538: We Studied Thousands of Heads

40:23Oh, no, I don't want that. I know. You're such an anti-laptopist. Yeah, I am. But yeah, I'm very interested in that. But I'm glad that they bumped the Mac Studio, right? 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? The whole M1 line, 10 out of 10. Excellent. The M2 is like an 8.5 out of 10 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 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 yeah i know but it you know i it could have more panache especially at the prices because the mac studio is not cheap like you configure i configured a reasonable mac studio and it was you know oh 6800 like that's i mean yeah that's that's the mac pro like that's that's really for most people that is the mac pro i know but for 6800 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 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 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.

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44:50it's contacts only to prevent the um you know the problems that could result from that 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 says hey so and so has an updated picture do you want to use it and you constantly have to dismiss it and carefully not pick it because you like your picture better right yep is this the same as that or is this something different like does this just like shove it at people but it doesn't it doesn't offer to add it to their contacts like i like the idea of a bigger you know uh picture that uh that you for 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 i feel like there's still this tension that wasn't really addressed in the explanation of this feature between um do i get to pick the picture that i want for the person does the person get the picture that they want for themselves and to give an example uh my daughter uses a comically mangled photo of me as the contact picture for me instead of the picture that I would prefer.

45:48And I think she would be mad if I overrode that with something I pushed her. Yeah, as far as I know, I haven't tried, I don't have the beta installed in my, it's been a day. But 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. But I would, yeah, 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 um yeah but and i would assume it's somebody who has to be in your contacts already or who you've responded to this you know the way the current system works is you get a random text from somebody nothing happens if you respond then it will tell you hey do you want to use this person's updated photo and name you know so it's probably something like that for new contacts but i think for existing contacts again and I haven't tried it yet.

46:37We'll know all this next week. But for existing contacts, there's probably some kind of approval and decline available process there. Yeah, I'm not sure. Messages is getting some love. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm skipping ahead. Live voicemail is exciting, although I would assume that's going to require carrier support, I would guess. No, it's just doing a transcription. Yeah, it seems like it actually has replaced carrier voicemail. The way this works mechanically, it looks like your phone is answering every call, even if you if you send it to voicemail it seems like your phone is actually really answering it which i think is interesting i i worry a little bit about will people or like telemarketers be able to tell the difference between this kind of thing picking up and and a carrier thing picking up you know i i worry a little bit about that but it sure seems like it is it is taking on that whole responsibility directly on the phone i like the example of you're in a meeting and you get a call but you don't want to pick it up but you're also gonna 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 not only you're now looking to see who called you're also staring at your phone to watch the transcription slowly appear so you're paying even less attention to the meeting so maybe not the best example but uh you know perhaps a useful feature all right then we got uh facetime which now has voicemail as well facemail facemail kim beveritt came up for messages which has uh search filters it has i 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.

48:11So this is basically a jump to unread thing, which I am so excited about. That'll be very, very cool. Audio messages are transcribed for the six people in the world that use them. You can do location stuff in line. If you are a complete worrywart, like, hello, me, it's me, I'm the problem, it's me, check-in is a thing now. 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 uh which i am pretty excited about wait doesn't doesn't this additionally sherlock like through the grave your old app uh yes what was the one with the feet what was it called i forgot oh fast text no i was i thought you were thinking of something else.

49:02Yeah, doesn't it look additionally Sherlock Fast Text? Oh, Fast Text has been Sherlocked eight ways to Sunday. I mean, it's long. Yeah, this just dug up its grave and then reburied it deeper. Yeah, pretty much, pretty much. 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 of years now, where it lets you see somebody going down the road. nevertheless they also redid the messages ui a little bit 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 in what order etc etc hallelujah on that we've talked about that for so many years and it's like oh because when ever since they hid the attach photo and under a second tap 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 just 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 and coming, but it will have an outsized effect on my life.

50:26So 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. Yeah, this is all like, you know, nice little everyday nicety features. I'm so happy they're doing this stuff. Yeah, again, sure, it would have been great if they did it years ago, but they're doing it now. And like any kind of little improvement to messages, that has such a massive impact on the world. Like, you know, Messages is so big, it is probably the most used app on the iPhone globally, period. And so, you know, this has sucked, like any little thing they do.

50:59Obviously, that's probably one of the reasons why they're fairly conservative with its feature set, because the impact is quite large and, you know, you don't want to get anything wrong. But I'm so happy they're doing stuff like this. Little good quality of life features. Yeah, I completely agree with you. 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. I live in messages. It is far and away that, I mean, I have to look at the stats, but I've got to assume it is far and away my most used app.

51:27So all these little quality of life improvements are excellent. We got some, speaking of quality of life improvements, we got some airdrop updates. You can do name drop, which I don't know. Some people are snarking on the name. I love that name. I think it's hilarious. But you can name drop via NFC, where you just basically bump your two iPhones together. Please don't bump them. this 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 please do not do not bang the back of your phone against the top front screen just everyone has cases it'll be fine doesn't this doesn't this sherlock an actual startup that was named bump wasn't that actually a thing something like that yeah yeah but they kept showing one over the top of another so it was like just i really hope i really hope this this happens with just proximity and not overlapping and clacking together but but was interesting like that was that was part of a larger airdrop update too where airdrop um now it's kind of it's more automatic when you just bring phones near each other i wonder how that will work with max and you know non-phone devices um because i frequently will airdrop something between a phone and a mac or you know and usually phone to mac and um and so i hope and sometimes it's me sometimes it's tiff you know so i hope that is better because right now it it is it's a very slow process to airdrop something from your phone to your still faster than file sharing in the finder that's true that's not difficult but yeah it's a very slow process i'm hoping that's that with this they've probably done some degree of rewriting here to enable all this cool cool stuff so i do wonder if people are going to be taking their phones like pressing it again up against their screen it's like i'm sorry there's nothing in that screen that's going to know the phone is near it like this especially if you have a desktop you got to hold it near the mac studio or something or if you have a laptop indicate and like your little holster you got to take the phone and rub it against your laptop or something yeah um and also now air airdrop uh now can continue the transfer over the internet if the phone leaves the range during the transfer which is that's pretty cool yeah that is incredible yeah now it's limited only to people who are signed into iCloud on their phones so both the sender and the recipient need to be signed into iCloud.

53:35But yeah, you can start your airdrop transfer via NFC and then you can do the negotiation via NFC and then you can 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. Not just NFC, like airdrop does the peer-to-peer Wi-Fi thing. Yes, it uses that to transfer, but I believe it uses ultra-wideband to detect that super tight proximity. And so actually, a good thing to check is like, what models of phone does this work on? Because, you know, if it's, whatever they added, the ultra wide band, I think it was like somewhere around like the iPhone 12 or 13, like somewhere around there-ish.

54:16You know, so if phones older than that can't do it, then we know it's using, you know, the U1 chip or whatever. All right, we got some keyboard and dictation stuff. Allegedly, they've really, really honest, I promise, seriously, you guys, I swear, it's fixed this time. Autocorrect, it's gonna work this time. I swear. I promise. 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. It was so good. I lost it. Oh my gosh. The best thing was, he said, you have to teach Apple what the curse words are.

54:58It says, when you want to type the ducking word, You type it and then the keyboard will learn it too. So we get to, you know, corrupt our phones basically with the words that Apple, Apple walks in and pretends they don't know. I wish I didn't remember all the same pitches I heard about the previous version of autocorrect. Oh, we've improved it so much and it's great and it will learn and blah, blah, blah. And that was not the case. 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. I loved everything they said. I'm like, yes, please make it better.

55:31or you're acknowledging that it's bad by telling us that you've improved it. I don't know if they're trying to say if it's all new or not. I hope it's all new because the existing one just needs to... Well, they did say something important. So one word that you didn't hear in this entire presentation was AI. Or a large language model. Yes. Those were not mentioned. Neither was Metaverse. Those were not mentioned. That was intentional, from my understanding. But AI was never said. And there's lots of reasons for that. it's a buzzword. It means a lot of things to a lot of different people. And what people usually are referring to these days when they say AI, there's more precise language if you want to be more precise.

56:11And 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 for word prediction. So this is the kind of thing that ChatGPT is. Those large language models, those are transformer language models. And so what it sounds like is that they built in some custom transformer-based language model into iOS 17 for both autocorrect on the keyboard and for dictation. And those are probably two different models. But, you know, so they're both using transformer AI-based tech. You know, like it's that kind of tech.

56:50So that is probably a significant change from the previous ML system that was based on different older techniques that were probably not transformer-based. so this is that actually is a pretty big deal and if if it works if it has any chance of working well it's going to be with this kind of technology in in this day and age so they didn't call it ai but well i'd say i don't know because like the large language models don't do this job like have you like large language models do also all sorts of stuff but i haven't seen them perform this function like people are typing on a keyboard trying to figure out what they were saying so like i for me it's an open question are those type of models good at this specific task because it is very different than conversing asking a question looking something up like all the sorts of things that people are doing 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 then have it convey that message to siri and have it do a thing for you so i still say the jury is out on this i'm hopeful uh i did note that they said some new technologies and said some new things about how it's going to be better, 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.

58:03All right. As we keep going, we got Journal debuted, so potentially bad news for day one. This was introduced by Aditi. I didn't catch their last name. But iPhone, thank you, iPhone creates suggestions throughout the day of things you might want to journal. Now, I got super excited because they said there would be an API for this. 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. And I thought that was freaking awesome. Because then, you know, I can use day one, which I have literally thousands of entries in.

58:43and 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. You will be suggesting to Apple what they can include in journal. They will not be suggesting to anyone else. And I mean, I don't think we've seen these APIs or certainly as we are recording, we haven't seen the APIs. Perhaps they're available now. But yeah, I think that was perhaps too generous, say read on the situation, which kind of bums me out because I love day one.

59:17I, we, 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. They are a, it's a fantastic app that I put at least, you know, 10, 15 minutes of time into every single day. And I'm very thankful for it every single day. So, uh, 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, but if this is enough, then this is enough. But I do think that, based completely on my own experience, I think that journaling, to some degree, I think that's a helpful and healthy thing to do.

59:50I 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. And I think it's great that they're trying to provide an outlet or vehicle for this for more people. And I dig this in principle. I'm excited for this. moving on we've got standby which is similar to the apple watch uh when it's in i think nightstand mode they called it or something like that but basically if you put your iphone horizontally you can see a big old clock you can see a bunch of widgets uh widgets are the widgets are swipable just like on the home screen um and you can interact with them which we'll talk about a little bit more later uh but yeah this looks neat this is not filling a use that i have personally 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, 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.

1:01:00but either way i mean i i don't know that this is going to be a terribly popular thing to do but i like it i think it's a neat idea and and what's it going to hurt it's kind of bridging the gap between like our generation that had clock radios on the nightstand yeah because that's a thing that's kind of like a you know landscape oriented but kind of vertical ish thing and the current 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 that the time on the the you know what i mean i'm not sure if that hybrid approach is going to find a market or not but hey it's a useful thing to do with your phone when it's at orientation and you mentioned there's not many stands like that 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 but right now it doesn't fulfill that role because it doesn't look clock radio-ish and this does so thumbs up for old people yeah i mean i think this this is a cool feature set to add to an iphone the clock radio thing I think is the most obvious use case for it but ultimately what this really I think is much cooler of an idea for would be like a kitchen countertop thing similar to how people use voice assistant products like the Amazon Alexa line of stuff and they have various ones with screens and everything, the Google Home stuff they have one with a screen and so what's interesting is like why is this on the iPhone but But I think this is foreshadowing maybe a dedicated product in this area, which should be much better.

