Macs and M3s, shot on iPhones

24:02Let's talk about the iMac for two minutes, which I think is as long as the iMac deserves. I started out when Apple announced the iMac, which is literally just the same damn computer, but they took out the old chip and they put in the new chip. The end. No new accessories. No nothing. Nothing. Still lightning keyboard. I was outraged by this. I'm still kind of outraged by this, but I also now understand this. This and what I think it is, is Apple believes that there are people who buy iMacs and that's a very specific set of person. And what they are going to do is they're going to take their 11 year old iMac that they bought that runs an Intel thing and no longer gets software updates and is basically falling apart.

24:39They're going to replace it with this one and they're going to be very happy. And I think they're right. And I think that is like a sad way to think about the iMac line at this point in time. But I think that's where we are. The iMac was always there, though. There was like the bit of time where the iMac was used by kids and teens. But for the most part, it's always been like your parents' computer that they keep in their computer room because they're the ones that still have computer rooms. Yes. It served the role as the shared family computer or the home computer. And I would argue that at this point, that is an increasingly shrinking audience and does not exist for the reality of most modern families or modern homes.

25:16People have moved on to personal devices, whether they're Chromebooks or laptops or iPhones or tablets or whatever. So it makes sense to me that they are not throwing lots of investment at the iMac, like David said. Like, we don't have an iMac Pro because the Mac Studio exists and the Mac Pro exists, and that serves those customers better because they can swap out that computer without having to, like, deal with the whole thing. and the audience for iMacs, which we all know, is you go into a spa or a fancy doctor's office or whatever, and they are sitting there on the desk as they're checking computers at the reception.

25:50Or your kitchen, according to Apple. While you cook, you just hang out on your iMac like a super cool guy. Same. Yeah, I can't wait to read divorce notes of the husband insisted on putting the iMac in the kitchen. So the wife was like, this is invading my space. But yeah, that's the reality of it. So what we got is, you know, I'm glad that they didn't completely ignore the iMac like they have for two and a half years, that they did put a faster chip in it, but everything else is exactly the same. It would have been great to have USB-C accessories because I would have happily replaced some of my older accessories.

26:19These prices are goofy. If I'm reading this correctly, the base model iMac doesn't have USB ports? It has two instead of four. So the base model, this is the same as the M1 generation, has two USB-C ports on the back. If you upgrade the processor to the higher binned version or whatever, it jumps up to four. That's goofy. It's goofy. All right. We have spent now exactly as long talking about the event as the event was itself. So we're done here. This event deserves so far. Thank you, guys. Dan, I'm assuming we will have reviews of these at some point in the hopefully not too distant future. So stay tuned for that.

26:53Stay tuned. Yep. Thank you both. We got to take a break and then we're going to come back and we're going to talk about cameras like iPhones, which shoot events sometimes at night. We'll be right back.

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28:19We're back. Right at the end of the Apple thing the other night, there was this little notice on the stream that said the event had been shot on an iPhone, an iPhone 15 Pro Max, I think, and edited on a Mac, which is impressive given all the dark shots and swoopy drone stuff and the huge empty rooms and the tricky camera moves. It was a pretty good flex from Apple. But how big a flex, really? That's the question for me. The event was shot on an iPhone, but as we saw in some of the behind the scenes footage, it was an iPhone plus like a room full of giant lights and a bunch of drones and gimbals and much more.

28:54They didn't just like put the phone in video mode and pointed at Tim Cook. You know what I mean? And I don't mean that as a dig. That's not how anyone ever shoots anything professional. And this is still really cool. And actually, one of the things I thought was interesting was one of the folks who produced the event said that it was remarkable how not different it was to use the iPhone. Here's a clip from the behind the scenes shot. We're able to get the same complex shots on such a small device, similar to how we would do any traditional camera. We're on cranes, dollies, drone shots. Drones going up.

29:27This all raises a question we've been kind of asking all year. How good are smartphone cameras really? Have they gotten so good over the last 15 years that we've stopped noticing the ways they keep getting better, but they continue to be mind-blowing? Are they going to be as good as or better than big pro-level cameras anytime soon? We've been made these grand promises about the evolution of smartphone cameras. Where are we on that road? To figure that out, I grabbed Becca Farsachi, who has been running around all summer and fall taking photos and video with all of these new high-end smartphones.

