665: My Basement Is Beautiful

31:39We got some interesting news from Tim Hardwick at MacRumors. This is kind of regurgitating what Mark Gurman said. Apple is working on a revamped M6 Pro and M6 Max MacBook Pro with an OLED display, thinner chassis, and touch support. But it was curious that Gurman didn't say anything about the MacBook Pro with just the vanilla M6 chip. Yeah, I wonder if that's an omission, but it's worth... I've just put this here now because I feel like Tim at Mac rumors is maybe reading a bit much into it, but it's worth considering. It's true that when German talked about this, he only talked about the Pro and the Max models and did not talk about the plain no suffix M6 getting a new thinner chassis and an OLED screen or whatever.

32:20Would Apple bifurcate the MacBook Pro line into the two good ones with the Pro and the Max and an OLED screen and a touchscreen and a thin chassis? And then the no suffix one doesn't get an OLED screen, doesn't get a thinner chassis, doesn't get touch. that would be really weird. But if it's right, credit to Tim. It's also extremely... Is precedented a word? Do we know? Yeah, yeah, it is. I'm very heartened to hear that. It's very precedented because there's been lots of times over the years when the least expensive computer named MacBook Pro in the lineup was pretty different from the others.

32:58Obviously, currently, it's not that different. It is a little different but it's not that different currently um even before the m4 generation there were more limitations on like ports and monitors and stuff right or was it was it the m3 that had that it is usually the the unsuffixed m chip isn't as capable as the suffixed one so yes there were differences in like external monitor support and bandwidth and obviously the unsuffixed one usually had one fan instead of two so that was an internal difference yeah the entire internals are laid out differently usually um and so yeah that's there's all those differences and then And before this entire body style of the MacBook Pro, you had the MacBook Escape, the one that didn't have the touch bar.

33:37And then before that whole era of those unibody-body ones, you had the MD-101, the one that had the optical drive forever, long after optical drives were gone from the lineup. Didn't the MD-101 have that? Or was that the one before that even? But anyway, like you have you've had frequently in Apple's lineup of MacBook Pros, you have like the one that's like twelve to fourteen hundred dollars that is stripped down or is an older generation. But businesses and schools and stuff keep buying a whole bunch of them. So Apple keeps selling them and they make a bunch of money from that from that getting older, but still being sold.

34:17So I can totally see a plausible path here where if they're about to do some pretty big component updates and maybe a design update to the MacBook Pro higher-end models, you can totally see modern Apple saying, all right, we're going to keep the cheapest model. We're going to keep that on the old design, maybe for possibly years to come. And we're going to have the higher-end models, which we make more money on. We can help pay for that OLED screen and help justify the case redesign with those higher margins. So this is extremely plausible. Now, we don't actually know that there's actually going to do this.

34:51It could just be that like Gurman only heard about the Pro and Max. So the absence of Gurman mentioning something doesn't really mean that that is also absent in the reality of the thing. So we'll see how this goes. But that is that is extremely plausible because Apple's done it a lot in the past. All right. Let's talk Tahoe and Electron apps. uh, Dayton Lowell writes, apparently discord is using a custom forked version of electron and they cherry picked the fix. It's in the shipping version right now. Also, uh, discord has since updated the app such that the electron version detector no longer flags it.

35:26It's nice. Yeah. I'd forgotten about that, that cherry picking the fixes, uh, you know, get parlance or maybe predates get, but it's basically like they have, uh, you know, they have their own custom version of electron that has some changes to it. And rather than updating electron to the new version that has the fix that we're talking about that doesn't slow down in tahoe they just take the code that implements the thing that avoids that bug and stick it into their custom versions so there's a github issue where they did that but anyway since then they seem to have actually fully upgraded to a newer version of electron and so now the tahoe detector app uh does no longer flags discord as being a problem but it wasn't actually a problem before that's that's the limitation of this apple script thing that uh checks whether you have electron apps that might have this bug all they can go on is does this app have electron and what version number is it but they can't tell like it's not going to rummage the binary to see if it has the problem.

36:14Then Adam one adds the reason Microsoft Teams classic has that crappy older electron version is that development is ended for the classic version of teams. So that software will never be updated and is wasting space on your SSD. Time to delete that less than wonderful software. I won't be shedding any tears. Yep. I deleted it. All right. I don't know why this often when we record the show, we get feedback about something that I either knew or intended to say. and then the conversation moves on and it would be weird to bring it back around. This is a Casey problem. This is not a listener problem.

36:42This is a me problem. But I full well knew that the following was the thing. I don't know why I didn't bring it up. I use it all the time. Right, exactly. I don't know why neither of us brought it up. I mean, maybe it didn't seem that relevant, but the reason I put it in follow-up is because if you are not like me and Casey and are fully aware of this, it's good information to know. So that's why it's here. So Matt Rigby writes, with regard to emoji picking in macOS, you can summon the buggy macOS emoji picker by hitting control and command and space. and it will automatically suggest emoji based on the last word you typed, similar to LaunchBar.

37:12This is Marco saying that he uses LaunchBar to quickly look up and put an emoji. I didn't mention it to Marco because obviously he likes the way LaunchBar does it. He's not looking for an alternate solution or something. But just FYI, the built-in picker has... And the built-in picker also has two modes, which is like the small palette that has just like recent stuff or whatever, and then the expanded one. And I think it remembers that state. So sometimes you might do the expanded thing, and then it's not small anymore, but you can switch it back. But anyway, Control-Command-Space. Try it in a decent Mac app that uses native text controls, and you'll get a nice emoji picker.

37:41You can also go to the menus and select Insert Special Character or whatever. I think it's a standard menu in most Mac apps. Yeah, and I was glad to hear that. I actually did not know about this, so it was news to me. So thank you. However, I find it really clunky, and it is both slower, and it takes more keystrokes, and just is generally a little bit more friction. it yeah it brings up a ui that you then have to interact with versus like a launch bar type thing which is like i just get to keep my fingers on my keyboard right yeah exactly like i could you know i can type command space grim there we go it's already a grimacing face enter done like and if you know otherwise all right control command space grim no that's death and you gotta figure out what do i do to select the one that i found do i click on it do i double click on it yeah it's just double clicking on it insert it but not make the palette go away exactly like it's more work.

38:31It's more friction. So if LaunchBar stopped working and no other such app could possibly provide something like this, sure. Okay. I'd start using the system one. But as long as this better version exists, I'm going to keep using it. And look, that's what LaunchBar is. That's what all these apps are. The system offers search via Spotlight. You can type in something and type in an app name and hit enter and launch the app. The system now offers clipboard history if you upgrade to Tahoe and you can... 26? Whatever. Yeah, Tahoe. I always lose track even this soon it's the current OS I know like you know so the OS has offered a you know standard or basic version of these app launchers functionality for a while but we use these app launchers because we think they're better or they're faster or they have more capabilities or they kind of just fit our mental model or they fit our muscle memory better so yeah I'm going to keep using the launch bar but if I ever can't I'll look at my options then wasn't there an app that used to use KC called like Rocket or something?

39:28That's right. You do the same thing? Yeah, it's very similar. Do you not use that anymore? No, no, no, I do. Basically, I think by default, you type colon. I have switched it to semicolon. I don't remember why I did this, but I did this years ago. And so you type semicolon in basically any text entry field anywhere on the Mac and start typing the name of the emoji, like grimacing is a great example. So semicolon, or I should say colon actually by default. So colon, G-R-I-M, and then it'll filter down to grimace, you know, or grimacing emoji, whatever it's called. And I really like Rocket. It's not perfect, but it's very, very affordable.

39:59I don't remember how much I paid for it, and I paid for it like 85 years ago. And it's fast, and it works. So I really recommend it. We'll put a link in the show notes. All right, let's talk PogoStick Robot. So this was from Overtime last week, and we were talking about the Neo household quote-unquote robot. And John, you had brought up that there was some like PogoStick robot sort of situation, and you couldn't let it lie, so you did a little research. What did you find? Yeah, I was trying to remember, trying to find actually, I did after we finished, so tried to actually find this episode of the PBS series Nova that was about robotic stuff in like the 80s or 90s.

