674: A Reliable, Boring Partner

32:44This is the guy's name. Tim Scheisser? Scheisser? What do you think about that? Scheisser. All right. Tim Scheisser from Monitors Unboxed. Here's a quote from his video. He's looking at this monitor and this is what he said in the video, talking about the 75 hertz refresh rate. That's a little unusual. 75 hertz is quite a low refresh rate for a modern display. I tend to think of 120 hertz as being the minimum these days. So I thought, why are they making this monitor? He's questioning the existence of this monitor because it's only 75 hertz. All of Apple's monitors are 60. It's sad. G-Sync compatible display HDR 400, which is only 400 nits.

33:19And the studio display is 600 nits, which isn't great, but whatever. HDMI 2.1 display port 1.4a. USB-C with 15 watts delivery. Two USB-A with 5 gigabits. One USB-B with 5 gigabits. Headphone out. $500. This is a studio display equivalent. with the only the only thing gives up over the studio display is 200 nits versus yeah it's 400 versus 600 nits 500 the studio display nanotexture upgrade is 300 the studio display adjustable sand upgrade is 400 just upgrading from the taking away a non-adjustable stand and replacing with an adjustable one is 400 this entire monitor with an adjustable stand is 500 say you wanted to have two 5k displays 500 each you could have this thing and it's 75 hertz which is still better than studio display so there and the other thing is i think it might have been msi or maybe another blend had had a monitor aimed at mac users but they obviously have no idea what mac users want because i believe it was 4k 27 inches like oh no no no no you missed the whole point it looked like mac white and kind of mac and it had a special mode where it's like exactly calibrated to how the apple studio display is so a little match like the laptop monitors or whatever anyway all i'm saying is if you want a cheaper 5k display the gaming world where apparently all the action is in external monitors has finally come around to 5k 27 inch displays and now you have your choice what do you want what kind of features and they're all so much cheaper than the studio display so it is a great time to be looking at 5k displays it's just about time if these fcc rumors that maybe we'll talk about next week are real for apple to finally update its monitors will it update them to still be worse than the monitors i described here probably to find out they will certainly be more expensive you can be guaranteed that yep and then one more quick one um is lg so it's not as gamery 27 inch 4k rgb stripe tandem oled panel um this is a lot of words rgb stripe means the subpixels are red green and blue stripes we'll put a link in the show notes to an image i finally found that shows the sub pixels not like a drawing of it but literally a photo of the sub pixels you see this in the document when you scroll down yeah so like normally oleds for like ever since they've been out have had what i believe used to be called the pen tile arrangement of pixels right the pen tile arrangement is on phones where neighboring pixels share like the green sub pixel but on big displays they haven't used that but if you look at the picture you can see like this shows uh a couple generations of cutie oleds and then lcd but look at the cute look at all the cutie yola it's like there's a red and a green and blue for every pixel but they're kind of in like a triangle or a diamond right which is fine it's perfect for a tv i think because you want it to be kind of dithered and fuzzy on a tv but especially if you're using windows with sub pixel anti-aliasing this totally screws it up but now they have rgb stripe uh displays of various kinds um including oleds so lg has a 27 inch 4k rgb stripe type tandem oled tandem oled is the thing that apple puts in its ipads where it's like got another light emitting layer um it which makes the screen brighter with lower power blah blah this is the asus rog swift oled pg 27 uc wm not to be confused with the pg 27 ucdm which is believe it or not an alphabet soup that i've memorized because it's a very popular monitor no white sub pixel so this is the first time this this this generation is the first time that there has been a non-QD OLED without a white subpixel.

36:52So that is exciting. I don't know if the iPad has a white subpixel or not. I've never looked into that. But anyway, this is a monitor. I'm looking at this as a gaming monitor. Why do I care about 27-inch 4K? Not for my Mac, but my gaming monitor. I currently use on my PlayStation a 4K 27-inch monitor. That's the size and resolution I want for PlayStation games. This is a tandem OLED. It's basically like, take my iPad that I love and make it 27 inch and make these sub pixels be uh vertical stripe um glossy finish 240 hertz a thousand nits max price max brightness which isn't that much but it's way higher than my current one which probably is like 300 nits adjustable stand of course display port 2.1a hdmi 2.1 usbc with 90 watts power delivery headphone out no price announced that's so that's good specs though yeah and the stand is disgusting and i hate it but yes to casey's point like you can do something about the stand anyway i'm excited all i'm saying is that the time for me getting a new gaming monitor it's it's getting closer it's looking closer i love these specs i'm sure the price will be great and this would be a huge upgrade over my current monitor yeah well i mean we'll see what happens and whether any of this ships but it's definitely looking promising i'm really pleased that the pc industry has finally embraced 5k monitors because you know basically up until now there was apples and then there've been other options but they're few and far between there's the lg uh ultra fine dell for like 10 seconds had one years and years ago i think they still do there's a couple we've talked about a whole bunch of them but like they're they're kind of aimed at like creative professional type things so they're priced a little bit higher and they have different they have different things that they're shooting for but the this year at ces not only i just listed some 5k and 4k things there are 6k gaming monitors and i think part of the reason is the dlss and other sort of frame generation stuff that we've talked about on past shows is really really sort of coming into its own and people gamers are really accepting it essentially like run the game at a you know it would normally run at an unacceptably low frame rate but don't worry the video card will add frames in between the real frames and so now you can potentially game at 5k maybe you can't game at 6k but like it's it is these monitors are suddenly somewhat relevant to gaming not super relevant everyone's like can you run any real games at a good frame rate at 5k and people like oh i need 500 frames per second nothing can run and you know even that liquid cooled uh video card with the screen on it can't run 5k at 500 frames per second but it's it's happening the gaming world is discovering retina resolution and monitors are being made and that benefits mac users as long as you can stand the cases We are sponsored by Gusto.

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41:17All right, so let's talk some directly Apple stuff. and within the last 24 or 48 hours as we record this, Apple has announced Creator Studio. And so what is this? Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Pixelmator Pro, Motion, Compressor, and Mainstage, plus new AI features and premium content in Keynote Pages and Numbers come together in a single subscription. Apple Creator Studio will be available on the App Store beginning Wednesday, January 28 for$12.99 a month or$130 per year with a one-month free trial, which includes access to Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, and Pixelmator Pro on Mac and iPad, motion compressor and main stage on Mac, and AI features and premium content for keynote pages, numbers, and later free form for iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

42:00If you're a college student or an educator, you can do it for$3 a month or$30 a year. Up to six family members can share all the apps and content included in the Apple Creator Studio with family sharing unless you got it through the student discount, which case, tough nuts. Yeah, that was my plan. I was like, this is great. I have two college student children. They'll just get it for$30 a year and they'll share it with their six family members, you know, and it'll be great. No, not allowed to do that. Womp womp. Alternatively, users can also choose to purchase the Mac versions of Final Cut Pro, Pixelmator Pro, Logic Pro, Motion Compressor, Mainstage individually as a one-time purchase in the Mac App Store.