30:00And we're going to get to the bottom of this. Becca, welcome back to The Vergecast. Thanks for having me. Let's talk cameras, because you've been doing tests of really the iPhone and the Pixel are the two I'm most curious about. And I think the biggest question that I've had over the course of this year is, where are we in smartphone cameras? I feel like we've been on this trend of like smartphone cameras are getting really good, really fast, better every year. They're eventually going to be as good as pro cameras. Just you wait. And I feel like that idea has really aggressively plateaued for me the last couple of years.

30:30But then Apple comes out and they're like, it's the most pro. Whenever you can, you know, use video out through USB-C. This is a pro camera. Where are we in smartphone cameras? OK, question for you. When was last time you were impressed with the smartphone camera? Like truly like blown away impressed. I think the cinematic mode on the iPhone was the first one in a long time. It had been a while before that, but the cinematic mode on the iPhone was a moment that I was like, holy crap, this takes a thing I couldn't do before and works. I can now all of my like awful video walking down the street now looks passable.

31:04But just in terms of like the photos I get out of a phone, it's been years. Okay. Talk to me about cinematic mode. Do you still use it? Occasionally. It's one of those things that I use when I remember to turn it on. Okay. Which I think is the problem with a lot of phone cameras is they have a lot of cool features that are six swipes away and thus I don't use them. Yeah. And that's something about the Pixel 8 Pro and the Pixel 8 camera system that we'll talk about in a bit. Interesting. Cinematic mode. Okay. And that basically, cinematic mode, applies a blur effect to the background of your videos.

31:34It makes them look a bit more what some would call professional. It came in the iPhone 13, I believe. Maybe just the Pro. I think it started in the Pro and has since worked its way down. Yeah. And it like stabilizes things as you're walking. It just, it just feels. Adds a little bit of a color look. Yeah. And so all the things where you're like, I want to, I want to walk through something as I'm taking video and it used to just feel jumpy and bad. It smooths it out in a way that like, I will actually watch those videos later. Cool. And that's a software. Yeah. That's software. Yeah. Okay. So really you weren't impressed with the camera.

32:03You were just impressed with software that this company added. Yeah. Okay. That's fair. Hardware side of things, it is very slow, but the way I look at it, like I think, you know, You entered this question kind of comparing them to standalone cameras, cameras that have interchangeable lenses or that we only use to take photos. And there's just really no comparison to me because the experience is so different. Okay. Like when I pick up a smartphone to take a photo, it feels like I'm picking up a brick and I'm pointing it at someone and they know the etiquette, they know what to do. But when I pick up like a camera that's made to take photos, it feels different.

32:36I feel like my purpose is to only take photos. and the person who's standing in front of me all of a sudden is a lot more nervous. And so they're two like very different things. So now if we talk about just phones and their cameras, do we think that they are progressing meaningfully? Maybe like every three years. Every three years. I feel like if you look at like the iPhone 12 and you compare it to the 15, there is a big difference in quality. That's fair. I would know because I use an iPhone 12. Nice. But if I look at the 14 to the 15. Yeah. No, you're not going to notice a difference. And I guess that's fair.

33:11I mean, that's like the upgrade cycle of a phone now, right? People are keeping them for three, four or five years. So if you're feeling that upgrade every time you actually upgrade your phone, maybe that still counts. But I just can't let go of this idea that for, I don't know, the last, say, eight years, we have been told it's sort of right around the corner where your phone's photos are going to be passably the same as what you'd get from a DSLR or a Fuji street camera that people run around with for thousands of dollars or whatever. I love the Fuji street camera. This is what I call that. There's a million of them in there.

33:42They're all X1, whatever. They're just the Fuji street camera. But I just don't feel like we're getting closer to that at this point. I feel like we're teaching these cameras to do new things on smartphones, which are cool. But just in terms of how my photos and videos look, I don't necessarily feel like I've gotten much closer to I truly won't miss my camera in a while. OK, back to your point about forgetting to turn on cinematic mode. There are settings. Let's talk about the iPhone for a moment because I think it actually I do think the iPhone 15 Pro's camera comes close in some ways to some standalone cameras.

