542: Penguin Camel Monkey Shark

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38:37There was a pretty funny and, well, sad, funny and pretty good article over at the verge i believe this happened uh shortly before we recorded last week we didn't have a chance to talk about it uh this is an article by monica chin which i could summarize as hey the mac pro is kind of bullshit isn't it uh but it's really it's the question it's it's asking and attempting to answer is hey what is the mac pro really for and the official title is the mac pro's biggest problem is the macbook uh john i keep calling on you for this episode i apologize but i feel like so much of this is relevant or your opinions to so much of this are are very relevant so care to tell me who the mac pro is for john i mean this article i feel like is uh we didn't we skipped over it last week at least um and i would just assume it skipped over this week but you two want to talk about it casey wanted to of all things um if you listen to the show it's true there's nothing in this article that's news to you and on top of that i i feel like what this article does is it's kind of more like a human interest story it's not trying to be like hard reporting or trying to tell apple they should do something it's just a fun human interest story because they just talk to a bunch of people and say hey what do you think of the mac pro hey what do you think of the mac pro but it's just a bunch of random people and they say the things you would think they would say um it's good to see mainstream coverage of this computer being potentially disappointing to its target audience or people being confused about who the target audience is like i've watched tons of youtube videos about the latest line of macs because that's what i do on youtube in addition to watching car rebuilding videos uh and they you know everyone is uh aware of the exact thing that we talked about hey there's this giant expensive computer that costs three thousand dollars more than a computer that is exactly as fast pretty much like tons of people on youtube are testing it like but shouldn't this have lower temperatures or shouldn't it have better sustained speed than than the uh mac studio with the m2 ultra like shouldn't there be some advantage and the answer is pretty much no like the mac studio is amazing it's a tiny little computer they seem to be clocked the same the temperatures are very similar neither one of them throttles i mean that where even where there are temperature differences like yeah but they're still really cool and the mac studio is still very quiet and uh obviously we talked about this far there's a bunch of card slots in there and there's no card slots in the mac studio so there's differentiation but people still are struggling with the idea of like okay but if i can't put gpus in there what would i put in there and who wants to use it and like the answers are what they are we've talked about a million times in the show there's no getting around it it's a it's a weird machine whose uh target market or you know whose ideal customer is a narrower slice than it was before because the previous mac pro that was in this case uh could do all the things this one can do and more uh and obviously that one's old and slow now but they waited many many years to replace it and they replaced it with one that does less so they're further narrowing the market for the mac pro and on top of that the mac studio which didn't exist when the 2019 mac pro came out the mac studio exists and the exact same soc the exact same limits on ram cpu all that other stuff and it's just yeah i mean and this article is like oh but most people just buy macbooks yeah of course they do like we know like most people uh don't buy lamborghinis right we know then and the problem is that as marco has pointed out many many times in the show over many many years the laptops are so good now and apple chips are so good in laptops that people who previously needed to get a desktop performance don't even need to do that anymore um and in that environment the mac pro has not moved up market to say but you know what now the mac pro is going to even be even more insane and it's going to be so incredibly fast and nope nope it's not as fast as a mac studio it's just for people who want card slots so you know i i will probably i mean i feel like we'll probably end up reissuing some variant of the mac pro believe shirt in four years when the next rumors of the replacement uh mac pro come around because honestly uh we need i think we need a better mac pro than this in the meantime i'm glad this one exists instead of none but boy we need something different so that we don't have to see youtube videos and articles like this one that say what's the deal with the mac pro seems kind of weird and you know what i agree it is kind of weird and not great yeah i think one way to look at this is you know first of all the answer to who is the mac pro for i don't think the verge article really did a good job of answering it because i what i've been told over and over again especially from people people who work in this area or who from various you know apple people the answer is basically recording studios like this is a computer this is a mac it's a mac studio ironically for recording studios or video people that's again as apple apple gate if you want to capture 24 8k streams at the same time this is the only mac that can do it right and so it's for a very small percentage of people but i i think the way to look at it is it's you know in the same way that apple has in recent years made a rack mount version of the mac pro well who is that for the answer is very few people but whoever it is for they probably buy a bunch of them and so it's worth making that configuration for them like like that person said last time the guy who said he doesn't understand why they make the tower one because as far as he's concerned he's only interested in the rack mount one because the tower one is just inconvenient because he's going to put it in a rack and that's where all his other crap is for his audio thing and so what he was like why did they even bother making the tower it's so dumb just give me the rack mount right and it's like if you are using it in a recording studio guess what they're full of racks tons of recording studio equipment is rack mount and you know for all the same reasons that we use racks in data centers because when you have a bunch of stuff and you gotta you know it's it works better and it's more convenient and offers a lot of a lot of advantages anyway so you know in the same way that there has been this rack mount configuration of the mac pro that's got to be a super low volume product that almost no one relatively speaking to the whole market buys but it's still worth them making it i think similarly now we have to look at the mac pro itself maybe as the pci slot version of the mac studio like that is just a configuration of the mac studio that happens to add these fairly expensive components like i know people were trying to justify the price a little bit by by looking up like the PCI bridge chip they're using in there I think it's like a$700 part the the power supply they're they're using in there is a massive you know it's like a 1400 watt power it's the same one from my Mac Pro they didn't change it because you know why it's kind of like when they didn't change the power supply on the Mac Mini when it went to Apple Silicon it's like we've already got this one and it's over provisioned by like 10x and the only reason the power supply is so over provisioned is if you assume that the cards can't use that power in my Mac Pro you can use all that power you can put in giant gpus that suck the power up but i think you might have trouble finding non-gpu pci cards enough of them if you fill every single slot to use up that uh power supply because i'm pretty sure it's exactly the same one in mine and so it is more than and that's just cost savings like why bother making a different power supply we've got one it's more than enough just keep shipping it yeah like they they fitted the power supply to that that's like the most power you can draw out of a us 15 amp circuit and it's like so they will never need a bigger one for most u.s uses so like all right fine let's fit this and it'll be fine and yeah and now as john said like i don't know how you'd even use all that power with the small number of cards that are going to be compatible with this thing but it's there and so there are some reasons just like for the rack of version there are some reasons for this to cost more than the mac studio but none of those reasons are relevant to almost any mac buyers anymore that doesn't mean there aren't any for whom they're relevant but as we've discussed the market for that is getting smaller and smaller and smaller and i don't think that's necessarily a bad thing you know i don't want a giant tower if i don't need one if it doesn't offer any benefits to my life and it doesn't i don't even as we were saying like i don't even run a desktop anymore i have a laptop that is serving as a desktop and then when i go on trips i can bring it with me it's amazing and it's like most people will have their needs totally well solved without going to something like the mac pro and that's fine i do think they still need to make it and keep that category healthy though and that's what we were saying you know over the last few weeks about this like i don't think they're doing a good job of keeping that category healthy but that being said they have more data than we do they probably see as well they see way better than we do that it's a very dramatically shrinking category and they would be totally happy to just sell like all their awesome laptops and a small number of mass market desktops like like the iMac 27 like they'd be totally happy to just sell those forever as we pointed out before it's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy though they keep making this computer averages in terms of fewer and fewer people they sell fewer and fewer and by the way from what i've seen in apple's casual statements the mac studio seems to be selling well of course they don't tell you sales numbers but from what they've said in the press they've they've bracketed the mac studio saying like that it's selling well are we happy with how it's doing are we were surprised at how well it's doing because i think the mac studio we haven't talked about this too much but the mac studio fills an important need because apple had just basically been selling laptops because that's what people want right and then and then there was this huge jump to oh and if you want a desktop the only one that we still said is it sells either the all-in-one iMac which is kind of like a more consumer thing or this gigantic increasingly expensive tower and the mac studio is perfect because people are like i just want this to put this on people's desks for for them to use whatever the application is at work and i don't want it to be a giant tower i laptops have a screen that people aren't going to use a keyboard they're not going to use a trackpad they're not going to use because they're all using tablets or whatever mac studio is an important product for apple it is a taller more powerful mac mini and i think it is perfect for tons of use cases and it does take some pressure off of the mac pro in my opinion it should free up the mac pro to be even more insane and have a you know the quad cpu in there whatever and that's and as we talked about when the 2019 mac pro came out you don't design this case and get the manufacturing facilities for it and ship it on a single computer so pretty much no matter what they did if the mac pro was not canceled the next one was going to be in this case and lo and behold it is because that's not apple's way to go with these tower cases they don't make one of these towers they did way back in the day like the g3 g4 you know quicksilver mirror drive door they kept revising that it was kind of the same case but they did make lots of revisions if you look compare the the blue and white g3 all the way up to whatever the last one was which was i think the mirrored drive door one uh there are actually a lot of differences in the case but general the general shape was the same but this giant case it's dumb to put an m2 ultra in there like it's a waste of space they have way more cooling than they need they did weird stuff like they moved the ssds out of a place where they had air blowing over them to a place where they don't probably because i guess they don't need it but it is weird like the ssds are now where the ram used to be and but there's no air blowing on them anyway this case is massively over over provisioned and overpowered for what they put in it but what that means since i'm not getting rid of this case is if they keep making mac pros they can't they have a chance the next time they make a mac pro put tons of stuff in there that can't fit in a mac studio put the quad in there so how are we going to cool that thing that's what this case is for it's huge it's got three gigantic fans it's got so much room so much space for so much cooling so much power with that power supply right so much expense because you know this is your top price product and this one is cheaper than the previous one because the previous one you can make really, you know.