1:02:56And much cheaper, I would hope. Yes. The problem with an iPhone doing this is, number one, it's too small to be used in your kitchen. Number two, it's too expensive. And the ones that would be the most obvious things to do them would be the ones with always-on displays. So that limits it to even more expensive models. 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 if it's old enough to run this well they did add widgets to ipad os yeah so i think an ipad with widgets is close yeah but like you know the fact that it can that you know it i guess ipad do it you know it listens for siri but it can let you can run your widgets it's designed to be viewed at a distance like all things like that it would be a lot better as a use for a you know semi-retired ipad it would be great for that and it would also be great to have some kind of maybe good speaker built in maybe some kind of home pod with this as a screen like that could be a really nice kitchen counter kind of computer so i'm hoping that this is just the precursor to future products that are devoted to this for like you know kitchen counter use now bedside use that makes sense to be your phone because your phone's already on your bedside table.

1:04:09You're already charging it overnight, so that's really nice. One interesting little tidbit they threw in there at the end is they said that if you use a MagSafe charger, I guess MagSafe chargers have some kind of zero number in them, so it says each MagSafe charger will remember whatever view you configured for each MagSafe charger. So 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.

1:04:38Yeah, that is cool. I did not notice that. Or if they stated it during the keynote, I totally missed it. So that's cool. So yeah, we also get sharing. I think this is on one of those like quilt screens where it shows all the different features. We get sharing for Find My Items, which is pretty cool. And also pet recognition. So it'll recognize pets, your pets in photos. I'm excited by this. 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. Find out when we get the betas. 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, and they are not identified.

1:05:20And so when I ever want to search 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. And 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. We are brought to you this week by Squarespace, the all-in-one platform for building your brand and growing your business online. Stand out with a beautiful website, engage with your audience, and sell anything, your products, your content you create, even your time. You know, Squarespace, we're so thankful to have them all these many, many years they've been sponsoring us since the very, very beginning.

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1:07:38All right, iPadOS, we've got widgets on the lock screen. They are interactive, kind of. They are interactive, but very limited. It's very, very limited the way this works. And and I'm probably going to get some details wrong here, but my understanding is you vend to iOS or iPadOS that you support an activity intent, and you can, in your SwiftUI code, say, hey, by hitting this button, you are firing that intent. Does that sound right, Marco, if you looked into this at all? Does that at least sound vaguely correct? 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.

1:08:23And so basically you give the system a timeline of like here's what my widget should show between these time ranges into the future. So you can configure like if you're making weather, you have an hourly forecast. Okay, for this hour, from this time to this time, show this forecast. From this time to this time, show this forecast. And then ask me again in four hours for an update. so you can kind of tell the system 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 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 so you are not continuously running so when the rumors came up of interactive widgets we were asking on the show like well how does that work because if you tap a button or something in the widget does it have to then relaunch your process in the background And the answer appears to be yes, that they didn't change the way the process management is done, that your process is still not running when you have a widget on the screen.

1:09:21That app's process is still not running continuously. But they have added this new system where there are certain limited types of interaction like buttons and toggles that you can use from SwiftUI. and when they are triggered, you can, you know, it will request the app intent, which will wake up your app's process in the background and perform whatever act you need to perform. Some of those can be done in the extension, the widget extension. Most of them, I think, are just done in the app. And this remains, 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.

1:10:01You know, how quickly is it going to wake up my process? how quickly can I respond? What kind of interaction is really possible here? Is there throttling built in? Can I, you know, if somebody interacts with it constantly, does like over and over again, like if they tap it a whole bunch of times all in a row, can I actually respond to that? You know, if I put like a play pause button in there, which their documentation seemed to suggest as a valid use of this, you know, so if I make like a little mini player widget, like if people interact with it a lot, does it throttle? Does it do the requests like back up?

1:10:32Is it fast enough? Is it responsive enough to make that a good experience? That remains to be seen, and that might vary depending on what kind of hardware you have. If somebody, quote, forced quit your app out of the switcher, does it take longer to wake it up if they tap on your widget? You know, there's all sorts of little implementation details. If they make everything fast enough, and they have done a lot of work over the years with, like, making the loaders faster and stuff like that, like, processes can launch pretty quickly these days on iOS, especially if you're not too bloated with your app.

1:11:02but this all depends on that speed. Is it fast enough that most people wouldn't notice and it feels like a live version of your app? Or does it feel kind of like you're putting in a request and they're going to bring your order out later? We'll see what happens. I'm optimistic because, again, they have done so much work with the loader and everything to make everything faster to launch. As long as we don't have any odd limits and throttles in place, this should be pretty interesting. It's worth pointing out also this exact same system is now part of live activities as well. So live activities can also now be interactive in the same way.

1:11:39So there's a couple of minor differences, but they're minor. So this could be really cool. 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. But this is going to be probably a decent part of what my summer is spent working on. because again, now 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. So this will be some work, but it's a really cool idea. And if it works well, if it's responsive, if it's fast, if it's not weirdly throttled, this could be really great.

1:12:17Yeah, I'm also worried about the latency. And there's not a lot of good choices for Apple here if they're going to stick with this model because like interactively, uh one choice is as soon as they tap the button uh you know do the animation of the button being tapped highlight the button on the highlighted or whatever 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 and both of those choices stink because if you highlight immediately it's like oh it's great it's really responsive 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 it takes forever to launch right then you press the button and from the user's experiences i press the button it highlighted it unhighlighted nothing happened like for example with a play pause i hit it and it like either it changes into the 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 place but you still hear the music playing and now you now there's a disconnect the buttons is the play triangle uh but you still hear the music playing or you press it and literally nothing happens until you wake up the app it actually pauses the thing all bad choices right if it's fast enough no problem right and i bet it will be fast enough for well-written apps that launch quickly you know especially if it goes to the extension not the app that can presumably launch even faster but i do worry about it because there's nothing worse than an unresponsive ui and especially on things like the ipad where you've got you know the bigger ipads with more ram i do think this model is a little long in the tooth here i know they're really super cautious about everything but it's it may be it may be a little much like how much ram do we have to have how fast these socs have to be before we say you know what it's okay for something that has a widget to be running in the background uh you know i was going to destroy my battery like i'm not sure they struck the right balance but we'll see performance is not an issue it'll be fine this 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 it's going to talk to a process on your phone in some cases so not only does it have to wake up a process it's going to wake up a process on a whole other device 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 acceptable performance it's watch kid all over yeah i was exactly how watch stuff works a lot of times, and that works pretty poorly.

1:14:49But, you know, I mean, I'm guessing, for whatever it's worth, like, I'm guessing that, you know, 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 terminated. 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 it back up 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.

1:15:43I don't care, you know, because you have a screen full of widgets. So, you know, things are tight. Not as tight as they could be, but, like, anyway, I'm glad that they're moving in the right direction, which is more permissive, make more things possible, and we'll see how this goes. But I do have to think that eventually the hardware will catch up to the point where these limitations won't be quite as onerous. For what it's worth, it was pointed out by Adam the Stack in the chat that a friend of the show, James Thompson already got a PCALC widget running in the simulator. So it is seeming like you can put a bunch of buttons on there.

1:16:18It looked quick. We'll put a link in the show notes. You know, it looked reasonable. Granted, this is all simulators. It's beta 1, et cetera, et cetera. But it looked good. All right, where were we? Widgets, blah, blah, blah, health. There's now the health app on iPad. That's cool. I mean, I don't think there's too much more to say about it, but I'm here for it. Then Jenny Chen came out, talked about PDFs and Apple Pencil. apparently there's going to be much more robust pdf support which is funny because i didn't ever think it was particularly bad oh no it's bad so here's the thing with pdfs everyone loves to send you pdfs that they want you to fill out as forms but preview and apple's pdf handling it's got like a 50 success rate in my experience with can it open and fill out this pdf in a sane way and that's not great uh but the worst part is in the part that they're addressing here most people have no idea how to even do what i just described because to do what i just described you have to know that it's possible you have to know you have to download you have to know you can open in preview you have to know preview has these features this is much more in line where it's like 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 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 pdf forms are bad they should be web forms but we have to live with them so i i think apple is doing what it can i just still would like to know what is it about apple's pdf and it's probably the fact that apple's pdf handling is correct according to the spec 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 well the good news is now what's changed is not ai it's quote new machine learning models that's to identify the pdf forms and and what's cool what's also cool is that they demoed that if it identifies forms and it looks like something like you know an address field it will offer autofill which is really cool yeah no they're brute forcing it right because you can't actually make forms with pdfs that says you know this area is where they're going to fill in text and this but you can also brute force it which is just you know what machine learning i'll figure it out it's an address field 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 or some insanity so like again apple's doing what it can which is like we can't we can't control the world of people sending out pdfs that only work in acrobat for some reason but we can apply our skills and knowledge to just say, I don't care what the heck that PDF is.

1:19:01I think that's an address form autofill. I thought it was cool, though. And it's really cool, too. The stuff that they added with making PDFs a bit more of a first-class citizen inside of a note in the Notes app, that I think is really cool. The Notes app is like the master Sherlocker of Apple products. It has Sherlocked so many apps over its history, and it does a pretty good job of many of them. And in this case, now you can keep multiple PDFs in the same note. If you're doing a research project, there are so many apps that used to have to be a separate app and now Notes does pretty much the same job.

1:19:41I feel like it's still not ideal. They were showing Notes being used for that. I'm like, that's not the ideal app for that. 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. Sherlocking was like, take an innovative idea for an app 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.

1:20:12You can read email, you can browse the web, you can take notes. And that basic functionality, what is the basic functionality? What does it encompass? Continues to expand as computers get more powerful. 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 no out of the box it will do all the basic stuff so what that's doing is say do you want to make a notes app do you want to make a journaling app the bar is now you can't just make a well-designed fairly basic notes or journaling app you have to make one that is fancier that has more features that has a point of view that we don't have that you know that is more specific that is more flexible and that's you know that's tough for people but it's not sherlocking it's just saying when previously you needed an entirely new app to do this at all now with the bundles app you can do an okay job of it but like i would not want to manage all my pdfs and uh inside a notes document 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 yeah and i think that's that's like the what what notes is really amazing at is if you don't need the super pro specialized advanced features of lots of stuff like you know if you suppose you know something like evernote where you want to collect all these ideas together for this one thing you're researching like that used to require special apps like evernote or things like that and now like you can just do the like the 80 version of that in notes and then you know if you need more advanced features you can go to the more advanced apps but notes by itself can do so i mean i really i i think notes if i had to pick like you know i've criticized apple a lot in in recent years for not really being able to make great applications you know their os's are amazing their frameworks are amazing their applications have been not super all there recently but i think notes is probably the major exception that notes is i i think really kind of a sleeper like people people often don't think about it or don't think about how much value it's given them but like there is so much built into notes and overall it works really well it is one of the best syncing apps in terms of like icloud reliability although it doesn't sync in the background enough yeah exactly i gotta that's a big asterisk on that statement but when yeah when it does say like you know it syncs it doesn't lose data you know it syncs reliably once it's going but like the feature set like there's so much there's drawing there's check boxes there's like you know photo like there's embedding all sorts of now they have linking that's one of the new things the document scanner thing yes like there's so much built into notes i think notes might be the best modern apple app and there's just so much in there and now there's even more we are brought to you this week by collide and they have some big news.

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1:24:15now 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. But nonetheless, Ariel got Sherlocked. Ariel, I've been running the Ariel screensavers for forever. Well, that's not a Sherlocking because Ariel was just a re-implementation of an Apple thing. And again, that's not Sherlocking. Taking Apple TV screensavers and putting them on your Mac. Now your Mac just has Apple TV screensavers. Right.

1:24:46And now Apple put Apple TV screensavers on your Mac. So, you know, Ariel filled the gap that Apple should have filled for a long time, which is hey these are your screen savers apple why are they not on the mac now they are 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 synonym a 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 have easier time with this name than ventura i don't know oh yeah oh yeah I 100 % agree with Marco.