34:17But you have to be willing to click some buttons. And I don't think you're going to be that person. And I don't think phones are like I don't think they're trying to have you pick it up and like take the photo that maybe you imagine that a standalone camera takes. You have to go in and tune some things, right? Which again goes back to your point about the object itself. You just have all that stuff one thumb movement away when you pick up a big camera in a way that on your phone it's actually buried in settings menus. Yeah, buried in settings and also not one thumb. My God. I mean, these things are huge.

34:53I got tiny hands and reaching across the screen sucks and I'm less likely to push buttons that are across the screen. So let's make them small. Okay, so like what do you do on the 15 Pro to get there? Oh, I'm so excited. Let me tell you about it. Please. So there is like a 48 megapixel mode, right? And you can turn that on and you can take a photo. Like I find faces. It's going to find faces. It's like it loves faces. And if you are, say, like five feet away from somebody and then the background is like far beyond them, you'll actually start to get some depth. Like some natural depth because the sensors are actually getting bigger and the lenses are bigger and, you know, like real camera things are starting to happen.

35:34And so much of that is physics. Like you need space for those things. Real physics. Yeah. Can I explain it well? Some days. I know big sensors. Good. Big sensor. Good. Bigger lenses. Good. Got that. Sometimes more megapixels. Fine. Yeah. But yeah, you're starting to get like some real depth. I especially notice it if I turn on like, you know, raw photos, 48 megapixels, blah, blah, blah. And I flip the camera around and I take a photo of myself with the main camera. Like that distance from like, I don't know, maybe that's two feet on me. That like I'm going to actually see depth. And you can compare that to like, you know, some of the lower end Sony cameras.

36:13Okay. And it's like not terribly far off, you know, something that has like a smaller sensor, like an APS-C sensor. Like it's looking pretty good. And the colors are really nice. I mean, Apple has always kind of had a really great color science. And so it's just like, for me, I love like a little bit more blue. And so like denim, oh my God, the way it reproduces denim. I'm just like, wow, I'm going to wear this denim jacket every day. So, all right. Well, what else? I feel like to me, the thing on the 15 that has actually been the biggest improvement is the fact that you can now do portrait after, which goes back to your point of like, I don't have to remember the thing anymore.

36:49I can just take the picture and figure out what to do with it later, which is a weird, like we like to talk about what is a photo. There's like a weird philosophical question behind all that. But just like leaving that aside, it's nice that I don't have to sit there and go, oh, I have two seconds to get this like cute photo of my dog doing a funny thing. I don't have to swipe it to portrait and then try to it says like back up. You're too close. And then I have to end. I've just missed it. Now you just take the picture and it does the thing. Sometimes. But yeah. Yeah. But I wonder how much we can put that in software.

37:18Because like you spend a lot of time. One of my favorite things is to be in the Verge office and just watch you or someone else on the video team set up a camera. Because it's such a good reminder of like there's so much time of just you hit a button and then you look at the screen and you look at the histogram. You're like, that's not it. And then you hit more buttons. And it's just like there's work that goes into doing this stuff that all these companies are trying to abstract out on your phone. I wonder how possible that is ever going to be. And if the answer is just give people more knobs, now we're back to like the user interface for that on a phone is just never quite going to work.

37:52I think it can get really good. It can get really good. And I see a world where, you know, the iPhone starts suggesting more like try portrait mode on this. So it's like even more like you're not thinking about it. I mean, Google has proven time and time again with their camera systems that like software can do a lot. And there is an amazing amount you can do in post. Oh, my God. An amazing amount if you feel like digging and then also manipulating images. But I do want to I mean, flat out software can do a lot. I don't know where we're headed. I don't have an answer for like, oh, yeah, in 10 years, like all of our photos are going to have this great blur and it's going to look more natural and the cutout is going to be better.

38:28I don't know. That's what I love about my job is that like I get a new product and I get to be like, oh, did this happen this year? But back to like the what is a photo? Like, I love this question. I love thinking about it. I think about it a lot. I don't think phones like really take photos anymore. I mean, they take photos, but like they're manipulating so much of the color. They're like, I mean, and then now you can like change anything you want. Like you can take a photo on iPhone and put it in Google Photos and change everything. So like these to me aren't like, let's stop like asking ourselves, like, what is a photo?