49:47So this case is sitting there waiting for Apple to make a computer worthy of it. Not worthy of it, but that takes advantage of it. And the M2 Ultra does not take advantage of it. The M2 Ultra is perfectly happy in the M2 studio. Again, I encourage people to take a look at some YouTube videos where they check the temperatures. The M2 Ultra in the studio stays so cool and the fans stay idle and it never throttles. Like in that tiny little cube. So of course it doesn't have any problems in this huge case. it's like la-di-da like again half the fan two two out of the three giant front fans are just blowing air through nothing out the back right so i really hope that you know if you build it the nerds will come like this they built this case it's sitting there waiting for something to come even the pci chip marker that you mentioned the expensive pci bridge thing like the m2 ultra does not have the number of pci lanes that the xeon did even and so they have all those slots in it the reason they're able to have those slots is they have multiple slots feeding into a single PCI switch inside, not a single switch, but there's a switching fabric inside the M2 Ultra.

50:46So you can't have like all the 16x slots, you can't have all of them having 16x speeds at the same time because they're sharing bandwidth. That wasn't the case with the Xeon because they had enough PCI Express lanes for all those slots, right? So it's not even like the M2 Ultra is able to correctly support the number of slots they put in this thing, but they just, you know, they did, they did what they did. They said, well, I hope you're not using them all at the same time at maximum bandwidth and if you are you're going to get bottlenecked a little bit so i really hope they eventually make another mac pro worthy of this case um otherwise things are looking grim for this case yeah and i think you know when you look at you know i was just saying how many of us are just totally fine with laptops now who used to need desktops for our work um you know when you look at how the m1 max in the pro laptops compares to the m1 ultra in the studio and mac pro it's a 2x chip you know you can get twice the cores if you go to the to the desktop mac studio or mac pro well if the mac pro is able to offer the quad at some point then and you can get another jump of 2x the cpu and gpu power by going from the studio to the pro that gives the pro a lot more reason to exist and if you look like i they had this this um they had like a disassembled new mac pro in the hands-on area uh in wbc this year and took a couple of pictures and they had there was no heat sink attached to the m1 ultra chip in it so you could see how much space the m1 ultra takes up in that case and it takes up like a quarter of the motherboard like it's not a small chip it's a huge chip but that's the whole computer like the rest of the motherboard is empty yes and so so with with some engineering like you know they probably couldn't put one like in front of the pci slots because that would block the length of the slots but like in in that like kind of upper right area where the hard drive bracket goes that you have like they could move stuff around to fit two of these in some form however they would interconnect whether it be one giant quad or whether it be two of these side by side with some kind of interconnect between them i don't know but there is room for it but you can tell like you actually do need a case of this caliber like of this size to be able to fit two of those m1 ultra dies and also have card slots so like it would make sense for the case to be this big if that was the goal it makes no sense for any other reason but again maybe that's the future plan here maybe they couldn't get it together for this one but maybe that is the future plan where you have kind of you know the the m1 max offering like you know 1x of this big performance you have the uh mac studio offering 2x and then you have the mac pro offering up to 4x that would give this product a great reason to exist um and until then we patiently wait and hope it doesn't get killed.

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55:17apparently we are playing top four today uh because in the show notes it says marco's top four vision pro challenges and price ain't one of them yeah i've been kind of waffling on this topic for a little while kind of drafting it in my head and i finally took some notes on it and wanted to actually bring to the show so i'm going to do this in the in the spirit of my other show top four start with honorable mentions yes so as casey said this is top four vision pro challenges This is like things I think will be challenges for the Vision Pro, and price is not one of them for this discussion. It's not to say it won't be a challenge, but I think these are like the kind of bigger picture things that even if the price comes down, I think these are still going to be challenges.

55:56So, first off, honorable mentions. Scrolling. Over the last few days, I've been asking various friends who had the press demo, how comfortable is it and how easy is it to scroll a lot on Vision Pro? because when you look at the smartphone era, and of course it also applies to iPads, but especially on phones, scrolling, especially vertical scrolling through a feed or a list is like the primary interaction of smartphones. Whether you're browsing a social feed and you're just kind of doom scrolling or scrolling forever, or whether you're scanning through a list of email or whatever, list views everywhere, scrolling is like the primary interaction method on phones the way vision i've been watching the vision pro demos i have the simulator installed and obviously it's nothing like using the real thing because you're using a mouse and in my case a ps5 controller to uh which works great by the way thank you for that last week um scrolling though for whatever it's worth everyone i've asked this question to has said it's fine that scrolling is totally comfortable but everyone only had like 30 minute pr demos and i and i think scrolling is going to be a little bit less comfortable and less awesome to do a large amount of with the interaction model the physical interaction model of vision pro and i think that's going to dramatically change how apps have to be built how they have to be laid out and the sessions even back this up in terms of like layout and design suggestions that apple's making and also just what kind of apps will succeed on this platform and largely i think that might be a very good thing in the sense that like i think the the era of doom scrolling forever on our phones has has overall not been positive for society i don't think uh but it's something interesting that we're having this major platform come out where one of the most common interaction patterns may not be comfortable or practical or nice to do a lot a large amount of can you describe the two mechanisms i think there's two of them that i'm aware of to scroll on vision pro um so i i are there too so the one i know of is you know so obviously you you look at what you want to you know select you look at it and then you tap you you'll pinch your fingers together and the way you scroll apparently is you just kind of like grab it with your fingers as you're looking at it and just like pull your hand up like it's like you know kind of make a as if you're like picking up a piece of string off a table like that kind of motion um and forgive me i could be wrong i didn't go to demo but i could i could be wrong uh but i it seems like so john is there a second way to do it what's the second way yeah so that's that's the one and i well i'll tell you the second one in a second but i was also thinking exactly the same thing when i saw the demos i didn't mention it on the show but i was like scrolling stuff might be weird because if you think about it so you mentioned the smartphone obviously we sit there most people scroll with their thumbs right it becomes an unconscious thing we don't think about it um on the the personal computer front uh on the in the laptop world on the mac world anyway two finger scrolling on a trackpad becomes second nature once you're used to it um and even before that for the entire world on desktop computers we had the mouse wheel uh where once you get used to having a wheel on your mouse and you're looking at a web page or something you scroll without even thinking your finger just finds the wheel or if you have an apple mouse you swipe across the surface those are all options actions that we do without thinking about it is an unconscious total disappeared interface for all those different things phone laptop desktop we scroll without thinking this one i can imagine getting to a similar place but the difference it has with all those ones i just described is it's way larger motions right so yes you look at the thing you want to scroll you make the pinch so far all those motions are tiny but now once you've made the pinch you have to move the hand that you have pinched up or down to scroll up or down and unlike all the other ones where we're just going to swipe swipe swipe you know with two fingers on a mouse wheel on the actual screen uh i think you would have to like release the pinch go back down pinch again pull up go back down pinch again it's the most complicated and largest motion which is why i think they added the second way to do it which is and again i have not tried this but i believe i've read about this is that you can just take a finger and swipe like you're swiping a screen now you don't have to reach your hand out and touch the virtual like screen floating in front of you i don't just like the pinch it doesn't matter where your hand is you can leave your hand in your lap but i believe there is a motion that is a lot like swiping at let's say the screen of an upright ipad that happens to be an inch away from your finger and you can scroll like that and i think that if that is real and i'm remembering correctly will be way easier than the look pinch grab unpinch look pinch grab or you know forget about the looking just pinch grab unpinch it but it'd be like moving a mouse on a very small mouse pad you gotta have to constantly pick it up and re reposition it that's how we used to scroll we used to grab the little scroll thumb and we'd move it up and down that has the same problem as pinching is that okay well i ran out of mouse pad and i gotta move up again whereas spinning that wheel you don't need to move the mouse at all and you've got as many spins as you want and you never run out of mouse pad and same thing with swiping so i think swiping will be better than pinching but both swiping and pinching i think will be more difficult to become second nature just because you know these things work by cameras looking at your hands which is harder problem than a wheel knowing when you've spun it or two or a trackpad knowing when you swipe two fingers across it yeah so if if that whole flick thing that you're talking about if that works that's great i didn't know about that so that that would largely improve this but you know please someone who had a demo please run in and tell us if i'm imagining things but i'm pretty sure that was a thing yeah but you know i think overall though like what you said earlier is is important though which is i think what we don't have a good idea of yet by not having used one is how much hand movement is actually required to to trigger a lot of these gestures because if it's it's got to be because it's camera based it's got to be a little bit less precise with very small movements than than you know a mouse or trackpad or so or a touchscreen and you're going to run out of room no matter what like say they made it like oh you don't need to move your hand a lot if you move your hands an inch that's the whole that's a huge amount of scrolling it's like well i don't want that because now i have no precision it's like okay but it's very precise so but now i have to move my foot and my hand up and down two feet to scroll that's the beauty of swipes on a screen or on a thing is you can just repeatedly do that gesture you can do a long swipe a bunch of little short ones it is very flexible in terms of not requiring you to do any large motions whereas no matter what choice they make for for the for the pinch and move motion they're going to have some problem if they make it so you don't have to move a lot now there's no sensitivity if they make it sensitive now you got to move a lot which is why i hope that swipe thing i'm not just imagining it yeah so anyway that remains to be seen um one other honorable mention before i move to the actual top four is people's physical spaces like we this is another thing where we don't really have a good idea yet of some of the details like for instance we mentioned airplane seats how like well there's lots of places in real life where if you're trying to get this ar mode and you know this blended view of reality and your windows and stuff um many physical places where people do work are not set up to have this much space in front of the user i mean honestly most people's desks like if you think it bigger most people's desk my desk included the wall and i mean the monitor in front of me is about an arm's length away the wall is about a foot behind that like i don't actually have enough space in my desk chair in front of me before i hit a wall to actually have the proper like roughly two meter focus distance to not cause vac like we talked about the last two weeks and i think most if in general if you have a desk against a wall or a cubicle wall you're gonna have the same problem and most people's desks are against walls i think so so you know i i think there's gonna be and and you can say look then you can turn on mount hood or whatever and you can have half Mount Hood in front of you and that's the whole point.