1:25:21100 % this is easier. 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. I had never heard of Sonoma until freshman year at college when someone on my floor was from Sonoma. So that's how sheltered I was out there. Well, I don't think that's you being sheltered. That's Californians' self-importance shining through. Because, I mean, yeah, I think. I was a big wine drinker in high school. Well, fair. um but no i think i think you know if you're going to take it as as fact that they're going to name things after california or places in california fine whatever uh sonoma i think is a pretty good choice so moving right along uh we talked about arial widgets are on the desktop now like on the desktop properly and it they dim when other apps are active i thought this was pretty neat they they tint based on the wallpaper behind them i thought that was kind of neat this is where things get a little bit weird though first of all i had heard through the grapevine this may not be true, but I'd 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.

1:26:26But did you notice what widget he was using or what widget was sitting on his desktop today? I don't know. Is that real? Is that fake? Who knows? How could you know? But he had the Lucid Air Charge widget on his desktop. And that That is a very nice and very expensive automobile, which if anyone can afford it, it's Craig. But I thought that was interesting. Nevertheless, this is what John was talking about earlier. Apparently, you don't need to install apps on your Mac in order to use widgets from your phone. You just need your phone on the same Wi-Fi network or within close proximity. And then magic.

1:26:59Surely it'll work no problem, right? When they said that, that you can access iPhone widgets on the Mac without installing the app on the Mac. and they're interactive yeah and they're interactive again hopefully it works more like anything than watch kit right but you know we'll see i mean part of the reason why watch kit 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 so hopefully that kind of thing will work better with you know things like laptops and phones which have bigger batteries and keep their Wi-Fi on more often and stuff like that, hopefully that will be better.

1:27:42And I sure it can't be worse than WatchKit, or Watch Connectivity, rather, is the framework. So hopefully it's better than Watch Connectivity. And I think it probably will be. This is so cool. iPhone widgets on the Mac. This is... For all of the trouble that Apple has keeping Mac OS relevant and updated and stable and high quality, at least they're giving it modern features. At least they're keeping macOS relevant. It isn't... It's as modern as Dashboard, which is, what, seven years old? No, but this is so much... More than seven. Dashboard, people are comparing... Dashboard, first of all, I loved certain things about Dashboard, but Dashboard sucked.

1:28:23I used Dashboard, and it just sucked, because here's the thing. First of all, the reliance on web technologies back then when it came out, it made everything very sluggish. You'd drag out the widget to plop onto the dashboard, and it would pause for a second before it showed that cool ripple vertex shader thing it did, because it was basically loading a little web browser for each one of those things. So that's problem number one. Problem number two is that those were never updated in the background. So you would hit whatever it was. Was it F11? What was the dashboard key? Hot corner. Or a hot corner, yeah.

1:28:59So you'd bring up dashboard, and everything in dashboard would be showing either blank data or stale data. and then over the following couple of seconds they would pop in with updated data because they weren't being updated in the background. So you'd load Dashboard and it was always stale and then it would pop in. I think all those things you complain about were eventually fixed. They eventually did one big web kit 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.

1:29:26The 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 but yeah this is the modern incarnation of that but 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 but why bother because you've got swift ui and this whole widget system which is great and it's great that it's the same across all platforms this is just sort of this is the uh whatever the opposite of a strategy tax is a strategy bonus 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 yeah and i think you know the reality is there there are two types of people out there there's the 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 i have my desktop's always covered in crap and when whenever i whenever i like mention that or post a screenshot i always hear from the former type of person 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.

1:30:59It's real estate you can use to get your work done. It's like people post those pictures of 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. My desk is always covered in crap, just like my desktop. That's how people live. And so the idea of putting a widget or a few widgets on my desktop, I'm not concerned about the clutter that brings. It's already cluttered. If it can bring me useful information, great. so next we we next in keynote orders gaming if you'll permit a slight change of procedure here i'd like to come back to that just try to blast through the other stuff real quick and then we can spend a few minutes on gaming um there were some video conferencing updates there's presenter overlay where you can get a fake green screen um 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 put this setup where the camera is taking the video of you and 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.

1:32:06I'm probably not doing a good job describing this, but it looked super cool. And I can imagine how this would be super useful, especially if you can do this with Zoom and all the other video conferencing apps, which my understanding is this is a system-level thing, and you can do exactly that. So I thought that looked really, really slick. But the guy's head is blocking half of a slide, though. I mean, I'm sure you could, well, I would. You could be dodging out of the way. I see this problem comically in 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 and they're always blocking the one part of the screen that they're trying to talk about.

1:32:41Then additionally, we got some talk about Safari. Again, I'm going to try to make this quick. They said often that they locked the, I think a private browser window. I think they were saying private browser window when you're not using it. I'm not entirely clear what that means. I'm assuming that means they don't show the contents. Yeah, 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. I'm sure it's probably something like that. Maybe it requires Face ID or Touch ID to unlock it.

1:33:06Who knows? Yep. They're doing more to remove trackers and things like that. Profiles for separating work browsing versus personal browsing. this is something that even when i had an actual job didn't ever bother me that much but i can totally understand if this is something that bothers you know the royal you and people use it in chrome a lot like like it's useful for like if you have kids that have a google account with their school but they also have their own personal google account dealing with those but you can deal with them both in a single profile but have having profiles in chrome is super handy so this is a catch-up feature for apple but it's uh it's a good feature i heartily endorse it yeah this i actually didn't realize that that this was implemented by anybody else because i'm not really a chrome person but this is great like because you know so often we would i would just use like a different browser for certain things 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 like you know now now this is this is much nicer 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 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.

1:34:48Now 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 an icon on Springboard on your phone. Yep, yep, yep. 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 passkeys. So quick recap. And passwords, not just passkeys. Oh, I didn't catch that. That's a good correction. Thank you. So passkeys and password. Well, we all know what a password is. Passkeys is that fancy thing where you can use biometric authentication or whatever. Again, I'm probably getting these terms wrong, but you get the gist of what I'm saying.

1:35:26But you can use biometrics in order to authenticate onto websites and things like that. And I am really into this because you don't have to worry about remembering passwords. You don't have to invent ridiculously long, complex passwords. and I'm super into this right now because 1Password 8 and 1Password is a former sponsor and I love the people at 1Password. Really, I do. 1Password 8 is really not good. Like, really, really not good. Really not good. And I think they're marching ahead with 1Password 8, come hell or high water. We don't care who we tick off in doing it. So I've been shopping around for something to replace 1Password and I am a religious user of the shared vault system where you can have a vault in one password of shared passwords that both Aaron and I can see.

1:36:12And up until literally today, I didn't really see any equivalent of that in passkeys. And now I don't know how good it's going to be. 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. And I am genuinely, no sarcasm, super excited for this. Here's a summary from Ricky on Macedon. you can share pass keys passwords and verification codes which means like the two-factor things and notes uh edits and updates seamlessly sync between group members end-to-end encrypted share with family friends or other close contacts so it's like it's the full thing it's like you know you know iCloud keychain where you put your stuff well now some of that stuff can be shared excellent love it yeah although there's there's still no like passwords app like it's still the as far as i can tell right it's still like kind of buried in either settings or in safari or like As far as I know, we'll have to check the iOS 17-bit is.

1:37:06I do wish they would just make an app for all this stuff, give us a little more features that are like 1Password in terms of just the editing interface and stuff like that. Just because they have all the pieces. They have this amazing system. If the app situation was a little bit nicer and better, I would definitely switch and I would drop 1Password. 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. 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, but I wish they would do that because this is screaming out for it.

1:37:47And I think that would ultimately, not only would that make our lives better as the nerds who use these kinds of things already, but I think that would actually help more people use this. Their goal, 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. That's a great goal. They should be doing that, and they largely succeed. 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. 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.

1:38:26I mean, you're supposed to use it at the point of you're not supposed to go digging for it. Like it's supposed to be right there in Safari and auto filling and everything like that. But when you do go and edit it, the interface for doing so is bare bones, right? It's not, there's not a lot of fancy stuff in it. So if it was a separate app, presumably you'd have a bigger team to do that UI and not, you know, because 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. That's the majority of what this team probably does.

1:38:55And then, oh, by the way, you need to have a UI so you can actually look at this stuff. that's 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 but in general i don't think you're supposed to be going to the app in the ideal case but sometimes you do need to go there and when you do the app is just kind of like well first of all it's not an app it's buried in settings the second it's just you know it's there the stuff's there it's fine well and i feel like you know if they had an app they could you know it kind of pushes them more in the direction of adopting to the reality of the world.

1:39:28In 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. So for instance, Chrome on the Mac, kind of a big thing. I know Safari's better. I agree. I use Safari myself, but many people use Chrome on the Mac. And this has, 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. Right, but like Apple, doesn't Apple make an extension for Chrome for Windows to do this, but not Chrome for Mac?

1:40:07Like 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. Those are good apps to an extent. But for those of us who are like mostly Apple-based in our ecosystem, Apple's solution is largely better in a lot of ways. And I wish I could kind of go all in on it, but there's still these little areas that keep me on 1Password. Anyway, maybe it's selfish. I don't know. 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.

1:40:51Yeah, I agree with what you're saying. I think for now, I would also stick with 1Password, 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. But anyway, if I'm forced to 8 and if 8 is still a pile of garbage, then this gives me options, right? 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. Who knows? 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.

1:41:28So anyways, this gives me hope that there will be a workable alternative, which I am super into. All right. We have been recording for something to the order of an hour and a half, hour 45 minutes. 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. So use your time wisely, sir. Go. Seems like you wasted a lot of time with that preamble. I could have just done it quickly. Oh, it's like that. I see. 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, we talked about Hideo Kojima being rumored to have been seen around Apple.

1:42:04Well, here he is. He's talking about stuff and he's talking about games on the Mac. 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 is anybody excited by that oh and he says he's excited to bring his future games to the mac presumably four years after everybody has already played them like the game technologies apple has on the mac platform are probably better than they've ever been before the problem is one the hardware they sell doesn't have enough gpu power for the amount of money that you spend on it two there is no high end as we just discussed for gaming at all and three nobody makes games for it uh and they're not really doing anything to you know solve that chicken and egg problem they're not making better hardware and paying people to make better software they don't have killer app software that's then you know able to run on it's just i don't this presentation i don't know why they bother 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 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 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 but what what is that all for like it's not for games what is it all for how do they get money how does this part of the company get some and to be clear i want them to have money i'm not saying i don't begrudge them their budget 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 but on the mac this just just out in the wilderness with an amazing technology stack uh and computers with not enough gpu that cost too much money and nobody making games for it i do want to i do want to i want to touch a little more on what you also seem to have picked up this appears to me that they are they're they're doing full-on emulation like almost like and i mean i know wine is not an emulator but almost sort of kind of like a wine sort of thing again more emulation than than facade but i think they're doing like a parallels kind of virtual machine with uh with gpu support 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 like here's how it might perform even before optimization or here's our estimate like 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 who buy your game?

1:44:58Well, look at all these tools we have for you. We give you the tools for free. You have a thing that recompiles your shaders and all you have to do is change all your graphic stuff to use Metal. It's really easy. Just watch all these sessions and learn Metal. And the developer's like, I already stopped listening. Like just now just rewrite your graphic stack. Do what now? I mean, it's nice that they had Unity there, but they didn't have Unreal on stage. and it's just, it's such a weird, it's such a weird split between the amazing technology and 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.

1:45:34And 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 iPhone, they do. And iPad a little bit less so, but the mac 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 the 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 well and i 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.

1:46:33But they'd prefer if you convert your shaders and do all this stuff with metal and blah, blah, blah, and says, boom, blah. That's not what I got from it, but I'll have to watch it again. Yeah, I mean, I'm not confident that I'm right either. It could be either one of us. But I just thought it was, it's, 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. I mean, that's what, that's what the Steam Deck does. They could do that, but Steam Deck doesn't, Steam Deck says, look, just run your PC games and we'll just handle the details.