38:58Like, I mean, first of all, I will never stop asking that question. Go ahead. Keep asking. And I will fire me if I stop asking that question. No, somebody described it to me relatively recently, which I thought was really interesting. was what we're doing with our phone cameras now is to photography what like the cameras spinning around on top of the Google Maps mapping things are where they are like, they are fundamentally data collection devices. And then you can do all kinds of interesting things with the data. Google uses it to map roads. It uses it to get street view. It uses it to find places.

39:29It uses it for AR and Google Maps, like all this stuff. Technically what it is capturing is video. But the point of it is not the video. The point of it is the data inside of the video. And they were like, that's just what our phones are now. They're collecting a bunch of data about their surroundings that you then manipulate to be whatever you want. I was like, that's a cool way of thinking about it. That is fundamentally not photography. But it is a really interesting way of thinking about like what happens when I hit the button on my camera. Well, let's also think about like what you're taking photos of.

39:56I mean, I'll tell you what I take photos of. Like receipts. You in denim jackets. Me in denim. Yeah, the top number one is me in denim. Number two is receipts. It's number three is like I just like, oh, I want to remember this restaurant. Let me just take a photo of it because that's quicker. Like I'm not really taking like photos. I mean, I like I'm collecting data, as you're saying. And so like I don't have this big problem around like, oh, our phones don't take photos. It's like I just need it to like collect information, you know, and like and then I'm going to send that information to my friends and they can see that I, I don't know, went swimming and it was really fun.

40:33And that's just data to them, too, on me. Andrew, our producer, was saying to me before we started that we're still in this phase where if you shoot something on a smartphone, you always say you shot it on a smartphone. That, like, every magazine cover, nobody talks about the camera that they use, but they'll always tell you that they shot it on an iPhone. I love this. I do, too. And it's so true. And it's like I could name you the movies that Steven Soderbergh shot with an iPhone. I could not for one second tell you what camera he uses when it's not an iPhone. And that to me goes to either we're just doing different things with different goals or phones are not getting anywhere near the realm of the other stuff because the camera shouldn't matter.

41:08Disagree. I think if everyone actually knew cameras, like I would love to know what every magazine cover is shot on because I know cameras. Everyone knows phones. So, of course, if you tell them, oh, it's shot on an iPhone, it's like they know what that is. If you told them it was shot on like a Nikon Z9. That's true, but I also think part of it is like it's still such a novelty that you can take a cool photo on a phone. And what they don't show you is that you have to do twice as much lighting and work way harder to get that photo to look good on a phone. Such that it will exist on a magazine cover.

41:38But I just think it's still like, oh my God, you can take a good photo with a phone. And to me, it's like until we're way past that where... Wait, but you don't believe that? Are you still at that point where you're shocked that you can take a good photo on a phone? No, but everybody is. You think they are? It's still such a novelty that you can do something cool on a phone. Can we pull the audience? Marquez Brownlee started a whole new YouTube channel where he shoots stuff on his phone. And part of the shtick is I'm shooting it on my phone to prove that you can. And it's genius because then he's also just like testing the phone at the same time.

42:06Oh, it's great. And the channel is great. He did it all extremely well and very smart. And he just like sits next to cars and films himself doing selfie videos. Great job. But it is, we're still at the point where like I can do this on my phone is like mind blowing to lots of people. Yeah, interesting. I would love to hear from folks if you agree or disagree with that. Because I don't know, like I remember Casey Neistat was shooting videos and like, I don't know, on his like Samsung Galaxy S7 or something. And like that, I was like, whoa, that's crazy. But that was like six years. No, that had to be more than six years ago.

42:37That had to be like eight years ago now. So I guess that novelty is like gone to me. Like it's, there's no doubt you can take a good photo on a phone. That's fair. And so then your point of like, are we going to get any better? It's like, yeah, marginally. But like we can already do all the things that we want to do on them. Yeah. So then the bigger question for me that I get a lot is like, why would I buy a standalone camera? Like, I really believe that people think that their phone cameras are good enough. And so then I ask them, like, well, what do you want to do? Like, what do you think a camera can give you that your phone isn't?

