Apple’s Vision Pro: the headset of the future?

28:58There's a lot of this stuff that is clearly not finished. Like one of the theories I've heard, and this is just a theory, but it makes a lot of sense, is that one of the reasons the Apple executives weren't wearing them is because the eye stuff on the outside is not ready yet. And yeah, a lot of that stuff is not finished. And that was one of the things I wanted to see was like what somebody's eyes look like, because I have a lot of questions. But yeah, we didn't get to see that stuff. So that's the hardware. And I don't want to discount, like that is a lot of hardware to been able to use experiences.

29:24Yeah. The big question, I think, Alex, this is the split between the people who just looked at what they saw and the people who experienced it. People who experienced it are like, wow, that's a lot of hardware. All right. Like, that's cool. Like, I love a gadget. Then there's like, do I want any of this? What is it for? So we should take a break and come back and talk about that aspect of it, because that's where things start to spiral, I think, in wild and exciting ways. All right. We're going to take a break. We'll be right back.

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32:26Okay, we're back. So we talked about the hardware, we put it on our face, we looked at the stuff. What was your favorite demo? I think for me, it was the second sort of movie thing that Apple showed, which is, I also saw the Avatar demo. I've actually seen the movie, it's very good. it lasts substantially longer than the vision pros battery which i think is great but uh but then they did a thing where they showed immersive videos is kind of what they call it and this is the kind of demo you see on every yes on every headset ever right they're like here's the 360 video you can turn your head and there's more video it's one of the things that is like the most standard tech demo of all time for these headsets so it was like watch a basketball game from above the backboard or soccer game from behind the goal.

33:10You can see some rhinos, just like being rhinos. And it's all this sort of big, wide panoramic video. And it was the first one of those that I was like, oh, this is not just like a tech demo of how you can move your head. This is like a cool thing that I would actually watch. And that was the moment it really sort of turned for me from like, oh, the fact that this is better changes what it's for to me, right? Whereas like I would watch Avatar on that thing in the way that like there's absolutely no chance in hell I'm going to watch a three hour movie on the meta quest. Yeah. Don't do that. But I would watch – I would spend time just sitting on my couch watching something.

33:45Like what does that mean for me as a person? We should talk about right now. But that was the thing that jumped out to me is like there's actually something to this kind of filling the world around me with content that I can actually get behind. Yeah. Yeah. I thought it was – you both wrote these hands-ons after seeing this thing. I thought it was really interesting because, David, you talked about how this is just the TV. They finally made the TV. David stole my headline. I'm really upset about it, and I kind of don't. Full disclosure, Neelai provided the headline and was like, this is a really good headline.

34:13We should run it. And then he was really mad after we run it that it wasn't the headline. Yeah, the story published in Neelai was like, damn it. I should have run that headline with my name on it. Neelai, you talked about how it kind of felt lonely in a way. And I thought that was a really interesting tension because, yeah, as a person who lives alone, sure, this sounds great for me. I don't have to have a TV ever again. I can just have this and wear that. But if you don't live alone, this would probably be a not great experience to watch all your content on. Yeah. I don't want to get too philosophical in Apple's podcast studio.

34:46It's a weird place to get deep. Tim just kicks the door in. Yeah. At any moment, Tim Cook is going to have me arrested. It's weird to not be looking at the same stuff as other people. Right? To be perceiving reality and have it to be objectively different reality that you know is different reality than someone else. To be like, I'm looking at a dinosaur and there's two people in the room who are not having that experience is fucking weird. It's just weird. You're like, I'm having all these feelings about what's happening to me. And they're like, huh. And taking notes about you or whatever they're doing.

35:19That's weird. Watching sports, unless it's a playoff game, I like to do with other people. Playoff games are very lonely. Very isolated experience. You're supposed to watch. James Cameron does not want you watching Avatar at home by yourself. He wants you in the theater. Tom Cruise is out there trying to have Christopher Nolan assassinated so he can get the IMAX theaters. There's just something about spending time with other people and literally looking at the same thing at the same time that is the human condition. And this thing puts you way away from that. Right. Where the answer is both of you will be wearing the headset, which is super weird.

36:00Like, and that's the, that's, that's the only answer that exists right now. And I just think like, there's a lot, there's another 10 years of verge coverage in that. Like, I know what we're doing for the next 10 years. Right. This thing, but right now it's like, it's meant to be like a Mac book display that you wear on your face. That's David's angle, right? It's a, they made an Apple TV for your face. Basically. Yeah. I mean, Dan, I'm curious what your thought was. Cause there's like Apple made the case basically that it's a, it's a productivity device. So you can like array a bunch of screens on your desk.

