less antitrust pressure globally.
Casey:
But because there being such petulant children about it,
Casey:
Here we are.
Casey:
And so, you know, F around and now they're finding out.
Casey:
So this is what happens.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And again, I think it will take a generation of their leadership to turn over before we see, you know, the Satya Nadella of Apple.
Marco:
Like, you know, the kind of like the newer generation, the more pragmatic for the current conditions kind of leader.
Marco:
Like, you know, you look at Apple now.
Marco:
And all those people who were in leadership positions at Apple now, in that upper leadership, they were there when Apple was the underdog.
Marco:
And so they still have so much of that underdog mindset.
Marco:
It's going to take the rising through the ranks and the time for a new generation of Apple leadership who came up while Apple was already the big dominant leader.
Marco:
honestly bully slash monopolist however you want to define it like it's it's going to take that that generation of leadership in the company to inherit power before we see meaningful change in this area because the current generation just will never ever see it that way I mean you know you made the comparison to Balmer and look I know Tim Cook did a better job by most measures than Steve Balmer but make no mistake Tim Cook is a Steve Balmer type doing a Steve Balmer role he's just doing it better
Marco:
But it's exactly the same kind of transition.
Marco:
And Tim Cook is exactly the same kind of leader in a lot of ways.
Marco:
He just does a better job of it than Balmer did.
John:
And he has better values, I would say.
John:
Balmer did not have a big environmental push.
Marco:
Yes, but Cook still has many of the same strengths and weaknesses.
John:
Yeah, it is definitely extension of because he came up with jobs like and hopefully Apple won't have to experience a Microsoft like transition because part of Adele's transition was that Microsoft was essentially a fading star, like the dominance of the place where it was dominant, like, you know, office and PCs and stuff like that.
John:
became less important, and all of Balmer's attempts to bring Microsoft into the future did not pan out.
John:
There was a lot of big acquisitions.
John:
All the attempts at mobile failed.
John:
Buying Nokia wasn't a great idea.
John:
The Skype purchase didn't... It was like other people were doing things, and Microsoft was trying to do things the old way, Windows and Office, but also new stuff, and it just... Windows everywhere, and it just wasn't working.
John:
I mean, Ben Thompson's written a lot about this, right?
John:
So the Nadella's takeover was kind of like...
John:
You should make me the new CEO because Microsoft, despite the stock price and the numbers that Balmer will point to to say, I've been a great CEO.
John:
Look at these numbers.
John:
And Tim Cook has even bigger numbers to point to.
John:
Despite all of that, the board could see that, look, Microsoft is not ascendant.
John:
Yes, they're making a lot of money, but they're making a lot of money.
John:
It's like a...
John:
a trailing indicator.
John:
Like they have a lot of existing businesses that have incredible amount of inertia and Baltimore was good at continuing to milk them and make tons of money and grow that business.
John:
But what does the future look like?
John:
And Microsoft had faded to the point where
John:
They wanted a new leader who could put the shine back on Microsoft.
John:
And I would hope that Apple doesn't have to get to that position where either the place where Apple was dominant becomes less important, which I don't think is any fear of happening anytime soon, or that Apple is not seen as having a future beyond the stuff that it has done.
John:
I don't think that has happened yet either.
John:
The generational thing was like, oh, Tim Cook will retire and all those people will retire.
John:
But I think for the I mean, that's the good thing about Apple, because if they don't screw things up and they certainly haven't again, Tim Cook has done amazing things with every metric you could possibly measure at Apple.
John:
If they don't screw things up.
John:
Maybe you just do need a generational turnover to say we're going to continue to do all the things that Apple used to do, but we don't be jerks about certain stuff.
John:
It's not a big change, but it is type of like you need a new sheriff in town, right?
John:
Or you need a big change of heart from Tim Cook, which doesn't seem to be forthcoming, right?
John:
so i really hope it's not like apple the fading star never got into holo headbands like their their vision pro was a flop but the whole headband from some company we never heard of is taking the world by storm and yeah apple still has the phone market but phones are less important now that we have holo headbands and you know what i mean like that's where microsoft was when adela took over and said it's not going to be the windows company anymore we're going to ship linux we're going to put our software on every platform like you know that strategy is
John:
Baltimore would never have done that.
John:
Gates would never have done that.
John:
And there's all sorts of things that Tim Cook would never have done.
John:
But honestly, I don't think Apple needs that kind of turnaround.
John:
They just need leadership that takes a different view of their place in the ecosystem that they've created.
John:
It's a course correction, not a revamp.
John:
Because if Apple gets to the point where it needs a revamp, that means things have gone really badly.
John:
I mean, that's where the...
John:
If they're 90 days from bankruptcy like they were in 97 or whatever, yeah, new leadership has a lot of leeway to do all sorts of great things.
John:
But I hope they don't get to that point.
Marco:
Well, I mean, so two clarifications on that.
Marco:
I mean, first of all, I think we – this story has yet to be finished, but we haven't seen how Apple is handling AI stuff yet.
Marco:
And so I think that is one area where –
Marco:
it could reveal problems if they really drop the ball on it.
Marco:
Now, we'll see what happens.
Marco:
Again, we have lots of strong rumors of big stuff coming in just a few short months, so we'll see.
Marco:
We don't know how that story ends yet, but that is one area where it is possible that Apple could still drop the ball and have a lot of the tech industry disrupt Apple's businesses by using that.
Marco:
So we'll see what happens there.
John:
But the reason I was thinking that wouldn't be as bad was because the thing that...
John:
really hurt microsoft was the rise of mobile yes and mobile is the thing right now so even if the current large language models are a big thing and apple falls really behind to them the phone is still the thing and yes the phone is less valuable it doesn't have a good llm you know what i mean like i can see how they could you know they can fall behind in this area but as long as they continue their iphone dominance at the same level or close to it
John:
That's why I gave the HoloHeadband fictional example.
John:
There's not some new realm of the tech sector, some new platform that is now the show.
John:
The phone will still be the show.
John:
Even with AI, it is a possibility that if they do such a bad job on AI, that will ding the iPhone or whatever.
John:
But there's so much else to recommend the iPhone that I don't think would hurt them that much.
John:
But maybe this is just me being in the large language model pessimism.
John:
They're very useful, and Apple should use that technology.
John:
Yeah.
John:
But I don't think it's so revolutionary that if Apple does a poor job of it, it's going to hurt the iPhone in the same way that mobile hurt the PC.
Marco:
I mean, we'll see.
Marco:
I think you're probably right.
Marco:
I mean, I always say don't put it against the smartphone.
Marco:
I think you're probably right.
Marco:
But this generation of modern AI techniques and the types of models that are being created and deployed now in really compelling ways in a lot of cases, I think this is the most credible attack yet on the smartphone.
Marco:
Because in many cases, we talked about in ATP Overtime a couple weeks ago, the Rabbit R1 and its idea of the large action model.
Marco:
And yeah, there's a lot of reasons right now where we're looking at version one of this and saying, well, that has all these shortcomings.
Marco:
It probably won't be very good.
Marco:
Here's why you might not want to use it or where it might fail.
Marco:
But this is version one.
Marco:
The things we're seeing – look at the Humane AI pin.
Marco:
That is something that I don't think has much of a use right now in what we see now.
Marco:
But that is also a direct attack on the smartphone.
Marco:
At some point, one of these attacks might actually succeed because we're seeing really only the very early versions of it.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
if one of those does eventually take off and start really undermining the smartphone in some way, Apple better be there, you know?
Marco:
And so I think that, that kind of bomber moment could happen to Apple.
Marco:
We can see it.
Marco:
We can see how it could happen.
Marco:
If it happens, if it comes from an area where Apple is not strong and I think, you know, we'll see how that goes.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So they're trying to go it on their own with pins and the little Playdate type thing.
John:
But those things just feel so naturally at home on a phone.
John:
And it remains to be seen, like we said, when we talked about the Apple AI stuff most recently.
John:
Is the AI stuff a commodity or is it a competitive advantage?
John:
Because if it's a commodity, Apple will just license it or make some of its own or whatever.
John:
But if it's a competitive advantage, how big is that advantage and how much does it weigh against all the other stuff?
John:
That's why I threw a whole headband out there because it's like, what if there's something that replaces the phone?
John:
But a lot of that AI stuff is going to be perfectly – its natural home is on the phone.
John:
It's the computing device that you already have that already has microphones.
John:
It already has cameras.
John:
It already is connected to the internet.
John:
You already pay for that connection.
John:
It already has a platform and software and CPUs in it.
John:
Like that's all the stuff you need and you just need to connect it to the AI large language model.
John:
And yeah, Apple could screw that up by being dumb and everyone else connects to a large language model and no one wants to license it to Apple or Apple has a cruddy one.
John:
But I just look at how much the terribleness of Siri has hurt the iPhone and the answer is not that much.
John:
Despite the fact that the voice assistants on every other platform have been better significantly for years, it hasn't really hurt the iPhone too much.
