We Studied Thousands of Heads - Accidential Tech Podcast

00:00:00 Casey: big day john how's the weather where you are i am in my house so it is indoor weather i am also in my house uh john and i definitely were not cool enough to be invited not that i'm i won't speak for john not that i'm bitter at all but marco where are you i am in a hotel room in california

00:00:22 Casey: I'm very jealous.

00:00:23 Casey: I'm very, very jealous.

00:00:24 Casey: Although I'm not sure I'm jealous of you being in San Jose particularly, but that's neither here nor there.

00:00:29 Casey: But you are in California.

00:00:30 Casey: You are our intrepid reporter on the ground.

00:00:33 Casey: I am very pleased that at least one of us was cool enough to show up or be allowed to show up.

00:00:39 Casey: So tell me, should we do a vibe check?

00:00:42 Casey: I mean, since apparently that is acceptable.

00:00:44 John: I'm going to stop with the vibe check.

00:00:45 John: It's a one-time thing.

00:00:48 All right, fine.

00:00:49 Casey: Okay, fine.

00:00:49 Casey: Marco, would you tell me what the feeling is around Cupertino today?

00:00:53 Marco: The feeling check is, frankly, I mean, I got to say, so, you know, I got in last night, and the vibe, even before it started, was you could kind of just feel the energy, like, vibrating.

00:01:08 Marco: Everybody was excited, because, you know, the handful of people who were walking around, they were super excited, and

00:01:13 Marco: The handful, you know, the developers that I saw last night, you know, some friends here and there, everyone was super excited.

00:01:19 Marco: And look, with good reason.

00:01:20 Marco: I mean, we all knew this was going to be like, you know, a big announcement.

00:01:23 Marco: And I mean, geez, I don't even know where to start.

00:01:27 Marco: I mean, there's so much.

00:01:29 Marco: I mean, so, you know, I guess we'll start with, you know, our usual, you know, keynote order of things.

00:01:34 Marco: But there is just so much.

00:01:36 Marco: So I want to disclose immediately, I have not yet tried the headset.

00:01:40 Marco: Yeah.

00:01:40 Marco: I am hoping to get a chance to try it before I leave.

00:01:45 Marco: I don't know how likely those hopes are at this point, but I have not tried the headset.

00:01:50 Marco: I have seen the headset, but seeing it is very different from trying it.

00:01:54 Marco: And I also saw Tim Cook seeing the headset, but he did not prevent me from seeing it this time.

00:02:00 John: He was further over in the room.

00:02:02 John: It was a hands-off area, right?

00:02:04 John: You weren't actually allowed to touch it?

00:02:05 Marco: Yes, we could touch the MacBook Air, and I don't know if I could touch the Mac Pro.

00:02:11 Marco: I didn't touch the Mac Pro, but I did take a lot of pictures.

00:02:14 John: You can always try it.

00:02:15 John: You can do what I did with the iMac Pro, which is just walk right up to it and start using it until an Apple person swats you away.

00:02:20 Marco: I did get mildly swatted because I started – well, I'll get to the MacBook Air.

00:02:26 Marco: I tried just playing music super loudly and turned the speakers all the way up and put my ear up to it to see how good the speakers were.

00:02:31 Marco: And that was – I was instructed, you know, please ask the demo people to do that rather than doing it yourself.

00:02:39 Marco: But otherwise, yeah, I didn't – I don't think I committed any other faux pas in the demo areas.

00:02:44 Casey: Before we get started, though, NonRevGuy makes an excellent point.

00:02:48 Casey: I almost forgot to ask.

00:02:50 Casey: What is the count of Believe shirts that you yourself have noticed?

00:02:53 Marco: I have not seen any Believe shirts.

00:02:54 Marco: I have seen ATP shirts.

00:02:57 Casey: Oh, that's good.

00:02:58 Marco: But I have not yet seen the Believe shirt.

00:03:01 Marco: Now, I actually brought a Believe shirt with me.

00:03:03 Marco: I have not yet worn it because it didn't fit with my keynote outfit.

00:03:06 Marco: But I will.

00:03:08 Marco: Now I feel like I kind of feel like I don't need to wear it anymore.

00:03:10 Marco: But we'll see.

00:03:11 Marco: We'll see.

00:03:12 John: There's plenty there.

00:03:13 John: I've got a lot of pictures of people at WWDC sitting in the audience watching the big screen, the whole nine yards.

00:03:21 John: Plus a bunch of people in front of the big rainbow Apple logo, so they're probably Apple employees, so the shirts are there.

00:03:26 Marco: I think it's also important to disclose state of the knowledge.

00:03:30 Marco: This is the time of day and what has been revealed so far, what we know as we record this.

00:03:36 Marco: So...

00:03:37 Marco: Right now, we're recording this on Keynote Eve after State of the Union.

00:03:41 Marco: That means we have not seen any other sessions.

00:03:44 Marco: So any details that are revealed in sessions, we haven't seen those yet.

00:03:47 Marco: The Vision OS SDK isn't even out yet, and it won't be out, I think, until they said later this month.

00:03:54 Marco: So none of us even tried the simulator of that.

00:03:55 Marco: We have no idea.

00:03:56 Marco: I have no idea how any of the SDKs work yet, besides what was announced in the State of the Union.

00:04:02 Marco: I have not had time to pour through the documentation and everything, and...

00:04:05 Marco: even like, you know, browse Macedon to see what everyone else has uncovered.

00:04:08 Marco: I've gotten almost none of that because, you know, the logistics of being here are very weird and different.

00:04:14 Marco: And it's hard to get, it's hard to catch up on the internet and catch up in real life stuff at the same time.

00:04:20 Marco: So I assume the two of you have, have beaten me in that department.

00:04:24 Casey: But only a tiny bit.

00:04:26 Marco: So anyway, there's probably a lot that's going to be unveiled in the next couple of days with session videos and stuff that we have not yet seen.

00:04:33 Marco: And of course, since none of us have any experience yet with the headset, it's hard to give first impressions.

00:04:38 Marco: I have spoken to some people who have used it, and I've got a lot of questions about it, which we'll get to later.

00:04:44 Marco: So yeah, let's get going.

00:04:46 Marco: Keynote order.

00:04:47 Casey: All right, so Tim comes out and says, the biggest announcements ever at WWDC.

00:04:53 Marco: I feel like that was a qualifier.

00:04:54 Marco: Like, biggest announcement ever was probably the iPhone, but the qualifier at WWDC, I think, gives him a pass for that.

00:05:01 John: You can just say biggest ever all the time.

00:05:03 John: It's in marketing.

00:05:04 Casey: Yeah, that's awesome.

00:05:05 Casey: I mean, I don't know.

00:05:06 Casey: I think it's fine.

00:05:07 Casey: I don't have a problem with it.

00:05:08 Casey: But John Ternus comes out for a moment.

00:05:10 Casey: He says the M2 MacBook Air, according to Apple's world's best-selling laptop.

00:05:14 Casey: And then we got Kate Bergeron, who's talking about a new MacBook Air 15.3 inches.

00:05:20 Casey: This is not a computer for me personally, but I'm super excited that this is a thing.

00:05:24 Casey: I think this is a great idea.

00:05:26 Casey: I think this will probably sell really well, and I think it's filling a hole in their lineup right now.

00:05:29 Casey: So this is two thumbs up for me.

00:05:32 John: Yeah, the straightforward thing.

00:05:33 John: It's the 13-inch, but 15 inches.

00:05:36 John: Nothing about it is different with the exception of the battery, which is about 21% bigger.

00:05:42 John: And the screen area, where there's about 21% more of it.

00:05:45 John: And interestingly, for that extra bits that you get, exactly the same rated battery life according to Apple.

00:05:51 John: So all that extra battery is going to power all that extra screen.

00:05:56 John: And that's it.

00:05:57 John: Very straightforward.

00:05:58 John: The pricing looks...

00:06:00 John: good-ish right like it's it's not you know eighteen hundred dollars it's not pressing up against macbook pro uh levels it's what a hundred or two more than two hundred dollars more than the uh the 13 inch because they lowered the 13 inch yeah when you match it spec for spec it's only a hundred bucks more like because it does it's a 200 entry price difference but it but the entry 13 inch has some of the cores cut

00:06:21 John: The other thing they did with the 15 inch with the extra space provided to them is they put more speakers.

00:06:25 John: It's got six speakers instead of the four on the 13 inch and it's got force canceling woofers, which I think maybe the 13 inch doesn't have.

00:06:32 John: I'm not sure.

00:06:32 John: But anyway, they had more room and they put more speakers in.

00:06:35 John: They didn't put more keyboard in because that's not a thing that Apple does, but the keyboard doesn't look ridiculous.

00:06:39 John: So it's fine.

00:06:40 Marco: This is the first time they've had a 15-inch laptop that doesn't have speaker grill holes in the side.

00:06:44 Marco: So the side panels next to the little margins next to the keyboard are just flat metal.

00:06:50 Marco: It looks kind of weird at that size because we're just not accustomed to seeing it.

00:06:54 Marco: I will say, having played with it briefly, first of all, it feels great.

00:06:58 Marco: You pick it up.

00:06:59 Marco: It's extremely light.

00:07:02 Marco: It feels very similar to the 13-inch MacBook Air, which is a very good thing because that thing feels amazing.

00:07:08 Marco: it really does feel like you're just using the same computer, but bigger.

00:07:11 Marco: I tried getting an idea of how good the speakers were, as I mentioned in the hands-on thing.

00:07:15 Marco: It's a little hard to tell because it's a loud room, but my impression was they didn't seem like they were that much better than the 13-inch speakers, honestly.

00:07:22 Marco: I think overall, it's a very, very good computer overall.

00:07:25 Marco: Don't buy it for the speakers, but overall, like...

00:07:29 Marco: This is exactly what it had to be.

00:07:32 Marco: A really great overall computer for almost anybody if you want a little bit bigger version than the 13-inch.

00:07:39 Marco: Now you have more screen space, etc.

00:07:41 Marco: So same ports, same everything else, same trade-offs, of which, honestly, there are very few trade-offs in this product.

00:07:48 Marco: I think it really broadens up the lineup.

00:07:50 Marco: Like now you don't have to spend what was before $2,500 to get a screen bigger than 14 inches.

00:07:57 Marco: Like that was a huge gap in the lineup that is now filled by this.

00:08:01 Marco: So very, very happy with this launch.

00:08:03 Marco: It looks great.

00:08:04 Marco: It feels great.

00:08:05 Marco: It will probably work very, very well.

00:08:07 Marco: And I think this is going to be the right computer for a ton of people.

00:08:12 Casey: Yeah, I'm really impressed by this.

00:08:14 Casey: It looks really good.

00:08:15 Casey: And I think it's worth mentioning that the 13-inch MacBook Air with the M1 processor now under $1,000 by a dollar, but under $1,000.

00:08:22 Casey: All right, so we move on to Jennifer Mann who introduces the Max Studio.

00:08:27 Casey: We've got a new Max Studio with the M2 Max and the appearance, this is the debut, right, of the M2 Ultra with its UltraFusion Interposer, 24 cores, 76-core GPU, 32-core neural engine, and...

00:08:39 Casey: up to 192 gigs of RAM, which is half again more than the M1 Ultra, which is exciting.

00:08:45 Casey: And John, maybe you can translate this for me.

00:08:47 Casey: There's a new HDMI that supports 8K and 240 hertz.

00:08:50 Casey: Is that like some new version of HDMI?

00:08:52 John: I haven't dug into it.

00:08:53 John: Again, with the HDMI versioning, if it just said HDMI 2.1, that means nothing.

00:08:59 John: You have to look at the fine, fine print.

00:09:01 John: But I'll take Apple at its word that it supports this.

00:09:03 John: I'm not sure what you'd connect it to exactly.

00:09:07 John: Yeah.

00:09:07 John: But the interesting thing about this product is so much of the rumors that they're skipping a generation with the Mac Studio.

00:09:12 John: Nope.

00:09:13 John: Just straightforward upgrade.

00:09:14 John: Just like they had an M1 Ultra and this has the M2 Ultra and the M2 Ultra looks exactly like what you think.

00:09:20 John: I wonder if they could even like reuse this.

00:09:22 John: the animations of oh the two m2 max is coming together and the interposer connects them and the whole nine yards is exactly what we thought um so that's great can we reuse our shirt designs can we just like put like you know put some duct tape over the one that forms like a little two out of duct tape and just wear the same shirt we could but i'm not sure we will um i i as i snarked on mastodon i think i missed the part of the keynote where they said and an all new cooling system

00:09:47 John: they didn't say that did they no they sure didn't because that's the the main thing that i want out of the max studio for all we know it could have one maybe they revised it but we don't we'll have to wait until people start getting these and review them because that was the one weakness with the max studio uh it that it just made a little bit more noise than we thought it should especially you know i have the m1 max max studio uh

00:10:10 John: And they make a laptop with that same exact SoC in it.

00:10:13 John: And the laptop makes less noise.

00:10:15 John: And the Mac Studio is substantially larger.

00:10:18 John: So that is disappointing.

00:10:19 John: So we'll see how they did on the M2 Mac Studios.

00:10:22 John: But, I mean, worst case scenario, I imagine it will be the same as it was.

00:10:25 John: I can't imagine it being worse.

00:10:27 John: I hope it's better.

00:10:28 John: But they didn't say anything about it.

00:10:30 Marco: So, hmm.

00:10:32 Marco: Overall, though, assuming that hopefully they improve the thermals, this is exactly the kind of update that we want them to do to pro hardware.

00:10:40 Marco: It's a boring spec bump upgrade.

00:10:42 Marco: That's exactly what they didn't do reliably for so many years.

00:10:46 Marco: So I'm really – even though this is not like a massively newsmaking product –

00:10:50 Marco: I'm really happy they did this because it shows this was not just a one-off.

00:10:55 Marco: They are committed to it.

00:10:56 Marco: And as we get to the Mac Pro in a minute, it's very clear what the role of this product is.

00:11:01 Marco: And frankly, I think it really holds its own against the Mac Pro in a few ways.

00:11:07 Marco: So...

00:11:07 Marco: With that said, I loved when they announced, the presenter was like, we're going to talk about our Pro products, quote, starting with Mac Studio.

00:11:16 Marco: And at that point, we knew, oh boy, this is just part one of the Pro products.

00:11:23 Marco: So part two, John, sorry, Casey, it's Mac Pro Day.

00:11:29 Casey: Do you guys need me for the next two hours?

00:11:31 Casey: Because I'm going to go take a nap or something.

00:11:32 Marco: So I think what's interesting about this is, first of all, the rumor mill had this all wrong in terms of like release timing, release likelihood.

00:11:42 Marco: It shocked me when not only were we getting the Mac Pro today, but that you can order it today and it ships next week.

00:11:49 Marco: Along with the Mac Studio and the MacBook Air.

00:11:52 Marco: All three of these Macs are ready to order now and shipping really soon.

00:11:57 Marco: It's not end of the year tricks, nothing like that.

00:12:00 Marco: So, John, what do you think of this new Mac Pro?

00:12:04 Marco: I have some thoughts, which I'm sure I'll get to, but what do you think?

00:12:08 John: We talked about this computer for so long.

00:12:10 John: And one of the frequent topics of conversation is how would this be differentiated from an M2 Ultra Max Studio, which in our early conversations, we just assumed was coming.

00:12:21 John: And then the rumors came that maybe the M2 Ultra Max Studio isn't going to come.

00:12:25 John: And that we had new rounds of conversations about how does that change the Mac Pro, so on and so forth.

00:12:30 John: And the reason we kept having these conversations is ever since the rumor that the sort of the quad SOC thing was dead, which would basically be like twice as big as an M2 Ultra, like two M2 Ultras combined somehow, ever since the rumor of that thing being dead and not shipping at all,

00:12:46 John: We were trying to find out how the Mac Pro would be differentiated as a product from a hypothetical or real M2 Ultra Mac Studio.

00:12:56 John: And we were struggling to think what the answer to that could be.

00:13:01 John: And Apple's answer was one of the things that we discussed over and over again.

00:13:05 John: And every time we discussed it, we said, yeah, but that's not great.

00:13:09 John: Well, guess what?

00:13:10 John: That's what they did.

00:13:12 John: It's an M2 Ultra in a Mac Pro case.

00:13:15 John: With, as far as we know right now, no support for third-party GPUs.

00:13:20 John: It's got a whole bunch of slots into which you can put things that go in slots that are not GPUs.

00:13:26 John: None of them are MPX slots.

00:13:29 John: They're just plain old PCIe slots.

00:13:31 John: It's the new version, PCIe version 4 or whatever, and they have 16X slots and 8X slots.

00:13:36 John: The PCIe slots are fine, but...

00:13:39 John: That's it, right?

00:13:40 John: It is just a Mac Studio in a way, way bigger case.

00:13:45 John: Now, what do you get for your way bigger case?

00:13:46 John: Well, first of all, I think you get a pretty cool-looking case.

00:13:48 John: That's thing number one.

00:13:50 John: Second, you can put some more stuff in there.

00:13:53 John: If you look at the insides of the case, you can see there's room for...

00:13:58 John: Basically anything.

00:13:59 John: You could make a little house in there.

00:14:01 John: You could put hard drives in there, like spinning hard drives.

00:14:03 John: I have spinning hard drives in my Mac Pro.

00:14:05 John: You can put spinning hard drives, I would imagine, in that Mac Pro if you buy an expensive bent piece of metal and you shove it in the right spot and you'll be able to mount hard drives.

00:14:12 Marco: You can.

00:14:12 Marco: By the way, I verified that.

00:14:13 Marco: So the SATA ports are still in there and they still are supporting that metal bracket thing that you bought, the bent piece of metal.

00:14:19 John: Yeah.

00:14:19 John: like i i recognize the arrangement of screws from having put the thing in so that that that part's the same there is the sata part there's an internal usb port for like dongles and you know all that stuff um and that's something you can't do with the mac studio and of course you've got a bunch of slots and that's how apple pitches said here you go if you want a bunch of slots that you need to put in we sell a computer with those slots and here's what you can put them and they showed a bunch of cards it was like oh you can put you know

00:14:44 John: um io cards in there weird you know fiber channel things uh you could you know storage cards video input cards they have made a big point of saying like if you had like a bunch of eight 24 8k video streams streaming into this thing each one of them going into like a card right and that the soc was powerful enough to process them all right um

00:15:06 John: And so that is the pitch for this computer.

00:15:09 John: It's like an M2 Mac Studio with an M2 Ultra in it, except you can put cards in it as long as they're not GPUs.

00:15:15 John: And by the way, you can also put some internal storage, right?

00:15:20 John: That is not a particularly compelling product unless you have one of those specific needs.

00:15:26 John: If you remember the previous Mac Pro, you could do all that stuff and also you could stuff it to the gills with GPUs.

00:15:32 John: And the previous Mac Pro was kind of designed

00:15:35 John: a lot of money was spent making it so you could stuff it to the guild with gpus with those mpx slots which was apple proprietary thing and cost more money and takes more power and apple itself sold many third-party cards in those big mpx modules that you could stuff in there and not only that but apple upgraded those cards over time so you could you could configure which cards which gpus you wanted and as new gpus came out apple in their sort of lazy way they normally do did eventually offer newer and better versions and you could buy them aftermarket um

00:16:04 John: That was a big part of the Mac Pro that is now completely gone.

00:16:09 John: You cannot add GPU grunt to this machine.

00:16:11 John: You get the grunt that you buy it with that's in the SoC, and that's it as far as we can tell.

00:16:16 John: And I think, you know, in the PCI slots, you could probably put a PC GPU in there, but I'm not sure you'd be able to find the power headers for it, like on the motherboard, and certainly there's no MPX module type stuff, and then you need a separate cooler on the thing.

00:16:28 John: uh you know again the case is cavernous the pictures they showed of it are a little bit comical because it is just almost entirely empty space there is the big block for the cooler for the the uh the m2 ultra and i would assume this thing will be just as quiet as the you know if not more quiet than the intel one because it's got gigantic fans in the front of it which look to be about the same and all it's cooling is an m2 ultra which is apparently able to be cooled in a tiny mac studio case right um but the the sales proposition for this thing is

00:16:56 John: Take our target audience for the Intel Mac Pro, cut some big portion of it out.

00:17:03 John: And what you've got left is the market for the Mac Pro.

00:17:07 John: And that makes me worry about this product because it's not like the Mac Pro was selling in huge numbers.

00:17:11 John: I don't know what percentage of the market they've eliminated by not supporting third-party GPUs, but I'm going to say it's surely double digits and possibly even bigger than that.

00:17:21 John: So they're further narrowing the market for this product.

00:17:25 John: then we look at the price all right you do get some stuff over the m2 ultra and assuming you can you know as soon as you have space for this monster and you don't mind hanging with this gigantic thing around you know you don't get the gpus but hey you do get some stuff over the the uh the mac studio how much more do you pay for that privilege

00:17:45 John: And the answer is a lot.

00:17:48 John: If you similarly configure a Mac Studio and an M2 Ultra, a Mac Pro and an M2 Ultra Mac Studio, the delta in price hovers around three grand.

00:17:59 Marco: Every configuration I could find, it's exactly three grand.

00:18:01 John: Yeah, I didn't do it.

00:18:02 John: I didn't do every configuration of the sun, but I did a bunch of them.

00:18:04 John: They always came out to three grand, right?

00:18:06 John: So for three grand, you're getting the ability to have internal spinning disks, internal SSDs, the ability to have expansion cards, and you could put more USB ports on there.

00:18:15 John: You could put an internal PCI Express card, NVMe cards, like the ability to put those cards in there, and quieter fans.

00:18:24 Marco: Don't forget more Thunderbolt ports.

00:18:25 John: Yes, you do get more Thunderbolt ports.

00:18:27 John: You get more Thunderbolt standard, and also you can probably add more to the thing, right?

00:18:31 Marco: No, but you've forgotten something very important.

00:18:33 Marco: What's that?

00:18:34 Marco: I verified with Apple that not only does it still support wheels.

00:18:38 Marco: Oh, the wheels, yes.

00:18:40 Marco: But you can even use the same wheels from the previous Mac Pro if you want to, because the case has not changed.

00:18:47 John: Oh, I didn't look at that.

00:18:49 John: Let me just peek at that now.

00:18:50 John: Did you happen to see if they fixed the little bar at the bottom so that you have to take out all the wires before you take the case off?

00:18:55 Marco: I'm guessing it's the same because the case really is unchanged.

00:19:00 Marco: It's the exact same enclosure.

00:19:02 John: And this makes sense.

00:19:03 John: So the case being changed is not a big deal.

00:19:05 John: There's a reason I made the shirt with the 2019 Mac Pro on it because this is such an expensive case and they spent so long designing it.

00:19:11 John: There's no way they're going to use it for a single computer, even if they don't really have...

00:19:16 John: the guts to fill this case anymore like it's very easy to show a packed 2019 mac pro if you take the case off my computer and you look inside that you're like boy that thing is packed because every inch of it is filled with something practically i have almost every slot filled granted some of them are filled space wise and not you know card wise because i have these double and triple height cards i've got spinning discs in there it's just there's tons of stuff in there this thing as again as i snarked on mastodon like the universe it's mostly empty space

00:19:43 John: you buy this thing and it's default configuration it's a tiny little m2 ultra soc shoved in the corner and then just nothing just literally nothing just this tiny little quarter depth card with the io and just totally empty space two gigantic fans are just taking air from the front of this thing pushing them through empty space and ejecting out the back there's nothing in their path what are they cooling they're not cooling anything

00:20:11 John: It is extremely expensive for the marginal extra utility that you get.

00:20:19 John: And this, you know, part of this is the problem we were talking about.

00:20:21 John: You know, they don't have an expandable RAM story.

00:20:24 John: They don't have an expandable GPU power story.

00:20:27 John: It's all on that SoC plus PCI slots.

00:20:30 John: I still think they should have made this computer, but I'm not worried so much about whether or not it appeals to me, because who cares?

00:20:36 John: I'm worried about the market for this computer is being further narrowed.

00:20:41 John: How narrow does the market for this computer need to be before the powers that be at Apple that always want to kill this computer eventually win and say, there's no reason for us to be selling this.

00:20:51 John: Look at the sales numbers.

00:20:52 John: 2019 sold X amount, and the 2023 one sold like X divided by seven.

00:20:57 John: And this thing is so expensive.

00:20:59 John: I think that also explains possibly, although I haven't dug into the specs, why this thing's base configuration is so much more expensive than the old one.

00:21:07 John: Didn't it go up like a thousand bucks for the base config?

00:21:09 John: It did.

00:21:10 John: Yeah.

00:21:10 John: I mean, you know, from 2019 to 2023, the base config going up a thousand dollars in this machine, it would make a lot more sense to me.

00:21:18 John: If I could look at the component prices and explain it, but Apple isn't paying Intel's margins on Xeons here.

00:21:23 John: I know the M2 Ultra is an expensive chip, but we have a direct comparison to that exact same SoC in the Mac Studio.

00:21:30 John: It looks like less of a bargain than it was before, and it has less of a reason to exist, and Apple didn't do anything...

00:21:39 John: i'm not gonna say anything interesting didn't do any of the the seven things that we discussed that they could have done oh you know a tiered approach to ram some way to expand that expandable gpus from third parties expandable gpus from apple anything like that they were forced to tout things like oh it's like having seven afterburner cards like but

00:21:55 John: that's the same as the mac studio everything you're bragging about is also in the mac studio oh and of course if they had had the quad chip right if they had that giant monster that was apparently too expensive for them to make it the volumes they wanted um there was like the strength of two m2 ultras easy to explain the value proposition there with there would be things then that were literally close to twice as fast on this computer as they're on a mac studio and you know granted the price would have been even higher but but you know

00:22:20 John: You would have had double the GPU grunt as well.

00:22:23 John: That is a much easier machine to explain, especially since, as we did the math on ages ago, if it had had the quad SOC thing in there, its GPU grunt would be in the conversation with the very best PC GPUs.

00:22:39 John: The M2 Ultra is not in the conversation with the very best PC GPUs.

00:22:44 John: It's just not.

00:22:44 John: It doesn't have enough power, which is fine when you're talking about the Mac Studio or something.

00:22:50 John: But for a machine this big and this expensive, forget it.

00:22:54 John: The NVIDIA 4090 crushes this thing, and that card's been out for ages, right?

00:22:58 John: And there's nothing you can do to change that.

00:23:00 John: You can't spend any more money on a Mac to make it competitive with existing, that have existed for practically a year,

00:23:08 John: high-end pc gpus that is very disappointing like i said that takes that entire market and sort of like you know it makes them all look at the back studio because like what they'd be like what am i buying this for so i know you know we've got the believe shirts you know they they did introduce the product the product is not dead the product being dead would be the worst case scenario but i feel like this is like the second worst case scenario not because i think this is necessarily a bad machine because of the people who want it i think apple should make it but i don't think

00:23:34 John: i think it narrows the market too much i don't think that enough people are this is enough people are going to say this is the machine for me to sustain this product like it is now now granted you know whatever whatever the quad chip that went down the tubes you know tomorrow you know next year is another year year after that's another year you know we'll see how this goes in the future do they just keep upgrading this to the m3 ultra m4 ultra or do they eventually make the quad chip because

00:23:58 John: Because if you're going to make the quad chip, this is the case for it.

00:24:01 John: It's got the space.

00:24:02 John: It's got the cooling.

00:24:03 John: And the quad chip justifies this computer way more than the M2 Ultra does.

00:24:09 John: So, yeah.

00:24:12 John: The more I dwell on the Mac Pro announcement today, the more...

00:24:16 John: i'm not gonna say disappointed the more kind of fearful and sad i am which is not the vibe i was going for with all the believe shirts so i don't know i'm i have very mixed feelings about this computer and by the way well i mean we'll discuss this in a little bit and certainly our future shows but i just do not think this is the machine for me which again is who cares if it's a machine for me i'm not i don't even need this one but it doesn't it doesn't there's nothing in it that makes me want to buy it pointlessly like i bought the 2019 pointlessly

00:24:45 Casey: Nah, the internal storage will get you.

00:24:47 Marco: Looking at... No, not for $3,000, it won't.

00:24:50 John: No, that's the thing.

00:24:52 John: For the internal storage, it won't get me for that amount of money.

00:24:54 Marco: Yeah, you could replace all the hard drives you have with nice SSDs for $3,000.

00:24:57 Marco: Exactly, right?

00:24:59 Marco: That's fair.

00:25:00 John: Yeah, we'll get... Apple's upgrade price.

00:25:05 John: Apple's prices for its storage upgrades and RAM upgrades and everything continue to be comically...

00:25:12 John: They always have them, but just, as I said, for three terabytes of SSD space, they want $1,000.

00:25:19 John: Three terabytes of very fast SSD does not cost $1,000.

00:25:24 John: It costs half that, less than half that.

00:25:27 John: And it's disappointing that those prices are like that, especially on a machine this expensive,

00:25:30 John: Because for me, you know, and for anybody who wants lots of storage, it really jacks up the price on these things.

00:25:35 John: And I felt like when I priced out my Intel one, yes, it was horrendously expensive, but I felt like it was justified because what I was getting was a powerhouse machine that has no equal in the Mac line.

00:25:46 John: And it's you're not getting that with this.

00:25:48 John: You're not getting you can't buy from Apple a powerhouse machine that has no equal in terms of capabilities.

00:25:53 John: You can buy this thing and then you can buy stuff from third parties and shove it in there.

00:25:56 John: And then that has no equal like all those, you know, video input cards or fiber channel cards or something like that.

00:26:01 John: But you can't just buy that from Apple.

00:26:03 John: It's a bunch of third party cards that you have to shove in there and you have to know which cards you want to put in there and you have to need them.

00:26:08 John: It's I don't know.