36:25It's a content capture device, which is basically they have these sort of like 3d volumetric videos and photos you can take. And it's an entertainment device for watching stuff. These are three things I know you care very much about individually and together. I do. Yeah. I'm curious what it all kind of made you feel. I think of those three, the content capture is a non-starter. Like I, the, the demo, uh, taking a picture of my kids wearing a goggles, uh, my wife would just literally leave me. You're not going to do that. I don't foresee myself doing that. I think that the first one, the productivity thing, is kind of interesting if it is done well.

36:59I do not think that I could wear that thing for 8 to 10 hours a day and not just boil my eyes trying to blog and read articles and stuff like that. But the idea of having an infinite canvas in front of me that I can put as many windows as I want and stuff like that is kind of intriguing. And then I think, like you were saying, you would watch Avatar on it. And I think that like if you are alone, maybe on an airplane, that is like an area where I do not want to be watching the same thing as other people. So the airplane. Okay. First of all, one of the best airplane experiences I've ever had in my entire life is when the Baywatch movie went viral on like a long flight, like cross country.

37:37And like one person started watching Baywatch. And then all of the people started watching Baywatch. It was just I've never seen anything like that in my life. Aside from watching the Baywatch movie. Apple wants to take that away from me. the rest of my 737 flight mates. The other reason the airplane one is, it's just the Baywatch thing. That's the only thing I care about. The other reason it's fascinating to me is that's the one where you are definitely in VR. Yes, you would be in a full VR environment. And there's a reason they did not show the airplane demo from the perspective of the wearer.

38:06They showed the person sitting on the plane wearing the headset. But that is not a mixed reality or an augmented reality situation. And I don't think that like, even watching it at home, You wouldn't really want a mixed augmented reality situation if you're watching a movie. The whole point is to be immersive, right? Otherwise, just watch the movie on a TV where it's there in front of you and you probably already have it, right? This is where I think the form factor of the thing, which is a VR headset. Yep. We can just be honest with each other here. They're all looking at me. It's weird, man.

38:37But the form factor of the thing leads them into places where the desired product would not take them. Yep. So the desired product is augmented reality glasses. You can never put a light seal around you and block out the world and say you're on the top of a mountain watching Avatar. But this thing lets you do that. And I think you have to make the case for it. You have to say, well, there's big screens in front of you. And that's weird because if you keep stepping down the curve to where they want to go, eventually they're going to ship you a pair of glasses and they will not be able to do that.

39:09And I don't know how that goes. Right. Maybe what everyone wants is a bunch of virtual displays to run Safari and a movie and a FaceTime call instead of having physical monitors. That's my dream. Or maybe what we want is actually augmented reality. And that is like I just don't – again, half an hour on the device. I couldn't tell you the split. But that seems like a very challenging – right? If the goal is augmented reality. Right. The augmented reality would be like you're wearing the glasses but you are watching your TV. And then what are the glasses doing around your TV? And what I mean by the plane example specifically to make it clear is if you do the big screens on a – if you're sitting – imagine sitting on a plane and you're like, I'm going to do the big TV in augmented reality.

39:50Where's the screen going to go? Right. If you project it on the seat in front of you, you have a 100-inch screen two inches from your face. Yeah. That's bad. If you put it four rows ahead of you, there's just a bunch of seats between you and your TV. So like you're saying, the only correct thing to do there is just occlude everything else and sort of disappear into a thing where the screen just fills your view. And that just is a VR headset. I think it's the right call for that place. Like that is what I would want to do. I don't need to see the other people or the seats. But you cannot do that with a pair of glasses unless you have a bunch of like glasses and accessories, right?

40:22So that's just like a fascinating like form factor like result. What if the plan is to keep it as goggles though? And the goggles just get smaller and smaller until you're wearing like welder goggles. And then welder goggles are the new hit thing. Those glasses with the things on the side, like Mad Max. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like everybody just looks like that. When I think of Tim Cook's greatest ambitions, I think of Mad Max glasses. Tim Cook's secretly extraordinarily steampunk. Those like wraparound Oakleys would do it too. Yeah. Some blades. Some blades, yeah. I bet Cred Federighi has some steampunk in him.

