571: Adding Some Carrot

37:05Right? Yeah, it's so true. It's so true. Yeah, the travel case in particular, like, ooh, that's a lot of money for that. It's made out of$1 bills. and annoyingly i knew that i think it was spigen speaking whatever they're called uh came out with a travel case that was something like 30 to 50 bucks and i saw that it was a thing and if i had ordered a vision pro i should have ordered it um and so i regret not having done so but that's neither here nor there don't worry like i mean so keep in mind also like you know stuff that's not proprietary to the vision pro like a case you know anybody can make a case very easily for this or a battery probably possibly well i don't know i think it has a custom connector we'll see how we'll see how it goes yeah but anyway like any of these things like you're basically paying for day one you know apple nice version of this it's always going to be a huge premium whereas if you just wait a few months at most you'll be able to buy like you know a million thirty dollar versions on amazon of things like the travel case and stuff like that yeah i looked on amazon to see if there was anything there yet i mean look like i i know what you got to in a second of like the belkin battery holder which is basically a plastic bracket for the battery that's 50 for your 200 battery yes i didn't we didn't actually put that in the show notes yeah i didn't put third-party stuff well but that's barely third party yeah they work with apple on this for sure but you can get a belkin uh piece of plastic with a liquid with like you know a belt clip for the battery for 50 because of course the battery in typical apple design the battery is just a smooth featureless blob of metal and you can tell even like even in the vision pro travel case for 200 to hold the battery they have to like strap it in because they designed this blob of the battery that has zero way to attach anything to it so you like so the only ways to attach it to things or to attach things to it are incredibly inelegant wraparound or you know straps or plastic kind of things like they couldn't have just put like a mounting hole or a slot or it's just like the air tag it's like you make a robotic core you add what you want to it but we're not going to tell you you need a clip what if you just want a slippery little stone you can't make it smaller but you can always make it bigger buy this 50 case all right all right so then light seals are 200 a piece so now let's let's look at this here we have a piece of electronics the battery we have a piece of cloth the case and we have a cushiony thing all of these things are two hundred dollars really these are equally valuable equally just the light seal that seems especially egregious because it's like it's a wear part it is well not i mean the thing on the front it's actually it's not the cushion yeah the cushion is what touches your face oh if you're thinking by the way oh light seal that's the thing that goes in your face no it's an extra 30 dollars to get a complete thing that goes in your face no no it says it says it includes the cushions in two sizes all right anyway replacement cushions are 30 bucks yeah but it but like if first if for instance you need to change the size of the light seal like if you're if you're adding another person to it or giving it to someone else or selling it to someone else they probably have to spend 200 for a different light seal yeah it's bananas and it's just like i mean what is this made of it's like you know some probably some kind of like you know rigid you know plastic frame with cloth wrapped around it it's 80 recycled material i mean it looks real nice for what it's worth i i don't i don't really begrudge apple for this being not cheap but this is quite expensive so yeah i mean i don't know what to make of it but anyway so light seal which by the way uh friend of the show quinn nelson pointed out to me uh somebody m1 astra on on twitter pointed out there appear to be according to this individual 28 light seal sizes my word whoa that's why they don't list them i put i put the sizes here but when you look at the light seal when you're trying to buy it uh it says what size is available they're going to make you measure your face with their scanner thing like you don't get to pick from a pop-up menu of 28 sizes you you use and what it gives you is like a number and a letter like i you know we'll talk about it with the ordering processes later but like it just tells you the size and presumably when you go to the store they'll do the same thing scan your face with the face id scanner and then it comes up with the size and obviously if you're at the store you could probably try it on if you're doing a tryout thing and decide it doesn't feel right or whatever but yeah a lot of sizes indeed then the light seal cushion as discussed is$29.30 sizes n and plus w and w plus i guess normal and wide narrow and narrow and wide not normal let's not be normative it's narrow and wide then we have the solo knit band so this is the one that goes behind your head if i'm not mistaken the one that the one that looks like it's the one apple wanted to make yeah it's the one that looks cool it looks less cumbersome.

41:42Less slapped together in the last minute. Right. So that's$100, which honestly, that seems more in line with what I would expect, because that appears to be a relatively complex thing to make. It's an inert piece of fabric with adjustable straps for$100. It has a knob on the side. Alright, sure. Okay,$100. And it does seem complicated to construct. But yeah,$100 in sizes, small, medium, or large. Then there's the dual loop band. Now this one, to your point, John, does look like they threw it together at the last minute. It's got twice as many loops and it's the same price. What a bargain. It's also small, medium, and large.

42:17Then the optical inserts reader style are$100. Optical inserts full-on prescription style are$150. Both of those are for pairs. $100 for a pair,$150 for a pair. And just to be clear, when you buy the Vision Pro, you get a battery, you get a light seal with a cushion, you get the solo band and the dual loop band. You don't get the optical inserts. of any kind so it's not like you have to add all these numbers you put up together you pick your storage size which who knows how anybody knows what storage size to pick because we don't really know what we're going to be storing on it um and then if you want a travel case you can add that on and if you if you need optical inserts you can add them on but everything else comes in the box with it so it does have a lot of stuff like i said it does come with both the straps which is nice you don't have to pick one of them yes at these prices it comes with 600 of accessories in the box yeah well can't afford not to buy one oh my gosh you're not kidding are you holy smokes no i'm not oh yeah all right so marco what'd you order i got the base model what you i didn't get any glasses i didn't get any extra storage do you not need glasses with it i don't think so so you know if we're correct that we're roughly doing like a you know 1.3 meter focus distance here i don't need the only glasses i need are reading glasses for up close stuff and my my minimum focus distance is still less than my arm length so i think i am fine i don't think i'm going to need any kind of reader insert but just if for some reason i do i can always just get those afterwards yeah well uh you heard it here first marco bought the base model of something i know i am shocked on purpose for himself no and i'll tell so i'll tell you why so okay first of all i didn't get apple care because it's 500 and i i don't see myself taking the vision pro many places and i think by the time i am using the platform that much if that time ever comes there will probably be another model out that i will probably want to upgrade to because i i think this again i think it's gonna be a fairly slow build up in like the app ecosystem and stuff like that so i didn't necessarily think apple care was net was worth it for 500 um also i'm pretty careful with my stuff most of the time so i don't see myself breaking it Anyway, and then on the storage tiers, I got the 256 base model because I'm considering this basically like an iPad.