1:04:01Well, then you lose a significant value of the pass-through. You lose orientation in your space. You lose some of your awareness of your surroundings. There is a significant trade-off to turning on those virtual environments that I think most people doing most of their work most of the time are not going to want that. They're going to want the pass-through mostly and then put windows around their room. But I think this is going to be fundamentally physically inconvenient for a lot of people's actual workspaces. So, you know, that again remains to be seen. All right, to the actual top four. This is what the show is like too, by the way.

1:04:36And you're like, what, didn't he just do two? No, he didn't. Those don't count. Is it top six? Is it whatever? Just go with it. Number four, text input. This, I think, still largely remains to be seen. Now, if you look at text input on Macs and on iPhones and on iPads and hell on the watch. You know, the watch basically doesn't have it because it sucks, and that's fair. You know, the physical realities of that are pretty harsh. And so there's a reason why we're not typing long documents on our watches. Vision Pro supports Siri dictation, of course, in a nice, integrated, convenient way with, like, search fields and stuff like that.

1:05:15And that's fine. As we know, Siri is awesome and never gets anything wrong, and it's super reliable and fast. Correct. That's great. So we'll probably all be using Siri 100 % of the time. but for the small percentage of the time where that may not work for us um obviously you can do the thing where you configure where you connect a physical keyboard and i think that's going to be what most people do in their workspaces if you actually if you're actually going to have like a desk or a table setup where you're going to be using the vision pro a lot i bet most people are going to connect a keyboard if they're going to actually be using it for productivity tasks now if you're just using it to like watch movies and stuff who cares it's fine but if you're actually using it for like productivity tasks where you're going to be typing in documents and emails and stuff i think you're going to probably want a physical keyboard connected but i think other than that like for situations where you don't have the bluetooth keyboard connected we've seen they have like kind of an in-air keyboard that you can kind of poke at i don't think that's going to provide any kind of level of speed i think it's going to be a lot like you know you use your two index fingers and you go poke poke poke poke like alternating between your two index fingers that's going to be kind of what that keyboard is like in all likelihood now again we'll see when we get them i could be wrong it could be a lot better and in fact you know i give them credit usually their stuff is better than i think it would be before i've tried it so give them credit this might not be a big problem but i think text input is going to be very clumsy on it we also have issues like cursor movement selection things that go along with not having a keyboard or mouse that you know again when you when we saw the iphone and ipad come around they had to deal with these things they they still have to deal with them on some level they're still not perfect they're still not convenient um but doing a lot of text work is still way better on a physical keyboard uh and with a mouse or trackpad than it is on a touch device on these things on the keyboard by the way that's something that i believe nobody got a demo of like the demos did not include that keyboard that floated in the air so nobody has tried it i guess it just wasn't ready yet uh and related to cursor stuff there were some uh massed on post from steve trouton smith i'll try to get the links into the notes uh where he figured out how to turn on mouse emulation in the simulator i don't know if this is going to be a thing in vision os no one has vision os we just have the simulator but you can get a cursor in the simulator that looks a lot like the ipad cursor uh and you know so if you had a physical keyboard you could also in theory at least with the simulator have a physical mouse and move around the cursor the interesting thing he noted about the cursor is that it you can't make it leave the app right so the cursor is is like you can't drag the cursor from one floating window to like you know you're in safari and you're moving this cursor around you can't move it over through 3d space to like your music player window so it's like it's a captive cursor like in games right unless you look at music right so if you look at the next window then all of a sudden your cursor is there and the cursor can move within like you can have you know they have those little floating ornaments like the little side panels and stuff you can move the cursor to those fine but this is basically to prevent your cursor from being lost in the ether because the cursor mouse is a 2d you know pointing device right if you had the cursor suddenly be like in 3d space how do i get to the window that's like back there you can't you can't push the mouse in z direct you know what i mean so the way they do it is it's a 2d cursor for your 2d window and if you want to be in a different 2d window look at that window and now your cursor is over there but i have no idea if this is just a thing for the simulator or for a real thing but in those situations like you said where you're sitting at a desk and you have a physical keyboard i think people would want a physical mouse and by the way if they have that it would solve the scrolling problem because they would just use the scroll wheel or the scroll surface on their mouse so this is another mystery the mode is there it seems like it would be useful i hope it is enabled in the real device yeah me too all right number three and this i think i think i might have actually ranked this too low but we'll see number three digital personas so this is the this there's this is a multifaceted feature one part of it is the view of your eyes that is shown on the exterior screen to everyone around you and the other the other part of it that we've seen demoed so far is how you look to other people in facetime calls when you are using a vision pro because they don't have actual like full light and cameras to look at your eyes and face to see what you are actually looking like because you're in a dark headset inside so they read your facial expressions presumably with like the ir sensors or whatever inside and then they have this computer generated simulated like 3d rendering kind of deep fake version of you and the dem the impressions that people have reported from the press demo that had a little bit of this um seem to be all over the place generally not good uh or at least neutral um i think the digital personas are going to have significant drawbacks.

1:09:58The biggest problem is it doesn't really look like they're talking really to you. It looks like a deepfake AI version of you. And that is going to, first of all, cause a bit of a problem in the sense that if you're on a FaceTime call and you're the one person in Vision Pro, everyone else is going to look better to you because they're going to be the regular video heads. They're going to look better to you than you are to them. Will people feel comfortable talking to your digital persona and not to you? Will you feel pressured or will there actually be policies to not use a Vision Pro when you're on a work call or maybe a call with your significant other when you're traveling or something like that?

1:10:42The other option is you can use your Memoji, which I feel like is better in some ways, but way worse than others. Can you imagine being on a call with your spouse with your Memoji? They'd be like, get this thing out of my face. I'd rather not see you. And just imagine, like if you're talking about something serious like you know you got to talk about like you know like a parent has cancer and it's your emoji talking about you're a cartoon head yeah like you know that's horrendous right so like i think the the digital personas are going to not be well liked by the people you're talking to who are not on vision pros and i think that's going to cause significant um ostracization ostracization however the hell we can say that you'll be ostracized you will be ostracized for using them and you might not want to use it for a lot of your calls which will then reduce the utility of it and I think that will harm its spread we talked about this when it came out that the thing that Apple did not talk about at all that Facebook and I think maybe you and Microsoft have talked about a lot is the idea of digital presence where you feel like you're in a room with people your avatar is in the room and it's being controlled by you and their avatar is in the room and it's being controlled by them and you're both sitting at a virtual, you know, conference table and you're having a work meeting and it feels like you're both there sharing a physical space.

1:11:55And Vision Pro and their demos and in their presentation had literally none of that. Like even the thing where you're talking about the digital personas was explicitly not to show to feel like you're both in the same space. What it feels like is you're sitting on your couch and there's a disembodied floating hologram head like you're being spoken to in Star Wars or Star Trek. But like, but they're not there. They're clearly like, this is a projection of my head and shoulders floating up in the air in your living room it is not oh this feeling of presence where we're both sitting at the same conference table because that if for multiple people in vr headsets and like especially in like a work environment the feeling that you are both on even playing field and both sharing this fake digital space with each other is a for the people who have tried it have said it is you know a it is much better than talking on a zoom call right probably not as good as actually being in the same physical space but for people who can't physically be in the same space because they're in different offices on different coasts or whatever, being at a virtual meeting room can feel better and higher bandwidth and more comfortable and more effective for communication than just looking at each other's head and shoulders in a Zoom call.

1:12:58But Vision Pro does none of that. And they could, like Apple could have pitched it as like, hey, everybody in your organization gets Vision Pros and then you can have meetings around a virtual conference table. It has a technology for it. There's no reason they can't do it, but they didn't. That's not a thing that they are pitching this device for and it's not a thing that at least in as far as we know this device is capable of without some kind of third-party thing but that for everything you're talking about marco this presence thing is predicated on the idea that every other person who is quote-unquote present with you also has a headset on so you're on an even playing field but for for family calls nobody wants to do a facetime call with you where they can't see your face when you're calling with relatives they want to see you no matter how terrible your lighting is and how you can't hold the phone steady they still want to see you they want to see the junk that's on your couch they want it they want to see you they do not want to see the digital version of you at all they certainly don't want to see your memoji and you know in work context it's less important and that's why they're pitching like in work context it's important for the other people to see your expressions so in that case in a memoji may actually even be better than the digital avatar because the facial expressions are more exaggerated but honestly i think the people at work would get more information out of your actual face as well and you know what they can't see your actual face when you're wearing a mask over it i mean i do wonder if people would say that would take a facetime call with the headset on because then at least people can see like batman style like the lower part of your mouth and they could tell if you're george clooney or val kilmer or whatever or michael keaton because at least they can see some part of your face and the rest of you would look silly and dorky but i feel like you'd rather see that than uh then you know you're uh you're me from nintendo or whatever although i do feel like me's are a better system than the emojis Let me give you a hot take.