42:36John has been kind enough to put notes in the show notes for me to read to you. Final Cut Pro,$300. Logic Pro,$200. Pixelmator Pro,$50. Motion,$50. Compressor,$50. Mainstage,$30. bucks uh main stage turns the mac into an instrument voice processor or guitar rig i'd never even heard of that app had you uh no nor had i heard of motion or compressor to be honest with you oh i've heard motion and compressor it's been around for a while i have compressor yeah main stage is just uh maybe it's a new app or maybe it's just a blind spot because i'm not a musician using my mac but i so two things before we continue with the story one i'm kind of surprised that they continued to have the one-time purchase things and two it kind of reminds me of those infomercials from our youth where it's like you know you're getting all this look at the value because when you add up the individual price of like okay well it's it's you know 130 a year but if i actually wanted to buy all those apps individually and i add 300 plus 200 plus 50 plus 50 plus 50 plus 30 it adds up so fast uh what a deal it is to get it for 130 a year um anyway we'll talk about pricing a little bit more but like that it does surprise me they did that but they did do it so if you hate subscriptions you can still for now buy these apps standalone yeah which and these i believe those were all the prices they already were yeah i don't think they changed it all right so with that in mind uh apple says you can use either version of the apps you can have both versions of these apps installed on your mac to make it easier to distinguish versions the apps in apple creator studio have unique icons yeah we can talk about the icons now so what they're saying is if you want if you get if you buy or have purchased in the past say the standalone version of final cut pro but then you get creator studio no problem you can have them both installed every one of these apps that's available as part of the creator studio and available standalone you can have both and they distinguish them because the old apps have the icons that they have now and the new apps all have a set of icons that kind of make a family kind of like how all the adobe apps are i figure what they're looking at like now it's like a they're just round racks with letters in them or something or the office microsoft office apps always have like a family resemblance where they pick a theme and they make word and excel and powerpoint or whatever look you know fit in the theme so these icons are tahoe style icons they have black backgrounds and they're little round racks on the mac and then they have kind of liquid glassy frosty glassy elements i don't even know if the i don't think they actually are the you know like the the icon composer frosty things i think they're like bitmaps or something because i don't think you can do those effects with icon composer but who knows maybe they're using a new version of icon composer that we don't have but anyway they're kind of modern microsoft office style abstract blobs on a black background lots of people are giving these icons crap and i have to say i think as a family they don't look terrible they're tahoe icons they're boring they all kind of look the same they're very abstract or whatever but i think this family is actually reasonably well executed if if every other icon on the mac didn't look like but and we just saw these be like oh what a refreshing change but as it stands they're kind of part of a larger movement that i hate but individually i don't hate this you know collectively i don't hate this family individually some of the icons are a significant downgrade from the icons that came before them and some of them are kind of nonsensical like the main stage one is supposed to look like a slider or something but it is a little bit off final cut pro is always really cool icon and now it's boring but you know the pages one i kind of like the little gradient pencil uh pixel meter i don't know what it's going for but it's kind of cool i don't like pixel meter pros at all it's like a round rect that's just an outline over a round rect that's the that's filled in i guess it's supposed to show layers with like three dots beneath it connected with that's the little like grab handles on like a bezier curve you know i guess i mean i don't like that one at all yeah some of them are better i like final cup pro i like logic pro do you like the mcdonald's icon yeah motion is basically two-thirds of a mcdonald's motion is the mcdonald's or follow the bouncing ball freeform was already like this so freeform is like yeah that looks like the freeform and numbers was already the middle finger like bar chart so yeah yeah remember when keynote was like a cool like wooden pillar stand and then you know like now it's just kind of you know there this is basically like imagine abstract shapes drawn with a strip of frosted glass like even the keynote one it's supposed to look like one continuous strip so it goes down and then to the left and then wraps to the back you see it at the bottom oh yeah yeah yeah i i don't mind them that much but lots of people are giving them hate but anyway i i think when i see them i say yeah this is this is an application suite this is a family and that's what they're going for you know the one thing that i will say that really made me laugh is that somebody put together and i don't think i'll be able to find it for the show notes but somebody put together for you you know where i'm going with this a tweet or whatever where they they showed the evolution of icon design but from current to original and the kind of the comment the caption whatever was something along the lines of looking at these icons in reverse is like watching an icon designer get incredibly good at their job or something like that which was very funny basically and it was and it was showing the um pages icon because pages is now this super abstract like pencil and like as you go backwards in time it gets more and more detailed and beautiful looking all the way down to one of everyone's favorite icon was like the pages icon that was like a really cool semi-photo real illustration of an inkwell with like a fountain pen next to it yeah that's just a very funny tweet these icons like some of them are not that different from what we had so you know like numbers free form like those are not that different even the pages were like not that different i i think the i mean some of them are bad like i think pixel is a terrible representation of anything logic is really a real downgrade from the cool platinum record logic pro i think looks like a robot breast from an elon musk movie and as a user of logic i'm not looking forward to when this is pushed on me but um i think the the entire idea of distilling the icon style down to an essence and having it be simpler more abstract shapes and And then layering on top of that, we want these to all look like a family.

48:50So we're going to have them all look somewhat similarly styled and they're all going to have these same simple flat backgrounds, basically single color, neon glass looking shape on top. What that does by that uniformity and having them look like a part of a family, that serves the corporation and their branding guidelines. But that doesn't really serve users because what that does when you have them all follow a very simple kind of template style, it makes them less distinguishable from one another at a quick glance. And the entire purpose, like when you're using an app icon, either in some kind of launcher capacity, like a phone home screen, or on the Mac in the case of looking at things in the dock, what you want, what you need is for those icons to be very different from each other so that you can quickly and easily visually locate the app you're looking for and distinguish it from other similar apps.

49:49Now, when companies do this thing where all of our things need to look similar, you know, all the big tech companies do this. Google does this with all their rainbow icons that all look exactly the same. You know, Adobe has all their weird, like, you know, letter icons for the creative suite apps, which this is obviously trying to rip off. Like, the big companies all do this. They make all their apps look the same, and they are serving their own goal of uniformity. And that, again, I don't think users are asking for that, first of all, or really benefit much from that. It's in the same way that, like, You know, Apple has always in the in the Alan Dye modern era, Apple has talked to and Johnny Ive, too, had talked about like unifying the platform so that you have a consistent user interface across the Mac and the iPhone and the iPad.

50:33And like that often does not serve those platforms or their users. It's just it's one of those things that to a designer or to a company's like, you know, marketing and branding teams, those sound really good. It sounds good to have a unified, consistent style. But in most cases, the results of that suck in some unnecessary ways. And I wish they would eventually maybe realize that. And there's a time and a place for consistent branding. But I think all of your icons and all of your UIs are not necessarily that place. Because what it actually does is make the icons work worse at one of their most important jobs.

51:14i'll see i'm with you on the google one because they basically use the rainbow kind of gradient and a couple of different shapes but i think apple has made some smart choices here and adobe kind of too because so first of all apple due to its own stupidity has forced every icon on the mac to be the same shape with the round rack which immediately cuts off one one for one form of identification which is different icon shapes okay to get around that kind of this creator studio suite of icons all use a black background which and they even put it on on a black background on the web page like the round rack is black and yeah it's got the stupid highlights on the edges whatever um and then they put it on a black web page and all that is to say let's try to make the background of our icons fade away instead of making the backgrounds white or a lighter color let's make them black i guess it only works if you have a darker desktop pattern whatever no wait is this but aren't is this liquid glass icons where like if you have a light mode home screen they will have light backgrounds?

52:11I don't know because I haven't, like it's not out yet. So I haven't run them. I don't actually know how opaque they are, but in the media literature they've provided. I think Steve Troutensmith dug up some screenshots from some videos where like somebody had a light mode dock and they were showing like they do have. So I think for now, let's assume that they actually might color shift with different themes. Yeah, but either way, like it's trying to be uniform and then there's bold colors on top of it. And the bold colors are trying to provide a shape. Logic Pro is round, Pages is pointy and to the right, Keynote is the little podium.

52:40final cut is you know a rectangle with an antenna coming out of it whatever um and then finally they didn't make unlike google they didn't make every single one the same color so pixel meter pro is the red icon final cut pro is the purple one keynote is blue they kind of run out of colors because freeform keynote and logic they're all kind of shades of blue but pages is clearly orange numbers is green motion is pink compressor is yellow i think they're trying to avoid what you just said which is like i don't know they made all the icons look the same now granted they're working within a system that demands they use the same art style for all of them which isn't that bad we used to use the same art style when they were all photorealistic too but anyway there's a little bit more sameness in an abstract design system than there is in a photoreal one because photoreal objects look different in real life so they can be distinguished in that way whereas no matter what you draw with this liquid glass frost it looks like liquid grass for frost but i think they did as good a job as they could do while still using the abstract liquid glass thing by distinguishing them in silhouette shape and major primary color i still like the old icon style better but i do give them some credit and adobe the same thing like their stupid icons are like letters like what a ps for photoshop and lr for lightroom and blah blah you can't you're not going to read the letters or whatever but they do make their stupid round rack icons all different colors now are the colors different enough when you have a certain number of apps in your icon suite and you run out of primary and secondary colors then you're into like tertiary colors and it's like but they're trying they're trying to distinguish the icons it's going to be a change for some people but i have a feeling if you're a video editor you'll be reaching for that purple rectangle pretty quickly and it won't be as terrible as you made it out to be so again this is this is a challenge of apple's own making and i think whoever would design these icons tried their best to surpass it and was only somewhat successful all right where did we leave off uh let's see uh The AI features.

54:33We're not going to list every single one here, but like you mentioned before, like that if you get the subscription, you get a bunch of intelligent features or whatever in keynote pages and numbers or whatever. And it's like, well, what are they adding? And I just pulled out two examples of like features that didn't exist before in these apps that are AI powered or whatever. So with transcript search on Mac and iPad, users can now easily find the perfect soundbite in hours of footage simply by typing phrases into the search bar to see exact or related results. That is legitimately super cool. I really do that.

55:06Yeah, that's like an AI transcription with full-text search. That's a good feature to add to your apps. Looking for a specific video clip also gets an intelligent assist with a visual search. Now users can quickly pinpoint exact moments across all footage by searching for an object or action. And I forget what the marketing image had for this, but it was something like they searched for going upstairs or something along those lines, and you see a bunch of clips of a person walking in front of steps. Yeah, it's like a pop-up menu that says, are you looking for a thing or something that happens?