44:33And I think, like, how do I use iPads? I don't foresee myself loading it up with a whole bunch of stuff to take on a plane that would actually exceed that level. And if it's anything other than, like, loading it up with media, I don't know what I would use that much space for. You know? I didn't want to like super option up this one and then have all these resources I never used. And then when I want to buy the next one, that's even better in two years to have invested so much in this one for stuff I never used. Oh, I totally I don't think you should be like ashamed or kicking yourself or whatever about getting this.

45:09It's just out of character. Yeah, it's just extremely out of character. And I'm very proud of you. Well, I mean, you know, when I buy iPads and stuff, I don't I don't ramp up the storage that much. yeah yeah but that's i mean it's kind of like you know you like you said you you know how you're gonna use an ipad it's a known quantity i think that's the problem with the storage in this one nobody knows like is storage going to be important or is it going to be like the apple tv where it's mostly a non-issue we don't know we don't know what the app ecosystem is going to look like and so everyone especially when you see these prices you're like let me just get the base one like because like you said marco if it turns out that you're wrong you're like oh i shouldn't have got that one it's constantly being filled up by the time you're annoyed by it you're just going to get the next model anyway so yeah and and i mean and to be fair like i do expect media for this is going to be large you know if they had a 128 i wouldn't have gotten that one you know but yeah like a 3d movie because it's got to have basically a separate movie for each eye or even you know what i what i expect to enjoy on this a lot is like immersive experiences put me on a mountaintop or whatever that i expect to enjoy a lot but i mean how many of those am i going to have on there at once like how big can they possibly be you know i i think 200 gigs of free space should be plenty for what will for my purposes mostly be a dev kit and a messing around occasionally kind of device well we still have like questions like but what if you turn on iMessage in the cloud oh all your storage is gone now but that's still no problem because iMessage gives you lots of ways to control how much space it takes up in your devices so don't worry it'll be fine No, it doesn't.

46:37It just takes all your space and there's nothing you can do. Focus. All right. So for me, I also ordered the base model. I did not get any accessories. I did not get AppleCare, although I'm thinking I might actually add AppleCare because I saw... We'll get to the repair prices. Yeah, I saw the repair prices, which we'll get to, but suffice to say, I think I might add AppleCare. And the part of the reason I think I might add AppleCare is if you'll permit me a slight tangent, I'd like to tell a funny story. So I was at a friend's house. It was a total of four couples, inclusive of Aaron and myself and the associated children.

47:12We were hanging out at somebody's house. This was, I think, the day of pre-order, the day after, something like that. I forget exactly when it was. But we're all hanging out, and they're all just beating me up in a friendly way about spending this pile of money on this thing that I may or may not even want. And that was totally justified for the record. But nevertheless, it was clear pretty quickly in the conversation that as much as they're giving me a hard time about it, everyone in the group was at least intrigued by this thing. And I started to explain, well, here's the thing though. I don't know if you could try mine.

47:44Like I'm happy from like, I'm happy to have you try it, but it may not be a particularly great experience because your faces may be differently shaped than mine. Well, they are differently shaped than mine. And you know, the light seal may not match. So then that got into a conversation about what the hell does that mean? What are you talking about? Blah, blah, blah. Well, how do we figure out if what we, if what you got works for us? Well, come to think of it, why don't you all bust out your iPhones and go and pretend like you're buying a vision pro. And so the next thing you know, and I wish I had taken a picture.

48:13I didn't have the presence of mind to take a picture, but the next thing you know, our video would have been even better. All of them are looking at their phones doing the, and I know this is not a video podcast, but doing the thing for scanning your face, like face ID style in order to get their size. And so everyone was checking out pretty much at the same time, checking out what size light shield they would need so they could see whether or not they could have a good experience testing out My Vision Pro. And the answer was of a total of eight people, inclusive, again, of Aaron and myself, and they were all boy-girl couples, as it turns out, all but two of the women could use my, or were sized to be the same as me, even though these body types are wildly different among the people that are allegedly the same size as me.

49:02the body types are wildly different which I thought was quite funny but yeah just imagine a total of eight adults you know all of us pretty much all of us in our early 40s just doing the thing all at once trying to size ourselves maybe it was one of those experiences you had to be there but it was hilarious to be watching all this go down but yeah I bring all this up to say and this is relevant for the AppleCare plus thing because even though all of them are probably better with their stuff than I am I just have a vision of like I have a vision ding of handing the Vision Pro from one person to the other and it dropping on some tile or something like that.

49:36And holy monkey, let's just skip forward to the repair cost. Don't you want to know if I ordered one? John, did you order a Vision Pro? No. Did anyone in your family order one? No, but I did go through the order process to get my size. You should have just told the people, oh, don't worry, if you want to try mine out, just buy a new light seal for$200. Right. Just$200 to try Casey's headset. that. Right, right. And then I would have a collection of them at the end. Oh, for the record, not that it matters, solo knit band, small, do loop band, small, light seal 21W. Yeah, someone was saying that they were getting different size measurements when they, whether or not they said they had prescription lenses, but it could have just been variability in the face scanning bit.