43:07Right. And it's always experience. And that's like where I base all of my like reviews around is like, what is the experience of holding this thing? What is the experience of using this thing? Like, that's what it is for me, because we can all take a good photo. I even have I should have brought that. I have the first iPhone, right? Nice. And like the camera on it, I love. It takes good photos. Like, and what does good mean? Okay. They're exposed well enough. Sure. You can see things well enough. Like the color's fine. It's kind of in focus, but the experience is so fun. And like, there's just, yeah.

43:42So like, yeah, phones will get better. But like, I think everyone believes that what they have in their pocket is actually pretty good. This is my point. You're grading on a curve. We're still grading phones on a curve. like it's because their phones like you're you're not replacing your professional gear you still carry 11 pelican cases every time you want to shoot something no i carry one pelican case and it's got a lot of stickers and it's very cute and we love her what are you talking 11 i don't even i don't even have hands for that there's like a van that follows becca around every time you go to shoot something boy i wish if anyone wants to drive that van is that has that van hit me up okay let's switch gears a little bit just before we have to go i'm curious about the differences between the iPhone 15 and I guess specifically the iPhone 15 Pro, which is like the camera-iest camera and the Pixel 8 Pro.

44:27And we were talking about this on the show a couple of weeks ago that we've sort of settled into a place where those two companies and Samsung to some extent too, have different ideas about photos, but everybody had kind of settled into their lane. And it's like, we'd gotten to a point where I think you could fairly reliably look at a photo and guess which company made the phone that it captured. You've spent a bunch of time with the Pixel and the iPhone over the last couple of months. Is that still the case? Are they kind of in their own lane about what their photos should look like? I think we are all coming together to the most collective.

45:01We think this photo looks good. Interesting. Okay. I really do. We do this fun thing. I do this fun thing. And then I see who will take the bait. When I'm doing these photo comparisons, I basically start the edit. Here's some like video jargon for you or some background on my process. I start the edit before I even start the script because like I just take so many photos. Like I really take over a thousand photos and then I put them all next to each other in the timeline and I sit there and I watch a blank timeline. Sometimes I put music in just for fun and I just like watch the slideshow happen and then I screenshot it and I send it to people and I'm like, okay, these are three different phones.

45:37Tell me which one's which. And like, I would say one person always takes the bait and that's Viren, my boss and coworker. He's like a photo person, he can't even tell anymore. Sometimes I can't even tell. Sometimes I'm like, oh wait, I forgot. Let me go look at the file names. Interesting. Like we are really coming to like the point of like, this is what the most people think is a good photo. And that's what all of the North Star for all of these companies is. So what are the characteristics of that? I'm assuming it's a little extra saturation everywhere. We love dynamic range. Oh my God, we love dynamic range.

46:09Like the number one most, we love dynamic yes let me see the sky and the ground let's do yes yes and the shadows like the man lurking in the back i want him to and i would think that everything you wouldn't want it to be too colorful but you'd want it to be like three percent extra colorful i don't know you tell me what are you seeing you know i think that the dynamic range is actually interesting because i think there's like a pendulum right i think companies really swung out on the dynamic range and it was like all of a sudden everything was not believable, which is funny that like. Yeah, like sometimes things are dark.

46:42Yeah. Which phones forgot for a while. Yeah, like I see shadows and that's okay. And so I think we're now we're like coming back to like more of a middle ground there. I think, you know, white balance is really important. You know, more so there's some like focus things happening. Like people do like a little depth of field. You know, people do want things to be a little out of focus, properly exposed, but that's been good for a long time. But the big thing is the white balance. That used to be the differentiator between like Google and Apple. You know, it was like the iPhone was always warmer and the Pixel was always cooler.

47:14And now we're seeing the Pixel kind of like realize that it was a little too cool and come towards Apple in that way. But it does feel like the competition has always kind of been chasing Apple and continues to. And I find that where their photos have been consistent throughout cameras, the Pixel has changed more and has adapted more to that style. Okay. So you think we're headed towards a much more like coherent version of what a smartphone photo looks like? Yes, because, you know, much like we don't label magazines with like what camera took them, like on Instagram, like you don't know what everyone's phone, who's everyone, you know, what phone they have.

