663: Defending the Honor of The Cheesecake Factory

39:11I don't think most phone cases do remove it. Look at the bull strap case. That doesn't remove the problem. Like the bump is so big now that it doesn't, it's impossible to level out with any reasonable case. Even the bull strap case doesn't do it and they cover the other part of the non-camera part of the plateau on the pro phones. I don't know. The cheap clear case I got and the Peak Design case both level it out. Well, the bull strap leather ones don't. Anyway, Apple could solve this problem, but so far they haven't. All right. So from the ATP Insider episode on The Restaurant Season 1, we fairly briefly made mention of the Cheesecake Factory.

39:47And I think one of us, maybe John had said, oh, it was Marco. See, it's always— We were telling Marco about how fantastically huge the Cheesecake Factory menu is because for some miraculous reason, Marco has never been to the Cheesecake Factory. We recommend that he goes just to see the menu because it is so huge. Now that he's a restaurant owner, he can appreciate what it must take to have a menu this big. And Marco said, well, surely a lot of this stuff is frozen. And I agreed. It's like, it's got to be frozen. Like, there's no way you can have all this stuff available and not have stuff, you know, frozen.

40:17Yeah. So we found, I don't know who pointed this out. I'm sorry. But somebody pointed to the Daily Meal website, which reads, despite the fact that a long menu is usually a red flag, the food at a restaurant is pre-made and reheated. The opposite is the case of the Cheesecake Factory. All 250 menu items or more are made from scratch every day with fresh ingredients. But the same can't be said for the cheesecakes. All the cheesecakes are delivered to the restaurant frozen and then defrosted before serving to customers. There's no name associated with this because a lot of people sent this in. There's a lot of Cheesecake Factory fans out there who wanted to defend the honor of the Cheesecake Factory and say, no, it's not frozen.

40:52And how excellent is it that a place called the Cheesecake Factory has all fresh food except the Cheesecake Factory, which is made out of factory? Well, so if you go through the history of the thing, it started with somebody who was making cheesecakes in their basement and then she was making the cheesecakes for the restaurant until it became like untenable for her to do it. But anyway, frozen or not, the cheesecake at the Cheesecake Factory is good. If you like cheesecake, they make good cheesecake. So I'm not going to besmirch the frozen cheesecake. I don't care if it's frozen. It tastes pretty good.

41:18I will still insist that cheesecake is pie. Well, I'd have to consult the cube rule and I don't have it in front of me and I'm not going to do that right this second. All right. But let's talk topics. And we have a smorgasbord of Mac rumors to talk about, starting with the M6 or OLED MacBook Pro. So we can read from Bloomberg. Let's see. The company is readying a revamped MacBook Pro with a touch display for late 2026 or early 2027. The new laptops will feature OLED displays and will retain a full trackpad and keyboard. the new machine's codename K114K116 will also have thinner and lighter frames and run the M6 line of chips.

41:59For the revamped MacBook Pro, Apple is retiring the notch. In its place, the company will adopt a so-called hole punch design. This will be similar in concept to the dynamic island on the phone. The company has also developed a reinforced hinge and screen hardware to prevent the display from bouncing back or moving when touched, a common drawback of the existing touch PCs. Because of the price of your components, the new 14 and 16-inch MacBook Pros are likely to cost a a few hundred dollars more than the current versions. As of now, Apple isn't actively developing additional touchscreen Macs. Instead, it's waiting to see the market's reaction to the touch version of the MacBook Pro.

42:31Earlier, Mark Gurman had written in a different article, Apple's investigating the idea of bringing cellular connectivity to the Mac. Oh, hell yeah. Cellular connections are unlikely to come to the Mac before 2026 when Apple's planning a second generation modem that includes support for faster speeds. So this is a lot of existing OLED MacBook Pro rumors. Like again, the MacBook Pro, OLED MacBook Pro was originally rumored for this year. Then they said it's actually going to be pushed next year. So the rumors continue to say next year is the OLED year. When we were talking about the M5 MacBook Pro, just the plain M5 one, I was saying this generation of M5 MacBook Pros will probably be your last chance to get this design because the new design is coming.

43:07And it looks like the new design is going to be different in many, many ways. Being thinner, maybe, you know, do you like the current trade-off in terms of size, weight, and battery life? Will the thinner ones be better because of better battery chemistry we don't know but like if you if you want so a known quantity the known quantity of the size weight and battery life of these ones it is here for you touch screen this is the first time this has been rumored like in a substantial from like german who usually doesn't just make stuff up right lots of people have been talking about touch max for ages and ages this is a german rumor and there's it's corroborated by at least one other person so it seems like they're going to do this they're finally going to bring touch screen to a Mac.

43:45That involves a new hinge to make it so the display doesn't wobble as much. There's also the cell modem rumors, which again, the C2 in 2026, 2027, which is when they're supposed to be coming out. And of course the OLED screen, which is, these are the OLED MacBook Pros. So it's going to be a big change. This is the biggest change since the Apple, since these new, it's not the Apple Silicon ones because the first Apple Silicon ones look like the Intel ones, but since whatever we're calling this new design, the kind of boxy ones that we've had for the, well i guess m2 through m5 this will be the end of the line seems like for that design in the beginning of an all-new design with a lot of different potential trade-offs i'm not saying you should buy these because the new ones are going to be bad maybe the new ones are going to be great and you should wait all i'm saying is it's going to be a change and i find this fascinating because we've been waiting for touch max for ages not because we're dying for them we're dying for a solid auto mac but for touch max we're like you know people want it why shouldn't you do it it shouldn't be that hard uh there was another rumor i didn't put in here of like the exact technology they're using to put the touch sensitive thing in the oled display it's some new tech that embeds the touch layer inside the oled so it's not as thick and yada yada whatever um i don't there's no rumors about software related to the touch thing but and i don't i'm not predicting they should do this i'm not recommending it but i think if they simply added touch to mac os as it exists today be fine yeah it's not ideal it's you you're it's going to come with the trackpad you should use the trackpad but how many times have you seen somebody who's accustomed to touch using a laptop and they just want to scroll a web page and they reach out and do it our dialogue comes up and it's just easier for them to just stab the okay button with their finger instead of hit the thing it's a thing that people do and that's perfectly possible to do with mac os mac os is not made for your finger it's made for the pointer but there are things that your finger can do on existing mac os so i don't think apple needs to say oh everything has to become fisher price huge and everything has to be usable by finger i don't think they need to do that i don't think they should do that because that's called an ipad all right leave the mac the way it is but i think a touch screen would be a useful addition for the people who want fingerprints all over their laptop screen yeah and the reality is like this is one of those areas is that no matter what we as traditional Mac and laptop nerds think is right, I don't want a touchscreen on my MacBook Pro.

46:02However, how many people among us can say we've never unthinkingly just touched our laptop screen thinking it would scroll? Yep. That's madness. I would never do that. But I will say that I have literally pinched Zoom paper, print paper, more than once. more than once multiple many times over my life i have literally put two fingers down on like a magazine page and pinch to make the text bigger so i'm not above doing that i just say i haven't done with the laptop screen but yeah stab that okay button with your finger yeah and even if all it is is scrolling and zooming that would go a long way because like the reality is again no matter what we think as nerds this is what people are used to with every other device every windows pc of any you know note has had a touch screen or at least had a touch screen option for many years now and they added it because like the pc ecosystem is so diverse someone's going to try everything and once somebody tried it and they're like people but first of all people didn't object to it and second of all once it becomes like a thing that you have and you know your competitor has but you don't you're like well maybe we should add that too and people just got used to it being there now was windows redesigned to be a touch interface hell no no windows is design optimized for nothing right but like the the pc manufacturers didn't have to like it was like well we can't put touch on our laptops until windows is radically redesigned so that everything is accessible with your fingertip nope they didn't do that they just made they just put touch screens on it and people started using them and it's like the market has decided that this is a desirable enough feature to justify what i assume is the fairly minimal cost for the touch layer to be added to the screens of laptops.