55:31If you're looking for action, you say, you know, a person falls down, car races by, or whatever. You're looking for an object, you say tree or house or rug or whatever. Again, a way to find stuff using, you know, image recognition in your video clips. Advanced image creation and editing tools let users create high-quality images from text or transform existing images using generative models from OpenAI. Hey, OpenAI, still working with Apple. The Content Hub is a new space where users can find curated high quality photos, graphics, and illustrations. A subscription also unlocks new premium templates and themes in keynote pages and numbers.

56:06This is kind of an Adobe type move of like, well, we have some stock art for you. And we have some, you know, new templates and new themes and, you know, premium stuff that you get if you sign up for our subscription that is essentially content for our apps. The content hub is interesting. I wonder how much they'll expand that. Or is it just going to be the same set of 100 pictures three years from now? But we'll see. It's a very familiar strategy from the Adobe side of things. Pixelmator Pro for iPad is compatible with iPad models with the A16, A17 Pro or M1 chip or later running iPadOS 26 or later.

56:37Apple Creator Studio version of Pixelmator Pro requires Mac OS 26. The one-time purchase version of Pixelmator Pro requires Mac OS 12 or later. That's a big difference there. Like, so Pixelmator Pro, again, there's the subscription one and there's the one-time purchase one. And the OS difference is Mac OS 12 versus Mac OS 26. And I know that that's not, you know, they skipped numbers there, but Mac OS 12 is pretty darn old. So like that's, that's essentially like the pixel meter that Apple bought. It works all the way back to Mac OS 12. The creator studio subscription one, nope, 26, 26 or nothing.

57:07So that's another thing, potentially keeping people on the standalone versions is if you don't want to upgrade to 26, um, or if you do really want the new version of this app, you have to upgrade 26. And then keynote pages, numbers in free form will remain free for all users to create, edit and collaborate with others, including Apple creator studio subscribers. These apps will continue receiving updates with the latest versions adopting the beautiful new visual design language with liquid glass on all platforms and supporting the new windowing and menu bar improvements in iPadOS 26. However, Pixelmator Classic for iOS, released in 2014 as a companion app to the now discontinued Pixelmator Classic for Mac, provides basic image editing features such as cropping, color adjustments, and effects.

57:45It remains a functional app but is no longer being updated. Another one bites the dust. and then chris welch pointed out photomator is not included in creator studio but will remain available for eight bucks a month or 30 bucks a year it's anyone's guess how much development attention the app will receive as a standalone item outside the new bundle if you're unfamiliar pixelmator pro is the company's answer to photoshop and photomator was more light roomish so that one's still around and it's still a subscription so i feel like it'll be getting some kind of uh work on it because otherwise they would have like made it free or said it was going to be discontinued because now's the time discontinuing everything but anyway looking at this whole suite of apps.

58:20my first impression upon looking at this and seeing availability pricing and what's included is this is a really really good deal subsidized by out a whole rest of apple's business but still it's a really good deal especially if you just need to use like final cut for one project that takes you like a month that previously you didn't have an option like this you get to buy final cut or you know whatever like and buying it for 300 bucks like oh do i really want to buy it or should i just try to use imovie or do i use another app this is now like a no-brainer like 13 for a one month long Final Cut Pro product.

58:55And by the way, you don't just get Final Cut Pro for$13. You get Logic Pro, Pixelmator Pro, Keynote, Pages, Numbers, Freeform, Motion, Compressor, and Mainstage, all for that$13. And it's all through Apple's subscription system. And it's very flexible. $130 a year is also really reasonable. They're super duper undercutting Adobe. Again, because Apple doesn't just sell a suite of applications. Now, Apple could have made all these free because, again, they have a large other business that makes tons and tons of money. But I think they did a pretty good job of finding the right way to position this in the market because if it was free it would be like great apple is destroying all possible third-party applications who wants to compete with a free version of final cut a free version of logic free version of pixel mater pro like who wants to compete with that free is no good plus free also makes us think they're never going to update it like photos for the mac for example or music for the mac or any other apps that are free on the mac apparently apple has lost interest in updating its free applications unless it is to make them work like contacts on tahoe make them worse rather like contacts in tahoe um so i think what they've done is we're going to charge you money and we're going to charge enough money that third-party apps in theory could potentially still exist it was gonna be hard for them it's gonna be hard for them to exist but they could maybe because again apple is still selling standalone one so if you want to sell a 50 image editing application you probably still could because you're competing with an app that's$13 a month or$130 a year.

1:00:24Now, granted, it's not just that app. Again, you get a whole suite. But if someone just wants an image editor, maybe your$50 image editor looks attractive compared to$13 a month or$130 a year. Charging some amount of money also makes me think maybe they'll possibly be able to fund teams to provide updates to these applications and make them better. On the other hand, $13 a month or$130 a year is not enough money to actually fully fund the teams that work on these applications. It's not even enough to fund the team that works on Pixelmator, let alone Final Cut and all those other apps. So they're not pricing it to cover their costs.

1:00:58But as a customer, I suddenly have access to better apps for less money than I did before. And as someone who cares about the Mac ecosystem, Apple is not 100 % decimating the third-party market for applications. yeah i mean this doesn't do that much for me uh in part because the one thing in this bundle or the two things i guess in this bundle that i think i'd be interested in are pixelmator pro for doing like touch up on photos and stuff which actually you can do in the photos app now but pixelmator pro has always been really good at that uh in final cut pro uh because occasionally i will do some manipulation to videos and i'm sure i could use a different app for it but thanks to my brief stint as a very unsuccessful YouTuber, I've gotten fairly familiar with Final Cut Pro.

1:01:44We've all been there. Yeah, right. It's a rite of passage, I tell you. So anyways, I really dig that the point that you made earlier, John, about you could do this, like dip in for a month and then cancel. Because I remember when I wanted to do this YouTube thing, just being really, really concerned that spending the 300 bucks, whatever it was for Final Cut Pro, is this worth it? Is this a good way to spend my money is this going to be something that i use for more than 10 minutes and as it turns out i'm glad i did buy it because even today like i was saying i'll occasionally do some video manipulations and use final cut pro but on that topic by the way steven robles was saying i think that uh when he wanted to get final cut to be a youtuber and wasn't sure it was worth or whatever it was 1300 bucks and he couldn't afford it so he got final cut express remember that remember final cut express i do not actually it was like the cheaper version of final cut pro i would say a really good investment for steven but just yeah for real worked out well that's a thing that a lot of people feel and and i do think that it's kind of weird speaking of final cut it is kind of weird that like final cut due to various reasons like the big final cut pro 10 kerfuffle about them dropping features and doing stuff and other industry forces that have essentially made a final cut less popular in the world of professional audio production for television and movies video video production yeah right video production but uh for whatever reason again maybe because of the influence of the iphone and apple's brand my impression is that final cut pro is much more popular with youtubers than it is with people who make television and movies i have no earthly idea i can't i mean i i don't that may not be true may just be it may just be the youtubers that i watch but because they're like mac and apple people or whatever but i feel like if you want it like it's a shame that apple seems to have lost so much ground in in the you know old school tv movie video editing market to avid and premiere and stuff like that but if you're looking for a market that is like the future of video editing you know youtube is not bad i guess maybe like tiktoks are even better and there's dedicated apps for them that apple does not make you know setting aside clips or whatever that i think was canceled i forget i believe that's right like i i want to say is i think i think final cut pro is not necessarily doomed no certainly ringing endorsement but yeah I mean this is interesting I'm glad that you can still buy stuff outright at least for now because again I don't think I would ever buy Logic Pro unless suddenly Marco decided he didn't want to edit the show in which case I guess I would but that's only going to happen when the show ends or Marco dies so you know and Logic Pro is not a as you can see from every new version of Logic Pro they put out it's not a podcast edit it's for music it's so for music they're like look at all these great features we have for beat matching and chord identification it's like not doesn't help at all probably hurts because everything in that ui is like you're making a song it's really not made for this and it never lets us forget it yeah and and as each new version comes out it just keeps going farther from being made for podcasts yeah but all in all i mean i think this is a pretty good idea i like that they're charging money for it.