50:16I actually heard that a lot as well. In my understanding, which I am not sure is correct, is that it actually accounts for a little bit of depth for the inserts if you're getting inserts again i don't know if that's true i could be accidentally lying to you but it does stand to reason that maybe that's true i don't know just a theory yeah that's why i mean obviously i didn't order one but if i had i ordered one like it would just make me feel a lot more comfortable to be able to sort of try on to know oh yeah definitely you know especially since we don't know what like the the return exchange situation will be like uh because of the variability because it's just your phone scanning your face because some people have reported i guess if you're on a borderline between two different sizes depending on what mood it's in and when you scan your face if it's going to put you on one side or the other it's like trying on jeans i mean you can know your jean size but it really helps to try them on first right yeah i'm very curious and i think marco you had told me privately you're doing some in-store pickup somewhere is that correct yeah because i basically figured if for some reason the light seal doesn't fit right or whatever i figured that's a lot easier and they might even you know like depending on what the process is for in-store pickup.

51:22They might even have me take it out and try it on there before I go. So that I figure in-person is probably best for something like this. Yeah, I feel the exact same way in that. And partially because my delivery schedule for UPS and FedEx seems to be at the end of the day. And partially because it just seemed like a smarter approach. I am also doing in-store pickup. And so by the time I got through the ordering process, which we should briefly talk about, actually, but I went through the ordering process as quick as I could. I was trying to toggle between or I was alternating between my iPad, my iPhone and my Mac.

51:54And it so happened that the iPhone landed first. And that was excellent because that seemed to be the thing that was most equipped to scan my face and so on and so forth. It took a little while to scan my face, I think in part because I was in a relatively dark room in the house. I was in the office and it was still dark outside or maybe it was an overcast day. I don't recall. And you may be hearing this and say, but Casey, Face ID doesn't need light. It just uses infrared. head what difference does it make what the lighting was well i can tell you that the scanning that you do in the apple star app on your phone demands that your room is well lit i don't know why it does but i just tell you for a fact it will tell you that your room is too dark and face id will never tell you that because face id i believe does not use the plain old light camera it uses the ir spreader entirely so whatever they're doing for this thing apparently it also wants to actually see your face you need to be well lit it also it it threw me off too because it this one made me do just up, down, left, right, not a big circle.

52:49So I kept doing it wrong and it kept yelling at me. Same, exactly the same story. You trained us for years to do the roll your head around, to loosen up your neck muscles, and now you've got to go up, down, left, right. Yep, I screwed up, particularly, I think, they have you scan it twice, and I think it was the second time. I don't know why I did it right the first time and not the second, but I screwed up the second time because I was doing the roll, just as you were saying, Marco. And that is an important point, John. I appreciate you jumping in there. Yeah, I definitely got yelled at once or twice that the room wasn't bright enough.

53:15But nonetheless, it was really easy for me, other than my own issues following directions and doing up, down, left, or not doing up, down, left, right, and rather doing a circle. It was pretty easy. I mean, I didn't get the 8 o 'clock time slot, which is a little bit of a bummer, but I'm a big boy. I can wait 30 freaking minutes. And so, yeah, I put five stars on the ordering process. I thought it was really, really straightforward. I heard a lot of people had problems, particularly in busier stores, where they would go to pick a pickup slot appointment, whatever. And then during the time they're doing the financial portion of the checkout, then the pickup slot would run out of available spots.

53:54And I guess it was presented as a payment error, but really the issue was that the pickup slot had been snatched out from under them. And this is huge Apple energy to show either no error or an incorrect error. There's something wrong. But I didn't have that problem. Like it was lickety split for me. But I did hear a lot of reports of that. But I don't know of anyone that I had seen that was deeply interested in getting one that in plan to get one that wasn't getting one either day one or, you know, within the first week or something like that. And, you know, friend of the show, Alex Cox, they ended up ordering one late on launch day, if I'm not mistaken.

54:32and still was able to find a day one delivery. I don't think it was first thing in the morning, but still a day one delivery, which is pretty cool. Yeah, we'll get to the rumored sales numbers a little bit, but I hoisted up the repair costs so we can talk about that next. Ah, yes, thank you. I got myself sidetracked. So yeah, so as I was saying, as all of my friends are scanning their faces and we look like a bunch of dorks, nevertheless, it occurred to me, I will be potentially passing this backward and forward. And I think I will probably go on at least a couple of trips with this thing. And at first I thought, there's no way I want to pay$500 for AppleCare.

55:01And then I saw the repair prices. Cracked cover glass,$800. With AppleCare Plus, the extraordinarily affordable$300. It doesn't even save you the entire price? Of course it doesn't. You're paying$500 for this AppleCare Plus to save you a few hundred dollars? Well, wait for the next repair, though. And then additionally, what we assume to be a full replacement due to, quote, other damage. two thousand four hundred dollars if you do not have apple care two thousand four hundred dollars if you do not have apple care but it is comparatively genuinely affordable at three hundred dollars if you do oh my god so for me i think as long as they let me retroactively you know how they typically in the first month or so let you add apple care yeah i think i'm probably gonna be adding apple care because holy jamolies yeah well so here's the thing if you crack the cover glass wouldn't you just leave it cracked who cares if people can see your eyes as long as everything else works fine i think people are gonna be like yeah i'll pass on the 300 dollar with apple care glass replacement so people can see my computerized eyeballs but like what if it affects the cameras and stuff that's that's the question well well here's the thing like the two categories we'll put a link on the show notes to the web page the only two things you can pick are crack cover glass and other damage and other damages covers everything i what i'm wondering is like okay but what if there's no damage what if just like something goes wonky like your r1 chip fries itself or something is that also a 300 repair is like is any kind of thing 300 with apple care well that would be warranty for you know the first year for the first year yeah but after that anyway man so i i don't know i don't know how to gauge the apple care on this i remember when i noticed that the apple care had run out on my 2019 mac pro which happened several years ago at this point.

56:50And I was like, because if anything breaks on this thing, it's also like a bazillion dollars. So yeah, I mean, I guess this argues for the doing the$25 a month thing instead, so you can just continue it indefinitely. But for this particular product, if you make it for the first two years, you're probably buying a new or better one. Potentially. Yeah, because I can't imagine like, you know, if you get really into this two years from now, there's going to be a better one that you're going to want. And you're going to want it, yeah. David Schaub in the chat makes a good point. They only have one part other than a full hardware replacement.