47:47Yeah. And the reality is like most people out there in the world, especially as you go younger or more novice, most people assume that every screen is a touch screen and they will try to touch it. And if it doesn't work like a touch screen, they're going to either think it's broken or they're going to think it's not as good as things that are touch screens. So you have huge market pressure to do it. And, you know, it's one of those cases where we, I think, have talked a lot about like, you know, purity and like Like what John was just saying, like waiting until we can redesign everything to do it right, which would be a terrible idea for macOS.

48:18But, you know, like waiting until the perfection is possible. And this is the thing that Apple and us, but, you know, Apple often gets stuck in this kind of thinking of, you know, they can't just pinch those and do something imperfect. They wait until they can do something perfectly. And in the meantime, they don't address it at all or have something horribly broken, you know, like because the perfect is the enemy of the good. and sometimes they compromise on their perfect pure vision for instance slowly turning the ipad pro into a laptop which is what they have done like the ipad it used the ipad originally was like you pretty much only were intended to use it in portrait orientation unless you were watching some video then you could rotate it and remember the first keyboard for the ipad that came out with the ipad one that was portrait it was a stand with portrait and then everyone was like hey you know this thing actually can work if you just turn it to its side and put a bigger keyboard on the bottom.

49:16And then eventually Apple made the iPad Pro and made their own keyboard that held it to the side. But still the camera was on the wrong side and the logo was on the wrong side. And they were like, they were insisting this is an everything device, but mainly a portrait device. And it's definitely not a laptop. And then slowly what they've done with the iPad is turn it into a laptop. They gave you, you know, landscape uses. They gave you landscape cases with keyboards. They added a trackpad and a pointer. Now they have resizable windows and like the finder kind of sort of, and they have the dock kind of sort of like they've turned it into a laptop.

49:50All of this was in complete violation of their pure idea, the pure design, the pure ethos, but it's what customers wanted. And it made the product generally better for everyone because either you didn't have to use that stuff and you could keep using it the way you always were, or you could use it the way you actually wanted to, like more of a laptop. And it turns out the iPad is a pretty good laptop for a lot of people. And so I think thinking about touch on the Mac, we should think about it the same way. The Mac is not going to be a great touchscreen device, probably ever, just the same way that Windows PCs aren't great touchscreen devices.

50:28But a lot of people want that and are assuming that will be there and are disappointed when it's not there or they have bad experiences because it's not there and they try it and it fails. and so even though we don't want fingerprints all over our screens similarly to how many ipad users don't want or use any of the multitasking features and never connect the keyboard to their ipads there are so many people who want their macbook pros or their macbooks to have tuck screens and assume they will and have bad experiences because they don't that it's it should be there it's it has reached the point of popularity and user pressure now that they should have tuck screens i mean it reached that point a while ago but yes and the rest of us who don't want fingerprints all over our screens don't have to use it yeah and i think when apple executives always talked about this they've even back when steve jobs was still out i think he said similar things like oh your arm gets tired having your arm up touching a mac touch macs are no good but obviously with laptops especially if you're literally using it on your lap the screen isn't out in front of your eyeline like an ergonomically correct desktop display it's down it's where an ipad screen would be if the ipad was in laptop floppy laptop mode or if the ipad is just up on a stand it's lower uh it's tilted and it is more viable and i'm assuming that's what they'll say it's like we've always said your arms will get tired but with the laptop you don't have to hold your arm up it's down there and i don't i don't know how they'll spin it but it's like all i'm saying is i think that this doesn't mean that like the new apple display which they'll come out with someday i swear uh will be a touchscreen uh because look in the pc world there's not a huge number of desktop displays that are touch displays uh because it is tiring to have your finger up like that now i'm sure there are some and especially if you have like a drafting table style uh touch pc uh that's a different ball of wax but apple has never really made one of those they still could uh but they haven't although if they made one of those it should probably run ipad os or something but like if they do what i'm saying is if they do this with laptops i would imagine as the article says although god knows how he could possibly know this like oh they're gonna they're gonna do it on the laptops and then just wait and see and if people like it maybe they'll expand it out or whatever but yeah laptops first makes uh perfect sense for putting the touch on things and again it will be fun to see how they market this all right a few other quick grab bag items uh the other new macs of development include updated macbook airs with the m5 chip these devices are slated for release in the spring apple's also working on a refreshed mac studio mac mini and a pair of external mac monitors dubbed j427 and 527.

52:55Sure they are. You'll notice that I have not yet mentioned the Mac Pro. Apple is exploring another major Mac change as well, a shift from the Touch ID fingerprint scanner to Face ID, but that remains years away. Years away? Oh my god, put Face ID on Macs. You know where you could experiment with that first? Put it on the laptops. It's killing me that they don't put like... Yep. The thing is, laptops is the place where they have an excuse, like all the displays, who's in? They're going to come out with new displays, these long rumored Pro Display XDR successor and presumably a studio display successor with a 19 pro and whatever there's so much room in those displays for a face id sensor they're so freaking thick but face id on the mac stop what are you waiting for it's killing me i mean i know you guys are waiting for cellular but the face id on the mac is just it's just it's just brutal i don't i don't know what they're waiting for like just gather up those more only put it on your own displays it's another reason for people to buy your displays you don't even have to like have it be third-party display only put it on your first-party displays anyway yeah originally when i put this in here it was like these this His German article was like, other Macs in development, MacBook Air, Mac Studio, Mac Mini, just not even a mention of the Mac Pro from German.

53:58But then, Brendan Shanks to the rescue. Brendan Shanks writes, new in Xcode 26.1 Beta 3. This is, I believe, a constant. CPU family underscore ARM underscore Hydra, H-I-D-R-A, which is listed as H17G. We discussed that, which is apparently an island. Where is the island? I forget. Is it in life? I remember the discussion. I don't remember. Scandinavia or something. Yeah, somewhere up there, yeah. Yeah, it's not the multi-headed beast of Greek myth. It was H-Y-D-R-A. Anyway, this was supposedly the code name for an Apple Silicon chip that has not been released that is potentially a large, beefy chip that would be suitable for a Mac Pro, even though German's not even mentioning that.

54:43It's like, oh, here's some of the Mac rumors for the next year. They're going to update these Macs and those Macs and those. Not even a mention of the Mac Pro. not even like no news in the Mac Pro or Mac Pro, you know, like just nothing just doesn't even get mentioned. Like it doesn't exist. Maybe the product is canceled. But then in the new beta of X code, a constant sleep sneaks through that mentions the rumored code name of a chip that as far as we know has not shipped is not one of the M5 chips slated for the MacBook Pros. It could be a Mac Pro ship, or it could just be the beefy chip that they ship in the next Mac studio.

55:15And the Mac Pro really is dead. Who knows what will happen, but here I am out here trying to sell those MacPro Believe shirts, wearing mine in my heart every day. We are sponsored this episode by Skims. Now, I, like many of you, I probably, I wear underwear. In fact, I would say I wear underwear almost every day. And Skims is now making underwear for men. It's honestly really nice. So the first thing I notice about the skims they sent me a couple sample pairs i got the cotton five inch boxer brief and the stretch five inch boxer brief and the first thing i noticed is these fabrics feel great and they look great and they fit really smoothly on my legs and you know other stuff now granted i'm talking about underwear so you know it's a family podcast it can't be too specific here but let me just say it feels really nice and it looks nice so one thing is like fashion wise they hit right at the thigh you know it it looks modern it's a nice modern cut and they stay where you put them.