1:47:00That's not what Apple is saying at all. Right. So we'll see. AirPods get adaptive audio, which is kind of transparency and active noise cancellation on one. also conversation awareness will duck the volume of music that's cool I'm into that I'm really curious how well this works in practice because that's you know 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 I hope, two things, I hope that works well I also hope that's not the only option going forward you know i hope you can still just have transparency or just have noise cancellation if you want to and you probably can hopefully but if they can pull that off that's really nice i mean you know the the examples they gave you know the leaf blowers versus conversations that all sounds really good like it seems like you know it demos well it sounds really good i hope this works because that if it works as well as they say it could be really cool um you know the the conversation detection as you mentioned where like someone comes up and talks to you it'll automatically like lower your music like that's again this is really cool stuff i hope it works one thing that um that i'm a little scared of but i'm glad they were touching it is they they mentioned they've like dramatically improved the cross device switching mechanics let's see how that works because to date that has not worked well it's great for me hope they didn't make it worse but right now still like it yeah same it's not perfect for me but it's pretty good for the most part i leave it on i use it on a daily basis and it pretty much never goes wrong for me 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 but the airpods have instead paired themselves somehow to my mac which i never pair them to my mac in you know in the next room over and by clicking the stem on the airpods it will begin playing the max audio on the Mac, out of the Mac speakers.

1:49:09Yeah, I've had that happen like once or twice. That's very rare for me. That happens to me all the time. 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? It's infuriating. So yeah, I'm hoping for some attention to that process. And they said they did it. So let's see how that works. I would love more options to turn off some of this magic. Because when magic does not work well, you kind of want an option to turn it off. 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.

1:49:54When I walk near my Mac while wearing these AirPods, don't put up a little notification that says connect to the AirPods. when i walked 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 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 yep yep i i totally hear that uh then we got uh from ann park shidlosky 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 wi-fi and connect to the screen the tv screen in front of you which is super cool 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 now teenagers all use spotify so it's not going to help you too shy well for me that that's great for like your spouse who's in the passenger seat like that's like to me like you know it's always it's always my phone on the car play screen in my car or it's tiff's phone on the car play screen in her car and so it's really nice to be able to like now you know what we've done up to date is whenever i want to hear like you know if i want to have tiff play the music while i'm driving and it's my phone on car play her phone isn't set up for all that in my car so we keep it on my car so i can you know keep my driving directions up and everything but then we just have to like figure out what she's playing and 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 and so this to be able to have her just like just play something play like an apple music playlist from her phone onto the carplay head unit without it switching like that's really nice if that feature works at all that's going to be a nice little quality life improvement for a lot of people yeah yeah i completely agree uh tv os and apple tv were mentioned we got a new control center which i think looked pretty good um you can locate the remote using iphone which i don't think requires new hardware which i am very excited about that's super great um you can select memories of the screensaver you can do facetime on apple tv if you use continuity camera which i thought was super cool yeah i can i can absolutely imagine occasions when i would want to do that with like grandparents or something like that and there was this weird app mentioned or i think pictured at the bottom right maybe pictured on screen, Overcast was in the keynote, at least briefly, which is super exciting.

1:52:44So congratulations, Marco. Yep, yep. Yeah, the icon, it was part of one of those lots of features slides, and it was about that apparently there is, I haven't looked into this yet, but there's kind of a mechanism for you to ask Siri on a HomePod to play, to initiate playback from an audio app on your phone over AirPlay. So before, you couldn't do that. Before, like, there 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. You could take the phone out and begin playback and AirPlay it to the HomePod, like all manually from the phone, but you couldn't do that via Siri.

1:53:25if I understand that slide correctly it sounds like they have now added that ability to initiate to initiate that airplay session totally by voice without taking the phone out of 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 maybe if you take advantage of Siri app intents which I do for playing audio maybe it just works without any intervention for me which would be great but super excited about that and I'm so thrilled it was so cool to see my app on the slide in the keynote or at least see my icon on the slide in the keynote, that's a huge developer win a long time ago I had Instapaper appear during a session video and that blew my mind, and that was just during a session but to have my icon in the keynote I'm pretty happy about that That's super awesome, congratulations Thank you.

1:54:24Watch OS, revamped mostly as we've heard, so I don't think there's a lot we need to talk about. You turn the crown to reveal widgets and smart stack. They went all in on like vertical paging, which I think makes sense. Apparently there's a widget to hold your complications now, which at first I was like, what? But I guess that kind of makes sense. It's a little unusual, but I think I can get behind it. Developers can use more of the display, 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. And the time will automatically move to the center if need be because developers can put stuff in the toolbar up there.

1:55:02Really dig that. We get Snoopy and Woodstock faces. I am not a huge fan of these animated faces. I think they're clever and cool. They're just not for me. But I dig that Snoopy and Woodstock are there. And additionally, they seem to interact with not only what's going on around you, but with things that are happening on the watch. 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. We saw Eric Charles come up with some cycling and hiking updates. Most of this I thought was cool, but, I mean, again, I'm not a big cycler, cyclist, whatever, and I don't hike often, although I do quite enjoy it when I do go hiking.

1:55:41What 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. and also maps have topographical maps which i thought was really neat then we got from dr desai we got some health updates mental health has mood logging which which is also available on iphone and ipad and the watch you can take standardized assessments for anxiety and depression risk which i thought was interesting they also talked about vision health and how you can reduce myopia myopia is not being able to see close near-sightedness I think I probably, okay, oh, okay, so I have that backwards then.

1:56:21Anyway, effects like a third of the population, probably going to be more in the future. 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. 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. Anything else on watch before we move to the one more thing? well the the watch face situation remains dire yes i mean so i with the with the new focus on widgets and everything this this seems like this is this is kind of like the the rebirth of the siri watch face which they launched a long time ago now and it was kind of this you know dynamic context sensitive little rectangles that would come up depending on what was coming up it was a cool idea that they kind of launched version one over the never touched again so this this is that final version too and i like that you can just kind of scroll down from any watch face so you don't have to use the siri face which as a watch face wasn't very good 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 um i i still want third-party watch faces or or at least much more customization available via the widget system so for instance like a full screen widget that maybe just has the clock in the top center or something like that you know it's some other ways that we can do this maybe we can do some of this now just with this new system probably not um so i still want custom watch faces i'm still not surprised that they didn't give it to us and in the meantime this is some pretty solid updates i i like the um the with the with the cycling workout thing the way that you can now use your phone as a screen for your cycling data like oh yes that's a good point yeah that's a pretty cool you know because like 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 is you know a little bit of a clumsy and slightly dangerous maneuver so ideally so this is this is actually really nice if you're if you're a bikest this is this is very nice and then the you know there's like the new high frequency motion data access on the series 8 nultra for the golf and tennis swing monitoring and the whole API for that.

1:58:36That's pretty cool. Overall, it's actually a fairly medium-grade watchOS update. It's not a massive revamp like we thought. It's a nice, it's bigger than average years in terms of UI updates and SDK updates, but about the same in average years in terms of user-facing features. There's not a ton of user-facing new features. There's some little refinements here and there. There's some new workout functionality. so in that kind of way it's kind of as expected 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 I think this is going to make better watch apps easier to make and nicer 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 Yeah.

1:59:34I would like to take just a two-second pause here and evaluate if this was the whole of WWDC. I don't think that there was anything super revolutionary that was introduced, except maybe the Mac Pro. But I think it was a pretty good WWDC. I mean, these are all very mature platforms. We got nice quality of life improvements pretty much everywhere. so far i felt like this was pretty good i mean not like a revolutionary i will remember this until the end of time kind of wwdc but a pretty good one i mean john what did you think excluding the headset excluding the headset i feel like the 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 stuff and they just didn't have time for that with the headset in here so it was much more like a sort of mac world expo keynote than a wwdc one because they had to fit all the products in.

2:00:26But are you pleased with it, though? Yeah, no, it's good. Marco, thoughts? 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. 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. And in this case, you know, at this point, with everything we've covered, they were at an hour 20 um 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 so maybe you know i think we would have been even more excited about a lot of that stuff but yeah i think it would have been a pretty good wbc i mean these are all pretty nice you know incremental but not revolutionary os updates we had great mac hardware releases at the beginning well we had mac hardware release at the beginning the most some of which were great some of which john hates uh but overall all like yeah that's a pretty good wbc in in most cases in most years yep i would agree with that but there was one more thing yeah we go back to tim and tim says to us well I have one more thing.

2:01:29And this is the first Apple product you look through, not at. And we are introduced to the Vision Pro. I don't dislike the name, but the name doesn't really rev my engine that much. Like, I don't know what I would suggest in lieu of this. Like, it's 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. 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 agree with that, too. Yeah, I mean, honestly, first of all, full credit to them, this name did not leak at all.

2:02:06Everyone thought the name was either going to be Reality Pro and Reality OS, or maybe Reality Pro and then XROS. Those were the names that leaked. Because those were in the code. Those were in all the open source code. And I bet the symbol, the enum, will probably still be Reality OS. and they did trademark XROS, but you trademark stuff just defensively to make sure no one else has it, right? 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. I mean, Reality Composer is what they did brand that particular product that is related to this, but yeah, RealityOS was the code name.

2:02:39Maybe they'll change it, but that's the type of thing they can change with the source code before release. No, but see, I think Vision is what they're going to go with. 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, everything else is about creating a virtual environment inside the headset. And the AR or looking through transparency kind of features are kind of afterthoughts for most of them. In this case, they leaned way into that. So they want the name, the product, everything to be about, we're making you participate in the real world while creating a partial virtual world most of the time for you.

2:03:27We're not leaning that heavily into full blackout mode where you're totally isolated from everything else. The whole product is designed around that, and that will set it apart greatly from its competitors in most ways. And 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. This is about integrating the technology more into your surroundings and making you remain part of the world. It's about your vision of the world and augmenting your vision, not isolating you and making you look like a weirdo.

2:04:09and 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 but setting that as the tone and setting that right at the beginning as 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 you see a bunch of cameras on the bottom everyone was super excited but that was pretty much within expectations and it was masterful the way they did it when that video shows the woman's face who was wearing it and it like it lights up and her eyes are there everyone in the audience gasped when that like it was like whoa like that that was the moment of the keynote was when you saw her eyes 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 it sounded ridiculous 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 um but man if it works like that that is potentially amazing now it has to be perfect to not be creepy and this this bears but it's not going to be perfect like they they one of the things i think didn't leak is the lenticular thing where it doesn't just show a single image so if you're viewing it from an angle you see a second image that's more on the angle you're looking at it but bottom line is uh the headset sticks out sticks out from your face by an inch or two your eyes aren't there your eyes are way back farther uh 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.

2:06:06So the front view they showed in the keynote is putting its best face forward, right? Sure. Any angle other than dead on, it's going to be tricky. But kudos for trying. We'll have to see how it looks in real life. Like you can imagine a future version of this where they use transparent OLEDs that you actually do see your eyeballs through. uh you know like like the illusion that they were giving you in that reveal that could be real with uh transparent oled screens i think lg made a transparent oled tv and it's it's kind of silly technology but it does exist it's just that you know it to do a headset with that where we that doesn't quite work right now but it's not out of the realm of possibility as this thing shrinks to have something like that but yeah i agree with you marco that vision is a good name for a thing where they're trying to pitch the uh the ar aspect of it uh but so i i made this comment on when i was watching i feel like this entire section of the keynote was missing one little tiny piece of text which i i wasn't on the commercial it probably will be on the commercial but anyway uh images simulated oh no that 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 oh no they were not i have it on good authority that everything that was shown from the perspective of the wearer was actual capture from the real hardware we'll see we'll see how that goes like here's the thing like 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 like they have that feature so you don't trip and fall 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?