1:04:52I like that they're doing a subscription. I like that they updated their apps. That's great. They don't do that with most of their apps. Right. True. So all in all, I think this is good. I don't know. Marco, I feel like you've been a little quieter. Any thoughts on this? I think it's, I mean, it mostly doesn't affect me because it's, I mean, it's a bunch of apps that I mostly don't use. But I think anything that makes these apps more accessible to people with small budgets is better. And this does that. Like, you know, before you know that you you had situations situations like you know oh you'd have to buy final cut express you have to buy like the small version or use some free tools or use some tools that are not like what the pros are using or you know back in our day just pirate all the big tools um but i think it's harder now and so i don't but but you know at the end of the day like these tools if you're going to buy these in the previous arrangements they were way more money at least you know up front and if you were gonna if you were you know just thinking like oh let me try to learn say final cut or logic or whatever there really wasn't a good path for you to go from i think i want to try learning this to go between that and i'm going to spend hundreds of dollars on this now there's a path for that that's great i think that is wonderful um there are a lot of details about this that i think don't make a lot of sense i don't think keynote pages and numbers and free form should be included like those aren't those are what i think used to be free iWork apps and now it's like are they are they i mean they're still free like that's one of the things that people are complaining about it and link to it but jason just posted a thing to six colors saying all right so keynote pages numbers are still free but there are they're freemium because they're you can if you pay for like the subscription version of them it's the same app but also now you get certain special ai features or access to like the content whatever that content hub thing stuff like that and so it's kind of people are worried it's a slippery slope that like oh you just have the free version of keynote but you don't have the cool thing where you can you know find a slide by describing it or something like that and i agree that that's not great but i also i also kind of think that like you know apple providing like a mail client a notes app all right like there's some amount of platform like basics that apple has to provide and they should provide them in a high quality way about while also leaving room for third parties but when they get into office suites like what we used to be called iWork where it's like this is kind of like microsoft office type stuff should apple provide all those for free too does it want to foreclose the entire market for office style applications and at one point it would have said yes because apple will do them better but now we've learned that a apple won't do them better and b apple will never freaking update them and see their competition is free it's google apps like that's the like yeah i mean that was someone pointed out in the chat room too that uh davinci resolve is the free competition for uh yeah final cut pro and avid and adobe from here and all that stuff so it's a changing landscape and i think it is a little bit confused that those apps are in this bundle but the but they're also still outside it for free so it seems apple is trying to like hedge all of its bets here yeah but so i think you know there's a lot of ways this can go in the future um that i think could be relatively negative or or mediocre um once you know no one's happy to see apple push more into services revenue like that's that's not healthy for them.

1:08:07I don't know if I would call this services or no. This is just a subscription model for an app, which is different than services. It is. But, you know, there is, you can ask like, well, why are they doing this? And, you know, there's some good reasons and there's some cynical reasons. We'll see how it goes over time. So far, Apple's track record for keeping these apps updated and keeping them competitive has been kind of spotty. Some of them do well. Some of them are laughing stocks. Some of them are ignored. Some of them get frequent updates. They're kind of all over the place. If this is something that they're kind of trying to plant a flag on the ground and say, like, we're going to start doing this better or being more consistent about it or these apps are going to be updated more frequently and they're going to compete better with their competition, that's a good thing.

1:08:56I don't think we have that here. I think this is a rebranding with a new subscription model and that's fine. you know there's again pluses and minuses to that and most importantly I'm happy that I don't need to subscribe to the apps in this bundle that I've already bought that I can continue using them as a customer and that being said also once Apple switched to the Mac App Store and put all these apps in it they have I think never charged an upgrade fee so I bought logic for i think two hundred dollars how many like 10 years ago and i've never paid for another copy of logic i bought final cut like pro yeah final cut i think was three hundred dollars i bought that years ago never paid for an upgrade i mean fortunately i never use it because i also failed at youtube pretty hard um but like they've never charged an upgrade fee in in large part because the Mac App Store can't.

1:09:57I do kind of, on one hand, I'm like, wow, I've gotten some good value out of this. And I'm glad to have bought these tools a thousand years ago. On the other hand, as both somebody who sells software through a subscription and also somebody who recognizes business realities here, I think the days of my perpetual one-time purchase license being, even working and getting the new version, let alone being available to new purchasers, those days might be numbered. But we'll see. As it is right now, today, this looks purely additive in terms of we get more options, there's some new updates, and the icons all got weird and a little bit worse.

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1:12:47All right. Apple and Google are sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G. They have decided that Google Gemini will be the backing technology behind Siri in the future. So let me read Google's entire press release. Buckle up. Apple and Google have entered into a multi-year collaboration under which the next generation of Apple Foundation models will be based on Google Gemini models and cloud technology. These models will help power future Apple intelligence features, including a more personalized Siri coming this year. After careful evaluation, Apple determined that Google's AI technology provides the most capable foundation for Apple Foundation models and is excited about the innovative new experiences it will unlock for Apple users.

1:13:27Apple intelligence will continue to run on Apple devices and private cloud compute while maintaining Apple's industry-leading privacy standards. That is it. That is the entire thing that Google submitted. And it is supposedly a joint statement, but I believe it is only on Google's website. Yeah, and they gave it to Jim Cramer. yeah so a couple interesting things here so first bit that i highlighted in the notes uh apple foundation models were based on google's gemini models and cloud technology i don't know what the and cloud technology means their foundation models will be based on gemini yeah that's the rumor you know this is the headline and then this is apple and google make it official the rumor has been that apple is you know the gemini is providing models to apple but apple likes them that they're the front runner official announcement they got it they won gemini won the the bake-off they are going to be the helper because apple can't do its own models although that being said i don't believe the rumors were indicating that it would also include on device models i think that's new no that's not new they had that as well like there was part of it was uh getting gemini down to that size there was a rumor about like making smaller ones that could fit on device um there was two two bits of that one isn't google already doing that for android phones yeah like i didn't it's not unreasonable like the apple google makes a whole bunch of gemini models of various shapes and sizes so it wasn't unreasonable that in fact the most of these stories are talking about the extra work that a google had to do to get their stuff to run on private cloud compute not to get it to run on the phone but you know i'm sure they're tweaking it for both of them but anyway it's the they're going to be the the you know they're the what is it the apple foundation models will be based on google gemini models and cloud technology what is the cloud technology yeah i know there's a couple ways this could happen i mean they they emphasize you know apple stuff it's going to run either on your device or on private cloud compute which is a special secure privacy preserving way you know we've talked about in the past right that's where it's going to run but private cloud compute is a it's a combination of apple hardware and supposedly their m5 based server chips are coming sometime soon but they got the m2 ultras that they've been using anyway it's it's a special hardware and software thing and that live in a data center somewhere i assume apple has its own data centers where it houses this stuff i guess they could host this hardware in a google data center and then they'd be using cloud like what is the cloud technology i might be missing it this is something man and reese brought up in a slack that ran and i was like i don't know i don't know what the answer maybe it's just a written press release and i don't know what the cloud technology is but yeah anyway there's that and then the second bit after careful evaluation apple determined that google's ai technology provides the most capable foundation well you know in these competitions capability is not the only factor in who wins the competition uh the rumored price for this from german was that it's a billion dollars a year which is not which is peanuts for apple and is a good deal that's a steal like that for app for what apple is getting and and for how badly apple needed it that's a steal right and and and supposedly the rumor is that anthropic wanted more so price apparently was a factor another thing that might be a factor a rumor that was out today also late breaking i don't have a link sorry but it was that some source familiar with blah blah blah and open ai says open ai essentially opted out and said yeah we're not interested in being apple's model provider in this way so was google the most capable or was it just the best choice because the price was right the technology was good enough maybe open ai had better tech maybe even anthropic had better tech But OpenAI didn't want to do it, and Anthropic wanted too much money, and Google, as we've talked about in the past, is a reliable, boring partner that Apple has worked with before.

1:17:07So they win, but the press release doesn't say that. The press release says the most capable foundation. All right, it's a press release. It's a joint statement, sorry. So, you know, that's fine. All right, so the information had a post about this, and there's some interesting tidbits in there. I'm going to read some very short passages. is in November, Bloomberg reported that Apple would pay about$1 billion annually to Google for the AI to power Siri. Again, incredible deal. These servers, according to a person who has been involved in the project, the Gemini-based AI will run directly on Apple devices or its private cloud system, which is powered by Apple's own server chips rather than running on Google servers.

1:17:46That's what we were talking about earlier. This one just really made me raise an eyebrow. Another common set of questions that Siri has historically struggled with involved emotional support, such as when a customer tells a voice assistant it's feeling lonely or disheartened. In the Gemini-based version, Siri will give more thorough conversational responses the way ChatGPT and Gemini do, this person said. Danger, danger, warning. As terrible as Siri is at trying to do its crappy humor at the worst possible time, we all know the failure mode of LLM-based agents when discussing things like this.

