581: A Different Way to Be Evil

54:08But make no mistake, Tim Cook is a Steve Ballmer type doing a Steve Ballmer role. He's just doing it better. But it's exactly the same kind of transition. And Tim Cook is exactly the same kind of leader in a lot of ways. He just does a better job of it than Ballmer did. And he has better values, I would say. Like Ballmer did not have a big environmental push. Yes, but Cook still has many of the same strengths and weaknesses. Yeah, it is definitely an extension of it because he came up with jobs. And hopefully Apple won't have to experience a Microsoft-like transition because part of Adele's transition was that Microsoft was essentially a fading star.

54:44Like the dominance of the place where it was dominant, like, you know, Office and PCs and stuff like that, became less important. And all of Balmer's attempts to bring Microsoft into the future did not pan out. There was a lot of big acquisitions. uh you know all the attempts at mobile failed buying nokia wasn't a great idea the skype purchased and you know it's like other people were doing things and microsoft was trying to do things the old way windows in office but also new stuff and it just you know windows everywhere and just wasn't working i mean ben thompson's written a lot about this right so the nadella's takeover was was kind of like i you should make me the new ceo because microsoft despite like you know the stock price and uh you know the the numbers that ballmore will point to to say i've been a great CEO look at these numbers and Tim Cook has even bigger numbers to point to despite all of that the board could see that like look Microsoft is not Microsoft is not ascendant right yes they're making a lot of money but they're making a lot of money it's like it's like a a trailing indicator like they they have a lot of existing businesses that have incredible amount of inertia and Baltimore was good at continuing to milk them and make tons of money and grow that business but what does the future look like and it and microsoft had faded to the point where they wanted a a new leader who could put the shine back on microsoft and i would hope that apple doesn't have to get to that position where either the place where apple was dominant becomes less important which i don't think is any fear of happening anytime soon or that apple like is not seen as having a future beyond the stuff that it has done i don't think that has happened yet either

56:45the generational thing was like, change of heart from tim cook which doesn't seem to be forthcoming right so i really hope it's not like apple the fading star never got into holo headbands like their their vision pro was a flop but the whole headband from some company we never heard of is taking the world by storm and yeah apple still has the phone market but phones are less important now that we have hollow headbands and you know what i mean like that's where microsoft was when adela took over and said it's not going to be the windows company anymore we're going to ship linux we're going to put our software on every platform like you know that strategy ballmore would never have done that gates would never have done that and there's all sorts of things that tim cook would never have done but honestly i don't think apple needs that kind of turnaround they just need leadership that takes a different view of their place in the ecosystem that they've created it's it's a it's a course correction not a revamp because if apple gets to the part the point where it needs a revamp uh that means things have gone really badly i mean that's that's where they if they're 90 days from bankruptcy like and they were in 97 or whatever yeah uh new leadership has a lot of way to do all sorts of great things, but I hope they don't get to that point.

57:49Well, I mean, so two clarifications on that. I mean, first of all, I think we this story has yet to be finished, but we haven't seen how Apple's handling AI stuff yet. And so I think that is one area where it could reveal problems if they really drop the ball on it. Now, we'll see what happens. Again, like we have lots of strong rumors of big stuff coming in just a few short months, so So we'll see. We don't know how that story ends yet. But that is one area where it is possible that Apple could still drop the ball and have a lot of the tech industry disrupt Apple's businesses by using that. So we'll see what happens there.

58:27But the reason I was thinking that wouldn't be as bad was because the thing that really hurt Microsoft was the rise of mobile. Yes. And mobile is the thing right now. So even if the current large language models are a big thing and Apple falls really behind in them, the phone is still the thing and yes the phone is less valuable it doesn't have a good llm you know what i mean like i can see how they could you know they can fall behind in this area but as long as they continue their iphone dominance at the same level or close to it that's not like that's why i gave the holo headband fictional example there's not some new realm of the tech sector some new platform that is now the show the phone will still be the show even with ai it is a you know it is a possibility like that if they do such a bad job on ai that that will ding the iphone or whatever but there's so much else to recommend the iphone that i don't think it would hurt them that much but like maybe this is just me being in the large language model pessimism they're they're very useful and apple should use that technology but i don't think it's so revolutionary that if apple does a poor job of it it's going to hurt the iphone in the same same way that uh mobile hurt the pc i mean we'll see i think you're probably right i mean i would say, don't put it against the smartphone.

59:40I think you're probably right. But this generation of modern AI techniques and the types of models that are being created and deployed now in really compelling ways in a lot of cases, I think this is the most credible attack yet on the smartphone. Because in many cases, we talked about in ATP Overtime a couple weeks ago, the Rabbit R1 and its idea of the large action model. And yeah, there's a lot of reasons right now where we're looking at version one of this and saying, well, that has all these shortcomings. It probably won't be very good. Here's why you might not want to use it or where it might fail.

1:00:16But this is version one. The things we're seeing, look at the Humane AI pin. That is something that I don't think has much of a use right now in what we see now, but that is also a direct attack on the smartphone. At some point, one of these attacks might actually succeed because we're seeing really only the very early versions of it. But if one of those does eventually take off and start really undermining the smartphone in some way, Apple better be there. And so I think that kind of bomber moment could happen to Apple. We can see it. We can see how it could happen. If it comes from an area where Apple is not strong, and I think we'll see how that goes.

1:00:59When we talk about the Rabbit R1 and the Humane AI pin, though, that stuff so wants to be on a phone. So I think the only way that would happen to apple is it ends up being on android phones but not on iphone's due to stupid like app store policy reasons and that would hurt apple but those things so clearly want to be on a phone it's just that the the companies putting them out don't have a phone platform to put them on so they're trying to go down their own with pins and the little uh playdate type thing but those things just feel so naturally at home on a phone and it remains to be seen like we said when we talked about the apple ai stuff but most recently is the ai stuff a commodity or is it a competitive advantage because if it's a commodity apple will just license it or make some of its own or whatever but if it's a competitive advantage how big is that advantage and how much does it weigh against all the other stuff that's why i threw a whole headband out there because it's like what if there's something that replaces the phone but a lot of that ai stuff is going to be perfectly its natural home is on the phone it's the computing device that you already have that already has microphones it already has cameras it already is connected to the internet you already pay for that connection it already has a platform and software and cpus in it like that's all the stuff you need and you just need to connect it to the ai large language model and yeah apple could screw that up by being dumb and everyone else connects to a large language model and no one wants to license it to apple or apple has a cruddy one or but i just look at how much the terribleness of siri has hurt the iphone and the answer is not that much despite the fact that the the voice assistants on every other platform have been better significantly for years it hasn't really hurt the iphone too much so i still feel like the i keep saying hollow headband and people are probably thinking i'm saying vision pro but i'm trying to think of some fantastical future thing that obviates our need to hold rectangles with screens well and so this actually leads me into the you know the second refutation or kind of clarification i want to make on this whole topic is you know uh the way that that i think we've all characterized it here and there in this conversation with apple's behavior now we've kind of said like we we wish they would be a little like let go a little bit or be a little bit you know nicer or more more gracious with some of these app store related policies.