John:
So I still feel like the, I keep saying hollow headband and people are probably thinking I'm saying Vision Pro, but I'm trying to think of some fantastical future thing that obviates our need to hold rectangles with screens.
Marco:
Well, and so this actually leads me into the second refutation or kind of clarification I want to make on this whole topic is the way that I think we've all characterized it here and there in this conversation with Apple's behavior now.
Marco:
We've kind of said we wish they would let go a little bit or be a little bit nicer or more gracious with some of these App Store-related policies.
Marco:
The failure of leadership here is not that they are not being nice enough.
Marco:
And for them to ease up their grip a little bit on some of these areas would not be them being charitable.
Marco:
I think it's actually strategically the right move to have done that for lots of reasons that would generally benefit the company and its users and developers all because –
Marco:
The grip they have held has been so damaging to the entire ecosystem and to them and their products that has invited so much of this regulation.
Marco:
And the regulation comes with it the possibility to significantly negatively affect them.
Marco:
For instance, look at what the DOJ is asking for in their lawsuit.
Marco:
They're asking for some pretty significant changes to the way Apple makes integrated products.
Marco:
That is a massive attack on Apple's entire method of making products.
Marco:
It is a huge attack on key components of their operating system, their hardware, their integrations.
Marco:
If the DOJ gets what it wants, even if the DOJ only gets part of what it wants –
Marco:
It could really negatively impact Apple and for Apple's leadership to have basically driven the ship directly into this and invited these attacks from governments by being so incredibly anti-competitive in so many areas for so long.
Marco:
I think that shows a failure of leadership and a failure of strategy.
Marco:
When I say I wish Apple would have avoided some of this by loosening the grip a little bit, I'm not saying that they should have been nice, that they should have been charitable, that they should have been generous.
Marco:
No, I'm saying they actually made a strategic error that will cost them more in the long term in much larger areas.
John:
Yeah, we've been saying that for, it feels like for years now, but like the problem is Apple disagrees with us so clearly.
John:
So characterizing it the way we do of like that they should loosen their grip or they should be nicer is trying to tell them what behavior they should change.
John:
But the argument has always been Apple, if you do this, it will literally be better for you.
John:
And in the long run, right, which is which I've always said is supposed to be Apple's always going on about how like we take a long view.
John:
We don't care about the ROI.
John:
We do what's right.
John:
You know, that's and they have done.
John:
Apple has done.
John:
It's not just hype.
John:
Apple has done many, many things since the return of C jobs going on for decades, including in the Tim Cook era, decisions that are bad in the short term, but good in the long term.
John:
Apple does that all the time, except in this one area.
John:
And the reason is because they disagree with us.
John:
They don't think it's good in the long term.
John:
We obviously think it is, but we don't run Apple.
John:
So yeah, when we say they should be nicer, it's not because we were telling them to be magnanimous or to give up money or whatever.
John:
It's because we literally think it will make the company more money in the long run.
John:
Like so many other things that they have done that were sort of counter to conventional wisdom, counter to what their competitors were doing, that seemed like a bad move, that took years to come to fruition.
John:
So many of those are why Apple is where it is today.
John:
And we're trying to say, this is another one Apple, and they're saying they disagree.
John:
And what Marco was saying, if he was ready to make this reference, he could have.
John:
The more Apple tightens its grip, the more developers will slip through its fingers.
Marco:
We are brought to you this week by ATP members.
Marco:
Please consider becoming a member today.
Marco:
You probably are not one because one of the benefits of the member feeds...
Marco:
is that you don't hear ads like this or the other ad in this episode inserted into the show.
Marco:
You also get bonus content as a member.
Marco:
So not only do we have the roughly monthly specials we've been doing for various tech and non-tech topics, but now we've introduced recently ATP Overtime.
Marco:
Every single episode now has member-exclusive bonus content in the form of one extra tech topic that is stuck on the end of the show for members.
Marco:
So if you're a member, you get a little bit more ATP in every single episode, plus no ads.
Marco:
You also get access to the bootleg feed because our unedited live stream, many people love listening that way.
Marco:
You get to hear the raw uncut show.
Marco:
It's released sooner than the regular episode, and it includes extra stuff beating an end, managing the live stream and choosing titles and stuff like that.
Marco:
It's kind of fun.
Marco:
You also get access to some merchandise discounts when we do sales, little stuff like that here and there.
Marco:
But for the most part, what you're paying for with membership usually is the bonus content.
Marco:
People love it.
Marco:
See for yourself atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
And there you can see that you cost about eight bucks a month for membership.
Marco:
And you have annual plans available, different currencies available.
Marco:
But basically, it's eight bucks a month or close enough in your currency.
Marco:
Check it out today, atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
Please consider becoming a member today.
Marco:
It is the best way to support the show.
Marco:
It supports us directly.
Marco:
There's no middle people taking a cut.
Marco:
There's no indirect relationship.
Marco:
It's a direct relationship between you and us.
Marco:
You give us eight bucks a month or equivalent, and we give you bonus content and the rest of the podcast with no ads, basically.
Marco:
So check it out today, atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
Thank you so much for your consideration.
Marco:
And now back to the show.
Casey:
apple vision pro personas can now be 3d and float freely across different apps so reading from the verge starting uh what was it yesterday day before something like that uh starting today as verge writes vision pro personas will be able to do more than hover like a ghost and facetime calls now you can use them in share play enabled apps to collaborate play games or watch media with other people apple's calling this a spatial persona the idea is to make it feel like you're in the same physical space as another user
Casey:
It was part of what Apple showed in developer previews last year, but hasn't been available in the actual Persona beta until now.
Casey:
And I will point you to this week's Connected, where they discussed this and had a really good conversation about it.
Casey:
I do plan on trying this in the next couple of days.
Casey:
In fact, I was trying to get some time with Mike from Connected in order to try this before we recorded, and it just, our schedules didn't work out today.
Casey:
And I apologize to all of you for not having been able to make that work, but, you know, stuff happens.
Casey:
So yeah, check out Connected if you're interested in that.
Casey:
Marco, I'm assuming you haven't tried it because you never asked me to.
Casey:
I'm not sure how many people you know with Vision Pro.
Casey:
So what is your understanding here?
Marco:
You're right.
Marco:
I have not tried it.
Marco:
In fact, my Vision Pro is not even in my house right now.
Marco:
I actually lent it to a friend for a few days because I hardly ever use it.
Marco:
And I wish...
Marco:
I wish that this was not my answer to this question, but I don't think this is going to change my usage of the Vision Pro at all because, I mean, first of all, I still can't get it to look right with my eyes.
Marco:
I guess that's a me problem, just like how AirPods never fit me until the AirPods Pros.
Marco:
The Vision Pro does not work with my eyes.
Marco:
And I know it's not my eyes' fault because when I put on my son's $500 MetaQuest 3, everything is tack sharp.
Marco:
I can see every single sharp edge of all of those blocky pixels on those low-resolution screens with no adjustments.
Marco:
All I do, I crank the little head thing back because he's a kid, so he has a head smaller than mine.
Marco:
So I just crank the little head thing back to make it bigger, stick it on my head.
Marco:
No adjustments, no setup, perfectly sharp.
Marco:
And I put on the Vision Pro, no matter what I do with the Vision Pro, I've tried everything, believe me, everything I've tried.
Marco:
And it is a blurry mess.
Marco:
And so I have a very hard time using it for anything.
Marco:
But even if I get past that...
Marco:
I think this is, first of all, I have major concerns with the Vision Pro.
Marco:
I'll get to those in a little bit when we talk about the soccer video.
Marco:
But I'm not motivated to use it.
Marco:
I'm going weeks at a time without even putting it on because I'm just not finding those compelling use cases that fit into my life.
Casey:
Yeah, so recently, I don't know, maybe it was a couple of months back, I added a shortcut to, and I think we might have talked about this on the show, I added a shortcut to both my iPad and the kids' hand-me-down iPad that will send me a push notification when either of those iPads falls below 20% battery.
Casey:
And I did that because even though the iPad is not an essential device for me and is mostly not an essential device for the kids, I am never happy when it's completely discharged.
Casey:
And I would notice probably relatively quickly and probably at an inopportune moment.
Casey:
I have no idea what the battery state of my vision pro is ever.
Casey:
And that's mostly okay because I'm just not using it that much.
Casey:
And I think it's a few different reasons.
Casey:
Um, you guys covered this really well from a developer in like business perspective on under the radar, uh, or the most recent under the radar.
Casey:
Um, there's obviously more to it than just the business perspective, but, um, from a personal and user perspective, uh,
Casey:
I do very much like the product, and I think it is, as everyone has said, a technological marvel.
Casey:
I don't have a lot of occasions for it in my life.
Casey:
And I think a lot of that is because it's so immensely antisocial.
Casey:
I think Apple did as good a job as they possibly could with making it social, but inevitably you have a humongous set of goggles on your face between you and your eyes and between your eyes and the other person's eyes.
Casey:
And that's just never going to work.
Casey:
You're never going to be able to watch something together because, you know, my limited experience with SharePlay is not great.