40:36And it showed this pogo stick robot. I was describing how like that's, that was so clearly a breakthrough to my, when I saw that I'm like, they're on the right track with how to make things that move around. Like it has to be able to be like off balance and self-correcting, you know. and I talked about these scary Boston Dynamics robot dogs that we've seen in the modern era and everything I couldn't find the Nova episode but I did find a YouTube video I think it's like a some kind of British thing I think the narrator is British showing the Pogo robot so we'll put a link in the show notes to a YouTube video you want to see the Pogo robot I was thinking of this will show it even though it's not the Nova episode and apparently that robot was from something called the MIT Leg Lab founded by Mark Raybert in the 1980s and they created that Pogo robot and mark raybert would go on to found boston dynamics so kind of makes sense that i saw that pogo robot i'm like they're on the right track and then now we have boston dynamics this is literally the same guy um so check it out if you want to see what uh pogo stick robots were like in the 80s it all comes full circle and then finally uh we have trey carpenter writes my mother-in-law butt dials me all the time what we figured out is that she makes a call from favorites the other person hangs up first my name is where the hang up button is and her favorites happens two times a week i tested this many many people sent this in this was not just trey writing in that this is definitely uh like this is this can happen i tried it myself if this is what my parents are doing it would make sense but lots of people's parents and siblings and friends and they're apparently doing this because if you miss if you lose the hang-up race which you're like oh where is that red x button and you know you go to press it this is another thing like the coyote time stuff we talked about like lots of people suggested this in fact i think this is this exact issue was suggested at that time of like game programming techniques for user interfaces to make them feel better or be less error prone and one of the ideas is when you just transition a screen like there used to be a full screen overlay showing like the call and like the red x button everything like that but the other person hangs up and suddenly that overlay goes away revealing the phone app beneath it with maybe your list of favorites or whatever ignore all taps for the next 300 milliseconds or something to make it so that if you see because it takes a while for your brain to go i'm going to hit the red button then it sends nerve impulses down your arm and to your hand and then your finger has to start moving and then it has to move and move and move and hit that like that is a large amount of time to the computer um and it would be great if there could be some a little bit of forgiveness for when the screen transitions and just ignoring taps after that on the other hand if you have lightning fast reflexes and the second the screen changes you hit the button and it doesn't register you're like this phone feels broken but i do feel like in this case uh butt dialing mitigation is worthwhile uh to for that extra delay i mean they already do delay stuff like that with the uh it has to tell whether you've double tapped the side button so the first tap of the side button doesn't count until it has waited x number of milliseconds to see if there's another tap coming yeah well maybe that's it we are sponsored this episode by factor you know this fall between all the busyness of you know getting back into the school schedule and upcoming Thanksgiving and everything like that, shorter days now, it's hard to find time to cook.

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45:35okay so like i said at the top of the show i was really sick the last couple of days and is this what caused the illness well maybe i don't know was it cdrs yeah it was cdrs uh no i woke up what was this yesterday i believe as we record this and there was like some sort of weird like sock looking purse thing that apple announced and they dropped this i think first thing in the morning and i genuinely thought that this was a gag me too that this was not real and that i just wasn't understanding kind of like another announcement apple made long ago that people thought was a gag uh perhaps yes we will talk about that no i'm 100 with you i've when i when i first breezed by this it was i think it was like early in the morning or something or like i just woken up from a nap or something i was like a little bit tired and i hadn't been near the computer for a while and i was kind of catching up on whatever had happened and i scrolled past that and i got the same instinct instinctual feeling in my mind as i do on april 1st and i'm scrolling through the news and i see some weird thing and i'm just and i just instantly classified it as that's a parody that's a parody that's a joke like i just kept going and i saw the same thing like three times from different people as i'm scrolling up and i'm like wait a minute and then i saw one of the link previews and it said apple.com and i'm like oh no yep this is this real sure enough sure enough so issey miyaki and apple today unveiled iPhone Pocket, inspired by the concept of a piece of cloth.

47:04Let me read that one more time because this is verbatim. Inspired by the concept of a piece of cloth, its singular 3D knitted construction is designed to fit any iPhone as well as all pocketable items. Beginning Friday, November 14th, it will be available at select Apple locations and on Apple.com. iPhone Pocket is the short strap design. In the short strap design, retails at$150 American dollars. and the long strap design at$230 American dollars for a mankini. Yeah, well, to describe what this looks like, it's like a long sort of pleated, like the pleated part of the sock when you pull up your socks.

47:43It's a long version of that with like a slit in it, and you can put the phone into that. It's closed at the bottom. It's not bent like a sock. It's just like a big rectangle with a slit in it that you can shove a phone into. And everyone immediately, especially older people, said, that reminds me of iPod socks. Well, one person, Paul Caffassa, said it reminded him of a mankini, and he did a blog post with, who is that, Borat? Yep, the Borat swimsuit. Oh, my God. What a perfect analogy that was. Yeah, I think you could actually wear this like that. I think it might actually work. As Paul says, someone can feel free to try it.

48:14All right, John, what's it going to take? Oh, no, that's not going to happen. Although the level of body hair might be similar. I mean, I'll tell you one thing. I couldn't pull that off, but I bet you could. i don't think anybody can pull that off that's the thing with the mankini um anyway ipod socks were a thing that was released in 2004 i should i think i didn't get the youtube link here there was a good youtube link to uh jobs introducing the ipod socks when they were introduced even the people who were in the room with steve jobs thought it was a joke because he very often has a slide in a presentation and it would be like we did this and it shows like an ipod with a rotary dial on it for the iphone we all know that's a joke when he did the ipod socks you can hear the room like laughing and tittering and not being like this is a joke right and then eventually realizing as he goes on to the next slides that it's not a joke they released socks again not like foot shaped socks but just basically like a tube the tube part of a sock that's closed on one end for you to put your ipod in um this was in 2004 and you could get six of these they came in a package of six in different colors for 30 bucks they're currently selling for 40 to 80 bucks on ebay by the way that may go up with this thing so the easy miyaki thing obviously that's a designer thing gruber had a post about this easy miyaki is the person who designed the uh black turtleneck the signature black turtleneck that steve jobs used to wear that everybody parodies uh the actual guy easy miyaki uh died a while ago but the company lives on but the thing is it's high fashion in the world of high fashion like we complain about apple's ram prices but in the world of high fashion everything costs a huge amount of money because there is really no connection between uh the cost of manufacturing or materials and the price.

49:47The price is the price and it has to do with brand and image and fashion and absolutely nothing to do with what the things are made of or how they're made or anything like that. So this is just a piece of cloth. Why is it$150? Two words, Issey Miyake. Like it's just like Calvin Klein or Louis Vuitton or like, it's just, it's fashion. So I, I have no, the Hermes, Hermes, sorry, whatever. Those bands, you're not paying that much because they're made of special leather at the cost of a big deal just because they're a fancy brand. So this is the same thing. Why does this seem to exist? Why is Apple need to make it?

50:15obviously they have a probably have some relationship with isimiyaki whatever i don't care some fashion people want to spend 250 bucks on a sock for their phone go for it i don't care i will say that it's easier to get your phone in and out of this than it is for the crossbody strap that apple made for less money and so it has that going for it but uh but yeah ipod socks definitely seemed a lot more cozy you got six of them for 30 bucks it was one of the rare amazing deals in apple and you know why because apple in 2004 was not isimiyaki or ms or any of these other companies apple was just apple and they made the ipod and they were the iphone didn't exist yet and they weren't yet the apple of today so they could sell you socks for 30 bucks and it seemed kind of expensive like 30 bucks for the top portion of six socks but i can tell you of someone who's bought socks recently uh in 2025 regular men's socks uh 30 bucks for six of them is actually a pretty good deal yeah the the original ipod socks were like of course we all made fun of them at the time they were also delightful they were great and in fact we actually we own a set at some point tiff got an ipod i got her an ipod mini as an early gift in our relationship um in fact it was the first ipod i ever bought uh was one for tiff uh and i got her at some point later that year i got her the box of ipod socks and she kept it in the i think it was the teal one that she used she kept it in the ipod sock for most of the time she owned it it was delightful and we still have the rest of them like in a box somewhere in my closet delightful this thing like look this is harmless Apple did a fashion collab with a fashion house that you know they're gonna sell a couple hundred of these things maybe like they're not gonna sell a ton of them it's fine however I will say if any of our listeners buy one of these I would love to see it worn like Borat because John won't do it you're gonna you're gonna stretch it out too much no you're right I won't someone someone's i mean some youtuber will probably do it but like someone's got to spend the 200 bucks to to get that for that picture gosh i hope not yeah all right but look it's fine like there's all sorts of so and what we've been told apparently like i saw a few people a few things breeze by on mastodon and stuff that like apparently similar types of things have been you know getting some traction in different markets usually not in the u.s which is why a lot of us like haven't heard about it but similar types of things have gotten traction similar to like the crossbody strap when that came out you know a few months ago with the phone everyone's like yeah okay good job apple you're taking you know you're kind of entering a market that was already proven in certain market in certain other markets like okay fine i'm sure this thing will be fine it'll go in like you know the dustbin of apple history with like weird things they've made in small volumes for a lot of money like gold apple watches and the made an apple book uh the johnny ive uh the design by apple in california book like stuff like that like they occasionally make weird stuff in small batches okay whatever yeah i mean it's silly and i don't really understand it but i don't understand fashion so oh if we can get a picture of somebody wearing one of these borat style while also wearing a gold apple watch wow and maybe i mean maybe ai can help us with this and then also like carrying a macbook in that in that 300 macbook leather sleeve they made about that 300 leather sleeve sounds like a bargain now with 250 dollar piece of cotton sock or whatever this thing is at least that thing's leather right in front of them a coffee table with made it with designed by apple in california on it hey don't make fun of that book i've got one of those it's great the large version a large version is too big to fit on shelves um one one cute thing from the ipod sock announcement with steve jobs is uh a sign of the times different different times technology wise was that uh he mentioned and it will also keep your ipod warm the idea of putting your phone in something to keep it warm is not common.