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57:21All right, let's talk some new developments or new-ish developments in the OS's 26 in the beta 4. In beta 4 for iOS 26, you can now tone down liquid glass. And I saw a lot of news articles about this, and they all frustrated me that they didn't have side-by-side comparisons, or at least not when I first started reading about it. But our dear friend Stephen Hackett did Yeoman's work to put these together. And so we'll put a link to Stephen's excellent post in the show notes. You go into, for iPad OS and iOS, you go into settings and then display and brightness. For macOS, you go into system settings, appearance, and there you'll find a new toggle that lets you swap between two looks, clear and tinted.

58:03Clears the look of liquid glass since iOS 26 launched, while tinted adds opacity and contrast. So I know that the names they put in the ui aren't necessarily connected to the names that of the apis behind the scenes but it was i initially saw this and i was wondering if this is the same as the api at least on mac os when you make a glass material thing you have a choice between clear and tinted like those are like the the constant numbers or whatever dot clear or dot tinted and when you do glass that's tinted you can also specify the tint color so like the the if you have switch glass my little app switcher thing that looks like the dock it has like a background or whatever and has materials you can pick for the background then i use all the deprecated constants that apple doesn't want me to use for the different backgrounds anyway in tahoe you can pick glass and you can pick clear glass or you can pick tinted glass and then when you pick tinted glass you can pick the color so i wonder if the tinted look is literally they just change all the things that are when they see the dot clear constant they just use the dot tinted one and they pick a fixed uh tint color it's hard to say because just because the name matches doesn't mean it's the same thing but But anyway, it seems like it might not even be new code and it's just simply like, oh, when they do dot clear, ignore that and really just use dot tinted with white as the background with some opacity level.

59:18All right. And then below these selections, there's little teeny tiny gray text because, of course, it's gray that reads, choose your preferred look for liquid glass. Clear is more transparent, revealing the content beneath. Tinted increases opacity and adds more contrast. and uh speaking of yeoman's work john has done us a service and we'll put a link in the show notes to some examples of tinted versus untinted uh john do you want to talk these through yeah so steven hackett's got a lot of uh before and afters lots of other people on the web since then have had a bunch of before and afters and i i picked some from this is actually running the beta and i took some screenshots of it and by the way the rc is out there release candidate is out now so this is a little bit old news but i don't think it's changed but side by side depending on the context, I don't see that much of a difference between the regular and the new setting, you know, between clear and tinted.

1:00:08you can see the background through both. it's not like it's not like reduced transparency where it makes it totally opaque like i was i was just in a messages thread that's what you'll see is like part of messages and it shows like a photo uh you know like it's a white background with non-white photos and the non-white photos clearly show through the tinted version they show through more in the clear one but it's there's still like if you're gonna make this setting it seems so subtle it seems like it's a little bit more opaque is that better just like if people don't want to see stuff that is behind their controls don't make them go all the way to reduce transparency and if this really is tinted as i said uh like the actual tinted control let people pick the opacity and the color put it like a you know or a put an opacity slider underneath it because it would be you know when you do tinted you can pick the color and you can put an alpha channel on that cover like i don't know like it's it's clear that they decided to do this because people thought it was too transparent but boy you give a setting like i was i'm gonna be hesitant to even tell this to like my kids because they complain a little bit about liquid glass stuff they're gonna be like what difference does that make it's the same i'm like well it's actually a little bit more opaque so if you could see them side by side you'd notice that yeah i guess if you see them side by side you would notice but i don't i don't know like it seems half-hearted to me i guess i can tell you so as soon as the setting was released in the bed as i switched to it for my iphone and then at some point later i didn't realize that there was also the option on the mac and so then like on my laptop that runs tahoe um at some point like a few days after using it on the phone full time i saw a notification show up in tahoe with the ridiculous overly glassy look and it was immediately i was like like it jumped out at me so much well well here's the problem on beta 4 changing that setting doesn't affect notifications oh great like i tried that's what i tried when i was trying to do the screenshots on tahoe you mean because on ios it does yeah i know but when i was trying to do the screenshots i'm like i know i'll do notifications because those are so clear they annoy me so i turned the setting on got a notification it didn't change it looks exactly the same now maybe that was a beta 4 bug and maybe in the rc it does change but that's what i'm saying about it being half-hearted on mac os it doesn't even look like it's applying the setting to lots of places where you wish it would be applied like notifications again it's beta 4 knowledge i'll i haven't installed the rcs yet but it seems a little half-hearted to me that's uh and hopefully mac os will eventually apply it everywhere but yeah maybe maybe it looks a little bit better in ios but um yeah reduced transparency really does reduce transparency but it it radically changes how things look and i think it makes things look even uglier so that setting is always there for you in accessibility but this is pointedly not an accessibility it's in you know settings appearance or settings display and brightness which is a weird place for it to be i guess there's no appearance equivalent in iOS settings.

1:02:59Anyway, when 26.1 comes out, this will be a setting, and if Liquid Glass is annoying you, you can give it a try. I can say also, again, on the phone, having used this now for what, it hasn't been like two weeks, I can say it's great. It has been going great, and it is generally better. Liquid Glass is not perfect with it, but I can say, like, after switching to this, and then seeing the glassy version on mac os it instantly made the regular version of liquid glass look garish and tacky and already old like liquid glass has been out for two seconds and it already once you see something a little bit more toned down it makes the shipping version look really old it always looked tacky to me and i think you can check this too but i think even on ios you know like the play pause controls that hover over playing video like in a pop-up window the ones that directly get in the way of your content that it's trying to spotlight yes yeah i don't think those honor the setting either i think they look exactly the same with the setting on or off well those were so that's that's the clear style i know well that's what i'm saying but like i just i'm it seems weird to me like those are the most egregious those are so because the content behind them is always you know it's guaranteed to be something you know uncontrolled because it's video and those are the glassiest of the glassiest things for controls that i don't need to be glassy like i think they're too big and obtrusive as it is i don't want them to have specular highlights and be warping and refracting things and all that crap so i wish this setting applied to them even if it only applied a little bit it's so weird to me that you would put the setting in and say yeah but the clearest controls those are accepted from this maybe but to be fair like that was those kind of controls the the ones like the playback over the video those were always a more clear version than the default that's not the default those are actual dot clear yeah those are like that's what i'm saying the constant it's confusing whether using the same languages as the constants because the settings here are clear and tinted but there's clear and tinted glass in the os and this clear tinted setting only seems to apply to the not clear api you know constants it's it's confusing yeah and i think and you know kind of broader picture i think the fact that they had to add this so soon shows that they're getting a lot of pushback and people have a lot of problems with liquid glass and ultimately there's a lot about the liquid glass design language that i don't think is good there are some things that i think are nice it's going to need a lot of tweaks it's going to need a lot of adjustments i think generally speaking it we will get to a place with it with a bit more iteration where it is actually pretty nice but it's going to need a lot it's going to need you know work and time and the fact that they're already fixing it number one you can say like wow lol what a failure that they had to fix so soon which is valid um but at least they are fixing it at least we are going in the direction where they're toning this down so quickly because maybe they got enough pushback that it needs it needs the work that it needs so that's promising at least to me um and i I think we will look back, you know, similarly to how when iOS 7 was first unveiled at its WWDC, the fonts were these like super thin, like ultra light Helvetica.