1:14:37From everything I've seen, and granted, I did not try the device, and certainly I agree with what Marco said, that the opinions have been mixed on this, more negative than positive. But based only on the keynote and whatever associated videos came out immediately thereafter from Apple, I didn't think it was that bad. I thought it actually looked sufficient. I don't necessarily disagree with anything that you guys said. You know, obviously it'd be better to see a real person, especially if you're discussing something that's really deep and personal. But I don't think for everyday use it's that bad.

1:15:09I really, really don't. We'll see. I have a feeling I'm going to eat these words when they come out or whenever I have a chance to actually try one, even if it's in a year and a half or two years. But I was not as turned off by this as a lot of other people, especially Mike. Like I was listening to Upgrade earlier today and Mike was briefly, or I think it was Upgrade, maybe it was actually thoroughly considered. It was apparently an all-Mike day here for me at the Bliss household. But anyway, I was listening to something that Mike was on and he was saying again how he was very, very turned off by the whole persona thing.

1:15:42And I trust his experience and certainly he has actual experience with it. But it really honestly did not seem that bad to me. one of the things that apple is leaving on the table with this whole uh a digital version of yourself is apple historically has not been super with the memoji they're a little bit into this but not really like the the idea of having an avatar having some kind of image that represents you in the world of the computer is ages old right this even the term avatar is i forget how dated it is but it's from many decades ago right um and historically on the internet people have used the system of having avatars and usernames to the same extent as a way to present themselves differently than they present in the real world because in the real world you have you don't have much of a choice you are you you look like what you look like you are what you are you can pick your clothes and everything but in general you have limited control over your appearance in the real world but in the virtual world you could be anything you want on the internet nobody knows you're a dog right you could present however you wanted you can try to make yourself look better taller more sophisticated cooler you know whatever thing you want to do you could present as a different gender as a different you know race as a different location you could pretend you could be an aol chat room and you're 13 year old and you're pretending you're 23 and you're from a city and you're really from the country right that whole phenomenon of being able to present a different you to the digital world things like headsets and virtual avatars are perfect for that and i think part of what you're seeing about the the uh virtual what is it called again the digital personas is that it is kind of an idealized representation of you it's very symmetrical uh it's just kind of a scan of your face with kind of an idealized body behind it uh you know you can look better in your persona than you do in your real life where your hair is not combed and you know like you just woke up and you're wearing an undershirt with stains on it or whatever but hey your your avatar looks the same as always fresh and chipper and the exact amount of stubble that you want and your hair is the way you want it to be and you got to rescan your face five times and if apple wanted to they could say you know what you can change this a little bit oh do you wish your ears didn't stick out quite as much hey just move this slider and push your ears in a little bit or whatever memojis let you do that you can present a memoji as a penguin you could be a camel right you can be whatever you want in the not maybe not the memoji like the what are they called the emoji ones they have some flexibility there to present differently albeit within the limited world of cartoon stuff or whatever but in general apple had wanted to go there they give you the ability to look kind of silly and to be a penguin or a camel they give you the ability to make a cartoon version of your safe of yourself as long as your head shape is the one head shape they offer which is the major weakness that memojis have over me's and nintendo's me's because nintendo's me's i could make one looks like me because my head is long and skinny and i got a big nose you can't do that with memoji there's no long and skinny heads right and you can try to make your nose big but it just makes everyone have this little button nose and it just makes the button bigger it's not you know it doesn't look anything like me it just looks like a generic doll with one doll mold right so i do feel like apple is kind of you know not leaving money on the table but like not reaching for a thing that is within their grasp which is okay the limitation is people can't see your real face that's a bummer and it excludes a lot of things where people will want to see your face but what about scenarios where not seeing your face is a feature not a bug where not seeing your face is good let people use this amazing technology you have to let people present themselves as something different than they are with higher fidelity than they've ever been able to before not limited to just penguin camel monkey shark but just let you know let them pick anything they want again this might be a third party opportunity or whatever but this is another area that apple didn't go into they didn't say this lets you present a different face to the world they didn't say this will let you be the tiger that you've always wanted to be and hang out with your other jungle pals in the giant jungle together where you have this amazing sense of presence they could have done that but they didn't even even for games like tons of games let you build your character my destiny character is looks nothing like me it's a character that i built i picked the fashion for i pick all the shaders or whatever that's part of the game part of the game is doing that and then this would have a way to do that for yourself for your entire body because they can't see your actual body but so far apple has not wanted to touch that yeah all right we'll see how that goes but yeah digital personas honestly i i think it has a lot of potential to really hold back this product in some of its initial use cases and especially socially you know facetime you know other social things but especially facetime so anyway that and even i would extend the digital persona you know challenge to also the display of the eyes on the outside because that is based on i believe the same kind of thing that's got to look really good for that feature to justify existing if it doesn't look really good people are going to think you're look people are going to think you're a weirdo wearing this thing for a while and i think it's going to it's going to increase the weirdo risk and increase the ostracization i gotta find a different word you're preaching for that one um if if the if the eye display on the outside is is not really really good and doesn't look really creepy it's it's not going to look really good but the reasons you know like it's an lenticular display we know we know what lenticular displays look like they give multiple you can put multiple images each of which is viewable from a different angle but the number of angles is not unlimited the number of angles is very limited and the the fact is that the image is several inches away from your eyes are going to be so i don't think it's going to look good but it does have a functional component that i think probably justifies its existence and the functional component is to let the people who are around you know whether you can see them or not that's the function of that and they could have put two cartoon eyes there in fact they probably have an emoji version that did that right that's the function if it's all wavy siri dust or whatever they know that you can't see them but if it's eyeballs they can see you right and same thing with the breakthrough when you walk up to them and you break through you will suddenly see their eyes and they'll be able to see you and by the way since it's their actual eyes and they look at you you'll be able to tell they're looking at you so i don't think it's going to look good but i think the functional part of it is important enough that it's good for them to do as good a job as they can and in all the videos also by the way It's kind of like the thing that they would do in movies where the special effects aren't that good.

1:21:57It's like, well, just this scene will be in the dark. So, yeah, this puppet doesn't look great, but it's a dark scene. No one can tell. And so the eyes on the mask, like all the images I've seen, all the PR images, it's very kind of like dark and smoky in there. And that hides the fact that it's a lenticular display and it's kind of weird and the fidelity is not great. and you know and it's it's got to be essentially a like night vision view of your eyes because it's not like they're going to shine lights on your face inside the thing you know speaking of movies in every movie where someone's like a space helmet or they're underwater there's tons of lights inside the helmet shining on their face so you can see the actors acting right but in actual spacesuits they don't have tons of light shining the astronaut's eyes they'd be blinded in there like but you know in real spacesuits that you know it's different anyway there's no lights inside there shining on your eyeballs constantly it would be blinding like the screens are the light shining on your eyes but the screens may be showing something that's dark at the moment so it's got to be kind of like an ir night vision type of thing you know images of your eyes that they then i guess artificially colorize or enhance the color aspect of it like that's why the fidelity of the eye images aren't great because it is an actual i believe actual live image of your eyes but it is massively processed to try to make them look better than they would because your actual eyes are currently in darkness with tiny screens pointing at them yeah it that if i had to guess looking at this product and seeing like you know here this is this ideal feature that's that's kind of has the potential to be a little bit off putting a little bit weird in practice kind of like when the apple watch launched and had all that digital touch stuff and and it turned out that was kind of weird for most people and it went away quickly it would not surprise me if that eye display on the outside changes dramatically in like the next one or two iterations of the product and possibly goes away completely in favor of some some kind of simpler indicator because it i think that will prove to be both maybe not worth its component cost and also um maybe just a little too weird for people i could see it being cut for cost on a low cost model maybe but i think it's hard to give up the idea of showing real eyes just because it's not just that that you can see the eyes it's also where the eyes are pointing and the easiest way to do that is to show them the actual eyes i mean again you could do cartoon eyes i suppose but that i feel like that would be even weirder yeah all right that was number three number two vision pro big challenge this is a big one the software ecosystem this i think is going to i haven't heard a lot of people talk about this but i think this is going to be the big story about it after like a year when you look at the software ecosystem the environment that vision pro is running in we don't know much about like what's going to be allowed and stuff we don't know things like app review and stuff like that but we can be pretty sure now that we have the sdk especially we can be pretty sure generally what it's like and we can make some pretty good guesses that i think are going to end up being correct so number one this is an ios-based system and it's going to be app store only in all likelihood so when you're looking at this as a platform you know i think where this is going to fit in in people's computing lives it depends on who you ask and what their plans are, I think for many people it's going to be a very nice entertainment device.

1:25:10That's going to, and that's fine. And if that's all it ever is, if it's kind of like an Apple TV in that like you use this for a small number of consumption entertainment based apps and you don't do a lot of work on it, that's still a big market and that's still a powerful product. So I think that's, I'm not trying to speak down about it in this way. I think we don't know yet how this is going to end up, but I think it's going to end up either being like the Apple TV, the iPad, or the Mac. And in all three of those cases, and maybe somewhere in between for a lot of people, but in all three of those cases, that creates some difficult software environments.