1:02:56The failure of leadership here is not that they are not being nice enough. And for them to ease up their grip a little bit on some of these areas would not be them being charitable. I think it's actually strategically the right move to have done that for lots of reasons that would generally benefit the company and its users and developers all because the grip they have held has been so damaging to the entire ecosystem and to them and their products that has invited so much of this regulation and the regulation comes with it the possibility to significantly negatively affect them if for you know for instance if you look look at what the doj is asking for in their lawsuit they're asking for some pretty significant changes to the way Apple makes integrated products.

1:03:45That is a massive attack on Apple's entire method of making products. It is a huge attack on key components of their operating system, their hardware, their integrations. If the DOJ gets what it wants, even if the DOJ only gets part of what it wants, it could really negatively impact Apple. And for Apple's leadership to have basically driven the ship directly into this and invited these attacks from governments by being so incredibly anti-competitive in so many areas for so long. I think that shows a failure of leadership and a failure of strategy. When I say I wish Apple would have avoided some of this by loosening the grip a little bit, I'm not saying that they should have been nice, that they should have been charitable, that they should have been generous.

1:04:34No, I'm saying they actually made a strategic error that will cost them more in the long term in much larger areas. yeah we've been saying that for it feels like for years now but like the problem is uh apple disagrees with us so clearly so characterizing it the way we do of like that they should loosen their grip or they should be nicer is trying to tell them what behavior they should change but the argument has always been apple if you do this it will literally be better for you and in the long run right which is which i've always said is supposed to be apple's always going on about how like we take a long view we don't care about the roi we do what's right we you know that's and they have done apple has done it's not just hype apple has done many many things since the return of c jobs going on for decades including in the tim cook era decisions that are bad in the short term but good in the long term apple does that all the time except in this one area and the reason is because they disagree with us they don't think it's good in the long term we we obviously think it is but we don't run apple so yeah when we say they should be nicer it's not because we're telling them to be magnanimous or to give up money or whatever it's because we literally think it will make the company more money in the long run like so many other things that they have done that were sort of counter to conventional wisdom counter to what their competitors were doing that seemed like a bad move that took years to come to fruition those so many of those are where why apple is where it is today and we're trying to say this is another one apple and they're saying they disagree and what marco was saying if if he was ready to make this reference he could have um was that uh the more the more apple tightens its grip the more developers will slip through its fingers.

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1:07:53Apple Vision Pro personas can now be 3D and float freely across different apps. So reading from The Verge, starting, what was it, yesterday, day before, something like that, starting today as The Verge writes, Vision Pro Personas will be able to do more than hover like a ghost in FaceTime calls. Now you can use them in SharePlay-enabled apps to collaborate, play games, or watch media with other people. Apple's calling this a spatial persona. The idea is to make it feel like you're in the same physical space as another user. It was part of what Apple showed in developer previews last year, but hasn't been available in the actual Persona beta until now.

1:08:24and I will point you to this week's Connected where they discussed this and had a really good conversation about it. I do plan on trying this in the next couple of days. In fact, I was trying to get some time with Mike from Connected in order to try this before we recorded and it just, our schedules didn't work out today and I apologize to all of you for not having been able to make that work, but you know, stuff happens. So yeah, check out Connected if you're interested in that. Marco, I'm assuming you haven't tried it because you never asked me to. I'm not sure how many people you know with Vision Pro.

1:08:53So what is your understanding here? You're right. I have not tried it. In fact, my Vision Pro is not even in my house right now. I actually lent it to a friend for a few days because I hardly ever use it. And I wish that this was not my answer to this question, but I don't think this is going to change my usage of the Vision Pro at all because, I mean, first of all, I still can't get it to look right with my eyes. I guess that's a me problem, just like how AirPods never fit me until the AirPods Pros. The Vision Pro does not work with my eyes. And I know it's not my eyes' fault, because when I put on my son's$500 MetaQuest 3, everything is tack sharp.

1:09:40I can see every single sharp edge of all of those blocky pixels on those low-resolution screens. With no adjustments, all I do, I crank the little head thing back, because he's a kid, so he has a head smaller than mine. So I just crank the little head thing back to make it bigger, stick it on my head. No adjustments, no setup, perfectly sharp. And I put on the Vision Pro, no matter what I do with the Vision Pro, I've tried everything, believe me, everything I've tried. And it is a blurry mess. And so I have a very hard time using it for anything. Even if I get past that, I think this is, first of all, I have major concerns with the Vision Pro.

1:10:17I'll get to those in a little bit when we talk about the soccer video. But I'm not motivated to use it. I'm going weeks at a time without even putting it on because I'm just not finding those compelling use cases that fit into my life. Yeah. So recently, I don't know, maybe it was a couple of months back, I added a shortcut to, and I think we might have talked about this on the show. I added a shortcut to both my iPad and the kids hand-me-down iPad that will send me a push notification when either of those iPads falls below 20 % battery. And I did that because even though the iPad is not an essential device for me and is mostly not an essential device for the kids, I am never happy when it's completely discharged.

1:11:03And I would notice probably relatively quickly and probably at an inopportune moment. I have no idea what the battery state of my Vision Pro is ever. And that's mostly okay because I'm just not using it that much. And I think it's a few different reasons. You guys covered this really well from a developer in like business perspective on Under the Radar or the most recent Under the Radar. There's obviously more to it than just the business perspective. But from a personal and user perspective, I do very much like the product. And I think it is, as everyone has said, a technological marvel. I don't have a lot of occasions for it in my life.

1:11:51And I think a lot of that is because it's so immensely antisocial. I think Apple did as good a job as they possibly could with making it social, but inevitably you have a humongous set of goggles on your face between you and your eyes and between your eyes and the other person's eyes. And that's just never going to work. You're never going to be able to watch something together because my limited experience with SharePlay is not great. And what are you going to do? You're going to have one person looking at a TV and the other person looking at the Vision Pro in the same damn room? Yeah, Aaron, why don't you sit next to me with these idiotic goggles on my face while we watch this movie together because the fidelity on the Vision Pro, you just don't understand, honey.

1:12:31It's just that much better. We're going to spend$7 ,000 on Vision's Pro instead of just using our TV together. And as we establish, the fidelity actually isn't better if you have a 4k television decent 4k television that you're a reasonable distance from or a subwoofer yeah right exactly so anyways um there are occasions when it is freaking magical and i really do mean that i mean being i will forever and always be dumbfounded and incredibly impressed by mac virtual display and the handful of times i brought the vision pro to like the library to work i have used the mac virtual display and it is just chef's kiss it is just incredible.

1:13:12I could not say enough good things about it. The problem, though, is that you're that idiot at the library wearing the Vision Pro. And so the only times I've been able to do it, because I just haven't had the gumption to do it otherwise, is when I'm in a private room that, granted, you know, has glass walls behind me or whatever, but I'm facing an interior wall. And so the only thing that people can see as they walk by is the back of my head. And I am secluded from the rest of the library. And the other day, I went back to Wegmans to work for the first time in a long time. And it's really delightful at Wegmans.

1:13:45You know, there's really great Wi-Fi and not say our libraries are bad by any stretch. But anyways, Wegmans is really nice. It's got comfortable chairs, really great Wi-Fi power all over the place. And you know, if I'm thirsty or hungry or whatever, I can go and grab a snack. But I'm not going to use the vision pro there. Like this is just it's to look at me, look at me, you know, and so I haven't had a lot of places where I think to myself, you know what? Now is vision pro time. And the only times I can really think of other than, you know, when I'm working privately, even in a public spot, is on the rare occasions that Erin has a social thing in the evening.