1:06:18And over the course of the beta that summer, they iterated the design of iOS 7 to be less egregiously thin so that you could actually read text anywhere in the OS. That's happening to Liquid Glass. It just didn't finish during the beta. but i think we're seeing that process now in the point releases that oh this the most egregious versions of this are being tweaked now yes it should have happened in july it didn't but at least it's happening now instead of having to wait till next summer well it kind of happened in the betas you remember there was i forget which beta was maybe beta 3 or something where it added basically this super frosty yeah right and i think someone should dig up these screenshots but i think it was the the beta 3 version of this showed less stuff through controls than this new version does with the tinted setting turned on so it's not like they because they they turned they turned it on and then there was some outcry from developers we talked about on the show like oh you've you know you said it was called with a liquid glass but now i can barely see through the controls it doesn't look like glass anymore and they and they so like during the beta it went really really opaque and then it went back it went back to be more transparent and the more transparent ones that the one they released maybe not as transparent as the very first beta but certainly more it was not the uh the uh most opaque of the betas right then after release now they're adding a setting to make it slightly more opaque i haven't seen a lot of outcry about this but we're all kind of sitting here waiting for when apple starts forcing this update on people which i'm assuming will happen 26.1 is that when they usually do it usually like and what we mean by that is like if you lots of people were surprised about they're always surprised about this every year like the new os comes out and they're like i went to system settings on my phone to get the new os and can you believe it was trying to tell me like there's a new version of ios 18 you have to scroll down it's like oh and by the way there's also a thing called 26 do you want that one but the top one on the phone was 18 they don't sort of like shove 26 in your face at least on the phone uh until the 0.1 release and then people's phones are gonna like they're gonna it's gonna prompt them it's gonna be in system settings it's gonna be a badge it's gonna auto update overnight like all sorts of like when they really push this out to the general public and it's it's a good move because 26.9 was a mess and you don't want to push that out to everybody 26.1 will be better i will note that on the mac the day mac os 26 came out system settings got a badge and it's still there and i can't make it go away because like you know 26 is out i'm like oh i don't have one i do it's been there since the day mac os 26 was launched software update available badge with a one in it cannot make it go away no matter what i do because there is one And if I go to system settings, it says, hey, Tahoe's available.

1:08:52Do you want it? Not only that, but every 15 update, like 15.7.1, if you weren't careful, like if you have auto updates off and you go to manually install it, if you weren't careful and you tried to install Sequoia, it would install 26. If you didn't go in and like uncheck the 26 checkbox, it was it's like it's been pushing 26 so hard on the Mac. I'm like, Apple, you don't want to do this. I mean, it doesn't really matter. So if you Mac users and we're technically more technically savvy than the average phone user, I suppose, and blah, blah, blah. but uh but yeah on the phone they hold back so i'm still kind of waiting for 26 to get pushed to quote unquote everyone to finally decide what the public reaction to it but i feel like the public reaction to 26 as it exists right now has been people aren't super big fans of it but i haven't seen any uh you know complaining on the level of like the new photos app and we'll see i don't remember did the new photos app complaining only start after they pushed 18.1 to everybody or did it happen with 18.0?

1:09:49Yes. It was both. Well, we'll see when they push it to everybody. But right now, even my kids who were like, who refused to use a Mac that had Tahoe on it, they've got it on their new phones and they grumbled a little bit, but otherwise they're like, eh, it's fine. And I think we're going to see like, what has happened throughout the course of computer interface history whenever anyone has used transparency because it looks cool. What happens over time? They make it less transparent because transparent UIs don't work very well. And that's happening here. We are going to see this progression. It will end up somewhere that is reasonably fine.

1:10:28And the translucency is not liquid glass's only problem. But this is probably its biggest. And so we're going to end up somewhere that's better. Yeah, unfortunately for liquid glass, it's in the name, the glass part of it. And you mentioned like, oh, we'll eventually find a happy medium. Like the correct move is not to show things through controls, especially controls that have text on them, because it doesn't serve a functional purpose. It's only there for aesthetics and it only hurts your legibility. So like, why are you doing this yourself? Why are you choosing this? Like, well, don't you understand?

1:10:58It's glass. OK, if that's your controlling metaphor and your aesthetic and your marketing, then you're kind of stuck with showing stuff through because glass doesn't show anything through really is like opaque glass. Like, I guess it could be shiny on the edges, but people think of glass as being able to see something through it. that's just a fundamentally wrong-headed idea nothing behind that button needs to contribute to the content of that button to the extent that you show it through the button it can only make the button uh more misleading and obscure so the correct amount of transparency in a button if there is content behind it is zero uh and they're like but what if we how close can we get we don't want to do zero because it doesn't look can we and yeah they'll probably find something that is like makes people it's like all right it's fine but it's a fundamentally wrong-headed idea i also think the floating controls off the edge is a fundamentally wrongheaded idea in terms of efficiency and space usage especially on the phone but that is a separate issue but yeah that's that's kind of the problem with this whereas the fonts like well we can just make the fonts thicker done and done but this is like our one of our basic ideas and it's like i said it's the floating the controls of the edge showing through the content and whatever third one that i can never remember the touch targets are too small everything has no contrast around it i mean there's multiple issues yeah well there's something pre there's there's some pre-existing problems but like but but it's kind of hard to have a thing styled on glass where you don't have it show stuff to, but they don't put content behind buttons.

1:12:17And if you do put it there through behind buttons, don't make the button show the content through. Don't make the text field show the content through like where I'm still seeing screenshots granted from the nerds that are in my circles on like Mastodon of like, look at this scrolling text region that is fading up behind some header text, making the header text completely illegible because right behind it offset by one pixel is other text and it's just it looks like an error and like this is the ui that you want like that whole fade thing where text scrolls behind text uh with with a with a gradient fade that's a bad idea you can never make that work you have to stop doing that and use the hard edge scrolling thing like like you know like an ios 18 and all the ones before there's no amount of fading and adjusting of a contrast or whatever they will ever make that a good idea it is just a bad idea and so we just have to live with it until somebody wakes up and says you know that thing where we put text behind text let's not do that anymore then uh one more quick item there's now an option to disable the lock screen swipe to get to the camera this is in settings camera lock screen swipe to open camera i didn't know this was a thing that people hated but i guess this is a thing that people hated it's accidental uh input it's not that people hate it if you use it it's great to have it but if you never use it intentionally but only ever accidentally use it uh that's the thing what they need is some kind of i don't know how to implement this but what they need is butt dial protection because my parents butt dial me all the time and there is no explanation like my the best i can come up with is they don't they don't sleep their phone before they put it in their pocket oh yeah that's a common thing i do that sometimes or they do sleep their phone like they press the sleep wake button but their their phone is like bogged down or slow or something and it doesn't like doesn't go to sleep until they've begun putting in their pocket but the bottom line is somehow their hands are touching the screen and activating stuff that's causing them to call me and i get a call from inside of their pocket and i can hear them talking and i say dad butt dialed me he usually can't hear me i just hang out but like and i've you know i've been with him when this has happened and like what did you just do tell me and he can't explain it but there is some kind of accidental input user interface thing going on here and again my leading theory is they just are simply not sleeping the phone but like so all right so say they don't sleep the phone how do you accidentally i'm probably in their favorites or maybe in their recents like but how do you accidentally initiate a call to me by accidentally rubbing your fingers slide slide to go to the camera i can see happening because that's just a pretty simple move you just slide sideways but anyway lots of accident i don't know what happening i'm glad to see this setting i'm sure it will still be on by default but if you find yourself accidentally going to the camera when you don't want to and you never use the shortcut now you turn it off All right.

1:14:57I have a question for you. Uh, is Tahoe safe to run yet? Because I am not currently running Tahoe and I've seen a medium amount of chatter, particularly, particularly around one in particular bug that we'll discuss in a minute. Um, but I've been reluctant to upgrade, which is not unusual these days, but I used to be like a day one person for everything. So what's the deal? Are you two running Tahoe? Do you recommend it? Do you recommend me holding off? Where do we go from here? Let me start with Marco. I am running it on my small travel laptop. I am not running it on my main, my desktop laptop.

1:15:37And so far, like what I, as I'm using it on my little laptop, and then I go back and forth between my desktop and my laptop, I'm not motivated to upgrade my desktop to Tahoe. so like when i'm not using tahoe i don't miss it there's no feature i miss there's nothing about it that's motivating me that i should update my desktop except that eventually sequoia will stop getting updates meaningfully from apple and but right now like there is there is no motivating reason for me to do it now also when i am on tahoe on my laptop i don't care besides my stupid glass notifications like it's fine everything looks different everything's lower contrast i don't think Liquid Glass holds up well at all on the Mac, especially the treatment of toolbars and sidebars.