57:19So that's probably why, at least for now, it's cover glass or anything else. It's just like the Apple Watch. They don't even replace the cover glass in that. It's just total replacement. Yeah. All right. The weight. So let's talk about weight. This is in grams. All right. So I'm going to start with other things and end with the Vision Pro. PlayStation VR 2, 560. Valve Index, 810. MetaQuest 2, 503 grams. MetaQuest 3, 515 grams. metaquest pro which is the closest i think most analogous device to the vision pro 722 grams the apple vision pro i'm sorry not the apple vision pro apple vision pro 600 to 650 grams depending on the light seal and the headband but john you helpfully reminded us of something can you tell me about why these numbers aren't really fair so some of these in fact other than the valve index all these headsets have their batteries built in whereas that apple vision pro weight is just the weight of the apple vision pro not including the weight of the battery and i think that's fair because the point is that apple didn't put the battery on the headset you put it in your pocket or wherever else you're going to put it with that 50 clip and so the weight actually isn't in the headset but you can see it's it's pretty heavy you know the the meta quest 2 and 3 are lighter and they have the batteries with them so the meta quest 2 and 3 are 503 515 and the apple vision pro is 600 to 650 and those those quest ones have the battery in the headset uh the valve index is the big chunker but it is also probably the the beefiest sort of gaming thing that includes the battery inside it anyway um i don't think it's outrageous i think the weight is reasonable i think apple did a pretty good job keeping it light i think apple made a wise choice not to have the battery uh as part of the headset uh i just wish they had made the dangling battery a little bit bigger yeah it doesn't this doesn't seem that bad i mean like my my big favorite headphones are 500 grams so goodness it i mean this seems like pretty normal for like high-end thing you'll have on your head i mean how much are the airpods max i'm trying to look yeah 384.8 grams you are pretty darn close i mean they feel really heavy on your ears for a long time but again that's part of their design um based on this the vision pro doesn't excuse me apple vision pro doesn't really seem like it is uh you know particularly heavy compared to its peers yeah and then uh apparently attaching the zeiss optical inserts to the apple vision pro there i go again to apple vision pro you don't they're not the boss of you casey you can say it however you want they're not going to come no i i'm trying to make a point i this is this is my uh you're not you're making a point by obeying their marketing uh edict no i'm making a point that it's so ridiculous that that this is the way they want it pronounced but nobody actually pronounced it this way except up marketing at Apple.

1:00:03It doesn't matter. Attaching Zeiss optical inserts to Apple Vision Pro requires pairing. On 9to5Mac, they write, the pair of Zeiss optical inserts comes with a personal code to pair the lenses to Apple Vision Pro. After attaching the optical inserts magnetically to the headset, users will have to scan the pairing code on the card inside Zeiss optical inserts box to finalize the pairing process. The code in question appears to be an app clip code that triggers a system action to pair the Zeiss lenses to the Apple Vision Pro. That's interesting and kind of cool so this this brings up a a point that was mentioned before right uh you may be wondering and i don't know if this is different in other countries why can you get readers uh like we were saying in the drugstore like you don't need a prescription you just go buy them uh whereas uh apple is insisting that you have a prescription uh signed by a u.s uh qualified optometrist or whatever to be able to even buy these inserts like why why all of the uh stricture around certain kinds of vision correction and not others i don't actually know the answer an optometrist will write in maybe in next episode and tell us here's my best guess my best guess is based on what we were just talking about like accommodation and everything that if you have if you put on a pair of readers and you pick the wrong one you pick plus 2.5 instead of plus point one or whatever uh that it doesn't cause as much eye strain like you're not going to mess up your eyes by doing it it'll just kind of like things will be blurry and things close up will be bigger than they were or whatever um whereas the prescription lenses that you need a prescription for like these inserts for for uh people who can't just use readers if you were to get the wrong prescription and wear them for a long time that it could if not mess with your eyes then at least cause problems with your eyes in terms of like causing eye strain uh and potentially i suppose mess with your eyes and i've seen a couple of stories recently about um what causes uh nearsightedness what causes people not to be able to see things far away was it was part of a scare story of like oh kids they're staring at the phone screens up close and if you do a lot of that it will make you nearsighted kind of like the thing that your parents used to tell you if your nose is buried in books you'll end up wearing glasses because you're focused on things up close and turns out there is some medically explainable mechanism within how the eye forms and grows over time that lends some support to the idea that if you spend a lot of time focusing, I think it's really close that your eyes can become misshapen in a way that makes you not able to see things far away.

1:02:27That's my guess. If you're an optometrist and you're out there and you know, why is it? Is, is it just some, you know, historical regulatory thing doesn't make any sense? Or is there actually a medical reason not to let people say, I know by a prescription, it's this, that, and that, give me these lenses uh is that why we're not allowed to do that in this country or is it just some weird thing and anyway this pairing process you only need to pair i think the ones that well we'll see when people get these i would imagine you don't need to pair the readers for the same reason that you don't need a prescription to buy the readers but we'll see how that works out if you do need to pair the readers then i don't understand this feature at all you can even get these engraved by the way because it's hard to tell like one insert from one person insert from another they like magnetically snap in but i think you get free engraving on them or you can put your name on the inserts so if you have a whole family using the vision pro and they have different inserts and presumably different 200 face shields uh that's how you can do it just look for the tiny incredibly low contrast engraving that you won't be able to see without your actual reading glasses and then you'll know which inserts to put in wonderful All right.

1:03:26We made a brief mention of this earlier in the episode. Mark Gurman writes, I've been told that Apple's initial inventory for launch weekend is about 80 ,000 units, which the company sold out in the first hour of pre-orders. Is that true, though? I don't think that's actually true. Well, read the next rumor. These are all people guessing about how many units they have. German is usually pretty well sourced, but, you know. So then Ming-Chi Kuo writes, Apple sold between 160 ,000 and 180 ,000 Vision Pro headsets during its first pre-order weekend, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. I'm sorry, this is being recounted by Mac rumors.