1:14:20So she's out, the kids are asleep. And then hell yeah, I'll put that on and watch a movie because I'll watch something in 3D, you know, or what have you, or I'll do something along those lines. And that's pretty cool. And bringing us to the next topic, the immersive stuff is just phenomenal, even though this new video kind of wasn't. So what am I talking about? So when Apple first debuted the Vision Pro, there were several immersive experiences. And again, just to set the table or set the conversation, there's 3D where you're looking at, say, a rectangle. and there's depth to the images in that rectangle, right?

1:15:02But you can't change your perspective at all. You're still always looking at a fixed, you know, from a fixed camera, you're looking at something that now has depth in a way that my television on my wall does not, but it's still a rectangle. There's nothing you can do about that. And when you mean fixed camera, just to be clear, it's what you basically can't do is you can't move the camera forward or backwards, up or down, left or right, but you can rotate because the camera's field of view is larger than your field of view. So you can turn your head. Imagine your head, the camera is replaced with your head.

1:15:31You can turn your head. You can look up, you can look down, you can look up, you can look right, but you can't take a step forward. But no, no, that's, you're getting ahead of me. I'm talking about just vanilla 3D, like Marvel movies is what I'm saying. Same answer though. Same answer. If you're sitting close to the screen, you can't ever change your perspective in a 3D movie same way. Like even if you're sitting in the front row, you can turn your head to the left, you can turn your head to the right, you can look up, you can look down, but you can't take a step forward and see like more of the back of something like, oh, I can't see what's written on the side of that truck.

1:15:59Let me take two steps forward and now I can see it. That's not how 3D movies work. And that's not how Vision Pro 3D works for these things that are recording. Right, but I mean, just to make sure we're saying the same thing, 3D is when you're watching a Marvel movie or something along those lines. And there's depth to that movie in the way that there isn't depth in your TV. But you have zero control over the perspective of what you're looking at. You are along for the ride. With immersive stuff, and I think this is what you're describing, John, with immersive stuff, yes, you can turn your head.

1:16:30You can go up and down, left or right. And that will actively change what you're looking at. You are immersed in this environment. You have agency over where you're looking. Well, it's basically just because the screen is really wide and really tall. Yeah. It's basically using like a 180-degree camera. it's like you're sitting extremely close to a very large 3d movie so the screen that wraps around you yeah like you still can't like shift your head left or right and like look around objects like that that's not a thing you can do like you're still fixed in what you are seeing but you can but your field of view is way bigger and this is and the comparison in the vision pro world is the immersive environments that are like 3d modeled where you can actually take one step forward before you go down or tilt your head to the side of the screen.

1:17:20Because those are 3D modeled and you're essentially changing the position of the camera because the camera is your eyes in those immersive 3D model environments. Right. So in any case, what we're talking about is when the Vision Pro was released, there were, I think, four off the top of my head immersive experiences. So there was a thing with a woman on a tightrope on a fjord in Norway, I guess. there was a completely computer animated dinosaur experience this is not the thing that everyone got in the demo in june this is like your it's a video effectively but it's an immersive video so you can look around and change your perspective uh there was a thing about rhinoceroses or something along those lines where um this was a documentary a very brief documentary and then finally there was the something like half an hour 45 minute alicia keys concert where you're in a studio space and the perspective occasionally changes between cameras.

1:18:13But the point is you can look around and, you know, if, if the bass player is just jamming out and doing something incredibly exciting, you can turn your head and watch the bass player, which is pretty freaking cool. So that was the only four things. And for the Rhino one and for the, the, um, the tight roping one, tightrope walking one, they were listed as episode one back in February two or whatever it was that this came out. And we still haven't gotten anything since. But last week, Apple released their immersive video sports film on Apple Vision Pro. And this was an immersive video featuring highlights from the 2023 Major League Soccer Cup playoffs.

1:18:51So this is the American soccer slash football, what the Brits would call football playoffs and finals. And And the first time I watched it, I was really, really disappointed by it. And it's been talked about a lot. I forget specifically where. Jason Snell talked about it at Six Colors a bit. And Ben Thompson talked about it on Stratechery a bit. And also, I think it was covered on Dithering, if I'm not mistaken. But the problem with the immersive video, the soccer video, is that it was edited like a commercial for regular old TV. So it was, oh, look over here. Change. Look over here. Oh, look at this thing.

1:19:36Now look at that thing. Now look at this thing. Now look at that thing. Which is fine if you're watching something where you don't have any influence on what you're looking at. but so often I would be put in a situation where I'm, I'm maybe the players are walking onto the field on either side of me. You know, you're at the edge of the field, the perspective of the cameras at the edge of the field, the players are walking by you onto your left and to your right, going to the center of the field to do like a coin toss or whatever. And you're naturally panning and tilting your head, you know, and trying to see different things that are happening in the scene.

1:20:08And by the time you're just getting a feel for like, okay, I see the scene. I get what's going on here. and I'm now going to concentrate on wherever the video appears to want me to concentrate. Well, guess what? Now we're somewhere else. And what made it even worse was a lot of times there would be a soccer ball rolling down the field as people are kicking it down the field and you would get this like view from way off in the corner and you'd be looking, oh, where's the soccer ball? There it is. All right. I'm going to focus on the soccer ball, which is approximately, you know, down to my left.

1:20:38And then next thing you know, Oh, now the soccer ball is over to my right. And it was infuriating. The second time I watched it, which was about an hour ago, knowing what I was getting into, I liked it a lot more, but it's still really damn annoying because the whole point of immersive video where you can change the perspective by tilting your head all around is that you want to give that some space and some air to breathe, you know? And you want to be able to look where you want to freaking look. And the Alicia Keys thing did this so much better because they had, and I think we talked about this on the show, like several of these different cameras positioned throughout the studio space.

1:21:21And they would cut between them, but they would do it like every minute or two. And so you can really settle in to where the camera is and look around and take in what you want to take in. And yeah, it occasionally was annoying if like you were positioned on one extreme end of the studio and that bassist who's just killing it is way on the other end of the studio. So they're far away. You can look over where they are, but they're far away. And that's annoying, but it's still nice that you have the space to settle in and look at what you want to look at. And with this, it was just rapid fire in a way that was extremely off-putting.