1:18:24i you know this there's lots of stories about how apple will be able to tweak this and guard rails this and safety that or whatever but this is the tricky bit we always talked about like how is apple before we back when we had some faith that apple would actually integrate lms into siri we're like how are they going to do it in an apple way that doesn't cause harm and it turns out they're just not going to do it at all for years so we didn't have to worry about it but everyone else who has done it it's there's you hear all the stories about like oh you know i was just talking to my phone and all of a sudden it's telling me to pound nails into my forehead or whatever so it's we'll see how this goes but that that is it's true that siri is bad at that it's true that an llm based a gemini based one could be better at it but it also can be much much worse yeah one set of answers apple hopes to improve with gemini is the ones related to so-called world knowledge or factual questions such as describing the population of a country or scientific information the new system will give a conversational answer and cite where the answers came from similar to the way google's gemini chatbot or open ai's chat gpt answer certain questions devils in the details in this one so like one of the things that i had liked about the pre-llm days of voice assistants is that you asked any of them something like the population of a country or the age of an actor or something you knew that the only way they could give you that answer is they probably had some kind of database that they're looking the stuff up because they weren't smart enough to essentially just look at a free text a body of free text and derive the answer um and in the case of siri they often didn't have a database and would be like i don't know here's what i found on the web right that's the joke with the siri thing but things like you know the amazon assistant and stuff they would have little databases of things that people ask a lot and they would just like they would find out what people are asking about a lot and they would say we just need a list of all that stuff we need a calendar tool they can tell people what day easter is on and well no let's what day one of those holidays it doesn't always fall on a sunday is on you know they would make essentially little tools for these dumber systems like look stuff up and that was limiting and annoying but it also meant that when they told you an answer what's the population of this country you're like that's a number they looked up and it may not be exact and it may be a little out of date but it's not going to be horrendously wrong with llms as we know you ask them a facts-based question they'll give you an answer that looks plausible you have no freaking idea where it came from so you're like i mean that could be right but like the whole reason i asked you is i have no idea if you have some idea and say what's the what's the population of belgium and they said 17 billion you're like that's probably wrong right but if they say something plausible you're like well is that the population of belgium so now we get okay cite your sources it's an lm powered thing it's gonna get the answer and it's gonna say here's where i got it from i got it from wikipedia i got it from this website i got it according to this new york times article by this person or whatever you can do that well by giving these sort of thinking models the tools to essentially do what the old dumb models did which is hey look this up in a database but you can also do it poorly which is oh just look at this document on the web and extract the information from it and llms are notoriously bad at that task of like summarize this thing extract the relevant piece of information from this larger text people think they're really good at it because their summaries look plausible that every time they've tested this they're like oh summarize the scientific paper and it's like no your summary is the wrong conclusion like it's the opposite of what this paper says or tell me the top population of this country based on this wikipedia page the number's right there we can see it but they pull out a different number because they get confused and it's a plausible number and it's near where it's supposed to be and you can see how it got confused because maybe it's talking about population migrations and deltas or whatever but it gives you a number and it's like and i got it from this wikipedia page when you're talking to an agent and it says the population of belgium is seven million should you trust it how many times do you have to verify that information by looking it says i got this from wikipedia how many times do you have to look wikipedia yourself from the belgium wikipedia page look at it before you trust it without knowing how it's getting that number it's a little bit tricky now maybe it doesn't matter for things like trivia and age actors and you know you should just build an lm to call sheet uh casey um you know or build it uh an app intent or whatever like maybe it doesn't matter too much for that stuff but like we are in this still this in this uncomfortable time where systems like this you know how many cups in a quart or whatever all i know we do a lot of unit conversion over here in our country because things aren't nice and even so we have no idea how many teaspoons are in a pint or whatever um and i asked my google voice assistant that and i was more confident before i was llm powered that it was giving me the right answer because i knew it had to be a dumb calculator and now i worry that it is just like same way when you ask these like voice assistants to do any kind of math or sum things up or even if you just say here's a tab delimited text document with numbers in them please sum them up and it doesn't get the correct sum it really shakes your faith in computers you're like this is the one thing computers are supposed to be good at i really want to be certain and so i'm glad that they're trying to go in that direction but i'm still cautious about because they don't tell you the implementation i'm still cautious about it because and the reason i am is i use these assistants all the time and they do they increasingly do the little citation link like the little gray link icon i think jeff tbd and jem and i both do this and i follow that icon and And I look at that webpage and so many times I say that sentence is not from this webpage.

1:23:34Like you made that up. Nothing in this webpage says anything like that. And then really shakes your faith in their citation. So we'll see how this goes. Indeed. All right. And then finally old versus new Siri. While certain common Siri tasks such as setting a timer reminder or sending a specific test text message to a phone contact will continue to be powered by technology stored on Apple devices, the new version of Siri would also be able to handle instances in which the customer's question isn't clearly understood. And I think they gave an example in the article, if I'm not mistaken, of like, send my mom a text telling her I'll be home in 10 minutes.

1:24:12But you don't have any clearly defined mom in your contact card or whatever the case may be. It will try to figure out via context clues who mom is and take a stab at sending her the right message. And I hope it gets it right. Are you going to send some awkward messages so like the good version of this is making me think this is exactly what we were asking for put an lm in front of siri make siri figure out what you want and then make the lm formulate the siri approved stupid syntax that it can understand to do the task the bad version of this from the same paragraph is actually what will happen is the bad old siri will get a first crack at all your commands and be stupid and dumb but in the case where the bad old Siri 100 % throws up his hands and says it has no idea, we will throw the bad old Siri aside and pass it off to the LM and cross our fingers.

1:24:59That's not the system I want. But, you know, this is, again, we'll have to try the product. The ingredients for an improved meal are there. I think these ingredients can make something better than the current Siri. But if you put them in the wrong order and the wrong proportions or ask them to do the wrong things, it might actually be worse because i don't i don't want essentially anything to go to directly from me to the old siri i always want an llm between me and like the tools that it's using on the background because i have faith that the llm will parse what i'm saying and capture my intent and then i want a bunch of tools that i can rely on that are used to do the stuff so a tool that reliably can find the mom contact i don't need the llm to do that mine is labeled right and a tool that can send the message or a tool that can do unit conversion lookups or a tool that can calculate a tool that can sum numbers.

1:25:51That's what I want to happen, but they're not going to tell me how it's implemented. So the only thing I'll have to go by is I will pick up my phone and talk to it and see the results. All right. Finally for tonight, Chase has been officially announced as the new issuer for Apple Card, or at least will be in two years or something. Anyway, reading from Apple News resume today, which was January 7th, Apple and Chase announced that Chase will become the new issuer of Apple Card with an expected transition in approximately 24 months. During this transition, Apple Card users can continue to use their card as they normally do.

1:26:23More information, including FAQs, is available at a link we'll put in the show notes. Additional details will be shared with users as the transaction date approaches. MasterCard will remain the payment network for Apple Card. Eric Silva from MacRumors writes, reports began circulating over two years ago that Goldman Sachs was looking to end its partnership with Apple as a part of an effort to scale back on consumer banking products amid steep losses. According to the Wall Street Journal, Goldman Sachs is unloading its roughly$20 billion of outstanding Apple Card balances at a discount of more than$1 billion, a rare move for co-branded account deals like this.

1:26:56But higher than average delinquency rates and high exposure to subprime borrowers made it difficult for Goldman Sachs to find a buyer. Yeah, so this has been I pulled up stuff from the show notes from like years ago that we had down there of like, oh, Apple Card, like the very first story we have is like apple card it's moving from golden sacks it's totally moving it's yeah it's definitely moving and then like months later yep apple card is moving it was just eventually like apple card is probably moving right it's just years and years of this i deleted all that it's like guess what it's moved chase has got it um and we'll put a link in the show to the wall street journal story that gives more of this saga but apple card is essentially like it's not a hot potato it's a rotten apple nobody wants it it's a money loser golden sacks is losing money on credit on a credit card which is not what you want to happen when you're running a credit card you want it to make money hey great become a partner they've been trying to get rid of it forever and apple has all the demands about who's going to have it or whatever but like nobody wants it like because anyone who might be interested apple comes and says but you got to do this you got to do that you got to do that and like oh no i'm not interested so that's why it's taking so long for somebody to take this goldman sachs is so desperate to get rid of it they're just going to take a loss of a billion dollars to say here you take it it's not our problem anymore and it's still going to take two years to do it uh the wall street journal story has more of this saga but like the few things we've heard about on the outside is that one of the things that immediately tripped up goldman is that apple decided that everybody's bill should be due on the first of the month which is a totally apple style thing to do like oh it's consistent it's you never know when you never wonder when your bill date is it's the first of the month and then any credit card issuer could have told them don't do that because that means all your customer support will be concentrated around the first of the month instead of being spread evenly over the entire month and sure enough it destroyed goldman's ability to do customer support and it's been an ongoing problem the other thing is apparently apple or whoever decides what card whether you're not you get an apple card has been too permissive so tons of people have it who have like really bad credit and don't pay their bills so that's another reason it's a money loser so i mean i'm i have an apple card i basically only They use it to buy Apple things to try to get cash back or whatever.

