00:00:00 ◼ ► So, are we all returning our vision prose as the news stories seem to indicate is the big wave?
00:00:06 ◼ ► This is what you decide to do to start the show. I was saving this and now you're just going to drop this bomb right up front.
00:00:16 ◼ ► No, of course not. But I was trying very hard to make it sound believable. I'm a terrible liar, so I don't think I succeeded, but I was trying very hard.
00:00:25 ◼ ► No, I didn't return mine. I mean, truth be told, now we are getting into a topic that I don't think you intend to.
00:00:29 ◼ ► But it is exceedingly overpriced. It is exceedingly heavy. I don't think my particular nose construction is terribly compatible with it.
00:00:39 ◼ ► And I'm stubborn and obstinately refusing to use the probably more comfortable two-sided strap. I'm still on the crank strap.
00:00:48 ◼ ► I feel like my particular nose construction is that all of the weight really wants to rest on my nose.
00:00:54 ◼ ► And part of the problem is, and I've heard other people not complain as much about the nose thing, but complain about the fact that the Vision Pro really wants to sit lower on your face than I think I would choose to naturally put it.
00:01:06 ◼ ► And so if I put it where I think is most comfortable, and not on like, I don't know, my nose ridge or whatever, I'm sure there's an anatomical term for it.
00:01:15 ◼ ► But if I sit it where I want to sit it, then it's like, please move the headset down. It's too high. Or I forgot the messages.
00:01:20 ◼ ► But if you have a Vision Pro, you've seen it. And if you've seen any of the videos, you've probably seen it.
00:01:23 ◼ ► That's the Vision Pro equivalent of your hand is covering up the face ID camera on your iPad Pro?
00:01:28 ◼ ► Yep, yep, yep, yep. Exactly. Exactly. I could not think of a better analogy. And so I have to have it ride a little bit lower than I want.
00:01:35 ◼ ► And so for me, all of the weight tends to sit on my nose unless I really crank the crank strap really tight, in which case then I can transition some of that weight onto my forehead or sometimes my cheekbones.
00:01:49 ◼ ► And that's better. But yeah, I was in a room at the library again today. And yeah, after like an hour and a half, two hours, it was hurting my schnoz a little bit.
00:01:59 ◼ ► And comically, Erin hadn't had a chance to try it until this past weekend. We've just been so very busy.
00:02:05 ◼ ► And for her, all of the weight was on her cheekbones. And immediately I knew I should have put the dual strap or whatever it's called on there for her.
00:02:15 ◼ ► But, you know, we just wanted to go plow ahead with what I was trying to show her. And she it was so uncomfortable for her that she ended up like, you know, having her pointers as like load bearing fingers under the Vision Pro just to keep it from like slamming into her cheekbones.
00:02:31 ◼ ► And I mean, I don't think Erin has exceedingly prominent cheekbones. You know, I think, you know, they're regular-ish cheekbones.
00:02:38 ◼ ► Well, this is this is part of what the different like, did you see people linked around that there was a thread on Reddit where the people were compiling basically what the light seal sizes mean?
00:02:49 ◼ ► So there's there's, you know, the two digits and then the end of the W at the end. They've figured out like through various sleuthing and trial and error and stuff that it basically encodes like each digit is separate.
00:02:58 ◼ ► It's not like 23 millimeter versus 33 millimeter. Like it's it's the two and the one or whatever. Like those are two different indicators. They can both change up or down. And one of the factors I forgot the specifics, but one of the factors is like whether it like sits high or low on your cheekbones or something like that.
00:03:14 ◼ ► And so chances are this isn't it. This is just, you know, for Erin to comfortably wear it. She would most likely need a different light seal, which I would totally buy that being said, the scan that she did said the same as me.
00:03:27 ◼ ► That doesn't mean that that's, you know, the right answer. It's just the automated scan says she and I have the same one. But it very well could be that if we had all of them arrayed out in front of us, I mean, hell, maybe even not mine would be different.
00:03:37 ◼ ► But I concur that that, you know, it's very likely that maybe a different light seal would work better for her. But certainly if she were to buy her own based only on the experience she had by scanning her face, she would end up with the same one I've got.
00:03:49 ◼ ► I think I think one of the things that's that's hurting the Vision Pro, you know, initial sales and reactions is they've made this system so complicated of how to fit it.