40:54That's just my... I saw him playing Black Sabbath on a triple-headed guitar. I feel it. But that's weird, right? Like this VR form factor. Well, I think that like, yes, you are totally right. But if they came out with this and you couldn't, with the form factor that they have today that they are releasing and you couldn't do what David just described of going into full VR, people would be like, why can't I just go into full VR? I'm wearing a VR headset. And I can see that like for today, for this product, for what it can do, for the capabilities it has, that is an experience that makes sense. If we get to the point where AR glasses, like you're talking about, that do not have the occlusion and things like that, maybe that experience just kind of fades away or the track divides and we have goggles for that experience and we have AR glasses for, I don't know, knowing your name, birth date, and phone number.

41:40Oh, so this is the other thing. When I look at you. So as the virtual house listeners well know, the killer app for glasses for me is being able to know faces and names. And if I could just remember these people's names, I would be the most powerful politician in America. Vote Patel. I cannot, and thus I will host the show for a opportunity. Apple doesn't show any of that. There's none of that there. And there's a whole stack of problems to do that, the worldwide facial recognition database being the first one. But Apple didn't show any of that. They didn't show hardly any augmented reality, apart from the very fact of displaying screens in space, which is a challenging augmented reality problem, right?

42:18I don't mean to denigrate that, but the things that they've been showing us for years, there's a chessboard on this table, and you're going to play chess on it. Not there. The only augmented reality demo I think we actually got was the butterfly in the dinosaur experience landed on your finger. Right, yeah, you held out your finger and a butterfly sort of flapped through the room and landed on your finger. And I'm told it didn't land on everybody's finger, but I think that's a lie. I think it landed on everybody's finger. I think they were like, if you hold out your finger, it may land on you.

42:45And I was like, oh, am I special? Yeah. But I think... You are. I thought so. I mean, I know so. I was like, this butterfly is coming. Can't resist. riz god over here we're not even touching that but i think i think the this like impossible place apple has put itself in with this is it has to make the case for a device that exists right now and cost 3500 and apple is not the kind of company to come out and say what like snap has been saying for years which is like this is the very beginning of a very long road we don't expect anyone to buy this one we're gonna make many more like look at this cool vending machine right like That's not a thing Apple does.

43:21So what they have to do is say, here is the best thing we can do right now. It's very expensive. You should totally buy it. You should totally make apps for it. But also you and we both know that we're on this long road to somewhere that is not only better, it's not like an iPad that gets like faster and bigger and the battery lasts longer and that like slowly changes things over time. It's going to be fundamentally different in its final form. And so they're trying to sort of explain where we're going, but also convince you that where we are is worthwhile. And that's really hard to do simultaneously.

43:53And I think like the thing we talked about in the run-up to this was that the whole industry was out there like desperately waiting for Apple to like explain to the world why you need one of these things. And I think of all the things that we saw, that's the thing that fell sort of the most flat for me was that just, I didn't come out of this being like, I know exactly what this thing is going to be useful for, for lots of people. they did make one argument that tracked right into your uh your thesis your your piece with an excellent headline a totally original headline do you want to co-byline i can put this i can just add my name to it just like every other paragraph headline by nila patel i'll just put it right there and this was in the keynote right it was mike rockwell who said yes it's a big number but imagine you're buying a big screen tv and a sound bar and all this content all this Just imagine all the screens you're buying.

44:41That would be$3 ,500. Assuming you buy exclusively Apple. And the second half of that line is, and it doesn't do nearly as much as this. And so, again, the point that they're making is, this is very much a consumption device. We have not yet gotten to, right, you can just run Safari on it. And I did open Safari and scroll through text, and it looked great, right? You can just use this as a monitor. The resolution is high enough. You can mirror your Mac to it and get a Mac display on it, unclear what the resolution will be because your mac has to support it and the headset has to like that's some wonky question they didn't demo that for us they didn't see that stuff you can make a facetime call in it and send a 3d avatar to someone else like you can do a bunch of this stuff and i think what everyone is caught up in is the form factor of it because if they actually produce the glasses and so you could do all this stuff we'd be like that's pretty rad but it's a it's a vr headset like the quest pro is not a good product and you should not buy it true it is exactly i think it started 1500 it's exactly the 1500 version of this and now they've dropped the price 2000 like get them off the shelf like you can see exactly the 2000 difference in in quality and ambition between these two products but in terms of what meta says about what the quest pro should do it mirrors your laptop with a variety of clunky software dongles it shows you a bunch of workspaces That was the thing that went viral with the Quest Pro, right, was here's four monitors in front of you.