2:08:13It'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? Whereas Apple's saying, no, this isn't like an afterthought to keep you from tripping. This is a major feature of the product. We're leaning heavily into AR, right? That's where they differ. Where they meet is at the fact that screens, and we talked about this before when we talked up HDR screens currently do not have the same fidelity as your eyes looking at the real world there's more dynamic range in the real world than there are on even the most amazing screens and so there's always and 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 uh 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 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 but it's not going to be better enough to feel like you were really looking at your room what you're really looking at is a video of your room or like if you imagine take your iPhone and look at the screen.

2:09:28It's got 1600 nits of brightness, right? Really amazing fidelity. But you pointed it to the 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. But I think that's the part where you need the image of simulated disclaimer. And if they weren't simulated, I think they are misleading in the way that all advertising is misleading is that they are showing an idealized scenario. Your results in your dim computer room or actual real home are probably going to be different. No, I mean, again, I have it on very good authority that they were actually captured from the hardware.

2:10:01Like, so, you know, not everything in the video was user viewpoint. Like, you know, there were things that were showing, like, you know, outside of the video, like outside of the user, what they look like. And in those kind of cases, compositing might have been used, you know, or maybe for the eye images because it's hard to film screens, you know, but what it's showing inside the headset, that was all hardware captured. and that is amazing well it has the advantage of being incorporated into a video like it's these are being incorporated into a video which is also limited by the limitations of a screen or whatever when i was comparing it to is looking at your actual living room versus looking at a video of your living room whereas this everything is a video of the room but it is impressive that this is all captured from device uh but i in the ad especially i kept looking for images simulated and didn't see it no and and again like you know you can yeah if you want to criticize ideal conditions.

2:10:51Yeah, they were ideal conditions, I'm sure. But no, it's like, this is the real deal. They actually captured them from the hardware. The only way to solve this is for Apple to send us all headsets so we can try it ourselves. Seeing will be believing. 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 have had a chance to work on it or try it, whoever I'd run into, whoever would talk to me, I asked various people, and the one thing I want to know first is how convincing is the transparency simulation? When you put it on, how much do you feel like you're looking through it?

2:11:30And 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. That's what I really want to know because that matters so much. If it took, obviously, what Apple is going for here, again, with the whole the whole vision angle focusing much more on ar than vr making it much much better of an integrated citizen of the environment around you in terms of you know it senses when people come up to you 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 like you know the integration with the outside world in this product is clearly that was clearly like the number one design goal and then everything else fell from that if it took them until now to deliver that tech to do that that makes sense like that makes total sense like they they couldn't make a good enough uh you know illusion of transparency 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 much larger combination of stuff that is doing this, it makes sense that they waited until now to do this, and it makes sense that this product is starting at such a high price point because they probably never want to deliver a Vision Series headset from Apple that doesn't have this convincing illusion.

2:12:58And that's pretty cool because that really does set it apart from everything else. There are some very high-end, very specialized headsets that have that kind of thing, but they're even more expensive and much less general purpose much more specialized and even they from people who have used them I don't think they do as good of a job so that's again that's the one thing I really want to know and that's I'm hoping to get a chance to try one before I leave here I really want to know how that illusion is the rest of the stuff with like you know what apps can do and everything I believe them on that I believe all that I'm really curious how good that illusion is and secondarily I'm curious how sharp text actually really is because that's another thing like you know if you've ever used one of the gaming headsets their resolution is garbage by comparison and text is so chunky and blocky and the idea of having your mac show a little 4k virtual screen in your viewport uh and being able to do work on that that seems you know that seems optimistic unless the text is very very sharp what they say is that it is well yeah so let me i was going to touch 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 we've alluded to it many times when talking about the specs but just to make it very clear um they said that you have more than 4k per eyeball on the little screens that are inside there so there's one thing i don't know but i'm willing to give apple the benefit of the doubt and what i don't know is uh so if you had both your two eyes looking at a 4k monitor 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 is it double is it 8k 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 i don't actually know if that's true but i'm willing to let's just give it the most optimistic one and say it's 8k right let me let me read to you from the marketing website more pixels than a 4k tv for each eye the custom micro oled display system uses 23 million pixels delivering stunning resolution and colors and specifically does not And a specifically designed three element lens creates the feeling of a display that's everywhere you look.

2:15:04So, yeah, that says to me more than 4K per eye. Right. But what I'm getting at, does that mean that you can see the equivalent of 8K pixels? Because each eye has 4K and they see slightly different pixels. Right. And here's what I'm getting at. Right. So let's just assume it's 8K. Right. That's 8K for your entire field of view. Right. So when they show a monitor floating in front of you, that can't be an 8K monitor at true resolution. because if it was an 8K monitor true resolution, it would literally extend from edge to edge of your field of view. And that would not be a comfortable way to look at a monitor because it's just too wide for you to see.

2:15:39So 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? 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. Because in the most optimistic scenario, I have 8K of pixels in front of me. 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. But anyway, like you don't think that every single rectangle you see can be 4K. The entire field of view for your left eye is 4K.

2:16:11And 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? So I think it will be, the resolution will be good, probably matching the best gaming headsets. But you won't, 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 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 you cannot have a 6k screen on there and see all the pixels now do you need to see all the pixels probably not because you can't resolve the pixels on a 6k screen from a comfortable distance anyway so i think it will be fine and good but i think a lot of people 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 like yeah you can look at each one in turn and you'll more or less get true pixels out of it but we 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.

2:17:23I 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. 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. Well, that was stated during the keynote, but during the State of the Union, they said, you just look at it. So they showed a MacBook Pro with the screen open and the wearer of the Vision Pro looked down and, you know, there's a brief pause.

2:17:56And then suddenly that Mac screen dimmed from the perspective of the Vision Pro user. Maybe it did in real life as well. And then this 4K screen was, you know, dropped in the middle of their field of view. But they specifically said 4K, both in the keynote and the State of the Union. And I bet that's not an accident. You know, it's exactly what you're saying. You know, you can only get but so much resolution uh with what's in the device already um but to go back i think and it's slightly my fault we're getting the weeds a little bit i think we should talk a little bit more about you know yeah us uh we should talk a little bit more broadly about what this is um i 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 um i i don't i don't know what i expected but this is not what I expected.

2:18:49And I think in a good way, 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 and that never really appealed to me much. And I think I really dig the idea of this being kind of a halfway between VR and regular reality. And I think I really dig, even though we heard what was going to be done 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 and i and a lot of people were snarking on mastodon about uh i what is it eyesight the thing on the front that reveals the wearer's eyes and everyone said it looked like garbage and was on uncanny valley, uncanny valley, uncanny valley.

2:19:45And I didn't get that at all. Like it looked really good to me. And I, I hear what you guys are saying about being off access and so on and so forth, but from what they showed, it looked really good. And I loved that it showed, uh, with like kind of the almost top of a home pod blur. It showed when you were really engaged with something and not paying attention to the outside world, but then it was fairly transparent looking when you were interacting with the outside world. And I don't know, 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.

2:20:29But that being said, I think this appeals to me more than I expected. well, I expected, of course, that I would be wowed by the keynote, which I was. But I feel like I can see places in my life where this could be neat. 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? I think it's perfect for an airplane. No, no, no, but hear me out. Like, from a social perspective, you're an idiot if you're wearing this on an airplane. Why? Why? Just hold on. Just hold on. Because you look like a fool. You look like a fool.

2:21:06Why do you look like a fool? You're in your seat. You're watching a movie on basically a very compact screen. Look at this jackass with their$3 ,500 fancy lad headset. People wear masks like this just so they can sleep. It's better than a neck donut. This is the worst thing. I can't reach over and smack you two like I'm used to being able to do in years past. So I think what I keep coming back to with this, specifically with the social stigma about it, And like watching their video of the dude recording his like kid's birthday, that it just seems like such an obnoxious time to have a physical barrier between you and your children.

2:21:42Like I understand what they're driving at. I understand they've got this whole 3D camera thing. I get that. They could just put that on their phone, by the way, Apple. That's a free tip for you. Exactly. But I get what they're driving at here, but what an obnoxious time to do. And so all this social stuff. I disagree on that, by the way, just for reference. I mean, the birthday one you disagree with? Yeah. Well, okay. Let's get to finish. I'll get to it. Thank you. I appreciate it. Um, so I keep coming back to the social stigma for this. I think will be ugly. Like you're going to look like an idiot wearing this, but, but, and this is what I couldn't get to a second ago.

2:22:14I remember vividly when the AirPods first came out. And if you had AirPods, I feel like everyone looked to you like you were a lunatic for a couple of months. And then after that, everyone had AirPods. 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. Oh, I'm too good for wires. Look at me. And that lasted not very long at all. 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.

2:22:57Just the other day, I was at dinner somewhere with the family, and I looked over at the table next to us, and there was another family at dinner, and one of the kids had an AirPod in. They're at family dinner, and presumably family dinner was too boring, and they needed to have an AirPod in to have music during family dinner. Leaving aside the fact that the restaurant was playing music, they needed to have their music, kids these days, I tell you. But that's how prevalent, and that's how often you see AirPods now that it's not unusual to see an airpod in a kid's ear at family dinner. 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.

2:23:39But I think it will not take long for me to change my tune. And to come back around to what John, I think, was going to say, what an unbelievably awesome time to put on these dorky goggles. How amazing would it be to have this 50-foot screen in front of you with your AirPods, with noise cancellation, and effectively surround sound. While we're flying across the country to WWDC next year when Apple actually invites all of us, imagine being able to watch a movie that whole way across the country. That sounds so cool and such a perfect use case for this. And I can't wait. One way or another, I can't wait to try it.

2:24:17I think it'll take a little bit longer for a$3 ,500 headset. uh 3 500 you're right you're right versus 160 airpods a little 100 is kind of expensive airpods too but uh yeah i'm not so much worried about the social stigma but to get to they get overcome the social stigma thing you need to get over the uh 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 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 pretty confidently say that no one tried to shape this to look particularly beautiful because it doesn't look particularly beautiful it's it is a little bit clunky and awkward because it has to be here's the thing that i was most surprised by i kept saving uh screenshots of people doing mock-ups based on rumors and stuff 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 mac or 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 that they just turned sideways and like made right and i was like have these people never seen an actual headset you can't just take a single watch band and put a strap that goes straight back from the ski goggles that literally does not fit on human heads they know what human heads look like have you ever put on a pair of ski goggles even a literal pair of ski goggles has a wider band than that and it's alaski you can't put the apple watch band there so i'm glad to see that this doesn't look like that 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 it's the band is perpendicular to the surface of the glasses and that's it and most of the other headsets have something that goes towards the top of the head you know what i mean right yeah there was no top strap 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 a 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 but you know it doesn't have the top strap 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.

2:27:31So 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, right? They're not, your eyeballs are not in the center of them. The back of them are not symmetrical. Like 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 the hell they said richard howard said we studied thousands of heads they also studied thousands of years when they made the original airpods and apparently they didn't study marcos 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 i hope it works i hope they pulled it off i hope it doesn't sag looking at the side things especially the audio pods they are particularly awkward especially awkward if that i don't know mark did you anyone confirm that you can use the airpods i would assume you can but they didn't say that did they you can use it with airpods or and i don't know if other blue probably anyway you can't use it with airpods the the built-in speakers that are on the head strap basically um they had like a special word for them like audio pods or something but so the built-in built-in speakers they are not uh like bone conduction transducers they are regular speakers.

2:28:50They're just very close to your ears. But there is a gap between the speakers and your ears. So it's kind of like an open headphone. You will hear outside noise. I asked when I was in the hands-off area, how is the leakage of sound? People who had worked on it. They can't tell us that much because it's still PR. They're not going to tell great detail. But it might leak a little bit of sound if you're really close. I was saying, obviously, you probably wouldn't wear it on a plane because it's too much ambient noise. Yes, that's correct you know the planes are too loud you wear airpods on a plane for the noise cancellation but i was like you know if you're wearing on a bus would the passenger next to you hear your stuff 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 need to be wearing airpods 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.