Casey:
And what are you going to do?
Casey:
You're going to have one person looking at a TV and the other person looking at the Vision Pro in the same damn room?
Casey:
Like, that's... Yeah, Aaron, why don't you sit next to me with these idiotic goggles on my face while we watch this movie together because the fidelity on the Vision Pro, you just don't understand, honey.
Casey:
It's just that much better.
Casey:
Like, no, that's just...
Marco:
We're going to spend $7,000 on Visions Pro instead of just using our TV together.
Marco:
Right, right, right.
John:
And as we established, the fidelity actually isn't better if you have a 4K television, a decent 4K television that you're a reasonable distance from.
John:
Or a subwoofer.
Casey:
Yeah, right, exactly.
Casey:
So anyways, there are occasions when it is...
Casey:
freaking magical.
Casey:
And I really do mean that.
Casey:
I mean, I will forever and always be dumbfounded and incredibly impressed by Mac virtual display.
Casey:
And the handful of times I brought the Vision Pro to like the library to work, I have used the Mac virtual display and it is just chef's kiss.
Casey:
It is just incredible.
Casey:
I could not say enough good things about it.
Casey:
The problem, though, is that you're that idiot at the library wearing the Vision Pro.
Casey:
And so the only times I've been able to do it, because I just haven't had the gumption to do it otherwise, is when I'm in a private room that, granted, has glass walls behind me or whatever, but I'm facing an interior wall.
Casey:
And so the only thing that people can see as they walk by is the back of my head.
Casey:
And I am secluded from the rest of the library.
Casey:
And the other day, I went back to Wegmans to work for the first time in a long time.
Casey:
And it's really delightful at Wegmans.
Casey:
You know, there's really great Wi-Fi.
Casey:
Not to say our libraries are bad by any stretch.
Casey:
But anyways, Wegmans is really nice.
Casey:
It's got comfortable chairs, really great Wi-Fi, power all over the place.
Casey:
And, you know, if I'm thirsty or hungry or whatever, I can go and grab a snack.
Casey:
But I'm not going to use the Vision Pro there.
Casey:
Like, it's just, it's too look at me, look at me, you know.
Casey:
And so I haven't had a lot of places where I think to myself, you know what?
Casey:
Now is Vision Pro time.
Casey:
And the only times I can really think of, other than, you know, when I'm working privately, even in a public spot, is on the rare occasions that Erin has a social thing in the evening.
Casey:
So she's out, the kids are asleep.
Casey:
And then hell yeah, I'll put that on and watch a movie because I'll watch something in 3D, you know, or what have you, or I'll...
Casey:
do something along those lines.
Casey:
And that's pretty cool.
Casey:
And, and bringing us to the next topic, you know, the immersive stuff is just phenomenal, even though this new video kind of wasn't.
Casey:
So what am I talking about?
Casey:
So when Apple first debuted the vision pro, there were several immersive experiences.
Casey:
And again, just to set the table or set this, you know, the conversation, um,
Casey:
There's 3D where, you know, you're looking at, say, a rectangle, and there's depth to the images in that rectangle, right?
Casey:
But you can't change your perspective at all.
Casey:
You're still always looking at a fixed, you know, from a fixed camera, you're looking at something that now has depth in a way that my television on my wall does not, but it's still a rectangle.
Casey:
There's nothing you can do about that.
John:
And when you mean fixed camera, just to be clear, it's what you basically can't do is you can't move the camera forward or backwards, up or down, left or right.
John:
But you can rotate because the camera's field of view is larger than your field of view.
John:
So you can turn your head.
John:
Imagine your head.
John:
The camera is replaced with your head.
John:
You can turn your head.
John:
You can look up.
John:
You can look down.
John:
You can look up.
John:
You can look right.
John:
But you can't take a step forward.
Casey:
You can't take a step back.
Casey:
You're getting ahead of me.
Casey:
I'm talking about just vanilla 3D, like Marvel movies is what I'm saying.
John:
same answer though same answer if you're sitting close to the screen you can't ever change your perspective in a in a 3d movie same way like even if you're sitting in the front row you can turn your head to the left you can turn your head to the right you can look up you can look down but you can't take a step forward and see like more of the back of something like oh i can't see what's written on the side of that truck let me take two steps forward and now i can see it that's not how 3d movies work and that's not how vision pro 3d works for these things that recording
Casey:
Right, but just to make sure we're saying the same thing, 3D is when you're watching a Marvel movie or something along those lines, and there's depth to that movie in the way that there isn't depth in your TV.
Casey:
But you have zero control over the perspective of what you're looking at.
Casey:
You are along for the ride.
Casey:
With immersive stuff, and I think this is what you're describing, John, with immersive stuff, yes, you can...
Casey:
Turn your head.
Casey:
You can go up and down, left or right.
Casey:
And that will actively change what you're looking at.
Casey:
You are immersed in this environment.
Casey:
You have agency over where you're looking.
John:
Well, it's basically just because the screen is really wide and really tall.
Marco:
Yeah, because it's basically using like a 180 degree camera.
Marco:
It's like you're sitting extremely close to a very large 3D movie.
John:
It's a screen that wraps around you.
Marco:
Yeah, you still can't shift your head left or right and look around objects.
Marco:
That's not a thing you can do.
Marco:
You're still fixed in what you are seeing, but your field of view is way bigger.
John:
And the comparison in the Vision Pro world is the immersive environments that are 3D modeled where you can actually...
John:
Take one step forward before you go down right or tilt your head to the side I see around because those are 3d models and you're You're essentially changing the position of the camera because the camera is your eyes in those like immersive 3d model environments
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
So in any case, what we're talking about is when the Vision Pro was released, there were, I think, four, off the top of my head, immersive experiences.
Casey:
So there was a thing with a woman on a tightrope on a fjord in Norway, I guess.
Casey:
There was a completely computer animated dinosaur experience.
Casey:
This is not the thing that everyone got in the demo in June.
Casey:
This is like it's a video, effectively, but it's an immersive video so you can look around and change your perspective.
Casey:
There was a thing about rhinoceroses or something along those lines where this was a documentary, a very brief documentary.
Casey:
And then finally, there was the something like half an hour, 45 minute Alicia Keys concert where you're in a studio space and the perspective occasionally changes between cameras.
Casey:
But the point is you can look around and look.
Casey:
You know, if the bass player is just jamming out and doing something incredibly exciting, you can turn your head and watch the bass player, which is pretty freaking cool.
Casey:
So that was the only four things.
Casey:
And for the Rhino one and for the tightrope walking one, they were listed as episode one back in February two or whatever it was that this came out.
Casey:
And we still haven't gotten anything since.
Casey:
But last week, Apple released their immersive video sports film on Apple Vision Pro.
Casey:
And this was an immersive video featuring highlights from the 2023 Major League Soccer Cup playoffs.
Casey:
So this is the American soccer slash football, what the Brits would call football, playoffs and finals.
Casey:
And the first time I watched it,
Casey:
I was really, really disappointed by it.
Casey:
And it's been talked about a lot.
Casey:
I forget specifically where.
Casey:
Jason Snell talked about it at Six Colors a bit.
Casey:
And Ben Thompson talked about it on Stratechery a bit.
Casey:
And also, I think it was covered on Dithering, if I'm not mistaken.
Casey:
But the problem with the immersive video, the soccer video...
Casey:
is that it was edited like a commercial for regular old TV.
Casey:
So it was, oh, look over here.
Casey:
Change.
Casey:
Look over here.
Casey:
Oh, look at this thing.
Casey:
Now look at that thing.
Casey:
Now look at this thing.
Casey:
Now look at that thing, which is fine if you're watching something where you don't have any influence on what you're looking at.
Casey:
But so often I would be put in a situation where I'm, I'm maybe the players are walking onto the field on either side of me.
Casey:
You know, you're at the edge of the field, the perspective of the cameras at the edge of the field, the players are walking by you onto your left and to your right, going to the center of the field to do like a coin toss or whatever.
Casey:
And,
Casey:
And you're naturally panning and tilting your head, you know, and trying to see different things that are happening in the scene.
Casey:
And by the time you're just getting a feel for like, okay, I see the scene, I get what's going on here, and I'm now going to concentrate on wherever the video appears to want me to concentrate.
Casey:
Well, guess what?
Casey:
Now we're somewhere else.
Casey:
And what made it even worse was a lot of times there would be a soccer ball rolling down the field as people are kicking it down the field.
Casey:
And you would get this like view from way off in the corner and you'd be looking, oh, where's the soccer ball?
Casey:
There it is.
Casey:
All right, I'm gonna focus on the soccer ball, which is approximately, you know, down to my left.
Casey:
And then next thing you know, oh, now the soccer ball is over to my right.
Casey:
And it was infuriating.
Casey:
The second time I watched it, which was about an hour ago,
Casey:
Knowing what I was getting into, I liked it a lot more, but it's still really damn annoying because the whole point of immersive video where you can change the perspective by tilting your head all around is that you want to give that some space and some air to breathe, you know, and you want to be able to look where you want to freaking look.