00:26:10 John: I'm I'm I'm a little bit a little bit sad about this computer.

00:26:14 Marco: Yeah, I feel like when you look at this computer, I wonder, like, when two years ago, when John Turner said the Mac Pro was a story for another day, I bet this is not what he had in mind.

00:26:25 Marco: Like, I bet this is not what was originally planned for the outcome of this product.

00:26:29 John: But when he made that announcement, I think the quad was already dead.

00:26:32 John: So I think he knew that this is the thing that was coming.

00:26:36 John: You know, it is what it is.

00:26:39 John: This is why it might be hard to fight for this machine internally, because...

00:26:42 John: You can see why internally they would say, why do we even bother doing this?

00:26:45 John: Just keeping the machine and the name alive is probably worthwhile, but it's a tough fight because once the quad's canned, everyone's saying, why are we even doing this?

00:26:52 John: And you're like, no, we just got to do it.

00:26:54 John: Maybe we'll get the quad in the M3 or M4 generation, but it's rough.

00:26:59 John: It's rough.

00:26:59 John: It's an uphill battle.

00:27:00 Marco: Yeah, and I have to wonder, is this the machine that got through all the committees?

00:27:06 Marco: And as John mentioned, we've kind of heard there are factions that don't want this machine to exist inside the company and factions that do.

00:27:13 Marco: And it almost seems like this is kind of what came out of the meat grinder from people who want this product to die.

00:27:20 Marco: Because it really is...

00:27:22 Marco: cutting down the market by so much for this product.

00:27:25 Marco: And in addition to the capabilities it's losing, the high RAM support, the GPU support, in addition to all that, they also raised the price and made it even less compelling.

00:27:35 Marco: I feel like if people wanted to kill this product inside the company, they would do exactly this.

00:27:41 Marco: Release something that shrinks its market down, raise the price by so much that everyone else buys the Mac Studio, and then in a couple of years say...

00:27:48 Marco: look, all customers have spoken.

00:27:49 Marco: Everyone just buys the Mac Studio.

00:27:50 Marco: So we'll just kill the Mac Pro and just keep making the Mac Studio.

00:27:53 Marco: Whereas, obviously, if they gave this product a little more capability to set it apart, maybe that would keep its market a little healthier.

00:28:02 Marco: But the way it is now, I can't see this product living very long unless...

00:28:07 Marco: This is only, okay, we couldn't get the giant quad chip with the M2 generation.

00:28:12 Marco: Maybe with the M3 generation, maybe they can get it then.

00:28:15 Marco: And so maybe this product is kind of a stopgap to fill the slot in the lineup and get it onto Apple Silicon at all.

00:28:22 Marco: And then maybe down the road, they release the quad chip in a future version of this product.

00:28:26 Marco: That, I think, could keep this product alive in some way.

00:28:30 Marco: Even that's going to be a very small market, especially if the price difference is what it is.

00:28:35 Marco: But at least it's a market.

00:28:36 Marco: And the way it is now, the only market for this, as far as I can tell, is people who need a bunch of those PCI capture cards, like for audio and video specialized use.

00:28:46 Marco: That's who's going to buy this.

00:28:47 John: Or IO cards or something like that.

00:28:49 John: But yeah, if they need cards that are not GPUs, which is a market, it does exist as part of what this machine serves.

00:28:54 John: I just wonder how big a percentage of the market is.

00:28:57 John: And by the way, I think...

00:28:59 John: Like this machine needs a GPU story.

00:29:01 John: Forget about the cards.

00:29:02 John: It needs, it needs some story with GPU that is not, it's exactly the same as the Mac studio.

00:29:07 John: Cause that's not a good story for a computer.

00:29:09 John: It's like seven times the size and $3,000 more expensive.

00:29:13 John: And I know not everybody needs it, but it's just, it already even, it needs a CPU story.

00:29:17 John: Like it just using literally the exact same SOC.

00:29:21 John: Macs are so defined by these SOCs in the, in the Apple Silicon era.

00:29:25 John: that you can't give your $3,000 more expensive computer literally the same SoC as the cheaper one and say, well, we'll make it up in expansion and storage.

00:29:35 John: Oh, and by the way, a lot of things that you could expand, you can't expand anymore.

00:29:39 Casey: So looking on Apple's accessories website for the 2023 Mac Pro, and I will attempt to link this in the show notes,

00:29:45 Casey: There is a $50 Belkin lock adapter, a $130 Thunderbolt 4 Pro cable, a $160 version of the same, the Profeet kit for $300, the Promise Pegasus 8TB internal storage enclosure, so this is just the enclosure, for $400, and our final option is the $700 Apple Mac Pro wheels kit.

00:30:08 Casey: That is the sum total of the accessories that are apparently for the Mac Pro.

00:30:12 John: You can also buy SSD expansions that are even more accessible

00:30:15 John: expensive than when you then put them up so like what i said before if going from one terabyte ssd to four terabyte ssd is basically adding three terabytes of ssd is a thousand dollar option but if you try to buy that same upgrade aftermarket as opposed to just ordering it when you order your computer i think it's seventeen hundred dollars so if you like the little module upgrades if you buy them from apple they're even more expensive

00:30:37 John: It makes the machine ridiculous.

00:30:39 John: And again, I choked down those prices when I configured this machine because I felt like I was getting a machine that really had no equal in the Mac line, that it was more powerful in everything, in every aspect.

00:30:49 John: And that's what a machine that costs this much money should be.

00:30:52 John: On the date of its introduction, it should be able to do literally everything better than every other Mac with the possible exception of single core performance if you get a super high core count or whatever.

00:31:03 John: But this Mac Pro does not cross that line.

00:31:07 Casey: I'm sorry, John.

00:31:08 Casey: I was excited for you.

00:31:10 Casey: Genuinely, I know it's kind of my shtick to poop on the Mac Pro, but I was excited to see it, and I was excited for you, but I understand what you're saying.

00:31:18 John: Yeah, I mean, it wasn't an exciting introduction.

00:31:20 John: They didn't tout anything about how fast it is and how capable it is.

00:31:23 John: The things they touted were like the things that are also true of the Mac Studio with the M2 Ultra, and that's not a good Mac Pro introduction.

00:31:31 John: You've got to be able to show it

00:31:33 John: doing something like even a contrived thing.

00:31:36 John: Show it doing something that other Macs can't do and they just can't.

00:31:38 John: They mentioned the thing about the 24 streams of 8K, but they didn't show it doing that and they don't sell any of those cards anyway.

00:31:44 John: So it was very weird.

00:31:45 John: And for the people in the chat room asking, what does this mean for me and my computer upgrade things?

00:31:49 John: Well, the first thing that it means is that I'm not buying this computer.

00:31:53 John: Uh, the second thing that it means is, so what computer are you buying?

00:31:57 John: You're going to get M2 Mac Studio, something like that.

00:31:59 John: I think I'm going to sit out the M2 generation.

00:32:02 John: I think I'm going to hold tight with the computer that I have for a while longer.

00:32:06 John: And when the M3 Ultra Mac Studio comes out, or maybe even the M3 Max Mac Studio comes out, that will probably be the machine that I replace this with.

00:32:17 John: Um,

00:32:17 John: Another thing, by the way, that could have made this announcement more exciting is an XDR replacement.

00:32:21 John: Of course, they didn't have that either, right?

00:32:22 John: So no, like, you know, 8K, 6K display with promotion, something like that.

00:32:27 John: So in the absence of the things that the Mac Pro brings, me trying to get, like, the Ultra so I can get a little bit more GPU, it's like, well, who are you kidding?

00:32:35 John: You're still not in the ballpark of...

00:32:38 John: PC high-end GPUs.

00:32:40 John: So why waste your money to go from 50% to 65%, right?

00:32:46 John: Like, you know, and, you know, those costs a lot of extra money.

00:32:49 John: So we'll see.

00:32:49 John: I'm right now I'm saying my next computer will probably be an M3 something, something Mac studio next year when it comes out.

00:32:58 John: unless they massively revised the Mac Pro.

00:33:01 John: Although, given these prices, I shudder to think how much a quad Mac Pro would have cost.

00:33:06 John: But again, at least the quad would be like, look, it's got double the number of cores, it's got double the amount of GPU, and here are a bunch of benchmarks.

00:33:13 John: Like, whatever you do, as long as it's not literally single-threaded, Xcode compiling, playing a game, grinding through, processing something, like, you know, using machine learning, like, the quad would have...

00:33:25 John: done really well on those things and so maybe you could help justify its outrageous price but that computer doesn't exist so i'm i'm eyeing an m3 mac studio of some kind as a replacement and in the meantime i will continue to enjoy another year of decent gpu power and the ability to boot into windows and play windows games

00:33:44 Casey: uh someone from inside your house sent me a text a moment ago 10 more years you interpret that how you please but i almost laughed out loud in the middle of you guys saying something not funny oh on on that front by the way did you see people saying huh the the mac os uh 14 uh beta doesn't have an intel version i'm like oh no no

00:34:07 John: Oh, is that right?

00:34:08 John: I did not know that.

00:34:09 John: No, they were just talking about what betas were appearing on the Apple website.

00:34:11 John: I'm assuming that they would have mentioned it if it was dropping Intel support.

00:34:14 John: I don't think it is.

00:34:15 John: It's just a question of like, I think someone tried to go download it and I think the Apple Silicon one was up first or something like that.

00:34:21 John: But that's in the back of my mind.

00:34:24 John: Unlike my past computer that I could use for 10 years, I can't use it for 10 years because Mac OS is going to drop Intel support before that.

00:34:30 John: So I'm watching out for that.

00:34:32 Marco: Yeah, I bet you probably have like one or two more years at least, but you don't have 10, that's for sure.

00:34:38 Marco: No, yeah.

00:34:39 Casey: So before we move on, how do you feel overall about the Mac-specific hardware that was announced today?

00:34:46 Casey: I mean, for me, I think it's pretty darn good.

00:34:49 Casey: Like, I'm pleased that the Mac Pro is still something in their lineup.

00:34:52 Casey: I totally understand where you're coming from, John.

00:34:54 Casey: I echo your sentiments that make perfect sense, but I'll take this over nothing personally.

00:34:58 Casey: And I think you'd probably agree.

00:35:01 Casey: So I think this looks good.

00:35:02 Casey: You mean the Mac studio, like Marco said earlier, you know, boring update works for me.

00:35:05 Casey: The new MacBook air, cheaper previous MacBook airs, all good, all across the board.

00:35:10 Casey: I give this two thumbs up.

00:35:11 Casey: Marco, what do you think?

00:35:12 Marco: So first of all, I think the rumors were that we were getting no back hardware today.

00:35:16 Marco: So this was all a pleasant surprise, and especially, as I mentioned earlier, how they all ship next week.

00:35:21 Marco: That's great, and that's a nice surprise.

00:35:24 Marco: Overall, the transition to Apple Silicon has –

00:35:28 Marco: It has omitted certain things at the very high end, and that hurts the Pro products, especially the Mac Pro.

00:35:35 Marco: That's what John is complaining about, that it had, in the Intel generations, it had higher capabilities and higher expansion potential than what the current ones have relative to their peers in the PC world.

00:35:49 Marco: But the...

00:35:51 Marco: The percentage of Apple's customers who need the super high-end configurations of these computers has also dramatically dropped in the Apple Silicon era, in part for reasons that are crappy, like they've kind of lost certain high-end or specialized markets, but mostly because what the Apple Silicon era has done is dramatically raise the floor of what the low-end computers do.

00:36:15 Marco: If you look at that 15-inch MacBook Air, that's just the regular M2 chip.

00:36:18 Marco: That's a $1,200 computer.

00:36:21 Marco: Or 13, I guess.

00:36:23 Marco: That is an amazing computer.

00:36:26 Marco: And the vast majority of user types and user requirement types that used to need the big desktop towers with the maximum cooling, the maximum processors, the maximum RAM, the maximum disks and stuff...

00:36:41 Marco: Most people who used those towers five or ten years ago would be totally fine using a MacBook Air class computer today.

00:36:49 Marco: Not because, you know, just things have gotten better over time, you know, just incrementally with tech, but because even Apple's cheapest computers now, as long as you give them enough RAM and disk space, they can satisfy way more, way higher percentage of people's needs than in previous eras than those low-end laptops and those low-end computers.

00:37:09 Marco: So,

00:37:10 Marco: It's a great story.

00:37:11 Marco: The Apple Silicon story is a great story for almost everyone.

00:37:16 Marco: The only people who are kind of meh about it are the very high-end users who want things like GPU slots and stuff like that or super high RAM, that kind of stuff.

00:37:26 John: Or people who just want GPU power, which we'll get to that when we talk about gaming in a little bit, because it's not just the desire for third-party GPUs.

00:37:32 John: It's like, well, but I just want to play modern games at a reasonable frame rate.

00:37:35 John: And the plain M2 with no suffix is not doing that for you.

00:37:39 Marco: That's true.

00:37:40 Marco: But ultimately, most PC gaming happens on PCs.

00:37:45 Marco: That's the reality.

00:37:46 John: And it's like you said, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

00:37:48 John: If you stop shipping any computers that can play high-end games, then there's no high-end games for your platforms.

00:37:54 Marco: Well, but, you know, it's not like high-end gaming was super healthy on the Mac in the Intel era either.

00:38:00 John: No, but if you thought it couldn't get worse, it can and has.

00:38:03 Marco: Yes, but, you know, ultimately, PC gamers don't buy Macs.

00:38:06 Marco: PC gamers buy awesome gaming PCs, and that satisfies their needs way better and way cheaper than anything Apple sells.

00:38:13 Marco: And so...

00:38:14 Marco: That market largely – I don't think Apple cares too much about that market.

00:38:18 Marco: They never have, and I think separately from maybe some headset stuff, I don't think they ever are going to really push into that market very much.

00:38:25 John: We will talk about that when we get to the gaming portion of the keynote.

00:38:28 Marco: Yeah, yeah, and they announced some relevant stuff there, but I still don't think it's going to be a massive area for them just because the markets are so different.

00:38:34 Marco: But overall –

00:38:36 Marco: I think the Mac continues to be in a very, very good place for almost everyone.

00:38:41 Marco: I mean, look, I have the giant 16-inch, but the reality is if I swapped out my 16-inch for that new 15-inch MacBook Air, much of the time I'm doing much of my work, I would not notice.

00:38:54 Marco: And that's really saying something.

00:38:56 Marco: Like, the fact is that even their, like, quote, low-end computers are so good now.

00:39:03 Marco: And you can do, you know, the stuff that we used to, that we used to, quote, require the high-end stuff.

00:39:07 Marco: Video editing, you know, developer compilation stuff.

00:39:11 Marco: All of that stuff is surprisingly fast and capable, even on the cheapest MacBook Air.

00:39:16 Marco: And that's, so we're in an amazing place.

00:39:18 Marco: Yes, the high-end has suffered a little bit in terms of how high it can go.

00:39:23 Marco: But the number of people in Apple's user base who need the high end keeps shrinking and shrinking and shrinking because almost everyone's needs across way more industries and use cases than ever can now be solved with their cheapest computers.

00:39:36 Marco: And that's an amazing place to be overall.

00:39:38 John: Yep, I completely agree.

00:39:39 John: Yep, I think the Macs they introduced today are all, you know, fine, except for the Mac Pro, which is good.

00:39:48 John: But the 15-inch is my favorite because they just pretty much nailed that one.

00:39:52 John: You know, it is exactly what they needed to make at a good price, and, you know, it's great.

00:39:57 John: the mac studio i'm i find myself suddenly very very interested in the insides of the mac studio like way more than i'm interested in the mac pro because i feel like that's going to be my computer and the mac my future in the mac line is going to be mac studios and i don't want one that makes weird fan noises right like it's not terrible i have one here you put it on a desk you can't hear it but i don't want to put it under my desk i want it to be anyway well look you already have an xdr you can do a desktop laptop i i can tell you it's a really good setup no i don't want that i know

00:40:24 Marco: You're such an anti-laptopist.

00:40:27 John: Yeah, I am.

00:40:28 John: But yeah, I'm very interested in that.

00:40:30 John: But I'm glad that they bumped the Mac Studio, right?

00:40:33 John: I mean, that's, you know, I continue to think that the M2 line is, like, the M1 was a 10 out of 10, right?

00:40:40 John: The whole M1 line, 10 out of 10.

00:40:42 John: Excellent.

00:40:42 John: The M2 is like an 8.5 out of 10, but...

00:40:45 John: because mostly because they didn't get it's not on a new process i know it's like on the revised five nanometer whatever blah blah but when they go to three nanometer with the m3 that is going to be a bigger jump so it's like m1 amazing holy cow can you believe it m2 small incremental improvement in m3 i hope will be another jump and that will make all these computers you know even better than they are

00:41:06 John: will the mac pro survive long enough to ever get a quad or a reason to exist i'm not sure but like i said this makes me way more interested in and invested in the mac studio i want i want better for the mac studio i want a better cooling system i want if i'm honest i want a more interesting looking case and not that it's bad it's fine but it's certainly not interesting it's a very humble looking case

00:41:30 John: Yeah, I know, but it could have more panache, especially at the prices because the Mac Studio is not cheap.

00:41:37 John: I configured a reasonable Mac Studio and it was, oh, $6,800.

00:41:41 Marco: I mean, yeah, that's the Mac Pro.

00:41:44 Marco: That's really, for most people, that is the Mac Pro.

00:41:47 John: i know but for 600 bucks i want a little more panache yeah it looks like one of those like concrete brutalist buildings it's like the mac version of that it's really just like a really uh beefy uh mac mini which is fine but anyway yeah like you know the the mac announcements are good and fine the mac pro really took a little bit of wind out of my sails and now i'm just going to spend the next one to five years just fretting about that product even more

00:42:12 Marco: Well, if you want, I mean, Apple will take other ways to take your thousands of dollars.

00:42:16 Marco: They're offering some other interesting options there soon.

00:42:20 John: They sure are.

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00:44:26 Casey: Let's try to do our best to plow through software stuff, iOS 17, some interesting new stuff with contact posters, which is used in various places throughout iOS.

00:44:38 John: Does either one of you know from any more people talking about this?

00:44:43 John: Is the idea that I pick something and it gets shoved to other people?

00:44:48 Casey: That's the way I took it, yeah.

00:44:49 Marco: I would assume it's contact only to prevent the problems that could result from that.

00:44:55 John: But no, but as in like, you know, the current system where you pick a contact thing and then everybody gets a stupid prompt on top of the screen that says, hey, so-and-so has an updated picture.

00:45:02 John: Do you want to use it?

00:45:03 John: And you constantly have to dismiss it and carefully not pick it because you like your picture better, right?

00:45:08 John: Yep.

00:45:08 John: Is this the same as that or is this something different?

00:45:11 John: Like, does this just like...

00:45:12 John: shove it at people, but it doesn't offer to add it to their contacts.

00:45:16 John: I like the idea of a bigger picture to represent yourself to the world, so when you call somebody, they can see your picture like a kind of a push-type thing or something like that, but...

00:45:28 John: I feel like there's still this tension that wasn't really addressed in the explanation of this feature between do I get to pick the picture that I want for the person?

00:45:35 John: Does the person get the picture that they want for themselves?

00:45:38 John: And to give an example, my daughter uses a comically mangled photo of me as the contact picture for me instead of the picture that I would prefer.

00:45:48 John: And I think she would be mad if I overrode that with something I pushed to her.

00:45:51 Marco: Yes.

00:45:52 Marco: As far as I know, I haven't tried.

00:45:53 Marco: I don't have the beta installed.

00:45:55 Marco: It's been a day.

00:45:56 Marco: But as far as I can, as far as I understood from the presentation, I think it is basically an expansion of that feature that like now you can specify this whole poster.

00:46:06 Marco: But I would, you know, again, I would assume that that like the receiving person probably has the option to not accept your customization to prevent the chat roulette problem that could result from that.

00:46:18 Marco: And I would assume it's somebody who has to be in your contacts already or who you've responded to.

00:46:22 Marco: The way the current system works is you get a random text from somebody.

00:46:26 Marco: Nothing happens.

00:46:26 Marco: If you respond, then it will tell you, hey, do you want to use this person's updated photo and name?

00:46:32 Marco: So it's probably something like that for new contacts.

00:46:35 Marco: But I think for existing contacts, again, I haven't tried yet.

00:46:37 Marco: We'll know all this next week.

00:46:38 Marco: But for existing contacts, there's probably some kind of approval and decline available process there.

00:46:45 Casey: Yeah, I'm not sure.

00:46:47 Casey: Messages is getting some love.

00:46:48 Casey: Oh, I'm sorry.

00:46:49 Casey: I'm skipping ahead.

00:46:50 Casey: Live voicemail is exciting, although I would assume that's going to require carrier support, I would guess.

00:46:55 John: No, it's just doing a transcription.

00:46:57 Marco: Yeah, it seems like it actually has replaced carrier voicemail.

00:47:01 Marco: The way this works mechanically, it looks like your phone is answering every call.

00:47:05 Marco: Even if you send it to voicemail, it seems like your phone is actually really answering it.

00:47:09 Marco: Which I think is interesting.

00:47:11 Marco: I worry a little bit about, will people or telemarketers be able to tell the difference between this kind of thing picking up and a carrier thing picking up?

00:47:22 Marco: I worry a little bit about that, but it sure seems like it is taking on that whole responsibility directly on the phone.

00:47:28 John: I like the example of you're in a meeting and you get a call, but you don't want to pick it up.

00:47:32 John: But you're also going to like it's bad enough when you get interrupted in a meeting and like you're looking down at your phone and the person speaking knows you're not paying attention because you're looking to see who called.

00:47:40 John: Not only are you now looking to see who called, you're also staring at your phone to watch the transcription slowly appear.

00:47:45 John: So you're paying even less attention to the meeting.

00:47:47 John: So maybe not the best example, but, you know, perhaps a useful feature.

00:47:51 Casey: All right.

00:47:52 Casey: Then we got FaceTime, which now has voicemail as well.

00:47:56 Marco: Facemail.

00:47:57 Casey: Facemail.

00:47:58 Casey: Kim Beverett came up for messages, which has search filters.

00:48:02 Casey: It has, I looked away when this was discussed, but my understanding is there's a button that will let you jump directly to the oldest message that you have not yet read.

00:48:11 Casey: So this is basically a jump to unread thing, which I am so excited about.

00:48:15 Casey: That'll be very, very cool.

00:48:17 Casey: Audio messages are transcribed for the six people in the world that use them.

00:48:20 Casey: Uh, you can do location stuff in line.

00:48:24 Casey: Uh, if you are a complete worry wart, like, hello, uh, me, it's me.

00:48:28 Casey: I'm, I'm the problem.

00:48:28 Casey: It's me.

00:48:29 Casey: Uh, check-in is a thing now.

00:48:31 Casey: And I don't know how one establishes that you need or want to check in or how you establish that you're going to provide a check-in, but one way or another, it detects, you know, whether or not you've gotten home or whatever place you're trying to travel to and will automatically tell the person that you're checking in with, oh, you know, Casey has arrived home safe and sound.

00:48:48 Casey: uh, which I am pretty excited about.

00:48:51 Marco: Wait, doesn't, doesn't this additionally Sherlock, like through the grave, your old app?

00:48:56 Marco: Uh, yes.

00:48:57 Marco: What was the one with the feet?

00:48:58 Marco: What was it called?

00:48:58 Marco: I forgot.

00:48:59 Casey: Oh, fast text.

00:49:00 Casey: No, I was, I thought it was something else.

00:49:02 Casey: Yeah.

00:49:03 Marco: It's like additionally Sherlock fast.

00:49:04 Casey: Oh, fast text has been Sherlock eight ways to Sunday.

00:49:07 Casey: I mean, it's long.

00:49:08 Marco: Yeah.

00:49:09 Marco: This is, this is dug up its grave and then reburied it deeper.

00:49:11 Marco: Yeah.

00:49:11 Casey: Yeah, pretty much, pretty much.

00:49:13 Casey: I thought you were talking about Glimpse, which is an app I used to religiously use, and I haven't used in a long time, but Maps has a similar feature and has for a couple years now, where it lets you see somebody going down the road.

00:49:26 Casey: Nevertheless,

00:49:28 Casey: They also redid the messages UI a little bit.

00:49:31 Casey: So now apparently there's like a plus button to the left of the text entry field where everything lives and it tries to be smarter about what it presents there and what order, et cetera, et cetera.

00:49:40 John: Say hallelujah on that.

00:49:41 John: We've talked about that for so many years and it's like, oh, because ever since they hid the attached photo under a second tap,

00:49:48 John: uh you know and elevated the stupid like uh audio message right you're like just you know just give me a list of the things i use most frequently and now they've they've totally eliminated that part of the ui like it's there's not an extra row there so you get more message space and everything's under a little plus and my impression from the thing is oh just sort by most recently used hallelujah it's a miracle amazing algorithm they could figure it just

00:50:10 John: so many years for that so i this i'm i was excited by this portion of the thing because the features they were saying like more sophisticated search and swipe to reply and a sane ui for doing message things have been so long in coming but will have an outsized effect on my life so i give this whole section a thumbs up even though kind of like marking as unread it's things that they should have had ages ago better late than never

00:50:33 Marco: Yeah, this is all like, you know, nice little everyday nicety features.

00:50:38 Marco: I'm so happy they're doing this stuff.

00:50:39 Marco: Yeah, again, sure, it would have been great if they did it years ago, but they're doing it now.

00:50:43 Marco: And like any kind of little improvement to messages, that has such a massive impact on the world.

00:50:49 Marco: Like, you know, messages is so big.

00:50:51 Marco: It is probably the most used app on the iPhone globally, period.

00:50:55 Marco: And so, you know, this is such like any little thing they do.

00:50:59 Marco: Obviously, that's probably one of the reasons why they're fairly conservative with its feature set.

00:51:02 Marco: because the impact is quite large, and you don't want to get anything wrong.

00:51:06 Marco: But I'm so happy they're doing stuff like this.

00:51:08 Marco: Little good quality of life features.

00:51:10 Casey: Yeah, I completely agree with you.

00:51:11 Casey: However, real-time correction follow-up, my understanding is that Messages is not as big a deal globally, but certainly here in the States, 100% agreed.

00:51:20 Casey: I live in Messages.

00:51:21 Casey: It is far and away that, I mean, I'd have to look at the stats, but I've got to assume it is far and away my most used app.

00:51:27 Casey: So all these little quality of life improvements are excellent.

00:51:30 Casey: We got some, speaking of quality of life improvements, we got some airdrop updates.

00:51:35 Casey: You can do name drop, which I don't know.

00:51:37 Casey: Some people are snarking on the name.

00:51:38 Casey: I love that name.

00:51:39 Casey: I think it's hilarious.

00:51:39 Casey: But you can name drop via NFC where you just basically bump your two iPhones together.

00:51:44 John: Please don't bump them.

00:51:45 John: I do wonder with their demos, if this is going to be an epidemic of people cracking each other's screens, kind of like playing the Easter egg game where you bang the eggs together to see which one breaks.

00:51:53 John: Please do not bang the back of your phone against the top front screen.

00:51:58 John: Everyone has cases.

00:52:00 John: It'll be fine.

00:52:00 Marco: Doesn't this doesn't this Sherlock an actual startup that was named bump?

00:52:04 Marco: Wasn't that actually a thing?

00:52:05 Marco: Something like that.

00:52:06 John: Yeah.

00:52:07 John: Yeah.

00:52:07 John: But they kept showing one over the top of another.

00:52:10 John: So it was like, just I really hope I really hope this this happens with just proximity and not overlapping and clacking together.

00:52:17 Marco: But that was part of a larger AirDrop update, too, where AirDrop now, it's more automatic when you just bring phones near each other.

00:52:26 Marco: I wonder how that will work with Macs, non-phone devices, because I frequently will AirDrop something between a phone and a Mac, and usually phone to Mac.

00:52:36 Marco: And so I hope, and sometimes it's me, sometimes it's Tiff, so I hope that is better, because right now it is...

00:52:43 Marco: It's a very slow process to airdrop something from your phone to your – Still faster than file sharing in the Finder.

00:52:50 Marco: That's true.

00:52:51 Marco: That's not difficult.

00:52:52 Marco: But, yeah, it's a very slow process.

00:52:54 Marco: I'm hoping that with this – they've probably done some degree of rewriting here to enable all this cool Colonic Kuna stuff.

00:52:59 John: Yeah.

00:52:59 John: I do wonder if people are going to be taking their phones and pressing it up against their screen.

00:53:03 John: It's like, I'm sorry, there's nothing in that screen that's going to know the phone is near it.

00:53:07 John: Especially if you have a desktop, you've got to hold it near the Mac Studio or something.

00:53:10 John: Or if you have a laptop in your little holster, you've got to take the phone and rub it against your laptop or something.

00:53:16 Marco: Yeah.

00:53:17 Marco: And also now AirDrop now can continue the transfer over the internet if the phone leaves the range during the transfer, which is pretty cool.

00:53:26 Casey: That is incredible.

00:53:27 Casey: Yeah.

00:53:27 Casey: Now it's limited only to people who are signed into iCloud on their phones.

00:53:32 Casey: So both the sender and the recipient need to be signed into iCloud.

00:53:35 Casey: But yeah, you can start your AirDrop transfer via NFC and then you can do the negotiation via NFC and then you can

00:53:43 Casey: walk away, and apparently it will just magically get uploaded to iCloud and then transferred, and then I presume deleted thereafter, which is super cool, and I'm super excited about that.

00:53:53 John: Not just NFC.

00:53:53 John: Airdrop does the peer-to-peer Wi-Fi thing.

00:53:56 Marco: Yes.

00:53:57 Marco: It uses that to transfer, but I believe it uses ultra-wideband to detect that super tight proximity.