1:29:03But unlike Apple Pay, this has been out for a while and has not been a ringing success. And Apple is lucky they found somebody who's willing to take it off Goldman's hands. Yep, very much so. So from the Wall Street Journal article, still Murray Abrams, one of Capital One's most senior executives, met with Goldman around early June. And this is relevant for a couple of reasons. First of all, Capital One didn't win the bid. and secondly, Capital One is effectively based here in Richmond. Privately, Capital One executives viewed Apple's outreach as an attempt by the tech giant to try to squeeze more favorable terms out of J.P.

1:29:39Morgan. Classic tactic, but I think it's quite funny. More than a year ago, Johnson told employees that those who stay until last day of the Apple program will be eligible for a lump sum payment equal to their 2023 compensation. This is for the Goldman Sachs employees. They're getting an entire year's pay, if I understand this right, to stay until the ship has finally sunk that is something else yeah because i mean obviously all those people like oh fine well we're losing the card so i'm gonna lose my job i better start looking for new and like no stay it's gonna be two year transition when you just stay we'll pay you lots of money uh yeah that like apple was talking to everybody and trying to make it seem like everybody's in the game and you know play everybody off against each other while also still being super demanding it just seems like like not a not an exciting winner like i'm i don't even know if apple is excited about apple card anymore but uh nobody wants to do to run the card to do the stuff that apple doesn't want to do there's also rumors they're going to move from the master card to the visa payment network but that also didn't happen there's also some uncertainty about these savings accounts uh like they have apple has like a savings account for i figure what it's like it was originally like high interest savings account that you can put your apple you know cash that you get back on things you can put it into our high interest savings account and over the course of like year or so that high interest savings account was out the interest rate of the high interest has gone down and down they just kept announcing oh it's gone down another half percent i mean it's not just apple doing that like it's the whole financial world but like it just it just aside from having a really cool physical card that no one should ever use and aside from giving you i think six percent back on apple purchases is six anyway um and having a cool icon in the wallet app it just doesn't seem like a very successful or exciting product, but it is still a product in their lineup and soon it will be a product in Chase's lineup.

1:31:24As an aside, if you permit me to fuss and whine for a moment, I was trying to put together a link to the Wall Street Journal article from Apple News, because if you're an Apple One subscriber, you get some of the Wall Street Journal for free, I think. I think all of it. Maybe all of it. I don't know. One way or another. But I went and I tried to copy a bit of the text to put here in the show notes for us to talk about. And I did this on my Mac in the Apple News app, right? It freaking hijacked my, I don't know, whatever, I clipboard hijacked, whatever the term is, where I copied a little bit from the text, but what ended up on my clipboard was the text.

1:32:03And then, well, first of all, it was the text with quotes, although they were curly quotes, so I guess they got that for going for them. And then after that excerpt from behind the unraveling of yada, yada, yada by so-and-so, the Wall Street Journal link, this material may be protected by copyright. All of that landed in my f***ing clipboard. I hate that so much. And the reason I use Apple products is so I don't have to deal with this f***ing bullshit. And yet here I am dealing with it. I'm so mad and it's so unbecoming of Apple news. Now, I probably just need to wake up and embrace the fact that Apple is not the company that I think it is and want it to be.

1:32:39But why are we doing this? I hate it. Are you sure it's an Apple News thing? Because tons of websites do that. I imagine it's a Wall Street Journal thing. Well, that's the thing, is that I think it's actually that Apple News is just rendering some web kit, something or other. Yeah, because tons of websites do this. Right. You can see how sometimes it's useful. Like, oh, I get the link, because I'm probably going to want the link anyway. I get the text and the citation all at the same time. But it's not what you expect. When you highlight some text and copy and paste it, you expect what you paste to be what you copied and not have extra stuff stuck on the end of it.

1:33:10But yeah. annoying expensive newsy websites tend to do this i'm i'm currently going to blame this on the wall street journal and not on apple news but apple news itself is a not a nice app the only reason i ever use apple news by the way is to read the wall street journal quote unquote for free because i'm an apple news plus subscriber because it's part of my bundle so i go to the wall street journal article on my apple web browser safari on the phone or whatever and then i share to apple news if you don't have apple news in your list of like frequently used sharing cards do it because If you share to Apple News when you're on a Wall Street Journal article on their website, it will take you to your ability to see it inside the Apple News app.

1:33:49And the Apple News app is worse than your web browser. And this may be one of the ways that it's worse, but I bet the website does the same thing. And I think it is ultimately the Wall Street Journal's fault. But I hate that Apple didn't put the kibosh on this. It's just, it's gross. They're not telling people how to modify their websites. I think they learned the lesson of don't try to ask people who are in Apple News to specially format stuff or make a special Apple News version. They're like, look, we'll just show your website. We'll just let people see your website. Yeah. All right. Thank you to our sponsors this episode, 1Password, Guru, and Gusto.

1:34:21And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at ATVT.fm slash join. One of the many perks of ATP membership is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. Members get a weekly topic every week that is just for them, plus all the other stuff, you know, the ad-free feed, the bootleg, the membership discounts on merchandise, the exclusive content like member specials, but also every single week, extra topic called overtime. This week on Overtime, we're going to be talking about the continuing disaster over at X and Grok and all that stuff. So stay tuned for that fun bit. If you're a member, if you want to hear it, join ATW.FM slash join.

1:35:03Thanks, everybody, and we'll talk to you next week. Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin. Because it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental. John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him. Because it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental. And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM. And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S. So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.

1:36:08The NBA immersive experience. So this was announced a while ago, and then Apple had their first instance of it, I think this past weekend. And what this is, is you put your Vision Pro on your face. And if you are a Los Angeles Lakers fan and you pay for the Spectrum app or whatever, or if you pay for the NBA app, then you can watch, depending on if you're in the home region, you can either watch this live or you can watch it the next day if you're not from the Los Angeles area. I love how we have all this modern technology in a VR headset, and yet we still can't escape the Byzantine rules of rights ownership of how and where and when I can watch a sports.

1:36:55So what this is, is it's the entire basketball game filmed specifically for the Vision Pro. It has a announcing team that's specifically for the Vision Pro. It had a on-the-court reporter specifically for the Vision Pro. This is a very, very bespoke experience. And I have a lot of thoughts about how this is done and what they're doing and how they're doing it. But before I get into the nitty gritty, I'd like to kind of give my overall thoughts. And I'd like to kind of indirectly respond to our good friend Ben Thompson over at Stratechery and Dithering, who is very fired up about this. and Ben's thesis, I think, in the Stratechery article was actually a freebie for this week or last week, whenever it was.

1:37:44If Ben would permit me a summary of his thesis, I think his thesis is never move the camera is basically what it boils down to. Which I've also said on the show, I want that to be an option. For all of the Vision Pro immersive stuff, I am frequently very disoriented by the changing cameras and everything and what I always ask for, like man wouldn't it be great if there was an immersive camera like in a really good seat equivalent in like a concert or a stage production you know and in the case of sports it's you know it's a little more complicated but like a similar i think value of there of like just make me feel like i am there and the way i think i would want to do that is just give me a fixed camera like in or maybe above a really good seat.

1:38:32But that being said, Apple has not yet delivered that. So we don't actually know if that's what we want, but it sure would be nice to try it. Well, but they sort of have. So here's the thing. So the way the broadcast was, was they had a big wide shot to start. Then they had some on the court reporting. And then when the game started, they basically had a camera at the half court line. So on the middle of the court, long ways. And they just sat there. That's what you did. You had, and you had almost the entire court in your field of view, the very extreme edge, like the three-point area right against the out-of-bounds line.

1:39:14You couldn't quite see because field of view wasn't quite enough. And that's on either end. But by and large, you could see the entire court. And up until, and I actually wrote this down, the first shot that I saw that wasn't the half-court live shot was halfway through the first quarter with eight minutes and 14 seconds game time remaining. And I loved this view that they had, where you're basically sitting courtside, dead center, and you can twist your head left and right in order to watch the action. And the announcers will occasionally say, look to your right to see this, look to your left to see that.

1:39:52I don't want to get into the nitty-gritty right now, but another thing that was very cool was I didn't see a score bug. You know, the thing which shows what the scores are and how much time is left and blah, blah, blah. And it wasn't until after the first couple of minutes that I realized, oh, I need to look down because they don't have to have it in the middle of, you know, the action. They can have it below the action. And when I would like to see the score, I look down. Extremely clever. Love it. After the eight minute and 14 second mark, what they started to do from time to time was have a view basically behind the backboard.