46:10That's the same thing. Yes, 3D personas in FaceTime, which we should actually talk about a little bit more. They're very neat and worth examining. Mark Zuckerberg's like, here's some cartoon shit. You may have legs, you may not. But it's still just like talking to each other. You can really see the difference between like a company that's been doing hardware for 30 years, 40 years, and a company that does social media and just pivoted to hardware like four years ago. Yeah, and like Meta is, there was a disastrous startup called Magic Leap, which we've talked about on the show. They've hired a bunch of those engineers.

46:42They've acquired a bunch of those patents. Like these are ideas that have been around for a long time. Ronnie Abramovitz, the Magic Leap CEO, I think he was tweeting like, this is a greatest hits reel of every VR demo for the past 10 years. And I think that's right. Like we've seen a lot of these experiences before. The basketball one is like a perfect example of this. I cannot tell you how many times I've been told that I will put something on my face and sit courtside. Yeah, constantly. Like endlessly. This ship's like you can watch YouTube pilots and like spin around with a mouse if you want to.

47:14You can do this today. Apple invented a new video format called Apple Immersive Video, which it will not tell you the specs of. And apparently as a proprietary new camera developed to shoot an Apple Immersive Video, which it will not talk about. I was like, you made a new camera? and they're like, yes. An MBA is totally going to buy one. Tell me anything about it. No. Are you going to ship it? I don't know. But they concocted these demos at the highest level of their own ambition to make sure they were great. And so this is the best executed riff. I'm like, all these are very familiar ideas, but the ideas are inherently familiar.

47:48And that little gap between, is this what's going to make me buy it? Is this what's going to make me spend even more money? That's why the developers have it now. Right. And I think that's the like, we're on this funny spectrum from, you have the meta quest where it's like tech demos that are not real things that anyone would do in their life. This demo was like, okay, this, you've made just these basic things so much better that it's not just like you made my computer slightly faster. It's like, you've, you've actually changed the set of things I am willing to do on this device by making it this much better.

48:19Like I would watch an NBA game like that. It's kind of a weird camera angle. You can't see very much, but if you, sitting courtside actually kind of sucks. all of this but if it's as good as we saw in the demos right like every sentence we say on here should be if it's preceded by if it's as good as we saw in these incredibly controlled on rails demos uh i opened the notes app and i got yelled at about it like we don't know most things about this but the the thing after that is still is this worth the price to you and i think overwhelmingly the crest pro is like well it's not very good and it's not very expensive so no i don't want it and this is now we're getting to, it's pretty good and very expensive.

48:56Is that something? If those use cases appeal to you, because I think one of the other things to Alex's point that a lot of the kind of shruggy reaction I've seen is from a lot of people who are expecting VR experiences and want to use it for VR experiences because it has that incredible hardware and displays and things like that. And it's not doing gaming and it's not doing flight simulators and it's not doing racing simulators and all these things that are like really high-end VR experience where there is an audience that will pay$4 ,000 for a headset to make that better. But like this is a self-contained MacBook on your face.

49:31It's not probably powerful enough to run Flight Simulator or any of those, and you can't plug in your GPU on the floor. Also known as a PS5. Also known as a PS5. My good old Ford GPU. Battery in one pocket, GPU in the other pocket. Let's go. Or a PC gaming rig or whatever it is, right? And so there's kind of like that audience who has been in this world for a while has been watching the development and the tracking. And they see this as like, oh, this is the next leap in the technology. But we can't use it for that because Apple's kind of gating it to the use cases that it wants. I mean, look, I'm one of these people.

50:05I got a 4GPU situation. I'm with you. Here are my people. You've got her big. Like that is a tiny market that has accomplished very little. How big is the market that will spend$3 ,500 on this? I think it's also a teeny tiny market, but I think Apple's ambitions are way bigger than Apple doesn't need this thing to make money. For a long time. If Apple's like, we got to pay for this whole program, Tim Cook is going to be like, I don't know, make it 35%. And so it's over. They can just do it. And like very few other companies in the space, say for meta, have that ability. And I think that's just a part of the dynamic here is like we're thinking through is Apple's just going to stick with it.

50:46Even Microsoft. God bless the number of commenters in our hands-on posts who are like, the HoloLens did it. My friends, the HoloLens came out eight years ago. It was a flop, and Microsoft acts the entire division. You can keep typing it. It doesn't matter. It did it. The kin did it first. I think the next nine months, I think, are going to be fascinating. And Apple has done this before, like announce a product way before it launches. And typically what happens is a lot changes in that time. because developers start to see it. They start to use it. They start to have ideas. They start to build stuff.