00:54:04 Marco: Actually, a good thing to check is what models of phone does this work on?

00:54:08 Marco: Because, you know, whenever they added the ultra-wide band, I think it was somewhere around the iPhone 12 or 13, somewhere around there-ish.

00:54:16 Marco: So if phones older than that can't do it, then we know it's using the U1 chip or whatever.

00:54:22 Casey: We got some keyboard and dictation stuff.

00:54:24 Casey: Allegedly...

00:54:26 Casey: They've really, really honest.

00:54:28 Casey: I promise.

00:54:29 Casey: Seriously, you guys, I swear it's fixed this time.

00:54:32 Casey: Auto-correct.

00:54:33 Casey: It's going to work this time.

00:54:35 Casey: I swear.

00:54:35 Casey: I promise.

00:54:37 Casey: But the best part, possibly my favorite moment of this entire presentation, including the debut of the Vision Pro, was Craig saying, those moments when you just want to type a ducking word.

00:54:50 Casey: It was so good.

00:54:51 Casey: I lost it.

00:54:52 Casey: Oh, my gosh.

00:54:53 Marco: The best thing was, he said, you have to teach Apple what the curse words are.

00:54:58 Marco: It says, when you want to type the ducking word, you type it, and then the keyboard will learn it, too.

00:55:04 Marco: So we get to corrupt our phones, basically, with the words that Apple walks in and pretends they don't know.

00:55:11 John: I wish I didn't remember all the same pitches I heard about the previous version of autocorrect.

00:55:17 John: Oh, we've improved it so much and it's great and it will learn and blah, blah, blah.

00:55:20 John: And that was not the case.

00:55:21 John: So they said all the right things again, but this time I'm a little bit more doubtful whether they've done it or not.

00:55:28 John: I loved everything they said.

00:55:29 John: I'm like, yes, please make it better.

00:55:31 John: You're acknowledging that it's bad by telling us that you've improved it.

00:55:34 John: I don't know if they're trying to say if it's all new or not.

00:55:37 John: I hope it's all new because the existing one just needs to...

00:55:41 Marco: Well, they did say something important.

00:55:43 Marco: So one word that you didn't hear in this entire presentation was AI.

00:55:50 John: Or large language model.

00:55:51 Marco: Yes.

00:55:51 Marco: Those were not mentioned.

00:55:52 Marco: Neither was Metaverse.

00:55:54 Marco: Those were not mentioned.

00:55:54 Marco: That was intentional, from my understanding.

00:55:56 Marco: But they...

00:55:58 Marco: AI was never said, and there's lots of reasons for that.

00:56:01 Marco: You know, it's a buzzword.

00:56:02 Marco: It means a lot of things to a lot of different people.

00:56:04 Marco: And, you know, what people usually are referring to these days when they say AI, there's more precise language if you want to be more precise.

00:56:11 Marco: And what they said about the new autocorrect and the new dictation, which I'm very curious about the API around that, what they said was they're now using a, quote, transformer language model.

00:56:22 Marco: Forward prediction.

00:56:23 Marco: So this is, you know, this is like the kind of thing that chat GPT is like those large language models.

00:56:28 Marco: Those are transformer language models.

00:56:30 Marco: And so what it sounds like is that they built in some, you know, custom transformer based language model into iOS 17 for both autocorrect on the keyboard and for dictation.

00:56:42 Marco: And those are probably two different models.

00:56:43 Marco: But, you know, so they're both using transformer models.

00:56:47 Marco: AI-based tech.

00:56:48 Marco: It's that kind of tech.

00:56:50 Marco: That is probably a significant change from the previous ML system that was based on different older techniques that were probably not transformer-based.

00:56:58 Marco: That actually is a pretty big deal.

00:57:01 Marco: If it has any chance of working well, it's going to be with this kind of technology in this day and age.

00:57:07 John: It ain't called AI, but... Well, see, I don't know, because, like, the large language models don't do this job.

00:57:15 John: Like, large language models do all sorts of stuff, but I haven't seen them perform this function.

00:57:20 John: Like, people are typing on a keyboard, trying to figure out what they were saying.

00:57:23 John: So, like, for me, it's an open question.

00:57:25 John: Are those type of models good at this specific task?

00:57:29 John: Because it is very different than conversing, asking a question, looking something up, like all the sorts of things that people are doing with them now, having it perform a task, or even like what I talked about in the past, which is say a bunch of crap and then have it figure out what you mean and then have it convey that message to Siri and have it do a thing for you.

00:57:45 John: So I still say the jury's out on this.

00:57:47 John: I'm hopeful.

00:57:48 John: I did note that they said some new technologies and said some new things about how it's going to be better.

00:57:53 John: But I haven't actually seen or used something that does autocorrect for phone keyboards that uses this type of model to say, oh, I know it'll work great because I've seen it before.

00:58:04 Casey: As we keep going, we got Journal debuted, so potentially bad news for day one.

00:58:11 Casey: This was introduced by Aditi.

00:58:12 Casey: I didn't catch their last name.

00:58:14 Casey: But iPhone creates suggestions throughout the day of things you might want to journal.

00:58:21 Casey: Now, I got super excited because they said there would be an API for this.

00:58:25 Casey: And I took that as, oh, we will provide to day one or whatever an API where you can ask for, well, so hold on, where you can ask for the suggestions we've come up with.

00:58:36 Casey: And I thought that was a...

00:58:37 Casey: freaking awesome because then you know I can use day one which I have literally thousands of entries in and I can continue to use day one but have it kind of fill some of this stuff out for me and I was so excited and then someone pointed out to me later I think via like Macedon or something or maybe it was a text message but one way or the other somebody pointed out no no no no no no no no

00:58:57 Casey: you will be suggesting to Apple what they can include in journal.

00:59:01 Casey: They will not be suggesting to anyone else.

00:59:03 Casey: And I mean, I don't think we've seen these APIs or certainly as we are recording, we haven't seen the APIs.

00:59:08 Casey: Perhaps they're available now.

00:59:09 Casey: But yeah, I think that was perhaps too generous a read on the situation, which kind of bums me out because I love day one.

00:59:17 Casey: They have sponsored in the past a couple of times, I'm pretty sure, but I will evangelize them until I'm blue in the face.

00:59:23 Casey: They are a it's a fantastic app that I put at least, you know, 10, 15 minutes of time into every single day.

00:59:29 Casey: And I'm very thankful for it every single day.

00:59:31 Casey: So whether whether or not this Sherlock's day one, I think it's as always, it's going to be one of those situations where if you want more, you go to day one.

00:59:39 Casey: But if this is enough, then this is enough.

00:59:41 Casey: But I do think that based completely on my own experience,

00:59:45 Casey: I think that journaling, to some degree, I think that's a helpful and healthy thing to do.

00:59:50 Casey: I don't think it's required to be a healthy individual, but I think it is a healthy activity, just like exercise is a healthy activity.

00:59:58 Casey: And I think it's great that they're trying to provide an outlet or vehicle for this for more people.

01:00:03 Casey: And I dig this in principle.

01:00:05 Casey: I'm excited for this.

01:00:07 Casey: Moving on, we've got standby, which is similar to the Apple Watch when it's in, I think, nightstand mode, they called it or something like that.

01:00:13 Casey: But basically, if you put your iPhone horizontally, you can see a big old clock.

01:00:19 Casey: You can see a bunch of widgets.

01:00:22 Casey: The widgets are swipable, just like on the home screen.

01:00:25 Casey: And you can interact with them, which we'll talk about a little bit more later.

01:00:29 Casey: But yeah, this looks neat.

01:00:30 Casey: This is not filling a use that I have personally.

01:00:35 Casey: And I don't know a lot of people that have stands that facilitate a landscape mounted phone, but I could totally see because I'm one of those a-holes that buys a new phone every year.

01:00:46 Casey: I could totally see putting like one of these in the living room or in the kitchen or something like that and just making it chock full of HomeKit buttons and having like a HomeKit, you know, control center sort of thing with like a couple of year old phone.

01:01:00 Casey: But either way, I mean, I don't know that this is going to be a terribly popular thing to do.

01:01:05 Casey: But I like it.

01:01:05 Casey: I think it's a neat idea.

01:01:07 Casey: And what's it going to hurt?

01:01:08 John: It's kind of bridging the gap between our generation that had clock radios on the nightstand.

01:01:14 John: Because that's a thing that's kind of like a landscape-oriented but kind of vertical-ish thing.

01:01:19 John: And the current...

01:01:20 John: past few the generations that are after us because the generations are after us I believe their experience is it's just your phone laying flat on your nightstand they use their phone as their alarm but it's just laying there flat and so whenever the alarm goes off they reach over pick it up and press the button or whatever and so this is like okay we know all you've got in your nightstand is a phone but we know from generations past that sometimes it's convenient to have it facing you so you can read the time by just turning your head instead of picking your head up and peeking so you can see the time on the you know what I mean

01:01:50 John: I'm not sure if that hybrid approach is going to find a market or not.

01:01:55 John: But hey, it's a useful thing to do with your phone when it's at orientation.

01:01:58 John: And you mentioned there's not many stands like that.

01:02:00 John: I think you're going to see a lot more stands like that in the coming years because there are a lot of people in our generation or older who would like to replace their clock radio with a phone.

01:02:09 John: But right now it doesn't fulfill that role because it doesn't look clock radio-ish.

01:02:13 John: And this does.

01:02:14 John: So thumbs up for old people.

01:02:16 Marco: Yeah, I mean, I think this is a cool feature set to add to an iPhone.

01:02:21 Marco: The clock radio thing, I think, is the most obvious use case for it.

01:02:25 Marco: But ultimately, what this really, I think, is much cooler of an idea for would be, like, a kitchen countertop thing, you know, like, similar to how people use voice assistant products, like, you know, the Amazon Alexa line of stuff, and, you know, like, they have various ones with screens and everything, the Google Home stuff, you know, they have one with a screen.

01:02:45 Marco: And so what's interesting is like, why is this on the iPhone?

01:02:49 Marco: But I think this is foreshadowing maybe a dedicated product in this area, which could be much better.

01:02:56 John: And much cheaper, I would hope.

01:02:58 Marco: Yes.

01:02:58 Marco: The problem with an iPhone doing this is, number one, it's too small to be used in your kitchen.

01:03:02 Marco: Number two, it's too expensive.

01:03:04 Marco: And the ones that would be the most obvious things to do them would be the ones with always-on displays.

01:03:10 Marco: So that limits it to even more expensive models.

01:03:13 Marco: so what this really wants to be first of all I don't know why this isn't an iPad feature like this would be a great use of especially like an old iPad like if it's old enough to run this well they did add widgets to iPadOS yeah so I think an iPad with widgets is close

01:03:30 Marco: Yeah, but the fact that it listens for Siri, but it can run your widgets, it's designed to be viewed at a distance, all these things.

01:03:40 Marco: It would be a lot better as a use for a semi-retired iPad.

01:03:45 Marco: It would be great for that.

01:03:47 Marco: And it would also be great to have some kind of maybe good speaker built in, maybe some kind of HomePod with this as a screen.

01:03:55 Marco: That could be a really nice kitchen counter kind of computer.

01:03:58 Marco: So

01:03:58 Marco: I'm hoping that this is just the precursor to future products that are devoted to this for kitchen counter use.

01:04:05 Marco: Now, bedside use, that makes sense to be your phone because your phone's already on your bedside table.

01:04:10 Marco: You're already charging it overnight, so that's really nice.

01:04:12 Marco: One interesting little tidbit they threw in there at the end is they said that if you use a MagSafe charger,

01:04:17 Marco: I guess MagSafe chargers have some kind of like serial number in them.

01:04:20 Marco: So it says each MagSafe charger will remember whatever view you configured for each MagSafe charger.

01:04:26 Marco: So like if you have one in the bedroom that's MagSafe and then you also have a separate MagSafe charger in the kitchen and you have two different views configured, based on what they said, I think it will actually maintain separate settings for those, which is pretty cool.

01:04:38 Casey: Yeah, that is cool.

01:04:38 Casey: I did not notice that.

01:04:39 Casey: Or if they stated it during the keynote, I totally missed it.

01:04:42 Casey: So that's cool.

01:04:44 Casey: So yeah, we also get sharing.

01:04:46 Casey: I think this is on one of those quilt screens where it shows all the different features.

01:04:51 Casey: We get sharing for Find My Items, which is pretty cool.

01:04:54 Casey: And also pet recognition.

01:04:56 Casey: So it'll recognize pets, your pets, in photos.

01:04:59 John: I'm excited by this.

01:05:00 John: I think that may be my favorite iOS 17 feature, considering as far as we know, we don't have any confirmation on the force quit all apps or hide all pictures feature.

01:05:11 John: Find out when we get the betas.

01:05:12 John: But pet recognition, we've been waiting for that for such a long time because a huge percentage of my pictures are pictures of my various dogs.

01:05:18 John: And they are not...

01:05:19 John: identified and so when i ever want to search for for dogs i have to just search for dog and it's my dog my past dog and also every other dog i've ever taken a picture of there's a lot of them too i'd love to be able to just search for my specific dog so i'm excited to try out that feature i hope it does well

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01:07:38 Casey: All right, iPadOS, we've got widgets on the lock screen.

01:07:41 Casey: They are interactive, kind of.

01:07:44 Casey: They are interactive, but very limited.

01:07:46 Casey: It's very, very limited the way this works.

01:07:48 Casey: And I'm probably going to get some details wrong here.

01:07:51 Casey: But my understanding is you vend to iOS or iPadOS that you support an activity intent.

01:08:01 Casey: And you can, in your SwiftUI code, say, hey, by hitting this button, you are firing that intent.

01:08:08 Casey: Does that sound right, Marco, if you looked into this at all?

01:08:12 Casey: Does that at least sound vaguely correct?

01:08:13 Marco: So, you know, when the rumor started about interactive widgets, one of the things we said was, look, the way widgets work is those processes for those apps are not continuously running.

01:08:23 Marco: And so, you know, basically, you give the system a timeline of, like, here's what my widget should show between these time ranges into the future.

01:08:32 Marco: You know, so you can configure, like, if you're making...

01:08:34 Marco: you know, weather, you have an hourly forecast, you know, okay, for this hour, from this time to this time, show this forecast, and this time to this time, show this forecast, and then ask me again in four hours for an update.

01:08:43 Marco: You know, so you can kind of tell the system, like, when you have new data, or you can send a push notification to request a refresh, or your app can request a refresh, or whatever, but

01:08:51 Marco: It's all based on like you're kind of pre-rendering the content for the widget, and then your app is suspended into the background.

01:08:58 Marco: So you are not continuously running.

01:09:00 Marco: So when the rumors came up of interactive widgets, we were asking on the show, like, well, how does that work?

01:09:04 Marco: Because if you tap a button or something in the widget...

01:09:08 Marco: Does it have to then relaunch your process in the background?

01:09:12 Marco: And the answer appears to be yes.

01:09:14 Marco: They didn't change the way the process management is done.

01:09:18 Marco: Your process is still not running when you have a widget on the screen.

01:09:22 Marco: That app's process is still not running continuously.

01:09:24 Marco: But they have added this new system where there are certain...

01:09:30 Marco: you know, limited types of interaction like buttons and toggles that you can use from Swift UI.

01:09:34 Marco: And when they are triggered, you can, you know, it will request the app intent, which will wake up your apps process in the background and perform whatever action you need to perform.

01:09:45 Marco: Some of those can be done in the extension, the widget extension.

01:09:47 Marco: Most of them I think are just done in the app.

01:09:49 Marco: And,

01:09:51 Marco: I'll have more to say on this once I've had a chance to actually try it because this all depends on how quickly that is happening in the background.

01:10:01 Marco: How quickly is it going to wake up my process?

01:10:03 Marco: How quickly can I respond?

01:10:05 Marco: What kind of interaction is really possible here?

01:10:08 Marco: Is there throttling built in?

01:10:10 Marco: If somebody interacts with it constantly over and over again, if they tap it a whole bunch of times all in a row, can I actually respond to that?

01:10:17 Marco: If I put a play-pause button in there, which their documentation seemed to suggest as a valid use of this, so if I make a little mini-player widget, if people interact with it a lot, does it throttle?

01:10:30 Marco: Do the requests back up?

01:10:32 Marco: Is it fast enough?

01:10:33 Marco: Is it responsive enough to make that a good experience?

01:10:35 Marco: That remains to be seen, and that might vary depending on what kind of hardware you have.

01:10:39 Marco: If somebody, quote, forced quit your app out of the switcher,

01:10:42 Marco: Does it take longer to wake it up if they tap on your widget?

01:10:45 Marco: There's all sorts of little implementation details.

01:10:48 Marco: If they make everything fast enough, and they have done a lot of work over the years with making the loaders faster and stuff like that, processes can launch pretty quickly these days on iOS, especially if you're not too bloated with your app.

01:11:02 Marco: But this all depends on that speed.

01:11:05 Marco: Is it fast enough that most people wouldn't notice and it feels like a live version of your app?

01:11:10 Marco: Or does it feel kind of like you're putting in a request and they're going to bring your order out later?

01:11:16 Marco: We'll see what happens.

01:11:18 Marco: I'm optimistic because, again, they have done so much work with the loader and everything to make everything faster to launch.

01:11:24 Marco: As long as we don't have any odd limits and throttles in place, this should be pretty interesting.

01:11:30 Marco: It's worth pointing out also this exact same system is now part of live activities as well.

01:11:34 Marco: So live activities can also now be interactive in the same way.

01:11:39 Marco: So there's a couple of minor differences, but they're minor.

01:11:42 Marco: So this could be really cool.

01:11:45 Marco: This adds yet more to the pile, making a little bit of work for me and a lot of work for our friend underscore David Smith.

01:11:52 Marco: But this is going to be probably a decent part of what my summer is spent working on because again, now I think

01:11:59 Marco: I think it's probably now going to be expected that apps like mine have now playing widgets that can actually work as little mini players.

01:12:07 Marco: So this will be some work, but it's a really cool idea.

01:12:10 Marco: And if it works well, if it's responsive, if it's fast, if it's not weirdly throttled, this could be really great.

01:12:17 John: I'm also worried about the latency and there's not a lot of good choices for Apple here if they're gonna stick with this model because like interactively One choice is as soon as they tap the button, you know, do the animation of the button being tapped highlight the button on highlighted or whatever

01:12:34 John: Uh, the other choice is to wait until it has woken the app up and the app has responded in the affirmative to highlight the button.

01:12:41 John: And both of those choices stink because if you highlight immediately, it's like, Oh, it's great.

01:12:44 John: It's really responsive.

01:12:45 John: But if you highlight immediately and it's taken a while to open the, to, to launch the app behind the scenes, because it has 27 ad SDKs in it and takes forever to launch.

01:12:53 John: Right.

01:12:54 John: Uh,

01:12:54 John: Then you press the button and from the user's experiences, I press the button, it highlighted, it unhighlighted, nothing happened.

01:13:01 John: Like for example, with a play pause, I hit it and it like, either it changes into the play symbol because it was previously was paused and you press it and now it's like, oh, I've paused and I'm going to change into the play symbol, but you still hear the music playing.

01:13:12 John: And now there's a disconnect.

01:13:14 John: The button is the play triangle, but you still hear the music playing.

01:13:17 John: Or you press it and literally nothing happens until you wake up the app.

01:13:22 John: It actually pauses the thing.

01:13:23 John: All bad choices, right?

01:13:25 John: If it's fast enough, no problem, right?

01:13:27 John: And I bet it will be fast enough for well-written apps that launch quickly.

01:13:31 John: You know, especially if it goes to the extension, not the app that can presumably launch even faster.

01:13:36 John: But I do worry about it because there's nothing worse than an unresponsive UI.

01:13:39 John: And especially on things like the iPad where you've got, you know, the bigger iPads with more RAM.

01:13:44 John: I do think this model is a little long in the tooth here.

01:13:48 John: I know they're really super cautious about everything, but...

01:13:51 John: It may be a little much.

01:13:53 John: How much RAM do we have to have?

01:13:54 John: How fast do these SoCs have to be before we say, you know what?

01:13:58 John: It's okay for something that has a widget to be running in the background.

01:14:02 John: I was going to destroy my battery.

01:14:07 John: I'm not sure they struck the right bounce, but we'll see.

01:14:09 John: Performance is not an issue.

01:14:10 John: It'll be fine.

01:14:11 John: I know we'll get to this in a little bit, but they're supporting this on the Mac, and on the Mac, it's not launching a process on your Mac.

01:14:16 John: It's going to talk to a process on your phone in some cases.

01:14:19 John: So not only does it have to wake up a process, it's going to wake up a process on a whole other device.

01:14:23 John: so i worry about that i mean it's great that they're there it's cool you can see your charge level on your lucid air or whatever but interaction press the thing on your mac mac says hey iphone are you around if you're around oh by the way here's an app intent the iphone's like wait what who are you okay app intent all right launch the app oh geez uh i really hope that is uh the acceptable performance let's watch kid all over

01:14:44 Marco: Yeah, I was about to say, that's exactly how a watch stuff works a lot of times, and that works pretty poorly.

01:14:50 Marco: Yeah.

01:14:50 Marco: I mean, I'm guessing, for whatever it's worth, I'm guessing that there is a pretty critical difference with process management, whether you're talking about something that is just simply suspended, which is basically pausing it and putting it in the background, so it can't execute anything live, but when you want to resume a suspended process, you just unpause it, and then it keeps going, so it's much faster, versus terminate it.

01:15:12 Marco: if it's terminated it is quit and then you have when you do need to relaunch it it has to load up you know from scratch like load everything back into memory i'm guessing i hope that if you have if you've configured a widget for an app and it's currently being displayed i'm guessing they don't let your process terminate i'm guessing they leave it suspended only and that way when you do tap it it's much faster to wake up

01:15:35 John: because someone's going to launch a game and you're going to get booted out like you're not you're not going to be suspended anymore like games will just take all available ram on an ipad oh yeah i don't care you know because you have a screen full of widgets so they you know things are tight not as tight as they could be but like anyway i just i i'm glad that they're moving and they're moving the right direction which is more permissive uh make more things possible and we'll see how this goes i but i do have to think that eventually the uh

01:16:01 John: The hardware will catch up to the point where the limitations won't be quite as onerous.

01:16:07 Casey: For what it's worth, it was pointed out by Adam the Sack in the chat that a friend of the show, James Thompson, already got a p-calc widget running in the simulator.

01:16:14 Casey: So it is seeming like you can put a bunch of buttons on there.

01:16:18 Casey: It looked quick.

01:16:19 Casey: We'll put a link in the show notes.

01:16:20 Casey: It looked reasonable.

01:16:23 Casey: Granted, this is all simulators.

01:16:24 Casey: It's beta 1, et cetera, et cetera.

01:16:25 Casey: But it looked good.

01:16:27 Casey: All right, where were we?

01:16:28 Casey: Widgets, blah, blah, blah, health.

01:16:29 Casey: There's now the health app on iPad.

01:16:31 Casey: That's cool.

01:16:32 Casey: I mean, I don't think there's too much more to say about it, but I'm here for it.

01:16:36 Casey: Then Jenny Chen came out, talked about PDFs and Apple Pencil.

01:16:38 Casey: Apparently, there's going to be much more robust PDF support, which is funny because I didn't ever think it was particularly bad.

01:16:44 John: Oh, no, it's bad.

01:16:44 John: So here's the thing with PDFs.

01:16:46 John: Everyone loves to send you PDFs that they want you to fill out as forms, but Preview and Apple's PDF handling...

01:16:54 John: It's got like a 50% success rate in my experience with, can it open and fill out this PDF in a sane way?

01:17:02 John: And that's not great.

01:17:03 John: But the worst part is, and the part that they're addressing here, most people have no idea how to even do what I just described.

01:17:08 John: Because to do what I just described, you have to know that it's possible.

01:17:10 John: You have to know you have to download it.

01:17:11 John: You have to know you can open it in preview.

01:17:12 John: You have to know preview has these features.

01:17:14 John: This is much more in line where it's like,

01:17:16 John: well we'll give it a shot right here where you see the thing in the mail app in the notes app like just you don't have to go anywhere you don't have to download it you don't have to open in another map it's right here but then we're still faced with the same problem which is like why does it only work sometimes is it because people are bad at making pdf forms yes they are bad at making pdf forms but

01:17:32 John: I've had to multiple times download the trial of Adobe Acrobat to use the one and only application I could find that will successfully fill out the stupid PDF form.

01:17:41 John: PDF forms are bad.

01:17:42 John: They should be web forms, but we have to live with them.

01:17:44 John: So I think Apple is doing what it can.

01:17:46 John: I just still would like to know, what is it about Apple's PDF handling?

01:17:49 John: It's probably the fact that Apple's PDF handling is correct according to the spec.

01:17:52 John: and people's pdfs are made like an acrobat and they only work in acrobat it's like i don't know if it's acrobat or something else like the equivalent of chrome where it's like well whatever chrome does is correct and safari screw you even if you follow the standards but uh good step in the right direction but i continue to find filling out pdfs frustrating on apple platforms without the help of janky third-party pdf stuff that i don't want to use

01:18:12 Marco: Well, the good news is now what's changed is not AI.

01:18:15 Marco: It's, quote, new machine learning models.

01:18:19 Marco: That's to identify the PDF forms.

01:18:20 Marco: And what's also cool is that they demoed that if it identifies forms and it looks like something like an address field, it will offer autofill.

01:18:28 John: which is really cool.

01:18:29 John: Yeah, no, they're brute forcing it, right?

01:18:31 John: Because you can actually make forms with PDFs that says, you know, this area is where they're going to fill in text.

01:18:37 John: But you can also brute force it, which is just, you know what?

01:18:39 John: Machine learning.

01:18:39 John: I'll figure it out.

01:18:40 John: It's an address field.

01:18:42 John: Because a lot of times people will send you a PDF that isn't a form, that doesn't have places for you to put stuff, and they just expect you to print it and scan it back in are some insanity.

01:18:48 John: So, like, again, Apple's doing what it can, which is, like, we can't control the world of people sending out PDFs that only work in Acrobat for some reason, but we can...

01:18:56 John: you know, apply our skills and knowledge to just say, I don't care what the heck that PDF is.

01:19:01 John: I think that's an address form autofill.

01:19:03 Casey: Yeah, I thought it was cool, though.

01:19:04 Marco: And it's really cool, too.

01:19:05 Marco: Like the stuff that they added with making PDFs a bit more of a like, you know, first class citizen inside of an inside of a note in the notes app.

01:19:13 Marco: That, I think, is really cool.

01:19:15 Marco: The Notes app is like the master Sherlocker of Apple products.

01:19:20 Marco: It has Sherlocked so many apps over its history, and it does a pretty good job of many of them.

01:19:27 Marco: And in this case, now you can keep multiple PDFs in the same note.

01:19:31 Marco: If you're doing a research product, there's so...

01:19:33 Marco: There are so many apps that used to have to be a separate app, and now Notes does pretty much the same job.

01:19:41 John: I feel like it's still not ideal.

01:19:42 John: They were showing Notes being used for that.

01:19:44 John: I'm like, that's not the ideal app for that.

01:19:47 John: I think what they're doing is saying, look, if you're going to make a third-party version of this thing, people call it Sherlocking, but I think the definition has been lost.

01:19:54 John: Sherlocking was like, take an innovative idea for an app,

01:19:58 John: that has that you hadn't seen before that has a signature look and style and feature set that is recognizable as this thing and make one just like it and that's not what apple's doing instead what they're doing is saying when you buy our products you get the functionality to do basic stuff you can read email you can browse the web you can take notes and like and that that basic functionality how what is the basic functionality how much what does it encompass continues to expand as computers get more powerful or

01:20:23 John: But the idea is you don't have to buy an Apple device and be like, okay, now I got to spend 20 years in the app store asking my friends what I should download.

01:20:29 John: No, out of the box, it will do all the basic stuff.

01:20:32 John: So what that's doing is say, do you want to make a notes app?

01:20:35 John: Do you want to make a journaling app?

01:20:37 John: The bar is now, you can't just make a well-designed, fairly basic notes or journaling app.

01:20:42 John: You have to make one that is fancier, that has more features, that has a point of view that we don't have, that is more specific, that is more flexible.

01:20:50 John: And that's...

01:20:51 John: You know, that's tough for people, but it's not Sherlocking.

01:20:54 John: It's just saying when previously you needed an entirely new app to do this at all.

01:20:58 John: Now with the bundles app, you can do an OK job of it.

01:21:00 John: But like I would not want to manage all my PDFs inside a notes document.

01:21:05 John: But the fact that it's possible to do it at all means people don't have to suffer through hunting through for a third party application if they just want to have that basic functionality.

01:21:13 Marco: Yeah, and I think that's what Notes is really amazing at is if you don't need the super pro, specialized, advanced features of lots of stuff.

01:21:25 Marco: Something like Evernote where you want to collect all these ideas together for this one thing you're researching.

01:21:30 Marco: That used to require special apps like Evernote or things like that.

01:21:33 Marco: And now you can just do the 80% version of that in Notes.

01:21:39 Marco: And then, you know, if you need more advanced features, you can go to the more advanced apps.

01:21:43 Marco: But Notes by itself can do so much.

01:21:45 Marco: I mean, really, I think Notes, if I had to pick, like, you know, I've criticized Apple a lot in recent years for not really being able to make great applications.

01:21:56 Marco: You know, their OSs are amazing.

01:21:58 Marco: Their frameworks are amazing.

01:22:01 Marco: Their applications have been not super all there recently.

01:22:05 Marco: But I think Notes is probably the major exception that...

01:22:08 Marco: Notes is, I think, really kind of a sleeper.

01:22:13 Marco: People often don't think about it or don't think about how much value it's given them.

01:22:16 Marco: But there is so much built into Notes.