1:40:28Remember, the backboard is glass. And behind the backboard, and it was looking down the court the long way. And in and of itself, this view was incredible. I loved this view because you got a much clearer shot of the action. However, they flip-flopped back and forth between the two extreme ends of the court. And if the person with the ball, or the thing that you're looking at really is what it boils down to, the thing you're looking at is approximately in the center line of the court laterally, the short way, then it was fine. But if you think about it, if you're watching the ball and the person and the player is dribbling, let's say, on the extreme left-hand side of your view, when they flip 180 degrees, that person is now on the extreme right-hand side of your view.

1:41:13And it is off-putting, to Ben's point. Now, with that said, I don't think I would want to watch an entire two and a half hour experience just stapled to the 50-yard line to mid-court. I don't think I would want to do that, and that's what Ben is dying for. I violently disagree with him there. I think just being stuck there forever would be awful. Now, I will say, however, that I agree with you, Marco, the option to be stuck there forever, I'm good with that. And in a perfect world, I think some amount of control, and I don't know how you would do this, but some amount of control of what view and what camera angle you have would be great.

1:41:52Because then it's not off-putting, because you're not being whipped through space suddenly. It's that you're choosing when to get through space. And I was actually talking to my friend, John, who does channels, and he pointed out, you know, it's like when you're in a car and the driver breaks suddenly, the driver's head stays still because they know what's about to happen. The passenger's heads are all whipping forward because they didn't expect the driver to stand on the brake. And it's kind of sort of like that. But I thought overall, I only watched the first quarter. I watched a bit of halftime, and I watched the very end of the game.

1:42:24And I'm going to go through some specific thoughts in a moment. But overall, this was incredible. I have quibbles, but it was incredible. Now, I don't know that this would work too well for soccer or football or maybe even wouldn't even work too great for hockey because these are all bigger fields or courts or what have you. I think hockey is the best chance it would have. But something like football, be that American, or soccer, no matter how you slice it, I don't think football slash football would be a good fit because you're going to have to whip around the field. The camera angles will have to change.

1:43:02But golly, I'm not a particular basketball fan anymore. I used to be years and years ago. But I only want to watch games this way. And goodness knows if my preferred team gave me the ability to do this, especially if I'm out of market, and do this every time, take all of my money. Take every bit of money I have. I can't get a hotspot, Marco, because I'm giving all my money to this phantom Apple Vision Pro thing that will let me watch my favorite NBA team, you know, courtside. Give me all the money. How much does a courtside seat the Lakers? 50 grand? 100 grand? I mean, suddenly the Vision Pro seat is positively cheap.

1:43:37Before I go through my line-by-line things, John, you also tried this. Tell me what you thought. Yeah, I got a Vision Pro, so I thought I'd give it a try. I also heard Ben's big complaint, and I think his core issue here, which he didn't really, I mean, he said it by, he implied it, but he didn't explicitly say it, which is that he likes being in person at sporting events, particularly basketball games. He likes that. So obviously, if he could reproduce the experience that he likes of, you know, sitting half court at a basketball game, courtside seats. That would be great. And that's what he wants.

1:44:13And he's like, why won't you do it? Why don't you give me this thing that I like? But here's the thing. Not everybody either likes or if they do like it, even prefers the experience of being at sporting events live. A good example is the Super Bowl, the most popular sporting event in our country. It is an experience to be there in person, I'm sure. but if you are very into the game you just get a much better view and understanding of the game not being in person and watching the broadcast because they have 500 cameras and you get to see everything and every replay and every little bit and and honestly that's how most people experience american football is by watching it on tv and they've done a good job of perfecting that art and when you're there in person it's a different experience but i bet a lot of people would say you know what if i really care about the teams and the minutiae of individual plays or whatever I kind of would rather see it on a TV.

1:45:06Not everybody feels that way, but I think for lots of sporting events, being there in person, as exciting as it is, it's exciting as kind of like a change of pace. It's not like live music versus recorded music where it's like, you know, they're close enough to each other and it's mostly an auditory experience and it's only purely additive because televised sports with a bazillion cameras and cutting and a team announcing or whatever is just, it's experienced by millions and millions and millions of people all the time, every single day. Live sports is only experienced by the people who can fit in the freaking stadium.

1:45:40It's a very small number of people. And a lot of those people have terrible seats and can't see anything. And even if you have the very best seat still, if the exciting play happens far away from where you are, it's not great. So I get where Ben's coming from, but he should basically say, I want a live sports simulator, which I agree should be a thing and would cost less money. But I'm not sure I could make the argument to Apple that a live sports simulator is the best use of their budget. Because I don't think its appeal is as wide as trying to find a good way to give the good parts of being in person at a sporting event, while also giving the good parts of being in a virtual reality headset where you can have crap floating around you and do cuts and stuff like that.

1:46:26Because when you're sitting on the sideline, yeah, you can look up at the stupid fuzzy screen on the top of the stadium and see all the stupid advertisements blaring in your face, but you can have a bunch of like floating views or like in your F1 app of seeing the view from the car and seeing the map. It's like you can do that in VR. So I feel like whether or not Apple has been successful with its current product, i don't agree that they should say our only ambition is to simulate the live experience that should be one of their ambitions that should be a thing that they offer but i don't think that has the widest appeal of all the things they could potentially do for sporting events and watching i only watched like the first quarter of this game and then jumped around because i don't care about the teams um watching this stuff in in the vision pro did nothing to dissuade me from that i didn't find that the cutting and jumping to be that big in fact like you said casey i was kind of surprised they kept the view for as long as they did unfortunately for the vision pro and basketball uh sitting uh you know in the center of the half court line on the on the sideline uh with the vision pro is worse than sitting there in real life in one super duper important way which is i mean you noted that the field of vision doesn't get you all the way around but the real problem is the vision pro and the vision pro cameras have much more resolution and detail in the center and yes you can turn your head to look at the basket on one end of the corner of the other but the camera doesn't turn which means that when you're watching the part where the action happens towards one side of the corner of the other where the baskets are you are looking at the worst possible edges of the film's footage the part with the least resolution the part with the most warping the part that's the softest that's what you're looking at all the time if you want to see the tip off boy that's great best resolution it's perfect but But when you're sitting there in real life, you just turn your head and then you're getting full resolution when you look at the basket on either side.

1:48:15So not ideal for basketball in that position. In the under the basket end position thing, that's cool because you can see the people closer. But it's also kind of hard to see what the ball is doing. Yeah, the backboard is clear, but like it has a frame and there's paint on it. And there's a big, you know, the big arm that holds out the backboard. I felt like that was kind of like an obstructed view. I felt like I was kind of like I was sitting behind a beam in like a, you know, Fenway Park or something. i don't know if anybody had the beams some places have them anyway um when i was watching this the only thing i could think of course is a sport that i like better which is tennis if you watch a televised tennis match because the court is small and there's only two people most tennis matches like there's the master shot of a tennis match which is essentially like above and behind one of the players so you see the entire court and you see both players um that's not the same as being there live i've been to many tennis matches live being there live you don't get that sort of bird's eye view type thing but you can still pretty much see the entire court and it feels more like you're you know like like you're on the court with them kind of like being courtside you're on the court with uh with the basketball players so i feel like tennis there's a good chance they should do that they wouldn't they should never put a camera on the net or even with the net to do vr tennis because that the whole you know cliche of watching people in the stands at a tennis match, turning their head side to side as the balls go back and forth.