1:25:50So number one thing is if you're going to use this thing for productivity apps, you're going to have many or all of the same problems you have on iPads for productivity apps. So it's, again, app store only. That's going to rule out a whole bunch of types of apps and a whole bunch of developers that don't want to deal with apple or don't want to give them their cut and they just won't be there you're not going to have like you know terminals and file system access you're not going to have third-party system utilities you're not going to have stuff like rogue amoeba's audio utilities you're not going to have window management utilities you're not going to have you know cloud backup providers and stuff like that no if it if it can't run on an ipad for you know policy or you know tech design reasons it's probably not going to run on vision pro complicating factor on that especially though is that the ipad launched to a fairly high volume market this is not that this is going to be a very low volume market it's going to be pretty hard to make money there for a while and it's going to be pretty hard to have growth because it's just going to be a low volume market for a while now also compounding on that as we're playing with the sdk more and you know seeing how our apps look and everything I think Vision Pro is going to end up kind of like the iPad in that you can run your iPad code fairly unmodified on it but it's not going to be good and if you actually want your app to be at all good and not look really crappy on this platform or not work really poorly on this platform you're going to have to custom design for this platform you're going to have to make tweaks you're going to have to maybe rewrite some parts of your interface or redesign whole parts of your interface it's not as easy as just porting over an ipad app with no changes also what we're seeing so far non-native components will look and work even worse in vision os than they do on ios and the mac in my recent uh rewrite of overcast up until a few days ago i was using a custom toolbar on top of my my new three column layout that i'm writing and there were just certain like behavioral and appearance details that I could just not get to be the same as their default toolbars in Vision OS.

1:28:03And I just dumped my custom one and just started using the standard one because it was just easier and it ended up working better and looking better in Vision OS. And I lost some little details in the iOS version, but not a lot. And it's easier to just use theirs for this purpose. That pattern where you were doing something custom and it worked fine in iOS, but it doesn't look or work right on vision os that pattern will be seen a lot that extends to not only just little design choices you make in your ios apps or a little implementation details like well i made this toolbar it's not really using a ui toolbar because it had some limitations so i made one that looks and works the same well on vision os it doesn't this extends even further to if you want to maybe say use something like electron or some kind of cross-platform framework those apps are going to be even worse on vision os than they are on ios and mac they're going to stand out like a sore thumb they're not going to work right they're not going to look right even more so and so when you combine all of that you know you have a low volume platform you you need custom design for it you're going to have to deal with the app store and all the restrictions and all the fees they're in what you're probably going to see is pretty low adoption especially by big companies i seriously doubt that you're going to see google microsoft adobe you know porting their big apps to this platform anytime soon maybe they'll give lip service here and there to get in the keynote here and there make some deal but you know google and like these big companies have enough trouble keeping up with the ipad as a platform they mostly do a pretty you know half-butted job of keeping up with the ipad vision os is going to be even worse because it is going to be a similar amount of custom work as keeping up with the iPad, but with way less volume to make up for it.

1:29:50So I think the software ecosystem is going to be very, very challenging. Now, you can also look and say, well, look, you can run your iPad app in a window. Well, are they going to let companies opt out like they did on M1 Macs? Because I'll tell you one thing, I frequently will go look for an iPad app so I can run it on my M1 Mac, and it's not there, because the developer opted out all the time. The bigger the company, the more likely they are to have opted out. But even a lot of small developers opt out. There are so many iPad apps I would love to use on my Mac that I can't because they just unchecked that box that says, allow me to run an M1 Mac.

1:30:30If there's a similar mechanism for iPad apps on Vision OS, you will see just as many developers opt out. The software ecosystem of Vision OS is going to be the big challenge that we will talk about for years to come, just like we've talked about it on the iPad, just as people are trying to use iPads for productivity work over the years, and they've been oftentimes extremely hindered, not just by the OS, which is a big part of it, but by the software ecosystem of not having enough good productivity apps, putting enough effort in to either be there at all or to do a good job there or to keep up with the features of the OS.

1:31:05In 13 years, we'll have Final Cut Pro for the Vision Pro, though. We only have to wait 13 years. We won't ever have an Instagram app, obviously. We know that. But in 13 years, we'll get Final Cut Pro. Assuming Apple still makes it. Yeah. And so I think ultimately what we should expect from the Vision Pro software ecosystem is some things like the Mac and some things like the iPad. You know, the Mac market has many of these same problems. The Mac market requires customer development. It doesn't have anywhere near the volume of an iPhone, you know, in terms of customer volume. But it's been around for much, much longer.

1:31:38and it has way more product volume than the vision pro is going to have anytime soon but at the same time writing apps for the mac is harder than right like if you if you already have an ios code base and you want to have a mac app or a vision pro app the vision pro app is going to be way easier to get than the mac app unless maybe you know catalyst makes things a little bit different but not that different um you know and the mac you know people don't feel like learning app kit because it seems like a dying platform relatively or at least an unmaintained platform uh relatively speaking so it's harder to justify working on a mac app if you have an ios you know a mostly ios based app but vision pro is going to have many similar problems it's going to have a lot of companies and developers looking at it and saying you know what this is too much work it's not worth it for us so i i think that's it's going to be a very very challenging software environment for years to come and i don't think there's much apple can really do about that you know like i'm not this isn't really an action item per se i think this is it's more like setting expectations for ourselves that we're not going to be able to get all of our work done in in division pro in all likelihood for a while and depending on what your work is and what apps you choose or need to use that you know the amount of time on that will vary and it could be forever for a lot of people's needs and that and that's okay you know you can still use your mac and i and you know whatever features they use to bring mac apps in you know it seems like the the initial launch is going to have a fairly rudimentary version of that you know where you can show a 4k screen on your mac and so it's it's probably just doing like airplay you know into a window in in the envision pro you can you can imagine in the future maybe a better version of that feature where like in each individual Mac window might be able to be brought in as an individual window in Vision Pro.

1:33:32And you can move them around separately and not just have, like, here's a rectangle that your Mac screen will be mirrored into. Like, you can imagine better versions of that feature that will probably come in future software updates. But until then, you know, if you want to get super good work done, you're probably going to be using Vision Pro native apps. And that's going to be difficult for all these different reasons. So that's number two, the software ecosystem. I think that's going to be the story for years and years to come. all right number one vision pro's biggest challenge and to honestly to top digital personas and the software ecosystem i think this is a big one but i think this is the biggest challenge couples vision pro seems like a really cool thing if you live alone in a house with lots of space uh i don't know how this is going to go for couples this is going to be the first like mainstream digital device in a long time uh if ever that there is really no way to have a shared experience with someone else like if you are watching a movie on your ipad you can stick it on a table or the end of the bed or whatever and you can watch it with your spouse or partner You can watch it with your kids.

1:34:47You can watch it with your dog. Whatever it is, it's a shared experience. It's easy to say when you're showing something on your phone, hey, look at this. Or you can watch something together on your iMac on the corner of your apartment or whatever. There are so many good ways to do that. With this product, there is no good way to make a shared experience. Now, I have seen, like my kid uses the Facebook Quest or whatever, you can mirror it to a computer screen so other people in the room can watch on a computer screen whatever you are seeing in the headset. In practice, not only does that not work very well, just technically speaking, but it's very difficult to watch because you are watching someone's full head movement and it moves around a lot and it makes sense for them to have it be that way.

1:35:34But for you watching it, it's very difficult to really get that experience to both appreciate it and to just deal with the reality of all the motion and weirdness that comes with that. so some kind of like you know video mirroring solution here i don't think is going to do it so share the lack of shared experiences being easily possible and convenient here again and this is setting aside the price issue which is a really big issue because many people are not super keen to spend thirty five hundred dollars excuse me to spend starting at thirty five hundred dollars for something that only one person can really use in the family that's that's going to be a huge limiting factor not just by price though just by simply like if you are in your vision pro no matter how good your eyes look on the outside of that screen you are disconnected from your family or your relationship and that's going to be a huge limiting factor on who can actually use this and when and keep in mind also you know this kind of even ties into the software ecosystem the vision pro is is such a i think it's going to start out being such a limited use product in the sense of like when and where you can conveniently use it whatever you invest in software wise in it whatever habits or apps you invest in software wise you're only going to really get to use in it during those times like you probably remember a few years back when i bought those bose speaker sunglasses they're like sunglasses that had speakers in the sticks that would like fire sound into your ears they still exist sort of i think bose discontinued their line but like other companies still make stuff like that and one of the problems that i have with my audio sunglasses is that sometimes i want to listen to audio and i don't want to wear sunglasses like if it's dark outside if i'm going into a building like there there were lots of situations where like wait i want to keep listening to this but i don't want to be wearing sunglasses right now so i just no longer have headphones right now vision pro there's going to be situations where you you want the computing environment of vision pro you want to use some app you have in there you want to access some data you have in there but you'll be in a situation where you can't use it or you shouldn't use it and so again many of this much of this is going to be caused by couple dynamics or people interpersonal dynamics much of it is going to be you know just physical environmental requirements or it might come down to like comfort or battery life issues but all that i know that's kind of bleeding into my number two but number one you know the the couples thing i think it's going to be a massive challenge to this product who's going to be able to get one of these well if you're if you're a tech company employee and you're being overworked in your workaholic culture tech company and you don't have enough time to have anything outside of work this will be great for for the two seconds a day that you're allowed to use it this will be great uh but for most people they have other people in their lives and this this is going to be significantly challenging now you can even project forward and say well once once this thing is cheaper maybe then you know both members of a couple or like a couple and their children can all have their own vision headsets that sounds like a terrifying hellscape to me like i don't does that seem terrifying to anyone else like i maybe i'm just being a luddite a little bit here maybe i'm just you know i now everyone has their own phones and they're all buried in their phones all day so maybe this is this is not as uh you know a thing worth worrying about but that just seems really weird to me that everybody would be even more disconnected from their realities and from the people around them um once this thing if this thing actually does get mass market adoption and you do end up getting, you know, everyone in the house has their own one.