01:22:20 Marco: And overall, it works really well.

01:22:23 Marco: It is one of the best syncing apps in terms of iCloud reliability.

01:22:27 Marco: Although it doesn't sync in the background enough.

01:22:29 John: Yeah, exactly.

01:22:30 John: That's a big asterisk on that statement.

01:22:32 Marco: But when it does sync, it doesn't lose data.

01:22:35 Marco: It syncs reliably once it's going.

01:22:37 Marco: But the feature set, there's so much.

01:22:40 Marco: There's drawing.

01:22:41 Marco: There's checkboxes.

01:22:42 Marco: There's photo.

01:22:44 Marco: There's embedding all sorts of stuff.

01:22:46 Marco: Now they have linking.

01:22:47 Marco: That's one of the new things.

01:22:47 Marco: The document scanner thing.

01:22:49 Marco: Yes, like there's so much built into Notes.

01:22:52 Marco: I think Notes might be the best modern Apple app.

01:22:56 Marco: And there's just so much in there.

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01:24:15 Casey: now mac os sonoma i i when they were talking about wine this is my ignorance to all things california i thought they were going to say mac os napa but apparently no mac os sonoma and this is where jason snell is rolling and getting very upset with me sorry jason uh but nonetheless uh ariel got sherlocked ariel the i i've been running the ariel screensavers for forever well that that's not a sherlocking because ariel was just a re-implementation of an apple thing

01:24:39 John: And again, that's not Sherlocking.

01:24:41 Marco: Yes, taking Apple TV screensavers and putting them on your Mac.

01:24:43 Marco: Now your Mac just has Apple TV screensavers.

01:24:45 John: Right.

01:24:46 John: And now Apple put Apple TV screensavers on your Mac.

01:24:48 John: So, you know, Ariel filled the gap that Apple should have filled for a long time, which is, hey, these are your screensavers, Apple.

01:24:55 John: Why are they not on the Mac?

01:24:56 John: Now they are.

01:24:57 Marco: yeah it's like it was such an obvious like we of course put it on the mac why would you not want that now we now we have it by the way can i can i say on the sonoma name at least they finally picked a name that most people won't mispronounce or argue about how it's supposed to be pronounced you won't have all the california thing it's ventura i'm not sure that's true what what do you think people are easier time with this name than ventura i don't know

01:25:18 Casey: Oh, yeah.

01:25:19 Casey: Oh, yeah.

01:25:19 Casey: 100% agree with Marco.

01:25:21 Casey: 100% this is easier.

01:25:23 Casey: And it's not, I don't know, it's a place that I think people have actually heard of, which I feel, well, I mean, that's not fair.

01:25:29 John: I had never heard of Sonoma until freshman year at college when someone on my floor was from Sonoma.

01:25:35 John: So that's how sheltered I was out there.

01:25:37 Casey: Well, I don't think it's you being sheltered.

01:25:38 Casey: That's Californian self-importance shining through because I mean, yeah, I think I was a big wine drinker in high school.

01:25:44 Casey: Well, fair.

01:25:46 Casey: But no, I think I think, you know, if you're going to take it as fact that they're going to name things after California or places in California, fine, whatever.

01:25:52 Casey: uh, Sonoma, I think is a pretty good choice.

01:25:54 Casey: So moving right along, uh, we talked about aerial widgets are on the desktop now, like on the desktop properly.

01:26:00 Casey: And it, they dim when other apps are active.

01:26:02 Casey: I thought this was pretty neat.

01:26:03 Casey: They, they tint based on the wallpaper behind them.

01:26:05 Casey: I thought that was kind of neat.

01:26:07 Casey: This is where things get a little bit weird though.

01:26:09 Casey: First of all,

01:26:10 Casey: I had heard through the grapevine, this may not be true, but I had heard through the grapevine that, speaking of Sonoma, that Federici, up until at least a couple of years ago, which was the last time I was asking about this, drove like a piece of garbage, like 10-year-old Audi A6.

01:26:26 Casey: But did you notice what widget he was using or what widget was sitting on his desktop today?

01:26:30 Casey: I don't know.

01:26:31 Casey: Is that real?

01:26:31 Casey: Is that fake?

01:26:32 Casey: Who knows?

01:26:32 Casey: How could you know?

01:26:33 Casey: But he had the Lucid Air Charge widget on his desktop.

01:26:37 Casey: And that is a very nice and very expensive automobile, which if anyone can afford it, it's Craig.

01:26:42 Casey: But I thought that was interesting.

01:26:43 Casey: Nevertheless, this is what John was talking about earlier.

01:26:46 Casey: Apparently, you don't need to install...

01:26:50 Casey: apps on your Mac in order to use widgets from your phone.

01:26:53 Casey: You just need your phone on the same Wi-Fi network or within close proximity.

01:26:57 Casey: And then magic.

01:26:59 Casey: Surely it'll work no problem, right?

01:27:01 Marco: When they said that, that you can access iPhone widgets on the Mac without installing the app on the Mac.

01:27:08 John: And they're interactive.

01:27:09 Marco: Yeah, and they're interactive.

01:27:10 Marco: Again, hopefully it works more like anything than WatchKit.

01:27:14 Marco: Right.

01:27:14 Marco: But, you know, we'll see.

01:27:16 Marco: I mean, part of the reason why WatchKit sucks so badly is that the watch is a very, very low power device that is constantly turning off things like it's Wi-Fi radio and it's forcing everything over Bluetooth and keep trying to keep things like in sleep state as much as possible because it's so it's it's so power constrained.

01:27:32 Marco: So, hopefully, that kind of thing will work better with things like laptops and phones, which have bigger batteries and keep their Wi-Fi on more often and stuff like that.

01:27:40 Marco: Hopefully, that will be better.

01:27:42 Marco: And I sure... It can't be worse than WatchKit.

01:27:47 Marco: Or Watch Connectivity, rather, is the framework.

01:27:49 Marco: So, hopefully, it's better than Watch Connectivity.

01:27:52 Marco: And I think it probably will be.

01:27:53 Marco: But it's just... This is so cool.

01:27:55 Marco: iPhone widgets and the Mac.

01:27:57 Marco: This is... For all of the...

01:28:01 Marco: trouble that apple has keeping mac os relevant and updated and stable and high quality at least they're giving it modern features you know at least they're keeping mac os relevant it isn't it's as modern as dashboard which is what seven years old no but this is so much dashboard people comparing dashboard first of all

01:28:19 Marco: I loved certain things about dashboard, but dashboard sucked.

01:28:23 Marco: I use dashboard and it was, it just sucked because here's the thing.

01:28:27 Marco: First of all, you know, the, the reliance on web technologies back then when it came out, it made everything very sluggish in, you know, you'd like drag out the widget to plop on the, onto the dashboard and you'd want, and like it would, it would pause for a second before it showed that cool ripple vertex shader thing.

01:28:43 Marco: It did.

01:28:44 Marco: Um,

01:28:44 Marco: because it was basically loading a little web browser for each one of those things.

01:28:48 Marco: So that's problem number one.

01:28:49 Marco: Problem number two is that those were never updated in the background.

01:28:52 Marco: So you would hit whatever it was.

01:28:55 Marco: Was it F11?

01:28:55 Marco: What was the dashboard key?

01:28:57 John: Hot corner.

01:28:58 Marco: Or a hot corner, yeah.

01:28:59 Marco: So you'd bring up dashboard, and everything in dashboard would be showing either blank data or stale data.

01:29:05 Marco: And then over the following couple of seconds, they would pop in with updated data because they weren't being updated in the background.

01:29:11 Marco: So you'd load dashboard, and it was always stale.

01:29:14 John: and then it would pop in i think all those things you complain about were eventually fixed they eventually did one big webkit process for the whole thing instead of other ones and eventually they updated so fast that by the time the animation was done new data was in them at least with the widgets i use the main thing i liked about dashboard was that it was off screen so you didn't have to deal with what they're doing here where they're like oh they're dimmed because we don't want you to be distracted by them but dimming them is going to hurt their legibility but on the other hand i don't want them cluttering up my desktop so imagine if they were just off somewhere on another screen that i could hit a hot corner to get to uh

01:29:40 John: But yeah, this is the modern incarnation of that.

01:29:43 John: And by the way, if they did it with web technologies now, it would be lighting fast and they could update it in the background.

01:29:47 John: But why bother?

01:29:48 John: Because you've got SwiftUI and this whole widget system, which is great.

01:29:51 John: And it's great that it's the same across all platforms.

01:29:53 John: This is just sort of this is the whatever the opposite of a strategy tax is, a strategy bonus.

01:29:58 John: strategy credit like this yeah this this widget technology and the fact that swift ui is all cross-platform means that when you do this stuff you can share it across all your platforms and it is sort of a unifying force as they you know spread this around and people like widgets and if you know they don't have to make something dashboard was just totally out of left field because there was nothing like it now making it with apple's first class you know ui framework that works across all their platforms including their freaking headset uh that's that's the strategy bonus

01:30:25 Marco: Yeah, and I think the reality is there are two types of people out there.

01:30:30 Marco: There's the people who maintain a very clean, minimalist desktop, and then there's the rest of the world who uses their desktop for all sorts of crap, and I'm one of those people.

01:30:39 Marco: My desktop's always covered in crap, and whenever I mention that or post a screenshot, I always hear from the former type of person, like,

01:30:46 Marco: how can you live like that you know but hello the reality is most people use their desktop as a drop spot as as a working space because it's what's it there for it's not supposed to be clear all the time it's a working space it's it's real estate you can use to get your work done it's like people post those pictures like of like their real life desks and there's nothing on them those people aren't doing anything they're not working that's not how it really looks if you're actually doing anything

01:31:10 Marco: My desk is always covered in crap, just like my desktop.

01:31:12 Marco: That's how people live.

01:31:13 Marco: And so the idea of putting a widget or a few widgets on my desktop, I'm not concerned about the clutter that brings.

01:31:20 Marco: It's already cluttered.

01:31:22 Marco: If it can bring me useful information, great.

01:31:25 Casey: So next in keynote orders gaming, if you'll permit a slight change of procedure here, I'd like to come back to that and just try to blast through the other stuff real quick, and then we can spend a few minutes on gaming.

01:31:36 Casey: There were some video conferencing updates.

01:31:38 Casey: There's presenter overlay where you can get a fake green screen.

01:31:42 Casey: What I thought was super cool about this, I didn't take good notes about it, so I'm going off the top of my head, but you can put this setup where the camera is taking the video of you

01:31:54 Casey: And in the background behind you, like the real life background behind you, but then it will superimpose your screen as though it's being presented adjacent to your head.

01:32:06 Casey: I'm probably not doing a good job describing this, but it looked super cool.

01:32:11 Casey: And I can imagine how this would be

01:32:12 Casey: Super useful, especially if you can do this with, you know, Zoom and all the other video conferencing apps, which my understanding is this is a system level thing and you can do exactly that.

01:32:21 Casey: So I thought that looked really, really slick.

01:32:24 John: But the guy's head is blocking half of a slide, though.

01:32:27 Casey: I mean, I'm sure you could.

01:32:29 John: Well, I would be dodging out of the way.

01:32:31 John: I see this problem comically on the Destiny videos I watch is they all have kind of like the same thing where they can show their screen with their little head superimposed.

01:32:37 John: And they're always blocking the one part of the screen that they're trying to talk about.

01:32:41 Casey: Uh, then additionally, we got some talk about Safari again.

01:32:44 Casey: I'm going to try to make this quick.

01:32:45 Casey: Um, they said often that they locked the, they, I think a private browser window.

01:32:50 Casey: I think they were saying private browser window when you're not using it.

01:32:52 Casey: I'm not entirely clear what that means.

01:32:54 Casey: I'm assuming that means they don't show the contents.

01:32:56 Marco: Yeah.

01:32:57 Marco: It's probably like locked notes where like if you have a locked note and you go away from it for a little while, you come back and it re requires the authentication.

01:33:03 Marco: I'm sure it's, it's probably something like that.

01:33:04 Marco: Maybe it requires face ID or touch ID to unlock it.

01:33:06 Marco: Who knows?

01:33:07 Yeah.

01:33:07 Casey: Yep.

01:33:08 Casey: They're doing more to remove trackers and things like that.

01:33:11 Casey: Profiles for separating work browsing versus personal browsing.

01:33:16 Casey: This is something that even when I had an actual job didn't ever bother me that much.

01:33:19 Casey: But I can totally understand if this is something that bothers the royal you.

01:33:24 Casey: Yeah.

01:33:24 John: And people use it in Chrome a lot.

01:33:26 John: It's useful if you have kids that have a Google account with their school, but they also have their own personal Google account dealing with those.

01:33:32 John: But you can deal with them both in a single profile.

01:33:34 John: But having profiles in Chrome is super handy.

01:33:36 John: So this is a catch-up feature for Apple, but it's a good feature.

01:33:39 John: I heartily endorse it.

01:33:41 Marco: Yeah, I actually didn't realize that this was implemented by anybody else because I'm not really a Chrome person, but this is great because so often I would just use a different browser for certain things.

01:33:51 Marco: Like, oh, I have this browser for this account, and then I'll have this other browser that I launch only to use this other account.

01:33:56 Marco: Now this is much nicer.

01:33:58 John: yeah and what chrome does is they let you have like different themes for the for the chrome for the chrome and the ui so you can kind of tell like this is the school when these are all the school windows are kind of bluish and all my personal windows are kind of whitish or whatever um the way apple is doing it is not coloring the whole uh ui but the button that switches profiles is strongly colored orange blue or whatever so i think that's a good compromise i think apple did a good job with this feature

01:34:21 John: yep all right so then the other thing that was super exciting to me about safari um oh i'm sorry before we get there uh web apps on the mac you can do file add to dock that's cool not from not something i feel like i would use but that's cool and people are gonna say you're sherlocking a thousand apps but again i'm gonna say not the same definition of sherlock but boy are there have there are and there have been so many apps on the mac that did this exact job and apple finally got around to doing it after what like a decade a decade and a half that those apps have exist and

01:34:48 Casey: now it's built in and arguably apple did it first ish on the iphone because i think from like day one you could basically save a website as a icon on springboard on your phone yep yep yep uh but the thing before we move on and come back to gaming the thing that i am genuinely no sarcasm super freaking amped about is shared pass keys so yeah recap and passwords not just pass keys

01:35:12 Casey: Oh, I didn't catch that.

01:35:14 Casey: That's a good correction.

01:35:14 Casey: Thank you.

01:35:16 Casey: So passkeys and password.

01:35:18 Casey: Well, we all know what a password is.

01:35:19 Casey: Passkey is that fancy thing where you can use, you know, biometric authentication or whatever.

01:35:24 Casey: Again, I'm probably getting these terms wrong, but you get the gist of what I'm saying.

01:35:26 Casey: You can do use biometrics in order to authenticate onto websites and things like that.

01:35:30 Casey: And I am really into this because you don't have to worry about remembering passwords.

01:35:35 Casey: You don't have to invent ridiculously long, complex passwords.

01:35:38 Casey: And I'm super into this right now because 1Password8 and 1Password is a former sponsor.

01:35:44 Casey: And I love the people at 1Password.

01:35:45 Casey: Really, I do.

01:35:47 Casey: 1Password 8 is really not good.

01:35:49 Casey: Like really, really not good.

01:35:52 Casey: Really not good.

01:35:53 Casey: And I think they're marching ahead with 1Password 8 come hell or high water.

01:35:56 Casey: We don't care who we tick off in doing it.

01:35:58 Casey: So I've been shopping around for something to replace 1Password.

01:36:01 Casey: And I am a religious user of the shared vault system where you can have a vault in 1Password of shared passwords that both Aaron and I can see.

01:36:12 Casey: And up until literally today, I didn't really see any equivalent of that in passkeys.

01:36:18 Casey: And now I don't know how good it's going to be.

01:36:20 Casey: I don't know if it's going to be easy or not, but at least there's a chance because shared passkeys and apparently passwords are a thing or will be a thing.

01:36:29 Casey: And I am genuinely, no sarcasm, super excited for this.

01:36:33 John: Here's a summary from Ricky on Mastodon.

01:36:36 John: You can share pass keys, passwords, and verification codes, which means like the two-factor things, and notes.

01:36:42 John: Edits and updates seamlessly sync between group members, end-to-end encrypted, share with family, friends, or other close contacts.

01:36:48 John: So it's the full thing.

01:36:49 John: It's like, you know iCloud Keychain where you put your stuff?

01:36:52 John: Well, now some of that stuff can be shared.

01:36:54 John: Excellent.

01:36:54 Marco: Love it.

01:36:55 Marco: Yeah, although there's still no, like, passwords app.

01:36:58 Marco: It's still, as far as I can tell, right, it's still, like, kind of buried in either settings or in Safari.

01:37:03 John: As far as I know, we'll have to check iOS 17-bit.

01:37:06 Marco: I do wish they would just make an app for all this stuff, you know, give us a little more features that are like 1Password in terms of just, like, the editing interface and stuff like that.

01:37:15 Marco: Just because they have all the pieces.

01:37:17 Marco: They have this amazing system.

01:37:20 Marco: If the app situation was a little bit nicer and better, I would definitely switch and I would drop 1Password.

01:37:26 Marco: But at least until that happens and if that happens, right now I think I'm still going to stick with 1Password just because I like having that easy access to everything.

01:37:36 Marco: So I know Apple, again, like I said a few minutes ago, they're not great at making applications in recent years with a few exceptions.

01:37:42 Marco: But I wish they would do that because this is screaming out for it.

01:37:48 Marco: And I think that would ultimately – not only would that make our lives better as the nerds who use these kind of things already, but I think that would actually help more people use this.

01:37:56 Marco: Their goal –

01:37:57 Marco: which is a laudable goal, is to make this stuff built into everything so it's easy to use so more people have better security.

01:38:04 Marco: That's a great goal.

01:38:06 Marco: They should be doing that, and they largely succeed.

01:38:09 Marco: But these passwords being buried in these places that most people don't even know you can go to access them, that's not good enough to achieve that goal.

01:38:17 Marco: You need easier access for people to see and edit and view this stuff instead of just being buried in a settings panel somewhere they don't even know is there.

01:38:27 John: I mean, you're supposed to use it at the point of, you're not supposed to go digging for it.

01:38:30 John: Like it's supposed to be right there in Safari and autofilling and everything like that.

01:38:33 John: But when you do go and edit it, the interface for doing so is bare bones, right?

01:38:37 John: It's not, there's not a lot of fancy stuff in it.

01:38:39 John: So if it was a separate app, presumably you'd have a bigger team to do that UI and not, you know, cause like the guts of this feature are the important part, the backend, the syncing, the end to end encryption, like, and the, all the APIs for hooking it into apps.

01:38:52 John: That's the majority of what this team probably does.

01:38:55 John: And then, oh, by the way, you need to have a UI so you can actually look at this stuff.

01:38:58 John: It's kind of like not an afterthought, but they don't have the resources to go a whole hog of like to even come close to competing with one password for the features of the actual app that you go to.

01:39:07 John: But in general, I don't think you're supposed to be going to the app in the ideal case.

01:39:11 John: But sometimes you do need to go there.

01:39:13 John: And when you do, the app is just kind of like, well, first of all, it's not an app.

01:39:16 John: It's buried in settings.

01:39:17 John: Second, it's just, you know, it's there.

01:39:19 John: The stuff's there.

01:39:19 John: It's fine.

01:39:20 Marco: And I feel like if they had an app, it kind of pushes them more in the direction of adopting to the reality of the world.

01:39:28 Marco: In the reality of the world, not every app people use on Apple's platforms, let alone off of them, is Apple's version of that app.

01:39:36 Marco: So, for instance...

01:39:38 Marco: chrome on the mac kind of a big thing i know safari is better i agree i use safari myself but many people use chrome on the mac and this has as far as far as i know this still has no way to integrate with that oh it has a way to integrate it with but google doesn't use that way so it doesn't integrate like there are apis google could integrate with it but they choose not to

01:40:00 Marco: Doesn't Apple make an extension for Chrome for Windows to do this, but not Chrome for Mac?

01:40:07 Marco: I feel like there are... I wish Apple would open up a little more of the access to this to reflect what people actually want and do, because their functionality is great in this area, and now we're kind of just stuck with things like 1Password to fill that role instead, which is fine.

01:40:26 Marco: Those are good apps to an extent, but...

01:40:29 Marco: For those of us who are mostly Apple-based in our ecosystem, Apple's solution is largely better in a lot of ways.

01:40:36 Marco: And I wish I could kind of go all in on it, but there's still these little areas that keep me on 1Password.

01:40:40 Marco: Anyway, maybe it's selfish.

01:40:41 Marco: I don't know.

01:40:41 Marco: But I think they could get more people using this feature and benefiting from Apple's increased security with a few little tweaks here and there or large things like an app.

01:40:51 Casey: Yeah, I agree with what you're saying.

01:40:53 Casey: I think for now, I would also stick with 1Password.

01:40:57 Casey: But this gives me a whole bunch of peace of mind knowing that if 1Password forces me on 1Password 8, because I actually downgraded to 7, and oh my god, my experience got so much better.

01:41:08 Casey: But anyway...

01:41:09 Casey: If I'm forced to 8 and if 8 is still a pile of garbage, then this gives me options, right?

01:41:15 Casey: Whereas up until today, I feel like I would just have to suffer through with 1Password 8, which maybe it's gotten better in the last month.

01:41:21 Casey: Who knows?

01:41:22 Casey: The chat room seems to disagree with me here, but I can tell you it's been nothing but a nightmare for me up until a month ago.

01:41:28 Casey: So anyways, this gives me hope that there will be a workable alternative, which I am super into.

01:41:35 Casey: All right.

01:41:35 Casey: We have been recording for something to the order of an hour and a half, hour, 45 minutes.

01:41:41 Casey: I have a feeling, John, you're going to have a couple of words to say about gaming, but please remember that we have an entire other product line to talk about.

01:41:49 Casey: So use your time wisely, sir.

01:41:51 Casey: Go.

01:41:51 John: Seems like you waste a lot of time with that preamble.

01:41:53 John: I could have just done it quickly.

01:41:55 Casey: Oh, it's like that.

01:41:56 Casey: I see.

01:41:57 John: We're going to talk a little bit more about gaming later, but this is the typical thing that Apple does, where they get someone.

01:42:01 John: We talked about Hideo Kojima being rumored to have been seen around Apple.

01:42:04 John: Well, here he is.

01:42:05 John: He's talking about stuff, and he's talking about games on the Mac.

01:42:08 John: Oh, it's a four-year-old game that everybody's already played, and here we are showing it playing on a Mac with jumpy, bad frame rates.

01:42:14 John: Is anybody excited by that?

01:42:16 John: Oh, and he says he's excited to bring his future games to the Mac, presumably four years after everybody has already played them.

01:42:22 John: Like the game technologies Apple has on the Mac platform are probably better than they've ever been before.

01:42:28 John: The problem is, one, the hardware they sell doesn't have enough GPU power for the amount of money that you spend on it.

01:42:33 John: Two, there is no high-end, as we just discussed, for gaming at all.

01:42:37 John: And three, nobody makes games for it.

01:42:39 John: And they're not really doing anything to, you know, solve that chicken-and-egg problem.

01:42:45 John: They're not making better hardware and paying people to make better software.

01:42:48 John: They don't have killer app software that's then, you know, able to run them.

01:42:51 John: It's just...

01:42:52 John: i don't this presentation i don't know why they bothered doing this like who who is you know who who wants to play death stranding who has not already played death stranding on a 500 box at better frame rates than this right and and what i don't understand is how the heck do all the gaming apis get budgeted at all these things where you convert your shaders and the whole thing that are like here's

01:43:13 John: where you can run your thing windows game and emulation on the mac will estimate how well it's going to perform and we'll recompile your shaders and like all the whole technology stack they have for metal and the scale like they have like a full featured their own little world of gaming technology stack with metal and their gpu support and it's good and it performs well and you know it takes it does really well on the on the chips that apple makes right

01:43:36 John: But what is that all for?

01:43:38 John: Like it's not for games.

01:43:40 John: What is it all for?

01:43:41 John: How do they get money?

01:43:42 John: How does this part of the company get some?

01:43:44 John: And to be clear, I want them to have money.

01:43:46 John: I'm not saying I don't begrudge them their budget.

01:43:48 John: It just amazes me how much time and effort Apple puts into this and what an amazing job they do only to just stumble at the finish line because the company itself has no idea how to encourage a healthy medium to high-end game ecosystem on anything except for iPhone and maybe secondarily on iPad.

01:44:05 John: But on the Mac...

01:44:06 John: This just out in the wilderness with an amazing technology stack and computers with not enough GPU that cost too much money and nobody making games for it.

01:44:15 Casey: I do want to touch a little more on what you also seem to have picked up.

01:44:20 Casey: This appears to me that they're doing full-on emulation.

01:44:25 Casey: I mean, I know Wine is not an emulator, but almost sort of kind of like a Wine sort of thing.

01:44:32 Casey: Again, more emulation than Facade, but...

01:44:35 John: I think they're doing like a parallels kind of virtual machine with GPU support.

01:44:40 John: I mean, the whole point of that, it's supposed to be just a developer tool to let people know, hey, were you to port this game to the Mac?

01:44:45 John: Like, here's how it might perform even before optimization or here's our estimate.

01:44:50 John: Like, it's just an entire area of like, hey, person who has a game, don't you want to sell that to the dozens of Mac developers?

01:44:57 John: You might buy your game.

01:44:58 John: Well, look at all these tools we have for you.

01:45:00 John: We give you the tools for free.

01:45:02 John: You have a thing that recompiles your shaders, and all you have to do is change all your graphic stuff to use Metal.

01:45:06 John: It's really easy.

01:45:07 John: Just watch all these sessions and learn Metal.

01:45:08 John: And the developer's like, I already stopped listening.

01:45:11 John: Now just rewrite your graphic stack.

01:45:14 John: Do what now?

01:45:15 John: I mean, it's nice that they had Unity there, but they didn't have Unreal on stage, and it's just...

01:45:19 John: it's such a weird it's such a weird split between the amazing technology and the the phenomenal gpus for the power envelopes like it's when i keep saying phenomenal gpus it's like yes for a 15 watt soc their gpu power is amazing and their apis for accessing it are amazing but they have nothing to compete with high-end gpus and they have no game development ecosystem to speak of on the mac on the on the iphone they do and ipad a little bit less so but the mac

01:45:48 John: it's a sad situation so i don't i don't i i really hope they solve this not by saying let's give up on gaming again because they did that they did like input sprockets and game sprockets and they gave up on it for like two decades and now they're back but they still the rest of the company is not on board with this plan they just i mean i guess that technology useful elsewhere and we'll talk about it when we get to the headset but this was kind of a uh depressing another depressing section of the keynote

01:46:11 Casey: Well, and I don't know, it's hard for me to understand what their preferred order of operations is or what their preferred approach is because it appeared to me like Apple is giving you some sort of emulation layer where if you want to do nothing, you can use this emulation layer and walk away.

01:46:33 Casey: But they'd prefer if you convert your shaders and do all this stuff with metal and blah, blah, blah.

01:46:38 John: That's not what I got from it, but I'll have to watch it again.

01:46:40 Casey: Yeah, I mean, I'm not confident that I'm right either.

01:46:42 Casey: It could be either one of us.

01:46:44 Casey: But I just thought it was – it's cool that they're saying, well, since nobody wants to actually spend the time to bring the games to us, then maybe we can bring us to the games maybe.

01:46:53 John: I mean, that's what the Steam Deck does.

01:46:55 John: They could do that.

01:46:56 John: But Steam Deck doesn't – Steam Deck says, look, just run your PC games and we'll just handle the details.

01:47:00 John: That's not what Apple is saying at all.

01:47:02 Casey: Right.

01:47:02 Casey: I don't know.

01:47:04 Casey: We'll see.

01:47:06 Casey: AirPods get adaptive audio, which is kind of transparency and active noise cancellation all in one.

01:47:12 Casey: Also, conversation awareness will duck the volume of music.

01:47:16 Casey: That's cool.

01:47:18 Casey: I'm into that.

01:47:19 Marco: I'm really curious how well this works in practice because that's...

01:47:25 Marco: The idea that you kind of wouldn't need to turn on noise cancellation and transparency separately, it'll just kind of figure out what's probably best.

01:47:36 Marco: I hope... Two things.

01:47:37 Marco: I hope that works well.

01:47:38 Marco: I also hope that's not the only option going forward.

01:47:40 Marco: I hope you can still just have transparency or just have noise cancellation if you want to.

01:47:45 Marco: And you probably can, hopefully.

01:47:46 Marco: But if they can pull that off, that's really nice.

01:47:49 Marco: I mean...

01:47:50 Marco: The examples they gave, the leaf blowers versus conversations, that all sounds really good.

01:47:55 Marco: It seems like it demos well.

01:47:57 Marco: It sounds really good.

01:47:58 Marco: I hope this works because if it works as well as they say, it could be really cool.

01:48:04 Marco: The conversation detection, as you mentioned, where someone comes up and talks to you, it'll automatically lower your music.

01:48:08 Marco: That's

01:48:09 Marco: Again, this is really cool stuff.

01:48:12 Marco: I hope it works.

01:48:13 Marco: One thing that I'm a little scared of, but I'm glad they were touching it, is they mentioned they've dramatically improved the cross-device switching mechanics.

01:48:25 Marco: Let's see how that works, because to date, that has not worked well.

01:48:29 John: Still works great for me.

01:48:31 John: I hope they didn't make it worse, but right now, still like it.

01:48:33 Casey: Yeah, same.

01:48:34 Casey: It's not perfect for me, but it's pretty good for the most part.

01:48:37 Casey: I leave it on.

01:48:38 John: I use it on a daily basis, and it pretty much never goes wrong for me.