Casey:
And the Alicia Keys thing did this so much better because they had, and I think we talked about this on the show, like several of these different
Casey:
cameras positioned throughout the studio space and they would cut between them but they would do it like every minute or two and so you can really settle in to where the camera is and look around and take in what you want to take in and yeah it occasionally was annoying if like you were positioned on one extreme end of the studio and that bassist who's just killing it is way on the other end of the studio so they're far away you know you can look over where they are but they're far away and that's
Casey:
annoying, but it's still nice that you have the space to settle in and look at what you want to look at.
Casey:
And with this, it was just rapid fire in a way that was extremely off-putting.
Casey:
So I have some quotes to read, but Marco, you said you did watch this, is that right?
Marco:
I have not.
Marco:
Because honestly, every time I've watched video on my Vision Pro, I've gotten eye strain and a headache, and I have to stop.
Marco:
Because again, I can't get it to be that sharp.
Marco:
And again, I've tried everything.
Marco:
I have tried the reader lenses.
Marco:
I've tried different settings.
Marco:
I've tried the different hacks for the face shields, having no face shield, different gaskets.
Marco:
I have tried everything.
Marco:
It doesn't look good enough.
Marco:
I would feel a lot better just watching something on a laptop.
Marco:
That being said, this isn't particularly for me because I'm not a sports person.
Marco:
I understand what people are saying and what you're saying about how it's edited like a traditional video and it's not really edited for the new format.
Marco:
And I forgive them for that for the very first teaser or whatever in most ways.
Marco:
I think the way that I have concerns,
Marco:
It points to the larger concern I have with the Vision Pro, which is, did no one at Apple think this was a problem?
Marco:
Like, did they watch it?
Marco:
Because so far, everyone who has watched it who knows sports and who knows the Vision Pro in our tech press group here, everyone's had the same feedback.
Marco:
Like, oh, yeah, this is not the right style for this.
Marco:
It's disorienting.
Marco:
It's not good.
Yeah.
Marco:
Did Apple not know that?
Marco:
Did they not put it through like a test audience of any kind?
John:
Right.
John:
Apple's a big company, though.
John:
And I think the evidence that Apple institutionally does know this is all the demos they actually gave and like the Vision Pro thing.
John:
All of those had like not just the Alicia Keys thing, but the type rocker, all those things had a stationary camera without lots of cuts.
John:
right they all they they must the people who made those must have understood that because there was such a variety of content in the short little demo and all of it was like the one thing that did move was like the like i said it was like the slow moving uh drone shot that you see in like the apple tv screensaver it's just so slowly like no fast movement no fast cuts like so somewhere in the organization probably in the vision pro team are people that know this now who put together this mls thing
John:
probably an entirely different set of people.
John:
And, you know, big companies, like people in one org aren't communicating with people in the other org, or if they are, they don't want to be told what to do.
John:
And that's where I give some forgiveness because it's like, look, the people who did this either...
John:
They hadn't taken on board the institutional knowledge that clearly exists in Apple related to Vision Pro stuff, or they had heard that advice but thought, well, but we've been cutting sports together for our entire career, so we know better, so we're going to try it like this, right?
John:
And there is a little bit of a dance here because the dance is between the person doing the editing and the person doing the watching.
John:
casey was watching in the way that he chose to watch immersive content which was finding the things that he wanted to look at and looking at them you could also look at immersive content without moving your head at all and just look at what's in front of you enjoy the 3d effect which is way some other people may do it obviously they haven't worked out the kinks here but i think
John:
maybe they maybe if this this knowledge was communicated maybe the sports people said well that's too limiting yeah that works fine for your demo or you have a locked off camera and you change perspective you change from one camera to another once every 90 seconds but that's not going to work for an exciting sports thing and by the way i think the biggest problem with the sports thing was that it was a five minute highlight reel uh that is not teasing you for any longer content because there is no longer content yeah
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
And it's a five-minute highlight reel for games that happened last year.
John:
It's a highlight reel.
John:
Wouldn't it be great when you can watch the whole game in immersive video?
John:
You can't.
John:
So, anyway.
John:
But, yeah.
John:
So, I hope this is just one of those stunning looks.
John:
But I will point out that... So, this...
John:
how to handle making things exciting in video while also making it trackable is also a thing in 2d video and despite the by this point 100 plus years of making moving pictures and how to edit them still people get it wrong and even like the most recent example i was thinking about this casey when you were saying looking at the base player looking off to the side of the soccer ball um the most recent example that people know from
John:
being on the internet and reading various articles and reviews about it is Mad Max Fury Road.
John:
Have either of you saw this movie?
John:
Casey must have seen it, right?
Casey:
I've seen – actually just rewatched it maybe a month ago.
Casey:
Marco, have you seen it?
John:
Of course not.
John:
Okay.
John:
Anyway, when that movie first came out, one of the many genres of like sort of –
John:
press surrounding the movie was about the director and specifically about a technique the director used and i'm sure there's youtube video showing it where uh there's lots of quick cuts and lots of action it's an action movie people are fighting and jumping and crashing cars and shooting and doing all sorts of stuff like that and it does use a lot of fast cuts and the technique the director used to make it so that the audience doesn't get lost is that
John:
when they would do cut cut cut from one one camera to another camera another camera another perspective another perspective he would doggedly keep the most interesting thing that you needed to look at dead center in the frame which is not a thing most people do most people are like yo we're gonna compose the image on my frame and i'll use rule of thirds and i'll try to guide the eye to this thing or whatever but
John:
uh george miller i think that's the direction i correctly realized that if i'm going to do lots of fast cuts in action i want people to track it i don't want them to have to every time there's a cut figure out where the point of interest in this frame is so we kept it dead center which artistically seems like isn't that so super boring like you're drawing a bullseye and you're like look when we go to this camera whatever i want them to look at i want them to see this hand punching this face i want to see this knife being stabbed in this direction i want to see this guy
John:
Just put a dead center in the frame so you can put your eyes in the center of the movie screen or your television screen and endure incredibly fast, exciting cuts and never have to move your eyes.
John:
Because whatever they wanted you to see, most importantly, was dead center in the frame.
John:
And maybe those frames aren't as artistically interesting if they had been composed in a more painterly manner or whatever.
John:
But it allows very fast action to be more easily tracked by the people watching it.
John:
It doesn't require them to do anything interesting.
John:
So I would say that if you go into these immersive things and you never move your head and you keep your eyes dead center, A, you're...
John:
sacrificing one of the things that's cool immersive video but b i bet they would actually work better right you don't get to look at what you want as cool but at least you'll survive the cut so maybe casey i was going to ask you the second time you watch it did you move your head less
Casey:
Probably, yeah.
Casey:
I didn't think about it consciously, but yes, probably.
Casey:
It's too bad, too, because I am a very enthusiastic viewer of concert videos.
Casey:
You know, in Plex, I have probably a couple hundred different concert videos, and only maybe a hundred of them are Dave Matthews concerts.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
But anyway, I really enjoy a concert film.
Casey:
I really, truly do.
Casey:
And I would consider a Hamilton, for example.
Casey:
I know it's not a concert, but I don't think it's too dissimilar.
Casey:
And I love a concert film.
Casey:
I love watching certain sports.
Casey:
And one of...
Casey:
the most... Did we talk about this on the show?
Casey:
I don't recall if we have.
Casey:
But one of the just... The most... And I hate the way they use this term, but the most blow-away experiences I've had in the Vision Pro was when I used the app, which is currently in beta.
Casey:
I believe it's called Vroom.
Casey:
I don't know if I'll be able to put my hands on a test flight link or not because...
Casey:
It's test flight only at the moment.
Casey:
But what Vroom does is it lets you use your F1 TV subscriptions.
Casey:
This is where you pay to get, you know, kind of like to get the F1 season that you can stream, you know, and watch later or watch live or what have you.
Casey:
And F1 being super nerdy is all about data.
Casey:
And so they have immense amounts of telemetry that you can get from F1 TV.
Casey:
They have camera feeds and audio feeds for every single car on the racetrack.
Casey:
They have obviously the footage that's being broadcast on, say, ESPN if you're here in the States.
Casey:
Well, what Vroom does is it says, all right, we're going to take the main feed and put it dead center in a rectangle right in front of your face.
Casey:
But you can optionally add several other...
Casey:
panels around it.
Casey:
So you can do, I believe you could do two panels to the left of the main panel and two panels to the right of the main panel.
Casey:
So you now have six panels.
Casey:
So you have your main feed that's jumping between, you know, all the different racers and whatnot.
Casey:
And then upper left, you have your favorite driver.
Casey:
Bottom left, you have that driver's teammate because there's, you know, two drivers per team.
Casey:
And then maybe upper right, you have your rival.
Casey:
And bottom right, you have their teammate or, you know, however you want to do it.
Casey:
And then even cooler is below all this, you can optionally put a 3D rendering of the racetrack.
Casey:
And you can see little dots racing around the racetrack.