51:20Apple changes stuff as things move along, and time goes, and people start to see it, and it's out in the world. And so, like you said, there's a lot of stuff we haven't seen. Absolutely, I would bet my life that Fitness Plus ends up being a meaningful part of this thing, and we haven't seen any of it. Right. So they showed us meditation. They did a one-minute meditation. Again, a very odd thing to do with other people in the room, especially when the voice is like, be grateful. And it's like, I don't know, man. I'm pretty grateful, like generally, maybe not in this situation. But Supernatural exists.

51:51Alex and I both use it on the Quest 2. It's a totally fine experience. It sells a bunch of Quest headsets. That's why Facebook bought it. They bought it out notably from under Apple, who also wanted it. And I know for a fact that it is a killer app for that platform, which is why both companies wanted it. And the median Supernatural user is a woman over 40. right? And that is, that's how you grow a platform. Fitness was a very real killer app for the Quest. And I don't mean like fitness for women over 40. What I mean specifically is like, you go attract a demographic that is not inclined to be an early adopter of a bleeding edge gadget.

52:29You show utility to a huge thing and you expand your user base by providing utility to like average consumers, right? Apple has not shown, and at$3 ,500, I don't think they need to, but fitness plus is the thing that gets them there. I think so too. Yeah. So, yeah, that was actually Addy's theory, too, is that that's going to be the killer app for it. It's like fitness. Because I believe you guys saw there's stabilization bands, right? There's like a third strap to put on it so it'll stabilize and stuff. And this is something that, yeah, you can imagine having somebody running alongside you. You can imagine having yourself jogging alongside you so you can keep pace with yourself.

53:07I would never do that. This was John Porter's suggestion. This disembodied ghost of yourself. that you're running away from. I'm telling you, this is glasses stuff. This is not ski goggle VR headset stuff. Right. But I think that idea of having a fitness coach, having that fitness even more intimate than it already is with Supernatural, than it already is with Fitness Plus and its current incarnation, would be really, really compelling, particularly for those people who are already spending$2 ,500 on a Peloton, right? Yep. Like, oh,$3 ,500 and I get a personal coach? But I think the open question here is going to be, how do you control it, right?

53:45Like Beat Saber is a fitness application. Supernatural is a fitness application. You're holding controllers to do those things. Yeah, you will look like a dumbass with this. Just doing like - Just cross chops. Just pinching your fingers. We'll see. I mean, like there's a universe of potential third-party accessories and like it's so early. And now that this is out, we're going to start to see that stuff trickle in a big way over the next nine months. Oh, without question. Yeah. All right, we should take a break. Yep. We'll come back with Marquez and do what? Yeah, it's going to be great. We'll be right back.

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56:40We're back. And boy, do we have some special guests. Waveform Crew is here. Welcome. Thank you for having us. Thanks for having us. David, Andrew, Marquez, we're here. I still have this David. Hi. D1. I feel less good now. D1. My D0. We've improved, David. You're DA. D-prime. D-prime. I like that. That's good. D-max. We got to stop it. Dan Siebert's here. Kranz is here. David, D1, has promised me that he can execute a lightning round. Look, dude, you called me DP2 for a decade. This is better. This is better. Look, David Pogue talked shit about us in a CES keynote one time, and now he's dead to me, so we're good.

57:22All right. David has promised he can run a lightning round. Okay, so the way we're going to do this is we have five categories about things that got announced. We went really fast through all the news, so we're going to just very quickly go through the stuff that we thought was coolest and best and most interesting. And the way this is going to work is we're just going to go down the line. So David, you're going to go first on all of them. Alex, you're going to go last on all of them. Yeah. And Alex, if you ruin it, I will be furious with you. I just want you to know. You too, David. Don't mess this up.

57:47I promise I will probably not ruin it. Okay, good. Alright, so the five categories are the just straight up coolest thing announced. Oh, and I should say the one rule is you can't just answer to the Vision Pro for any of them. You have to pick a feature or a thing. You can't just, that's like Apple things. Like, no, you can't do that. The thing you're most likely to use all the time, big or small, the thing you care about that no one else cares about, which is the one I'm most excited about for everybody. The tiny, small thing that you are needlessly excited about and the most I can't wait for the next version new feature.