54:02I know phones don't like to be super cold and people who live in very, very cold climates say, well, actually I do have to keep my phone warm. But the thing is iPods did not really produce that much heat, especially in 2004. And many of them, including the one in the picture, had mechanical hard drives in them. And so keeping them warm, even in mildly chilly winter temperatures, was probably a good idea. So the sock was actually performing in a function to keep things warm, but I don't see them selling, for example a macbook pro case that's designed to keep your macbook pro warm unless again you're using it outdoors on a film shoot or something but you know i mean in all fairness i think most macbook pro cases do keep it warm uh it's probably not something you want but but it is something that happens it depends you know that someone's going to write and say we are shooting these videos in uh alaska and we need to keep our macbook pros warm all right so john did me personally a great favor by adding a whole bunch of information about some new gaming hardware releases that I have no opinions on.

54:59So I'm just going to check out for the next half hour. And you got this, John. Well, you're recovering from illness anyway. But still, I think you might have some interest in some of this stuff. So this was a big, this came and swept away all of our other topics. At first, I was going to save it until next week. But I think it's just, it's of the moment. It was announced yesterday, I believe. Valve announced the company behind the Steam store. We used to say Valve, the company behind Half-Life and Portal or whatever. But now we just say Valve, the company behind Steam, which is where people buy PC games.

55:27um they have a existing hardware product called the steam deck and they have a vr headset called the was it the valve index or something yep anyway they made an and they have have had some other hardware over time they made a big announcement where they're releasing a bunch of new hardware products and they're very interesting but before i get into the products i want to just give a brief aside about valve doing this and how it's how it's different yeah it's another one how are things different than when you were young john well here we go um great to be clear what um what what valve's hardware does like the steam deck for instance steam deck is the handheld gaming thing and it plays quote-unquote pc games that are sold through steam and by pc games we need meaning games that run on windows pcs running on x86 processors that's and uh and the steam deck runs them but it doesn't run windows and it doesn't have an x86 processor actually no but it does have an x86 processor sorry i'm getting confused with another product anyway um it doesn't run windows uh it runs i believe it's even on the steam it's called steam os it's just a linux variant it's like how are they running windows games windows quote-unquote pc games on linux and as we've discussed in the past when talking about apple similar technology they have a thing that i think they call it proton that's like a translation layer that understands the like direct x api calls or whatever inside of windows x86 binary and translates them to calls into their own linux native library for doing 3d stuff and that way they are able to sell a platform that plays games made to run on windows but they don't license windows and they don't have to you know be involved with microsoft in any way and this has been going on for years and obviously also there's the steam store which is an online store where you can buy games you can even buy games to the mac there some some games for the mac um that has become incredibly dominant and the way that a lot of people buy games it is one it was one of the very early app stores even before the iphone i believe uh you can check my math on that um because it makes real easy to install games you go to like an app store like experience so you run the steam app there's a bunch of games you can buy them you put a credit card it's like the app store but before the app store and for pc games the pc games used to be a pain in the butt to install and they would fight with each other and Steam like made it so don't worry about it.

57:42If it's in the App Store, it's in the Steam Store, you just click install, give us your money and it'll install it and it'll be great. What got me sold on Steam back then was the lack of all the stupid copy protection crap that the real games would install. Yeah, yeah, like the App Store. You don't have to deal with that. Yeah, it was great. Like you could just like download the game, first of all. You don't have to like go to a store and buy a disc and then you wouldn't have the disc constantly checking it for sale for disc protection and all that crap and then like if you went like somewhere else, like your friend's house, You could log in and just download the game there.

58:12And as long as you weren't playing it at the same time as you were on your home computer, you could play your games there. It was incredible. It's like the App Store. When you get a new phone, you sign into the App Store. You can download all your apps. You don't have to enter serial numbers for all your apps. You don't have to log in. Yeah, all the activation crap that was like, because copy protection was getting so advanced and therefore also burdensome and invasive back then. Because like, you know, basically CDRs did a number on game sales because again, S tier coming back to the CDR. Yeah, good thing all those CDRs are now bad, so you can't play those copies anymore.

58:45Yeah, but there, I mean, there were so many, because look, I used to pirate games a lot. Of course, I was a teenager back then. And like, there were so many like weird tricks they would do like, all right, we're going to store like this protection data in like this weird sub-channel of the CD. They did that on floppy disks too, by the way. Of course, yeah. And then, and of course, then you'd have, you know, apps that would be able to rip that sub-channel data and then burners that would be able to burn it. And you had, okay, you got to get this version of Nero burning ROM to rip the disc and then burn it with this one Plex store CD writer.

59:12Like it was this whole thing. And then as a result of that cat and mouse game, the copy protection got so invasive. It started basically being like a root kit on your computer. And there were all these different schemes that different companies would use. And it was a nightmare to both try to be a pirate during that time and also to be a regular customer during that time. Because you had to deal with all the stuff that was meant to make pirates' lives more miserable, but it made your life more miserable too. Yeah, it was awful. And then Steam comes in and is like, all that's gone. We're going to do online activation-based DRM, which worked just fine, but it was way less invasive.

59:45There was no more, like, physical component. They were ahead of their time with the, you're only selling digitally? You can't get a disk? And you have to be online? Have to be online? I'm never going to use a service that makes you have to be online? That's what people would say. That was controversial at the time. People did say that. Because it was a long time ago. It's so much better now. Right. And so the thing that strikes me and has always struck me about Steam and doing all this is that the Microsoft of my youth would never have allowed this. because the microsoft of my youth the microsoft before it lost an antitrust case against the u.s and had all the baggage when it was the dominant company and the dominant thing which was personal computers all before mobile before all that that microsoft would never have allowed another company to make and sell a platform where you could run windows games that didn't give microsoft any money that didn't run Windows, that didn't need Microsoft's permission, and you know how they would solve this problem?

1:00:42How would they not allow it? They would constantly be modifying their APIs in such a way that it would break the proton layer. And I'm not saying they haven't done that. I bet they probably have. But they would leverage their strength by saying, if company, we will only license Windows to you if you promise to never do business with Valve in any way and like they were like we will only let you ship your game on windows if you promise you will never you will put in this code that will cause it to not function on steam because valve is is selling hardware and selling games through their own app store and that runs apps not made for their operating so they're selling hardware with linux on it these games are not linux games they're windows games developers are making windows games and valve is like we're just going to make them work we're going to make a compatibility layer we're going to certify that they work if they don't work we're going to tweak our compatibility layer so that they do work and it's like that's not going to work that's not tenable and they hit valve has shown it is tenable they can do it at microsoft probably because they've been chastened by the their antitrust case probably because the pc is not that important of a platform so they just ignore it has allowed them to exist and expand so much so that microsoft is currently over the past several years deciding whether or not they still want to do that whole xbox thing and the answer by the way seems to be no they don't really they entered the console space they did amazingly well for years and years but they're not the top of the console space the highest they probably got was a 360 and they've had a bunch of poor choices since then they seem to be getting out of that but they're still make pc games but val was coming and say oh hey microsoft you're getting out of the xbox space and you're just going to do pc games well guess what we essentially own the pc gaming space we don't run windows we don't care what you do uh and it's weird that people are still writing games for x86 windows but uh we can run them on our links platform and gamers seem to like it fine uh and they buy them through our store and our store is the only gaming store that matters even though you have your own store uh so sorry about that um and now with these announcements you'll see they're basically looking to fill the gap that will eventually be left by microsoft either radically changing and de-emphasizing the xbox or abandoning it entirely sorry for this big long pre-enamble but here's what they announced so the first is this thing called the steam controller they've made a controller before do you remember the one with the big touchpads on it like the round touchpads i think it was also called the steam controller i used it and didn't like it but anyway it's a handheld controller it just looks like like a xbox or playstation controller but it's got two big uh square touchpads uh on it most of the things that They do like their Steam controllers are made for quote unquote PC games, which means they expect you to have a mouse.

1:03:27So the controller has to have some equivalent way to use a mouse. Same thing with the Steam Deck. Steam Deck also has two big square touchpads on either side of it because these games are made to use the mouse cursor. They're PC games. And so you need a touchpad to basically be, you know, to be the mouse cursor on a system that doesn't have a mouse cursor. This controller works with any PC or device running Steam. So that includes a Mac running Steam, a PC running Steam, any of the hardware that we're going to talk about, or the Steam Link app. This includes Mac, Windows, Linux PCs, as well as tablets and smartphones.