47:49And I think people want to like fit in on Instagram, right? So you want the photo that looks good, but also it doesn't look too different from everyone else's. And, you know, maybe if you're an iPhone user, you want to like call out your Android friends and your Android friends just want to live in peace. All right. They're doing fine. Just leave them alone. Fine, y 'all. Shut up. We don't care that we're green. That only affects you. Wow, that's kind of deep, actually. We're going to come back to that another time. It's fine. So what about the pro experience of doing this? Obviously, Apple made a bunch of noise about this is a pro camera.

48:20Yeah. Having used these things kind of within an inch of their life, does it feel more pro? There's more stuff to do, but I would not say that's the same thing as being a pro camera. No, I think, you know, obviously pro is like marketing. It's like a way to say this is the best phone, but they can't call it like the iPhone 15 best. Parentheses, the good one. I wish they would. The better iPhone 15 Pro. The bigger, better. Yeah, that would be incredible. The smaller, not so good. I mean, it's good. Never mind. So, I mean, all of that's marketing, right? And I was talking to some folks at Google at the event, and I was kind of picking their brain on like Pro Tools and Pro this and Pro that.

48:58And, you know, Google with the Pixel 8 Pro didn't say this is for pros, whereas in the iPhone 15 Pro Max, they were like, this is for pros. And Google's kind of stance on it was like, you know, if folks who are professional photographers come to the system, they will have tools that they recognize in their professional workflow. And that's cool. And that's great. And they're like and they honestly said to me, but we find that most pros don't like, you know, they they pick up a phone because they know that it's like the easy thing and they're not trying to work with it. And I haven't spoken to Apple about this, so I don't know where they stand on it.

49:31The thing is they label everything pro, but then they don't give the pro tools, which it's like, okay, that's fine because we've established that pros aren't maybe using the system for their professional work. But it does just kind of baffle me, and I think it's just because they want people to buy apps and pay for things. I think that's right. And I do think there's potentially more interesting stuff to come on the third-party side. Like what we've seen from the third-party camera apps in the last few months has been really interesting. Yeah. And there's potentially a lot more to do there. And I want to shout out all the developers there.

50:00I did feel bad when I made this whole thousand photos with the iPhone 15 Pro, and I went to the desert. It was sick, and I drove in sand for the first time, and I'm addicted. I just want to whip through the sand. Anyway, in that, I was like, you know, Apple, if you want to be a pro camera, you have to have pro controls. And I didn't really mention and shout out all the folks who have built pro controls for the iPhone. and there's many good ones that I wish I could list off for you right now and I and I can't just pull them out of my brain like that but there's lots of folks that are building really good tools if you're interested in that and I think it is cool that there is like a marketplace for those people to make what they love and do what they love so yeah totally um all right we have to go but before we do okay you have to tell me yeah only one answer okay what is the best smartphone for taking pictures and video right now oh my god okay can I tell you what it's not no oh Okay, well, it's the first-gen iPhone.

50:55It's gorgeous. It has, like, a filmic quality. It makes the cutest noise. It's really slow. And she's just so cute to hold in your hands. And everybody's like, oh, my God, what is that? And then you get to open the camera and take a photo. And everyone is just, like, amazed. And it warms my whole heart. It's a great bar trick. I've been doing it a lot. It's actually a really good answer. I'll allow that. I was not going to allow that when you started talking. And now I will allow that. I'll go get it out of my desk. What if the future of Polaroids is just like first gen iPhones that they just like make a comeback as the new retro camera that everybody's obsessed with?

51:30And they're going to sell them on Urban Outfitters where they're selling the iPod. And Urban Outfitters is going to make a killing. Becca, this is going to happen now. You just did this and I'm going to be so upset with you when this happens. No, you're going to love it. But also I will buy one. It's the greatest experience. Get them on eBay while you can, everybody. All right. We got to take a break. Becca, thank you so much. Yeah.