00:04:01 ◼ ► And it seems like the whatever the app is saying should fit you maybe is not always accurate or maybe they just are not good at presenting alternatives to people or whatever it is, it's a highly, you know, fit dependent device.
00:04:14 ◼ ► And I was thinking, like, why do we not hear about this so much with the Quest headsets? I mean, obviously part of it is I think we are applying stricter standards to Apple because everyone does and their stuff always gets more scrutiny.
00:04:28 ◼ ► But I think part of it might also just be like there's such a weight difference. Like Apple chose to make a very high end headset. It's a very heavy headset compared to its competitors.
00:04:37 ◼ ► And maybe therefore it is more sensitive to like different fit adjustments. And I was thinking, like, is it a mistake to have made the Vision Pro in such a way that the light seal or whatever, whatever the fit mechanics of it are, are not adjustable on the device?
00:04:56 ◼ ► Now, obviously, that would introduce more mechanical complexity, probably a little bit more weight as a result of that. But like, would it have been a better choice? I know Apple would never do this, but would it have been a better choice to have like some adjustment knobs or whatever, like on the actual light seal to have it be somewhat adjustable?
00:05:12 ◼ ► I don't know. But it seems like there's a lot of areas where Apple's approach to this is you find your perfect fit or more often we automatically find it for you. Here it is. Period. And if your perfect fit is a little bit different, they're just like, no, this is your perfect fit. Period.
00:05:29 ◼ ► And there's just no alternative. I wonder if that's something that they'll tweak over time.
00:05:34 ◼ ► It's a third party opportunity, though. It's kind of like how third parties sell tips for the AirPods Pro, right? Like all day you can buy foamy tips or plastic tips or tips where you take a mold of your ear.
00:05:44 ◼ ► Because as far as I know, there is no weird DRM or parts pairing with the light shield. It's just fabric and plastic and a couple little magnets. I would imagine that if this product ever becomes popular enough that it can sustain the third party ecosystem for light shields.
00:05:59 ◼ ► Like if they start selling to lots of people, there'll be third party things that you can snap in there that are very differently shaped, maybe are adjustable.
00:06:07 ◼ ► You know, like I think the rigidity of the main screen part is tough to change at this point in the technology curve because there's a lot of stuff going on in there that really kind of has to be carefully aligned.
00:06:18 ◼ ► But the replaceable light shield is actually a good design for, if not Apple, doing this for third parties to say, "Yeah, we'll sell you a thing for less than $200 that goes between you and the main unit. And maybe you can find one of these that fits you better."
00:06:33 ◼ ► I mean, certainly like the Quest line does have many third party, like, you know, head gaskets or whatever they're called.
00:06:47 ◼ ► Very true. But I don't know. I do think that, I don't know how I got on this tangent, which I believe I did to myself, but I do really like this device.
00:07:01 ◼ ► And since I do feel like it is a compulsory purchase for this, for my job, both in terms of ATP and call sheet, I feel like I kind of had to spend the money.
00:07:13 ◼ ► And I will whine about the money I've spent until the end of time because, hi, have we met? Hi, this is Casey.
00:07:20 ◼ ► Fair. But I do really love the device. And, you know, it is incredible for media consumption.
00:07:28 ◼ ► I think you and I will never see eye to eye as to whether or not it's good as a secondary monitor for your replacement monitor for your Mac.
00:07:38 ◼ ► And no, I don't I don't play. I mean, my time has run out at this point or I think is running out or has run out, but I don't plan to return it.
00:07:49 ◼ ► And I don't know if I'd go so far as to say I love it quite yet, but I do really, really like it.
00:07:58 ◼ ► See, I think it's cool, but I'm treating mine. I'm ending up using it more like a dev kit than like a product that's going to really have a huge place in my life so far.
00:08:09 ◼ ► Because, I mean, first of all, look, Apple reaped what it sowed. There are no apps. There's no games. There's very little content.
00:08:30 ◼ ► And the reality is I don't watch that many movies. And when I do watch movies, I'm rarely watching them alone.
00:08:37 ◼ ► I'm not sure I'm going to have all use for it. That's not to say that no one else has use for this product.