2:30:11Also, the face gasket piece, which I think they call the light shield, something like that. Light seal. That's it. Yeah, light seal. So that piece, the implication is that there's going to be many different sizes of them. Not just like, you know, with AirPods, you get like the three little earplugs, small, medium, large. 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. Also, interesting little tidbit, I asked about the different eye, lens things. I asked about stuff like the adjustment for things like interpupillary distance, the IPD, which is the spacing between the eyepieces.

2:30:51Any kind of headset or binoculars even, you can adjust that spacing. Apparently, they are automatic and motorized for the IPD adjustment. They showed that in the keynote. They showed them adjusting. Yeah, you just put it on and adjust that. 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 like shoot a light through it and then they bring out perfectly matched lenses for you 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 um so maybe there will be a you know you go in you put your glasses in a thing they measure your head and they bring out okay here's your perfect fit try it on you know so what they're going for apparently is they have again studied thousands of heads uh 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 it really has to be a very good fit in lots of different ways comfort for light isolation for you know long-term wearability for accessibility you really need a lot of different uh adaptation ability to different people's needs and bodies so they are apparently doing that that they have lots of different you know light seal things lots of different lens options and everything so apparently it's going to be really good in all those ways and uh 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 apparently a lot um also on the realm of motion sickness which they had some euphemism for like motion sensitivity or something like that oh sorry motion discomfort they called it in the notes but on that they talk a lot about the R1 chip that they've done everything to try to make stuff as real time as possible they talk a lot about that 12 millisecond processing latency which is way below what everyone else is doing in the market that apparently I asked some people what does that mean in real life for motion sensitive people and everyone claims that it basically eliminates motion sickness.

2:32:56Now, 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. So it sounds like they're on the right path here. I am really dying to try this thing. 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. I'm just, I'm so curious. But again, for the handful of people who have tried it, the reports so far are very good. Yeah, they're one order of magnitude off of latency. Remember that video I always post from my, I posted on my blog of the Microsoft thing where they had an adjustable latency where they got to do it a thousand milliseconds, 110.1 of just scribbling on a screen with their finger.

2:33:42One millisecond is where you start getting down to the point where it's like, it seems like it's real time. 10.12 is good. They're, you know, they got one more order of magnitude 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 no latency. Because they're controlling everything that you see. 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.

2:34:14That is the origin of motion sickness. So software is a big factor. and that's where by the way the ar stuff comes in handy because that really tries to root you 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 before we were saying what are they going to do with this headset what am i supposed to do with it is it going to be like the watch where they say it can be all things to all people and i figure out what it is and the answer from this presentation was no apple has a very clear idea of what they think you can do with this and it is narrow hideo kojima was at apple he was not there to pitch games for the headset this incredibly powerful headset was not presented as a gaming device by apple at all which is shocking to a lot of people because like the their competition hardware wise are all gaming headsets and Apple's, I mean, they mentioned, you know, it is a 3D thing.

2:35:17You can make games for it. You know, it'll like games will work. It'll be fine. But Apple was like, no, this is not a product for people who want to play video games, which was very clear. What is it for? It's for people who want to basically use your Apple devices, right? Now, granted, this is an Apple device and you're using it, but what are you using it for? Like I kept thinking it was basically as like the pro display XDR, but for your face. this is a display product what does it let you display running applications oh and by the way it also runs them because it's not like it's just a display like it has an m2 in there and it will run your ipad apps and run your iphone apps and you can look at your mac screen 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 but instead a 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 replaced 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 i feel like this was a very clear message of what apple thinks this device is for are they right is this what it's going to be for the most touchy one is the one we touched on before was like is dad gonna wear these at the birthday party so he can get 3d video on the one hand 3d video is super cool on the other hand you can get 3d video on a phone if you just separate the two cameras by a little bit and it's way more you know it's not just like socially acceptable and people will get used to it your kid should see your face and if he sees your face and you're holding the rectangle of the iphone he can still kind of see your face right so when these things are actual glasses sure wear them and record the party when they're goggles it seems like a shame to use this as a capture device for 3D video.

2:37:09As a viewing device for 3D video to relive memories of your kid's second birthday, awesome. 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. Well, I mean, on that front, again, this is very early for this stuff. 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. But if you look back, like this is kind of like the original VHS-sized camcorders. Remember when those came out like in the 80s and 90s?

2:37:45You put them on your shoulder. Yeah, those giant – it was just a VCR on your shoulder. They were so big and so heavy that when somebody, usually like a dad, would take that out, it was a big deal. And you'd take it out every so often, not at every possible occasion. You would take it out for stuff like birthdays and Christmas and whatever. and you would film around for a little while and then you'd set it down so you wouldn't be capturing the entire event that way because it was way too big and heavy and the battery sucked it was kind of an occasional brief capture device and I think that's kind of what this is going to be like I think the appeal of capturing 3D video and audio is so compelling that people will do it and you know people will gladly 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 like i don't i don't think people are going to be spending the entire party in the headset and nor should they probably but they can't because the battery life won't let them yeah right but i think i think it will be totally it'll become fairly reasonable like it won't it won't look weird after a little while you know to casey's earlier like it'll become fairly common for people to take this out and capture parts of experiences and then go back to the real world so and i don't think that's a bad thing you know until we have 3d capturing iphones which we might never have or might not be for a while uh that's totally fine and and by the way and it certainly raises the question of like for parents who were in their phones all the time how present are they really you know like that's that's a separate separate question, but certainly one worth considering that this makes it more obvious, but is it actually different in presence levels?

2:39:34Maybe not. But anyway, yeah. Think of it as a giant old camcorder. There's going to be this time in history for a little while where this is the only slash best way to capture 3D video of what's going on, but capturing 3D video is going to be so compelling. I cannot wait to have that. I think that's going to be amazing you could have used it on nintendo ds years and years ago two cameras anyway i think that's i think that thing's going to be amazing for that and and as for the use cases 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 we always had people write in yes i know people watch porn in them like i thanks for telling us everyone didn't have a section of the keynote on that it's weird yeah we are fully aware that that's a thing also yeah you people watch movies in them you know that aren't porn they did have that that framework that detects sensitive images it would just blur everything you see yeah right yeah that's a new framework now it's basically an unity sensor anyway so yes i'm sure it'll be great for that and yes people will buy it for that and even if you only buy it to watch videos on you know movies and tv shows and stuff i mean look ipads are are capable of doing amazing things they have much of the same computational power.

2:40:52They have amazing capabilities, and yet what most people do on iPads is watch video on them, and that's fine. Yes, they made this ridiculous, amazing headset. If most people end up watching movies on it a lot, or other activities that involve watching video feeds, that's fine. You don't need to be doing amazing things on it. If it's otherwise being used largely as a computing platform, as basically a glorified monitor for apps that you're working with or working in or running. 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 right exactly but like if that's you know i i was i was thinking earlier like when you look back over computing history there's kind of this like base load of like the amount of computational power that we burn just to do things in a more modern way that are otherwise fairly simple like you know type of document or something like you know when when we had to move to like a compositing window management system, like with Mac OS X or whatever the hell version of Windows added that, the system was burning more computational resources to do the basics.

2:41:58Our apps had to work above that, and that mattered for a little while when the hardware was super early, but then as hardware went on, now we don't even think about that. Later on, we had things like web technology doing all the rendering for UIs. That is, from a computational perspective, hilariously wasteful and inefficient, but things got fast enough that it didn't really matter, and it became more about other factors that made that compelling. Well, when you think about the amount of computing power that the Vision Pro burns just to show you like an app window in the middle of your room, the amount of complexity and sophistication and amazing feats of engineering required to show you like a spreadsheet in the middle of the room is kind of hilarious.

2:42:41Like I was thinking about that earlier and just like laughing to myself in the middle of the Apple Visitor Center. or no one else, everyone thought it was a weirdo, probably. Just thinking, like, the amount of computing power that we're just considering, like, passe, 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, having a cooling fan. By the way, yes, there's a fan. Like, doing all that to show, you know, a couple of floating windows in your virtual room is kind of amusing and is so comically over the top.

2:43:18But 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, and that's great. I am looking forward to being able to go on a virtual retreat 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. That will be amazing. 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.

2:43:58It will be great to be sitting on a plane and to have a giant screen field of view that you can be doing other better, nicer things in. It will 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. They didn't talk about fitness stuff and there's probably lots of reasons for that. One thing I instantly thought of is like, well, how sweaty is your face going to be with this whole face gasket? I mean, it's fabric, so it's better than it being rubber, but breathability is always an issue and also I think bouncing up and down is going to be an issue.

2:44:31Yeah, but there are certain like I was thinking like, my God, if when I'm sitting on my water rower, by the way, there was a wonderful segment on Cortex. This is a very brief version. I know we're short on time um where uh where gray was saying you know don't even try a water rower if you if you are if you ever use a gym rowing machine like the they're like chain kind of rowing machine in a gym i got a chance recently to use a chain rowing machine for the first time ever i've only ever had a water rower it was like rowing a trash can lid across a field of gravel like it was such a terrible feeling compared to the water rower oh my god he like yeah if you if you use a water and you ever think, maybe I should go to Concept 2.

2:45:10No. Oh my God, they're awful. Anyway, sorry, Concept 2 people, if you're listening. So anyway, the idea of like taking my wonderful water-growing machine and virtually rowing across a wonderful lake in a peaceful lake scene 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 without having too many weird practical problems. But anyway. And they'll be even better because the fans will be blowing a little breeze on your face. No, they'll be blowing hot air, though, unfortunately.

2:45:45Well, it's a summer row. It's a summer row in Arizona. In the rainforest, maybe. It's very humid and hot. Yeah, right. Anyway, so I can think of lots. So anyway, there's lots of use cases for this beyond just gaming. 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. it has not taken over the gaming world as much as everyone thought it would. It has not produced nearly as many good VR games as people would have assumed would exist by now. There are some that are fun. They're mostly like, you know, novelties or fads, honestly. 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, and also gamers are not going to be spending$3 ,500 on this anytime soon.

2:46:35Well, I think they'd be the most likely to people to spend$3 ,500 on this headset because it's got such amazing specs. If only they could play games with it, but they can't, at least not the games they want to. But 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. And then you can start doing some more of the app stuff. It's like, yeah, maybe while you're capturing your 3D media, hey, maybe you have your messages over in the corner and you start doing that or you start messing around with whatever your productivity apps on your iPad are.

2:47:09There 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. 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. And then when it does come out, it's going to be fairly expensive and fairly limited. And so, yes, but this is a start. This is not going to replace people's computers anytime soon for most people. Well, what about replacing their monitors? I feel like that is a more realistic goal. Maybe? It's not going to replace your computer, but will it replace your monitor?

2:47:40I mean, that's kind of, it's not a shame, but it's interesting that this is not just a display device. It's an entire computer by itself, but you can use it to see your Mac screen. So they showed it being used with a keyboard and a mouse and stuff like that. But like the thing I'm most disappointed with in terms of their demos is Apple didn't seem to have a any kind of point of view or story or solution to the whole thing of like, OK, but what kind of apps can you make in the third dimension? They have frameworks for it. They showed that satellite rotating in 3D, but that's nothing like that is like it's cute.

2:48:14But that doesn't that doesn't let me do that. That's not a new kind of application that I couldn't use on a 2D screen. show me you know and and clearly it's possible to make applications that you couldn't do on a 2d screen but kind of like the gaming thing you were saying show me the the killer app show me the one that everybody has to have show me the one that they say you can't do this on a laptop screen you have to do it in the headset 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 like we were saying before about like what can the ipad do better than the phone and the mac what can the mac do better than the you know what can the headset do better well it can be a better display in certain ways because you have flexibility about where to put things and stuff like that but what about the app experience it you know it has to be it doesn't have to be but like 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 right that's not that's not adding anything and apple didn't have an answer there they didn't say and here's our killer app that can only exist on the headset that goes far beyond just showing you an ipad app and a rectangle that's floating in front of you first of all like I think what they did demo is that.