Casey:
I cannot overstate how incredibly f***ing cool this was.
Casey:
It is unbelievable how cool it is.
Casey:
And that's a thing that you can do.
Casey:
There's an app called Multiviewer for the desktop that works okay, but I've tried it in the past and I have not had a good experience with it.
Casey:
You can't do this near as well on a desktop as you can with the Vision Pro.
Casey:
And the...
Casey:
These moments, and that's not immersive at all.
Casey:
Well, it's not really immersive in the way we're talking about.
Casey:
But a concert, an immersive concert, is amazing.
Casey:
When you watch immersive sports, granted, I'm getting all these damn cuts all the time, but for the three seconds before another cut happens, it's incredible.
Casey:
And for me...
Casey:
I don't feel like I'm just up close to a screen the way that two of you guys have described it.
Casey:
To me, I feel like I'm frigging there.
Casey:
I really, really do.
Casey:
And at the end, you're in the locker room and the team is celebrating.
Casey:
And I'm glad I actually watched it again because I could swear that all these dudes had Vision Pros on even though they're spraying champagne at each other and I was deeply confused by it.
Casey:
It turns out they just have some sort of goggles on.
Casey:
I don't know why.
Casey:
I don't know enough about soccer to know why those goggles were there in the first place.
Casey:
But regardless...
Casey:
In any case, you feel like you're there.
Casey:
You feel like you're in the locker room.
Casey:
You feel like you're about to get sprayed with champagne.
Casey:
It is immersive.
Casey:
That's why they call it that.
Casey:
And it has so much potential.
Casey:
It would be amazing.
Casey:
Unreal.
Casey:
And I think Ben in particular has been banging this drum for a while.
Casey:
It would be unreal to have, say, courtside seats in an NBA game.
Casey:
Just unreal.
Casey:
Because you can look up at the Jumbotron if you want.
Casey:
You can look at where the action is.
Casey:
I don't know if this could happen live.
Casey:
And certainly, given that it took like three or four months for this to get put together after the MLS season ended...
Casey:
I don't know if it would happen in a timely fashion, but if it could, holy freaking smokes, it's amazing.
Casey:
So let me quickly read a couple of summaries from Ben and Jason because I think it's relevant.
Casey:
Jason writes, as you might expect from the runtime, this video is a highlight package with lots of quick cuts.
Casey:
Video is all about quick cuts, but immersive video doesn't work with quick cuts, I don't think.
Casey:
Several times during the MLS highlights video, my head was turned in one direction, taking advantage of the 180-degree immersive space to watch something happening off to my left or right.
Casey:
only for the vantage point to change to a different perspective.
Casey:
Now I was staring at nothing.
Casey:
It would take a few seconds for me to scan my surroundings and reorient, oftentimes a delay that led me to miss the highlight I was meant to be viewing.
Casey:
Ben writes, in short, this video was created by a team that had zero understanding of the Fission Pro or why sports fans might be so excited about it.
Casey:
I never got the opportunity to feel like I was at one of these games because the moment I started to feel the atmosphere, some amount of immersion, there was another cut.
Casey:
And frankly, the cuts were so fast, I rarely, if ever, felt anything.
Casey:
This edit may have been perfect for traditional 2D video posted to YouTube.
Casey:
The entire point of immersive video on the Vision Pro, though, is that it is an entirely new kind of experience that requires an entirely new approach.
Casey:
Now, to jump in for a second, I cannot overstate this enough.
Casey:
Like, it is unlike anything I have done with just a 2D rectangle.
Casey:
No matter how great my 2D rectangle is, which my TV is pretty good, and it certainly was really good back in 2019 when I got it, this is just a whole different level.
Casey:
So Ben continues...
John:
Well, just to be quick, it's because it's 3D.
John:
It's showing a different picture to your left and your right eye.
John:
So the comparison to a movie screen would be if you were seeing Avatar in 3D with the stupid 3D glasses and you were up close to the screen and you could turn your head left to the right.
John:
That would be the closest analogy.
John:
But as we said when we talked about the Vision Pro originally, the difference is the Vision Pro doesn't cut the brightness in half.
John:
for each of your eyes because of the stupid polarized lenses.
Casey:
But again, it's more though.
Casey:
It's so much more than that though.
Casey:
I really think you're underselling it when you say that because with Avatar in 3D, you don't get to change your perspective.
Casey:
The perspective is your perspective.
John:
But you just established that you don't get to change your perspective in the immersive video.
John:
You can turn your head only.
John:
If Avatar was in 3D and you didn't have to wear polarized glasses, like if you could see Avatar, it's basically like Avatar in the Vision Pro, but it wrapped around you like it wasn't a rectangle in front.
John:
It's just essentially a screen wrapped around you spherically
John:
Different picture for left and right eye.
John:
No brightness loss and a high resolution.
John:
And that's not, I mean, I'm not saying just that because that is significant and that's why it is so profoundly different feeling, but it is essentially just different picture to your left and right eye.
John:
i i i hear what you're saying and that may be technically accurate but the experience of it is vastly different than that oh yeah because it's no it's not flickery it's not no but you're too hung up john it's wrapped around you you're too hung up on the the technical aspects but but that but that's that is the difference that is that that is why it feels and i felt the difference myself i've watched tons of 3d movies and like i said when i talk to the vision pro it feels different it's kind of like the touch screen on the iphone felt different well it's just a touch screen just more responsive yeah but
John:
But when you cross this threshold, something happens that makes it feel different to your point.
John:
And I think that's the Vision Pro.
Casey:
And I think the thing is that if you put me in an IMAX theater with, let's suppose I had perfect, no brightness altering glasses so that I got a perfect view of this IMAX screen that's wrapping all around me.
Casey:
I still would be hard-pressed to feel like it would hit quite as well as the Vision Pro does.
John:
But that technology doesn't exist.
John:
That's why you've never felt that there.
John:
Well, even still.
Casey:
Even still.
Casey:
Like, it really is.
John:
I cannot stress enough how much it is.
John:
I mean, that technology is just, that's the headset.
John:
That is the, it's a pair of glasses with no brightness cut off and high resolution.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
But all I'm saying is, even if you're imagining like a 3D movie where it wraps around you, I genuinely, to me anyway, feel like it's more than just that.
Casey:
Well, anyway, to finish up, Ben continues, today is April 1, 2024.
Casey:
The Vision Pro is available to customers on February 2.
Casey:
In other words, it has been just short of two months, and there isn't an episode two of any of these videos.
Casey:
There is, as noted, only one additional immersive video, that MLS highlight reel, that I'm so disappointed by.
Casey:
This is frankly bizarre, given that immersive video is arguably the single most important thing in terms of standing up the Vision Pro ecosystem.
Casey:
Maybe this is all still going to happen, but it is baffling to me that there's been such a paucity of new immersive content from Apple.
Casey:
But maybe this MLS clip explains why.
Casey:
Apple has what I think is compelling footage, but they didn't release it until it had been heavily edited because I guess they thought it looked better that way, even though I think it looks worse.
Casey:
This is the antithesis of a highly iterative experimental approach to figure out what works, but perhaps Apple isn't as capable of that as we might have hoped.
John:
I think the explanation of this is, you know, the sort of slow start is mostly explained by the fact that Apple hasn't sold a lot of these.
John:
And so the amount of money, I feel like it's a penny pinching way to do things.
John:
But say, look, why are we going to spend millions and millions of dollars doing production on this stuff when we know the total potential audience, the TAM, as they would say in business speak, total addressable market?
John:
It's so incredibly small that it's a rounding error because we just haven't sold that many of these stupid headsets.
John:
So it's like, wait, how much are we spending per Vision Pro user to make this sports video?
John:
And what I would say to Apple and what Apple would say to itself, I was like, well, it's chicken egg.
John:
Like, you're never going to get more Vision Pro users if you don't make those videos.
John:
But I know you don't want to make those videos at a cost of $1,000 per Vision Pro user or whatever it is, right?
John:
And so, yeah, Ben's point is like, they need to do it if only to get better at it.
John:
or at least to spread the knowledge about how to be good at, to spread that around and to work out the things.
John:
But I still currently, I may be proven wrong, but I still currently believe that Apple does have pipelines of Vision Pro immersive content going.
John:
We just haven't seen any of those pipelines push the first things out the end.
John:
This thing seems like a one-off or whatever, but I feel like those pipelines are currently ramping up and running, and I think they will start spewing forth content maybe sometime in the middle of the year or next year.
John:
And is that part of Apple's plan?
John:
Did they plan to have those pipelines coming out sooner?
John:
If they had gotten NFL Sunday ticket, would it have changed their plans?
John:
Are they waiting until they have a few more Vision Pros sold?
John:
Are they waiting until version two?
John:
Like there's all sorts of explanations that you might have for this.
John:
From the outside, it definitely looks like a miss.
John:
And it looks like a miss to people who own Vision Pros, right?
John:
Because they're like, I bought this thing.
John:
It's sitting in my house.
John:
I would like to be able to use it for something.