1:22:00so I have some quotes to read but Marco have you you said you did watch this is that right I have not I mean because honestly like every time I've watched video on my vision pro I've gotten eye strain and a headache and I have to stop because again like I can't get it to be that sharp um and again I've tried everything I have tried the the reader lenses I've tried different settings I've tried the different hacks for the face shields having no face shield different gaskets like i have tried everything it doesn't look good enough i i would feel a lot better just watching something on a laptop um but that being said you know this isn't particularly for me because i'm not a sports person i understand what people are saying and what you've been what you're saying about how like it's it's edited like a like a you know traditional video and it's not really edited for the new format and i forgive them for that for the very first you know teaser or whatever in most ways um i i think that the way that i have concerns it points to the larger concern i have with the vision pro which is did did no one at apple think this was a problem like did they watch it and because so far everyone who has watched it who knows sports and who who knows the vision pro in our in our like tech press group here everyone's had the same feedback of like oh yeah this is not the right style for this it's disorienting it's not good like did apple not know that did they not put it through like a test audience of any kind right apple's apple's a big company though and i think the evidence that apple institutionally does know this is all the demos they actually gave and like the vision pro thing all of those had like not just the alicia keys thing but the type rote walker all those things had a stationary camera without lots of cuts right they all they they must the people who made those must have understood that because there was such a variety of content in the short little demo and all of it was like the one thing that did move was like the like i said it was like the slow moving uh drone shot that you see in like the apple tv screensaver just so slowly like no fast movement no fast cuts like so somewhere in the organization probably in the vision pro team are people that know this now who put together this mls thing probably an entirely different set of people and you know big companies like people in one org aren't communicating with people in the other org, or if they are, they don't want to be told what to do.

1:24:24And that's where I give some forgiveness because it's like, look, the people who did this either didn't know, hadn't taken on board the institutional knowledge that clearly exists in Apple related to Vision Pro stuff, or they had heard that advice but thought, well, but we've been cutting sports together for our entire career, so we know better, so we're going to try it like this, right? And there is a little bit of a dance here because the dance is between the person doing the editing and the person doing the watching. Casey was watching in the way that he chose to watch immersive content, which was finding the things that he wanted to look at and looking at them.

1:24:58You could also look at immersive content without moving your head at all and just look at what's in front of you and enjoy the 3D effect, which is the way some other people may do it. Obviously, they haven't worked out the kinks here, but I think maybe if this knowledge was communicated, maybe the sports people said, well, that's too limiting. Yeah, that works fine for your demo or you have a locked-off camera and you change perspective you change from one camera to another once every 90 seconds but that's not going to work for an exciting sports thing and by the way i think the biggest problem with the sports thing was that it was a five minute highlight reel uh that is not teasing you for any longer content because there is no longer content you know what i mean it's like and it's a five minute highlight reel for games that happened last year it's a highlight reel what would be great when you can watch the whole game in immersive video you can't so anyway but yeah so I hope this is just one of those stunning looks, but I will point out that, like, so this, how to handle making things exciting in video while also making it trackable is also a thing in 2D video.

1:25:58And despite the, by this point, 100 plus years of making moving pictures and how to edit them, still people get it wrong. And even like the most recent example, I was thinking about this, Casey, when you were saying looking at the bass player or looking off to the side of the soccer ball. The most recent example that people know from being on the internet and reading various articles and reviews about it is Mad Max Fury Road. Have either of you saw this movie? Casey must have seen it, right? I've seen, actually just rewatched it maybe a month ago. Marco, have you seen it? Of course not. Okay, anyway, when that movie first came out, one of the many genres of like sort of, you know, press surrounding the movie was about the director and specifically about a technique the director used, and I'm sure there's a YouTube video showing it, where there's lots of quick cuts and lots of action.

1:26:41It's an action movie. People are fighting and jumping and crashing. cars and shooting and doing all sorts of stuff like that and it does use a lot of fast cuts and the technique the director used to make it so that the audience doesn't get lost is that when it would do cut cut cut from one one camera to another camera to another camera to another perspective another perspective he would doggedly keep the most interesting thing that you needed to look at dead center in the frame which is not a thing most people do most people like yo we're gonna of compose the image on my frame and i'll use rule of thirds and i'll try to guide the eye to this thing or whatever but uh george miller i think that's the direction i correctly realized that if i'm going to do lots of fast cuts in action i want people to track it i don't want them to have to every time there's a cut figure out where the point of interest in this frame is so we kept it dead center which artistically seems like isn't that so super boring like you're drawing a bullseye and you're like look when we go to this camera whatever i want them to look at i want them to see this hand punching this face i want to see this knife being stabbed in this direction i want to see this guy just put a dead center in the frame so you can put your eyes in the center of the movie screen or your television screen and endure incredibly fast exciting cuts and never have to move your eyes because whatever they wanted you to see most importantly was dead center in the frame and maybe those frames aren't as artistically interesting if they had been composed in a more painterly manner or whatever but it allows very fast action to be more easily tracked by the people watching it it doesn't require them to do anything interesting so i would say that if if you go into these immersive things and you keep your eye you never move your head and you keep your eyes dead center a you're sacrificing one of the things that's cool immersive video but b i bet they would actually work better right you don't get to look at what you want as cool but at least you'll survive the cut so maybe casey i was going to ask you the second time you watch it.

1:28:31Did you move your head less? Probably. Yeah. I, I, I didn't think about it consciously, but yes, probably. Um, it, it's too bad too, because I am a, a very enthusiastic viewer of concert videos. You know, in Plex, I have probably a couple of hundred different concert videos and only maybe a hundred of them are Dave Matthews concerts, but anyway, um, I really enjoy concert film. I really, truly do. And I would consider, you know, a Hamilton, for example, I know it's not a concert, but I don't think it's too dissimilar. Um, and I love a concert film. I love watching certain sports and one of the most, I don't, did we talk about this on the show?

1:29:18I don't recall if we have, but one of the, just the most, and I hate the way they use this term, but the most blow away experiences I've had in the vision pro was when I use the app, which is currently in beta. I believe it's called Vroom. I don't know if I'll be able to put my hands on a test flight link or not because it's a test flight only at the moment. But what Vroom does is it lets you use your F1 TV subscriptions. This is where you pay to get, you know, kind of like, to get the F1 season that you can stream, you know, and watch later, watch live, what have you. And F1 being super nerdy is all about data.

1:29:52And so they have immense amount of telemetry that you can get from F1 TV. They have camera feeds and audio feeds for every single car on the racetrack. They have obviously the footage that's being broadcast on, say, ESPN, if you're here in the States. Well, what Vroom does is it says, all right, we're going to take the main feed and put it dead center in a rectangle right in front of your face. But you can optionally add several other panels around it. So you can do, I believe, you could do two panels to the left of the main panel and two panels to the right of the main panel. So you now have six panels.

1:30:24So you have your main feed that's jumping between, you know, all the different racers and whatnot. And then upper left, you have your favorite driver. Bottom left, you have that driver's teammate because there's, you know, two drivers per team. And then maybe upper right, you have your rival. And bottom right, you have their teammate or, you know, however you want to do it. And then even cooler is below all this, you can optionally put a 3D rendering of the racetrack. And you can see little dots racing around the racetrack. I cannot overstate how incredibly cool this was. It is unbelievable how cool it is.

1:30:59And so, and that's the thing that you can do. There's an app called multi viewer, um, for the desktop that works. Okay. Um, but I've tried it in the past, and I have not had a good experience with it. You can't do this near as well on a desktop as you can with the Vision Pro. And these moments, and that's not immersive at all. Well, it's not really immersive in the way we're talking about. But a concert, an immersive concert is amazing. When you watch immersive sports, granted, I'm getting all these damn cuts all the time. But for the brief way, for the three seconds before another cut happens, it's incredible.