1:16:25I think it looks ridiculous. The corners of everything are really massive, like the rounded corners, massive corners. So there's a lot of little noises with it, but whenever I'm on either computer, I'm never wishing that it was the OS of the other one. And I'm never looking at it and saying, wow, I love this OS. like it's it's fine everything looks different yeah it's a different skin on the os things work fine um i don't have many major problems with either one to be honest but again like it's not motivating a change in either direction that being said something's up with my tethering setup on my phone and i don't know i don't know again it's 26.1 on both and on you know i have the 26.1 beta on the Mac and I have the 26.1 beta on the phone.

1:17:20It's an iPhone 17 Pro. Cellular and tethering have been really unreliable to the point where I'm frequently having to reboot the iPhone to get cellular data to keep working. Now, I don't know if that's and that's oftentimes happening when I'm tethering with a laptop. So I don't know if tethering is somehow interact. Like, I don't know if it's like a Tahoe bug that's breaking the phone cell connection or if the phone has a broken tethering implementation this is also all to say that that was all only with the betas of 26.1 the rc came out i think what today or yesterday um and i've i've only just installed the rc like tonight so i i don't know if it's fixed in the rc but i i honestly it's been so bad in the betas i don't know how it would be i don't know how it would be fixed uh but something is really broken with cellular data or tethering or both with 26.1 on an iphone 17 pro and i don't know if that's part and i don't know if it's related to the way tahoe's using it from the mac or not i don't know but tethering and data are super broken for me and i it could be it could even be like my phone could be bad it's that bad to the point where i cannot get through a train ride without having to reboot my phone for tethering connectivity.

1:18:37Anyway, all that being said, Tahoe in general, again, it's been fine. The design is stupid on the Mac, but it's been fine. If you need to upgrade for some motivating reason, go for it. If you don't have such a motivating reason, I don't see any reason why you would need to rush it. Fair enough. What about you john uh is tahoe safe 26.0 no not safe i rarely say that about the point really the the point out releases i usually update them as soon as possible although that's been moderated in my podcast in years by whether or not the uh rogue amoeba like audio hijack stuff is updated or whatever but 26.0 just i've read about too many problems with that now 26.1 is going to be out soon so maybe this will change with 26.1 i've been running the betas but 26.0 just has so many problems i've heard about not just like little things like well i don't use tethering but like fundamental sort of os wide slowdowns that people don't have good explanations for and we're going to get into one possible popular or culprit here in a second but i'm not saying don't upgrade because it's ugly and it is uh or because of the ui just because it seems buggier than usual and there's one particular there's one known particular bug that may affect a lot of people and there's no real workaround for it dan morin has been chasing this for a while because he thought it was the bug we're going to talk about but he's like now i'm pretty sure it's not that bug and it's still happening to me lots of people complaining about slowdowns and i know it's like oh liquid glass is doing more effects and whatever but those effects are very well accelerated and maybe it'll use like someone tried to do a battery test recently like i'm going to use like liquid glass versus like uh i think with the setting on and off to see if like one uses more power than the other you could probably isolate that if you took great pains to do so but it's dominated by other things so i don't believe the hype that like liquid glass is so much more processor intensive that it's making things slow down and causing your battery to drain i do believe there are bugs that are causing things to slow down and make your battery drain and those are the things to avoid so i would say if you're not updated to tahoe and there's no thing that you really really want out of you know if there is something you really want out of like you like the new shortcuts features or you want like to be able to put a dark mode light mode toggle in your menu bar using the new control center thing, which is the thing that I do because it's convenient.

1:20:54Still wait till 26.1. Do not upgrade to 26.0. 26.0 is bad. And the main culprit is Casey, please tell us about it. Yeah. So there's an electron bug because of course there is. The bug is being tracked on the electron GitHub. It is a number four, eight, three, one, one. avar air writes i believe i found the root cause and it's not apple's fault it turns out electron is overriding a private app kit api underscore corner mask to apply custom corner masks to vibrant views this method is called by windows server to calculate the shadow of the window i'm speculating that apple uses some sort of memoization by reference and this method breaks the memoization and forces windows server to repeatedly recalculate and repaint the shadow What's particularly funny is that even a simple override that does nothing but call super, which is to say call, it's like parent, so to speak, still presents the issue.

1:21:5095Mac writes, recent Electron versions no longer utilize this private API, and developers have begun updating their Electron version to mitigate the issue. There's a detector app by Thomas Kafka that Craig Hockenberry pointed us to and posted about that will look at your system and tell you which of the apps that you have on your system are offending. and there's also a website where you can go to that is all about shaming electron particularly for this specific bug uh and you can see the status of of a whole bunch of popular apps and so we'll put all those links in the show notes so electron is the web rendering engine used by lots of popular mac apps because people don't want to make native mac apps they just want to wrap a web app in some chrome uh the slack app that uh we're all running right now probably does that and many many others uh they use the electron engine electron engine has this bug the electron folks fixed the bug but requires every single app that is built on electron to update their version of the electron engine that they're using and release a new version of their app that uses the new updated electron version and people are slow in doing that i'm not sure these apps even always use the latest version of the electron uh engine because you know that could affect things in the app and they might be a few versions behind or whatever so the this website the shame electron thing it's basically say here are the popular apps that use electron and here are the ones that have been updated and here are the ones that haven't uh from what i've heard from the people who suffer from this bug if you're using an electron app every day and it hasn't been updated with this bug fix again do not upgrade to tahoe because it's going to cause slowdowns like system-wide slowdowns i guess if you could not run slack and not run like but if you have to run those apps all day don't upgrade it now again is this technically tahoe's fault no like it was an electron using a private API blah blah but practically speaking it means that if you're perfectly fine in Sequoia and then you upgrade to Tahoe and you're running five Electron apps all day all of a sudden your whole system bogs down and again Dan Morin has that problem and he's like I think every single one of my apps has been updated to the new version of Electron and still I'm getting these horrendous slowdowns that I can't explain and that's 26.0 so just say no to 26.0 26.1 may be okay again we'll see what marco finds out about the tethering stuff but like tahoe is definitely a year where you might want to wait a little bit before upgrading especially if that like marco said if there's no thing that you really really want like you know if there's some feature that you gotta have or some new setting or whatever if there's nothing like that just wait like i'm you know i think roguemaba stuff is all updated so technically i could update obviously i'm running tahoe i boot reboot this into tahoe all the time to do dev stuff and test things my laptop is running tahoe over here um but like marco i feel no compulsion to upgrade and unlike marco i go back and forth with my laptop's over there my desktop's over here i go back and forth between them all the time uh and i i just like how secoia looks better so i i i definitely i have a uh an attraction to not looking at that hideous ui and looking at it so i'm enjoying this one while i can uh even simple things like the menu bar like they made the menu bar transparent and there's that option that says like oh make it kind of like the clear and tinted option the option on uh in tahoe that says don't don't make the menu bar not be there it instead of it being completely you know no background whatsoever uh it gives it a background that's like the barest of tint like it's like a really like a 50 transparent black like tint thing it's like people who want that option just make it opaque just like if they're clicking that option they probably just want to be opaque and by the way i have to use that option because if you don't use that option it puts like a one and a half inch gradient at the top of your screen that casts a gradient shadow onto the icons that are on your desktop which i don't i think that's a bug like it shouldn't do that seriously it does the gradient to try to make the text more visible like or whatever and and it depends on what your desktop background is because if your desktop background is um very dark it will do light and if it's very light it will do dark and yada yada right now in sequoia uh with my background that i'm using my menu bar is white-ish uh but with the same background tahoe my menu bar is black-ish and i don't like that because all my menu titles are in white and anyway i don't like how it looks so i don't know when i'm gonna upgrade but i'm not being compelled to do so especially since i can reboot into it whenever i want and i have a laptop that's running it all the time all right so it sounds like when 26.1 lands presumably soon then I'm probably okay.