01:48:41 Marco: I still reliably have the bug where I will be leaving my house with my AirPods to go take a dog walk or something, and I will click the stem to begin playback of Overcast on my phone.

01:48:53 Marco: But the AirPods have instead paired themselves somehow to my Mac, which I never pair them to,

01:48:58 Marco: My Mac in the next room over.

01:49:00 Marco: And by clicking the stem on the AirPods, it will begin playing the Mac's audio on the Mac.

01:49:08 Marco: Out of the Mac's speakers.

01:49:09 Casey: Yeah, I've had that happen like once or twice.

01:49:11 Casey: That's very rare for me.

01:49:12 Marco: That happens to me all the time.

01:49:15 Marco: And so I'm like, what kind of bug is this where clicking the stem on my AirPods as I walk out the door makes my Mac start playing fish in the other room?

01:49:23 Yeah.

01:49:24 Marco: It's infuriating.

01:49:26 Marco: So yeah, I'm hoping for some attention to that process.

01:49:30 Marco: And they said they did it.

01:49:31 Marco: So let's see how that works.

01:49:34 Marco: I would love more options to turn off some of this magic.

01:49:39 Marco: Because when magic does not work well, you kind of want an option to turn it off.

01:49:44 Marco: And so I would love an option to say, for instance, for this pair of AirPods, never offer to automatically connect it to anything else besides the devices I connect it to.

01:49:53 Marco: like don't don't you know when you walk when i walk near my mac while wearing these airpods don't put up a little notification that says connect to the airpods when i walk by my family who's watching something on the apple tv and i just came in from a dog walk with the airpods on the tv's right near the door don't don't show on the apple tv connect to marco's airpods like and then if i click a button on the airpods you can turn that off i hope like there's some of those things a lot of those things you can't turn off you can't like right now you can go turn that off in settings in your apple tv

01:50:18 Marco: oh good but you can't turn that off like on the mac as far as i can tell and you can't turn it off you can't say for a given pair of airpods like never auto connect to anything unless i've told you to um you because you have to like go to each device and say on each device for each pair of airpods say don't automatically reconnect and then sometimes it just forgets that setting and reconnects anyway so or plays fishing in the room when you're leaving the house so anyway some attention in that area is appreciated

01:50:44 Casey: Yep.

01:50:45 Casey: Yep.

01:50:45 Casey: I, I totally hear that.

01:50:47 Casey: Uh, then we got, uh, from Ann Park, should Lasky, some airplay improvements, uh, hotels, allegedly maybe like six of them will allow you to scan a QR code and then connect to the hotel wifi and connect to the screen, the TV screen in front of you, which is super cool.

01:51:03 Casey: Um, I don't have teenagers, so I'm not too into share play for the car yet, but I can imagine that that will be super cool for me in a few years.

01:51:12 John: No, teenagers all use Spotify, so it's not going to help you.

01:51:14 Marco: Touche.

01:51:15 Marco: Well, for me, that's great for your spouse who's in the passenger seat.

01:51:19 Marco: To me, it's always my phone on the CarPlay screen in my car or it's Tiff's phone on the CarPlay screen in her car.

01:51:27 Marco: And so it's really nice to be able to... What we've done up to date is whenever I want to hear... If I want to have Tiff play the music while I'm driving and it's my phone on CarPlay, her phone isn't set up for all that in my car.

01:51:38 Marco: So we keep it on my car so I can keep my driving directions up and everything.

01:51:41 Marco: But then we just have to figure out what she's playing and then try to send it to my phone in some way that works while we're driving or use Siri, which is always an abysmal failure.

01:51:50 Marco: And so to be able to have her just play something, play an Apple Music playlist from her phone onto the CarPlay head unit without it switching, that's really nice.

01:52:00 Marco: If that feature works at all, that's going to be a nice little quality of life improvement for a lot of people.

01:52:05 Casey: Yeah, I completely agree.

01:52:08 Casey: tvOS and Apple TV were mentioned.

01:52:10 Casey: We got a new control center, which I think looked pretty good.

01:52:13 Casey: You can locate the remote using iPhone, which I don't think requires new hardware, which I am very excited about.

01:52:19 Casey: That's super great.

01:52:21 Casey: You can select memories of the screensaver.

01:52:22 Casey: You can do FaceTime on Apple TV if you use continuity camera, which I thought was super cool.

01:52:29 Casey: I can absolutely imagine occasions when I would want to do that with my grandparents or something like that.

01:52:33 Casey: And there was this weird app mentioned, or I think pictured at the bottom right, maybe, pictured on screen.

01:52:41 Casey: Overcast was in the keynote, at least briefly, which is super exciting.

01:52:44 Casey: So congratulations, Marco.

01:52:45 Marco: Yep, yep.

01:52:46 Marco: Yeah, the icon, it was part of one of those lots of features slides, and it was about that apparently there is some, I haven't looked into this yet, but there's one mechanism for you to ask Siri on a HomePod to play, to initiate playback for

01:53:02 Marco: from an audio app on your phone over AirPlay.

01:53:04 Marco: So before, you couldn't do that.

01:53:06 Marco: Before, you could tell a HomePod to play music and it would play it itself, but you couldn't ask a HomePod to begin playback for the version of Overcast running on your phone in your pocket.

01:53:18 Marco: You could take the phone out and begin playback and AirPlay it to the HomePod all manually from the phone, but you couldn't do that via Siri.

01:53:26 Marco: If I understand that slide correctly, it sounds like they have now added that ability to initiate... Excuse me.

01:53:32 Marco: to initiate that airplay session but totally by voice without taking the phone in your pocket and that i've been hoping for this for so long so i am super excited about this i assume the reason they put my app on the slide is that maybe it just automatically works because if you maybe if you take advantage of siri app intense which i do uh for playing audio maybe that just works without any intervention for me which would be great

01:53:55 Marco: Um, but super excited about that.

01:53:57 Marco: And I'm, I'm so thrilled that like, it was so cool to see my app on the slide in the keynote, like, or at least see my icon on the slide in the keynote.

01:54:06 Marco: That's, that's a huge, like, you know, developer, you know, win.

01:54:09 Marco: Like I've had in a long time ago, I had Instapaper appear during a session video and that blew my mind.

01:54:16 Marco: And that was just during a session, but to have, to have my icon in the keynote, I was, I'm pretty happy about that.

01:54:22 Casey: Yeah, that's super awesome.

01:54:23 Casey: Congratulations.

01:54:24 Casey: Thank you.

01:54:24 Casey: WatchOS, revamped mostly as we've heard.

01:54:27 Casey: So I don't think there's a lot we need to talk about.

01:54:30 Casey: You turn the crown to reveal widgets and smart stack.

01:54:32 Casey: They went all in on like vertical paging, which I think makes sense.

01:54:35 Casey: Apparently there's a widget to hold your complications now, which at first I was like, wow.

01:54:42 Casey: What?

01:54:43 Casey: But I guess that kind of makes sense.

01:54:45 Casey: It's a little unusual, but I think I can get behind it.

01:54:48 Casey: Developers can use more of the display.

01:54:50 Casey: And in fact, the time can even move to the center of the display because it's usually in the upper right-hand corner if memory serves.

01:54:56 Casey: And the time will automatically move to the center if need be because developers can pull up.

01:54:59 Casey: Yep, developers can put stuff in the toolbar up there.

01:55:02 Casey: Really dig that.

01:55:03 Casey: We get Snoopy and Woodstock faces.

01:55:05 Casey: I am not a huge fan of these animated faces.

01:55:07 Casey: I think they're clever and cool.

01:55:09 Casey: They're just not for me.

01:55:10 Casey: But I dig that Snoopy and Woodstock are there.

01:55:12 Casey: And additionally, they seem to interact with not only what's going on around you, but with things that are happening on the watch.

01:55:17 Casey: They showed a demo of Snoopy putting his ear over Woodstock so Woodstock doesn't get rained on because it was raining, allegedly, when that happened, which I thought was super neat.

01:55:27 Casey: um we saw eric charles come up with some cycling and cycling and hiking updates uh most of this i i thought was cool but i mean again i'm not a big cycler cyclist whatever and uh and i don't hike often although i do quite enjoy it when i do when i do go hiking uh what i thought was really neat was last known cellular contact waypoint so as you're hiking it'll say oh this is the last place that i had cell coverage so if you have an emergency you can like run back there hopefully

01:55:51 Casey: And also maps have topographical maps, which I thought was really neat.

01:55:56 Casey: Then we got from Dr. Desai, we got some health updates.

01:56:00 Casey: Mental health has mood logging, which is also available on iPhone and iPad and the watch.

01:56:05 Casey: You can take standardized assessments for anxiety and depression risk, which I thought was interesting.

01:56:11 Casey: They also talked about vision health and how you can reduce myopia.

01:56:14 Casey: Myopia is not being able to see close.

01:56:17 Marco: Nearsightedness.

01:56:18 Casey: Okay.

01:56:19 Casey: Oh, okay.

01:56:19 Casey: So I have that backwards then.

01:56:20 Casey: Anyway, effects like a third of the population, probably going to be more in the future.

01:56:25 Casey: So it'll tell you, hey, you should probably, you know, scoot your face away from the screen if you are using something like an iPad with Face ID.

01:56:32 Casey: And also it'll measure for kids especially, it'll measure how much time they spend outside using the ambient light sensor to tell you if, hey, you should maybe get outside because some of those, you know, some of the sun's rays really help your eyes.

01:56:44 Casey: Anything else on watch before we move to the one more thing?

01:56:46 Marco: Well, the watch face situation remains dire.

01:56:50 Marco: Ah, yes.

01:56:52 Marco: I mean, so with the new focus on widgets and everything, this seems like this is kind of like the rebirth of the Siri watch face, which they launched a long time ago now.

01:57:02 Marco: And it was kind of this, you know, dynamic context sensitive little rectangles that would come up depending on what was coming up.

01:57:07 Marco: It was a cool idea that they kind of launched version one over the never touched again.

01:57:11 Marco: So this, this is that final version too.

01:57:13 Marco: Um, and I like that you can just kind of scroll down from any watch face.

01:57:17 Marco: So you don't have to use the Siri face, which as a watch face, wasn't very good.

01:57:21 Marco: Um, you can kind of get this, this kind of contextual widget based awareness and dynamic functionality now with any face, I think, which is great.

01:57:29 Marco: Um,

01:57:30 Marco: I still want third party watch faces or at least much more customization available via the widget system.

01:57:39 Marco: So for instance, like a full screen widget that maybe just has the clock in the top center or something like that.

01:57:43 Marco: You know, some other ways that we can do this.

01:57:46 Marco: Maybe we can do some of this now with this new system.

01:57:48 Marco: Probably not.

01:57:49 Marco: So I still want custom watch faces.

01:57:52 Marco: I'm still not surprised that they didn't give it to us.

01:57:55 Marco: And in the meantime, this is some pretty solid updates.

01:57:58 Marco: I like with the cycling workout thing, the way that you can now use your phone as a screen for your cycling data.

01:58:06 Casey: Ah, yes, that's a good point.

01:58:08 Marco: Yeah, that's a pretty cool – because a lot of people will have a mount on their bike handlebars or something to stick their phone there so you can see real-time stuff there rather than having to look at your watch, which on a bike is a little bit of a clumsy and slightly dangerous maneuver.

01:58:21 Marco: So this is actually really nice if you're a bikist.

01:58:26 Marco: This is very nice.

01:58:27 Marco: And then there's the new high-frequency motion data access on the Series 8 and Ultra for the golf and tennis swing monitoring and the whole API for that.

01:58:37 Marco: That's pretty cool.

01:58:38 Marco: Overall, it's actually a fairly medium-grade watchOS update.

01:58:44 Marco: It's not a massive revamp like we thought.

01:58:46 Marco: It's bigger than average years in terms of UI updates and SDK updates.

01:58:54 Marco: But about the same in average years in terms of user-facing features.

01:58:59 Marco: There's not a ton of user-facing new features.

01:59:01 Marco: There's some little refinements here and there.

01:59:03 Marco: There's some new workout functionality.

01:59:04 Marco: So in that kind of way, it's kind of as expected.

01:59:07 Marco: I am interested, though, and excited about the new design stuff possible and made easy by all the new design language around those cards and the corner toolbar items and stuff like that.

01:59:18 Marco: I think this is going to make...

01:59:20 Marco: better watch apps easier to make and nicer.

01:59:25 Marco: It remains to be seen whether any of the background execution limits and stuff like that have actually been lifted or not, and I'm guessing probably not.

01:59:35 Casey: I would like to take just a two-second pause here and evaluate if this was the whole of WWDC,

01:59:42 Casey: I don't think that there was anything super revolutionary that was introduced, except maybe the Mac Pro.

01:59:48 Casey: But I think it was a pretty good WWDC.

01:59:51 Casey: I mean, these are all very mature platforms.

01:59:53 Casey: We got nice quality of life improvements pretty much everywhere.

01:59:56 Casey: So far, I felt like this was pretty good.

02:00:00 Casey: I mean, not like a revolutionary, I will remember this until the end of time kind of WWDC, but a pretty good one.

02:00:05 Casey: I mean, John, what did you think?

02:00:07 Casey: Excluding the headset?

02:00:09 John: Excluding the headset.

02:00:10 John: Excluding the headset, I feel like if the headset wasn't there, they would have added more of the stuff that was in the State of the Union because there was lots of cool developer-y stuff and they just didn't have time for that with the headset in here.

02:00:20 John: So it was much more like a sort of Macworld Expo keynote than a WWDC one because they had to fit all the products in.

02:00:26 Casey: But are you pleased with it though?

02:00:28 Casey: Yeah, no, it was good.

02:00:30 Casey: Marco, thoughts?

02:00:31 Marco: Yeah, I think it would, you know, without the headset, just seeing what we saw so far and the SDK updates that are, you know, coming behind the scenes.

02:00:41 Marco: I mean, obviously, we would have had more explained to us in the keynote because, you know, the keynote's usually about two hours long.

02:00:48 Marco: And in this case, you know, at this point with everything we've covered, they were at an hour 20.

02:00:54 Marco: So, you know, there's 40 more minutes of content that is taken up by the headset that they would have expanded upon other things.

02:00:59 Marco: So maybe, you know, I think we would have been even more excited about a lot of that stuff.

02:01:02 Marco: But yeah, I think it would have been a pretty good WBC.

02:01:04 Marco: I mean, these are all pretty nice, you know, incremental but not revolutionary OS updates.

02:01:09 Marco: We had great Mac hardware releases at the beginning.

02:01:11 Marco: Well, we had Mac hardware releases at the beginning.

02:01:13 Marco: Some of which were great.

02:01:14 Marco: Some of which John hates.

02:01:16 Marco: But overall, like, yeah, that's a pretty good WBC in most cases in most years.

02:01:21 Casey: Yep.

02:01:22 Casey: I would agree with that.

02:01:23 Casey: But there was one more thing.

02:01:25 Casey: Yep.

02:01:25 Casey: We go back to Tim and Tim says to us, well, I have one more thing.

02:01:29 Casey: And this is the first Apple product you look through, not at.

02:01:33 Casey: And we are introduced to the Vision Pro.

02:01:36 Casey: I don't dislike the name, but the name doesn't really rev my engine that much.

02:01:42 Casey: Like, I don't know what I would suggest in lieu of this.

02:01:44 Casey: Like it's...

02:01:45 John: fine it's actually better than going with reality despite the fact that as i said reality has a storied history in 3d or whatever like i feel like the marketing team probably said the reality opens them up to too much snark and i kind of agree with that i would i would agree with that too yeah i mean honestly like i first of all full credit to them this name did not leak at all everyone's thought the name was either going to be reality pro and reality os or

02:02:11 Marco: maybe RallyPro, and then XROS.

02:02:13 Marco: Those were the names that leaked.

02:02:14 John: Because those were in the code.

02:02:15 John: Those were in all the open source code.

02:02:16 John: And I bet the symbol, the enum, will probably still be RealityOS.

02:02:19 John: And they did trademark XROS, but you trademark stuff just defensively to make sure no one else has it, right?

02:02:25 Marco: Yeah, and there are a few different places in the code so far where you see the word reality, like in various enum values and stuff like that.

02:02:32 John: I mean, RealityComposer is what they did brand that particular product that is related to this, but yeah, RealityOS was the...

02:02:38 John: Maybe they'll change it, but that's the type of thing they can change with the source code before release.

02:02:43 Marco: No, but see, I think Vision is what they're going to go with.

02:02:48 Marco: And I think the reason why this makes sense is when you look at this product relative to everything else in the market in this kind of area...

02:02:58 Marco: Everything else is about creating a virtual environment inside the headset.

02:03:03 Marco: And the AR or looking through transparency kind of features are kind of afterthoughts for most of them.

02:03:10 Marco: In this case, they leaned way into that.

02:03:14 Marco: So they want the name, the product, everything to be about...

02:03:18 Marco: we're making you participate in the real world while creating a partial virtual world most of the time for you.

02:03:27 Marco: We're not leaning that heavily into full blackout mode where you're totally isolated from everything else.

02:03:33 Marco: The whole product is designed around that, and that will set it apart greatly from its competitors in most ways.

02:03:39 Marco: And

02:03:40 Marco: So calling it Vision Pro and Vision OS, that sets the tone for this product, which is this is not about creating alternative realities for you most of the time.

02:03:53 Marco: This is about integrating the technology more into your surroundings and making you remain part of the world.

02:04:01 Marco: It's about your vision of the world and augmenting your vision, not isolating you and making you look like a weirdo.

02:04:10 Marco: And to whatever degree that's possible, and we'll see how that goes once we actually have the product, which is not going to be anytime soon.

02:04:17 Marco: But setting that as the tone and setting that right at the beginning of the expectation, I can tell you when they did that unveiling video, and here it is, and you see the thing and you're like, okay, cool, goggles, looks cool, nice glass and metal.

02:04:32 Marco: You see a bunch of cameras on the bottom.

02:04:34 Marco: Everyone was super excited, but that was pretty much with the expectations.

02:04:37 Marco: And it was masterful the way they did it.

02:04:38 Marco: When that video shows the woman's face who was wearing it, and it lights up and her eyes are there, everyone in the audience gasped.

02:04:47 Marco: It was like, whoa!

02:04:50 Marco: That was the moment of the keynote, was when you saw her eyes

02:04:55 Marco: It everyone I'm telling you it was to feel that in that audience was really cool and because that surprised everyone you know we heard the rumors that it had an outward facing screen to show the eyes of the wearer and that sounded like the most ridiculous everyone's like that's some people thought that that must have been like a joke to suss out leakers.

02:05:14 Marco: it sounded ridiculous.

02:05:16 Marco: And it might be ridiculous, I don't know yet, but if it works at all the way that they demoed it working or show it working, like in the videos, again, I haven't seen one or tried one yet, but man, if it works like that,

02:05:31 Marco: That is potentially amazing.

02:05:34 Marco: Now, it has to be perfect to not be creepy.

02:05:40 John: But it's not going to be perfect.

02:05:42 John: One of the things I think didn't leak is the lenticular thing where it doesn't just show a single image.

02:05:46 John: So if you're viewing it from an angle, you see a second image that's more on the angle you're looking at.

02:05:50 John: But bottom line is the headset sticks out from your face by an inch or two.

02:05:55 John: Your eyes aren't there.

02:05:56 John: Your eyes are way back farther.

02:05:59 John: And they do the best they can to make your eyes not seem like they're on the surface of the headset, but they're not where your eyes are supposed to be.

02:06:06 John: So the front view they showed in the keynote is putting its best face forward, right?

02:06:10 John: At any angle other than dead on, it's going to be tricky.

02:06:14 John: But kudos for trying.

02:06:15 John: We'll have to see how it looks in real life.

02:06:17 John: Like you can imagine...

02:06:19 John: a future version of this where they use transparent OLEDs that you actually do see your eyeballs through.

02:06:27 John: You know, like the illusion that they were giving you in that reveal, that could be real with transparent OLED screens.

02:06:34 John: I think LG made a transparent OLED TV and it's kind of silly technology, but it does exist.

02:06:39 John: It's just that, you know, to do a headset with that where that doesn't quite work right now.

02:06:44 John: But it's not out of the realm of possibility as this thing shrinks to have something like that.

02:06:48 John: But yeah, I agree with you, Marco, that Vision is a good name for a thing where they're trying to pitch the AR aspect of it.

02:06:57 John: So I made this comment when I was watching.

02:07:02 John: I feel like this entire section of the keynote was missing one little tiny piece of text, which I... Was it on the commercial?

02:07:09 John: It probably will be on the commercial.

02:07:10 John: But anyway, images simulated.

02:07:12 John: Oh, no.

02:07:13 John: That...

02:07:14 John: That needed to be on every single portion of the keynote when they were showing you what the wearer of this is supposedly seeing, because all those images are simulated, right?

02:07:24 Marco: Oh, no, they were not.

02:07:26 Marco: I have it on good authority that everything that was shown from the perspective of the wearer was actual capture from the real hardware.

02:07:34 John: We'll see.

02:07:35 John: We'll see how that goes.

02:07:36 John: Like, here's the thing.

02:07:38 John: Like...

02:07:39 John: obviously the production values on this are very high so even the things they just film in real life look better than they would look if you just you know took your iphone and took a picture of something because everything's well well lit and so on and so forth and maybe that's true but the thing about uh ar is that uh you know you mentioned the other headsets don't lean that heavily into that they just have that feature as an afterthought they the other headsets like the gaming headsets they have that feature so you don't like hurt yourself getting in and out of your chair

02:08:02 John: Like they have that feature so you don't trip and fall.

02:08:04 John: Like you need to be able to see the outside world for a moment to fiddle with something on your PC, to grab something on your desk, to find your mug, right?

02:08:14 John: It's a utilitarian function because otherwise you'd basically be wearing a blindfold, stumbling around your house with an expensive thing on your face, right?

02:08:20 John: Whereas Apple's saying, no, this isn't like an afterthought to keep you from tripping.

02:08:23 John: This is a major feature of the product.

02:08:25 John: We're leaning heavily into AR, right?

02:08:27 John: That's where they differ.

02:08:29 John: Where they meet is at the fact that screens, and we talked about this before when we talked about HDR, screens currently do not have the same fidelity as your eyes looking at the real world.

02:08:40 John: There's more dynamic range in the real world than there are on even the most amazing screens.

02:08:45 John: And so there's always, no matter how good the lenses are, no matter how good the resolution is, there's always that little difference between looking at the room with your eyeballs and looking through a screen because the screen isn't able to reproduce the fidelity of the room in all conditions.

02:09:01 John: And that is where the crappy PC gaming headset with an afterthought of looking at the room feature meets this one because they are both limited by screen technology.

02:09:12 John: Now, granted, the screen is going to be probably better than the gaming thing you have unless you have a very, very high end gaming headset.

02:09:19 John: But it's not going to be better enough to feel like you are really looking at your room.

02:09:23 John: What you're really looking at is a video of your room.

02:09:26 John: Or like if you imagine, take your iPhone and look at the screen.

02:09:28 John: It's got 1600 nits of brightness, right?

02:09:30 John: Really amazing fidelity.

02:09:32 John: But you pointed at your room, it doesn't quite look the same as looking at the room with your actual eyeballs, which I don't, to be fair, I don't think is that big of a deal.

02:09:39 John: But I think that's the part where you need the image of simulated disclaimer.

02:09:43 John: And if they weren't simulated, I think they are misleading in the way that all advertising is misleading is that they're showing an idealized scenario.

02:09:49 John: Your results in your dim computer room or actual real home are probably going to be different.

02:09:56 Marco: No, I mean, again, I have it on very good authority that they were actually captured from the hardware.

02:10:02 Marco: So not everything in the video was user viewpoint.

02:10:06 Marco: There were things that were showing outside of the user what they look like.

02:10:10 Marco: And in those kind of cases, compositing might have been used, or maybe for the eye images because it's hard to film screens.

02:10:16 Marco: But what it's showing inside the headset, that was all hardware captured.

02:10:23 Marco: And that is amazing.

02:10:25 John: Well, it has the advantage of being incorporated into a video.

02:10:28 John: Like, these are being incorporated into a video, which is also limited by the limitations of a screen or whatever.

02:10:33 John: And what I was comparing it to is looking at your actual living room versus looking at a video of your living room.

02:10:36 John: Whereas this, everything is a video of living room.

02:10:39 John: But it is impressive that this is all captured from device.

02:10:42 John: But in the ad especially, I kept looking for images simulated and didn't see it.

02:10:46 Marco: And again, if you want to criticize ideal conditions, yeah, they were ideal conditions, I'm sure.

02:10:53 Marco: But no, it's like, this is the real deal.

02:10:55 Marco: They actually captured it from the hardware.

02:10:57 John: The only way to solve this is for Apple to send us all headsets so we can try it ourselves.

02:11:01 John: Seeing will be believing.

02:11:03 Marco: So going back on that point, the one thing, people who... I ran into somebody who had tried it, and I asked various Apple people who

02:11:14 Marco: who have had a chance to work on it or try it, whoever I run into, whoever would talk to me, I ask various people, and the one thing I want to know first is how convincing is the transparency simulation?

02:11:26 Marco: When you put it on, how much do you feel like you're looking through it?

02:11:30 Marco: And what every single person who has tried it has told me so far, again, most of them are Apple people, so I'm sure they're optimistic, but they've all said it's a really well-done illusion.

02:11:40 Marco: So that's what I really want to know because that matters so much.

02:11:43 Marco: And if it took...

02:11:45 Marco: Obviously, what Apple is going for here, again, with the whole vision angle, focusing much more on AR than VR, making it much better of an integrated citizen of the environment around you in terms of its senses when people come up to you.

02:12:01 Marco: You don't just look like you're – well, you do look ridiculous, but you look less ridiculous than if you're just in a VR headset.

02:12:07 Marco: Yeah.

02:12:07 Marco: The integration with the outside world in this product is clearly... That was clearly the number one design goal.

02:12:14 Marco: And then everything else fell from that.

02:12:17 Marco: If it took them until now to deliver that tech to do that, that makes sense.

02:12:22 Marco: That makes total sense.

02:12:24 Marco: They couldn't make a good enough...

02:12:26 Marco: uh you know illusion of transparency with an with a very opaque device they couldn't do that well enough until they had whatever these components are you know these these super high-end little screens the you know the cameras the lenses whatever you know whatever much larger combination of stuff that is is doing this it makes sense that they waited till now to do this and it makes sense that this product is starting at such a high price point because they probably don't they probably never want to deliver

02:12:53 Marco: a vision series headset from Apple that doesn't have this convincing illusion.

02:12:58 Marco: And that's pretty cool.

02:12:59 Marco: Like, cause that, that really does set it apart from everything else.

02:13:02 Marco: You know, there are, there are some very high end, very specialized headsets that have that kind of thing.

02:13:07 Marco: Uh, but they're even more expensive and, and much less general purpose, much more specialized.

02:13:12 Marco: And even they, I don't, from people who've used them, I don't think they do as good of a job.

02:13:15 Marco: So that's, again, that's the one thing I really want to know.

02:13:17 Marco: And that's, I'm hoping to get a chance to try one before I leave here.

02:13:20 Marco: I really want to know how that illusion is.

02:13:23 Marco: The rest of the stuff with what apps can do and everything, I believe them on that.

02:13:26 Marco: I believe all that.

02:13:27 Marco: I'm really curious how good that illusion is.

02:13:29 Marco: And secondarily, I'm curious how sharp text actually really is.

02:13:32 Marco: Because that's another thing.

02:13:33 Marco: If you've ever used one of the gaming headsets, their resolution is garbage by comparison.

02:13:38 Marco: And

02:13:38 Marco: Oh, yeah.

02:13:54 John: I was going to touch on that in a little bit, but because you brought it up now, this is a thing that I just want to make clear to people.

02:14:00 John: We've alluded to it many times when talking about the specs, but just to make it very clear.

02:14:04 John: They said that you have more than 4K per eyeball on the little screens that are inside there.

02:14:08 John: So there's one thing I don't know, but I'm willing to give Apple the benefit of the doubt.

02:14:12 John: And what I don't know is, so if you had both of your two eyes looking at a 4K monitor,

02:14:17 John: You're looking at a 4K monitor, but if each of your eyeballs has its own dedicated 4K screen, that should be more resolution than a 4K monitor.

02:14:25 John: Is it double?

02:14:26 John: Is it 8K?

02:14:27 John: I don't know, but it seems it stands to reason in my, you know, I don't actually understand how this works, but I'm willing to believe that having 4K of dedicated pixels for each eyeball means that you can show more than 4K pixels because each guy has a slightly different view on the world and you should be able to resolve more dots.

02:14:43 John: I don't actually know if that's true, but I'm willing to.

02:14:45 John: Let's just give it the most optimistic one and say it's 8K, right?

02:14:48 Casey: Let me read to you from the marketing website.

02:14:51 Casey: More pixels than a 4K TV for each eye.

02:14:54 Casey: The custom micro-OLED display system uses 23 million pixels, delivering stunning resolution and colors, and a specifically designed three-element lens creates the feeling of a display that's everywhere you look.

02:15:04 Casey: So yeah, that says to me more than 4K pixels.

02:15:06 John: Right, but what I'm getting at is does that mean that you can see the equivalent of 8K pixels because each eye has 4K and they see slightly different pixels, right?

02:15:15 John: And here's what I'm getting at, right?

02:15:16 John: So let's just assume it's 8K, right?

02:15:19 John: That's 8K for your entire field of view.

02:15:23 John: So when they show a monitor floating in front of you, that can't be an 8K monitor at true resolution.

02:15:29 John: Because if it was an 8K monitor at true resolution, it would literally extend from edge to edge of your field of view.