John:
And Apple's like, yeah, yeah, we're going to do it.
John:
Hopefully they're saying we're getting to it and they're not saying, oh, we never actually planned to make any immersive content.
John:
We assumed developers would do it because they love us.
Marco:
I mean, first of all, I think there probably is some of that for sure.
Marco:
I hope not.
Marco:
I hope not too.
Marco:
But it's very difficult to look at the Vision Pro launch so far.
Marco:
Here we are two months out.
Marco:
To look at the Vision Pro launch so far and say, this is going the way it was supposed to.
Marco:
I have a really hard time believing that.
Marco:
This is kind of a weird time in the sense that we haven't seen WWDC yet.
Marco:
However, that being said, given that it seems like Vision OS is just barely done now, I honestly don't expect a lot from what they're probably going to call Vision OS 2, which will probably be debuting at WWDC and then coming out this fall.
Marco:
I wouldn't expect much from Vision OS 2.
John:
I think VisionOS 2.0 will come up with the App Store, right?
Marco:
Because the thing is, if you look at, again, where it is now, it launched basically halfway through this Apple product year.
Marco:
It's barely at a 1.1 now, but at
Marco:
logically it's kind of still a 1.0 product it's it barely is there now and so i don't see it somehow getting like massively more mature in the next two months that that just seems too aggressive software wise so i don't think if you look at where it is now product wise i wouldn't expect massive upgrades for 2.0 okay what about apps
Marco:
Well, as I talked about on Under the Radar, as Casey mentioned, from a developer's point of view right now, the install base of Vision Pro owners is just so tiny.
Marco:
And it seems like very few apps really make sense on it right now that it's very difficult as a developer to justify working on it and porting an app or bringing an app or writing a new app to it.
Marco:
there's really not much reason for developers to give any attention right now.
Marco:
Okay, so that kind of rules up developers.
Marco:
So there's also not that many apps for it.
Marco:
That kind of harms the computing angle.
Marco:
So then that brings us back to content.
Marco:
Okay, where's the content?
Marco:
That's still a big question mark.
Marco:
And, you know, John, I hope you're right that there's just a big pipeline and we're seeing none of it yet.
Marco:
But I keep going back to...
Marco:
Why did they launch it?
Marco:
Most of the content that was there on day one, which is almost all of the content that is still there now, that was mostly what they had last June when they were doing the press demos.
Marco:
It seems like they haven't really put out much new content in not two months, but like seven months.
Marco:
I don't know what they're waiting for.
Marco:
They have this big splash and they launched this big product and it's been crickets since then.
Marco:
There's no apps.
Marco:
There's no content.
Marco:
There's no users.
Marco:
It's very difficult for me to look at it right now and to see Apple putting what is necessary into this to make it succeed.
Marco:
It seems like they put it out there almost reluctantly.
Marco:
And they just kind of hoped things would support it.
Marco:
And that's not going to happen because of the volumes and everything.
Marco:
So Apple has to support it.
Marco:
And where is that support?
Marco:
I don't see it.
Marco:
It seems like Apple itself is not giving the Vision Pro what it needs to succeed.
Casey:
I don't know what you're talking about, Marco, because I have almost earned back the cost of my developer strap from all of my calls and sales.
Casey:
Almost.
Casey:
$260, baby.
Casey:
So I actually, what, I have another $100 to go?
Casey:
$150 to go?
Casey:
Something like that?
John:
Don't forget tax.
John:
The thing about the Vision Pro is it is a new product and platform.
John:
And so...
John:
I mean, first, I still do think there's a pipeline there and everything.
John:
And the fact that it's such an expensive product, the pipeline could have been intentionally set up such that it doesn't really start pushing the content until they get the cheaper version out or whatever.
Marco:
But that just screws everyone who buys it now.
Marco:
Honestly, if you ask me, who should buy the Vision Pro right now?
Marco:
My honest answer is nobody.
Marco:
I wouldn't say that.
Marco:
I would.
Marco:
Honestly, the more I've owned it, the more I've shown it to other people, the more we see that there's no content.
Marco:
Who should buy the Vision Pro right now?
Marco:
My answer really is nobody.
Casey:
I would disagree.
Casey:
I think it's frequent travelers who do not care about being that person.
Marco:
But it sucks as a travel device.
Marco:
It's too big and clunky.
John:
There's nothing equivalent to that except for other similar VR products.
John:
Like the VR experience in a plane, you need a VR thing to do.
John:
And the Vision Pro is an expensive one, and there are a couple of cheaper ones that are similar, but...
John:
I can see that.
John:
It's an early adopter product at this point, but the reason I mentioned it being a new product is because one of the things that is often true about new products at regular companies, and this may or may not be true at Apple, I've never worked there so I don't know, is that new products have plans about their launch with predictions about what will happen.
John:
And very often, the thing that happens next depends on how closely that product matched the predictions.
John:
So unlike something like the iPhone that doesn't really have to prove itself in the market because people continue to buy iPhones or whatever, they just really need to not screw up, right?
John:
This thing needs to come out.
John:
And they said, and we think when this thing comes out, we're going to sell this many this fast.
John:
And assuming we do that, then that will trigger this pipeline to start churning on this video or whatever.
John:
And it could be that this new product has not met Apple's internal expectations, which has caused them to slow down on their, like, hold your horses on those plans.
John:
Yeah, we were going to invest $200 million into sports content starting on the day of the launch.
John:
If the launch went like X, but the launch was 10 times worse than we thought it would be.
John:
So maybe we'll hold back on that.
John:
Maybe the new plan is we'll hold back on that until the cheaper one comes or whatever.
John:
Because it's a new product, I think there may be benchmarks that it had to pass in order to get it that next stuff ASAP.
John:
And the reason I think about this is something that came up earlier in the show.
John:
Podcast transcriptions.
John:
Doing that podcast transcription stuff is expensive.
John:
It's as expensive as probably spinning up one small pipeline of Vision Pro stuff, right?
John:
And that's for a free application, right?
John:
You know, Apple Podcasts is not, despite the premium podcast thing they rolled out, I don't think is a huge moneymaker, right?
John:
But because it's part of the iPhone, and it's just like, this is just another thing that makes iPhones valuable.
John:
The iPhone is established product.
John:
The iPhone, they're going to sell an expected number of them.
John:
And so someone had to get the budget to say, hey, we want to do podcast transcriptions.
John:
Here's how much it's going to cost every year forever and ever.
John:
Like to transcribe every single podcast.
John:
Here's how much it's costing computing or whatever.
John:
And what is that offset by?
John:
We think it will make the iPhone more valuable.
John:
No, we're not going to charge for this.
John:
It's going to be free for everybody.
John:
The podcast app is going to be free in the app store, right?
John:
We're just going to do it for free for now anyway, right?
John:
That is a big difference, but it does show that Apple, when it has a product that is performing as expected, is willing to put a fairly large amount of money into it, even with no return.
John:
Whereas this is saying, okay, why don't you just put a large amount of money in because it's going to make people buy more Vision Pros.
John:
And it smells to me like either the pipeline was always super delayed and they were aiming for when they get the cheaper one, or they were going to go like gangbusters until they saw the first month of sales.
John:
And they're like, you didn't hit expectations, Vision Pro, you know, executive.
John:
and so you're we're switching to the slower plan the plan that that that spaces out the content production so that it lands closer to when we have version two or three of this and it's cheaper or whatever with apple secrecy we don't know which one of these things is right but what we do know is out here as people who own vision pros it doesn't feel good it feels like you got a product and you're not sure what to do with it and it costs you a lot of money and it's disappointing and i think that is
John:
Part of the risk of being an early adopter, it's a new platform.
John:
You don't know how it's going to do.
John:
You took the risk right along with Apple.
John:
You paid the money.
John:
You got the thing.
John:
By the time content appears, maybe version two is out, and you're like, oh, man, I really want version two, but I already spent all this money in version one.
John:
You know, it's tough launching a product.
John:
Not every product is guaranteed to be a success, but I think for the most part, Apple still has at least as much faith in this as they did in, for example, the Apple Watch, and they're going to keep...
John:
churning on it despite the fairly slow launch is this slow launch slower than they expected or is it exactly as slow as they expected we don't know because again they're not sharing their uh numbers with us we did know that there was a ceiling on how much they could make just because of the screens and it seems like even if that ceiling wasn't there they probably wouldn't have sold anymore but it's a 3500 weird headset that you have to like
John:
get special try on stuff and deal with prescription stuff and like the barriers to purchasing are high so we are very far from the iphone 6 moment we're not even at the the iphone os 2.0 app store moment that was a joke about the app store yes the vision of us already comes with the app store but you might be forgiven for thinking that it doesn't and what did ios ios firmware 2.0 come with uh ios firmware 2.0 came with
John:
not too much past 1.0 but it did have the app store and that was a big thing so i also have very low expectations for vision os 2.0 at wwdc but i continue to think that if apple sticks it out with vision pro the year you should pick your head back i tell everyone so they should go do the free demo because why wouldn't you get using expensive product for free and it's really cool and to casey's point it does feel like nothing you've ever done before unless you've used another headset right and
John:
uh and then wait a year or two and see how this shakes up because version two and three of this are going to be better but i honestly don't even think the one that's really better than this is going to be out for several years because i think first they'll do the cheaper one that's about as good and then you'll get the more expensive one or the equally expensive one that's better and you know it's going to take a while for this ball to get rolling if it starts rolling at all and then we'll find out how big this ball is to torture this analogy yeah
John:
The Apple Watch did take off a lot faster than people expected, but it still seemed like it took years of the Apple Watch kind of wandering the wilderness until people settled on, you know, it's a rich person's fitness tracker.