2:49:20I guarantee you the killer app for this thing is 3D picture and video capture and being able to replay moments. That's the killer app. I'll call it right now. That's going to get everyone to buy it. Well, I mean, I didn't mean killer app isn't the thing that's going to make people want to buy it. I mean, like I said, the thing that takes advantage of 3D technology and more than just being a display, right? They have frameworks for it. 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. And that's, you know, to be clear, I think their concentration on 2D planes showing video content and applications, that was clearly their focus.

2:49:56It seems much more focused on the watch. And I think that's a smart focus because those are all things with proven utility. And that's why I keep framing this in my mind as, hey, you know, all that stuff that you already want to do. 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, like you said, watching media or even just the rowing thing. that is that 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 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.

2:50:52But Apple doesn't have any full 3D apps. They have 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 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. Right, but not like the independent ones where you're grabbing. have you played half-life alex you have right no no i haven't well anyway like yes you can help hold the 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.

2:51:46But 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. I don't think anybody has an answer for that, but just to be clear, Apple didn't have an answer for it either. 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. But what they were showing is we already know you want to do these things. We already know you want to watch video. You want to use your apps, right?

2:52:12you want to you want to you know record video and you know see it in 3d which is a thing you can't do without weird glasses and stuff like that 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 everything that they showed is something someone else was doing but in a worse way on on crappier hardware no i mean so i 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 that's that's plenty And again, I honestly think 3D capture and playback of video is its own killer app right there.

2:52:47But even more pedestrian stuff, and they've had this support in ARKit for a while, but it's been limited to tiny phone and iPad screens. Shopping and interior decoration of rooms. Like that, you know, if you're 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 the size or scale of it is not quite what you expected to be able to just have that object show up like in your room. That 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.

2:53:29that kind of stuff that's killer apps for so many people 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 so you know i i think they've already shown us enough that is going to make a lot of people want to buy this including me honestly and i was super skeptical before but now i'm super optimistic of course one of the things they also stayed away from by the way oh they kind of barely touched on is the whole the whole like feeling like you're you're all sitting around a meeting table with a bunch of people 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 like it was 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 i 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 they could have done oh the feeling of presence and you're there with your loved ones they were like yeah no like like they had to prove you can use this for work meetings you can use this to facetime with your family not the ideal use case right like it's it's so much they spent so much more time showing people looking at like movies showing on a virtual screen in front of them than they spent showing a disembodied cg head of a scanned face 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 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 you certainly not gonna have your entire family and 3500 headsets but even just one person and even in a work meeting it's a little bit iffy on that front but i you know this I don't know.

2:55:53this stakes out a different area of the headset space than i have seen anybody try to stake out even you know so the game things forget it apple's not anywhere near them and then when facebook did it facebook's not a particularly big gaming company oculus was a gaming headset they tried to stake out this whole presence virtual meeting little nintendo me's walking around with no legs or whatever apple's like no legs no body no nothing they got disembodied hands and a floating cg head but that's not what this is about let me show you more of your apps floating around you and speaking of the apps by the way they had alan everyone's favorite person marco's favorite uh ui designer alan die up there talking about the ui for this with the sort of translucent panes and everything and everything looks 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 and the whole time i'm looking i'm like is it possible for me as a human to tell which item is is selected on this screen 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 yeah they have like a hover effect on it yeah when i pin they're doing an effect and they said when i pinch which thing that's on the screen is going to activate right now 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 and white something i want to be able to know where the 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 yeah we've got old eyes here like everything can't be translucent flushed to glass 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 that's what i was looking out for there i do like mostly what they did with it the frosted glass look and the little controls on the side and everything it all looks cool i do wonder 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 so it feels kind of like stage manager and how rigid it is in terms of where you can place things 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 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 better use the you know speech to text at that point well yeah and of course there is dictation there is siri um you know there's there's you know stuff that that will allow input better but um this is probably like i think if you're going to be doing a lot of input you're going to be sitting with the keyboard now that being said i mean imagine imagine that on an airline tray table 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 the keyboard on the tray table and no screen to get in the way to get pinched by the by the seat 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's is like six inches from your nose it feels like right and you don't want the screen to be six inches so the virtual screen in the in the augmented reality has to be farther out and then how to the the it can't make a convincing augmented reality 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 which means if you have a keyboard in front of you you better be able to touch touch type without having to look at the keyboard because you can't look down and look at the keys but you could bring your bluetooth keyboard just sit on the tray table that's what i'm saying you can't you'll be able to type on your bluetooth keyboard without looking into 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 you know what i mean like it's someone's got to try it to see how does it how does it square that circle because you want the screen to be a two feet away from you but the seat is one foot away from you so now the screen is behind the seat and so it truncates at the bottom runs the illusion it'll probably be fine 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 well but what's good is like is like It is based on eye tracking and you making a hand movement, but it doesn't really matter where your hands are.

3:00:40So they can be in your lap off to the side. You can be lying down kind of. You can be slouching. And not only is that great for lots of different accessibility needs, but also that's just great for not being super tiresome. And you don't have to be waving your arms around in midair in front of you. 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 the sci-fi vision of the product like this would be it would actually be probably pretty terrible in real life so they rather than do the sci-fi vision they made the thing that's actually better in real life and i think that's kind of the theme of this whole product that we've seen so far that when you if you 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.

3:01:30That's not what they did. 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 seemingly something that is much better designed for reality. This is something that's actually going to be very useful in reality, no pun intended. And it's very it seems like a much more practical approach to solving some of these problems. That being said, of course, I use the term practical a little bit loosely there in terms of they needed to throw an absurd amount of technology and engineering to make these things work this way.

3:02:09And 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. But this isn't what we would have guessed. It isn't what we did guess. We don't have to be theoretical. We were guessing about this product for years. this is not what I expected it to be. This is not, I think, what anybody expected it to be. I mean, I think the rumors pretty much got the form right. It's just that it was hard for anyone to believe that they wouldn't talk about gaming. And guess what? They didn't talk about gaming. No, I'm saying, obviously, who cares what it looks like?

3:02:40You know, the goggles, whatever, fine. 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. I mean, that was Tim's original thing, that Apple was big into AR, not VR. It's just in the recent years, is 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. So people said it had to be more VR. But the original origin of the headset rumors was Apple wants to do AR. They're going to augment reality. 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 ship a headset that totally blocks your vision, right?

3:03:15And then that's where all the VR rumors came from. That's where the gaming angle started coming in. But no, the original rumors of this headset is that Apple is super into AR and that's what they're, that's why they present it as a product that is heavily focused on AR. But even that, if you ask people like what, Apple's going to make an AR focused headset, what kind of features will it have? 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, maybe pop over people. Oh, this is, you know, Emily Smith.

3:03:45Like that's what they're thinking when you say AR. 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. Like, that's what they actually should. I think people thought about that. 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, right? But that's the part that Apple concentrated on. Speaking of eye tracking, though, by the way, they made a big point of, like, 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 in uh in your uh you know your goggles right that they won't pass where your eyes are lingering as like cursor events yes it's kind of the equivalent if you're on your mac if you're on your mac and imagine if your mouse pointer moved everywhere your eyes went where your mouse pointer moves can be captured by most web apps or whatever or actually i don't know what the state of the art and security is but in theory it could be captured right but where your eyes move is not captured by any web browser because 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 a 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 which you know it's their privacy angle that biometric data that you don't expect to be passed on to these things we won't pass it on they'll only get the thing when you click with your fingers or whatever I think that's also applied to apps though which is interesting well so here's the thing you can like gaming and the headset one of the best 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.

3:05:41So 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 site using with the web browser. But of course, if you make a VR game, 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 i mean i 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 you know like if you look at like i think one of the things they breezed over in the state of the union was um that when you're viewing like for for apps that are that are reading like ar positioning information to figure out like where to put their volumes and stuff like that um they're not getting a camera feed of your room because presumably that would require some kind of camera permission so like even though the headset is constantly capturing the video of the room around you to show you in your in your eyepieces um the apps are not going to get visual data so they're not going to see that you know you're not wearing pants they're going to see there's just like some leg-shaped logs there well it depends on how detailed the depth the depth data it may be oh god yeah maybe that's a bad example but you know like they're not going to see like oh you have you have blue walls in this room they're going to see there's a wall there you know like they they get like geometry of the room but not images of the room speaking of the geometry by the way they really focus on that in the spatial audio did you see that bit where they're like we'll do spatial audio based on where your coffee table is and stuff and it made me think the same thing i always think when i see this stuff it's like there is a there is a application of that that is ideal and i think it's kind of like when you're doing like the virtual FaceTime with somebody or something.

3:07:37You want them to feel like they're in front of you. And when they talk, their sound bounces off your coffee table. 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. And when they talk, it bounces off your ceiling and your walls. And that's how it should work. But I continue to say that when I watch a movie, I don't actually want the sound to bounce off my coffee table. I want it to be perfect as it was mastered by the person who made this movie. Put it right into my ears.

3:08:04don't bounce it around my room i spend all this time trying to get an arrangement of speakers and everything to to eliminate bouncing around the room effects so like it's great technology it has its place another example is if i'm playing i don't know a game again if i'm playing a game i want to hear where the enemy is in the game my coffee table is not in the game don't bounce sound off of it right 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 if the sound was coming out of that tv it would hit your coffee table and bounce two years isn't that what you want and i would say no it's not what i want i know you know this is different between me and and the imagined audience of spatial audio i i don't i don't want the sound to sound like it's coming from my ipad when i'm watching tv on my ipad i want it to sound like it's coming out of the headphones that are in my ear so i'm glad i can turn it off 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 and i think they have ir spare things and everything so it's 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 and they just you know one of the uses of it is to figure out how to bounce sound around it marco are you going to make the bouncing around the room joke or do i have to uh feel free uh no i i i i just keep coming back to uh what marco said a few minutes ago and when i got to the one more thing in the keynote, you know, I think we all kind of knew what to expect, but I don't think I received what I expected.

3:09:32And I think it's actually far better. And I keep thinking to myself that right now I'm really, if you can't tell, hung up on the social, like, about all of this, but leaving that aside for a moment, you know, I, I really enjoy going places to work, you know, once or twice a week. I enjoy going to my beloved, don't call it a park bench picnic table. Think about this. You do leave your house to work a lot, don't you? I do like going to the library. 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. 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.

3:10:17But but then I got thinking to myself, well, what work could I really do on this thing as a standalone device? 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, I feel like you should be able to do the same here. 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. 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, you can probably do honest-to-goodness work with the Vision Pro.

3:11:05And that's appealing, but I don't think that's me most of the time because my work most of the time really has to be done on a traditional computer. and I do think it would be nice to have a very large 4k display wherever I wanted you know wherever I am I think that would be pretty neat so even if I have to bring my computer it would be neat to have the you know big display or in potentially even more than one and turn your head to look at each one well and I don't know if I can I don't think you can have more than one computer display just one for the mac but just at least for version one it was just one display but that doesn't mean I mean remember I'm a big spaces person and this is kind of like spaces on steroids.

3:11:44And 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 the Vision Pro adjacent to that. And I can have Slack adjacent to that. You know what I mean? And I can have Safari, all the other things running natively on the Vision Pro, strewn about this virtual workspace. And that would be pretty freaking cool. And speaking of Xcode and things like that, they do seem to be taking very seriously the simulator. They seem to be making it as reasonable as they can, given that the technology on a traditional computer is so different.

3:12:24But one thing they showed in the State of the Union 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. It was like in somebody's toolbar, right? Yeah, which I thought was funny. But nevertheless, what if you wanted to write an app for this thing? Well, what you could do is you could have your virtual monitor for your computer, and they showed it off to the right, and then you could have your app off to the left. And yes, of course you can do that. But seeing that, my mind just freaking exploded.