1:31:44And for me, I don't feel like I'm just up close to a screen the way that two of you guys have described it. To me, I feel like I'm frigging there. I really, really do. And at the end, you're in the locker room and the team is celebrating. And I'm glad I actually watched it again because I could swear that all these dudes had Vision Pros on, even though they're spraying champagne at each other. And I was deeply confused by it. It turns out they just have some sort of goggles on. I don't know why. I don't know enough about soccer to know why those goggles were there in the first place. But regardless, in any case, you feel like you're there.

1:32:19You feel like you're in the locker room. You feel like you're about to get sprayed with champagne. It is immersive. That's why they call it that. And it has so much potential. It would be unreal. and I think Ben in particular has been banging this drum for a while, it would be unreal to have, say, courtside seats in an NBA game. Just unreal. Because you can look up at the Jumbotron if you want. You can look at where the action is. I don't know if this could happen live. And certainly, given that it took like three or four months for this to get put together after the MLS season ended, I don't know if it would happen in a timely fashion.

1:32:54But if it could, holy freaking smokes, it's amazing. So let me quickly read a couple of summaries from Ben and Jason, because I think it's relevant. Jason writes, as you might expect from the run from the runtime, this video is a highlight package with lots of quick cuts. Video is all about quick cuts. But immersive video doesn't work with quick cuts. I don't think several times during the MLS highlights video, my head was turned in one direction, taking advantage of the 180 degree immersive space to watch something happening off to my left or right, only for the vantage point to change to a different perspective.

1:33:23Now I was staring at nothing. It would take a few seconds for me to scan my surroundings, reorient oftentimes a delay that led me to miss the highlight I was meant to be viewing. Ben writes,

1:34:00I cannot overstate this enough. Like it is unlike anything I have done with just a 2d rectangle, no matter how great my 2d rectangle is, which my TV is pretty good. And it certainly was really good back in 2019 when I got it. This is just a whole different level. So Ben continues. Well, it's just to be clear, it's because it's 3d, it's showing a different picture to your left and your right eye. So that's the comparison to a movie screen would be if you're seeing avatar in 3d with the stupid 3d glasses and you were up close to the screen and you could turn your head left to the right, that would be the closest analogy.

1:34:27But as we said, when we talked about the vision pro originally differences division pro doesn't cut the brightness in half for each of your eyes because of the stupid polarized but but again it's more though it's it's it's so much more than that though i really think you're underselling it when you say that because with avatar and 3d you don't get to change your perspective the perspective is your perspective well you know but you just established that you don't get to change your perspective in the immersive video you can turn your head only if avatar was in 3d and you didn't have to wear polarized glasses like if you could see avatar it's basically like avatar in the vision pro but it wrapped around you like it wasn't a rectangle in front it's just essentially a screen wrapped around you spherically different picture for left and right eye no uh no uh brightness loss and a high resolution and that's not i mean i'm not saying just that because that is significant and that's why it is so profoundly different feeling but it is essentially just different picture to your left and right eye i i i hear what you're saying and that may be technically accurate but the experience of it is vastly different than that oh yeah because it's It's not flickery.

1:35:25It's not dim. No, but you're too hung up, John. And it's wrapped around you. You're too hung up on the technical aspects. But that is the difference. That is why it feels that. And I felt the difference myself. I've watched tons of 3D movies. And like I said, when I talk to the Vision Pro, it feels different. It's kind of like the touchscreen on the iPhone felt different. Well, it's just a touchscreen. It's just more responsive. Yeah. But when you cross this threshold, something happens that makes it feel different, to your point. And I think that's the Vision Pro. And I think the thing is that if you put me in an IMAX theater with, let's suppose I had perfect, no brightness altering glasses so that I got a perfect view of this IMAX screen that's wrapping all around me, I still would be hard pressed to feel like it would hit quite as well as the Vision Pro does.

1:36:12But that technology doesn't exist. That's why you've never felt that there. Well, even still. Even still. Like, it really is. I cannot stress about how much it is. That technology is just, that's the headset. That is, it's a pair of glasses with no brightness cut off and high resolution. Right. But all I'm saying is, even if you're imagining like a 3D movie where it wraps around you, like I feel, I genuinely, to me anyway, feel like it's more than just that. Well, anyway, to finish up, Ben continues, Today is April 1, 2024. The Vision Pro is available to customers on February 2. In other words, it has been just short of two months, and there isn't an episode two of any of these videos.

1:36:41There is, as noted, only one additional immersive video, that MLS highlight reel that I'm so disappointed by. This is, frankly, bizarre, given that immersive video is arguably the single most important thing in terms of standing up the Vision Pro ecosystem. Maybe this is all still going to happen, but it is baffling to me that there's been such a paucity of new immersive content from Apple. But maybe this MLS clip explains why. Apple has what I think is compelling footage, but they didn't release it until it had been heavily edited, because I guess they thought it looked better that way, even though I think it looks worse.

1:37:11This is the antithesis of a highly iterative experimental approach to figure out what works, but perhaps Apple isn't as capable of that as we might have hoped. I think the explanation of this is, you know, the sort of slow start is mostly explained by the fact that Apple hasn't sold a lot of these. And so the amount of money, I feel like it's a penny-pinching way to do things, but say, look, why are we going to spend millions and millions of dollars doing production on this stuff when we know the total potential audience, the TAM, as they would say in business speak, total addressable market, is so incredibly small that it's a rounding error, because we just haven't sold that many of these stupid headsets.

1:37:46So it's like, wait, how much are we spending per Vision Pro user to make this sports video? And what I would say to Apple and what Apple would say to itself, I was like, well, it's chicken egg. Like, you're never going to get more Vision Pro users if you don't make those videos. But I know you don't want to make those videos at a cost of$1 ,000 per Vision Pro user or whatever it is, right? And so, yeah, Ben's point is like, they need to do it if only to get better at it or at least to spread the knowledge about how to be good at it, to spread that around and to work out the things but i i still currently i may be proven wrong but i still currently believe that apple does have pipelines of vision pro immersive content going we just haven't seen any of those pipelines push the first things out the end on this this thing seems like a one-off or whatever but i feel like those pipelines are currently ramping up and running and i think they will start spewing forth content maybe sometime in the middle of the year next year and is that part of apple's plan did they plan to be have those pipelines coming out sooner if they had gotten nfl sunday ticket would it have changed their plans are they waiting until they have a few more vision pros sold are they waiting till version two like there's all sorts of explanations that you might have for this from the outside it definitely looks like a miss and it looks like a miss to people who own vision pros right because they're like i bought this thing it's sitting in my house i would like to be able to use it for something and apple's like yeah yeah we're getting to it we're getting to hopefully they're saying we're getting to it and they're not saying oh we never actually planned to make any immersive content we assume developers to do it because they love us i mean first of all i think there probably is some of that for sure um but i hope not i hope not too but it's it's very difficult to look at the vision pro launch so far here we are two months out to look at the vision pro launch so far and say this is going the way it was supposed to like I have a really hard time believing that this is kind of a weird time in the sense that we haven't seen WWDC yet however that being said given that it seems like Vision OS is just barely done now I honestly don't expect a lot from what they're probably going to call Vision OS 2 which will probably launch you know probably be debuting at WWDC and then coming out this fall like I I wouldn't expect much from Vision OS 2.