John:
And that turns out to be a fairly lucrative niche, but it took a while to get there.
John:
So as someone who didn't spend $3,500 on this, I'm willing to give it time to grow.
John:
And I'm going to check back in on it each year and see how it's doing.
John:
And I don't have the bitterness of someone who bought one of these things.
John:
Uh, especially if you bought it for development purposes and now you sold two copies of your application, but you know, welcome to my world.
Casey:
You know, for the record, I'm, I'm not currently bitter about it.
Casey:
I mean, I'm bitter in general that it's so damn expensive, but I mean, I knew it going in and I'm not currently.
John:
And you didn't, you didn't even charge extra for your vision pro thing.
John:
You're just leaving literally dozens of dollars on the table.
Yeah.
Casey:
I mean, yes, that is true.
Casey:
I'm not bitter about it.
Casey:
And I think the thing, if I'm bitter about anything, it's that there is, to my eyes, an immense amount of potential here.
Casey:
And I can't get a good read, Marco, if you would agree with that or not.
Casey:
I'll give you a chance in a second.
Casey:
But I think there's an immense amount of potential here.
Casey:
And there are moments where it is...
Casey:
I mean, life-changing is dramatic.
Casey:
I wouldn't say that.
Casey:
But I cannot—I mean, like, that Vroom app, it is unreal.
Casey:
And I don't particularly want to watch F1 any other way.
Casey:
I literally will sit in the family room, if that's where everyone happens to be, such that I am available to people, and I will put the Vision Pro on to watch F1.
Casey:
Even if F1 is showing on the TV right there, the same thing I was making fun of people, you know, this hypothetical of me saying to Aaron, oh, I'm going to be in my Vision Pro.
Casey:
I literally would do that for Vroom because it is that much better.
Casey:
It is that incredible.
Casey:
Anything else, I wouldn't bother.
Casey:
Like 3D avatar, eh, I wouldn't bother.
Casey:
I just watched it on the TV.
Casey:
But nevertheless, there are so many things about this device that are unreal.
Casey:
Again, Mac virtual display for me and for my eyes in a literal and figurative sense is incredible.
Casey:
the immersive stuff, if we can get more of it is incredible.
Casey:
The Vroom app, as silly as it is to keep harping on this, it is that incredible.
Casey:
So there's so much potential here and I don't regret having bought it, but knowing what I know now is,
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Like, I think it was a professional responsibility, especially for the show, but into some degree for call sheet to buy one.
Casey:
But leaving that aside, I don't think it would have been a smart purchase.
Casey:
And I don't think I would have purchased it were it not for my professional obligations.
Casey:
But I don't know, Marco, do you see potential here?
Casey:
Do you think it's just a complete waste?
Marco:
I think it is possible for this product to succeed, but I am not yet seeing any evidence that Apple will be able to do what it takes to make it succeed.
Marco:
So what I think it will take is Apple needs to...
Marco:
dramatically over invest in it in a way that does not make financial sense directly in terms of content apps games you know because what they've made here is a really great technology product that has absolutely nothing in its ecosystem there is no content there are no games there are no apps there are no users
Marco:
How do you solve this?
Marco:
You seed it somehow.
Marco:
You invest money up front as the maker of the hardware to fund the creation of content to get users to buy it.
Marco:
And eventually, if you succeed at doing that, then you can start relying more on third-party investment.
John:
Like with Apple TV+, another great example.
John:
They put so much money up front to millions of dollars to make those TV shows so people would buy their service.
John:
And that was a huge upfront investment that only probably now has started to finally pay off in terms of getting subscribers.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
But what they have here is a totally clean slate that is...
Marco:
empty like when you turn that dial and you are put into the you know the the mount hood environment and you just hear the wind blowing by that's what the content ecosystem is like it's an empty field that just wind is blowing by and there's nothing there even the environments there's still the two that are coming soon that aren't even there yet like didn't say what soon meant no like i i
Marco:
it seems like nothing is coming.
Marco:
And so hopefully I'm wrong.
Marco:
I'm just saying that's how it looks as an outsider and as an owner of this device.
Marco:
It seems like nothing's there and nothing's coming.
Marco:
And I can tell you for sure from the developer side, there's no reason to bring anything there.
Marco:
So Apple needs to...
Marco:
Apple needs to see that ecosystem themselves.
Marco:
They need to maybe pay developers to make apps for it, maybe make more apps themselves.
Marco:
Even Apple's own apps are barely there.
Marco:
They have many of their own apps that are still in iPad compatibility mode for it or that aren't there at all.
Marco:
So it seems like even Apple...
Marco:
isn't visibly investing in the content ecosystem maybe they are behind the scenes and we haven't heard about it but it sure looks like they don't have their foot on the gas either and one thing i have learned over the years is to not care about any of apple's products more than apple cares about them that that is a recipe for heartache see also the home pod and so whenever apple doesn't care about a product that much i shouldn't either
Marco:
And so far, it seems like we are just waiting for Apple to start investing in the content ecosystem of this.
Marco:
And until they do, I don't know why we should.
Marco:
So I'm very pessimistic on this product right now because I don't see the evidence that they're going to be able to do what it takes to make it succeed.
Marco:
And right now, the way it looks right now today, I would be surprised if they ever launched another Vision Pro product.
Marco:
Oh, I don't know about that.
Marco:
Now, hopefully that's wrong.
Marco:
But that's just how it looks now, two months in.
Marco:
Again, this is still early days.
Marco:
But where are the signs that they are investing in what it will take to make this succeed?
Marco:
Right now, I don't see those signs.
Marco:
That's my concern, is that it seems like even Apple is having trouble justifying making software or content for this.
Marco:
And if they can't even figure out the reason, then we sure can't.
Marco:
So everything that I've said that I wanted – before this came out, I was very excited about it.
Marco:
Everything I've said that I want to do with it, all the possible applications for it that I think I will have –
Marco:
That all depends on software and content coming out for it.
Marco:
That can't happen yet because it makes no sense to get there until Apple really pushes and seeds the ecosystem themselves.
Marco:
So everything I hope this device could do, I still hope it can do it.
Marco:
But today it can't.
Marco:
Maybe someday it will.
Marco:
We just have to see what Apple will do to invest in it.
Marco:
And right now we're not seeing nearly enough of that.
Marco:
So hopefully I'm wrong or hopefully it'll turn it around.
Marco:
And we'll be looking back on this in a year and laughing.
Marco:
As of today, right now, I think this product is a massive failure.
Marco:
So I really hope that that is turned around soon.
John:
I've always been on the three-year mindset for this product because I didn't think like everyone's like, oh, next year it'll be even better.
John:
I'm like, no, next year.
John:
I think even something's in a show back when it came out.
John:
Next year, it won't be that different.
John:
And in two years, it probably won't be that different.
John:
So I'm on the three-year after launch timeline of saying three years after this goes by, at that point, there should be a new version of this hardware and the ecosystem should have moved a little bit.
John:
And that's a good check-in point.
John:
It doesn't mean that if three years they haven't done X, it's doomed or something, right?
John:
But in three years, I mean, the product still exists and hasn't gone big home potted into the mystery closet before it pops out again.
John:
That'll be a good time to look at progress because I think it's unfair to look at this after one year.
John:
I think it's unfair to look at it after two years because it is an unproven product in an unproven market because Apple is not doing what all the other headset makers did and tried to make a video game thing.
John:
Like they're not doing that.
John:
They're doing a new thing.
John:
right a mass market device that you can use for productivity in addition you know they're taking a different approach so i'm going to give them three years to figure out what the heck this is and to field new products and to update the os so we'll check in again and i guess it's three years from launch i guess i put that a note of my calendar or something what would that be uh
Marco:
2026 2027 ish 27 yeah i mean but the problem is like yeah sure three years before it like you know matures maybe but no no not matures not matures three years before it we figure out if it's gonna work at all well but i think i think the big challenge is between now and three years from now what will make people buy it
John:
Yeah, no, I'm assuming Apple is going to continue to spend money on this for the next three years, if only out of sheer bloody mindedness, as they say across the pond, because like this is Tim.
John:
Tim Cook is all in on this thing.
John:
This is the thing he shipped and not the car.
John:
I think despite the pace of investment being unsatisfactory to us on the outside, I believe there are at least three years of continued real investment in this product line from Apple.
John:
So that's that's why I'm putting the three year timeline on it.