1:03:56So this is just like a controller that will work with anything. It's got infrared LEDs that will make it trackable by the VR thing that we're going to talk about in a second. It's got magnetic sticks. So I think we talked about this on a past episode. The technologies for how little joysticks and controllers work. Even today, like the PlayStation, I think also the plain Xbox one. the controllers use um sticks that have things rubbing up against each other inside them and anything that rubs up against each other if you use it long enough uh the rubbing will cause you know friction and damage and it will stop working and so you get things like stick drift and the nintendo switch because things wear out over time there are technologies that allow joysticks to work without things that touch each other one of them are the uh the hall effect sensors which use i don't know we'll put a link to the difference between the hall effect and the we're about to talk about um but they things don't actually touch they just pass by each other and through magnetic fields or whatever determines where the stick's pointing uh this the steam controller uses tmr which is tunnel magneto resistance which is slightly more accurate than hall effect and a little bit better again they'll be like an assurance about these details but the point is steam controller they're using the very best kind of like joystick thumbstick technology that is available today that will last the longest um the steam controller like everything else we're going to talk about no pricing released but pricing probably won't be too bad 30 to 40 hour battery life a magnetically attaching combo charger and wireless dongle so um there's a little magnetic thing it's really neat like if you just sort of like slide the controller i don't know how to describe this if you leave the little magnetic charging thing flat on your desk and you put the controller flat on your desk and then you just push slide the controller along the desk towards the magnetic thing the magnetic thing will leap from the desk surface and stick to the underscite of the controller it's very neat um and that magnetic thing that charges it is also the wireless dongle that you has a cord that plugs into the back of your thing for the like low latency wireless signal so that's the steam controller neat and i think it looks kind of uncomfortable to use but you got to have some compromises for uh to be able to use pc games on it second thing they're releasing is called the steam machine which is a six inch black cube that is oh i should have got these images six inch black cube it's a gaming pc it's a small form factor gaming pc and a six inch black cube and i had some pictures of what is on the inside of this thing that i will try to find but it's pretty nice looking inside like it's a small form factor pc but not one that you made yourself it is um it looks almost kind of like something apple would make when you open it up there is just a massive single fan that's like probably six inches in diameter that's one fan pulling through and the whole rest of the thing is filled with like heat sink that the fan is pulling air through it's pretty neat it looks like a little black cube people are making parodies of it by putting a next logo on it even though it doesn't really look like the next cube um but it is a small form factor pc um it has an internal power supply uh it has an led strip on the front that's like customizable and the thing they described was like say you want to download a game on steam but it's taking a while to download um which probably won't take too long because they use peer-to-peer downloading it's really fast but anyway if you have uh this steam machine hooked up to your tv uh you can go just go watch a tv show or something and you'll be able to see on the led strip like a progress bar i like whether your download is done or not without having it take over the screen that is super cool and you can it's all customizable because again it's a pc they emphasize that it's a pc it runs steam os3 which is an arc based linux arch based linux with kde plasma as their desktop environment um here's a quote from their market material steam machine is optimized for gaming but it's still your pc install your own apps or even another operating system who are we to tell you how to use your computer i love this line so much when i saw very on apple i mean they've always been like this because this is they're a pc company and they're like look this is this is just a pc like we're not going to say like it looks like a little console what i'm getting is like this this looks like an xbox it is it's a little cube it plays quote-unquote pc games uh but it's not sold as a personal a computer but it is and they're like look it's it's a computer like you can like you want to install windows on it go ahead that'll work fine do whatever you want with it it is a cute small four-factor pc um another from bit from the marketing steam machine keeps cool and runs whisper quiet even when running the most demanding games and the the measurement i saw in some youtube videos was 28 to 30 decibels that's awesome a cute little small form factor uh gaming dedicated pc they the performance they describe as quote 4k gaming at 60 frame per second with fsr which is one of those technologies that does like upscaling or whatever so it's not going to do native 4k 60 seconds but you won't notice the difference um the specs it has a what they describe as a semi custom amd zen 4 processor with uh six they say 6c 12t uh six core 12 thread i guess up to 4.8 gigahertz 30 watts tdp uh they describe it as having more than six times the performance of the steam deck so i'm assuming this amd zen processor thing i'm assuming it's like one of those amd cpu gpu combos kind of like what the playstation has um that is an x86 cpu and a gpu comes with 16 gigs of ram your choices for storage are 512 or 2 terabytes it has a micro sd card slot wi-fi 6e bluetooth 5.3 a dedicated antenna for the steam controllers built into the steam cube so you don't need that uh the dongle thing um display port is 4k at up to 240 hertz or 8k at 60 hertz supports hdr free sync and daisy chaining hdmi 2.0 port at 4k 120 hertz supports hdr free sync and cec everyone loves cec it's got two usba 3.2 ports one usb c 3.2 gen 2 port and two usba 2.0 points and gigabit ethernet again no pricing but this you're like so is this a is this an xbox is this a game console it is a the steam deck is a quote-unquote handheld pc you can run quote-unquote pc games on the steam deck you download them from steam they're games designed to run on windows and they run on linux on this handheld thing this is the non-handheld version of the steam deck and of course it's more powerful it's a tiny little pc it's a cute little box you can connect it to your tv just like you would connect an xbox to your tv just like you connect the playstation to your tv but it but it's a pc so it's kind of like a steam console like is valve is going to replace xbox as the third company or are they just going to become to dominate the pc gaming space because most people don't want to build a gaming pc i know i don't like they just want to play pc games because pc games are good they're that's where you know pc games are made are more complicated have more features require a mouse and a keyboard often and here's valve out here with the dominant pc gaming store selling a handheld pc that you can play games on and now a non-handheld pc you can play games on that looks a lot like a game console and they also will sell their own controller i'm fascinated by this again no pricing uh the guess uh for people looking at this is that it's not going to be super expensive because it is not a super powerful gaming pc again it's a six inch cube it's it's gonna be like game console caliber power but i think it will also be game console caliber ease of use which is really important like marco you just talked about all the things that you liked about steam and how annoying pc gaming was the steam deck has the same advantage it's a dedicated piece of hardware you don't need anything but the steam deck you sign into your steam account you download your games you buy new games they play you know they're going to play on it because it's made by the same company like it's it's pretty compelling and in the same way you're like oh should i build a pc should i build a little pc and hook it up to my tv should i go to pc parts picker and start designing my small form factor pc and make sure that it doesn't overheat and has the right or should i just buy a steam machine steam machine something like this is the closest i've ever gotten to considering having a gaming pc in my house it's not even out yet by the way but i'm looking at this and going you know this would solve a lot of problems i have in particular i have no place for a gaming pc but this thing is a freaking six inch cube and i could put it right next to my playstation and connect it to the same monitor and use the same controller so i have some interest in this do either one of you have any interest in this cute little cube uh so by coincidence uh i have one right here no just kidding um but close uh a few months ago i bought a small form factor gaming pc for our house here because tiff and adam were basically like you know everybody wanted one more pc in the house and at this point almost all of our uh razor laptops are dead except for mine but the one that i repaired put in all the new stuff in um the others are all dead and so tiff wanted her own gaming pc for here and so i like there was this company that i found on amazon that basically sells almost like shoebox sized uh you know little it's like it's basically it can fit a full-size graphics card and everything else is kind of tiny around it.

1:12:59So it looks almost like a PCI enclosure, but it's the full computer in there. Anyway, so we bought one of those and it is currently connected to the TV with wires running across the living room for the keyboard and there's like a gamepad style controller on it. And Tiff uses it to play some old games and it's totally fine. But if the Valve thing was out, I would have definitely bought that instead because it is way smaller and it will have the Steam OS the shell and the software environment that is made It's meant to be used on a TV like a console You're not going to see the Windows Explorer It's running Linux.