1:40:02I think Vision OS 2.0 will come up with the App Store, right? Because the thing is, if you look at, again, where it is now, it launched basically halfway through this Apple product year. It's barely at a 1.1 now, but logically it's kind of still a 1.0 product. It barely is there now, and so I don't see it somehow getting massively more mature in the next two months. That just seems too aggressive software-wise. So I don't think, if you look at where it is now product-wise, I wouldn't expect massive upgrades for 2.0. Okay, what about apps? Well, you know, as I talked about under the radar, as Casey mentioned, from a developer's point of view right now, the install base of Vision Pro owners is just so tiny.

1:40:51and it seems like very few apps really make sense on it right now, that it's very difficult as a developer to justify working on it and porting an app or bringing an app or writing a new app to it. There's really not much reason for developers to give it any attention right now. Okay, so that kind of rules that developers, so there's also not that many apps for it. That kind of harms the computing angle. So then that brings us back to content. Okay, where's the content? that's still a big question mark and you know john i hope you're right that there's just a big pipeline and we're seeing none of it yet but i keep going back to why did they launch it most of the content that was there on day one which is almost all of the content that is still there now that was mostly what they had last june when they were doing the press demos it seems like they haven't really put out much new content in not two months but like seven months I don't know what they're waiting for.

1:41:50They have this big splash and they launched this big product and it's been crickets since then. There's no apps. There's no content. There's no users. It's very difficult for me to look at it right now and to see Apple putting what is necessary into this to make it succeed. It seems like they put it out there almost reluctantly, and they just kind of hoped things would support it. And that's not going to happen because of the volumes and everything. So Apple has to support it. And where is that support? I don't see it. It seems like Apple itself is not giving the Vision Pro what it needs to succeed.

1:42:37you know i don't know what you're talking about marco because i have almost earned back the cost of my developer strap from all of my calls and sales almost 260 baby so i actually what i have another 100 to go 150 to go something like that don't forget yeah don't forget tax and yeah yeah also the thing with the vision pro is it is a new product and platform um and so i mean first i still do think there's there's a pipeline there and everything and the fact that it's such an expensive product the pipeline could have been intentionally set up such that it doesn't really start pushing the content until they get the cheaper version out or whatever but that just screws everyone who buys it now like honestly like if you ask me like who should buy the vision pro right now my honest answer is nobody uh i wouldn't say that i would i honestly the more the more i've owned it the more i've shown it to other people the more we see that there's no content who should buy the vision pro right now my answer really is nobody no i would i would disagree i think it's frequent travelers who do not care about being that person but it sucks as a travel device it's too big and clunky like there's no there's no nothing equivalent to that except for other similar product other similar vr products like the the vr experience in a plane you need a vr thing to do and the vision pro is an expensive one and there are a couple of cheaper ones that are similar but i can see that like it's it's an early adopter product at this point but like the reason i mention it being a new product is because one of the things that is often true about new products at regular companies and this may or may not be true at apple i've never worked there so i don't know is that uh new products have uh plans about their launch with predictions about what will happen and very often the thing that happens next depends on how closely that product matched the predictions so unlike something like the iphone that doesn't really have to prove itself in the market because people continue to buy iphones or whatever they just really need to not screw up right this thing needs to come out and they said and we think when this thing comes out we're going to sell this many this fast and assuming we do that then we will that will trigger this pipeline to start churning on this video or whatever and it could be that this new product has not met apple's internal expectations which has caused them to slow down on their like hold your horses on those plan yeah we were going to invest 200 million dollars into sports content starting on the day of the launch if the launch went like x but the launch was 10 times worse than we thought it would be so maybe we'll hold back on that maybe we'll hold now maybe the new plan is we'll hold back on that until the cheaper one comes or whatever like because it's a new product i think there may be benchmarks that it was that had to pass in order to get it that next stuff uh asap and the reason i think about this is something that came up earlier in the show um podcast transcriptions doing that podcast transcription stuff is expensive it's as expensive as probably spinning up one small pipeline of vision pro stuff right and that's for a free application right you know apple podcast is not despite the premium podcast thing they rolled out i don't think is a huge money maker right but because it's part of the iphone and it's just like this is just another thing that makes iphones valuable the iphone is established product the iphone they're going to sell an expected number of them and so someone had to to get the budget to say hey we want to do podcast transcriptions here's how much it's going to cost every year forever and ever like to to transcribe every single podcast here's how much it's costing computing whatever and what is that offset by we think it will make the iphone more valuable no we're not going to charge for this it's going to be free for everybody the i the you know the podcast app is going to be free in the app store right we're just going to do it for free for now anyway right that is a big difference but it does show that apple when it has a product that is performing as expected is willing to put a fairly large amount of money into it even with no return whereas this is saying okay why don't you just put a large amount of money in because it's going to make people buy more vision pros and it smells to me like either the pipeline was always super delayed and they were aiming for when they get the cheaper one or they were going to go like gangbusters until they saw the first month of sales and they're like you didn't hit expectations vision pro you know executive and so you're we're switching to the slower plan the plan that that that spaces out the content production so that it lands closer to when we have version two or three of this and it's cheaper or whatever with apple secrecy we don't know which one of these things is right but what we do know is out here as people who own vision pros it doesn't feel good it feels like you got a product and you're not sure what to do with it and it costs you a lot of money and it's disappointing and i think that is part of the risk of being an early adopter it's a new platform you don't know how it's going to do you took the risk right along with apple you paid the money you got the thing uh by the time content appears maybe version two is out and you're like oh man i really want version two but i already spent all this money in version one you know it's it's tough it's tough launching a product not every product is a guarantee to be success but i think for the most part apple still has at least as much faith in this as they did in for example the apple watch and they're going to keep churning on it despite the fairly slow launch is this slow launch slower than they expected or is it exactly as slow as they expected we don't know because again they're not sharing their uh numbers with us we did know that there was a ceiling on how much they could make just because of the screens and it seems like even if that ceiling wasn't there they probably wouldn't have sold anymore but it's a 3500 weird headset that you have to like get special try on stuff and deal with prescription stuff and like the barriers to purchasing are high so we are very far from the iphone 6 moment we're not even at the the iphone os 2.0 app store moment that was a joke about the app store yes the vision us already comes with the app store but you might be forgiven for thinking that it doesn't and what did ios ios firmware 2.0 come with uh ios firmware 2.0 came with not too much past 1.0 but it did have the app store and that was a big thing so i also have very low expectations for vision os 2.0 at WWDC but I continue to think that if Apple sticks it out with Vision Pro the year you should pick your head back I tell everyone so they should go do the free demo because why wouldn't you get using expensive product for free and it's really cool and to Casey's point it does feel like nothing you've ever done before unless you've used another headset right uh and then wait a year or two and see how this shakes up because version two and three of this are going to be better but I honestly don't even think the one that's really better than this is going to be out for several years because i think first they'll do the cheaper one that's about as good and then you'll get the more expensive one or the equally expensive one that's better and you know it's going to take a while for this ball to get rolling if it starts rolling at all and then we'll find out how big this ball is to to torture this analogy uh the apple watch the apple watch did take off a lot faster than people expected but it still seemed like it took years of the apple watch kind of wandering the wilderness until people settled on you know it's a rich person's fitness tracker and that turns out to be a fairly lucrative niche but it took a while to get there.