02:15:34 John: And that would not be a comfortable way to look at a monitor because it's just too wide for you to see.

02:15:39 John: So every time they say, oh, you can put a monitor in front of you, and it's like a 4K monitor, I start doing the math and say, is that filling 50% of my field of view?

02:15:47 John: Because the only way it's going to be true 4K, to get to Marco's point about sharp text, is if it's filling 50% of my field of view.

02:15:54 John: Because in the most optimistic scenario, I have 8K of pixels in front of me, and if you're going to put a 4K monitor on it, well, not 50%, you know what I mean, because it's not quite the same.

02:16:03 John: But anyway, like...

02:16:04 John: You don't think that every single rectangle you see can be 4K.

02:16:08 John: The entire field of view for your left eye is 4K, and the entire field of view for your right eye is 4K, and the entire field of view for both eyes in the optimistic scenario is 8K, right?

02:16:16 John: So I think it will be, the resolution will be good, probably matching the best gaming headsets, but...

02:16:23 John: For example, you won't be able to have a Pro Display XDR at true pixel resolution at a reasonable filling of your field division.

02:16:31 John: Because right now my field division is, I can see my wall, I can see my desk, I'm looking straight at my XDR, right?

02:16:37 John: You cannot have a 6K screen on there and see all the pixels.

02:16:41 John: Now, do you need to see all the pixels?

02:16:42 John: Probably not, because you can't resolve the pixels on a 6K screen from a comfortable distance anyway.

02:16:46 John: So I think it will be fine and good, but I think a lot of people...

02:16:51 John: look at this and say, all I have in front of me is an LG 4K monitor, and now I'm going to be able to have, you know, three of them.

02:16:59 John: Like, yeah, you can look at each one in turn, and you'll more or less get true pixels out of it, but we...

02:17:06 John: we don't have a glut of resolution to pass around because remember what you're seeing in this headset is not just the monitor it's the entire world whether it is transparency showing you what the cameras see the outside world or a simulated world with those backdrops that they were showing so please do keep that in mind when thinking about the resolution of this the i think it will be good and probably better than any headsets anyone has tried and certainly better than a 300 headset but we need more pixels so stay tuned for the coming years

02:17:32 Casey: Well, and for what it's worth, they said both in the keynote and the State of the Union, and now I'm jumping ahead, but when you use a Mac with the device, which they said in the State of the Union, you can get a virtual display from your Mac.

02:17:45 Casey: Well, that was stated during the keynote, but during the State of the Union, they said, you just look at it.

02:17:49 Casey: So they showed a MacBook Pro with the screen open.

02:17:52 Casey: And the wearer of the Vision Pro looked down.

02:17:54 Casey: And there was a brief pause.

02:17:56 Casey: And then suddenly that Mac screen dimmed from the perspective of the Vision Pro user.

02:18:01 Casey: Maybe it did in real life as well.

02:18:03 Casey: And then this 4K screen was dropped in the middle of their field of view.

02:18:08 Casey: But they specifically said 4K, both in the keynote and the State of the Union.

02:18:12 Casey: And I bet that's not an accident.

02:18:15 Casey: You know, it's exactly what you're saying.

02:18:16 Casey: You know, you can only get but so many bits or you can only get but so much resolution with what's in the device already.

02:18:24 Casey: But to go back, I think, and it's slightly my fault, but we're getting in the weeds a little bit.

02:18:29 Casey: I think we should talk a little bit more about, you know.

02:18:31 Casey: Yeah, us.

02:18:32 Casey: We should talk a little bit more broadly about what this is.

02:18:35 Casey: I...

02:18:37 Casey: I'm not sure what to make of this, and obviously I've only been sitting with it for a few hours now in a figurative sense, but I don't know what I expected, but this is not what I expected, and I think in a good way.

02:18:50 Casey: I think I expected a, and Marco, I believe you had said something about this a minute ago, I'd expected a, well, the world has disappeared now because I have my headset on.

02:19:00 Casey: And that never really appealed to me much.

02:19:04 Casey: And I think I really dig the idea of this being kind of a halfway between VR and regular reality.

02:19:13 Casey: And I think I really dig, even though we heard...

02:19:17 Casey: what was going to be done with the, with the digital crown and how you'll adjust how much like not literal transparency, but you know, kind of transparency you have with the, with the outside world, seeing it as best as one can on a flat screen, seeing it in action, it looked really cool.

02:19:32 Casey: And I, and a lot of people were snarking on Mastodon about, uh, I, what is it?

02:19:38 Casey: I say the thing on the front that reveals the wearer's eyes and everyone said it looked like garbage and was on Kenny Valley, on Kenny Valley, on Kenny Valley.

02:19:45 Casey: And, uh,

02:19:46 Casey: I didn't get that at all.

02:19:47 Casey: Like it looked really good to me.

02:19:50 Casey: And I hear what you guys are saying about being off access and so on and so forth.

02:19:53 Casey: But from what they showed, it looked really good.

02:19:56 Casey: And I loved that it showed with like kind of the almost top of a HomePod blur.

02:20:05 Casey: It showed when you were really engaged with something and not paying attention to the outside world.

02:20:09 Casey: But then it was fairly transparent looking when you were interacting with the outside world.

02:20:14 Casey: And I don't know.

02:20:16 Casey: I feel like I'm not sure when I would use this device because no matter what they said, I don't feel like it's a around other people device.

02:20:30 Casey: But that being said...

02:20:33 Casey: I think this appeals to me more than I expected.

02:20:36 Casey: Well, I expected, of course, that I would be wowed by the keynote, which I was.

02:20:40 Casey: But I feel like I can see places in my life where this could be neat.

02:20:45 Casey: Leaving aside all the social stigma that will unquestionably come from this, like what kind of jackass is going to wear this on an airplane?

02:20:53 John: I think it's perfect for an airplane.

02:20:56 Casey: No, no, no, but hear me out.

02:20:58 Casey: Like, from a social perspective, you're an idiot if you're wearing this on an airplane.

02:21:01 John: Why?

02:21:02 Casey: Why?

02:21:02 Casey: Just hold on.

02:21:03 Casey: Just hold on.

02:21:04 Casey: Because you look like a fool.

02:21:05 Casey: You look like a fool.

02:21:05 John: Why do you look like a fool?

02:21:06 John: You're in your seat.

02:21:07 John: You're watching a movie on basically a very compact screen.

02:21:10 Casey: Look at this jackass with their $3,500 fancy lad headset.

02:21:15 John: People wear masks like this just so they can sleep.

02:21:17 John: It's better than a neck donut.

02:21:19 Casey: This is the worst thing.

02:21:20 Casey: I can't reach over and smack you two like I'm used to being able to do in years past.

02:21:25 Casey: What I keep coming back to with this, specifically with the social stigma about it, watching their video of the dude recording his kid's birthday, it just seems like such an obnoxious time to have a physical barrier between you and your children.

02:21:42 Casey: I understand what they're driving at.

02:21:44 Casey: I understand they've got this whole 3D camera thing.

02:21:46 Casey: I get

02:21:47 Casey: that.

02:21:47 John: They could just put that on their phone, by the way, Apple.

02:21:49 John: That was a free tip for you.

02:21:51 Casey: Exactly.

02:21:51 Casey: But I get what they're driving at here, but what an obnoxious time to do that.

02:21:55 Marco: And so all this social stuff... I disagree on that, by the way, just for reference.

02:21:59 Marco: The birthday one you disagree with?

02:22:01 Marco: Well, okay.

02:22:02 Marco: In case you finish, I'll get to it.

02:22:03 Casey: Thank you.

02:22:03 Casey: I appreciate it.

02:22:04 Casey: So I keep coming back to the social stigma for this, I think, will be ugly.

02:22:09 Casey: You're going to look like an idiot wearing this.

02:22:11 Casey: But, but, and this is what I couldn't get to a second ago, I remember...

02:22:15 Casey: when the AirPods first came out.

02:22:19 Casey: And if you had AirPods, I feel like everyone looked at you like you were a lunatic for a couple of months.

02:22:26 Casey: And then after that, everyone had AirPods.

02:22:28 Casey: And so suddenly this thing that I, and I had AirPods and even I would look at people, particularly before mine came in, I would look at people and be like, oh yes, look at you with your fancy earbuds that don't have any wires.

02:22:42 Casey: Oh, I'm too good for wires.

02:22:43 Casey: Look at me.

02:22:44 Casey: And that lasted not very long at all.

02:22:48 Casey: And now everywhere you go, at any moment in life, including times when I don't think it's particularly appropriate to have AirPods in, I see AirPods in.

02:22:57 Casey: Just the other day, I was at dinner somewhere with the family.

02:23:00 Casey: And I looked over at the table next to us.

02:23:03 Casey: And there was another family at dinner.

02:23:04 Casey: And one of the kids had an AirPod in.

02:23:07 Casey: They're at family dinner.

02:23:09 Casey: And presumably, family dinner was too boring.

02:23:11 Casey: And they needed to have an AirPod in to have music during family dinner.

02:23:14 Casey: Leaving aside the fact that the restaurant was playing music, they needed to have their music.

02:23:19 Casey: Kids these days, I tell you.

02:23:20 Casey: But that's how prevalent and that's how often you see AirPods now.

02:23:25 Casey: That it's not unusual to see an AirPod in a kid's ear at family dinner.

02:23:29 Casey: And I feel like sitting here today, if I saw the idiot next to me in the airplane wearing these goggles, I would think, what a dork.

02:23:39 Casey: But I think it will not take long for me to change my tune.

02:23:43 Casey: And to come back around to what John, I think, was going to say...

02:23:46 Casey: what an unbelievably awesome time to put on these dorky goggles.

02:23:49 Casey: How amazing would it be to have this like 50 foot screen in front of you with your AirPods, with noise cancellation and effectively, you know, surround sound.

02:23:59 Casey: And while we're flying across the country to WWDC next year, when Apple actually invites all of us,

02:24:05 Casey: Imagine being able to watch a movie that whole way across the country.

02:24:09 Casey: That sounds so cool and such a perfect use case for this.

02:24:14 Casey: And I can't wait.

02:24:15 Casey: One way or another, I can't wait to try it.

02:24:17 John: I think it'll take a little bit longer for a $3,500 headset versus $160 AirPods.

02:24:23 John: $160 is kind of expensive for AirPods, too.

02:24:26 John: I'm not so much worried about the social stigma, but to overcome the social stigma thing, you need to get over the...

02:24:33 John: uh is this a product that people want to use scenario and i'm not you know we'll see we'll see how that goes because none of us have tried it yet and it i mean it definitely does look early because it is in the grand scheme of apple products uh big and clunky right i mean it's it's it's amazing technology it's at the limit of what they can do but there's only so much they can do unlike the airpods which were you know the the perfect size practically from day one in fact they've actually gotten a little bit bigger over time because they've packed more stuff into them um but these are

02:25:02 John: these are an amazing feat of technology that is still nevertheless uh kind of clunky and actually looking at the physical form of this i said this is one of the things that i was going to be looking at to see how how they what this product looks like does it uh does it look like it was shaped uh by its utility or does it look like it was shaped by somebody who wanted it to look beautiful and i can

02:25:23 John: Pretty confidently say that no one tried to shape this to look particularly beautiful because it doesn't look particularly beautiful.

02:25:28 John: It is a little bit clunky and awkward because it has to be.

02:25:32 John: Here's the thing that I was most surprised by.

02:25:33 John: I kept saving screenshots of people doing mockups based on rumors and stuff.

02:25:39 John: or mock-ups based on their own ideas of what it would look like uh the one that i kept seeing it was probably nine to five macro i don't know who originated it but it was uh it was that thing you see people who do mock-ups do all the time where they just take existing apple products and like photoshop the pieces together so it was like basically a ski goggle type headset kind of looking like this and then the band was like an apple watch band right they just turned sideways and like made right and i was like

02:26:02 John: Have these people never seen an actual headset?

02:26:05 John: You can't just take a single watch band and put a strap that goes straight back from the ski goggles.

02:26:10 John: That literally does not fit on human heads.

02:26:12 John: Do they know what human heads look like?

02:26:13 John: Have you ever put on a pair of ski goggles?

02:26:15 John: Even a literal pair of ski goggles has a wider band than that, and it's Alaska.

02:26:19 John: You can't put the Apple watch band there.

02:26:20 John: So I'm glad to see that this doesn't look like that.

02:26:23 John: But you can tell that the people who are feeding them probably had seen this because the thing that surprised me the most is that it has a band that goes back.

02:26:32 John: The band is perpendicular to the surface of the glasses.

02:26:36 John: And that's it.

02:26:37 John: And most of the other headsets have something that goes towards the top of the head.

02:26:43 John: You know what I mean?

02:26:44 Marco: Right, right.

02:26:44 Marco: Yeah.

02:26:45 Marco: There was no top strap.

02:26:46 John: right the psvr one and two have it most of the other like big gaming headsets have it but this one goes straight back now granted it goes straight back to basically a catcher's mitt that cradles the back of your head that gigantic fabric thing so that's why i think you know that people have worn this i'm sure it works for its purpose it's not just a skinny straight back it's a big cup back a big flexi cup with the adjustable things on it that kind of grips your head with the little you know i'm it does the job you know it doesn't have the top strap

02:27:16 John: which i think they can get away with basically because of the battery pack basically because of the the incredible technology and lightweight the fact that they don't need to hang this off the top of your head because apparently that back of your head grippy thing can handle it for you um so i'm very curious to try this thing on to see how the fit feels because if you ever looked at the back of a human skull like human skulls are not spheres

02:27:39 John: right they're not your your eyeballs are not in the center of them the back of them are not symmetrical like they're they're weird and bulgy and stuff so if you try to draw a human head inside like the side view of this thing you'll start realizing that it is actually a little bit tricky where that thing lands but as apple said they looked they studied lots of heads or whatever Richard Howard said we studied thousands of heads

02:28:02 John: They also studied thousands of ears when they made the original AirPods, and apparently they didn't study Marcos.

02:28:06 John: So fit is still potentially an issue, but I am glad to see that this thing tries to get a good grip on your head with only a single strap without a top strap.

02:28:17 John: I hope it works.

02:28:18 John: I hope they pulled it off.

02:28:19 John: I hope it doesn't sag.

02:28:21 John: Looking at the side things, especially the audio pods, they are particularly awkward, especially awkward if, I don't know, Marco, did anyone confirm that you can use this with AirPods?

02:28:30 John: I would assume you can, but they didn't say that, did they?

02:28:32 Marco: You can use it with AirPods or – and I don't know if other Bluetooth – probably other – anyway, you can use it with AirPods.

02:28:37 Marco: The built-in speakers that are on the head strap basically, they have like a special word for them like audio pods or something.

02:28:44 Marco: So the built-in speakers, they are not like bone conduction transducers.

02:28:49 Marco: They are regular speakers.

02:28:51 Marco: They're just very close to your ears.

02:28:52 Marco: Mm-hmm.

02:28:53 Marco: But there is like a gap between the speakers and your ears.

02:28:55 Marco: And so it's kind of like an open headphone.

02:28:57 Marco: You will hear outside noise.

02:28:59 Marco: I asked when I was in the hands-off area, how is the leakage of sound?

02:29:04 Marco: Like people who had worked on it.

02:29:05 Marco: And, you know, they can't tell us that much because it's still PR.

02:29:09 Marco: They're not going to tell great detail.

02:29:12 Marco: Yeah.

02:29:12 Marco: It might leak a little bit of sound if you're really close.

02:29:14 Marco: I was saying, obviously, you probably wouldn't wear it on a plane because it's too much ambient noise.

02:29:18 Marco: Yes, that's correct.

02:29:20 Marco: Planes are too loud.

02:29:20 Marco: You'd wear AirPods on a plane for noise cancellation.

02:29:24 Marco: But I was like, if you're wearing it on a bus, would the passenger next to you hear your stuff?

02:29:28 Marco: probably not you know like maybe if you go really close to your head like they might if you're you know maybe like if you're if you're like a little tinny distant kind of thing kind of like yeah earphones yeah but yeah not like not like wearing wide open headphones like the super open headphones not like that apparently so we'll see how that goes but yes in most cases that you need isolation you'd be wearing airpods

02:29:47 Marco: yeah the other thing they said that i was uh encouraged by was the fact well i don't know again i have to re-watch the video they seem to make it say that you there's multiple fabric thingies that you can attach to it to fit your face yes so on so on the fit front they were they were pretty clear about this and but both in you know public and hands-on hands-off excuse me hands-off area um there are there are multiple straps that you'll be able to fit also the like the face gasket piece which i think they called the light shield something like that light seal

02:30:17 Marco: That's it.

02:30:18 Marco: Yeah.

02:30:18 Marco: Light seal.

02:30:19 Marco: So that piece, the implication is that there's going to be many different sizes of them.

02:30:24 Marco: Not just like, you know, with AirPods, you get like little, you know, the three little earplugs of the small, medium, large.

02:30:30 Marco: No, the implication is that there's going to be many different sizes and shapes and that you basically go to an Apple store to get fit.

02:30:36 Marco: Also, interesting little tidbit, I asked about, you know, the different eye, you know, lens things.

02:30:42 Marco: I asked about, you know, stuff like, you know, the adjustment for things like interpupillary distance, the IPD, which is the spacing between the eyepieces and, you know, any kind of headset or binoculars even, you can adjust that spacing.

02:30:55 Marco: Apparently, they are automatic and motorized for the IPD adjustment.

02:30:59 John: Oh, that's cool.

02:31:00 John: They showed that in the keynote.

02:31:02 John: They showed them adjusting.

02:31:02 Marco: Yeah.

02:31:02 Marco: Yeah, you just put it on and adjust that.

02:31:04 Marco: And then for the lenses, I don't know how this is going to work in the stores yet, but what they're doing in the demos apparently is you give them your eyeglasses that you're wearing and they shoot a light through it and then they bring out perfectly matched lenses for you.

02:31:18 Marco: So if they're doing that for the hands-on demos, I'm thinking maybe they also will have that ability in Apple retail stores when these things launch.

02:31:25 Marco: So maybe you go in, you put your glasses in a thing, they measure your head, and they bring out, okay, here's your perfect fit.

02:31:32 Marco: Try it on.

02:31:33 Marco: So what they're going for apparently is...

02:31:36 Marco: They have, again, studied thousands of heads and they do appear to be taking comfort very seriously and making fit very good because for the illusion to work, you can't have any light leaking in.

02:31:47 Marco: It really has to be a very good fit in lots of different ways.

02:31:50 Marco: Comfort for light isolation for long term wearability for accessibility.

02:31:55 Marco: you really need a lot of different adaptation ability to different people's needs and bodies.

02:32:00 Marco: So they are apparently doing that, that they have lots of different, you know, light seal things, lots of different lens options and everything.

02:32:09 Marco: So apparently it's going to be really good in all those ways.

02:32:13 Marco: And, you know, it's one of the things you kind of just have to try to tell, like how many people will this work for?

02:32:18 Marco: Apparently a lot.

02:32:19 Marco: Also on the realm of motion sickness, right?

02:32:22 Marco: which they had some euphemism for like motion sensitivity or something like that.

02:32:27 Marco: Oh, sorry.

02:32:28 Marco: Motion discomfort.

02:32:29 Marco: They called it in the notes.

02:32:31 Marco: Yeah.

02:32:32 Marco: But on that, they, you know, they, they talk a lot about the R1 chip that they've, they've done everything, you know, to try to make stuff as, as real time as possible.

02:32:40 Marco: They talk a lot about that 12 millisecond processing latency, which is way below what everyone else is doing in the market.

02:32:47 Marco: That apparently I, I asked some people like, Hey, you know, what does that mean in real life?

02:32:51 Marco: Like for motion sensitive people, um,

02:32:52 Marco: and everyone claims that it basically eliminates motion sickness.

02:32:56 Marco: Now, we'll see if that is true and for how many people, but they're talking a big game, and so far, the handful of people who have tried it seem to all back that up.

02:33:09 Marco: So it sounds like they're on the right path here.

02:33:11 Marco: I am really dying to try this thing.

02:33:14 Marco: I really want to see how good the comfort is, how good the latency is, how good the illusion is, whether I get motion sick, whether I can see everything sharply.

02:33:22 Marco: I am I'm just I'm so curious.

02:33:25 Marco: But again, for the handful of people who have tried it, the reports so far are very good.

02:33:29 John: Yeah, they're one order of magnitude off of the latency.

02:33:31 John: Remember that video I always post from my post on my blog of the Microsoft thing where they had an adjustable latency where they get to do it a thousand milliseconds, one hundred ten one of just scribbling on a screen with their finger.

02:33:42 John: One one millisecond is where you start getting down to the point where it's like it seems like it's real time.

02:33:46 John: 10 10 12 is good there you know you know they got one more order of magnitude to uh to travel down but like i said before a lot of the motion sickness stuff has more to do with the software than the hardware the hardware is your limit you're never going to be better than your hardware but you can make software experiences that make people motion sick with

02:34:04 John: With no latency because, you know, because they're controlling everything that you see.

02:34:08 John: And if they make you see stuff that your inner ear disagrees with because you're sitting on a couch, you're going to get motion sick.

02:34:14 John: That is the origin of motion sickness.

02:34:16 John: So software is a big factor.

02:34:17 John: And that's where, by the way, the AR stuff comes in handy because that really tries to root you.

02:34:22 John: in a room that is not moving right so if you're looking at a bunch of virtual screens in your living room motion sickness is probably not going to be a big problem if you're flying an x-wing through a canyon when your actual body is sitting on uh you know on a couch motion sickness may be a problem no matter what the latency is so that you know it's a big software issue and speaking of that by the way so we haven't really talked about this but like

02:34:44 John: Before we were saying, what are they going to do with this headset?

02:34:46 John: What am I supposed to do with it?

02:34:47 John: Is it going to be like the watch where they say it can be all things to all people and they figure out what it is?

02:34:51 John: And the answer from this presentation was no.

02:34:52 John: Apple has a very clear idea of what they think you can do with this.

02:34:56 John: And it is narrow.

02:34:57 John: Hideo Kojima was at Apple.

02:34:59 John: He was not there to pitch games for the headset.

02:35:02 John: This incredibly powerful headset was not presented as a gaming device by Apple at all.

02:35:08 John: which is shocking to a lot of people because, like, their competition hardware-wise are all gaming headsets.

02:35:14 John: And Apple was, I mean, they mentioned, you know, there's a 3D thing.

02:35:17 John: You can make games for it.

02:35:18 John: You know, like, games will work.

02:35:20 John: It'll be fine.

02:35:21 John: But Apple was like, no, this is not a product for people who want to play video games, which was very clear.

02:35:27 John: What is it for?

02:35:28 John: It's for people who want to basically...

02:35:31 John: Use your Apple devices, right?

02:35:35 John: Now, granted, this is an Apple device and you're using it, but what are you using it for?

02:35:38 John: Like, I kept thinking it was basically as like the Pro Display XDR, but for your face.

02:35:43 John: This is a display product.

02:35:45 John: What does it let you display?

02:35:46 John: Running applications.

02:35:47 John: Oh, and by the way, it also runs them because it's not like it's just a display.

02:35:50 John: Like it has an M2 in there and it will run your iPad apps and it'll run your iPhone apps and you can look at your Mac screen.

02:35:55 John: But in the end, it's saying like, hey, all the things that you normally do, imagine if you could do them without a bunch of monitors arrayed around you.

02:36:02 John: But instead...

02:36:04 John: thing on your face because some of us may have a monitor in front of us but how many people can have five monitors that we can swipe away and replace with other monitors and windows and floating around that was their pitch with this device you you use it to you know you put it on and you do computing type stuff video conferencing using all your apps that you're familiar with and new kinds of apps that we you know that we want you to make with this sdk and they show like a 3d satellite spinning around and stuff like that or whatever

02:36:29 John: I feel like this was a very clear message of what Apple thinks this device is for.

02:36:33 John: Are they right?

02:36:34 John: Is this what it's going to be for?

02:36:36 John: The most touchy one is the one we touched on before.

02:36:37 John: It was like, is dad going to wear these at the birthday party so we can get 3D video?

02:36:42 John: On the one hand, 3D video is super cool.

02:36:44 John: On the other hand, you can get 3D video on a phone if you just separate the two cameras by a little bit.

02:36:49 John: And it's way more, you know, it's not just like socially acceptable and people will get used to it.

02:36:54 John: Your kid should see your face.

02:36:55 John: And if he sees your face and you're holding the rectangle of the iPhone, he can still kind of see your face, right?

02:37:00 John: So when these things are actual glasses, sure, wear them and record the party.

02:37:05 John: When they're goggles, it seems like a shame to use this as a capture device for 3D video.

02:37:09 John: As a viewing device for 3D video to relive memories of your kid's second birthday, awesome.

02:37:14 John: As a capture device, it happens to be the only Apple device with two cameras separated by enough distance to get good stereo video, which is kind of a shame.

02:37:22 Marco: Well, I mean, on that front, again, this is very early for this stuff.

02:37:27 Marco: First of all, now that there will be a viewing device that can show 3D content, that certainly creates more demand for 3D capture devices, so maybe we'll see more in the future.

02:37:36 Marco: But if you look back, this is kind of like the...

02:37:39 Marco: the original VHS-sized camcorders.

02:37:42 Marco: Remember when those came out in the 80s and 90s?

02:37:45 John: You put them on your shoulder.

02:37:46 Marco: Yeah, those giant... It was just a VCR on your shoulder.

02:37:49 Marco: They were so big and so heavy that when somebody, usually like a dad, would take that out, it was a big deal.

02:37:57 Marco: And you'd take it out every so often, not at every possible occasion.

02:38:01 Marco: You would take it out for stuff like birthdays and Christmas and whatever.

02:38:05 Marco: And you would film around for a little while...

02:38:07 Marco: And then you'd set it down.

02:38:08 Marco: And so you wouldn't be capturing the entire event that way because it was way too big and heavy and the battery sucked.

02:38:14 Marco: It was kind of an occasional brief capture device.

02:38:20 Marco: And I think that's kind of what this is going to be like.

02:38:22 Marco: I think the appeal of capturing 3D video and audio is so compelling that people will do it.

02:38:31 Marco: And people will gladly...

02:38:33 Marco: Put this thing on and capture a few minutes of the party, and then they'll take it off and go back to the party.

02:38:38 Marco: Like, I don't think people are going to be spending the entire party in the headset, nor should they probably.

02:38:44 John: They can't because the battery life won't let them.

02:38:46 Marco: Yeah.

02:38:47 Marco: Right.

02:38:48 Marco: But I think it will be totally – it will become fairly reasonable.

02:38:54 Marco: Like, it won't look weird after a little while.

02:38:56 Marco: You know, to Casey's point earlier, like –

02:38:57 Marco: It'll become fairly common for people to take this out and capture parts of experiences and then go back to the real world.

02:39:05 Marco: And I don't think that's a bad thing.

02:39:06 Marco: Until we have 3D capturing iPhones, which we might never have or might not be for a while, that's totally fine.

02:39:14 Marco: And by the way – and it certainly raises the question of like for parents who are in their phones all the time, how present are they really?

02:39:22 Marco: That's a separate –

02:39:23 Marco: Separate question, but certainly one worth considering.

02:39:26 Marco: This makes it more obvious, but is it actually different in presence levels?

02:39:34 Marco: Maybe not.

02:39:35 Marco: Think of it as a giant old camcorder.

02:39:38 Marco: There's going to be this time in history for a little while.

02:39:41 Marco: where this is the only slash best way to capture 3D video of what's going on.

02:39:45 Marco: But capturing 3D video is going to be so compelling.

02:39:49 Marco: I cannot wait to have that.

02:39:51 Marco: I think that's going to be amazing.

02:39:53 John: You could have used it on Nintendo DS years and years ago.

02:39:57 Marco: Two cameras.

02:39:57 Marco: Anyway, I think that thing's going to be amazing for that.

02:40:01 Marco: And as for the use cases...

02:40:03 Marco: I think it's wise to lean more into the media stuff and the general computing stuff, because first of all, every single time we talked about like, Hey, what's, what are VR headsets good for?

02:40:15 Marco: We always had people write it.

02:40:17 Marco: Yes.

02:40:17 Marco: I know people watch porn in them.

02:40:18 Marco: Like I, thanks for telling us everyone.

02:40:21 Marco: I didn't have a section of the keynote on that.

02:40:22 Marco: It's weird.

02:40:23 Marco: Yeah.

02:40:24 Marco: We are fully aware that that's a thing.

02:40:26 Marco: Also.

02:40:26 Marco: Yeah.

02:40:26 Marco: You people watch movies in them, you know, that aren't porn.

02:40:29 John: They did have that, that framework that detects sensitive images.

02:40:31 John: It would just blur everything you see.

02:40:33 Marco: Yeah, right.

02:40:33 Marco: It's a new framework now.

02:40:35 Marco: It's basically an Unity sensor.

02:40:36 Marco: Anyway, so yes, I'm sure it'll be great for that.

02:40:39 Marco: And yes, people will buy it for that.

02:40:40 Marco: And even if you only buy it to watch videos on movies and TV shows and stuff, I mean, look, iPads are capable of doing amazing things.

02:40:49 Marco: They have much of the same computational power.

02:40:52 Marco: They have amazing capabilities.

02:40:53 Marco: And yet what most people do on iPads is watch video on them.

02:40:56 Marco: And that's fine.

02:40:57 Marco: So yes, they made this ridiculous, amazing headset.

02:41:01 Marco: If most people end up watching movies on it a lot or other activities that involve watching video feeds, that's fine.

02:41:08 Marco: You don't need to be doing amazing things on it.

02:41:09 Marco: And if it's otherwise being used largely as a computing platform, like as basically a glorified monitor for apps that you're working with or working in or running or whatever.