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53:08All right, we're back. Let's get to the hotline. As always, the number is 866-VERGE11 and the email is vergecast at theverge.com. We love all your questions. Call us, email us, bring us the weirdest thing you can think of. And we always try to answer at least one on the show every week. This week, we have a question about VR and AR and XR and mixed reality and all these new things about glasses on your face. So I grabbed Addie Robertson, who knows this space better than anybody. Addie, thanks for being here. Hi. This is about a product that of the people at The Verge only you and I have used so far.

53:39So I'm just going to play you the question and we're going to go from there. Sound good? Sounds good. All right, let's do it. It's from Peter. Hi, guys. This is Peter, long-time listener, first-time caller. I love what you do, but I am at a little bit of an impasse. I'm a big proponent of the future and of the potential for spatial computing. I love this idea of the Apple Vision Pro headset, and I'm excited to try it out. But I recently saw a really good review of the Xreal glasses, formerly called Nreal glasses, and I think you guys were talking about them recently too. And I can't help but wonder if this really is something that captures 90 % of the use cases, particularly that I'm going to use the Apple Vision Pro for, at one-tenth the price and much more convenient form factor.

54:25No battery, much lighter, you can pop it in your pocket. I really feel like we need to think about this, and this might be closer to where we're heading than the big, heavy Apple Vision Pro. Thoughts? Thank you. I love this question, but I want to know, like, right off the top, what you think. Okay. So I just have to caveat, A, I'm assuming we're talking about the Nreal, or sorry, the Xreal Airs, not the Xreal lights. That's correct. The Xreal Airs are the new headset. And I am also going to only be able to talk about this from really a theoretical perspective. Haven't used the Vision Pro, have just played a bit with the new Xreal glasses.

55:03I think it depends on what you see 90 % of the use cases as being, but Apple has all of this sort of you'll be able to do situational things kind of promise going on that the idea is that it can sense your surroundings to some extent that it can pin things to your desk or your wall or it can give the illusion that it has actual virtual objects in your real space and that is a thing you will not get at all with the new x-real headset that that is purely it's like imagine you stuck a tablet up in front of your face and the tablet was always there and the tablet was also like slightly transparent, especially in light.

55:41Those are the downsides of Xreal. The upsides is that in a lot of ways, I agree with you. A, you have a thing that is not tied to Apple's ecosystem or to a bunch of XR developers making things, that it's really just you plug it in, you see a screen in front of your face, it's incredibly convenient. B, that you can see everything else. Actually, you're not passing through a video feed, which is just kind of almost inherently going to be lower resolution and an inferior experience to the real world. And see, yeah, they're kind of surprisingly comfortable even compared to the older Xreal glasses.

56:16And I haven't tried the Vision Pro, but it's a big thing. Yeah, it's less comfortable, I can say with great confidence. So yeah, I really think people should be giving this a look. I'm not necessarily clear that it's a super viable product yet, and I haven't had a chance to seriously review it. But I am similarly optimistic about it. I think Xreal is a really interesting company. I agree. And I think your point about it depends on what 90 % of your use cases are is really right. Because the thing that X-Rail has done for me is make it very clear that the Vision Pro's idea of a$3 ,500 device that essentially puts a bunch of virtual computer monitors in the air and you'll sit there with your mouse and keyboard and use a headset to be a bunch of monitors.

56:57that is going to be, if not like totally commoditized very soon, then like not worth$3 ,500. Because that's fundamentally what the X-Real glasses are, right? Like you said, they are just computer monitors. Imagine plugging any device you have into a monitor that just floats in front of your face. So if that's your use case, X-Real is pretty good. I don't think it'll be as good as a lot of the stuff that Vision Pro is doing, but it does the job fairly well. To me, the biggest downside of these glasses so far and really a lot of these sort of plug and play products is just the interface like holding up my phone while watching something through the x-ray glasses it's cool because i can just like lean back and watch on a big screen but i'm still navigating on my phone which means i'm constantly looking down at my phone and kind of losing the thing whereas you know the vision pro and the meta stuff has native interactions and it feels like you're in a space as opposed to this much hackier feeling thing that is the glasses.