1:13:40It's its own operating system made so you hook this thing up to your TV you sit on the couch with a controller and you launch Steam and launch your games Right, so there's no question in my mind that if that was available at that time we would have bought that instead i could just put a link in the document we'll try to put in the notes to the verge article that has a an image carousel showing the internals it's a huge heat sink a huge fan and everything else it looks very apple like on the inside maybe not quite as neat and beautiful as the apple stuff but it is extremely well designed a little pc i forgot to mention in addition to the customizable led strip on the front it also has very much like various xboxes have a replaceable magnetically attaching faceplate so you can have different faceplates and brand them and put stickers on them and have color ones or whatever the default one is a cute little you know black cube but you can that front part can be replaced with third-party stuff or anything you want so that's pretty neat as well i'm very interested in this machine although basically my p my ps5 looks like my ps5 is an amd combo cpu gpu with an ssd and ram and connected to with a linux-based operating system connected to a store where i download games like that's what my playstation is the difference is my playstation plays playstation games and this thing plays quote unquote pc games which how long before they're called steam games or valve games or something because like like i guess they're still pc games like they're emphasizing like look gamers can build their own monster gaming pc and that will run all these games too but it's just weird to me that developers are making games presumably they're developing on windows machines they're testing on windows and then how many of their users are running their games not on windows it's fascinating yeah uh this is not something i have a need for today but it would not it's only a matter of time before declan discovers pc gaming like definitely i don't need for this right i don't plan to bring this into our world but you know he will find out and he will want it and if we do go down this path this seems like a great answer you know pricing it's better than building your own gaming pc for sure like if your kid wants to just play pc games and you don't have to think about it you just buy this thing plug it in like even you just hook it up to like a monitor in his room or hook it up to your TV or something like you can treat it like a console and that's yeah and you know who knows price performance wise people go oh I can build a small form factor PC that's 10 times as fast you probably could you always could doesn't matter yeah like that's like that's yes of course you can this is for this is like for you know for Apple buyers this is for people who don't want to do that and who don't want who either either don't have the time or don't have the skill or or want the more integrated experience that this will offer and that's a that's a good size market and the beauty is as i'm sure valve would tell you is say you build your small form actor pc or say you build your monster pc you don't you can install on it steam os which is free and now you have now your pc connected to your tv has a nice convenient interface that you can use from a controller from your couch because that's what they're offering like they are the the microsoft of pc gaming which sounds weird to say like is it microsoft the microsoft of pc gaming like they have an open platform well they don't microsoft didn't give windows for free but like a linux-based operating system designed for what it's supposed to do they have their own store they're the microsoft and apple combined of pc gaming they're they're the best of both of them like trying to provide a unified experience without giving problems but also being open like the old microsoft was and not super duper evil like the old microsoft was intentionally breaking stuff but still like if these games are still written to direct x valve does not control direct x so there's still this tension there's still this like other shoe waiting to drop where microsoft could wake up and go why are we letting them do this why why are they allowed to take all the profit and market share uh by selling a machine that doesn't run windows that runs windows games why are we allowing that to happen but i think microsoft's mostly distracted by ai and business customers so maybe it won't be a big deal also does minecraft still not run on steam os i think it's certainly i know it doesn't run like it's it isn't like natively in steam of course because microsoft but uh yeah i remember i looked into it because adam got a steam deck a few a couple years ago and I looked into like can we put Minecraft on it and the answer at the time was like you can sort of try but it's very hacky and it would maybe only be the Java version and like there would be like there was you had to like you know leave the walled garden to do it and I was just like yeah that doesn't sound worth it we're just not going to do that yeah I think I think what I saw from people who had talked to Valve in this product release is that like there is still a way like their games are like this is certified to run on SteamOS and blah blah but if you have a Windows game that's not certified to run you can still just ask it to run like you can you can say well give it a try like will it work well might there might be glitches that might not work right but like because of the open nature of it they're not stopping you from doing it's just like it might not work that well and i think minecraft probably falls into that category of like you know it's not steam certified for whatever but you can still run it and if it works then it works all right so this next one is where things get really interested in and there's more of an apple angle but there's also even more of the angle i was talking about like why is microsoft letting them do this it's called the steam frame and it is a vr headset um there is a much bunch more images of it at uploadvr.com we'll put that link in the notes steam frame looks like a vision pro but it's all black um it runs steam os3 just like the other things does it has a four nanometer snapdragon 8 gen 3 processor i know nothing about the snapdragon line but from what i've gathered this is a basically like a current or previous gen phone processor on really high-end phones um it's an arm processor and uh valve has added a translation layer that translates x86 to arm just like apple has done and just like microsoft has sort of done with a windows arm uh valve says that is there's a 10 to 20 percent performance hit for code that is being translated but that is only code that is running on the cpu and that is not part of an api that has a native implementation so for example all those direct x calls or whatever those get sent to native implement native arm implementations of everything it's only like the game code that is just running on the cpu that has a performance hit but everything else goes through the native stuff um they describe the steam frame as having roughly steam deck levels of power like if you were to run a game on the steam frame it's it's you know which means it's six times less powerful than than the steam machine but you know it's a headset like it's and they don't have an m5 to stick in it they they've got this which i'm i'm sure the snapdragon 8 gen 3 is fine but it's no m5 um according to dave 2d um we'll put a link to his review as well on youtube valve has touted its control over the whole stack they control the hardware the os the drivers when explaining why they were able to do this better than microsoft with their arm on windows efforts like microsoft has been trying to do this for a while ship windows for arm and have all the x86 runs stuff run well including games and it has proven difficult maybe they're not putting a lot of resources into it maybe they don't care as much uh but apple the gold standard for take a binary written for a different cpu and make it run amazingly on the current cpu has done exactly that with arm and x86 arm from the from the early days our max were running x86 binaries faster than many x86 max and now definitely faster than all of them including games and apple of course has its own similar based similar technology similar to protons similar to crossover similar to all these other things where you can run a windows x86 game on an arm mac through that type of translation layer and valve when talking about this sounds like apple they're like well when we have a problem if we see a game has a performance problem or a hitch or something we have the all the code for the os we have all the code for the drivers we control all the hardware we can fix it we can make the game run better because we control the whole stack in theory that's true of apple but apple doesn't care about games as much as valve does but still even apple's doing a good job with their game porting toolkit uh this headset has 16 gigs of ram your choice is 256 gig or one terabyte of storage it also has a micro sd slot the reason these things all have micro sd slots is steam deck's got a micro sd steam machine has it this thing has it if you have all your games and you downloaded them like huge games you downloaded them and you want those games to be on your headset yes you could download them to your headset again but you can also just copy them to the sd card take the sd card out stick it in your headset and now the games are there without having you re-download them because not everybody has gigabit fiber like like we do right because it's a pc of course you can copy stuff onto a removable media and move it to something else they all have a micro sd card slot although it's not sd express which is kind of a shame uh there is one usbc 2.0 part on the rear for charging and data it has wi-fi 7 bluetooth 5.3 and a dedicated wi-fi 6e uh radio just for the wireless adapter which we'll talk more about in a little bit it has a magnetically attaching front piece so division pro has a magnetically attaching back piece like the ski goggle part you pull the face shield off of that it attaches with magnets this thing is kind of not the reverse but slightly different this thing when it's you know if you put it on your face you can pull the front part of it off and what comes off is like the ski goggle part basically like the aluminum part so it's got the cpu the lenses the screens all the compute like all that stuff comes off but the rest of it is like the strap that goes around your head the equivalent of light shield that is a separate piece so they've broken they've broken the thing up in different pieces instead of having like on the apple thing the ski goggle part and the little temples sticks whatever that's all one piece and then the strap comes out and this thing the front goggly part with the cpu comes off magnetically and supposedly that says So if we come out with a better one that is higher CPU, you can just buy that and snap it on.

1:23:15Or if you like a different strap or whatever and different speakers, because again, the speakers are in that part, you can mix and match those things together. So interesting, different choice there. The head strap does include integrated speakers and they fired backwards. Like they're not in the little sticks. They're like in the, basically what you would imagine would be the light shield on a vision pro. They're force canceling kind of like the Sonos subwoofers that you do like, um which means they have uh drivers uh opposing each other so that their vibrations cancel out because when they didn't do this the vibrations would throw off the display for like tracking and stuff and that makes me wonder if the reason apple put the speakers in the vision pro in those little i don't know what they're called the sticks did apple put the speakers in there because if they hadn't they would have the same problem of vibrations because apple doesn't have like uh you know uh force canceling speakers as far as i know um they just have single ones but they're in the sticks if they had put them in the metal part maybe they would have the same problem so you know two different possible approaches to the same problem which is hey speakers cause vibration vibration is bad for the displays and for tracking and stuff apple just moved the speakers out of that area valve left them in like the front sort of uh uh light shield part but made them force canceling um it could also just be like getting getting them closer to the ears the way apple does yeah is of course going to be better for everything about them um and but it also probably involves costing complexity that maybe valve's product couldn't couldn't bear that in its margins yeah and it makes it like the the one piece like the non-replaceable piece it's all it's more stuff that is connected together like valve's whole idea is like maybe we didn't get this whole strap and speaker part right maybe a third party makes a better one maybe make a version too you can replace all those things whereas those are they're stuck to the apple headset um the the steam frame has which is what they call this thing has a 21.6 watt hour rechargeable battery the battery is on the rear of the strap lots of other headsets have done this instead of being on a cord in your pocket or whatever it's on the back like on the back of your head and lots of reviewers were sort of repeating the line that i'm sure valve told them and lots of people have said for other things oh it balances it because the front thing has a weight on it because that's where the headset the goggly part is and then the battery is in the back and it balances it and i'm like look it only balances it if there is a fulcrum in this seesaw but there's not because the steam frame does not have a top strap the steam frame has a single strap like a pair of ski goggles so i'm like putting weight on the back and on the front i guess it makes it feel like the front isn't sliding down your face as much but the only way for you to make that balance is to tighten that strap so right away i said you know what you should have done you should have put a top strap that the valve index has a top strap like it's not like they they don't know top strap technology so apple is definitely out ahead on the strap technology but i feel like this is surmountable for them especially since that part is replaceable um but yeah the battery is on the back of the head um and it's smaller than the vision pro battery the vision pro battery is a 35.9 watt hours compared to 21.6 uh battery life for this thing is quoted as one to four hours so like one is worst case scenario four is best case so probably in the same range as the vision pro maybe a little bit better maybe a little bit worse um the weight it's 440 grams which is roughly half of what the vision pro weighs it's not made of aluminum doesn't have a front screen on it it's plastic uh it's half the weight of the and it's half the weight of the vision pro and the vision pro weight does not include the battery so like keep this in mind it's half the weight of the vision pro with the battery but just stuck in the back of your head um for displays this is apparently it's very disappointing to a lot of the uh the pc people i will put a link to the digital foundries review of it and that guy's real broken up about the screens but you know anyway the screens are 2160 by 2160 per eye but they are lcd and lcd uh does not have per pixel lighting control and lcds and headsets don't even have mini led like uh you know dynamic backlighting or whatever it's just one single backlight for the whole thing which means when you put this thing on and it's showing a full black screen, which you actually see is a full gray screen.