1:39:22But until then, until you reach that weird apocalyptic hellscape, you have this issue of, well, whoever has one, whoever's in their headset, they're just not here anymore. They're physically checked out of this space. And yes, you can see through it. That helps a little bit, but it's not going to look that way to the people around you. I think that's going to be a significant problem. Yeah, the whole family were having it. then it would have the new problem of it should map the persona's face on top of, like, say your whole family's sitting around the kitchen table and you've all got these things on, or, like, sitting in the living room.

1:39:56Like, back to the future? Yeah, you can all see each other because it's in AR mode, right? But what you want to see when you look over at your spouse is not your spouse wearing a headset, but your spouse's actual face, so they do digital face replacement for the persona of their face, you know? I mean, obviously, this is all we assume a stopgap until they can make actual see through glasses that look like eyeglasses that have the same resolution that maybe use that thing we talked about last episode with where things are different focal depths from you and everything. But then you can see the person's entire face because people wear glasses all the time and nobody feels like they're hidden or whatever.

1:40:31And granted, their face would be, you know, maybe they're not paying attention to you because they're looking at like the virtual screen inside their glasses. But you can basically see their whole face. they can see you when they're not looking at the screen through the clear glasses that they're wearing and you can get their attention and blah blah it'll be fine we can't do that yet we're not there yet um and apple has decided we didn't talk about this too much with the the whole uh display stuff last episode but apple has apparently decided that the fidelity and quality of the display for the software is more important than the fidelity and quality of people being able to see your face and you being able to see the world right because if you had actual glasses the world is at 100 % fidelity it's just there you just look at it through the glasses right um and your face is completely visible except for your glasses frames but right now the best technology we have for the display that shows into your eyeballs when you're wearing regular glasses is not anywhere close to being as good as you know apple's display um with those you know tiny little pixels and high brightness and contrast and oled and blah blah blah we don't have an equivalent of that and the other thing i guess is that you can't shut off the entire world as easily if you're wearing just plain old glasses because plain old glasses don't cover your entire eye you'll always be able to see you know stuff leaking out from the sides or whatever so you can't get the same watch a giant uh movie screen on top of mount hood uh you can watch a giant movie screen but you're not going to be on top of mount hood you're going to be sitting at your desk so interesting to see where apple goes with this especially if this product doesn't take off um i think they'll keep trying and keep plugging away because i don't think you get to the glasses without the experience with the technology that's available so i'm glad apple is starting down this road but it's really going to constrain what they can do with this product based on the choices they've made and for the choices of using a piece of software or watching a movie i think a completely face covering headset with a high fidelity screen is the right choice but there's whole categories of things that are way harder impossible and i think the couple problem falls into that category of like okay how do you deal with your fact that your spouse is going to hate it when you're in that stupid headset right unless they're asleep next to you in the bed then fine you're not disturbing them with flashing light thumbs up on the headset but pretty much any other time unless you're using it like sitting in front of your computer and you it's like they do not disturb marco because he's programming type of he's in his office doing his work then fine wear the headset they don't care but if you come out into the living room for family time and you put that thing in your head everyone's gonna be like no i don't care that i can see your eyes uh and that's and you know that is on top of the idea that oh but everyone sits around our couch and they're always looking at our phones you're way more accessible when everyone is zombie like looking at their phones because you can say hey and nudge somebody and they can turn and face you and you can and then like like you said mark you can show them the funny tiktok on your phone and they can see it and you can laugh and you can see their face laughing and that is not going to happen when you take the time to put this giant thing in your face and by the way that what i thought you were going to say what the couple's problem is uh so who gets to get it for for people who are not marco and aren't going to buy two of these uh you get it fitted for one person's face then i suppose you could buy more light shields for the other person but then you have to adjust the straps too and you got to put in the the prescription lenses if you just think you're going to have one of them and share it amongst the couples technically possible because all the parts that need to adjust can be snapped out and adjusted but practically you're not going to want to go through all that it's not like you'll be oh let me look it's way easier to show someone your phone to hand someone your phone to show someone something on the ipad than it is to say let me get this apparatus off my head and take this thing out of my pocket get the new light shield out take out my prescription things put in your prescription things and put it on okay let's adjust the straps okay let's log in as you with your eyeball id okay yeah no this is what i was looking at oh no i'm sorry you can't see it you're in your environment never mind all right that even assumes a multi-user software environment that doesn't exist no i think like i think it does have i mean that's i think that's what the iid thing does we'll see we'll see how it happens but i mean there's not multi-user environment in ipads either but you can still show somebody something yes so it really does make this you know very focused on the applications that they showed i think even the thing with the dad recording the birthday is a more realistic scenario than you wearing this in a family setting because that's as we discussed in the past show That's like the dad whipping out the giant VHS recorder with the giant backpack and thing or whatever.

1:44:52And yes, it's ridiculous and everyone rolls their eyes when dad does it. But it's a dad thing to do and find whatever. Like they'll excuse that. But if you're just, you know, sitting around chilling after dinner and you're like, okay, well, I'm going to put this giant thing in my face. Everyone's just going to leave. I don't know. I agree with everything you said, Marco, but when I, I want to say fantasize, but it has connotations I don't want. When I imagine using a Vision Pro, I don't imagine myself in the living room, despite that unquestionably being what Apple seems to be imagining. I imagine myself at a cubicle at work, which obviously isn't my life anymore, which by the way, I skipped over that anniversary, but it's been five years.

1:45:40Thank you to everyone at ATP.fm. But anyways, I imagine myself at a cubicle at work or, you know, today, not literally today, but, you know, these days, maybe at a library. And again, as I've said many times, leaving aside the social, oh my God, look at this guy. Look, who does he think he is? Leaving that aside for a moment. Like if I was impervious to that, which I'm not, but if I was impervious to that, you know, going to a coffee shop or a library or something like that, or working at a cubicle at work, like how quickly all three of us forget, John, probably least of all, uh, how quickly we forget what it's like to try to properly sit there and crank on code when you're getting interrupted every 15 seconds from everything between like, Hey, can you help me with this work related problem to, Hey, what are you doing this weekend, man?

1:46:28Like having that barrier between you and somebody else is actually kind of convenient in some of these settings. And again, like on an airplane, I was listening as well to Gruber and Panzerino on the talk show earlier today, and they were talking about, and Gruber seems to be really fixated, and I agree with him, fixated on using this on the plane. Again, social stigmas aside, these are all occasions where that barrier between you and the people around you is an advantage. It's a feature, not a bug. I agree with you that at home, on the couch, it is a bug, not a feature. But there are a lot of places I imagine where it's a feature, not a bug.

1:47:08And when I envision using the Vision Pro, wow, that was a lot of visions in very little space. When I think about using the Vision Pro, again, I think about, well, I don't really have a need for it at home. I have a want insofar as like 3D movies or this supposed demo of like, you know, football or basketball or what have you. But I don't think I have a need for it at home. and I don't have a need for it at the library or the coffee shop or what have you or the airplane, but man, I have a strong want for it there. It would be great to, instead of using just my 14 inch laptop screen, or instead of using my 14 inch laptop screen and my 12 inch or 11, whatever inch iPad pro kind of, you know, sidecaring it.

1:47:52What if I could just have a 4k display right in front of my face and everything around me goes away. And of course that makes me ask myself, well, then why am I going to the damn library in the first place? And it can be any number of reasons. And you just go to your basement. Right, exactly. And so I think that that's a conversation we can have, but I don't know if it's really pertinent. But suffice to say, sometimes I just like a change of scenery. And granted, that makes me think, well, I could go to Mount Hood. But you know what I mean? I like the act occasionally. It's funny how you enjoy the act of driving somewhere deliberately and going to a different environment to get work done when you're no longer compelled to do it.

1:48:33You can just get away from your kids. It's fine. Sometimes, yes. No, sometimes, yes, but not always. And I know you're being silly, and that is absolutely sometimes the case, but it is not always the case. Sometimes I just want to leave the same, you know, what is this, like 10 by 12 room that I'm in all the time, and I just want to be somewhere else. And so, yeah, I think you're right, Marco, So the couples and families, that is a problem, especially if it ends up that the best audio and or video fidelity experience you have for television or movies is the Vision Pro, which for a lot of us, that's probably the case for a lot of us.

1:49:12I would say for almost everyone, probably. How many people have a better TV and audio setup than what you're going to be able to simulate in the Vision Pro? It's probably going to be by far the best one. And Casey, you can put yours not over your fireplace then. I walked right into that one, too. Your virtual screen can be the right height. Or he could put it even higher virtually. You can just have it on the ceiling. Yeah, it's on the roof. Yeah, just to make you mad. Just to make you mad. But I mean, I think honestly, Marco, both of us are exactly right. I think you are exactly right. Yeah, this creates a real big problem for couples or families or what have you.