00:08:41 ◼ ► Just me. Like, I don't have a ton of use for it. I was really hoping the Mac screen angle of it would be very useful to me, especially now.
00:08:49 ◼ ► I'm in this weird housing transitional period where I really want a big monitor, but I can't really fit one in this rental house.
00:08:55 ◼ ► There's all sorts of uses that I thought I might be able to squeeze out of it that ended up not really working that well for me.
00:09:03 ◼ ► So for me, it's really just a dev kit, and it's a dev kit for a branch of my app that I'm not really working on yet because I don't have time because I'm working on the iPhone version.
00:09:13 ◼ ► And I think this is going to be kind of a story we keep hearing, something like that, where it's going to be difficult. Again, over time, it's going to be difficult for developers to justify investing time into the Vision OS platform if there's no customer base for it.
00:09:28 ◼ ► And it's a chicken and egg problem. If there's not a lot of apps and content on it, it's going to be difficult for a lot of people to justify buying one, especially with the other hard-to-justify factors like the price and the single-person experience and some of the version 1 challenges and limitations.
00:09:42 ◼ ► Maybe I'm totally wrong, and maybe this is selling like gangbusters way above Apple's expectations, and maybe they can keep thinking that they don't need developers.
00:09:51 ◼ ► But the reality is what Apple has shown in their actions around app store policy over and over again is they believe that they grace us with a platform full of users, and we should kiss their feet and thank them and give them a third of our money or whatever, you know, because these are their customers they're bringing to us.
00:10:10 ◼ ► Effectively, therefore, we are not really bringing us any value to their platform, that they are bringing the platform full of users, and we should be very thankful for that.
00:10:16 ◼ ► And I think what we're seeing here is maybe this is demonstrating the value of developers to the platform.
00:10:24 ◼ ► If not a lot of people are finding much to do with it, that's because there's not a lot of apps and content for it, and that's because there's not a lot of third-party development for it.
00:10:36 ◼ ► And so maybe, I mean, I know Apple will not change their app store policies, but maybe at least this helps show them a little bit, like kind of where it hurts, because they just did this huge launch of this huge platform, and I think it might be maybe a little below expectations.
00:10:55 ◼ ► It's probably too early to say, but I'm kind of just getting that feeling, like I think they thought there would be a lot more apps than there are, and I think they thought there would be a lot more developer interest than there has been.
00:11:05 ◼ ► Maybe they thought there would be a lot more content deals from the big content publishers and stuff, and maybe that's not really happening as quickly or yet either.
00:11:12 ◼ ► This platform is starving for apps and content. It's starving for them. It's just not there yet, and I hope it's coming, but what if it's not?
00:11:22 ◼ ► Apple's going to have to just make this work largely on their own, because they've done such an effective job of alienating everyone else in the industry.
00:11:31 ◼ ► Other than broad changes to app store policy, like C-level changes, I'm not sure what I would have done differently, but I do think, and I can't help but wonder, if ceding dev kits to a handful of indies would have gone a long way, especially if it was in concert with "talk about it."
00:11:51 ◼ ► Because I think the problem is if they had ceded, let's say, underscore for the sake of discussion, they surely would have said, "Well, here's your dev kit. You may tell no one."
00:12:02 ◼ ► And then that's not really accomplishing much. Yes, then that gets an even more polished version of Widgetsmith in the store on day one than was already there, which is good, but I think the better approach would have been to hand underscore one and say, "Go to town, man. Talk about it. Get people excited if you can."
00:12:19 ◼ ► I mean, not an edict. You know what I mean? If he's going bananas, doing all of this work and having all this fun, and underscore would talk about it, underscore would be effusive about it, not because he's full of garbage, he's not at all, but because he's just a person who finds the good in things.
00:12:36 ◼ ► And so I think, you know, you seed an underscore, you seed a James Thompson or whatever, and you start to build a little more enthusiasm in the indie community. And I think, and again, I mean, admittedly, as I'm saying this, I'm like, "Well, of course you think that because you're in the indie community."
00:12:51 ◼ ► And maybe that's true, but I don't know, I feel like it would have done a lot to build enthusiasm amongst anyone other than Disney and like Unity or whoever it was that I don't even know if they got dev kits, I just have to assume.