1:49:38That's not enjoyable. You don't want those seats. You want to be behind one player or the other. And on that front, I'm like, what can you bring to Vision Pro that that brings like the advantages of being there live? I think the the the Vision Pro Lakers game brought a lot of that. Part of it is being kind of like you're on the same floor. It's one of the unique things about basketball. you were literally on the same floor as the players there's no step down there's no wall there's no barrier you're just on a little folding chair next to spike lee who's getting up and getting all excited and there are the players right in front of you you can hear them trash talking each other you know stuff you wouldn't hear on tv because the microphones are far away and because they mute it but you can hear and see them all talking and doing stuff right uh to your point casey about looking on the midcourt thing i don't is it half court i don't think it's midcourt anyway and on the on the half court line looking to the left and the right the coach of uh doc rivers yeah was getting in the way yeah blocking your view yeah that's what it would be like if you were in that seat what are you gonna do tell the coach to sit down that's part of the experience of being there in person is like he's he's out there he's going on i feel like there should be like penalties of like isn't there like penalties in football like the people can't you can't have like too many players in the field if they like go over the line or whatever he was literally on the basketball court i guess they don't care it's just like they don't call traveling anymore but like he's blocking your view he's getting on the field and that's just part of being there and that's it's annoying because now he's obscuring your view because he's a big guy right but it is it is like being there is an experience you would never get on tv so i did i did appreciate that part of it but i came away thinking that again if i really cared about this game i probably would have preferred to see it on a 2d broadcast but it was definitely an interesting experience to feel like the people were right there in front of me and to get a little bit of that and again going back to tennis one of the best things about seeing tennis live is the um the sort of uh visceral and auditory experience that you don't get on tv because i don't know if you've ever seen like oh i'm sure you have now unfortunately like filmed gunshots like because they're so loud they essentially clip on the uh the microphones that are recording them and they sound kind of like these muffled little things whereas when you're there in real life very close to them they don't clip quite as much when you watch a tennis match in person it sounds like gunshots are going off like you really get the impression of like oh these people are hitting tennis ball harder than i've hit a tennis ball in my life and they do it every single time they hit it yeah and it is shocking to be like oh like i you know you you see them on tv and this little ball going back and forth yeah but if you see that if you're like three feet away from them and you're seeing their hit it's like you cannot believe how hard and how accurately these people hit every single ball and it is terrifying and you only get that when you're there quote unquote in person and i feel like the vision pro could potentially deliver that as well so i give the broadcast mostly a thumbs up i don't agree with ben that live sports is the one and only and best thing with the broadest appeal but i do agree with him and both of you that it should be an option yeah so uh quickly going through some line items that i took notes on when i was watching um in the beginning particularly and including during the starting lineup they were feeding in the stadium audio which was very very weird instead of getting you know audio piped like soundboard a soundboard audio they basically were taking the ambient audio from the microphones on the camera which was barely intelligible for me i really didn't understand that choice maybe it was noops i don't know uh and speaking of during the replay there were times that it was just straight up silent for a few seconds.

1:53:15Like the video was working, but there was zero audio, not even like ambient, just chitter chatter from the stadium. It was literally silent. Very, very weird. But at one point during the game, I heard a kid shouting over my left shoulder when I was sitting courtside, which was pretty cool. Um, so I dug that, uh, then for, with regard to the video, um, the, you already mentioned the Doc Rivers thing, getting in the way, but the thing that was most striking to me, we already talked about all the other stuff I had, but the thing that was most striking to me was that when they would show an instant replay, what would happen is there was like a graphic that would swoop in and it would say like instant replay with like the NBA logo or whatever.

1:53:54And then instead of any sort of like swipe or transition or anything, it was just a hard cut to the replay. So they had the graphic, which you can see through, like it wasn't taking up the entire view and then back to the replay. And then because there was no swipe or anything to give you a clue that you're going back to the actual action as it's happening. Then they had a different but similar transition, or not even really transition, but thing on the screen, adornment, that said back to live or back to live action or something like that, which I get intellectually, but was really freaking weird.

1:54:29I don't understand why we can't do some sort of swipe. Maybe there's a perfectly legitimate reason. I think you mean wipe, not swipe. but yeah i think they don't have we don't yet have a vocabulary for building a vr broadcast in this way we don't have the vocabulary we have the vocabulary in like 2d broadcasts of like you know all the transitions we have the different camera angles how we cut between them it's kind of like like crossing the 180 degree line or whatever like when filming uh you know filming a movie with dialogue you don't want to cross over the line because it gets confused about who is on what side and who's talking where or whatever and they do that in these sporting events there's different vocabulary for doing sporting events to like not get people confused about where the ball is and where the players are right but we have all those rules for 2d television only yeah yeah in this vr space where where suddenly there's a new degree of freedom where the person can be looking not where you expect them to be looking we don't have vocab for that and i feel like i i maybe i'm wrong about this but i i feel like some of the solution has to kind of be to essentially put virtual 2d screens into the 3d world that the person watching has some control over just because like it's it's like an analog of like you know oh it's like you you can look you're looking at a computer screen inside your vr headset that's so dumb it's like but yeah but these screens i can literally put anywhere like i'm not constrained in the way the physical world is and then within those screens all of our 2d vocabulary exists right so the instant replay thing i kind of almost feel like Like if a thing had come into my field of view, that is the place where the instant replay would happen.

1:56:02And the instant replay was in 2D, but I can immerse myself in it if I wanted to. You know, I don't know the answer. I'm just spitballing here. But like it's so hard to because I think our vocabulary is so limited when you say the only thing we can do is throw small things in front of you, like the score bug and stuff like that. Or take over your entire field of view with a thing you didn't choose, which a lot of people feel is jarring, more jarring than 2D cuts in TV. So TBD, we're still experimenting and trying stuff out. I have to feel like there is a solution here, but we haven't found it yet.

1:56:33Yeah. And I mean, I get it. I get how they landed here. And I think you're right. I think there's something better out there. We just haven't figured it out. Just a couple other quick notes. At the end of the national anthem, I almost clapped because my brain was like, that's what you do now. You're there. You should clap. And so that's, I almost did. And that was a very, very weird feeling to have. Not a bad one, but a very weird one. Uh, additionally, I really do think that if you're going to cut behind the basket, which I think should happen on occasion, the best possible time to do that is during an instant replay, because then you get a closeup of the thing you just watched.

1:57:06And that was really good and really well done. And plus you're already getting ripped out of what's currently happening anyway, because you're going back in time. Why wouldn't you get the best possible view? And that's what they did a lot of the time. It was really great. they need those nfl sky cams though like i was begging for different camera angle i know it's i mean it's hard the camera the vr cameras are even though they're smaller than they used to be there it's a big like but just i i was kind of i was wishing for some cameras like that's the problem with being there in person is sometimes you don't have a great view and the problem with cameras that simulate being there in person is sometimes they don't have a great view the the cameras for the 2d broadcast get every angle and have amazing zooms on them which is another thing that you can't do as easily with these vr cameras which is like well those cameras all around the stadium and some of them have amazing telephoto lenses so you get the instant replay from seven different angles you can see right was this person fouled you know were both these feet inbound before we caught the ball like like that stuff you can see because they have so many cameras from so many different angles and the vr one is like you have like three choices and that's it yep well and they had basically you had behind the baskets and then the half court but occasionally they would put, I guess, one of these immersive doodads on a tripod and bring it on the court.

1:58:20As an example, the Laker girls did the halftime show. And of course, we had to get a close-up view of that. But anyways, I think in the end, this was an incredible experience. I would love to experience any sporting or concert event in a similar fashion. Again, I get Ben's point about keeping me stationary and never moving me or only moving me under my own control. I genuinely just do not agree and the whole thing for me is look, and John you were saying this earlier this could be a courtside seat but it doesn't have to be, it can be so much more than that, so make it more, if nothing else, do the instant replays from behind the basket figure out other ways to get us other views or do other things I feel like I get where Ben's coming from but I couldn't disagree more and also the announcers, like whether you're like these announcers are not again most people's experience of sports is with someone essentially guiding them through the event it helps people who aren't familiar with the sport get up to speed on it it helps it the announcers tell you things you don't know all baseball or whatever statistics this player usually does this well against this pitcher uh this thing has never happened in 20 years of this franchise the last time a super bowl team was down by this amount of this time was like the announcers give that info you don't get that when you're there live unless you have a very knowledgeable person sitting next to you they're different experiences and most people watch sports not the live way they watch it the way with knowledgeable announcers and a team cutting a few different angles and instant replay and and all that stuff and i think that's how that is the that is the mass market product that they're trying to imitate here despite how much the non-mass market product of you know ten thousand dollar courtside laker tickets are exciting and exclusive and cool there's also another thing that i think they shouldn't simulate which is uh those really expensive boxes that don't have a view of the game but you just eat the food and hang out with the rich people right yeah like they could do that in apple vision pro too and it would suck if you're interested in the game you don't want to be in one of those rooms they have a bad view like so you know i i this is not an either or they they should offer the option for ben to make him happy i agree but i don't think that's going to solve their problem i think their problem is all the stuff that you were talking about case of it just like this could this has lots of really cool aspects to it but it's still not even as good as the 2d one in terms of competence and confidence in how it works.

2:00:38So it's like amazing, you know, amazing parts of this experience and then a bunch of crappier ones that are worse than watching in 2D. Yeah. But for me, two thumbs very high up. It's not perfect, but it is really good and really cool. And I cannot stress enough, if the Lakers were my team and if I cared about the NBA and neither of those things is true, I would absolutely be buying a Vision Pro yesterday because it is that freaking cool and that freaking great. It's sloppy basketball in that game too. I didn't watch the whole match, but yes, there was some not great plays there. I don't know. Yeah.

2:01:12I mean, I haven't watched the NBA since the Bulls were really good. So that's 30 years ago now, something like that. But it's been a long time, but no, it was, it was some rough basketball for sure.