1:04:00Quo said that the headset sold out soon after the pre-order process opened, with shipping times for all models slipping by five to seven weeks. While the instant sellout and extended shipping times appeared to be positive at first glance, Quo cautioned that shipping dates remain unchanged 48 hours after pre-orders opened, indicating that demand may quickly be tapering off after core enthusiasts place their orders. Again, it's hard for me to square this, which I'm not trying to say that they're wrong, but square this with what Alex had, where they were able to order, I think it was like my evening time and still get a day one delivery.

1:04:30Now, maybe they're saying for the first weekend. First weekend is two days, right? Fair, yeah. It's not like on the very first day. Like, I didn't check, but if you were to go to order now, I'm assuming you can't get day one delivery. Yeah, I didn't check either, but I presume you're right. But I mean, the thing we all don't know, and we're trusting rumors like German or whoever to tell us, is like, we don't know how many have been made and are ready to ship to people. And, you know, I presumably only Apple knows that. Well, so I haven't confirmed this, but Chris3 in the chat writes, I just went on and could get one for the 3rd of February in-store, but late February if shipped.

1:04:59Yeah, that's the other factor very often with everything that Apple sells. If you try to get it shipped to your house, you get one shipping date, but if you're willing to go to a store and pick it up, you get a different one because I guess there are different pools of inventory for retail stores. They always want to have stuff available in retail stores at the expense of people who are ordering it for delivery. So we'll see what happens. And then, of course, we have to bring up the reseller market, and there's a post on 9to5Mac which talks about this, And apparently, based on both what 9to5Mac has found and what we looked at briefly, it looks like generally it's between$5 ,000 and$10 ,000.

1:05:33Yes, I said$10 ,000 for one of these. I did try to look for completed auctions on eBay, and I think I did find one for something like$5 ,000. So that's the thing. yeah it's some story i wish i had the link for notes of saying like you know that's people who wanted to resell this basically had found a way to automate the process that we all just described of like going through the apple store app and scanning your face and buying one apparently they found a way to automate that i don't know i'm just picturing like mannequin heads or something or whatever so they could order tons of them for resale that that was the story i don't know if there's any if the story is true i don't remember where i saw it but i just just imagine you know the motivation to get a bunch of these on day one so you can resell them kind of like ticket scalpers is motivating somebody to come up with a way to quickly and in an automated fashion go through the face scanning process and then a couple of videos that are i genuinely think are worth your time first of all there's the apple vision pro guided tour which you can find on apple's website there's different segments but they stitch them together into one cohesive movie that's something like 10 minutes.

1:06:37And I think it's a pretty good representation of what the Vision Pro is all about. And they do briefly talk about using your Mac within the context of Vision OS. I wish I had a better, shorter description for that. But anyways, they show that among many other things. The one funny thing about this, though, and I'm not the first to point this out, is that they have someone who they claim had never used a Vision Pro, which I do take on face value that that's probably true. But the person, the gentleman that's using the Vision Pro, they have a persona or they have the eyesight turned on and I'm pretty sure...

1:07:12They set it up off camera. Exactly. So they must have at least done enough setup to get through the orientation process and eyesight scanning process off camera. Yeah, that was a really weird... I have a hard time believing that those were his first reactions. They're actors. Don't tell anybody. And they were so, the reactions were so well in line with how marketing wants to describe things. And everything was so effusive. They're reading from a script. Don't tell anybody. There is no way. It's a commercial. Yeah. Still. I thought it was tastefully done. I thought it was nice. Yes. We all want to believe that we will be happy in our beautiful clutter-free home, led through a magical experience of this Apple product by attractive, charismatic people.

1:08:00That's the thing. Like, the content of it was good. Just like that, the conceit that, oh, this is allegedly this person's first time ever. I don't really buy that. I thought it was fine. I mean, the important job, the reason I think that it's worth looking at is if you're wondering, if you just want to see for the umpteenth time or you've never seen it before, what are all the things you can do with this? They go through all of them. Here you go. This is what it looks like. You can do this. You can use an app. You can look at a movie. but you can do, they just go through it all very quickly. And it's a nice overview.

1:08:28It's a guided tour. I thought it was a well done video. If someone, if, for example, like Casey, if you're having dinner over somewhere and they're like, what is this thing you're talking about? I would send them the link to the video and say, if you actually want to see what this thing is that we're talking about, this video will more or less explain it. You know, as long as you get the idea that what you're seeing very often is what that person is seeing inside the headset, you'll be fine. Yeah. They also have a like minute and a half long making Apple vision pro video, which is very much you know marketing it's almost like you know it's the sort of thing that usually accompanied johnny in his white room uh but it was a seriously sweet 90 second video so it's worth your time uh it's it's bananas the stuff that they're going through in order to make these things so it's trying to make you feel better about the price you say well it is really complicated to build and we have a lot of fancy machines although i always wonder with these things like how do square the beauty of these videos and the machines making it with what must surely be the much more cluttered and sad looking factories where things are put together with workers being oppressed by you know like it's just there's there's the marketing video of the factory and there's what a real factory looks like and how the people who work in that factory feel about working there and it's i think there's still some distance between those by the way some quick real-time follow-up i also just now checked the vision pro ordering to see like how back ordered is it now and so now we are almost a week from ordering being opened up i'm able to get all three capacities at it like not at like any store i want but at a store that's that's you know within a decent drive for day two or three delivery like february 4th february 5th february 4th like it's all like you know really right there so maybe there's some and and they're all back but you know for mail order out to like february 28th but that's a little that's very surprising to me like i think maybe obviously you know they're going to probably reserve a lot for for retail but maybe these are not actually selling out as quickly as we think well again we don't know how many they made if they already made as many as they can make like they made all of them now and they're just sitting there waiting then yeah you're not going to sell through a year's supply in the first week uh but if they made uh you know 20 000 of them they still have some left that's much more concerning but yeah only apple knows i also wonder if they favored and i think Marco, you were just alluding to this, if they favored the retail experience.