1:49:46But it also is kind of a lifesaver. Maybe that's a bit dramatic, but a lifesaver for when you want to be out of the house, but you don't want to be disturbed by randos or maybe you're even at work and you don't want to be disturbed by your well-meaning but ultimately constantly interrupting co-workers or maybe on a plane and you just want to be somewhere else for the next six hours and you have three other battery packs that you can swap between you know it it i can see those being being very very useful scenarios yeah and to be clear and you know the reason i'm kind of going over these now is is not to crap all over this product.

1:50:21I'm actually extremely optimistic about this product, and I desperately want one, and I want to use it, and I'm already developing software for it, even though I shouldn't really logically be spending my time doing that right now, but I'm doing it anyway. It's that I want us to, as tech fans and commentators and enthusiasts of these kind of products, I want us to go into it knowing that certain things are going to be a challenge and not be surprised by them and to maybe try to start addressing them as soon as we can. These things, I think they're going to hit us immediately when we get this product.

1:50:56We're going to instantly feel like, oh, yeah, text input kind of sucks. Oh, scrolling is different. Maybe it's fine. Maybe it's not. Digital personas are going to be very weird, and many people are not going to want to see our digital persona on FaceTime calls. And this software thing is going to be a mess. It's going to be a wasteland for a while. you know yes you will have a lot of stuff on day one from enthusiasts like like enthusiast developers like me and like you know many other indies but i think that the big company support is going to be very very small for for a while and possibly for a long while um and and these problems are all going to they're all going to make us want more they're all going to make us like we're going to be amazed about this platform and we're going to want to use it more and more but these problems will limit when and how we can use it and this will give us you know kind of a good starting point to say like look you know to kind of push on apple in many cases or to push on you know the ecosystem like hey that there's there's value here to unlock but you need to put some work in to unlock it or there's going to be some downsides you know until you unlock it or whatever the case may be and at in the end this might end up being like the apple tv in the sense that it has a full-blown computing platform but what most people use it for is just you know mostly content consumption that and again if that's all this is quote all this is that's still a huge market and immensely valuable in many situations many of which casey was describing like even if this ends up only being the best way to consume media on a plane that's still a massive market or media but like it's a 3500 monitor yeah like even that alone look it's cheaper than an xdr like even that and and and way more portable way way way more portable yeah yeah like so even that like that alone is a category that is very valuable and and that would be very successful for this product to fill um but i want it to be more than that i want it to be another great computing platform, not just a monitor, not just a content consumption device.

1:53:04And for it to be that, it has some major challenges. And, you know, there's no time in the present to start working on them. Thanks to our sponsors this week, Trade Coffee, Notion, and Squarespace. And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. We will talk to you next week. Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental. Accidental. Oh, it was accidental. Accidental. John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental. Accidental. Oh, it was accidental. Accidental. And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm.

1:53:53And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-D-M-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-O-Q. It's accidental. Accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Accidental. Tech Podcast. So long. You guys on Threads yet? Yeah, I logged in just to see what it was like. Yeah, I logged in for a minute and it was fine for the literally 15 seconds I was using it. So then leveraging their Instagram social graph saying, hey, here's all the people you follow on Instagram. Do you want to follow them on threads? Even though they're not on threads, when they come on threads, you'll follow them.

1:54:45Smart. It is kind of funny for it to come full circle that like what initially launched Instagram success was largely the importing of people's Twitter social graphs through their API. And now they're coming around and killing whatever the thing is that we're calling Twitter now. whatever like you know horrible shell of the thing that twitter now is half functional constantly changing constantly broken yeah like part of the reason we never talk about twitter is disinterest but other part of it is like it's not worth talking about because whatever we say by the time marco publishes the episode less than 24 hours later might not even be true because things change every day with no rhyme or reason because it's run by somebody who has no idea what they're doing yes indeed yeah so anyway yeah i'm on threads now i haven't posted anything yet but i don't even and the whole thing with like whether they should federate or whether that whether the fediverse should accept them federating and that's that's just i think it's a whole bunch of hammering over over nothing it's working as designed the whole point is people can make different decisions there is no one decision about whether they will federate with facebook every instance gets to decide that for themselves and instances get to make mistakes and change their mind about decisions or whatever but it is not a central decision it is a distributed decision so there you go although i don't actually know if this is one of the questions will facebook's threads thing actually federate with anybody ever we'll see i think they had stated somewhere that they plan to they just haven't yet yeah uh-huh kind of like kind of like blue sky well fair blue sky the decentralized network that's not decentralized but it will be trust us eventually remember blue sky yeah no i i i i'm glad there is this much competition and this much um and this many options for people now like with with twitter dramatically changing and and and having having initially been like the place for so many people to go for so long and all the problems that it caused by having having been this one company running this one product in this one way uh it is nice to have a bunch of options now it is nice to have competition there are some downsides like you know there there are a lot of advantages to there being one big dominant thing where you know you can go there and quote everyone is there and twitter i think way more than many other social networks really achieved that like you could go to twitter and you could be sure almost any like not real life person but almost every like celebrity or media personality or politician or company but like almost all of them would you know you'd find them on twitter they would have a twitter account even even government stuff local government city government state government federal government the president yeah like like you could be pretty reasonably sure for like people you knew like in your family or friends they'd probably be on facebook or instagram or both where but twitter was like everyone else like like all the other companies, media, etc.

1:57:39All that stuff, that would all be on Twitter. Nowadays, there really isn't one place like that. And again, in many ways, it's better being decentralized and not having this be all in a private company's thing. But we're in a very different place now. It's a lot better for some reason. It's a lot worse for others. But whatever it is, I don't think we have much of a choice. This is the world that we're in now. We have a world of multiple social networks. And for Facebook to come in here and leverage Instagram's massively successful social network, to leverage that into a new, you know, quote, Twitter killer or at least Twitter alternative or Twitter clone, however you want to look at it, I think it's interesting.

1:58:19And while I have no respect for Facebook as a company or its leaders as people or even basic human beings, this is a formidable competitor and it's going to bring a lot of people in. It already has. I launched the app. It came out like 20 minutes before I started recording. So I only launched it like once and peeked around a little bit and liked a couple of posts and found a couple of friends. And it was funny. The app was a mess. It's all these server errors being shown in the app. And I granted it notification access. It sent me 46 notifications in one minute. And I turned off notification access.

1:58:54Cool.

1:58:59Obviously, there's going to be some first day growing pains here. And we'll see how it goes. And we'll see, like, are they actually going to pull a bunch of people in from Instagram? I think yes, because Facebook is really good at that. Facebook is really good at leveraging Instagram success to boost things in other areas. So right now, it's a separate app. You think it always will be? Not a chance in hell. You know this is going to be part of the Instagram app. You know they're going to, like, start pulling in threads into the Instagram app to juice engagement with them and to get more people over there.

1:59:31like that's what facebook does they're really good at it and to run more ads and to run more ads and and of course and that's that's a good point like this platform is facebook So of course it's going to be full of tracking and full of ads and full of creepy behavior. That's what they do as a profession. Facebook is basically the devil. So don't be surprised when Facebook does what Facebook does what Facebook is going to do? but ultimately even all that said i think this is actually still a benefit for quote the fediverse and for like the mastodon style networks uh and mastodon itself like i think this is actually a benefit because the people who this is bringing over would never have come over on their own never in a million years they were never going to sign up for mastodon ever ever ever so if we can get some overlap between the rest of the massive world out there and you know the nerds like us use mastodon that's fine mastodon might have to put in more controls for things for you know moderation blocking muting whatever that's fine and they hopefully they should have been doing that anyway um i see no other major downside yeah facebook is going to crawl of our crap and use it for creepy purposes but everyone was already doing that like our stuff on mastodon is all publicly indexable on the internet like there was no like whatever data we have in mastodon is already publicly accessible by anybody to do anything they want with so that angle of it is there's no change there facebook could have already been indexing it all for their own purposes you know that there's no change there so it's just going to be more people who might at some point in the future when they someday federate um might be exposed to other social networks out there and this might end up being the big kind of i hate to use the word meta but the big kind of meta network like that would be the greatest success story of activity pub you know and and having one giant player in the space doesn't necessarily take over or ruin the space you know look at email gmail is by far the largest email service out there and yet the rest of us can still have email And most of the time, it's not really a problem at all that we aren't Gmail users.