1:49:35So as someone who didn't spend$3 ,500 on this, I'm willing to give it time to grow and I'm going to check back in on it each year and see how it's doing and I don't have the bitterness of someone who bought one of these things especially if you bought it for development purposes and now you sold two copies of your application but you know, welcome to my world. You know, for the record, I'm not currently bitter about it I mean, I'm bitter in general that it's so damn expensive, but I mean, I knew it going in and I'm not currently. And you didn't even charge extra for your Vision Pro thing. You're just leaving literally dozens of dollars on the table.

1:50:10No, I mean, yes, that is true. I'm not bitter about it. And I think the thing, if I'm bitter about anything, it's that there is, to my eyes, an immense amount of potential here. And I can't get a good read, Marco, if you would agree with that or not. I'll give you a chance in a second. But I think there's an immense amount of potential here. And there are moments where it is, I mean, life-changing is dramatic. I wouldn't say that. But I cannot, I mean, like that Vroom app, it is unreal. And I don't particularly want to watch F1 any other way. I literally will sit in the family room, if that's where everyone happens to be, such that I am available to people, and I will put the Vision Pro on to watch F1.

1:50:56even if f1 is showing on the tv right there the same thing i was making fun of people you know this hypothetical of me saying to erin oh i'm going to be my vision pro i literally would do that for room because it is that much better it is that incredible anything else i wouldn't bother like 3d avatar eh i wouldn't bother i just watched on the tv but nevertheless there are so many things about this device that are unreal again mac virtual display for me and for my eyes in literal and figurative sense is incredible. The immersive stuff, if we can get more of it is incredible. The Vroom app, as silly as it is to keep harping on this, it is that incredible.

1:51:35So there's so much potential here and I don't regret having bought it, but knowing what I know now, I don't know. Like, I think it was a, a professional responsibility, especially for the show, but into some degree for CallSheet to buy one. But leaving that aside, I don't think it would have been a smart purchase. And I don't think I would have purchased it were it not for my professional obligations. But I don't know, Marco, do you see potential here? Do you think it's just a complete waste? I think it is possible for this product to succeed. But I am not yet seeing any evidence that Apple will be able to do what it takes to make it succeed.

1:52:17So what I think it will take is Apple needs to dramatically over-invest in it in a way that does not make financial sense directly in terms of content, apps, games, you know, because what they've made here is a really great technology product that has absolutely nothing in its ecosystem. There is no content. There are no games. There are no apps. There are no users. How do you solve this? You seed it somehow. You invest money up front as the maker of the hardware to fund the creation of content to get users to buy it. And eventually, if you succeed at doing that, then you can start relying more on third-party investment.

1:53:05Like with Apple TV +, another great example. They put so much money up front to millions of dollars to make those TV shows so people would buy their service. And that was a huge upfront investment that only probably now has started to finally pay off in terms of getting subscribers. Right. But what they have here is a totally clean slate that is empty. Like when you turn that dial and you are put into the Mount Hood environment and you just hear the wind blowing by, that's what the content ecosystem is like. It's an empty field that just wind is blowing by and there's nothing there. Even the environments, there's still the two that are coming soon that aren't even there yet.

1:53:49Didn't say what soon meant. No, like I – it seems like nothing is coming. And so hopefully I'm wrong. that that's just i'm just saying that that's how it looks as an outsider and as an owner of this device it seems like nothing's there and nothing's coming and i can tell you for sure from the developer side there's no reason to bring anything there so apple needs to apple needs to see that ecosystem themselves they need to maybe pay developers to make apps for it maybe make more apps themselves even apple's own apps are barely there they have many of their own apps that are still in iPad compatibility mode for it or that aren't there at all.

1:54:28So it seems like even Apple isn't visibly investing in the content ecosystem. Maybe they are behind the scenes and we haven't heard about it, but it sure looks like they don't have their foot on the gas either. And one thing I have learned over the years is to not care about any of Apple's products more than Apple cares about them. That is a recipe for heartache. See also the HomePod. And so whenever Apple doesn't care about a product that much, I shouldn't either. And so far, it seems like we are just waiting for Apple to start investing in the content ecosystem of this. And until they do, I don't know why we should.

1:55:08So I'm very pessimistic on this product right now because I don't see the evidence that they're going to be able to do what it takes to make it succeed. And right now, the way it looks right now today, I would be surprised if they ever launched another Vision Pro product. Oh, I don't know about that. Now, hopefully that's wrong. But that's just how it looks now, two months in. Again, this is still early days. But where are the signs that they are investing in what it will take to make this succeed? Right now, I don't see those signs. That's my concern, is that it seems like even Apple is having trouble justifying making software or content for this.

1:55:49And if they can't even figure out the reason, then we sure can't. So everything that I've said that I wanted, before this came out, I was very excited about it. Everything I've said that I want to do with it, all the possible applications for it that I think I will have, that all depends on software and content coming out for it. That can't happen yet because it makes no sense to get there until Apple really pushes and seeds the ecosystem themselves. So everything I hope this device could do, I still hope it can do it. But today it can't. maybe someday it will. We just have to see what Apple will do to invest in it.

1:56:27And right now we're not seeing nearly enough of that. So hopefully I'm wrong or hopefully it'll turn it around and we'll be looking back on this in a year and laughing. As of today, right now, I think this product is a massive failure. So I really hope that that has turned around soon. I've always been on the three-year mindset for this product because I didn't think like everyone's like, oh, next year it'll be even better. I'm like, no, next year. I think even said this in a show back when it came out next year it won't be that different and in two years it probably won't be that different so i'm on the three year after launch timeline of saying three years after this goes by at that point there should be a new version of this hardware and the ecosystem should have moved a little bit and that's a good check-in point it doesn't mean that if three years they haven't done x it's it's doomed or something right but in three years i mean the product still exists um and hasn't gone big home potted into the you know mystery closet before it pops out again um that'll be a good time to look at progress because i think it's unfair to look at this after one year i think it's unfair to look at it after two years because it is an unproven product in an unproven market because apple is not doing what all the other headset makers did and tried to make a video game thing like they're not doing that they're doing a new thing right a mass market device that you can use for productivity in addition you know they're taking a different approach so i'm going to give them three years to figure out what the heck this is and to field new products and to update the os so we'll check in again and i guess i guess three years from launch i guess i put that a note of my calendar or something what would that be uh 2026 2027 ish 27 yeah i mean but the problem is like yeah sure three years before it like you know matures maybe but no no not matures not matures three years before it we figure out if it's gonna work at all well but i think i think the big challenge is between now and three years from now what will make people buy it yeah no i'm assuming apple is going to continue to spend money on this for the next three years if only at a sheer bloody mindedness as they say across the pond because like this is tim tim cook is all in on this thing this is the thing he shipped and not the car i think despite the pace of investment being unsatisfactory to us on the outside i believe there are at least three years of continued real investment in this product line from apple so that's that's why i'm putting the three-year timeline on it if that isn't true and they don't they may stop funding it well i mean we'll know because there'll never be another one but i think there's three years of money backed up behind this sucker if all goes to plan i hope you're right because i i think you know alternative timeline here i think in two months we start talking about ios 18 and we never come back to this well we may not come back to but i you know i think there's people at apple who are doing stuff and i think there's money being put towards it we'll find out like again this is about like internal benchmarks if there was some benchmark that said we have to sell this number of these things this amount of time or others were canceling a project if that happened apple's not going to tell us immediately right but that happens companies there are consequences there's like we're going to put this out here's what we predict is going to happen and if it catastrophically doesn't we're going to have to have a serious meeting about the future of this product line but you're never going to know about that like i mean for all we know that's what happened with the home pods we were all talking about people buying home pods two years after launch and they were getting a model that was manufactured two years ago right so that is a product that disappeared but it came back sort of so you know who knows We'll see.