1:10:49And I wonder if they have regional caches of Vision Pros or something like that, which they can easily get to a retail store, but maybe is a little bit harder to get into the shipping ecosystem for whatever reason. I know nothing about logistics. Maybe that's an extremely – well, it is an extremely ignorant to say. Some people were speculating that Apple might be making decisions about what other countries to open up based on how much stuff they have lying around, like for Canada or whatever. So we'll see. Speaking of other countries, that was a perfect segue. Thank you, John. Apple Vision Pro, App Store, Apple Music, and TV app require U.S.

1:11:20Apple IDs. So this was stated on Apple's website in the pre-order section, but MacRumors has a pretty good summary. for international customers who are thinking of purchasing Apple Vision Pro in the United States and using it in their own country, Apple has cautioned that they will be faced with several limitations when attempting to use the device. According to an FAQ on Apple's Vision Pro pre-order page, first of all the Apple Vision Pro only supports English US for language and typing and English for Syrian dictation. Number two, Apple Store excuse me, the App Store requires an Apple ID with region set to the US.

1:11:54Number three purchases on Apple Music and the TV app require an Apple ID with regions set to the US. Number four, for customers with vision correction needs, Zeiss will only accept vision prescriptions written by US eye care professionals and will only ship to US locations. Number five, customers may not be able to access certain apps, features, or content due to licensing or other restrictions in those countries or regions. And finally, number six, Apple support is only available in the US. This is fascinating. This is particularly fascinating for a lot of our mutual friends. I don't recall where I heard the story, probably on connected or maybe app stories, but the length to which, uh, uh, Federico and, uh, and Mike have gone to procure these devices is astonishing and it is worth listening to their stories.

1:12:38Again, I would look at connected. Uh, I probably won't put a link in the show notes because I'm not sure where I heard this for sure. Um, but anyways, it is worth investigating this because it is both funny and amazing what they've done in order to make this work. But yeah, it is kind of crummy for those not in America. And I get, especially if they're inventory constrained, why they would start here. But I do feel for our, you know, European and UK friends. Also, I'd be terrified to change the region on anything happening to do with my Apple ID because of all the horror stories I've heard about it.

1:13:05Oh, yeah. You don't want to do that. You're basically just going to end up using a test ID, which is great because, again, if you used your own Apple ID and you sync your messages, it would just fill the SSD. I don't know that that's true, but I'm just bashing on Apple's poor control of storage on the iPhone when it comes to messages. Hello, listeners. We are brought to you this episode by ATP Membership, and you can join today and become a member yourself. Here's what this gets you. First of all, the big one, an ad-free version of each episode. You have your own private RSS feed to add to whatever podcast app you want, so you can listen ad-free with your own feed there.

1:13:42You also have a bootleg feed. This gives you unedited copies of the live streams. Many listeners choose to listen this way because it's kind of like a raw, uncut version of the show. Usually has some extra bonus stuff kind of mixed in here and there. You get to hear Casey swear. It's totally unedited and it comes out right after we finish recording. So it comes out usually about a half a day to a day earlier than the regular show. And then also you get bonus episodes exclusively for members. We've done a lot of really fun bonus episodes recently. Everyone's raving about the connectors tier list.

1:14:15we've also done some movie episodes some different tech stuff non-tech stuff food stuff it's a lot of fun so all of that with atp membership at atp.fm slash join it's about eight dollars a month or whatever your local currency might be we have annual discounts we have gift memberships now so much stuff in our membership program so consider becoming a member today it is the best and most direct way to support the show and we give you all this cool stuff and we think it's pretty fun and our members seem like they enjoy it. They keep telling us how much they're enjoying all the extra stuff, the bonus episodes, the bootleg, stuff like that.

1:14:50So check it out, atp.fm slash join. Thank you so much for considering it. And now back to the show.

1:15:00Let's do some Ask ATP. I think we've actually slacked on this accidentally for the last couple of weeks. So one way or another, we're getting back to it, baby. Nigel Warren writes, listening to the, quote, Vision Pro Tidbits segment, of episode 570. I was struck by how the lens inserts complicate things in a variety of ways. Do you know why the Vision Pro doesn't have some kind of focal adjustment diopter like a camera viewfinder would use? Sure seems like it would make the buying using sharing of the device easier. Are there specific requirements or constraints that make it not practical for a headset?

1:15:30Do other headsets use lens inserts or have some kind of built-in adjustment system? I thought a lot of other headsets, or at least the MetaQuest, I thought they do take inserts, but I am talking way outside my comfort zone. Do one of you actually have facts to share about this? Well, I mean, I think this ties into everything we just discussed. All right. So what I was speculating about, is there something about prescription lenses that justifies us having to have a prescription in this country to get them, unlike readers, right? In other words, some kind of health damage or thing that could be done that will be bad for your eyes if you're just allowed to do it willy-nilly you really need someone to give you a prescription if that's true then maybe they don't want to provide the type of adjustment but setting all of that aside the much easier explanation is any kind of adjustability for lens stuff uh it adds space and complexity maybe not a lot but it is additional space and additional complexity versus snap and inserts and i can imagine the snap and inserts can be higher quality because it is just one lens element that doesn't move that's exactly the right position that is exactly your prescription and then finally there's more to your prescription than can be adjusted easily now obviously you can adjust it when you go to the eye doctor you know that big thing you sit in front of and they go one or two three or four and it's got a million different lenses that go in front of your eyes that can adjust for everything that's the it's the doctors you know it's their device for figuring out what your prescription is but there's more than just that you know the sphere number or whatever you can have the stigmatism they make you look at the lines tell you which one is thicker Like it is possible to do all those things.