1:27:24I guess LCDs cannot block the light from the backlight entirely. So even though it's supposed to be pitch black in there like it is in the OLED Vision Pro, it's not, it's gray. This is very much like the Quest 3 and the other things. Why do they use LCDs instead of OLEDs? One reason is cost, because those OLEDs and Apple's things are a whole jillion dollars, right? And this is not going to be as expensive as Vision Pro. But the other reason is a lot of the gaming headsets use, like they describe this as a low persistent LCD screen. Um, and for combating motion sickness and other, uh, you know, motion artifacts and stuff like that, uh, what was discovered very early on in the VR world was the way to do that with current screen technology.

1:28:02This predates OLED was to pulse the image onto the screen. So just say, boom, here's the image and then turn it off the screens and then wait, wait, wait, and then turn on light up for the next thing and turn off the screens and wait, wait, wait. um and the reason they can do that with lcds is because lcds can get really really bright so rather than uh they them having like for example uh a thousand nit screen uh or an 100 nit screen which that's what the the light output of this thing is 100 nit screen they said how about instead of 100 nits that we just show each frame at 100 nits the whole time how about we show that frame for one tenth of the time at a thousand nits so 10 times the brightness for one-tenth of the time.

1:28:47Does that work? The reason they're doing that is because the way the human visual system works is it's much better to show an image really, really bright and then show nothing for a long time and then show the next image really, really bright and then show nothing for another time. It's just why film projectors work well for us because they show the frame of film and then they show nothing and then they show the frame of the next frame and they show nothing because while they're showing nothing, the next frame of the actual film strip is traveling to get in position to be displayed. So there's nothing they can show at that point right and then they show that frame and then they show nothing right um that's what you want to do to avoid motion smearing now the the vision pro has the oled problem of like what they call sample and hold it's a reason motion looks weird on oleds oleds can turn on and off really really fast way faster than lcds way better than lcds with less smearing it's like why don't they just do this on oleds the problem is oleds can't get 10 times as bright you can't show an oled 10 times as bright for one tenth of the time because they can't get 10 times as bright if they could they absolutely would but they can't currently so they have to show the frame pretty much the whole time on an oled and then oleds instantly change to the next frame so you see one frame in a 24 frame per second thing for 1 24th of a second and that frame never changes for the whole 1 24th of a second you're like isn't that how it's supposed to work not in a film projector it doesn't in a film projector you see that frame frame briefly and then you don't see anything for a while as the next frame scrolls up into view same thing with a low processing lcd they'll show one frame very briefly way brighter and then show nothing for a while and then show the next frame and that makes for better clearer motion and less motion sickness and less stuttery things that's why if you watch a 24 frame per second movie on oleds and don't have any motion smoothing on some people perceive a stutteriness because it is literally showing frame one for 124th of the second never changes for that 124th and it is never black or anything and we'll show the next one that's why lots of t's have black frame insertion where they will show uh oleds will show a frame and then insert a black frame and then show another frame like they're trying to make it so the frame isn't on the screen the whole 1 24th of a second but that that cuts the brightness down and sometimes looks flickery depending how you do it so anyway these low persistence lcds for all their terrible contrast and bad black levels they uh they do use low persistence strobing they display each frame for around 300 microseconds which they describe as a 3.7 illumination cycle which i think means for the length of each frame only 3 of the time is the screen lit up and the other 90 whatever percent of the time the screen is off oleds can't get bright enough to do it the perceived total brightness of really bright frame for a short period for 3.7 of the time the perceived total brightness is 100 nits which is way less than the vision pro the contrast is way less than the vision pro uh but within a dark headset 100 nits is sufficient to to you know seem bright uh they're using pancake lenses just like the vision pro instead of the fresnel fresnel lenses how do you pronounce that fresnel something like that uh the like the the lenses in the quest that are cheaper to make they're like i think they're plastic they're like they have lots of like sort of concentric ridgy rings on them kind of like the uh the lenses and lighthouses they're cool and all but they make things a little bit fuzzier especially around the edges pancake lenses are more expensive and better that's what the vision pro has that's what this has um refresh rate is 72 to 144 hertz although they say 144 hertz is experimental it's got 110 degree field of view the vision pro is around 100 it's got pass-through cameras so you don't like bump into things and so you can find your mouse and your keyboard but the pass-through is monochrome that's wild saves money yeah uh and not only does it save money but it's also really good in low light because if you don't have to deal with color you can gather more light you know instead of trying to worry about the red green and blue and stuff there is a port a front port on the bridge of the nose where they say oh well if you wanted color pass-through you You could buy some sort of third-party camera module and shove it in there.

1:32:34And now you have a color pass-through. But this is not about AR. It does pass-through so you don't hurt yourself and so you can see what you're doing. But there's no AR. You're not going to be floating windows in the middle of your room. It has no idea where your walls are. It doesn't care about any of that crap. This is a VR headset for playing games. It's got IR illuminators for tracking pass-through in dark environments. So you can still play like in a really dark room. It'll still know where your controllers are. it does come with controllers we'll get to them a little bit streaming this is one of the things they emphasized about it um it has it does wireless streaming as in um yes you can play games on the headset i just described like the arm cpu and everything but you can also run games on your pc on your mac on your steam machine and stream those games to your headset so then it's just acting like a monitor and how does it do that not by connecting your headset with a wire like the valve index but instead i think the valve index uses wire but instead by using a wireless protocol with a special usb adapter they have that provides a dedicated low latency wi-fi connection only for the video usba adapter yeah yeah well which is hilarious it's a pc the pcs don't have usbc they commonly yeah every like pc game stuff is all like usb3 over usba yeah gracious yeah and So they've done this because they need the lowest latency connection possible.

1:33:57Like the Quest 3 can also do this. Quest 3 you can stream from PCs and stuff, but it's not great because it's sharing that connection. It's not like, again, them controlling the whole stack. Like this is a dedicated separate Wi-Fi connection only for visuals. If your game does network stuff, that doesn't go over this connector. The network stuff goes over the regular Wi-Fi that you're connected with, but this is just for the visual stuff. and it also does foveated streaming which means when it's streaming stuff from your mac from your pc from your steam machine it knows where you're looking in the thing that it's going to be streaming and it streams at higher resolution where you're going to be looking just like foveated rendering works inside the vision pro this is foveated streaming and unlike foveated rendering the thing being streamed has no idea that this is happening to it this is purely done at the level transporting the image they basically probably compress the image they take the image as it arrives at them because when we're playing on a pc it's not foveated anything it's they render the whole screen right they take that whole screen image but they don't send every single pixel from that image they send more pixels where you're looking and less where you're not which makes us screaming lower bandwidth lower latency and as everyone who tried this out this is a lot of uh you know pc gamers first experience with foveated rendering because not a lot of people have vision pros or the other fancier headsets they're like i tried to move my eyes and catch it and i couldn't do it like a valve did a demo where they they were streaming like half-life alex or one of those other vr games and instead of foveated streaming they did streaming where it literally sent blackness everywhere except for where you were looking like so just a little like you know two inch postage stamp of where you're looking like if you when you looked at the mirror display it's like you see a black screen with a little section of the where it's rendering and And when you're in the headset, you can't tell that it's doing this.

1:35:40Every time you try to look into the black area, you can't look at it. Why don't the OLED models do that to save power? I think with the blackness, I think you're I think you can tell like improve peripheral vision that it's not the full image there. Like, I think you need to put something there, but you can't catch it. You can't ever look at the blackness. I think you can detect that it is black instead of blurry or whatever. I mean, we've all used the Vision Pro foveated rendering like we see it in the UI. It's it's very difficult to catch. You can catch it a little occasionally, but it's very difficult to catch.