3:13:02Like, how amazingly cool is that? And that is a future that I think is very, very interesting. I think Marco's right that I think 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. The killer app for the iPad is being able to consume things wherever you want. And I think the killer app for this might be having a full surround sound setup, asterisk, with a humongous screen of high fidelity, dagger. But what appears to be those things. And you can have it anywhere. And then what could really make it interesting is if you can get work done on it.

3:13:43And again, I think if you can get work done on an iPad, and that's not me, but it may be you. If you can get work done on an iPad, I bet you could get work done on this. 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. And so that makes this very interesting to me. i as an engineer and i think we should talk about price here as an engineer i totally understand how we landed it starts at 3500 makes perfect sense absolutely reasonable as a consumer you know i feel like i need to to to paste in the goodfellas gif with uh what's his nuts laughing everyone laughing at the restaurant you know you know the gif i'm thinking of like that is just an asinine amount of money that being said i'm really thinking about it because this thing looks so freaking cool.

3:14:32And 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 recording videos of the Xcode simulator and the Vision Pro simulator and so on and so forth. I honestly don't know what I'll do because$3 ,500 is a lot of money to say, oh, why not? but it does seem very interesting. And although I haven't had time to read posts about people's firsthand experience, I see that Chance Miller has a post up, which we'll link in the show notes. Our friend Matthew Panzarino has a post up.

3:15:10We've had some other people report into the three of us that they have tried it and it is amazing. So I am really interested. I don't know if I'm going to do it. I don't know if I'm going to spend$3 ,500 on this. You will. I'm definitely not shutting the door on it. You're a dad and you're sentimental about your kids. You're going to want to capture, trust me, 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, 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.

3:15:47I have a question about the hardware, though, that I don't think I've seen the answer yet. so they mentioned the battery life made a joke about it uh up up to two hours um with the external battery pack connected and unlimited time if it's plugged in yet we know it's unlimited until the power goes out anyway um two things on that one uh that battery pack doesn't look too big couldn't they've doubled the size and given it four hours i mean it's it's not you know it's not on the headset it might pull your pants down it's not very big but it's probably very dense 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 so that seems a little weird like it makes sense i mean again you want the batteries out of the heads that you don't want it to be heavy that's the whole reason they have a thing like that's i They totally, the design decision makes sense.

3:16:46But then the decision to also make it kind of mag-safe-y, I mean, that also makes sense is you don't want the cord to snag on something. But also, it's like yanking the power cable out from your desktop Mac. It's kind of, I mean, all right, I just really give that file system a workout, I guess. Just, yeah, it might've 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. And of course, I'm pretty, well, I don't know, we'll find out. like it has to default total blackness right like that's if they if the cord comes off all you see is black right if this is a block it's like a blocking light and there's no other even small on-bar battery to light up the anyway well we'll try it but this definitely seems like a kind of uh you won't get this reference but uh you know neon genesis evangelion type of thing they have these giant mechs in them that in the beginning they uh they are connected to a tether and then as soon as you disconnect them from the tether a timer starts going down when that timer goes down they're out of power and the timer is like three and a half minutes long so it's a it's kind of like a ticking clock for the battle as the battery drains same thing with this only the second that cable just gets disconnected it's game over and you're in total darkness yeah i was kind of i was assuming and kind of hoping that there would be some kind of little grace period to swap the battery but who knows i mean when you think about like the amount of power this is you know look at look at the processors you know it's where it's running the full-blown m2 a whole separate processor called the r1 that i don't i don't think we know yet like how big or power hungry of a processor that is but it's probably not small the rumors were it's like a second m2 basically yeah exactly so if you think about it like this is you know it's powered via what appears to be you know modified usb power delivery um so it's probably gonna have like a roughly 100 watt max i'm guessing this is probably somewhere near a 100 watt device like i mean in terms of power draw that sounds high to me shocked if it's that high, but we'll see.

3:18:39Maybe it's, quote, only 50 watts. That's still a lot of power to be battery-powered continuously. So, I'm guessing this is probably like, they just can't do certain, like, they can't make it be that long-powered by whatever, like, I don't know, a giant capacitor or whatever it would be. They probably can't make it... 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 like where that big giant thing is if you can imagine apple could have put a smaller 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 uh so you know this is definitely kind of a version one it's got that prototype you kind of feel uh but yeah not having a battery at all in it is i mean again it would have because you gotta run the wires and everything it'd 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 although that's another thing i feel like apple uh was pretty careful not to show too much of which is people running around with this thing right i mean it's not like everyone was always sitting down the dad was by like the island in the kitchen or whatever and presumably he's walking around the house but uh not even no games where you're running around or you know like 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.

3:20:30Again, 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 how Apple is thinking of this right now. And I think 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? And in that case, will they sell a bigger battery pack, or would you just plug it in when you're at your desk? Those use cases are a little bit confusing. 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.

3:21:00Well, 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 what looked to be a dongle. So there's like, 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 well you're not going to watch a movie as long as it's less than two hours i guess on the plane well i think you know on the plane i think you'd probably like you know plug into power or something you know i don't know i mean it's also worth pointing out too 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 um i don't think it's that big so they they had the battery yes they had it like out in in like the hands-off area where you could like walk around steve jobs theater and like kind of look at it but you couldn't touch it they had the batteries lying right there next to them which is great like i i'm actually very happy that they didn't just pretend like these things have no wires like they're in their cool fancy demo of having these things look take a picture they had the batteries right there connected to them like resting on the table so that's nice but first of all a hundred watt hour battery is heavy especially for a pocket so i don't think they would do quite that high just for pocket you know weight reasons um but i would say you know just eyeballing it size wise it looks kind of like a 20 000 milliamp hour milliamp hour battery pack and plus you can have multiples even if it was 100 you could just get more than one of those batteries in the plane and just you know i guess your movie would be the whole os shuts down can and you yank the power cord, but it would remember your playback position probably.

3:22:46Maybe. If somebody does the math, like whatever a 20 ,000 milliamp hour battery would power for two hours, that's probably the rough power draw of this thing. So I don't know what that is, maybe 30 or 40, 50 watts, something like that. Up to two hours, which when they say up to it, it makes me think, you would think video playback would be a low stress application. Like there's just one thing, the decode is done in hardware, it's projecting it on a single rectangle in front of you. No, 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 it's not like playing a 3d game or even like you know crunching numbers and in some sort of uh you know everything is a 3d game the whole damn thing is a 3d game i know but like but like it doesn't have a lot of the desktop is a 3d game 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 you know what i mean as opposed to you know playing an actual 3d game with you know millions of polygons you're running through a forest or whatever um and even stuff like oh i want to run i have an ipad app for stable diffusion 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 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 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 all right we really got to wrap this up but a couple of other quick notes uh from the state of the union um first of all they said that they and i'm something like they're 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 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 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.

3:25:38It's only in the U.S. and sometime early next year. So, again, we are six months out at the earliest. But I don't know. This thing looks really cool. It is impressive. 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. And I am definitely interested to try it. I think there's a pretty good chance I'm probably going to end up buying one. Sounds like Marco, you're definitely... You're going to capture a video of your kids. I'm telling you, that's it. 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.

3:26:12It was actually full VR, but the VR scene was of a desk in a nice office, you know what I mean? So what you were seeing, every single pixel of it was was you know virtual like it's nothing it's not transparency at all but they had a bunch of like they had a conference room one and a desk and so if you want to feel like you're in one of these scenes probably half of these scenes were actually virtual you know apple style exposed brick wall light wood uh furniture type of scenario and in that scenario yeah you're using a bunch of floating images as screens but you'd also don't have to worry about the fact that like your room is a mess or your or your uh your office is actually much smaller than the one they're showing in this video and i feel like that's another advantage of to your point of case it's like i was thinking 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 it's like no you're just at a nicer desk in a bigger office so john are you are you feeling like you're in for one of these i know you have a mac pro to buy so probably not i'm saving a lot of money not getting that mac pro let me tell you um i definitely would like to try this i still am very skeptical of my ability to get any utility out of it uh do motion sickness and also i have a 6k screen here and this is not going to be bigger than that uh but here's here's the killer app for me personally i think could possibly be doing what i do already which is watch television on my ipad in bed next to my wife only with less light leakage and and a better display honestly right better display than than my current like non non-oled uh ipad that i use yeah also casey of course you're going to get this because call sheet is going to have to have a widget next to the thing when people watch yes i've thought about this a lot already actually i really honestly have i've been thinking i'm kind of shocked that apple didn't show that it's like people have sound like the the version of amazon x-ray i don't know why everyone hasn't copied amazon x-ray 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 the player in an Amazon video thing.

3:28:13It 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. This was all told. Now we are considering the Vision Pro headset. I thought it was a very impressive WWDC. 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. I am even more sad now that I'm seeing all my friends together and I'm seeing people trying the headset. I'm super sad, but there's always next year. But this was a really strong WWDC, a very, very strong one, and I am very impressed.

3:28:56And I can't wait to talk more about it. 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. You can try it. Maybe send a few dollars our way. It would help us buy this thing that we don't need. But we have to talk about it for our jobs. Yes, exactly. All right. Thank you very much for listening, everybody. Thanks to our sponsors, Squarespace, Collide, and Vector Bar. And thank you, as Casey was just saying, to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. We so appreciate our members.

3:29:32Thank you so, so much. And we will talk to you next week.

3:29:40Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin. Cause it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental. John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him. Cause it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental. And you can find the show notes at atp.fm. And if you're into Twitter, You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's K-C-L-I-S-S-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-G-M-O-R-M-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-Z Syracuse It's accidental, accidental They didn't mean to Accidental, accidental Tech Podcast So long So you want to hear about the food? I do, actually. Yes. Yes, I do. But briefly. Yes, very briefly. There's not that much to say.

3:30:49So I had the press badges here. The press had a little terrace overlooking Cafe Max where they have little snacks before it starts. So you're literally above the heathens below you. Yes. Wow. Wow. It's not that bad, but I mean, technically you are correct. Anyway, and it's, it is very much like a super fancified version of box lunch kind of things, almost, but like way better. So they had, 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 side, or like not even appetizer, like almost like, you know, cocktail party walk around kind of, you know, hors d 'oeuvres.

3:31:34that size little cups of, you know, a bean salad or like little tiny slider made of mushroom or like little tiny turkey sandwich cubes, like that kind of stuff. And it's all really good. And they even had like a chia pudding, like fancy stuff. Like it's exactly what you'd expect from like Apple's high production value for this thing. I thought it was funny speaking of production values too. you know last year they had the issue where it was very it was kind of sunnier than expected last year and a lot of people got sunburned because most of the developer seating was not shaded press was like kind of under the apple canopy of of the ring building so press mostly was in the shape most developers last year were in were in direct sun now apple thought of this they gave you in the little in the little like you know swag bags they give everybody they gave you a little bottle of sunscreen last year and it was good sunscreen too um so this year they decided rather than just give everybody sunscreen again.

3:32:29We're going to build this entire what might be a temporary structure where it was in the same location last year, starting from within Cafe Max, going out through those giant open doors into the field next to the building. 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. 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 in perfect condition as if it was never even there. I'm sure that's what's going on tonight as we sleep.

3:33:06Anyway, yeah, the food, their food is really good. In the visitor center, they had all these juices and everything, and then afterwards, I went over to the visitor center to hang out and download the betas and buy some t-shirts and stuff like that. That's where I watched the State of the Union. 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. Cookies, bags of chips. It was delightful. So this is way, way better than conference food. And yeah, just standard Apple Visitor Center fare, but that's a very high bar relative to anything else you would get at a conference.

3:33:47So thumbs up on the food. Even the coffee was pretty good. For me, that's quite a statement. So yeah, I'm overall very impressed by Apple's food and drink options at the conference. I can't wait to try it next year, Apple.