00:13:01 ◼ ► But, you know, whoever it is that got the dev kits, it certainly didn't seem to be indies, from what I can tell. And I feel like that was a missed opportunity. And it could have been that they wanted to and they just couldn't produce them in time or something held it up, I don't know.
00:13:14 ◼ ► But it sure seems like if you were doing these labs, which admittedly were pretty controlled, by the way, I went to a lab, but I can't tell you anything else.
00:13:21 ◼ ► Even despite these controlled labs, I feel like if you had those labs, you must have had the quantity of devices at a stage in which they were complete enough that you could have seeded a handful of trusted indies as well as the Disneys of the world.
00:13:36 ◼ ► And I wish they did and they didn't. And so, like you said, they're reaping what they sowed. And there isn't a lot on there. There's really not.
00:13:44 ◼ ► And I think part of this is exacerbated by your average iPad app is really not great on the Vision Pro, in part because all the iPad apps are shown in light mode and all the Vision Pro apps, the native apps, are not literally in dark mode, but effectively in dark mode.
00:14:00 ◼ ► And part of it is because these iPad apps are designed for touch targets that are much smaller than eye targets. And I've found that with almost every iPad app, it's often prohibitively difficult to grab the right target without using a cursor of some sort.
00:14:17 ◼ ► And Slack is to me the epitome of this, and I think I've already brought this up several times, but like changing between different Slacks, which is something I do constantly in that app, is very, very difficult. And I don't necessarily fault Slack for this, but it's just that the targets are too small.
00:14:32 ◼ ► And then it becomes difficult to use Slack. And then it's like, well, I'm just going to get my work done on my computer then.
00:14:37 ◼ ► And so all of these iPad apps are kind of eh. And there's not many Vision Pro apps because none of us had them. And so now what? And it's exactly what you said, Marco. Like, where do you go from here, Apple? What are you going to do?
00:14:50 ◼ ► What we've seen is like, I think the launch of the Vision Pro kind of is that dev kit program. You know, obviously a lot of people are buying them for their own uses, their entertainment use. A lot of it's just kind of status or YouTubers playing with it. But whatever it is, a lot of people are buying them as early adopters.
00:15:08 ◼ ► But I also think a lot of the early purchases are companies and developers who are wanting to start experimenting with it or get on board with it or try to look at porting their apps or whatever. And this is just, I think this is their dev kit program largely.
00:15:23 ◼ ► And it just so happens that you'll also see them like, you know, people watching movies in first class on airplanes as well.
00:15:29 ◼ ► The way it is now with there being almost no software and almost no content, it's not like a failure per se. It just really hurts the argument to buy it. And it really hurts the experience of owning it when, you know, I think people are predisposed to assume any new tech product is a fad that will fail and then laugh at it.
00:15:51 ◼ ► That's a very common thing in media and tech commentary culture. And I think if everyone who buys the Vision Pro at first ends up not using it very much a few weeks later because they kind of ran out of stuff to do on it, that's not great for the reputation of that product and its launch.
00:16:11 ◼ ► None of this should come as a surprise to Apple. Like, they saw coming up to the launch, like they knew how many apps there weren't. You know, they knew which apps were being built native and which ones weren't. They knew, you know, Netflix didn't have their native app submitted to them or whatever.
00:16:26 ◼ ► All the things that are missing, they knew that going into it. So it isn't like this is a surprise to Apple. Again, I hope that they are stepping on the gas behind the scenes in terms of their own content efforts. They're going to have to do most of this on their own.
00:16:41 ◼ ► They're not going to get a lot of help from third-party developers or third-party content makers on this. They have to be making a ton of the 3D content. If you're making a ton of the environment content, any kind of experiential, virtual travel stuff, they have to be the ones to kickstart that themselves.
00:17:00 ◼ ► Because no one else is going to do it with these numbers and with Apple having really alienated so many people over the last decade.
00:17:08 ◼ ► And it's funny, too, and we should probably move on from this, but I think what's kind of unfortunate about it is even though I'm, you know, kvetching a little bit about everything, like this is an amazing device.
00:17:19 ◼ ► Leaving aside the physical comfort, which is a big deal, leaving aside the cost, which is a big deal, like if you can get past that or just forget it for a minute, this is a truly incredible device.