1:59:36I mean, there is one thing, though, like that is, I think, a red flag in that. Did you see the other day that Woot had the Vision Pro on sale? Oh, yeah. That's not good. We were speculating for the last six months. We were saying the Vision Pro is going to be backordered throughout this entire year. It's going to be supply constrained. They're not they're going to be selling every single one they can make. That doesn't seem to be happening. And that doesn't seem to have been happening since launch day. Like, remember we were saying, hmm, there's really not a lot of lines. It's really surprisingly easy to get them.

2:00:11It seems like they're not selling to what they expected. And they already have discounted and gotten rid of a bunch of them through Woot. That's not good. So I am concerned. I really am concerned for this product. If I had to guess, it seems like it's selling well below expectations and Apple is not investing in it. And that's scary for two months out. You might have a collector's item. I don't want that. I want it to succeed. No, really what's going to happen is, John, you're going to have a collector's item because Marco is going to ship it to you as packing chips or packing peanuts in a few years.

2:00:46I never bought a G4 Cube either, but I did a review on. Oh, my God. I want them to get to version two so I can maybe have a chance of it being sharp for my eyes. Three years, Marco. Three years. Oh, God. All right. Thank you to our sponsor this week, Squarespace. and thank you to our members who support us directly. We have a new member-exclusive content area called Overtime. This is a bonus topic, a bonus tech topic, after the show that is member-exclusive in each episode. This week's Overtime, we're going to be talking about an unpatchable vulnerability in Apple chip design and the XZ open-source project backdoor that happened this past week.

2:01:26Two very interesting security topics, I think. So that'll be in Overtime this week. Join atp.fm slash join to hear those overtimes and all the other member perks. Thank you so much, and we will talk to you next week.

2:02:00Accidental. And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM. And if you're into Mastodon, 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-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse. It's accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Tech podcast so long. People just heard a new song. Ah, yeah, yeah. So we had asked and been asked, well, we'd been asked many, many, many times to have our friend Jonathan Mann do something with the theme song that mentions Twitter. because the three of us haven't used twitter in how long yeah yeah um it's not that it was not from lack of desire but first of all we didn't really want to put a lot of uh stuff on jonathan's plate and we love the original so darn much that we really didn't want to screw with it too badly uh but jonathan uh reached out to us i guess a week or two ago and said hey i'm gonna take another stab at it and and uh do see what i can do to make it sound a little different and so yeah that's what you just heard unless you are listening to the bootleg in which case i'm not sure what you're gonna do but you're gonna have to listen just go download the regular version and go to the chapter of the theme song yeah there you go yeah and and literally the only change is we've changed the line about twitter to never refer to mastodon that's it everything else is the same yeah jonathan did a more a more different version uh but it turns out it's very difficult to or at least difficult for us or for marco to blend vocals recorded a decade later with vocals recorded a decade earlier like your voice sounds different you know what i mean and so to try to get them to be to go together seamlessly it turned out to be uh beyond our capabilities so we did the surgical strike and i have to say that when we talked about this before i've saved a little link in my notes document that i send to people whenever they ask about the theme song we did talk about it ages ago and one of the beautiful things about the original theme song is that, well, A, it's kind of like a nostalgic historical record, and B, specifically the part about Twitter, it had one out from the beginning, which is that if you're into Twitter, it's a conditional.

2:04:25So the conditional becomes false. We all became not into Twitter, but whatever. And B, after we had talked about that, the guy renamed Twitter, right? So it's like not only is this, you know, have a conditional statement, it's a conditional statement about a thing that ostensibly doesn't exist, but still is because he can't figure out how to change the domain name because he's an idiot anyway um so i was perfectly fine having the historical theme song be there forever and ever and ever uh but now that we have a modified version uh you'll see it's slightly modified there were there are a few other modifications that i think would be useful but incorporating them is difficult so we still have the ability to modify it elsewhere so to give an example the uh the little uh verse with the john didn't do any research marco and casey wouldn't let him is dated from back when uh they were convincing me to do a tech podcast with them and i was afraid i was going to burn out because i was doing too many things at once obviously that is not the case anymore i don't even have my jobby job anymore but that thing is still in there and the out on that one it's all past tense wouldn't let him in the past you know didn't do any research you're lawyering our theme song i know i'm just saying like uh you know and i have a modification that makes it even more clear that it was in the past but it still kind of works but anyway uh we love the theme song we hope you love the theme song we hope you love the new theme song and if we have to change it again in 10 years i guess eventually we will yes extra extra thanks to jonathan mann for first of all working with john um but also for for doing this in the first place you know 10 years ago or whenever that was and also doing it again now uh we are very thankful check out his work jonathan mann.net uh we love his stuff and i i love the hero the song for us and we've used it all this time.

2:06:08It really, I think it fits the show very well and I know a lot of our listeners love it. So yeah, thank you very much to Jonathan for that again. For many of our listeners, the theme song is the only thing they like about the show. And I'm speaking of people's children and spouses that are forced to hear a tech podcast in a car ride and they hate every second of it, but they like the theme song. Or at least it sticks in their head. Yeah. Golly, Jonathan's been writing a song a day for 15 years since January 1 of 2009. Gracious. That is a long time. A lot of songs. The funny thing, too, is like, so he years ago, like if you notice that the ATP ad bumper music bits are actually parts of the theme song.

2:06:56that's because years ago when we first started doing like basically audio bumpers into ads i tried a few different like sound effects and you know john hated them all and they were all kind of awkward and jonathan man emailed me he's like hey i have here's here's the original like logic tracks to the theme song if you want you can like use this to formulate some kind of you know ad bumper music so i did and that's that's how we got our like music theme ad bumpers and it was great so with this it was it was great like he he literally just recorded a new song new vocal tracks and he he just gave me all the tracks again and we were able to like you know just drop in the vocals and and i was able to make some adjustments to make it match and it was great um but i also wanted to point out because i have like all the original like tracks to it i as a non-musician had no idea how many tracks are in a song like that like because first of all you know jonathan is the only singer he but if you listen to the song there's backing vocals there's also not just one backing singer the backing vocals there's like six different backing vocals that are all just him overlaid doing like a six-part harmony as backing vocals behind the main vocals and then there's there's like 17 different instrument tracks like so to to write a song every day that's like even just just the writing part like the the composition and the writing the words that's its own challenge that's but then to actually record these like many track compositions and recordings every single day is no small feat like there is so there's so many layers there's different instruments like there's all these like there's like seven or eight different vocals like it's really impressive i i don't know how he does it and i i am like the the more that i dove into this logic file the more impressed i was well at least you're using logic for what it's actually designed for for once yeah for once