John:
If that isn't true and they don't they may stop funding it.
John:
Well I mean we'll know because there'll never be another one.
John:
But I think there's three years of money backed up behind this sucker if all goes to plan.
Marco:
I hope you're right because I think you know alternative timeline here.
Marco:
I think in two months we start talking about iOS 18 and we never come back to this.
John:
Well, we may not come back to it, but I, you know, I think there's people at Apple who are doing stuff and I think there's money being put towards it.
John:
We'll find out.
John:
Like, again, this is about like internal benchmarks.
John:
If there was some benchmark that said we have to sell this number of these things, this amount of time or others were canceling a project.
John:
If that happened, Apple's not going to tell us immediately.
John:
Right.
John:
But that happens.
John:
Companies, there are consequences.
John:
There's like, we're going to put this out.
John:
Here's what we predict is going to happen.
John:
And if it catastrophically doesn't, we're going to have to have a serious meeting about the future of this product line.
John:
But you're never going to know about that.
John:
like i mean for all we know that's what happened with the home pods we were all talking about people buying home pods two years after launch and they were getting a model that was manufactured two years ago right so that is a product that disappeared but it came back sort of so you know who knows we'll see i mean there is one thing though like that is i think a a red flag um in that did you see the other day that woot had the vision pro on sale
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
That's not good.
Marco:
We were speculating for the last six months.
Marco:
We were saying the Vision Pro is going to be backordered throughout this entire year.
Marco:
It's going to be supply constrained.
Marco:
They're going to be selling every single one they can make.
Marco:
That doesn't seem to be happening.
Marco:
And that doesn't seem to have been happening since launch day.
Marco:
Remember we were saying, hmm, there's really...
Marco:
Not a lot of lines.
Marco:
It's really surprisingly easy to get them.
Marco:
It seems like they're not selling to what they expected.
Marco:
And they already have discounted and gotten rid of a bunch of them through Woot.
Marco:
That's not good.
Marco:
So I am concerned.
Marco:
I really am concerned for this product.
Marco:
If I had to guess, it seems like it's selling well below expectations and Apple is not investing in it.
Marco:
And that's scary for two months out.
Marco:
You might have a collector's item.
Marco:
I don't want that.
Marco:
I want it to succeed.
Casey:
No, really what's going to happen is, John, you're going to have a collector's item because Marco is going to ship it to you as packing chips or packing peanuts in a few years.
Marco:
I never bought a G4 Cube either, but I did a review on it.
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
I want them to get to version two so I can maybe have a chance of it being sharp for my eyes.
John:
Three years, Margo.
John:
Three years.
Marco:
Oh, God.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Thank you to our sponsor this week, Squarespace.
Marco:
And thank you to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
We have a new member-exclusive content area called Overtime.
Marco:
This is a bonus topic, a bonus tech topic after the show that is member-exclusive in each episode.
Marco:
This week's overtime, we're going to be talking about an unpatchable vulnerability in Apple chip design and the XZ open source project backdoor that happened this past week.
Marco:
Two very interesting security topics, I think.
Marco:
So that'll be an overtime this week.
Marco:
Join atp.fm slash join to hear those overtimes and all the other member perks.
Marco:
Thank you so much, and we will talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
Marco:
And if you're into mastodon, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's K-C-L-I-S-S-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A
Casey:
people just heard the a new song ah yeah yeah so uh we had asked and been at well we'd been asked many many many times to have our friend jonathan mann do something with the theme song that mentions twitter and
Marco:
Because the three of us haven't used Twitter in how long?
Casey:
Yeah, yeah.
Casey:
It was not from lack of desire.
Casey:
But first of all, we didn't really want to put a lot of stuff on Jonathan's plate.
Casey:
And we love the original so darn much that we really didn't want to screw with it too badly.
Casey:
But Jonathan reached out to us, I guess, a week or two ago and said, hey, I'm going to take another stab at it and see what I can do to make it sound a little different.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And so, yeah, that's what you just heard, unless you are listening to the bootleg, in which case I'm not sure what you're going to do.
Casey:
But you're going to have to listen.
John:
Just go download the regular version and go to the chapter of the theme song.
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
There you go.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And literally the only change is we've changed the line about Twitter to now refer to Mastodon.
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
Everything else is the same.
John:
Yeah, Jonathan did a more different version, but it turns out it's very difficult to, or at least difficult for us or for Marco, to blend vocals recorded a decade later with vocals recorded a decade earlier.
John:
Like, your voice sounds different, you know what I mean?
John:
And so to try to get them to go together seamlessly, it turned out to be...
John:
beyond our capabilities so we did the surgical strike and i have to say that when we talked about this before i've saved a little link in my notes document that i send to people whenever they ask about the theme song we did talk about it ages ago and one of the beautiful things about the original theme song is that well a it's kind of like a nostalgic historical record and b specifically the part about twitter it had one out from the beginning which is that if you're into twitter it's a conditional so the
John:
We all became not into Twitter, but whatever.
John:
And B, after we had talked about that, the guy renamed Twitter, right?
John:
So it's like, not only is this, you know, have a conditional statement, it's a conditional statement about a thing that ostensibly doesn't exist, but still is because he can't figure out how to change the domain name because he's an idiot.
John:
Anyway, so I was perfectly fine having the historical theme song be there forever and ever and ever.
John:
But now that we have a modified version, you'll see it's slightly modified.
John:
There are a few other modifications that I think would be useful, but incorporating them is difficult.
John:
So we still have the ability to modify it elsewhere.
John:
So to give an example, the little...
John:
verse with the john didn't do any research marco and casey wouldn't let him is dated from back when uh they were convincing me to do a tech podcast with them and i was afraid i was going to burn out because i was doing too many things at once obviously that is not the case anymore i don't even have my jobby job anymore but that thing is still in there and the out on that one it's all past tense
John:
wouldn't let him in the past you know didn't do any research you're lawyering our theme song i know i'm just saying like uh you know and i have a modification that that makes it even more clear that it was in the past but it still kind of works but anyway uh we love the theme song we hope you love the theme song we hope you love the new theme song and if we have to change it again in 10 years i guess eventually we will
Marco:
Yes, extra, extra thanks to Jonathan Mann for, first of all, working with John, but also for doing this in the first place, you know, 10 years ago or whenever that was, and also doing it again now.
Marco:
We are very thankful.
Marco:
Check out his work, jonathanmann.net.
Marco:
We love his stuff.
Marco:
And I love to hear the song for us, and we've used it all this time.
Marco:
It really, I think it fits the show very well, and I know a lot of our listeners love it.
Marco:
So, yeah, thank you very much to Jonathan for that again.
John:
For many of our listeners, the theme song is the only thing they like about the show.
John:
And I'm speaking of people's children and spouses that are forced to hear a tech podcast in a car ride and they hate every second of it, but they like the theme song.
Marco:
Or at least it sticks in their head.
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
Golly, Jonathan's been writing a song a day for 15 years since January 1 of 2009.
Casey:
Gracious.
Casey:
That is a long time.
Casey:
A lot of songs.
Marco:
The funny thing, too, is years ago, if you notice that the ATP ad bumper music bits are actually parts of the theme song.
Marco:
That's because years ago, when we first started doing basically audio bumpers into ads, I tried a few different sound effects.
Marco:
John hated them all, and they were all kind of awkward.
Marco:
And Jonathan Mann emailed me.
Marco:
He's like, hey...
Marco:
I have here's the here's the original like logic tracks to the theme song.
Marco:
If you want, you can like use this to formulate some kind of, you know, ad bumper music.
Marco:
So I did.
Marco:
And that's that's how we got our like music theme ad bumpers.
Marco:
And it was great.
Marco:
So with this, it was it was great.
Marco:
Like he literally just recorded a new song, new vocal tracks.
Marco:
And he just gave me all the tracks again.
Marco:
And we were able to like, you know, just drop in the vocals.
Marco:
And I was able to make some adjustments to make it match.
Marco:
And it was great.
Marco:
But I also wanted to point out, because I have, like, all the original, like, tracks to it, I, as a non-musician, had no idea how many tracks are in a song like that.
Marco:
Like, because, first of all, you know, Jonathan is the only singer.
Marco:
But if you listen to the song, there's backing vocals.
Marco:
There's also not just one backing singer.
Marco:
The backing vocals, there's like six different backing vocals that are all just him overlaid doing like a six-part harmony as backing vocals behind the main vocals.
Marco:
And then there's like 17 different instrument tracks.
Marco:
So to write a song every day...
Marco:
Even just the writing part, the composition and the writing the words, that's its own challenge.
Marco:
But then to actually record these many track compositions and recordings every single day is no small feat.
Marco:
There's so many layers.
Marco:
There's different instruments.
Marco:
There's all these seven or eight different vocals.
Marco:
It's really impressive.
Marco:
I don't know how he does it.
Marco:
And I am like the more that I dove into this logic file, the more impressed I was.
John:
Well, at least you're using logic for what it's actually designed for, for once.
Marco:
Yeah, for once.