1:36:06and the thing about foveated streaming like i said foveated rendering like in vision os the os is doing that like the window compositor or whatever whatever is you know displaying the ui in the vision pro when it renders that frame it has to know about where your eyes are and it renders a foveated image which is why you get a foveated image when you're mirroring it because that's that's what it's rendering but foveated streaming it's taking a non-foveated thing and then like it's just a transport thing so it's it's very clever very interesting saves bandwidth with makes it higher performance and you know and it allows you to uh uh be better than the quest 3 essentially that's what everyone said it's like i tried the quest 3 streaming it wasn't that good it's better on this thing that i tried um they say you can stream from pc steam machine or quote any device running steam that's what digital foundry said and again the max can run steam so i'm assuming that includes max uh media consumption is not really a thing valve said you can use a web browser so don't think you're gonna have cool theater i mean third-party opportunity people can make cool theater apps and stuff like that but this is not a priority for this product this is a game thing and to that extent it comes with two controllers two handheld controllers with a full set of buttons and triggers for 2d games which is not true of all the quests and other things like that a lot of times they have controls for vr games but they don't have sufficient controls to play like just a regular playstation game or i know it's going to be a playstation but like a regular game uh console like an xbox game expects you to have a certain number of triggers and buttons these days or whatever and a lot of times vr controllers don't have them but the uh the steam frame does their controllers it's basically like a regular console controller split in half and there it tracks where your hands are and there's little leds that shine through the plastic you know they're they're vr controllers the price of all of this the headset the controllers uh supposed to be less than a thousand dollars no prices are announced so people are just like trying to feel out like how expensive this is going to be or whatever the point is it's not vision pro prices less than a thousand dollars more than the quest sure because it's better hardware than the quest but less than a thousand dollars and valve would not be quiet about people say this thing ships with arm you're playing windows games for a different operating system on a different architecture are you going to do more of that like we can't wait to make more arm hardware they're like we're not announcing anything yet steam deck 2 but but we can't wait to make more ARM hardware so we can run x86 Windows games on non-Windows on non-x86.

1:38:34Which, again, boggles my mind that Microsoft is trying to put Windows on ARM, but game makers are out there. Time for me to make my PC game. Better compile it for x86 so 50 % of my users can eventually run it on ARM on Linux. So weird. Now, having Casey's Vision Pro now, none of the specs of this headset made me jealous or interesting i'm like man the the vision pro hardware is amazing but it did make me think you know apple your 3500 headset would be an amazing streaming vr headset if you could connect it to steam and if apple knew or cared anything about gaming they would have long since made a deal that said hey uh if you get steam on your mac or your pc you can stream vr games to it using the vision pro can you imagine how amazing that would be these screens look so good now maybe the persistence isn't as good as the low persistence lcd or whatever but and maybe the field of view is a little bit lower but and i would i know apple to its credit just did come out with the uh ability to buy the playstation vr controllers for vision pro but then what what do you get to play on them do you get to play all pc games that are available on steam no you do not do you get to play the vr games available on steam no you do not you get to play the games that are available on apple's app store which is a much more limited selection and by the way the playstation controllers probably don't have all the buttons needed to play pc caliber games now these three products steam controller steam machine steam frame and their existing handheld steam deck they have essentially a complete suite of console level hardware they have they are basically sony which has the psvr and playstation 5 microsoft which has quote-unquote pc gaming and nintendo which has the switch combined into a single company on an open platform running linux with the most popular non-console gaming platform steam might actually be bigger than all the consoles i'm not sure um playing games for an operating system they don't control on an architecture that is different than the one that people are targeting and i think they're going to be successful it boggles my mind but like i'm i think they hit it out of the park with these products i again no prices have been announced these are coming in 2026 i think but the rumor prices sound right and they all look really good and i'm mightily impressed with what valve has done here yeah it looks very promising like you know i mentioned earlier like the little square gaming pc thing looks great um and and the the headset i mean look what we see in the headset market we see like apple's take on it which is you know in space and then you have like everyone else here on earth uh they're using you know you basically you have like the meta quest series this is obviously meant to directly compete with the quest and it seems like it is built like a quest but be but be slightly better and slightly more expensive right which is great because like the quest the quest is a very successful product line and it and it is honestly a good product line like the for for vr gaming the quest is great it is a great product but it doesn't run pc games and it doesn't run steam games it runs like meta has an app store where they have their games and yeah i'm sure there's more games than on apple platforms but like steam is steam that's where all quote-unquote the game when declin is going to be interested in playing games it's going to be a quote-unquote pc game that's available on steam it's not going to be something from the meta app store exactly and so like i think this is this is great and it you know the things about like using an lcd for the display honestly in with today's technology i think for most use cases that might be the right move because look at what it has enabled them to do.

1:42:12The entire device is way smaller. It's way lighter. It's going to be way cheaper than something like the Vision Pro. It's using OLED. I mean, the size and weight aren't the thing. It's the price. The OLEDs and the Vision Pro cost more than all four of these products combined, I think. Yeah, almost certainly. But also, like, you know, OLED also has trade-offs. The Vision Pro is great for color and contrast. It's not so great for fast motion. well so that's that's the thing about all this is like i said uh oleds are better for motion that's why gaming people who buy gaming monitors are getting oleds because if you try to run an lcd gaming monitor at like 120 hertz or 240 hertz which is what high-end pc gamers want to do it becomes a smeary mess because lcds cannot change from one color to another fast enough to keep up with 240 hertz oleds can but lcds can get way brighter and inside a headset doing that thing where you show something 10 times as bright for one tenth of the time that's what you need for motion in a headset so while game every gamer in the world including me probably for my playstation 6 is getting oled monitors because oled oled pixels change instantly from one color to another they're perfect for this they just can't get bright enough to do the low persistence pulsing thing that you need to do inside a headset so yeah lcd was the only choice like people are disappointed because like i would wish it had no well if you wish that an oled control would be 2 000 bucks is that what you want because there's no like the current hardware reality is if you want vision pro style oled things it's going to be you know huge hugely more expensive and you're going to have the possibility of the sample and hold blur that you get inside the uh the vision pro because they're not pulsing the thing for 300 microseconds they think they're showing it for the whole frame yeah i i think this it this looks like they have made a very different set of trade-offs than Apple and a slightly different set of trade-offs than Meta, but I think it's going to be, you know, for its market, which is gaming, the only competition for gaming is the Quest.

1:44:13That's it. Like, there's no other competition out there in this market. And Valve's previous products. Like, that's the thing. This is not Valve's first headset. This is not Valve's first... There's a Varge article about, like, the earlier Steam machines. They made various kind of Linux PC looking things or whatever, but they learned from those. They learned why weren't those successful? Why didn't those take off? What is bad about our current headset how can we make it cheaper and better for games like they've really nailed like kind of like game consoles do where it's like we know what people are going to do with this they're going to play games how cheap can we make it and still make it good for games and that's what they've done with these products yeah i think it's probably going to be a hit yeah these look i mean this is not for me today but these all look really really impressive and also i think it's worth you know putting in context what it means to be a hit it's still a vr gaming headset and it's still vr and what that means is gamers like it not all gamers, not even most gamers but it'll do fine it's still going to be a pretty small technical market in terms of how big is it compared to computers other gaming PCs how big is it compared to game consoles how big is it compared to phones it's going to be tiny compared to all those just like everything in VR to date has been but I think it will do well within that market yeah and speaking of those markets so you look over there at the steam machine and you really just have to think a lot of game consoles sell people buy a lot of play stations millions of playstations millions millions of nintendo switches which i know is kind of more of a steam deck competitor but steam deck was kind of there first although it doesn't convert to a tv thing i think a lot of people kind of want that like why don't you just make the steam deck like the switch and instead they said how about we make one six times more powerful that connects to your tv um what does the console market look like with the playstation 6 probably still the nintendo switch 2 and the steam machine with the xbox essentially either bowing out entirely and then retiring the brand or them simply selling something as an xbox that is just a gaming pc um i think steam got there first like we're gonna sell you a gaming pc we're gonna get a different name steam machine and for anybody who wants to play pc games who does not want to deal with a pc who would previously have bought an xbox even though xbox doesn't run pc games or has xbox games but they're really similar how about we just cut out that all that all little nuances and say this just runs games from steam the world's most popular pc gaming store and you buy it and you plug it in and it works and i i really do think if depending on how much marketing valve puts behind this they could become the replacement for xbox as the third player in the console market with playstation nintendo and no longer xbox playstation nintendo and steam machine i think they could do that will they do that do they have an interest to do that or they just want to sell like these small form factor pcs to pc enthusiasts we'll see but like to your point about the vr market the vr market's small the gaming pc market is small the console market is less small so smaller than mobile games but less small and so if valve really wants to make money they would do this now the problem with valve is kind of like apple they're like okay we make all this stuff and it's great and we're really good at it but the real money's in the store just that's just fyi the reason we have so much money to make this hardware is we get a cut of all those things sold on steam and that makes us a lot of money and the margins on that service revenue they're way better than on these steam machines and the headsets we don't have to build any hardware we don't have to ship any boxes we don't have to do any warranty repairs we just run a bunch of servers and we collect the money and that's been going on for a long time so maybe they're not incentivized to uh become the world conquering third uh console maker with the steam machine but it has the potential to be that because i think they've already made a better non-nintendo non-sony console than the xbox because unlike the xbox this runs quote-unquote pc games so it it it opts out of that whole like getting exclusive games and doing all this stuff it's like the whole world of pc games is for you so it's like console versus pc or console versus console that's a pc i think it's amazing and and i love to i love the idea of like you know the steam deck has been great for for this so far of like creating a market for windows games to run on a platform that's not windows and you know as the steam platform SteamOS platform, as it gets more users, it gets more power in the market.