1:26:16I'm just real nervous because I'm a very, very heavy spaces user and I believe Dan Morin has said that, you know, he is as well and that's apparently been a little janky. So yeah, like that's one of the slowdowns, like switching spaces is like slow and stuttering and people are like, is it because liquid glass is like, that's just a bug that some kind, and is it electron related? Doesn't seem like it, but maybe, but like I would say like Casey, what is making you want to update? nothing in particular i mean honestly i'm sure that well right i'm sure there's something there that i am interested in that i remembered you know that i was like uh oh during june but whatever it is i have forgotten about it since then so and granted yes haha my memory but um but no i mean i don't feel like there's anything that i've been like yes yes yes yes it's finally time you know what i mean and so maybe i'll just hang on for another month or two and see what happens yeah i mean there are cool features like the new control center thing that gives you more flexible you know customizable control center and put different menu bar icons in the menu bar although there's also bugs related to that someone posted a thing recently uh on their like macbook pro with some other laptop with a notch the right half of the menu bar was gone like it just wasn't there anymore the whole thing with like the you know the date and everything like that i occasionally get like a weird thing where when i log in for the first time the the date in time is pushed off the right edge of the screen and the only way to get it back is to log out and back in that's in sequoia that's bug has been around for ages but they their whole right side of the menu bar was just gone there was nothing there um which is weird uh but yeah like i just there are cool features in there um like there's the there's the new phone app uh the short people who like shortcuts there's lots of cool automations there although you as you can imagine with my recent bug experience i'm a little bit wary of shortcuts these days but if you don't upgrade to them you don't miss those features so you know just stick with what you got unless you uh if that's just some reason you want upgrade, like 26.1 is surely going to be better than 26.0.

1:28:14I can tell you from an app developer's perspective, they've fixed tons of bugs. But have they fixed all the bugs in their OS? Has every Electron app updated? Maybe wait until 26.5. Cool. All right. Thank you to our sponsors this week. Claude, Skims, and Paka. And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of the perks of membership is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. Every week, there is usually between 15 and 30 minutes more of the show that is in ATP overtime for members only. This week in overtime, we're going to be talking about making an app, an explanation of how an app is created for non-developers to kind of help understand the process.

1:28:56You can join once again to listen atp.fm slash join. Thanks, everybody. And we'll talk to you next week. Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental. John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental. 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 N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N S-I-R-A-C U-S-A-S-Y-R-A-C-U-S-A It's accidental Accidental They didn't mean to

1:30:06All right, John. So you've had some more time with, uh, I'm going to call it your vision pro, at least for now. Um, and I was wondering, you know, have you done any other things with it? You said in the main show that you, you know, tried another attempt at Mac virtual display and that went better. Have you done any of the other stuff? And like, one of the things I was most curious about, and maybe this will be a short conversation if you haven't done it yet, but When we talked a few months ago, there was that Bono documentary, one man show thing, not documentary, like a one man show that came out and they had the same source material, but they treated it two very different ways.

1:30:44And there's a non-immersive version where it's just him on stage by himself chatting and talking to you slash at you. But the immersive version is way, way, way different with lots of animations and stuff. have you had the time to at least watch a portion of the immersion immersive version of the bono thing that's uh when i talked about my experiences with the m2 with casey's m2 vision pro one of the things i left out was a lot of the stuff that i had already done with it uh just because it's kind of some of the same things that you guys had already done and one of those was watching a lot of the content and so yes i did watch the immersive version of the bono thing not the whole thing but i scrubbed around and watched because i'd seen the whole thing before and i didn't want to sit through the whole thing again uh and it is very different like they really do uh spend a lot of energy embellishing with graphics and stuff now i'm not sure if it adds much to the experience like it's it's certainly there's lots of more visual flair and lots of interest and makes it makes it so there's more things for you to look at than just like the guy's face talking or whatever um but i'm not sure how successful it is artistically uh it's an interesting experiment but i feel like the like the boring like non-vision pro you can just watch it on your television version gets you most of that experience and maybe less distracting so i wasn't that big of a fan of that um i did watch not all the other content in fact one of the things that i realized i forgot because steve trot and smith's got a vision pro now and he's going through some stuff and i forgot to try like the uh the disney immersive environments like there's one for alien earth which i just talked about in a recent rectifs and there's like star warsy ones and like there's a there's some marvel stuff i have to try that there's avengers avengers campus is one of them for example i didn't do that that marvel thing that you watched i'm going to watch that eventually but i did watch like a lot of the that that one line of immersive content uh i showed it to my wife with the demos and she's like where's all the immersive content i'm like you see that thing she's like that's it like that's it um i watched a bunch of that stuff uh surprisingly one of the ones i found most affecting was the uh the highline one where the woman is walking on a tightrope uh above thing and i'm not particularly scared of heights but i feel like that that was an effective use of a thing that is you don't get as big an effect on a flat screen as you do in a 3d appearance um i thought that was a cool one did you do the um the parkour one in paris because that was similar i agree with you that the the tightrope walking was more affecting but that also had a similar vibe to it well i think the thing about it i haven't done the paris one yet that's on my list but like i think part of the the um the tightrope walking one is like i'm also judging i'm not judging these just based on like how well it takes advantage of vision problem judging them the same way you like not technology wise it's like how good a story does it tell like these are all very kind of short things they're not you know they're they're more like little tone poems or whatever like how effectively do they convey a story and emotion i felt like the highland one did a good job of that even though it is very similar structure the other ones just narrated by a person talking about that i just i thought it was well written and affecting and the visuals match the other stuff and uh by the same token i also found the one with sharks even though it's just like a bunch of sharks swim around you that is very compelling content in 3d um i didn't think the story of that one was as good but that's a that's a good demo and surprisingly one of the other ones that i found was good again this is like has even less to do with vision pro and more to do with just the content was the uh the moto gp one the motorcycle i was just about to ask you the french motorcycle riding guy now here's the thing for reasons that make sense to me they did not have vision pro cameras on the motorcycles like they don't put them on the f1 cars and the motorcycle is even smaller like there's no room to put a gigantic like they're in a competitive race like here put this giant thing on the front of your bike no thanks um so if you think you're gonna be like now i'm gonna be like it's like i'm riding the motorcycle no that's not what it is this is actual competitive as they say in the thing it's like f1 but for motorcycles right they are professional motorcycle racers they're trying to run a race they don't care that apple is there so it was just shot like a documentary where like okay the cameras were on the sidelines watching the motorcycles go by and the cameras were on the guy when he was in you know getting ready in his trailer and talking you know to his coaches and everything like that and the reason i found compelling was one i thought it was like a good story of you know this underdog athlete it's a french rider uh a french person has not won this french grand prix in like 70 years and how is you know is he gonna do it and he he keeps falling and uh he's having problems and you know like it's it's it's underdog type sports story uh one of the things i found most interesting about it was to get an up close look at those motorcycles because that interests me yeah like like you're because you're like the cameras are like inches from these motorcycles you can and i guess it's part of the 3d is like it feels like it's really there because you've got the 3d camera but you're just looking at a more but these motorcycles are amazing looking i'm i'm more interested in these than i am at f1 cars at this point maybe because i know more about f1 cars than i do about the motorcycles but like just how they're put together and how they differ from like a road bike like these racing bicycles and like the equipment that he puts on and like just i found that fascinating and super interesting and uh that and i think i would have found that just as fascinating outside the vision pro just a flat 2d thing because again it wasn't really taking much advantage of the immersive thing maybe when you're up close to the motorcycle but uh like that was interesting i did watch submerged i didn't think it was very good interesting why not again not nothing to do with the vision pronus just to do with the like short film like it's very challenging to make a compelling short film and i think that one was like yeah like just i don't i don't know if it was scripted well and the the number of events took place and the characterization and just it didn't all work that well if if you have a fear of being submerged in water maybe you'll you'll find it more affecting but blah uh the metallica one i watched all of that one i am not a metallica fan but i feel like i know what it's like to be on a metallica concert now and i think job done short film right like it made like if you're ever wanting what those shows are like this is it feels like what they're like you know like it gave me that experience um and it let me see uh the band performing it was is a little bit uh the production a little bit hokey with sort of over dramatizing and slow-mo pans on the person's face backstage when they're probably bored out of their mind but you get to see how the band reforms how they're the you know what what what what do people like about metallica i think it conveys that again i don't like particularly like metallica but i you watch this and you understand what people like about metallica what do these fans like about it what do they have to offer why are they a famous good band um and before you move on from that the moment that Marco and I talked about a lot when the James Hetfield I think is the singer's name is like right in the face of the fan and they actually did I'm recounting from several months ago now but they actually held the shot on that fan instead of following James as he walks away and I just thought that was just such an incredible moment and if I recall correctly Marco you felt very similarly did that affect you in any way shape or form or you just kind of like yeah whatever yeah no i i remember you guys talking about it and i wasn't looking for it but when it came up i'm like oh that must be the thing they were talking about because it was affecting and here's the thing about the all these little short films the hard part is not the vision pro part the hard part is making a compelling short film that moment is compelling outside the vision pro the reason you're reacting to that is because it's one of the more affecting moments in the short film and other parts are less so so like it's kind of like any type of thing where there's a technology you know like the movie with like the you know the trains coming out of the screen with the first moving pictures like you can do that once or twice but eventually it's like okay well show me a compelling story i'm no longer interested in in the the fascinating medium of the moving picture now you got to actually write a good script good good actors and you know like and i feel like vision pro these little demo things demonstrate that because very quickly the vision proness takes a back seat to is this a thing that i find interesting to watch you know and you can make interesting little short things and you can also make ones that just feel kind of flat and what i find is that very quickly i started judging all these based on how much i would like them if i was just watching them on a tv even like i said even the highline one i think that's good even if you're not in a vision pro now the vision pronest adds to it but that that can only be an ad it can't make up for you know a bad script a bad story bad editing or whatever um and the other thing i'll add in all this content that i'm watching so far i haven't watched the parkour one so far fingers crossed zero motion sickness i'm genuinely shocked by that i'm sure i'm as shocked as you are i didn't have it in the demo either but i'm like of course i saw very little things i haven't watched the parkour parkour one i did watch all of the flying over like scenic places like the hawaii and all that stuff i thought maybe that one would make me motion sick but no they fly so they fly so gently you know i gotta say i am not prone to motion sickness but and i can't remember a specific example of a particular moment but there's been times particularly in flight where not that i've been motion sick but i've had a little bit of like maybe light vertigo where i'm kind of like in flight as in you're on an airplane wearing the vision pro pro no no no no i'm sorry when when you're doing like a soren in disney world like you know you're you're the perspective of the plane flying boundless i think those clothes yeah and i mean this will happen to or like, uh, I think during submerged, if I recall correctly, we talked about this, that there was a moment where the camera's moving and it's, it's just kind of off-putting, not I'm making it out to be worse than it is, but it's a little bit off-putting because your body expects to feel and all the feelings that you associate with your body moving because the camera's moving, but you're stationary and yet your body's expecting a feeling it's not getting.