02:41:20 John: Not just glorified, a better monitor in some ways because you have your whole field of view and not just like things can be anywhere, not just on the rectangle that is the monitor.

02:41:27 Marco: Right, exactly.

02:41:27 Marco: I was thinking earlier, when you look back over computing history, there's kind of this base load of the amount of computational power that we burn just to do things in a more modern way that are otherwise fairly simple, like type of document or something.

02:41:44 Marco: When we had to move to a compositing window management system, like with Mac OS X or whatever the hell version of Windows out of that,

02:41:52 Marco: The system was burning more computational resources to do the basics.

02:41:58 Marco: And our apps had to work above that.

02:42:00 Marco: And that mattered for a little while when the hardware was super early.

02:42:03 Marco: But then as hardware went on, now we don't even think about that.

02:42:06 Marco: Later on, we had things like web technology doing all the rendering for UIs.

02:42:11 Marco: And that is, from a computational perspective, hilariously wasteful and inefficient.

02:42:15 Marco: But things got fast enough that it didn't really matter, and it became more about other factors that made that compelling.

02:42:22 Marco: The amount of computing power that the Vision Pro burns just to show you an app window in the middle of your room, the amount of complexity and sophistication and amazing feats of engineering required to show you a spreadsheet in the middle of the room is kind of hilarious.

02:42:42 Marco: I was thinking about that earlier and just laughing to myself in the middle of the Apple Visitor Center.

02:42:47 Marco: Everyone thought I was a weirdo, probably.

02:42:50 Marco: Just thinking, like, the amount of computing power that we're just considering, like, passe.

02:42:54 Marco: Like, oh, yeah, we're going to have, you know, 16 cameras and this whole M2 chip and this whole... Like, all this amazing... You know, this thing's probably drawing, like, 90 watts or something from its cable.

02:43:05 Marco: Having a cooling fan.

02:43:06 Marco: By the way, yes, there's a fan.

02:43:08 Marco: Like, doing all...

02:43:10 Marco: All that to show a couple of floating windows in your virtual room is kind of amusing and is so comically over the top.

02:43:18 Marco: But if that's what people actually want to do with this, I mean, yes, there are going to be amazing games and game-like experiences that become possible.

02:43:28 Marco: And that's great.

02:43:29 Marco: I am looking forward to being able to go on a virtual retreat online.

02:43:34 Marco: into somewhere warm when it's winter and freezing and crappy in real life, and when everything's all dark, because in the middle of the winter it got dark at 3.30 p.m., I can just go to a tropical paradise in my virtual headset.

02:43:48 Marco: That will be amazing.

02:43:49 Marco: There will be all sorts of things like that, but it will also be compelling to just do regular boring old app work in this thing once everything gets good and mature enough to do that.

02:43:58 Marco: It will be great to be sitting on a plane

02:44:00 Marco: And to have a giant screen field of view that you can be doing other better, nicer things in.

02:44:06 Marco: It would be great to be sitting in your living room in the middle of the winter and watching a movie in the middle of a jungle or whatever.

02:44:15 Marco: They didn't talk about fitness stuff.

02:44:17 Marco: And there's probably lots of reasons for that.

02:44:19 Marco: One thing I instantly thought of is like, well...

02:44:22 Marco: How sweaty is your face going to be with this whole face gasket?

02:44:26 John: I mean, it's fabric, so it's better than it being rubber, but breathability is always an issue.

02:44:29 John: And also, I think bouncing up and down is going to be an issue.

02:44:31 Marco: Yeah, but there are certain... I was thinking, my God, when I'm sitting on my water rower... By the way, there was a wonderful segment on Cortex.

02:44:39 Marco: This is a very brief version.

02:44:40 Marco: I know we're short on time.

02:44:42 Marco: Where Gray was saying, don't even try a water rower if you ever use a gym rowing machine.

02:44:48 Marco: They're like chain kind of rowing machine in a gym.

02:44:50 Marco: I got a chance recently to use a chain row machine for the first time ever.

02:44:53 Marco: I've only ever had a water rower.

02:44:56 Marco: It was like rowing a trash can lid across a field of gravel.

02:45:01 Marco: Like it was such a terrible feeling compared to the water rower.

02:45:05 Marco: Oh my God.

02:45:05 Marco: He like, yeah, if you, if you use a water rower and you ever think, well, maybe we should get a concept too.

02:45:11 Marco: No.

02:45:11 Marco: oh my god they're awful anyway sorry concept two people if you're listening uh so anyway the idea of like taking my wonderful water growing machine and virtually rowing across a wonderful lake in a you know a peaceful lake scene you know with maybe some trainer head in the corner telling me what to do or something that sounds amazing i would love that that sounds like so there are fitness experiences that i think could work with this um without having too many weird practical problems but anyway

02:45:37 Casey: And they'll be even better because the fans will be blowing a little breeze on your face.

02:45:42 Casey: No, they'll be blowing hot air, though, unfortunately.

02:45:45 Casey: Well, it's a summer row.

02:45:46 Casey: It's a summer row in Arizona.

02:45:49 Marco: In the rainforest, maybe.

02:45:50 Marco: It's very humid and hot.

02:45:51 Marco: Yeah, right.

02:45:52 Marco: Anyway, so I can think of lots of...

02:45:54 Marco: There's lots of use cases for this beyond just gaming.

02:45:58 Marco: And I think what we've seen, honestly, what we've seen from the gaming VR headsets is the gaming VR is a fun novelty.

02:46:06 Marco: It has not taken over the gaming world as much as everyone thought it would.

02:46:09 Marco: It has not produced nearly as many good VR games as people would have assumed would exist by now.

02:46:15 Marco: There are some that are fun.

02:46:17 Marco: They're mostly like, you know, novelties or fads, honestly.

02:46:22 Marco: So I think not having a strong gaming focus is both, you know, I think realistic in the sense that Apple is not great in the gaming world, despite their best efforts.

02:46:32 Marco: And also gamers are not going to be spending $3,500 on this anytime soon.

02:46:36 John: Well, I think they'd be the most likely to people to spend $3,500 on the gaming headset because it's got such amazing specs.

02:46:42 John: If only they could play games with it, but they can't, at least not the games they want to.

02:46:45 Marco: But, you know, I think if people start using this, even if it's only really used at first by most people for capturing and watching 3D media, that's still a big enough use case to get it going.

02:46:57 Marco: And then you can start doing some more of the app stuff.

02:46:59 Marco: Like, yeah, maybe while you're capturing your 3D media, hey, maybe, you know, you have your messages over in the corner and you start doing that or you start, you know, messing around with whatever your productivity apps on your iPad are.

02:47:08 Marco: Like,

02:47:09 Marco: There is a world where that makes a lot of sense, and I think they have positioned themselves very well to start that and capture that.

02:47:15 Marco: And I do think it's going to be very specialized and very kind of low adoption at first simply because, first of all, this thing isn't even coming out for a long time.

02:47:23 Marco: And then when it does come out, it's going to be fairly expensive and fairly limited.

02:47:27 Marco: And so, yes, but this is a start.

02:47:30 Marco: This is not going to replace people's computers anytime soon for most people.

02:47:34 John: What about replacing their monitors?

02:47:35 John: I feel like that is a more realistic goal.

02:47:37 John: Maybe?

02:47:37 John: It's not going to replace your computer, but will it replace your monitor?

02:47:40 John: I mean, that's kind of... It's not a shame, but it's interesting that this is not just a display device.

02:47:45 John: It's an entire computer by itself, but you can use it to see your Mac screen.

02:47:49 John: Like...

02:47:50 John: You know, so they showed it being used with a keyboard and a mouse and stuff like that.

02:47:54 John: But like the thing I'm most disappointed with in terms of their demos is Apple didn't seem to have any kind of point of view or story or a solution to the whole thing of like, OK, but what kind of apps can you make?

02:48:06 John: in the third dimension.

02:48:07 John: They have frameworks for it.

02:48:08 John: They showed the, that satellite rotating in 3d, but that's nothing like that is like, it's, it's cute, but that doesn't, that doesn't let me do, that doesn't, that's not a new kind of application that I couldn't use on a 2d screen.

02:48:19 John: Show me, you know, and, and clearly it's possible to make applications that you couldn't do on a 2d screen, but,

02:48:24 John: But kind of like the gaming thing you were saying, show me the killer app.

02:48:28 John: Show me the one that everybody has to have.

02:48:30 John: Show me the one that they say, you can't do this on a laptop screen.

02:48:33 John: You have to do it in the headset.

02:48:35 John: And by the way, when you do it in the headset, it is an experience that is better than trying to do the same thing anywhere else.

02:48:40 John: Like we were saying before about like, what can the iPad do better than the phone and the Mac?

02:48:43 John: What can the Mac do better than the, you know?

02:48:45 John: What can the headset do better?

02:48:46 John: Well, it can be a better display in certain ways because you have flexibility about where to put things and stuff like that.

02:48:52 John: But what about the app experience?

02:48:54 John: It doesn't have to be, but I feel like it is possible to be more than just 2D planes showing traditional 2D applications on them with maybe one or two 3D things poking out.

02:49:04 John: That's not adding anything.

02:49:07 John: And Apple didn't have an answer there.

02:49:08 John: They didn't say, and here's our killer app that can only exist on the headset.

02:49:13 John: That goes far beyond just showing you an iPad app and a rectangle that's floating in front of you.

02:49:17 Marco: First of all, I think what they did demo is that I guarantee you the killer app for this thing is 3D picture and video capture and being able to replay moments.

02:49:26 Marco: That's the killer app.

02:49:26 Marco: I'll call it right now.

02:49:28 Marco: That's going to get everyone to buy it.

02:49:29 John: Well, I mean, I didn't mean killer app isn't the thing that's going to make people want to buy it.

02:49:33 John: I mean, like I said, the thing that takes advantage of 3D technology more than just being a display, right?

02:49:39 John: They have frameworks for it.

02:49:40 John: They showed it, but they didn't have an application that they wrote that is essentially a 3D application as opposed to a bunch of 2D planes.

02:49:47 John: And that's, you know, to be clear, I think their concentration on 2D planes showing...

02:49:51 John: video content and applications.

02:49:55 John: That was clearly their focus.

02:49:56 John: It seems much more focused on the watch.

02:49:57 John: And I think that's a smart focus because those are all things with proven utility.

02:50:02 John: And that's why I keep framing this in my mind as, hey, you know, all that stuff that you already want to do.

02:50:06 John: uh imagine if you could have as many screens as you wanted wherever you wanted doing all that same stuff that is compelling imagine you know and like you said watching media or even just the rowing thing that is that i i feel like people are probably uh writing in already to tell me that is actually an example the rowing experience of something that you can't do on a 2d screen because the 2d screen doesn't fill your field of view yeah and when you're on the rowing machine you want to feel like you're on the lake you don't want to feel like you're looking at a monitor showing a lake

02:50:32 John: right it's kind of the difference between when you ride a bike and it's got a screen in front of you showing a road versus putting on a headset where you feel like you're actually on the road it's just that that is mostly just like a 360 video experience it is not the 3d stuff like i i'm thinking of this because i saw the state of the union where they're saying here's look you can have planes and volumes and in volumes you can have full 3d apps but apple doesn't have any full 3d apps they have

02:50:54 John: you know environments that you can be in and sort of 3d video experiences 360 video experiences and i think that will be amazing especially since by the way they they made a point of saying they don't have any hand controllers so most of the traditional type of games are out because you need hand controllers they do support game controllers if you like if you want to use like they're not like the independent ones where you like grab and you know have you played like alex you have right where you grab no i haven't

02:51:17 John: well anyway like yes you can help to hold a ps5 controller or whatever but not independent hands that you grab things with or whatever right so the type of game experiences you're gonna have are the ones that i feel like have a broader appeal to non-gamers which is they show that meditation thing or you're on a lake or you're walking through the mountains or even if you're flying through the clouds or whatever uh that is the that is the closest they came to having an experience you can't have on a 2d screen because you will feel like you're there because it fills your field of view but

02:51:46 John: The 3D stuff, as in 3D modeled objects in the world, whether you're putting them on the desk in front of you or a completely 3D world, they don't have an answer for that.

02:51:54 John: I don't think anybody has an answer for that, but just to be clear, Apple didn't have an answer for it either.

02:51:58 John: They have frameworks for it, and they're hoping someone will make an app like that that says, wow, this is, you know, that's why I kept saying the killer app in terms of 3D.

02:52:06 John: But what they were showing is we already know you want to do these things.

02:52:09 John: We already know you want to watch video.

02:52:10 John: You want to use your apps, right?

02:52:12 John: You want to record video and see it in 3D, which is a thing you can't do without weird glasses and stuff like that.

02:52:19 John: So I think they concentrated on the right things, but they also didn't have anything beyond what anyone else had had in terms of ideas for applications.

02:52:28 John: Everything that they showed is something someone else was doing, but in a worse way on crappier hardware.

02:52:32 Marco: No, I mean, so I think what I mean, honestly, all the things that they did show, I think that's enough to get this thing going and started.

02:52:39 Marco: That's that's plenty.

02:52:40 Marco: And again, like I again, I honestly think 3D capture and playback of video is its own killer app right there.

02:52:47 Marco: But, you know, even even more pedestrian stuff like, you know, and they've had this support in AR kit for a while, but it's been limited to tiny phone and iPad screens.

02:52:57 Marco: shopping and interior decoration of rooms.

02:53:02 Marco: If you want to buy something on the internet, one of the hardest, most challenging problems of online shopping is when you get something and you realize that the size or scale of it is not quite what you expected.

02:53:12 Marco: To be able to just have that object show up in your room...

02:53:16 Marco: That I think could be remarkable for as pedestrian and common uses as online shopping or to have, you know, room redecoration or furniture arrangement apps where you can like, oh, let's move this couch around or see what happens if we painted this wall blue.

02:53:30 Marco: That kind of stuff.

02:53:31 Marco: That's killer apps for so many people.

02:53:33 Marco: And those are all things that you can do now with the phone or iPad, but it would be so much better doing it with this.

02:53:41 Marco: So, you know, I think they've already shown us enough that is going to make a lot of people want to buy this, including me, honestly.

02:53:49 Marco: And I was super skeptical before, but now I'm super optimistic, of course.

02:53:52 John: One of the things they also stayed away from, by the way, all they kind of barely touched on is the whole the whole like feeling like you're sitting around a meeting table with a bunch of people.

02:54:01 John: they stayed pretty far away from that they said yeah you can do facetime in it and we have a solution to the problem of people can't see your face we'll make this little creepy avatar thing or whatever uh but the closest they got was like oh and you can have a disembodied head yeah disembodied head and shoulders but they were not going into the whole you know part of the reason they didn't say metaverse is they're actually not doing any of that stuff which is lego's a

02:54:23 John: a little 3d avatar of yourself and you feel like you're sitting at a table with everybody and you can see their expressions nope it's it's facetime it's disembodied heads with a little bit of a 3d effect on them and if they're also in a headset it's not really their face it's a model of their face or whatever like you know i think all that's fine that'll that'll come along but they stayed you know that is definitely a touchy-feely apple thing that he could have done oh the feeling of presence and you're there with your loved ones they were like

02:54:48 John: Yeah, no.

02:54:49 John: They had to prove you can use this for work meetings.

02:54:53 John: You can use this to FaceTime with your family.

02:54:56 John: Not the ideal use case, right?

02:54:58 John: They spent so much more time showing people looking at movies showing on a virtual screen in front of them than they spent showing a disembodied CG head of a scanned face.

02:55:10 John: that you know even in the in the idealized scenarios of this thing looked a little bit creepy right so i feel like that is a weakness of this product they tried to kind of hang a lantern on say we have a solution to that see don't worry about it they'll still be able to see your face sort of kinda but that is not what apple is pitching this on that i mean if you want to see the pitch for that it's continuity camera for the apple tv right whole family gather around on the couch put a camera that probably doesn't zoom in enough and has whatever like i

02:55:35 John: I'm not entirely convinced by the continuity camera thing, but FaceTiming with a bunch of people in your family, you're much more likely to prop up an iPad, hold a phone, or use continuity camera than you are to have.

02:55:44 John: You're certainly not going to have your entire family in $3,500 headsets, but even just one person, and even in a work meeting, it's a little bit iffy on that front.

02:55:51 John: But, you know, this...

02:55:53 John: This stakes out a different area of the headset space than I have seen anybody try to stake out.

02:55:58 John: Even, you know, so the game things, forget it.

02:56:00 John: Apple's not anywhere near them.

02:56:02 John: And then when Facebook did it, Facebook's not a particularly big gaming company.

02:56:05 John: Oculus was a gaming headset.

02:56:06 John: They tried to stake out this whole presence virtual meeting, little Nintendo Miis walking around with no legs or whatever.

02:56:12 John: Apple's like, no legs, no body, no nothing.

02:56:16 John: They got disembodied hands and a floating CG head, but that's not what this is about.

02:56:20 John: Let me show you more of your apps floating around you.

02:56:22 John: And speaking of the apps, by the way, they had everyone's favorite person, Marco's favorite UI designer, Alan Dye, up there talking about the UI for this with the sort of translucent panes and everything.

02:56:31 John: And everything was okay to me except the question I had, and I'm sure this would become clear if I actually used it, but it's hard to tell in the keynote, is they had the whole thing of where you look at the button you want and then you pinch your fingers to press it.

02:56:41 John: And the whole time I'm looking and I'm like...

02:56:43 John: Is it possible for me as a human to tell which item is selected on this screen?

02:56:49 John: It's kind of like the old Apple TV where it's like they would like zoom it in a little bit or, you know.

02:56:53 Marco: Yeah, they have like a hover effect on it.

02:56:54 John: Yeah.

02:56:55 John: When I pinch, they're doing an effect.

02:56:57 John: And they said, when I pinch, which thing that's on the screen is going to activate right now?

02:57:00 John: and alan dies like can't you see it's a subtly different sheen on this button it shows that it's the ones i'm like oh come on just highlight it like invert it make it white on black instead of black on white something i want to be able to know where this selection state is alan why won't you tell me anyway i can't blame it disappears into the void no i'm sure there's going to be like you know one accessibility option to fix that

02:57:20 Marco: Yeah.

02:57:21 John: We've got old eyes here.

02:57:22 John: Like everything can't be translucent frosted glass.

02:57:24 John: I have to know which item has the focus so that when I pinch which thing, you know, again, it's hard to tell from videos, but that's what I was looking out for there.

02:57:31 John: I do like mostly what they did with it, the frosted glass look and the little controls on the side and everything.

02:57:36 John: It all looks cool.

02:57:37 John: I do wonder...

02:57:38 John: Uh, they didn't show any minority report kind of like reaching out with your hands and swiping things from side to side and everything like that.

02:57:43 John: So it feels kind of like stage manager and how rigid it is in terms of where you can place things.

02:57:47 John: But I think we have a ways to go with hand and finger tracking before we're going to be Tom Cruise in our way through this UI.

02:57:53 John: Yeah.

02:57:53 Marco: yeah and also i mean there's there's the huge question of text input you know so they're very very clear to say like you know you can connect the bluetooth keyboard and mouse which is great um there is a virtual keyboard that you can kind of poke at in the air i'm curious how well that works in practice i'm a little skeptical because it seems like that's a very difficult problem to get right better use the you know speech to text at that point

02:58:17 Marco: Well, yeah, and of course there is dictation, there is Siri.

02:58:21 Marco: There's stuff that will allow input better, but this is probably... I think if you're going to be doing a lot of input, you're going to be sitting with the keyboard.

02:58:30 Marco: Now, that being said, I mean, imagine...

02:58:32 Marco: Imagine that on an airline tray table.

02:58:36 Marco: That's amazing because it's like you can actually sit and coach and have the person in front of you lean back like a jerk and you can just have the keyboard on the tray table and no screen to get in the way to get pinched by the seat.

02:58:48 John: i i hope you can touch type though because i was thinking about this in terms of the airline thing they they pointedly didn't really show someone watching a movie on an airplane and i feel like the only way you could do it is to turn that dial so you're full vr because if you try to do it with ar the screen would have to be two rows in front of you or one row in front of you and that would mess like how would that work with ar because like in you know in coach the back of the person seat is like six inches from your nose it feels like right

02:59:14 John: And you don't want the screen to be six inches.

02:59:16 John: So the virtual screen in the augmented reality has to be farther out.

02:59:19 John: And then it can't make a convincing augmented reality.

02:59:23 John: So you really got to turn that dial and make it so, nope, I'm in the desert at night or wherever the hell that thing was.

02:59:28 John: Which means if you have a keyboard in front of you, you better be able to touch type it without having to look at the keyboard because you can't look down and look at the keys.

02:59:36 Casey: But you could bring your Bluetooth keyboard, just sit it on the tray table.

02:59:39 John: That's what I'm saying.

02:59:40 John: You have to be able to type on your Bluetooth keyboard without looking at the keyboard because it's not an AR mode because, you know, or you could just have, fine, the screen will be out three feet in front of you and it will like, it'll do some weird clipping thing.

02:59:50 John: You know what I mean?

02:59:50 John: Like it's, someone's got to try it to see how does it, how does it square that circle?

02:59:54 John: Because you want the screen to be two feet away from you, but the seat is one foot away from you.

02:59:59 John: So now the screen is behind the seat.

03:00:02 John: And so it truncates at the bottom, runs the illusion.

03:00:04 John: It'll probably be fine.

03:00:05 Marco: man i there is there is just there's so much here like i'm well you know one another thing i mean obviously we're gonna cover this a lot in future episodes you know i think the the design of the ui and the interaction is interesting in the sense that they didn't do minority report style you have to like grab everything and have your arms up and out all the time because they also didn't really show much of that interaction so we don't actually know how it works i'm assuming it's a bunch of fixed positions but how do you manipulate those fixed positions with your hands

03:00:32 Marco: Well, but what's good is like is like, you know, it is based on eye tracking and you making a hand movement, but it doesn't really matter where your hands are as so they can be in your lap off to the side.

03:00:42 Marco: You can be lying down kind of you can be slouching.

03:00:44 Marco: And that's not only is that great for lots of different accessibility needs, but also that's just great for not being super tiresome.

03:00:51 Marco: And, you know, you don't have to be waving your arms around in midair in front of you.

03:00:55 Marco: You can just be moving your eyes and tapping with your finger and you can navigate the whole thing without doing a whole shoulder workout in the process, which that's – again, it's like the sci-fi vision of a product like this would actually be probably pretty terrible in real life.

03:01:12 Marco: So rather than do the sci-fi vision, they made the thing that's actually better in real life.

03:01:16 Marco: And I think that's kind of the theme of this whole product that we've seen so far, that if somebody tells you, oh, we're going to make AR glasses with the whole AR OS, what you picture is something very different, and what you picture how it would work is very different.

03:01:31 Marco: That's not what they did.

03:01:32 Marco: I'm sure they thought of that or maybe made some demo stuff and maybe saw it sucked and abandoned or whatever, but what they've shipped or what they're going to eventually ship here is

03:01:41 Marco: is seemingly something that is much better designed for reality.

03:01:48 Marco: This is something that's actually going to be very useful in reality, no pun intended.

03:01:56 Marco: It seems like a much more practical approach to solving some of these problems.

03:02:00 Marco: That being said, of course,

03:02:01 Marco: I use the term practical a little bit loosely there in terms of like they needed to throw an absurd amount of technology and engineering to make these things work this way.

03:02:09 Marco: And there's a large amount of cost and a large amount of wasted CPU power and stuff in the meantime to make this all happen.

03:02:16 Marco: But this isn't something that we – this isn't what we would have guessed.

03:02:21 Marco: It isn't what we did guess.

03:02:22 Marco: We don't have to be theoretical.

03:02:24 Marco: We were guessing about this product for years.

03:02:26 Marco: This is not what I expected it to be.

03:02:28 Marco: This is not, I think, what anybody expected it to be.

03:02:30 John: I mean, I think the rumors pretty much got the form right.

03:02:32 John: It's just that it was hard for anyone to believe that they wouldn't talk about gaming.

03:02:35 John: And guess what?

03:02:36 John: They didn't talk about gaming.

03:02:37 Marco: No, I'm saying, obviously, who cares what it looks like?

03:02:40 Marco: You know, the goggles, whatever, fine.

03:02:41 Marco: I'm just saying, like, the way it works, the way it is such a strong focus on AR rather than being all about VR...

03:02:48 John: I mean, that was Tim's original thing, that Apple was big into AR, not VR.

03:02:52 John: It's just in the recent years, the rumors started to drift more towards VR because the idea that it was Apple was going to ship something that was a headset that blocked your vision entirely.

03:03:01 John: So people said it had to be more VR.

03:03:03 John: But the original origin of the headset rumors was Apple wants to do AR.

03:03:06 John: They're going to augment reality.

03:03:08 John: And it just kind of shifted over time as people gave up on the pipe dream of the glass and said, well, I guess we'll just...

03:03:13 John: ship a headset that totally blocks your vision right and then that's where all the vr rumors came from that's where the gaming angle started coming in but no the original the original rumors of this headset is that apple is super into ar and that's that's what they're that's why they presented as a product that is heavily focused on ar

03:03:29 Marco: But even that, if you ask people, Apple's going to make an AR-focused headset, what kind of features will it have?

03:03:36 Marco: When people think of AR, they think of you walking down the street and having a little infill bubble pop up over the store saying, oh, this is rated five stars.

03:03:42 Marco: Maybe pop over people.

03:03:44 Marco: Oh, this is Emily Smith.

03:03:45 Marco: That's what they're thinking when you say AR.

03:03:48 Marco: No one thinks about, I just want to be sitting on my couch working on a Word document and be able to see if my spouse walks by.

03:03:56 Marco: That's what they actually should.

03:03:57 Marco: I think people thought about that.

03:03:58 John: I don't know if you weren't reading those articles, but this whole idea of having a bunch of virtual screens in front of you as augmented reality was definitely in the mix.

03:04:05 John: That's the part that Apple concentrated on.

03:04:08 John: Speaking of eye tracking, though, by the way, they made a big point of the privacy angle on this, which I think they skimmed over it too fast, but I think what they were getting at was essentially, hey, if you're looking at Safari in your goggles, that they won't pass where your eyes are lingering as cursor events.

03:04:28 Marco: Yes.

03:04:29 John: It's kind of the equivalent if you're on your Mac.

03:04:31 John: If you're on your Mac and imagine if your mouse pointer moved everywhere your eyes went.

03:04:35 John: Where your mouse pointer moves can be captured by most web apps or whatever.

03:04:40 John: Actually, I don't know what the state of the art of security is, but in theory it could be captured, right?

03:04:43 John: But where your eyes move is not captured by any web browser because...

03:04:47 John: computers don't detect it right and that is deemed more privacy related because they do like you ever see this where they test like a website with like a bunch of people do some usability testing that's where they track their eyes and they say oh people's eyes are hovering around here right but that doesn't happen when you use your phone when you use your ipad when you use your mac but with the headset something is tracking where your eyes are all the time and apple made it a point to say we're not going to pass that information on to facebook.com or whatever yeah

03:05:13 John: which, you know, it's their privacy angle.

03:05:15 John: It's the picture, you know, that biometric data that you don't expect to be passed on to these things, we won't pass it on.

03:05:21 John: They'll only get the thing when you click with your fingers or whatever.

03:05:23 Marco: I think that's also applied to apps, though, which is interesting.

03:05:26 Marco: Well, so here's the thing.

03:05:28 John: You can, like, gaming and the headset, one of the best...

03:05:32 John: gaming experiences that people come up with is things where you aim with your eyeballs feels awesome right and this eye tracking i'm sure is amazing compared to like the eye tracking on a 300 headset so those things where you look at something and shoot it by you know pressing a button on the controller you kind of have to pass the eye position to the game to do that so i think what they were saying is yeah we won't pass it to the the site using with the web browser but of course if you make a vr game

03:05:57 John: they have to pass the eye position onto the game because that's half of how you control one of the most amazing things about controlling games in vr is they can track your eye position so they didn't make that clear in the keynote but i will be shocked if you can't make a game for this thing that tracks your eye movement because that's because duh but uh yeah i guess i guess we'll find out what apple's dedication to gaming really is if they say nope even if you're a game you can't have eye position they're really truly closing the door on this thing as a gaming device

03:06:22 Marco: I think the mechanic will probably be – I bet there will be a mode for that that you just have to pass a privacy prompt to approve.

03:06:29 Marco: If you look at – I think one of the things they breezed over in the State of the Union was that when you're viewing – for apps that are reading AR positioning information to figure out where to put their volumes and stuff like that, they're not getting a camera feed of your room.

03:06:44 Marco: Because presumably that would require some kind of camera permission.

03:06:47 Marco: So even though the headset is constantly capturing the video of the room around you to show you in your eyepieces, the apps are not going to get visual data.

03:06:57 Marco: So they're not going to see that you're not wearing pants.

03:07:00 Marco: They're going to see there's just like some leg-shaped logs there.

03:07:04 John: Well, it depends on how detailed the depth data may be detailed to show something.

03:07:08 Marco: Yeah, maybe that's a bad example.

03:07:09 Marco: But they're not going to see like, oh, you have blue walls in this room.

03:07:13 Marco: They're going to see there's a wall there.

03:07:15 Marco: They get like geometry of the room, but not images of the room.

03:07:19 John: Speaking of the geometry, by the way, they really focus on that in the spatial audio.

03:07:23 John: Did you see that bit where they're like,

03:07:25 John: We'll do spatial audio based on where your coffee table is and stuff.

03:07:27 John: And it made me think the same thing I always think when I see this stuff.

03:07:30 John: It's like there is a there is a application of that that is ideal.

03:07:33 John: And I think it's kind of like when you're doing like the virtual FaceTime with somebody or something.

03:07:37 John: You want them to feel like they're in front of you.

03:07:39 John: And when they talk, their sound bounces off your coffee table.