1:48:42It starts to become such that game makers will actually make sure their games work on it. They'll test on it. And then if there's enough demand there, if it's a big enough user base there, then not only will game compatibility be better overall, it'll be more ubiquitous and just better in quality, but also it'll make it impossible for Microsoft to ever shut it down. And as somebody who uses Windows only for gaming, like I don't use a Windows PC for any other reason. And dealing with anything about the PC that's not the game is a huge pain in the butt that just gets in the way. I love the idea of a console style experience, but having the high quality Windows games.

1:49:27That's great. and the bigger and more powerful and more popular that platform gets the harder it will be for it to go away or to get shut out and that's that's only good for gamers because it gives you more choices it gives it makes more people you know port their games to it with higher qualities i was saying like it's just better for everyone um and valve can take their 30 whatever it's fine you know i think it's less than that but yeah there is the danger of them becoming the apple like in the bad way the apple of the pc market i mean so it's important to distinguish between steam the store which is already massively dominant and has been and these products which remains to be seen how dominant well the steam deck is doing pretty well but there are other handheld gaming pcs from other companies right um that's the beauty of the pc market like people other people can make hardware like it's the whole idea right it's a competitive market you can't just unlike the switch where that's the only place we'll run nintendo games you can buy a handheld gaming pc from asus or whatever and it'll run the same games but steam the store has been so dominant for years that when these days when anybody talks about like how is this game doing how is this pc game doing like i just did a podcast where i was talking about arc raiders and marathon and stuff and they're like oh you know all these stories in the in the pc gaming press arc raiders is doing great and marathon is doing poorly and destiny is has few years you know checking these live service games to see how they're doing like basically the ratings like how are the games doing all they talk about the foundation of all that information are numbers from steam a because steam publishes those numbers and b because they use that as a proxy for the entire pc industry and it's not it's not the whole pc industry you can download games directly from a game maker and install them with their own janky ass installer that you hate like that still exists because again it's the pc world it's not like apple where there's no quote-unquote side loading like you can do anything you want but steam is has just used this like we just look at the steam charts because steam shows them and because yes steam's not all the market but it's enough of the market that it is the stand-in for the entire market.

1:51:27And every YouTube channel, they're showing charts from Steam to show how well a game is going. But that's not all the users, and it's like it's enough of them. It's enough that it's representative. So Steam is the entire PC gaming market as far as we're concerned when we're seeing how well a game is doing, which is fascinating. Alright, thanks to our sponsors this week, Factor, Grammarly, and NordLayer. And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of the many perks of membership is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. Every single episode has bonus content that only members can hear.

1:52:00This week's Overtime is about Affinity's graphics apps are now going free, and people got upset about that. We're going to talk about that in Overtime. Join now to listen to atp.fm slash join. Thank you so much, everybody, and we'll talk to you next week.

1:52:17Now 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 Cause 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, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A. It's accidental. Accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Accidental. Tech Podcast. So long. Marco, you noted in our internal show notes that you made a trip to Home Depot, which means I assume you actually made seven trips to Home Depot.

1:53:24That's the way. Amazon helped a little bit reduce that. So I thought you would enjoy this brief story of me learning to do a very basic thing that I should have known a long time ago but did not. It's a common theme in our after shows or pre-shows. So I'm trying to hang some shelves in my garage. I got the shelves like a year ago and the problem is there's not that many studs in certain spans that the shelves need to go. And I have learned a long time ago, do not use drywall anchors for anything ever. Especially not for shelves. Yeah, they will always fail you. And so I've been delaying installing these shelves.

1:54:12one set where like one of the two like I guess arms of the shelf was in a stud and the other one had to be anchors and of course like the anchor got all loose and the shelf bent and yeah it was like okay this nice that's not going to work so I had I had an idea I'm like all right I'm going to install a bunch of horizontally installed one by four boards across across the wall you were deriving from first principles knowledge and the knowledge that is relevant to the industry that you're not familiar with exactly so and but i'm like all right i've been i've been having this in my head for months i'm going to do this but i'm like well how am i gonna like at some point i'll like ask a friend who has a pickup truck or something if i can you know if they can give me a ride to home depot or something or like maybe they'll deliver and like i just hadn't worked out in my head like how am i going to get wood to my house a pickup truck's bed is probably smaller than the inside of your SUV just FYI because pickup truck goods are now vestigial and don't actually carry anything so but but I assume like there's no like you know my car is not as big as a full-size SUV anymore so I'm like that I don't know so anyway um eventually I'm like I'm like I'm just gonna I'm just gonna do it I have some time this week I'm just finally going to do it how am I gonna get the wood here do they deliver like first of all does my local hardware store even sell lumber no they don't so I have to go to Home Depot like you know two towns over and I'm like I'm gonna ask chat GPT so first I'm like all right chat GPT I'm like what first of all what are common lengths of 1x4 boards that are sold in hardware stores and also here's what I'm trying to do should I even be using 1x4 do I need to use 2x4s instead it.

1:55:53And of course, ChatGPT is amazing for questions. Like, it was so good. It was like, all right. Especially when you don't know whether it's right or not. Yeah, it's like, here is a full report of, okay, here's why you might want to use one by fours versus two by fours. And, you know, and I described what I was doing, why I was putting wood on the wall. And it said, okay, you probably want to use two by fours for that. They're like three times stronger in this way and all these other things. I'm like, all right, all right. And then I'm like, what kind? It's okay. Well, you're going to want this kind of wood, you know, not pressure treated because it's unless it's going to be sitting in water, you know, like all these, all these different things.

1:56:28And it told me that they come in eight foot segments. I'm like, oh, okay. I went out, I like put the seats out of my car with a tape measure. I measure like, what's the longest I can fit in my car? And it ends up, I can fit something about nine feet long in my car. I'm like, okay. So I went to Home Depot and I'm like, I almost felt like, like a kid in a cartoon walking into an adult space and trying to fit in and trying to play it cool and not be noticed. I've never bought wood in my life. I have no idea how to buy wood. All I know is that I've seen people do it at Home Depot and there seems to be like that entire like left side of the store against the wall seems to be all big stacks of wood.

1:57:13But ChatGPT helped me out. It's like you're going to want this kind of wood, this kind of board. It comes in eight foot segments. It should probably cost around this at a standard hardware store like a Home Depot. It even told me what kind of screws to buy because of course I definitely would not have thought to buy screws. There is no chance I would have come back from that trip with wood and screws. I definitely would have forgotten those. Nice. So it told me what kind of screws to buy. It even recommended that I get like a star drive head for this purpose. I'm like, okay, great. I already have one of those fart drills that like hammers it while it screws it in.

1:57:46Like I got it in like a multi-pack. That's what they're called, fart drills. Yep, yeah. I never actually had used it before today, but a year ago, I had to buy a drill and there was a two-pack that had the regular kind and the fart kind for like$10 more. I'm like, all right, yeah, sure. I'll use it sometime. Anyway, so all this is to say I, in the most nerdy way possible, did research to figure out how to buy wood. And then I went and just bought it. And it was fine. I got one of those U-boat things at Home Depot, put on 15 two-by-fours and a box of screws, walked over, checked out. It was fine.

1:58:24They all fit in my car just fine. Everything worked out great. And I spent today starting the installation process for some of them, and it was all fine. I have a saw that I've used like three times, the kind that you lift it up and down and it makes chops. I don't know if it's a chop saw or not, but I don't know. Miter saw? maybe the kind that you can turn to different angles. Yeah, that's the one. Okay, yeah. You used it to cut miters. Oh, well, I also used it to cut wood. That's a kind of a cut in wood. Oh, well, I made only the most boring straight cuts. But yeah, it's been fine. I used the fart drill for some especially difficult screws for some of the shelf brackets, and it's been great.

1:59:07You know, I got to say that we were talking before we started recording about you doing some wiring in the restaurant and you doing these shelves, And I feel like Marco of five or 10 years ago would have been like, oh, I'll call somebody and this will just be done. I will trade. Oh, but the Marco of today has called a lot of people. He's learned what that's like. Yeah, that's one thing Marco is very experienced with. And I think he now fully understands what are the downsides of having someone else do something for you? Yeah. Also, like this, this is a really small job for like if you're going to call someone like putting some two by fours on your garage wall and hang some shelves on them.

1:59:41That's like, like, is that even worth anybody's time? And whatever it would cost, I would be like, I probably should have just done this myself. I mean, you're not wrong. I'm just, I'm impressed. Plus, I feel very accomplished. I'm like, I bought wood and I cut some of it and I put it on the wall. Yeah. And it probably won't spill everything that's on the shelves onto the floor. Most likely. Unlike the one that was in the drywall anchors. Yes, that wouldn't, that was, that was unpleasant. but I still have more to do but like I've done the hardest ones that were above the garage door where there's not that many studs I probably used way too many screws but I don't care better than too few right exactly until you have to unscrew it someday and you're like who put all these screws in here