1:40:22And it's, it's again it's a lightly off-putting and and i feel like i've gotten that from time to time uh when doing like flying scenes which is weird to say to hear you say that you're unaffected by it because you're you're affected by everything and i'm affected by nothing and there's occasions yeah like but the flying ones they fly so like they're not moving fast they're not swooping like it's just more kind of like a slow uh moving over stuff like i also watched the uh the um ice surfing in iceland i thought that story was interesting um but you know like you know i'm my memory of these and my ranking of them has nothing to do with the the how well they take advantage of the vision pro and i you know you guys talked a lot about like what's too much cuts what's not enough or whatever i you're right that like cutting too much doesn't lend itself well to the vision pro but also again if these were flat 2d bad editing is bad thing right like like it's it's a it's difficult to to pull this off with or without the 3d cameras um and it's a challenge to make compelling content yeah so i haven't seen every single thing but i've seen a lot of the stuff and i will go back and watch the rest of it just because each one of them i feel like you know i'd like to see someone you know and i don't blame like the submerged people or anything like it's new technology that let's let's figure out what we can do let's try some stuff this is stuff you try doesn't work like i think a lot of the shot design and editing and submerge does not work but someone's got to try to find that out you know it on paper it looks like it might be compelling in practice having shallow depth of field uh is not really great inside the vision probe because your eyes try to focus on the part that they can't focus on and it's never going to come into focus yeah that's that's the part that gives me i think a little bit of motion sickness like or at least like eye strain or like some version of it like i like whenever i whenever i try to focus on something that that is no that is not in focus and i can't focus on it that messes with my feelings i think more than the motion does yeah we talked about this when we were before the vision program out about like having variable focal the various technologies to do that but that doesn't exist in the vision pro it's a fixed focal distance um and so when anything's out of focus it will never be in focus um and the way that manifested not for motion sickness but for like eye-crossingly headache-inducing annoyingness it's on the moto gp one people talk in french and they have subtitles and this is i don't know if this is an inherent problem of the vision pro but the choice they made to deal with this was difficult because here's the thing with the subtitles the subtitles are on the screen as like a tinted black rectangle with white text on it or whatever right uh you're watching the vision pro you're watching these guys they're walking around by their motorcycle or they're sitting on a couch talking to each other he's riding on his stationary your bike or whatever and he's talking and the subtitle stuff appears very very often the subtitle stuff in like picture space on the screen was not at the depth it was in focus wise on the screen if that makes sense like my eyes would try to focus on where the text would be if it was floating where it appears to be in the scene like it looks like it's floating between this guy and that guy or like two feet in front of the couch but it's not there i have to like to look at these subtitles they're overlaid on top of everything i have to focus on whatever the fixed focal distance of the display is but my eyes would try to focus on not the fixed focal distance of the display but like further into the image where it looks like that thing is hovering in the space of the 2d image that's behind it and it would make me essentially go cross-eyed and double vision on I couldn't read the subtitles because I kept double visioning.

1:43:57I'm like, why is this happening? Are the subtitles blurry? It's like, no, you keep thinking the subtitles are somewhere in the space of the scene. They're not, they're not in the scene. They are, they are at the fixed focal distance of the, the, the display. And you have to focus on them there, even though looking at that part of the picture, which by the way, you can see through the little subtitle thing, right? Even though focusing on that part of the picture, like Marco said, would require you to focus on a distance that is not the same as the focal distance of division pro and so you're getting that marco when you just see a blurry version in you know on the the screen i'm getting it trying to read the subtitles and that's a difficult problem because they're it's so convincing that the subtitles are there floating in the scene that it causes my eyes to pick the wrong focal distance now maybe i could get used to it or maybe they could put the put the subtitles lower down or make them opaque or i don't know like make them go edge to edge so they so it's so clear that they couldn't possibly be floating floating between the ottoman and the couch you know like it's a tricky problem to have but it's something i didn't i didn't think of before subtitles in a fixed vision fixed focal length vr subtitles your brain might think they are not where they are and you might get double vision yeah it it's very when when you're i don't know if it's just like me or my eyes or like the way my eyes work i don't know what it is but like when i like in real life in regular life as i have needed reading glasses for up close focus over the last you know three three to four years when i am not wearing reading glasses or progressives and when i try to look at something up close that that i can't get sharp it causes similar kind of like eye strain like i and i think people who have lived with imperfect vision for their whole lives maybe they're more used to it than I am and maybe it doesn't have the same effect or noticeability for them.