58:19Sound good? Everybody good? Ready to go? All right. David you go first the straight up coolest thing that Apple asked I really like the name drop feature now you can just tap your phone to everybody else and it just kind of sends it across this is a startup that Apple killed in 2008 and they finally Sherlock I love it do you like the delayed Sherlock that makes it even worse it's rough alright I like it Andrew I like how if somebody comes into your vision in the VR headset it kind of like pops into in front of a window so you can actually tell someone's in the room with you the thing where it just like fades in yeah it's nuts a movie Love it.

58:51I'm a huge fan of the 8K aerial video screensavers in Mac OS. Very good. And they just pulled those from the Apple TV. Well, they shot new ones. They've got new ones. They shot new ones. That's why it's so cool. Okay. Are those going to the Apple TV also? I believe, well they talked about it on Sonoma, but I think they'll probably also put those on the TV. Because they are, sneakily the best thing about the Apple TV is the screensavers. Fully agreed. Apple is actually the master of putting a feature on one platform, and then like five years later putting it on the other platform and being like, you're high for it.

59:19All right, mine, I'm just doing dad stuff. It's the automatic deletion of verification codes from messages, which is a straight up Android feature. Yeah. But I'm happy about it. And in mail and messages. Yeah. Great news. All right. Because everybody uses Apple Mail. Dan texted me right after and he was like, I'm done with Mimestream. Back to Apple Mail. No way. No way. Mine was the sports example in the Vision Pro that Disney did where you can just like layer a bunch of different games from different channels all in one place. And you can like click through your favorite teams to see what's going on.

59:48Love that. Dan, what do you got? Automatic grocery list sorting and reminders. Let's go. Wow. It's possible I have that for another category. I love it. That is the single coolest thing that Apple announced. It is. It is the coolest thing that Apple announced. I got blown away on the dad category. They didn't even announce it. I had to read it in the press release in the list of things that we did not get time for. Spectacular. Alex, what do you got? The Hotel Airplay collaboration where you can airplay your stuff in a hotel. Another hot 2008 feature. they announced that like the year after they announced airplay and i think hotels are finally like all right we're done with usba ports we finally got rid of the 30 pin ipod dock i was gonna say every hotel on the iphone the i-home dock yeah they can announce that feature every year for the next 20 years it'll never come out have you ever been to a hotel it's gonna be great it's gonna be great i believe in it all right that's good um all right next category starting with you david the thing big or small that you are most likely to use all the time transformer based autocorrect.

1:00:47Very good. All the time. That's the answer for all of us, I think. Yeah. That was their big generative AI mention. They said twice they said anything about AI and they said Transformers twice. Yeah, they were effectively like, yeah, all of you, Chad Chibit is cute. We own the keyboard. Yeah. Yeah, so much better. I love it. Andrew? Annoyingly, the PDF iPad stuff I'll probably use quite a bit. As boring as that is. Unbelievable enthusiasm for PDFs. Cheers. really good yeah yeah we're always from the crowd uh for me it's the faster media engine encoding in the m2 ultra specifically we do back-to-back exports a lot and then just gonna enjoy that a lot you're a deeply on brand i'm sorry it's just no that's what i do i do it a lot a lot of renders yeah all right what do you got air tag sharing not stalking my wife is an important improvement and iOS 17.

1:01:42Together you can suck someone else. Yeah. Like, she has the car keys right now and she's like, how do I turn this off? Because it's like someone is following you. All right. All right. I like it. Mine is the live voicemail answering machine. Again, it's possible I'm never going to answer another phone call. Like, I'm just going to I'm going to screen every phone call for the rest of my life. This is my answer for another one. Okay. We'll come back around because that one's hilarious. Dan, what do you got? So, I'm most likely going to use automatic grocery list sorting and reminders. I sense a theme.

1:02:14Did you pick that for everyone? I don't know. This is your vision. I guess we will find out. Oh my God. I will kick you off this podcast. I warned you. I was going to make everyone really mad. Alex, what do you got? Dan, you're going to have to redo that because my plan is also to say that it's the hotel. If they do it. Can you tell why Alex and I work together so much? Here's my question for you. Okay. What comes out first? the full CarPlay integration they announced last year. They're not talking about this. That's not coming out. Or Hotel AirPlay. Apple makes a car or Hotel AirPlay. Neither.

1:02:50Apple makes a car or Hotel AirPlay. I'm going to bet the field. Cybertruck. All right, let's keep going. Next category, the thing you care about that nobody else cares about. Okay, there's an iMessage update where if you have a group message and there's iPhone users and Android users, you can still use iMessage features. Shut up. Yes, they didn't talk about that. this. So if you have one Android user in the chat, Which is always Marquez in your chats, right? It's me. They're not going to ruin it for everybody else and then they'll crowd up on you and tell you to get an iPhone. Tell your mom to get an iPhone.