03:07:42 John: And it will give that convincing illusion that they're not just a disembodied floating head in your field of vision, but they're actually a real floating head in your living room.

03:07:49 John: And when they talk, it bounces off your ceiling and your walls.

03:07:51 John: And that's how it should work.

03:07:53 John: But I continue to say that when I watch a movie, I don't actually want the sound to bounce off my coffee table.

03:07:59 John: I want it to be perfect as it was mastered by the person who made this movie.

03:08:03 John: Put it right into my ears.

03:08:04 John: Don't bounce it around my room.

03:08:05 John: I spend all this time trying to get an arrangement of speakers and everything to eliminate bouncing around room effects.

03:08:14 John: It's great technology.

03:08:15 John: It has its place.

03:08:16 John: Another example is if I'm playing a game again, if I'm playing a game, I want to hear where the enemy is in the game.

03:08:21 John: My coffee table is not in the game.

03:08:23 John: Don't bounce sound off of it.

03:08:24 John: Right.

03:08:24 John: But what they seem to want to make it sound like is imagine if you had a TV floating in front of your coffee table.

03:08:29 John: If the sound was coming out of that TV, it would hit your coffee table and bounce two years.

03:08:33 John: Isn't that what you want?

03:08:33 John: And I would say, no, it's not what I want.

03:08:35 John: I know, you know, this is different between me and and the imagined audience of spatial audio.

03:08:41 John: I

03:08:41 John: I don't want the sound to sound like it's coming from my iPad when I'm watching TV on my iPad.

03:08:45 John: I want it to sound like it's coming out of the headphones that are in my ear.

03:08:48 John: So I'm glad I can turn it off.

03:08:49 John: But they have the technology and it's using the same thing, that depth picture of where you are, which presumably is sophisticated because they have LiDAR on this thing.

03:08:57 John: And I think they have IR sprayer things and everything.

03:08:59 John: So it's got an idea of the shape of your room and applications will be able to sense that, but they don't get to see the video of it.

03:09:07 John: And they just, you know, one of the uses of it is to figure out how to bounce sound around it.

03:09:11 Casey: Marco, are you going to make the bouncing around the room joke, or do I have to?

03:09:14 Marco: Feel free.

03:09:16 Casey: No, I just keep coming back to what Marco said a few minutes ago.

03:09:22 Casey: And when I got to the one more thing in the keynote, I think we all kind of knew what to expect, but I don't think I received what I expected.

03:09:32 Casey: And I think it's actually far better.

03:09:35 Casey: And I keep thinking to myself...

03:09:38 Casey: That right now I'm really, if you can't tell, hung up on the social like about all of this.

03:09:44 Casey: But leaving that aside for a moment, you know, I really enjoy going places to work, you know, once or twice a week.

03:09:52 Casey: I enjoy going to my beloved, don't call it a park bench picnic table.

03:09:54 John: I didn't think about this.

03:09:55 John: You do leave your house to work a lot, don't you?

03:09:57 Casey: I do like going to the library.

03:10:00 Casey: And if I just do not care about what other people think of me, which I wish was true in so many parts of my life.

03:10:07 Casey: But anyway, if I just don't care about what other people think of me and I'm willing to strap this thing to my face, I could see this being an incredibly cool way to get work done somewhere else.

03:10:17 Casey: But then I got thinking to myself, well, what work could I really do on this thing as a standalone device?

03:10:26 Yeah.

03:10:26 Casey: And what I feel like, having not used it and knowing almost nothing about it, my knowledge being only a few hours old, it feels like if you're the kind of person that can legitimately get work done on your iPad today...

03:10:42 Casey: I feel like you should be able to do the same here.

03:10:45 Casey: Now, maybe you might want a physical keyboard because maybe you don't want to mash on a virtual keyboard or you don't want to use dictation or what have you.

03:10:51 Casey: But just in terms of the apps that are available, the way the device works, it appears to me like if you can do honest-to-goodness work on your iPad,

03:11:01 Casey: you can probably do honest-to-goodness work with the Vision Pro.

03:11:04 Casey: And that's appealing, but I don't think that's me most of the time.

03:11:10 Casey: Because my work, most of the time, really has to be done on a traditional computer.

03:11:15 Casey: And I do think it would be nice to have a very large 4K display wherever I am.

03:11:23 Casey: I think that would be pretty neat.

03:11:24 Casey: So even if I have to bring my computer, it would be neat to have the big display in potentially even... You can have more than one and turn your head to look at each one.

03:11:31 Casey: Well, I don't know if I can... I don't think you can have more than one computer display.

03:11:34 Casey: Oh, that's right.

03:11:35 Marco: They just said one for the Mac.

03:11:36 Marco: Yeah, at least for version one, it was just one display.

03:11:39 Casey: But that doesn't mean... And remember, I'm a big spaces person, and this is kind of like spaces on steroids.

03:11:44 Casey: And so maybe what I could do is I could have Xcode full screen or what have you on the virtual 4K screen, but I could have messages as running natively on...

03:11:56 Casey: the Vision Pro adjacent to that.

03:11:58 Casey: And I can have Slack adjacent to that.

03:12:00 Casey: You know what I mean?

03:12:01 Casey: And I can have Safari.

03:12:02 Casey: All the other things running natively on the Vision Pro strewn about this virtual workspace.

03:12:09 Casey: And that would be pretty freaking cool.

03:12:12 Casey: And speaking of Xcode and things like that, they do seem to be taking very seriously the simulator.

03:12:18 Casey: They seem to be making it as reasonable as they can, given that the technology on a traditional computer is so different.

03:12:24 Casey: But one thing they showed in the State of the Union,

03:12:26 Casey: was what if you wanted to develop a Vision Pro XROS app, and they did make mention of XROS, or at least it was visually shown in the Xcode screenshots.

03:12:38 Marco: Yeah, it was like in somebody's toolbar, right?

03:12:40 Casey: Yeah, which I thought was funny.

03:12:41 Casey: But nevertheless, what if you wanted to write an app for this thing?

03:12:45 Casey: Well, what you could do is you could have your virtual monitor for your computer, and they showed it off to the right,

03:12:52 Casey: And then you can have your app off to the left.

03:12:55 Casey: And yes, of course you can do that.

03:12:58 Casey: But seeing that, my mind just freaking exploded.

03:13:02 Casey: Like how amazingly cool is that?

03:13:06 Casey: And that is a future that I think is very, very interesting.

03:13:10 Casey: I think Marco's right that I think

03:13:12 Casey: The killer app for this, I'm not so sure that it's 3D specifically, but I think it's just the consumption of media, just like the iPad.

03:13:20 Casey: The killer app for the iPad is being able to consume things wherever you want.

03:13:24 Casey: And I think the killer app for this might be, you know, having a full surround sound setup, asterisk, with a humongous screen of high fidelity, you know, dagger.

03:13:33 Casey: But, you know, what appears to be those things, and you can have it anywhere.

03:13:38 Casey: Yeah.

03:13:39 Casey: And then what could really make it interesting is if you can get work done on it.

03:13:43 Casey: And again, I think if you can get work done on an iPad, and that's not me, but it may be you.

03:13:47 Casey: If you can get work done on an iPad, I bet you could get work done on this.

03:13:50 Casey: And if you had 17 iPads in like a grandma's boy style array in front of you, I bet you could probably get more work done, you know?

03:13:58 Casey: And so that makes this very interesting to me.

03:14:02 Casey: I, as an engineer, and I think we should talk about price here, as an engineer, I totally understand how we landed.

03:14:08 Casey: It starts at $3,500.

03:14:10 Casey: Makes perfect sense.

03:14:11 Casey: Absolutely reasonable.

03:14:13 Casey: As a consumer, you know, I feel like I need to paste in the Goodfellas gif with what's-his-nuts-laughy, or everyone laughing at the restaurant.

03:14:21 Casey: You know the gif I'm thinking of.

03:14:23 Casey: Like, that is just...

03:14:25 Casey: an asinine amount of money that being said i'm really thinking about it because this thing looks so freaking cool and we're presumably going to learn a lot more about it over the next six months we're presumably going to see people demoing even in 2d space we're going to see them demoing apps for it and you know recording videos of you know the xcode simulator and the the vision pro simulator and so on and so forth

03:14:48 Casey: I honestly don't know what I'll do because $3,500 is a lot of money to say, oh, why not?

03:14:54 Casey: But it does seem very interesting.

03:14:58 Casey: And although I haven't had time to read posts about people's firsthand experience, I see that...

03:15:05 Casey: That Chase Miller has a post up, which we'll link in the show notes.

03:15:08 Casey: Our friend Matthew Panzarino has a post up.

03:15:10 Casey: We've had some other people report into the three of us that they have tried it and it is amazing.

03:15:15 Casey: So I am really interested.

03:15:17 Casey: I don't know if I'm going to do it.

03:15:19 Casey: I'm not, I don't know if I'm going to spend $3,500 on this.

03:15:22 Marco: but you will i'm i'm i'm not i'm definitely not shutting the door on it you're you're a dad and you're sentimental about your kids you're going to want to capture trust me that's going to be that's what's going to drive so many early sales of this is computer dads with money who want to capture their kids maybe that's the excuse they'll use anyway yes but still like that's that is going to be a massive excuse for people to get this thing and that's going to be a huge killer app i guarantee it

03:15:47 John: I have a question about the hardware, though, that I don't think I've seen answers yet.

03:15:51 John: So we mentioned the battery life.

03:15:52 John: We made a joke about it.

03:15:54 John: Up to two hours with the external battery pack connected.

03:15:58 John: And unlimited time if it's plugged in.

03:15:59 John: Yeah, we know it's unlimited until the power goes out.

03:16:02 John: Anyway, two things on that.

03:16:04 John: One, that battery pack doesn't look too big.

03:16:07 John: Couldn't they have doubled the size and given it four hours?

03:16:09 Marco: I mean, it's not on the headset.

03:16:11 Marco: It might pull your pants down.

03:16:12 Marco: It's not very big, but it's probably very dense.

03:16:15 John: yeah it's hard to tell what would the deal with that and the second my second question is though it seemed like it was connected with a kind of a mag safety type of thing but if that gets disconnected the thing shuts off right like there's no battery in the headset i actually asked about that because i was saying like you know is there some kind of like you know temporary you know hot swap time you could you know you could swap it on and the answer is no it shuts down like when you it shuts down

03:16:39 John: So that seems a little weird.

03:16:40 John: Like, it makes sense.

03:16:41 John: I mean, again, you want the batteries out of the heads that you don't want it to be heavy.

03:16:43 John: That's the whole reason they have a thing.

03:16:44 John: Like, that's – I totally – that design decision makes sense.

03:16:46 John: But then the decision to also make it kind of MagSafe-y, I mean, that also makes sense is you don't want the cord to snag on something.

03:16:53 John: But also, it's like yanking the power cable out from your desktop Mac.

03:16:58 John: It's kind of – I mean, all right.

03:17:00 John: I just really give that file system a workout, I guess.

03:17:04 John: Just –

03:17:05 John: Yeah, it might have been in the middle of doing something, but whoops, the cat pulled the cord out and that's the end of what you're doing right now.

03:17:11 John: And of course, I'm pretty, well, I don't know.

03:17:13 John: We'll find out.

03:17:14 John: Like it has to default total blackness, right?

03:17:16 John: Like that's if they, if the cord comes off, all you see is black, right?

03:17:22 John: It's like a blocking light.

03:17:25 John: And there's no other even small onboard battery to light up the... Anyway, we'll try it.

03:17:31 John: But this definitely seems like a kind of... You won't get this reference, but, you know, Neon Genesis Evangelion type of thing.

03:17:36 John: They have these giant mechs in them that in the beginning they are connected to a tether.

03:17:42 John: And then as soon as you disconnect them to the tether, a timer starts going down.

03:17:45 John: When that timer goes down, they're out of power.

03:17:47 John: And the timer is like three and a half minutes long.

03:17:48 John: So it's kind of like a ticking clock for the battle as the battery drains.

03:17:52 John: Same thing with this, only the second that a cable gets disconnected, it's game over, and you're in total darkness.

03:17:57 Marco: Yeah, I was assuming and kind of hoping that there would be some kind of little grace period to swap the battery, but who knows?

03:18:04 Marco: I mean, when you think about the amount of power this is, look at the processor.

03:18:09 Marco: It's running the full-blown M2, a whole separate processor called the R1.

03:18:13 Marco: I don't think we know yet how big or power-hungry of a processor that is, but it's probably not small.

03:18:18 John: The rumors were it's like a second M2, basically.

03:18:20 Marco: Yeah, exactly.

03:18:21 Marco: So if you think about it, it's powered via what appears to be modified USB power delivery.

03:18:27 Marco: So it's probably going to have a roughly 100-watt max.

03:18:31 Marco: I'm guessing this is probably somewhere near a 100-watt device in terms of power draw.

03:18:36 Marco: That sounds high to me.

03:18:37 Marco: I'll be shocked if it's that high, but we'll see.

03:18:40 Marco: Maybe it's, quote, only 50 watts.

03:18:43 Marco: That's still a lot of power to be battery-powered continuously.

03:18:46 Marco: So I'm guessing this is probably like...

03:18:50 Marco: They just can't make it be that long powered by whatever, I don't know, a giant capacitor or whatever it would be.

03:18:58 Marco: They probably can't make it.

03:19:00 John: One of the things that headset makers have done to put battery on it to not be too heavy or crappy is they stick it on the back of your head.

03:19:10 John: Where that big giant thing is, you can imagine Apple could have put a smaller...

03:19:15 John: five minute battery pack strap there because it balances out the weight of the headset on the front and it gives you enough power like you said like the grace period right or something to turn on transparency on the headset to put up an image that says the cable has been disconnected you know and to pause everything but they didn't do that it would have added cost it would have added complexity it would have added danger because you don't want any batteries that can catch fire next to people's heads although having them in their pocket isn't great either um

03:19:40 John: So, yeah, this is definitely kind of a version one.

03:19:42 John: It's got that prototype-y kind of feel.

03:19:45 John: But, yeah, not having a battery at all in it is – I mean, again, it would have – because you didn't have to run the wires and everything.

03:19:52 John: It would be interesting to see if they revisit that because you don't need that big of a battery to give you a little grace period and to give you a little transparency or whatever.

03:19:58 John: Although that's another thing I feel like Apple –

03:20:01 John: was pretty careful not to show too much of, which is people running around with this thing, right?

03:20:07 John: I mean, it's not like everyone was always sitting down.

03:20:09 John: The dad was by, like, the island in the kitchen or whatever, and presumably he's walking around the house.

03:20:14 John: But not even... No games where you're running around or, you know, like...

03:20:20 John: there's lots of because it is self-contained like you're not tethered to a pc so you could in theory move around with some transparency on so you can avoid your furniture but they were not really into showing that again most of the things they were showing was someone sitting at a desk or on a couch and then one guy standing at a counter so that's that's how apple is thinking of this right now and i think the uh

03:20:39 John: The battery, the tethered battery, I mean, they kept showing it in people's pocket, but if you're sitting down, would you put it on the desk, right?

03:20:46 John: And in that case, will they sell a bigger battery pack, or would you just plug it in when you're at your desk?

03:20:51 John: Those use cases are a little bit confusing.

03:20:53 Marco: Yeah, and the battery has a USB hole on it, so I'm guessing you can just do pass-through charging or continuous power that way.

03:21:00 Casey: Well, but they also, in the State of the Union, they also showed, and I tried posting this to Macedon, but it kept failing, and I don't know, maybe it's user error, but they showed...

03:21:07 Casey: um what looked to be a dongle so there's like uh coming off of the spot where the thing plugs in there's something that looks like a dongle and then what looks like a usb port on it i don't know it was very unusual and i definitely caught a screen capture of it and i'll put a link in the show notes of what i captured but and i just put it in the chat room there's definitely something going on there not not a bad way just you know there's some sort of dongle looking thing happening

03:21:37 John: Well, you're not going to watch a movie as long as it's less than two hours, I guess, on the plane.

03:21:41 Marco: Well, I think, you know, on the plane, I think you'd probably like, you know, plug into power or something.

03:21:45 Marco: You know, I don't know.

03:21:46 Marco: I mean, it's also worth pointing out to like, you know, people in the chat are speculating maybe, you know, maybe they're hitting the FAA, you know, 100 watt hour limit with the battery.

03:21:54 Marco: I don't think it's that big.

03:21:55 Marco: They had the battery.

03:21:57 Marco: They had it out in the hands-off area where you could walk around Steve Jobs Theater and look at it, but you couldn't touch it.

03:22:04 Marco: They had the batteries lying right there next to them, which is great.

03:22:06 Marco: I'm actually very happy that they didn't just pretend these things have no wires.

03:22:10 Marco: In their cool, fancy demo of having these things, look, take a picture, they had the batteries right there connected to them resting on the table, so that's nice.

03:22:17 Marco: But...

03:22:18 Marco: First of all, 100 watt hour battery is heavy, especially for a pocket.

03:22:22 Marco: So I don't think they would do quite that high just for pocket weight reasons.

03:22:27 Marco: But I would say, you know, just eyeballing it size wise, it looks kind of like a 20,000 milliamp hour battery pack.

03:22:34 John: Plus, you can have multiples.

03:22:35 John: Even if it was 100, you could just get more than one of those batteries in the plane.

03:22:40 John: I guess your movie would be the whole OS shuts down because you yank the power cord, but it would remember your playback position probably.

03:22:46 John: Maybe.

03:22:46 Marco: If somebody does the math, whatever a 20,000 milliamp hour battery would power for two hours, that's probably the rough power draw of this thing.

03:22:53 Marco: I don't know what that is.

03:22:54 Marco: Maybe 30 or 40, 50 watts, something like that.

03:22:56 John: up to two hours which may when they say up to it makes me think like you think you would think video playback would be a low stress application like if there's you know just one thing the decode is done in hardware it's projecting it on a single rectangle in front of you no but there's a you know but that's what i was talking about earlier it's like you know the the baseline level of computation required to just show a still screen in this thing like to also show your entire surroundings to be scanning your eyes but there's so much going on

03:23:22 John: It's not like playing a 3D game or even like, you know, crunching numbers in some sort of, you know.

03:23:28 Casey: Everything is a 3D game.

03:23:29 Casey: The whole damn thing is a 3D game.

03:23:31 John: I know, but like it doesn't have a lot of polygons.

03:23:33 John: The desktop is a 3D game.

03:23:34 John: There's not a lot of polygons and shaders in that scene with a single rectangle in front of you is what I'm saying.

03:23:38 John: You know what I mean?

03:23:39 John: As opposed to, you know, playing an actual 3D game with, you know, millions of polygons you're running through a forest or whatever.

03:23:45 John: And even stuff like, oh, I want to run, I have an iPad app for stable diffusion.

03:23:50 John: and i want to run part of it on device it's the stable diffusion that runs on device up to three hours so you have whatever the lightest weight application of this you can think of and i suppose i think maybe video playback is the lightest weight because probably web browsing is more you know right that's where you get up to two hours right so

03:24:09 John: replaceable battery and again that's why the good the battery pack is replaceable battery packs is great third pottery battery packs based on that picture that you posted casey it seems like they would be possible in which case just open the floodgates to gigantic usb batteries and we probably all have a bunch of them already right maybe a backpack you have a whole battery backpack it weighs like 30 pounds because i'm saying like if it gets up to two hours out of this little thing

03:24:30 John: yeah like i might you know my wife has a monstrous battery pack that she uses for pokemon go they will power her phone for days that would probably give you 20 hours of video playback on this thing so third party opportunity but again makes makes me wonder why they gave such a small battery pack for this because they know the battery life is terrible i guess they wanted it to fit in everybody's pocket assuming people have pockets on their clothes which is not universally true but maybe maybe apple's going to change that you're gonna have to buy your uh your uh ar goggles pants with a pocket for the battery

03:24:59 Casey: All right.

03:25:00 Casey: We really got to wrap this up.

03:25:01 Casey: But a couple of other quick notes from the State of the Union.

03:25:03 Casey: First of all, they said that they will offer for developers to ask for Apple to run their apps on a real device and give them feedback, which I thought was interesting.

03:25:19 Casey: They also said they're going to have, I don't know if they call them labs, but like workshops or whatever in not only Cupertino, but like I think it was six other locations around the world where you can apply to go and get FaceTime with the device and try your app on the actual Vision Pro hardware, which I thought was pretty neat.

03:25:38 Casey: It's only in the U.S.

03:25:39 Casey: and sometime early next year.

03:25:41 Casey: So again, we are six months out at the earliest location.

03:25:44 Casey: Uh, but I don't know.

03:25:45 Casey: This thing looks really cool.

03:25:46 Casey: It is, it is, it is impressive.

03:25:48 Casey: I thought it was going to be a full VR thing and that just doesn't really rev my engine that much, but it seems to be very different than that.

03:25:55 Casey: And I am definitely interested to try it.

03:25:58 Casey: I think there's a pretty good chance I'm probably going to end up buying one.

03:26:01 Marco: Uh, sounds like Marco, you're definitely going to capture video of your kids.

03:26:04 Marco: I'm telling you that's, that's it.

03:26:06 John: Oh, and speaking of the AR versus full VR, they did note that a lot of the things they were showing in the 3D is good enough to fool you.

03:26:13 John: It was actually full VR, but the VR scene was of a desk, like, in a nice office.

03:26:20 John: You know what I mean?

03:26:21 John: Like, so what you were seeing, every single pixel of it was, you know, virtual.

03:26:25 John: Like, it's nothing, it's not transparency at all.

03:26:27 John: But they had a bunch of, like, they had a conference room one and a desk.

03:26:30 John: And so if you want to feel like you're in one of these scenes, probably half of these scenes were actually virtual VR.

03:26:35 John: you know, Apple-style exposed brick wall, light wood furniture type of scenario.

03:26:41 John: And in that scenario, yeah, you're using a bunch of floating images as screens, but you also don't have to worry about the fact that, like, your room is a mess or your...

03:26:50 John: your office is actually much smaller than the one they're showing in this video.

03:26:53 John: And I feel like that's another advantage of, to your point of case, it's like, oh, I was thinking of VR, but when you're thinking of VR, you're like, oh, I'm in outer space or I'm in a forest or whatever.

03:27:01 John: It's like, no, you're just at a nicer desk in a bigger office.

03:27:06 LAUGHTER

03:27:06 Casey: So, John, are you feeling like you're in for one of these?

03:27:09 Casey: I know you have a Mac Pro to buy, so probably not.

03:27:11 John: I am saving a lot of money not getting that Mac Pro, let me tell you.

03:27:14 John: I definitely would like to try this.

03:27:16 John: I still am very skeptical of my ability to get any utility out of it due to motion sickness.

03:27:22 John: And also, I have a 6K screen here, and this is not going to be bigger than that.

03:27:26 John: But here's the killer app for me.

03:27:28 John: Personally, I think it could possibly be...

03:27:31 John: Doing what I do already, which is watch television on my iPad and in bed next to my wife, only with less light leakage.

03:27:38 John: And a better display, honestly.

03:27:39 John: Better display than my current non-OLED iPad that I use.

03:27:46 Marco: Yeah.

03:27:46 Marco: Also, Casey, of course you're going to get this because CallSheet is going to have to have a widget next to the thing when people watch movies.

03:27:53 Casey: Yes, I've thought about this a lot already, actually.

03:27:55 Casey: I really honestly have.

03:27:56 Casey: I've been thinking about this a lot.

03:27:57 John: I'm kind of shocked that Apple didn't show that.

03:27:59 John: It's like people have sounded like the version of Amazon X-Ray.

03:28:01 John: I don't know why everyone hasn't copied Amazon X-Ray.

03:28:03 John: please apple copy this it's like the killer feature of all streaming apps just do it better than amazon does it which people don't know when you're watching something if you tap the the play the player in an amazon video thing it shows you the names and faces of everybody who's on the screen right now and if you tap on them call sheet style say here's what they're from here's what they've been in perfect for ar yeah totally very much so

03:28:24 Casey: This was all told.

03:28:27 Casey: Now we are considering the Vision Pro headset.

03:28:31 Casey: I thought it was a very impressive WWDC.

03:28:34 Casey: I have been sad for a long time since I figured out about a week ago I wasn't going to be able to be there.

03:28:39 Casey: I am even more sad now that I'm seeing all my friends together and I'm seeing people trying the headset.

03:28:47 Casey: I'm super sad, but there's always next year.

03:28:49 Casey: But this was a really strong WWDC, a very, very strong one, and I am very impressed.

03:28:56 Casey: And I can't wait to talk more about it.

03:28:58 Casey: But, hey, if you're interested in helping us buy these ridiculous computers for dads with money or whatever Marco said earlier, ATP.fm slash join.

03:29:08 Casey: You can try it.

03:29:08 Casey: Maybe send a few dollars our way.

03:29:10 Casey: It would help us buy this thing that we don't need.

03:29:12 Marco: But we have to talk about it for our jobs.

03:29:17 Marco: Yes, exactly.

03:29:17 Marco: All right.

03:29:17 Marco: Thank you very much for listening, everybody.

03:29:20 Marco: Thanks to our sponsors, Squarespace, Collide, and Vector Bar.

03:29:24 Marco: And thank you, as Casey was just saying, to our members who support us directly.

03:29:27 Marco: You can join us at atp.fm slash join.

03:29:30 Marco: We so appreciate our members.

03:29:32 Marco: Thank you so, so much.

03:29:34 Marco: And we will talk to you next week.

03:29:37 Marco: Now the show is over.

03:29:42 Marco: They didn't even mean to begin.

03:29:44 Marco: Cause it was accidental.

03:29:46 Marco: Oh, it was accidental.

03:29:50 Marco: John didn't do any research.

03:29:52 Marco: Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.

03:29:55 Marco: Cause it was accidental.

03:29:58 Marco: Oh, it was accidental.

03:30:01 John: And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.

03:30:06 Marco: And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.

03:30:15 Marco: So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C, USA Syracuse.

03:30:27 Marco: It's accidental.

03:30:29 Marco: Accidental.

03:30:31 Casey: They didn't mean to.

03:30:32 Casey: So you want to hear about the food?

03:30:41 Casey: I do, actually.

03:30:43 Casey: Yes.

03:30:43 Casey: Yes, I do.

03:30:44 Casey: But briefly.

03:30:45 Marco: Yes, very briefly.

03:30:47 Marco: There's not that much to say.

03:30:48 Marco: So I had the press badges here.

03:30:51 Marco: The press had a little terrace overlooking Cafe Max where they have little snacks before it starts.

03:30:59 Casey: So you're literally above the heathens below you.

03:31:01 Casey: Yes.

03:31:02 Marco: wow wow it's not that bad but i mean technically you are correct um anyway um and it's it is very much like a super fancified version of box lunch kind of things almost but like way better so and

03:31:21 Marco: They had set up like kind of this giant like, you know, cold bar of just little kind of like little like, you know, appetizer size or like not even appetizer, like almost like, you know, cocktail party walk around kind of, you know, hors d'oeuvres.

03:31:34 Marco: That size little cups of, you know, bean salad or like little tiny slider made of mushroom or like little tiny turkey sandwich cubes like that kind of stuff.

03:31:45 Marco: And it's all really good.

03:31:47 Marco: And they even had a chia pudding, fancy stuff.

03:31:51 Marco: It's exactly what you'd expect from Apple's high production value for this thing.

03:31:56 Marco: I thought it was funny, speaking of production values too, last year they had the issue where it was kind of sunnier.

03:32:03 Marco: than expected last year, and a lot of people got sunburned because most of the developer seating was not shaded.

03:32:09 Marco: Press was kind of under the Apple canopy of the ring building, so press mostly was in the shade.

03:32:14 Marco: Most developers last year were in direct sun.

03:32:17 Marco: Now, Apple thought of this.

03:32:18 Marco: They gave you, in the little swag bags they give everybody, they gave you a little bottle of sunscreen last year, and it was good sunscreen, too.

03:32:25 Marco: So this year, they decided, rather than just give everybody sunscreen again...

03:32:29 Marco: We're going to build this entire, what might be a temporary, like, structure where it was in the same location last year, like, starting from within Café Max, going out through those giant open doors, you know, into, like, the field next to the building.

03:32:43 Marco: Same location, but this time they built this tremendous, they basically built a concert venue that, knowing Apple, I wouldn't be surprised if it's gone by tomorrow.

03:32:52 Yeah.

03:32:53 Marco: Like, if it's just, like, somehow they will throw enough money at this problem that not only will it be totally gone, but the grass will be, like, in perfect condition as if it was never even there.

03:33:02 Marco: Like, I'm sure that's what's going on tonight as we sleep.

03:33:05 Marco: But anyway, yeah, the food, their food is really good.

03:33:10 Marco: And then, like, in the visitor center, they had, like, all these, like, juices and everything.

03:33:14 Marco: And then afterwards, I went over to the visitor center to hang out and, like, download the betas and buy some t-shirts and stuff like that.

03:33:19 Marco: And that's where I watched the State of the Union.

03:33:22 Marco: And they were just giving out free coffees and even more of those kind of little hors d'oeuvre-sized sandwiches and bean bowls and stuff like that.

03:33:31 Marco: Cookies, bags of chips.

03:33:33 Marco: It was delightful.

03:33:34 Marco: So this is way, way better than conference food.

03:33:38 Marco: And yeah, just...

03:33:40 Marco: Standard Apple Visitor Center fare, but that's a very high bar relative to anything else you'd get at a conference.

03:33:48 Marco: Thumbs up on the food.

03:33:49 Marco: Even the coffee was pretty good.

03:33:51 Marco: For me, that's quite a statement.

03:33:54 Marco: I'm overall very impressed by Apple's food and drink options at the conference.

03:33:59 John: I can't wait to try it next year, Apple.