57:51So again, it's a much less elegant system. But if the goal is like I need more screens in front of my face while I sit at my computer, like X-Fill is pretty close. I think it also a phone is kind of the worst way to interact with it. That's true. I was using it with the Steam Deck and the Steam Deck is basically just I'm holding a controller and I can see the screen in front of my face now. And so it's just I did it with the Switch for a while for the same reason. Yeah, pretty much just like using a console yeah and in that case it's very good so i think in general like we're both pretty bullish on this kind of glasses right i think is is xreal even like doing anything sort of unusual or are they just sort of first in this space you've been paying attention to these like wacky manufacturers of ar glasses longer than i have like is xreal doing something special my sense is that they are just ruthlessly conceptually efficient okay that their first glasses were a bit more in the, they have cameras and you can play sort of AR games and you can pin things sort of to the floor and they completely cut that.

58:53There's no cameras in the new glasses. It's just a thing that sits there. It doesn't give any illusion of interacting with space, but that also means that they can be really light. They can be, I'm not going to say normal looking, but more normal looking, and they can be comparatively really cheap. And I think that they really have actually just figured out there's a thing maybe we can make people want to do with this and we're going to deliver the best experience of that we can yeah i said i said on the show last week that i'm super intrigued by this race between companies like meta which are basically saying we're going to take various stylish classes start with essentially audio and then try to figure out how to add more screen stuff to it and companies like xrail who are like we have a screen it looks kind of silly in in comparison to like the ray-bans meta is selling but it has a screen and we'll figure out how to do the rest of it later.

59:38And those two companies are sort of running at each other from opposite directions. And it's going to be interesting to see what happens. And then I think like the Quest and Vision Pro stuff are just like all the way off in a different dimension. And I think it's not impossible that the simpler stuff is going to end up being way more appealing to way more people. I would not bet on that yet, but I don't think that's out of the question. Yeah, I think pass through has just really inherent limitations. I know that there are cases that it's very good for there are specific things it's very good for.

1:00:05But as a really casual consumer device, it is not the thing I'm the most bullish on. Yeah, that's fair. So$400 for X-Rail glasses. Again, we've only used them a very little bit. Like, Strikes Me is a lot to spend. They're a little bit of a novelty, but compared to, you know, whatever,$3 ,500 for the Vision Pro next year, which isn't even shipping yet, I guess it's a good deal. It's more than 10 % is fun for 10 % of the price, I guess. I don't know. Yeah, I think that if you think what you need is a really versatile, albeit imperfect screen that goes pretty much anywhere with you and that has a level of privacy if you're, I don't know, somewhere you don't want people to see what you're doing and that you can just really, as far as I can tell, plug into most things you own pretty easily.

1:00:49It seems like a good early adopter thing. Yeah. My main use case so far has been sitting here in this chair at my desk, like with feet up on my desk, leaning back, head sort of slightly upwards with the glasses on playing video games with the controller in my hand. And like you said, it's an excellent setup. The screen's not amazing. Neither is the Switches. It does the job. Yeah, my biggest problem so far is really just that you have to angle them precisely to not get some really heavy blur at the bottom of the screen. I've spent a lot of time moving the nose pads around to get them just so. And I eventually can get them there, but it is a fair amount of work, you're right.

1:01:24Yeah, it's way better than the original, like the lights, but it's still, I think the biggest drawback to them. Yeah, that's fair. All right, Addy, thank you as always. Appreciate it. Yeah. All right, that's it for the VergeCast today. Thanks to everybody who was on the show. And thank you as always for listening. There's lots more on everything we talked about from Becca's Thousand Photos series to all of the Apple coverage on TheVerge.com. We'll put some links in the show notes, but read TheVerge.com. It's a good website. As always, if you have thoughts, questions, feelings, or other costumes you wish Tim Cook had worn, you can always email us at VergeCast at TheVerge.com.

1:01:58or keep calling the hotline 866-VERGE-11. All your thoughts, questions, ideas, everything. We love it all. And we do, like I said, one hotline question every week. So keep them coming. This show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Neil, I, Alex, and I will be back on Friday to talk inevitably more about Apple, plus Sam Bankman, Freed, Google, and all the other stuff happening in tech. See you then. Rock and roll.

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