1:03:23But it's actually a feature. At the end, it's like, get an iPhone. It's just a little reminder. I'll have a miserable time, but you'll all be okay. So the Android users will probably not see anything that you're doing and it will be very confusing, but for the iPhone users, it will be more enjoyable, I guess. I mean, anything that gets rid of the so-and-so liked a message thing is a victory. This is the official Dieter Bohn Memorial RCS mention. Yeah. It's done. All right, moving on. Andrew? Standby mode and specifically how it can tell, like, the MagSafe chargers in different places in your house and how it changes up kind of the views that you have on each of them.

1:03:58Oh, you can have different standbys for different— Yeah, they said, like, it will know where you're putting it on. So, like, if by your bed you have, like, your alarm clock or whatever, and then I believe in, like, your kitchen if you have a different view in standby mode. I'm dying to know how it figures this out. What? I didn't say I didn't do it. I just said it sounds cool. All the MagSafe chargers have a handshake with the iPhone. So it's like device by device. That's cool. I'm into that. All right, Marquez, what you got? The ability to interact inside of a widget in iPadOS and just check a box and not have to open the app to check the box.

1:04:28You're going to get a tick-tick widget and it's going to change your life forever. It's about damn time. It's about it. You know what that's really good for? Marquez, Dan, and I are like America's three weirdest to-do list app people. so this is very exciting we're going to start a podcast later where we just talk about this feature it's going to be 19 hours long productivity apps alright Nilo what do you got mine's super wonky it's going to be the Vergecast team of all they announced the ability to pin web apps to the dock shit that's mine that's also mine that is the end of Electron apps on the Mac as long as those apps support Chrome this is like an hour of wonky Vergecast there's like 10 people on this thing that make an hour show about this one feature you're my people I love you but Apple's coming for Electron it's good and battery life will go up in some way and then down as chrome finds a way to make features exclusive to chrome so that's mine too no reaction from the group yeah no on this one this is good you've hit it's specifically something no one else cares about

1:05:25just turned off the show yeah no i said the same thing i i said the same thing because i think this is apple's way of trying to get around all of the app store regulation is to be like, look, you can turn web apps into apps. So you're like deeply cynical about it. They're like, screw you, Europe. And I'm like, Apple's making the web better. Yeah, they're like, what is an app if not an icon? All right, we got to move on from this deadly silence. Dan, what do you got? It's the opposite of reaction. So the thing I care about that no one else cares about is definitely... Don't do it! Alex, what do you have?

1:05:57If you say Hotel Airplay, you're not getting the next one. I'm ruling you out of the round five if you say Hotel Airplay again. Dan's already out. You can say it. This is the last time Dan will ever say it. Yeah, because it is. There it is. Like, if it actually happens, it's incredible. I got to say the Waveform crew showed up on our show prepared and ready to go. And the Verge House crew is like hotel airplane grocery lists. Yep. All right. Two more categories. We're going to do this really fast. The tiny small thing that you are unnecessarily pumped about. Okay. Apple Fitness Plus now has workout schedules.

1:06:27So they can, like, get you to do an entire week's work of things so I don't have to keep subscribing to things for one month for free and then canceling them. That's good. That is tiny and small and good. I like it. Andrew, what do you got? In the hiking activity on Watch, there's an auto waypoint for the last time you had cell reception. That one rules. I thought that was really, really cool and useful. And then they had the SOS one for the last time you had anyone's reception. Also good. Yeah, that was awesome. Mine is the Mac Pro. Tiny, small thing. Yep. Okay, cool. I like it. Just a little thing.

1:06:54The fifth PCI slot. Yes. Specifically. Screw the sixth one. The first four are busters. Number five. I need the fifth one. The sixth one is a compatibility slot in case you have even older cards. Like that's how Apple is thinking about this product. It's very good. Neil, what do you got? I also picked the voicemail transcription on the iPhone, but specifically what I'm excited about is how much of a straight up hack it is. It's an answering machine app on your phone. Your phone answers the call for you, listens to the person talking, transcribes it, and saves it. It bypasses the carrier voicemail.