2:01:52We still interoperate with... Gmail did ruin email a little bit. A little. You can't get deliverability if Gmail decides they don't like you. And so you have to use one of the big services, what we talked about when we talked about Mastinot originally. Like email, even though it is completely interoperable, you end up with a few big players who dominate because, in the case of email, you just can't deliver email if you're not sending from or receiving at one of the big players. But there's not just one of them. and it is an open protocol so you know that that's my hope for the threads thing is that it gets more people into activity pub that facebook doesn't outrun the mastodon development which i think they have they could if they wanted to they don't run the mastodon development to do the brace extend extinguish thing that microsoft pioneered uh that essentially interoperability with activity pub will will continue to be the case and kind of like google reader where google reader didn't it didn't embrace extend and extinguish rss uh so google reader growing away didn't mean rss had to go away whereas if threads becomes massively popular and they're so popular like we don't i know we started on activity pub but we don't actually need to federate with those loser services who have nobody on them we've got millions of people and so and by the way we need some more features for ad tracking so let's modify the activity protocol and so now not only are we not federating we couldn't federate because we're not interoperable with mastodon anymore because mastodon itself uh modified the activity protocol a little bit and we're modifying it too in incompatible ways so sorry mastodon we're leaving you behind and now we're not part of the federation we don't care because now we have basically our twitter clone that we leveraged into with our social graph into the new dominant platform but even if they are interoperable there's still a risk that they that you know that people start thinking that you have to be kind of like people think many people think that to use twitter you had to use the official twitter client and we were all here for you know 16 years not using the official twitter client uh and thinking people were silly to use the official one but they didn't know we existed right so it could be threads becomes really popular and people have no idea that we're able to read everything that they're posting in the mastodon client they don't even know mastodon is they have no idea and maybe when we reply to them and because they're federated our stuff shows up weird and you know like we could we can end up being as the green bubbles because our our messages don't show up the same inside the threads app right there's lots of not great scenarios for this but the good thing is at least it gives mastodon activity pub a fighting chance because if they keep fighting the good fight and keep trying to enforce interoperability and that's why i basically if you ask me like should people federate with or whatever i think this is kind of an apple china or like world china situation where in the end despite the incredible distaste and the terrible things facebook slash china does uh engagement is better than isolating them because isolating them lets them get more virulent and powerful in isolation whereas engagement at least forces them to deal with you you can't change them to make them better but constant engagement keeps them keeps you in a scenario where you need each other right like china needs us to buy all their stuff right and we need all their stuff so them blowing us up they've just killed all the people who you know buy their stuff from them it's not great china's not great facebook's not great like i don't and i don't want to draw a direct comparison to uh genocidal authoritarian china and facebook a tech company that we don't like but in general i think engagement with facebook as in we will federate with you because we want to try to force you to be part of this open ecosystem however we can like can you shame facebook into doing things can you you'll get you know if they start interoperating and then they break interoperability that's enough of a story that it will be in the tech press and maybe even in the regular press and so engaging with them as in federating with them i think is the move to because it's your only chance of trying to trying to foster the creation of an open ecosystem uh and yes the downside is they could become gmail and no one can deliver mail as they send into a from gmail like i understand there's downsides to it but they're doing this whether you engage with them whether you federate with them or not so once they've decided to do this i do feel like engagement at least as the opening salvo is the best move because if you ignore them that doesn't hurt them right i know it feels like the right thing to do like i'm going to preemptively ignore you forget it but like you're not in a position of power to do that they just have so much more money and so many more users that you're going to lose that fight so i hope that you know the there is engagement i hope i start seeing i you know i hope my instance federates with them i hope i start seeing thread stuff in my preferred activity pub client because facebook's client is garbage just like blue sky's kind of client is garbage but you know what the mastodon client ecosystem is filled with lots of cool clients and i'm using one that i mostly like so i hope that that continues to be and by the way i read blue sky through my favorite mastodon client now too because someone wrote like an adapter layer or whatever and that's not even an activity pub so i hope this i hope their engagement happens i hope federation happens the other alternative obviously the best case scenario is threads just absolutely fizzles and disappears because that would be ideal for all of us but um and not because i don't want the normals coming over to activity club i do i would just prefer them to come over under the control of anybody but facebook so but but ultimately like i think facebook for all of their fault they're good at at large-scale operational things mastodon is largely challenged by that mastodon does not deal well with large scale it's like three people like yeah and it's like you know when we were going when we were all going over to mastodon like you know last fall we were talking about this like mastodon does not scale well technically like it is significantly challenging to scale but you know both the protocol and the servers and everything and also um content moderation wise that's extremely difficult to keep up with content moderation for a social network well the facebook solution is we just won't well but i mean they do like you know they they don't do a very good job of it although i would argue no one does i mean it's it's it's it might be impossible to do a very good job i know but i mean the problem with facebook is facebook has to do it at scale mass.on instances don't have to do it at scale mass.on instances just have to do with the scale of their instance and they're going to do varying levels of crappy jobs of it but no one instance is ever going to face the challenge that facebook is which is like hey moderate the world no no mass done instance will ever get that big right but facebook for all of their faults they do have that infrastructure in place and so we can quibble about how they you know the choices they make but at least they have large infrastructure in place both technically and with moderation and if you're gonna have it like if all of these people instead of having a facebook app.

2:08:37By the way, and I know nowhere does this app say Facebook. They're calling themselves meta. Fine. I'm always going to think of them as Facebook. The same way I don't call Google Alphabet. I think of them as Google. But anyway, all over this app, they say it's an Instagram app. It's an app made by Instagram. And that's a wonderful branding choice they're making. Good for them. I'm glad you're trying to distance the incredibly toxic, hated Facebook brand from the incredibly toxic hated company that it is. It's only hated by tech nerds though. Most people like Facebook. I don't think that's necessarily true.

2:09:14Anyway, but this app, if all of these people instead of using a Facebook based app, if they all just came over to Mastodon, this many people, this many non-technical people from this many different backgrounds, I think Mastodon would have significant challenges both technically and with content moderation. and facebook again for all of their faults again this is a company i really strongly dislike um and they are not good at content moderation in general however they at least have the infrastructure in place to deal with it at this scale and that mastodon instances and mastodon itself can never have that kind of scale but doesn't but it doesn't need to though like the mastodon the ideal i mean these these years the safe threads become successful mastodon needs many more years to build up its society not not to build up its single instance not to build up its software but to build up the society it's had like you know before you know again my account was created in 2017 like it's had many years to develop so it was able to accept the people you know when elon bought twitter we were able to go to mastodon because it had been cooking for years the society of activity pub and mastodon instances or whatever needs many many more years to get a healthy society of instances.

2:10:29Instances need to figure out how to fund themselves. They need to figure out how to govern themselves. They need to figure out how to moderate, right? And all of them need to do that at a smaller scale than Facebook, but they haven't even figured out how to do it that well at a small scale. And what I'm hoping for, again, optimistic scenario, you know, setting aside if Dread just fails completely, which would be great. But if it doesn't, and it takes off, and it has all these people on it, those people are going to go through a honeymoon period. Threads is great. That's cool. Let's hang out. Let's have fun.

2:10:53Years of that, and then eventually facebook will start doing annoying stuff the client will get annoying like all the same stuff that happens with twitter will happen with with threads right but when that happens because in theory they're built on activity pub if they have chosen to federate during those years hopefully the society of activity pub instances that are compatible with threads will exist and be out here and when people get frustrated it'll be like hey by the way i know you're frustrated did you know there's a place you can go and keep all your followers and keep your social grab and like you know you'll get a better client in fact you'll get your choice of clients and you'll get your choice of instances and i know it seems confusing to you but guess what you don't like the instance you're on that's not your only choice and that's not something you can say about twitter or instagram for that matter those were your only choices if you want to leave rebuild a new world elsewhere but you can't take your followers with you you can't take any of your data or anything like with you in mastodon in theory you can take some of that stuff with you your identity is somewhat portable not as portable as in blue sky but still somewhat portable you have a choice and then you're going to say i have a choice but what the hell is my choice and hopefully by then five years from now it'll be like actually there are a bunch of viable choices here's how instances fund themselves if here's the models that you can go and do you want to be one from my volunteers do you want to be one that you have to pay for do you want to be one where it's part of a co-op and you're a part owner right do you want to be on a big one that's run by some centralized company you know that you would have different choices that are there waiting for you when you become dissatisfied inevitably with with threads because i mean we all it happened with twitter we all like twitter it was great and then we become dissatisfied and then we'd gradually stay and we become dissatisfied and gradually stay and eventually there was a breaking point with the elon thing but you know we ran to app.net because we were so pissed off at twitter at once and then we ended up going back so on and so forth so i hope that if if they actually federate with activity pub stuff that the world of ActivityPub will be ready in a few years to accept the migration in a way that we're not now.

2:12:52Because like you said, they can't all come to the one mastodon.social instance. It would be overwhelmed, right? And I don't want them to all come there. And that instance, frankly, hasn't figured out. No instances have figured this out. But instances are trying different things now, trying different ways of funding themselves. Hopefully, the people who run Mastodon will also be trying different ways to fund the development of the software because there's very few people and very few dollars being contributed to that right so that's all stuff that we have i guess maybe five to ten years to figure out uh you know and the thing i'm heartened by is the fact that we all you know checked out mastodon in 2017 and we're like man anyway back to twitter right but mastodon didn't die during that time they just kept plugging away right and they got a little bit better and a little bit better and so the next time we ran back i was like oh remember mastodon hey it's still there and there's a few more instances and the software's gotten better and we came back to it and we said this is pretty nice but you know you still need to fix x y and z you still haven't figured out moderation what about the quote tweets your search sucks or whatever i hope when we come back or people come back in five to seven years they'll be like oh you know what mastodon's even better than it was before like that's the beauty of having something open that uh you know one company can't lose interest or shut down or whatever it's still out there it is a protocol it is in theory somewhat interoperable the software is open source uh it has the possibility of being improved it's i think activity pub is part of w3c so it's an open standard uh so fingers crossed that the dumb limited protocol that obviously can't scale will follow the other dumb limited protocol that obviously can't scale i mentioned this before http http 1.0 sucks uh but we built an entire web on http 1.1 http 2.0 is here uh and so i have some faith that open protocols that don't have a lot of features can eventually win Beep beep beep.