1:17:02But when I look at the size of the thing at the eye doctor, I think to do that well probably requires space. They don't want to spend on the inside of this device. Space, weight, complexity, cost, all that. Those, I think, are the main reasons that this doesn't exist in the Apple Vision Pro. Because it makes for a smaller, lighter, simpler headset not to do that. And especially if you wanted to do it well. I don't know the details of what's going on inside that big thing in the doctor's office, aside from things tumbling in front of my eyes and things looking different. But I know it's not as simple, especially, again, if you have astigmatism, of just having a lens that you move farther and closer and farther away from your eye.

1:17:41If you have bad enough eyes, there's all sorts of things that can be wrong with them that are not solved by taking a single lens element and moving it farther or closer to your eye. Lawrence Koteff writes, Do you have an email backup regime outside of Time Machine or local computer backups? Recently, a family member accidentally deleted all of their iCloud and email in the Mac Mail app, not realizing that they had all the folders selected when they hit the delete button. And being a very fastidious email user, they immediately emptied the trash folder without noticing. Apple does not provide any way to restore trashed email, so we were left with restoring the mail database from a backblaze backup.

1:18:13This got most of them back, but apparently Apple Mail does not always download and store the contents of emails and attachments. So many of them were blank and lost. I haven't found an obvious solution for automatically backing up an email account and I wanted to know if this is something you have considered before. For me, it is not. I don't have a good answer. I'm not terribly worried that I will put myself in that position, I say, as I knock on wood. But I don't have any good answer for this. Marco, do you do anything about this? Not besides just local file backups. First of all, I am not an aggressive trash emptier.

1:18:47like that's i mean like the the purpose of the trash is to be like a buffer so that you're not like if every single time you delete anything you immediately empty its trash you know whether it's in your mail app or the you know the trash on your mac you're kind of you know ruining the point of the trash i think of that every time i delete something from my media volume on my synology because the finder says just so you know i'm going to delete this immediately and not move to the trash is that okay and the only choice you have is yes it's okay or no don't bother deleting it yeah like so i i think getting getting out of the habit of trashing everything or emptying the trash constantly like that is that would be extremely beneficial for you know to whatever degree you have control over it for you know whatever people you're talking about here um you know so i don't have this problem because i i let the trash be the trash i let it be a temporary buffer for deleted stuff in case i need to go get something out of it that i accidentally threw away or decided I didn't want to throw away.

1:19:45And I only empty the trash if I'm running low on space. I find it funny that both of my children, both in real life and on their computers, never empty the trash. Because unless you are out of space, you need the space right now, there's not much reason to empty it right after you've been deleting things. Oh, there's a reason. There's a reason, the same reason that this person's relative emptied the trash. That reason is very simple. A full trash icon bothers people. Oh. That's what it is. it's like it's like notification badges right i wish there was a way in the finder to say don't show the crumpled up paper because it makes people want to empty it makes me want to empty the trash yep that's a fair point john do you have any backup strategies for this what do you think i'm sure you do of course i do how many is the question right so this is uh you know so here's the things i do with my email all right first strategy so i use gmail for everything i use the gmail web client i use it and like it but i also use apple mail for this one purpose which is to pop to use the pop protocol to pull my gmail using pop down to my mac because that way i know i've got a copy it's not like imap where it might be somewhere else and you know the problem they were having it's like oh but mail didn't have all the mail locally some of it was still on the server i use pop which is an older dumber protocol which says just give me a copy of the mail from the server and i use apple mail periodically run it so it will pop all my gmail down and fill its apple mail database but of course i don't trust apple mail as far as i can throw it so that's just one thing i do the main thing i do once per year on a calendar you know reminder that i think it's sometime in december i use the very good google takeout feature that allows you to download data your google data onto your computer and google will make you a tarball tar.gz file of all your gmail on demand whenever you want it and i do that once a year and that gives me all my i think it's in like inbox format or whatever so worst and then of course once those are files they're in my backup vortex and they get backed up or whatever so worst case scenario i'm gonna lose on average six months of mail assuming my apple mail thing totally doesn't work at all which again i'm not sure i entirely trust it so those are my strategies pop from gmail using a mail client that i don't actually use for mail and i just launch apple mail every once in a while and just let it run in the background and then quit it right because it catches up pretty quickly and then google takeout i suggest everybody who uses gmail as their main email thing put a reminder in your calendar once a year once every six months whatever you're comfortable with to download all your gmail you can set the options it will give you a single file a single multi-gigabyte file depending how much mail you have it compresses really well so gzip compression will get it down pretty small because it's mostly text and that's what i suggest and then yeah that put that file into your own personal backup vortex and have it go on time machine and your super duper clone and your cloud backup the whole nine yards Severin writes, do you use iMessage contact key verification?

1:22:35I just stumbled upon it in settings in iOS 17.2.1. I've never seen it before. So in short, this is a mechanism by which you can verify that the people you are talking to are the people they claim to be. You can do a manual contact key verification by way of getting a key and then over like FaceTime or a phone call, whatever you read your two keys and verify that they're what you expect. I don't use this because I don't think anyone's going to man in the middle of me for state secrets. I just don't think I'm important enough. But I don't know. Do you guys use this? Let's start with Marco again.