1:45:51But for me, it's really uncomfortable and I start getting headaches and eye strain. It's very uncomfortable for me to be unable to focus on something that I'm trying to read or look at. And so I switch to glasses whenever possible or avoid doing those things close up when I can. In the Vision Pro, nothing is ever that much in focus and i have the reading inserts for it they don't seem to make a difference for the distance that it's rendering things at and it's because of as we were mentioning earlier all of those different layers of image processing and slight you know softening or sampling or warping that are occurring to make all the optics work in the vision pro nothing in the vision pro is super sharp to my eyes some things are more than others but like nothing is really really sharp all the time and when i'm watching immersive video that is made even more obvious to me and part of that's just because immersive video oftentimes is not shot super high resolutions or not delivered at super high resolutions yet because everything is so young around it but also part of that is just like the screens and the realities of it and the optics of things not being fully in focus and so when i'm watching that immersive video so often i'm feeling that same eye strain feeling that as if I'm trying to read my phone without my glasses on and I can't quite get it sharp.

1:47:14And it really throws me off. And it makes me feel like kind of unwell and certainly unpleasant. And I don't know if I'll ever be able to solve that problem. That might just be how my eyes react to that kind of thing. Maybe this will just never work for me. I don't know. I think the eye strain you're talking about, like it's less familiar to me because I'm nearsighted which means i can't see things far away uh and when you can't see things far away there is no thing that my my understanding at least my experience and some optometrists can write in and tell me if i'm wrong about this uh is that there's nothing the muscles that squish your eyeball can do to make you see things far away better they're far away they can't the muscles can't push they can only pull that's all muscles do is they contract they either contract or don't contract and there's not two opposing sets of muscles one of them that pulls your eyeball out of your face and one of them pulls your eyeball in there's no right uh if you're looking at something that's up close what you're trying to do is have those muscles in your eye squish your eyeball so that it can focus on the things that are closer to you and as you get older uh your lens gets less flexible because it gets harder and yellowed and gross and just like the rest of your body um and and the lens doesn't squish as much but damned if your muscles in your eye won't try to squish it and that's i feel like that eye strain feeling i can get that by either putting on my distance contacts or putting on my distance glasses and trying to look at my phone screen and my eyes are like come on squish those freaking lenses just a little bit more and you'll be able to focus and it's never going to happen because you're old and lenses just aren't gonna squish like that anymore and you get eye straight uh if that's happening inside the vision pro like maybe i don't know what the solution is but like i i went back and forth on this back when the vision pro came out and also for this m2 one to figure out what i was going to do with my contact lenses and stuff um i'm pretty sure apple recommends according to all the texts that i could find that you use your distance glasses prescription in the vision pro which makes me think Marco that you should not be using any kind of lenses if you don't need glasses to drive if your distance vision is uncorrected then you shouldn't have any lenses in the vision pro yeah I but I've tried it both ways like I spent I spent significant time with it both with with no corrections and with the the plus one reading glasses uh reading inserts and in it doesn't seem to make much of a difference like I I really can't tell any difference at all when I use them versus not using you get less eye strain with no inserts no it's exactly because when I'm when I'm looking in the vision pro the sharpest things in the vision pro are the ui it's like the windows the controls those are actually the sharpest things what is not sharp is video content and i and it seems like it's a combination of like low resolution of the signal and also you know the optics of not having everything in the scene be in focus and and it just it never looks good to me it always looks a little bit soft a little bit blurry or a lot blurry if i'm trying to look around the scene more and all like the only way i can watch immersive video on division pro without having really bad eye problems or motion sickness or other things is if i diligently never look at the periphery if i only look straight ahead and never look around the scene which is really hard because you can see the whole scene so i always want to look hey what's over there like it's really hard to not look around and to be clear what you're talking about is moving your eyeballs not moving your head.

1:50:53Yes. Like, I want to look around the scene and maybe even move my head a little bit. Sure. Well, because moving your head, you can keep your eyes focused on the center of the displays where most of the information is. Yeah, but the problem is the video itself is not shot with the edges of the scene in focus, but you can see what's there sort of. And it's just, ugh. That comes down to what the video content is. But like I was saying, when I was comparing the iPad to the Vision Pro, I can tell that the Vision Pro has less dots per degree than the ipad held at the distance close to my face that i in my retina ipad you know like it looks softer but i i mean tv looks softer before it was hd as well we're fine with it like 720p versus 1080 versus 240 or whatever standard def was um i i like softer video video with less information bothers me less it seems like what your eyes are constantly trying to make those sharper as if uh as if you have like your distance glasses on and you're trying to read your as if you're trying to look at your phone without your reading glasses right and you're like if i just if my eyeballs just squish a little bit surely that becomes sharper but like you're never going to add more pixels to that display uh and maybe your vision is good enough to really see the limitations of them i again i see the softness as well like i said with mac virtual display i see how much less crisp it is than the actual display but i also see how much more crisp it is and 3k display on the intel thing but my eyes are not saying if only you squish more that will get sharper it's just i'm accepting of the the resolution that it is um and speaking of steve trotten smith who's got his as well he's like i don't think they need to add any more pixels to these display i disagree i think you disagree as well marco they need to more add more pixels display like it's not pressing but like technology should march on in the next few decades if they can add twice or four times as many pixels to these displays first of all field division has to get bigger like the fov i forget what it is but it is narrow and that could be much better and second of all even within the existing fov we need more pixels like i think you should be able to get it so that it is the same number of pixels per degree as a retina display at normal viewing distances and even then i would say you could go a little bit farther if you wanted to make it look more realistic than a retina display because let's be honest even though you i can't see the retina pixels you can kind of see them a little bit if you get real close so do you have i'm sorry maybe you said this and i missed it do you have zeiss inserts yet or no i do not i'm working on that but i currently do not have them so i'm i'm uh you know knowing that i have to do vision uh that my distance vision i am trying to cobble together a set of distance vision contact lenses from old and new contact lenses that i have hanging around because unfortunately my eyes are my eyes are different from each other and my actual real current contact prescription intentionally has one eye for distance and one eye for up close which sounds terrible but it's better than not being able to read your phone with your contacts and believe me and your brain gets used to it right um so i'm cobbling together a slightly inaccurate uh prescription with contacts which means every time i want to use the vision pro i have to put in contacts because as soon as i'm done using the video i need to take those out because i cannot use a computer or a phone with those contacts in so it's kind of a it's kind of an ordeal to use the vision pro which is uh you know if if and when i get lens inserts that will go a long way towards making it easier just to pop on the vision pro what i will say though is i've become very good at using the vision pro without contacts in like i take off my glasses and i put on the vision pro and it's as blurry as hell in there it's like you know 2350 24 like whatever my vision is like without them but if you know what the ui looks like and you know can sense changes in like saturation and brightness like i can actually use the ui the problem is like when i was trying to like i was trying to test the like hold down on the x button thing that uh that uh who was it that nick wrote in about i'm like oh let me put the vision pro on and try that so here i am blurring the vision pro i get the x button i pinch to hold down the menu pops up i'm like does that say hide others maybe like because i knew what it was supposed to say beforehand, I could believe that.

1:54:58And then, you know, I could select the option and do it or whatever. So I don't recommend using the vision pro that way, but let's be honest, if I take off my glasses and walk around the house, it's a very similar experience.

1:55:11So sitting here now, what a week and a half, two weeks in or whatever it's been a vision pro quote unquote ownership, uh, granted the price was incredible. So the price was right for you, but do you, on a broad level, and I'll probably ask you this again in a couple of weeks, are you enjoying it? Do you not like it? Is it burdensome? Is it fun? Is it crappy? What is your current thinking on a macro level? I like having it here. It's a fun, cool gadget to play with. I'm glad I didn't pay for it. Fair. Like, it's ideal. Like, oh, if someone's going to lend you one for free for a while, sure, yeah.

1:55:45If someone offers you that, take it. You know, it's a cool thing to try out. But when I have to send it back to you, I'm probably not going to be too broken up about it. Beep beep beep.