1:07:27Is this not what call screening is on the Pixel? It's the same thing, but it's just such a hack. Like it's so funny that they're like, screw it, answering machine. Visual voicemail? No, we're doing that for free. Yeah, it's like great. Yeah. But yeah, this is exactly as it's called transcript, but they're playing it as voicemail, which makes it much more like an answering machine, which I think is hilarious. It's very good. They should put up like the tapes. They should go back to skeuomorphic and put up the tapes. Animation. Yeah. I like it. Mine is that now in spotlight search, if you search like Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, it'll pull up a toggle.

1:07:57I like that. You can turn it on and off in the spotlight search. Yes. Without having to open the menu. I didn't know that. I like that a lot. about that tweaking settings and you can launch shortcuts from spotlight search now big fan dan what do you got never mind you're out i will no longer have to say hey siri when i'm adding things to the grocery list and reminders that means i get to do the bed still oh god no moving on david last category the most i can't wait for the next version new feature what do you got uh they have not added group competitions in the apple fitness app forever that was mine and i really want them to add it so i guess it'll come in uh ios whatever the next one is seven 18 18 i I don't know.

1:08:31Watch OS 11. Or watch OS 11. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Hopefully. Yeah. Let's hope. Andrew, what do you got? You know, I was going to say grocery list, but then he stopped the bit, so I couldn't even like combo breakers, so I don't know what to do anymore. But like contact cards, like when they do the personalized contact cards in the future, I'm just waiting for like Marques to knock on the phone screen as he's like calling me or something. Oh, that's good. Like animated contact. Where they can go with that. Nemoji ones? Because they're going to do that at the same time for sure. Or different ones for different people.

1:08:59Yeah. Yeah. They suggested in my briefing you could give like a fake contact card to people because, you know, you can choose you can choose like my cell phone number or my email address or whatever. And then a representative from Apple was like, or a fake number. And I was like, that's a great idea. I didn't even think about that. I mean, that's the most important one. Like you get those people who just really want your phone number and you're like, leave me alone. We should hang out. Exactly. Finsta of contact posters. I just give everybody Alex's number. It's fine. Oh, that explains a lot. I'm just gonna second David's group competitions.

1:09:31Yes, please. Yeah, it's good. I picked watchOS 11 as a concept. Assuming that some updates will be made. Okay. Given that no updates are made. This is the biggest update they've ever made, despite not making very many updates at all. Snoopy. Yeah, sure. Let's go. He sits on the clock though. Greatest generation. Yeah. Greatest generation. That's horrible. Mine is with the new contact posters where something comes up when you call somebody else. I want to have several of those so that I can have one where I'm doing really rude things for just when I call Neelai and one for other people. And I want lots of those depending on who I call.

1:10:07I like that. So as we all know, Siri works wonderfully. So I know that when I don't say, hey, Siri, and just say, say, Siri now, it's not going to work. How do I keep getting played by this, Alex? You get to go last. Okay, it's the face scanning for your Vision Pro mask. like the next generation of it presumably I'll be able to wear a mask and scan that and then make it like talk for me so I never have to show my face in public again I think that's cool she's going out with like the full glitter N95 I've got like a giant Ewok head and I just want it like Dyson Zone on the bottom Vision Pro on the top you're good to go we've got these people here we have to ask about the Vision Pro So give me a five word vision pro reaction.

1:10:58Touching stuff with your eyes. Nice. Well, that was good. That was quick. That was fast. I really just meant short. I didn't know that you were going to say five words. I am not going to do that. No, this is the bit now. Five words. You got to do it. Oh, you actually just meant short. Yeah, I just meant short. Oh, sorry. I'm good at haikus, I guess. I'm very impressed, my man. Thank you. I feel like it needs a rechargable or a swappable battery pack. That was like nine words, dude. Double battery. That was way too many words. Give me more battery packs. Give me more battery packs. I really did not mean for this to become what it's becoming.

1:11:32No, I got five words. Don't worry. Way sharper than I expected. Yeah. I mean, the displays are amazing. Yeah. That's what I got. We just did an hour on Vision Pro. Do we need to do more words? This is so many words. No one needs 15 more words from this group of people on the Vision Pro. All right. It's just a TV haul. That's it. That's a Vergecast. Apple is going to arrest us at any moment for what we did to their podcast studio today. Thank you, gentlemen, for joining us. We've got a collab episode with the Waveform crew doing trivia. That's also in our feeds. Check that out. Really excited about it.

1:12:04That's it. That's for Chest. Bye for all.

1:12:12And that's a wrap for VergeCast this week. We'd love to hear from you. Shoot us an email at vergecast at theverge.com. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Marino. Our editorial director is Brooke Minters. That's it. We'll see you next week.

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