1:23:11No, for the same reasons. I didn't know about it until fairly recently, but I think it's a pretty recent thing. I think it's iOS 17.2 that added it. But I don't really have the need for this level of security in my iMessage. Now, if this becomes easy and on by default and everything, then sure, yeah. but you know for the same reason i don't use that like ultra lockdown protection mode of ios i forget what that's called lockdown mode is that it yep yeah so i don't use that either for the same reason that like you know i don't i don't really deal with data that's sensitive or and that big of a target uh but if i were dealing with very sensitive stuff if i was like a whistleblower or a journalist or you know like that would be different then i then i would be very happy these features are here but the way it is now i don't need them john i do actually want to try it with somebody because i want to see how onerous it is it seems kind of onerous like it seems like a burden that you would not want to deal with unless it was like super important like marco said like you're you're in an actual secure situation where you want to make sure you're talking to who you think you're talking to i just wanted to see what that burden was do i have do you have to like use some side channel to do something is it done all through the phone i was willing to try it but i haven't found anyone to try it with so i currently do not have this enabled or used at all and related to that uh 17.3 is out now iowa 17.3 and it has the stolen device protection and i turned it on i turned it on on my phone and i had my wife update hers and turns it on on her phone and i'm trying to get my kids to turn it on have you guys turned it on i haven't yet but i probably should i have it and i'm doing test phone probably this weekend with it because that's one of those things where like because like she can access our shared bank account and stuff like i feel like this is like a family it security policy thing that is worth uh you know closing all the doors on well they can still get to your banking out they just can't take over your apple id well but again yeah that's that's it's it's a high risk enough situation and also her passcode hygiene is not great anyway the reason i did it on my wife's one is remember the the family photo library is on her apple id now with the great shared library feature i get access to all of them but technically it's her Apple ID.

1:25:20So having her Apple ID get taken over is really the worst case scenario, not mine. Although I have all the purchases so we'd lose all the movies. But honestly, I'd much rather lose the movies than the photos. So yeah, I want her to have stolen device production on. Thanks to our sponsor this week, Squarespace. And thank you to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. And we will talk to you next week.

1:25:46Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin, cause it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental. John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him, cause it was accidental. It was accidental. And you can find the show notes at atp.fm. And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-G Marco Arment S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S It's accidental Accidental They didn't mean to Accidental Accidental Tech Podcast So long has adam or tiff shown any enthusiasm for the vision pro adam because he is so into the quest uh three yeah he's so into that he has requested that i please let him try it tiff doesn't care at all what does adam know that there's no controllers yes and because he's a big fan of um because there are so the quest two some games could use like just hand recognition the Quest 3, based on what he's told me it seems like that has gotten better but not every game will use it so he still uses the controllers and it makes sense, I can understand why for gaming purposes controllers are generally a better option because you want the higher precision, you want maybe more buttons because most of the gesture recognition of these systems, it can do a handful of gestures, no pun intended but it's not doing every single finger individually, stuff like that and latency is better with controllers presumably yeah i would assume so uh you know when you look at the vision pro it's very clear that this is a device that's made for computing first and games maybe second or not at all right exactly whereas like you know the quest is a game console and to be fair to apple like you can just use like a playstation controller with the vision like that's their solution essentially oh you want to play a game in the vision pro just literally use your xbox or playstation controller right which is not the same thing as a vr controller which like in the like in the valve games like oh you have a virtual hand and you're reaching out to grab the ladder or the gun or the bottle like that's not a thing that apple is showing or promising at all it's more like oh you can put something in front of you and here hold the playstation controller now you get low latency fast access to buttons yeah yeah so but it seems it seems like you know the way apple has designed the vision pro they they want it to be a computer and that is a very different set of priorities and a very different set of choices than game consoles the quest series those are game consoles first that facebook keeps trying to make computers and they're not very good but they're they're game consoles and you know and all the stuff that the vision pro does that's not games adam doesn't care he might someday but he doesn't now it's not his job he's 11 he hears about games he might like the movie thing or the panorama like imagine if they have like a you're riding on a roller coaster immersive experience thing that'd be fun to do like but i'm thinking about games and the vision pro all that resolution that's good for looking at like your documents is not good for games games don't want to push that many pixels they want high frame rates and you can't get high frame rates in a you know a headset type thing with a low power soc and gpu on there and so not having so many pixels to push is an advantage to those less expensive ones but yeah the only thing i can think of where it'd be an advantage is oh you're on a roller coaster that you might want to see in HDR 4K for each eyeball.

1:29:33Yeah, but I feel like I would think that's amazing. I don't think Adam would... He would just be like, okay, that's cool. And then he would just go back to his game. Show him the gerbils demo from Quickdraw 3D. Neither one of you knows what that is. Nope. Do you know what Quickdraw 3D is? I know what Quick... Quickdraw, that was like the toolbox functions in the original Mac that made fast window drawing stuff, right? Yeah, it was the drawing API. You know what CoreGraphics is now? quick draw was so what was quick draw 3d yeah so quick draw 3d was at a certain point and this this is the time when apple did its quote-unquote most serious push into gaming they made libraries for gaming stuff called game sprockets they had input sprockets and a bunch of other sprockets were like handling joysticks and you know doing game type stuff and they had a 3d api you know like instead of open gl or direct x or whatever and they called it quick draw 3d and it was it was you know it was 3d api just like all those other ones i described except for much much worse and uh and made by apple and one of the demos they had for it like in a typical apple fashion once they came up with quick draw 3d like it works everywhere there used to be a desk accessory called the scrapbook i don't know if you guys remember that nope you go to the apple menu to pick scrapbook and it was just basically an application with a bunch of like a horizontal scroll bar and a bunch of different things and what could you put in the scrapbook anything you wanted you could paste in text you could paste in images you could paste in a movie and once quick draw 3d came out you could paste in 3d objects so you'd get a mac with quick draw 3d and you'd open the scrapbook and there would be a 3d model of a palm tree that you could rotate anyway one of the things they had i believe it was a demo application called gerbils i think and it was a quick draw 3d application that uh modeled I believe a bunch of supposedly furry gerbils riding on a roller coaster in in 3d if you can find a movie of what gerbils look like uh it is the most hilariously not impressive to young people thing you've ever seen in your life and the frame rates were awful I don't think there was any 3d hardware acceleration either so it was all in software not an impressive experience but if someone can port gerbils to the apple vision pro I guarantee a bunch of old people like me that actually had a Vision Pro will buy it for 99 cents and try it.

1:31:49I'm like, yeah, so they'll sell like 12 copies. Right. Yeah, yeah, no, it's a big market for gerbils. Ha ha ha ha ha ha.