00:17:28 ◼ ► And, you know, the 3D stuff, like consuming a 3D movie in it is very cool, but the immersive content of which there is very little, but we're hearing more and more rumblings that there's more coming, in fact statements even that there's more coming.
00:17:40 ◼ ► The immersive content is, what is the Tim phrase? It's blow away. It really just knocks your socks off.
00:17:49 ◼ ► Maybe it was. I think you might be right, actually, now that you say that. I think you're right.
00:17:54 ◼ ► I think you might be right. But anyways, the immersive stuff is just, it's unlike anything I've ever experienced. It's tremendous.
00:18:01 ◼ ► And for me, and I'm not saying it's true for you, Marco, or anyone else, but for me, I really like the Mac virtual display thing and, you know, universal control.
00:18:17 ◼ ► And so this is a truly incredible, incredible device. And even though, you know, we've kind of accidentally enumerated some of the crappy parts of it, it is incredible.
00:18:28 ◼ ► And whether or not it's the future, it is a future that I am on board with and is super neat.
00:18:34 ◼ ► And I don't want to lose sight of that because I think we're coming across as two grumpy old men, which is accurate.
00:18:38 ◼ ► But there's a good side to this as well that we're not giving, you know, we're not shining enough light on.
00:18:43 ◼ ► Like, it is incredible. And if you are lucky enough to be able to have one, it is very, very cool.
00:18:50 ◼ ► And I really think that there's a lot of potential here. It's just a question of whether or not we'll realize it.
00:18:58 ◼ ► Like, you know, because we were just saying a few weeks ago, like, this is going to be, they're going to sell as many as they can make.
00:19:03 ◼ ► It's going to be backordered for, you know, the whole year it's going to be backordered.
00:19:09 ◼ ► I just looked and I can pick one of these up tomorrow or I can have it shipped to me next week.
00:19:19 ◼ ► Speaking of things with a lot of potential that may or may not have been realized, two different things.
00:19:24 ◼ ► First of all, the 2015 movie Steve Jobs. And second of all, our new member special about that movie.
00:19:29 ◼ ► So we recorded this month's members only special about Steve Jobs, the 2015 movie with Michael Fassbender and Kate Winslet and a bunch of other people.
00:19:54 ◼ ► Yeah, man. Hey, you could have bought a Vision Pro. You could have been a part of this. You opted out of the conversation, sir.
00:20:07 ◼ ► Unless I want to watch Major League Soccer, games that have already taken place, because Apple just announced they're providing that content. Anyway.
00:20:12 ◼ ► See, I put you to sleep before I talked about the good parts, apparently, because there are good parts, for sure.
00:20:16 ◼ ► ATB.fm/join if you'd like to become a member. Not all of our member specials are about movies, but some of them are, and this one is.
00:20:25 ◼ ► It is accurate. No, it was a lot of fun watching this and talking about it, and I don't want to give anything away.
00:20:32 ◼ ► But yeah, remember that if you go to ATB.fm/join, you can join on a monthly or yearly basis.
00:20:39 ◼ ► You can also go to ATB.fm/gift, if I'm not mistaken, to gift yourself or someone else a membership. Hint, hint, hint.
00:20:50 ◼ ► But yeah, we had a lot of fun recording this one, and if you become a member, for any amount of time, you can go back in the history books and listen to any of our member specials.
00:21:07 ◼ ► I don't have an account in front of me, but we have a fair bit of member specials in the can at this point.
00:21:12 ◼ ► So check it out, ATB Movie Club, Steve Jobs, and we'll put links in the show notes for the relevant information, ATB.fm/join.
00:21:24 ◼ ► Chase writes, "Regarding the blur in the Vision Pro when you turn your head, I'm pretty sure that this is just typical sample and hold display blur.
00:21:36 ◼ ► Impulse displays like CRTs and plasma have much higher motion resolution. To combat this, LCDs can use backlight strobing, and OLEDs can use black frame insertion."
00:21:48 ◼ ► And BlurBusters, which apparently is a website I learned today, has a really good resource where you can read about blur of all kinds.
00:21:57 ◼ ► "A lot of headsets, like the Quest 3, use very low persistence to get much better motion resolution.
00:22:05 ◼ ► The downside is in brightness. The upside of the microLED displays and pancake lenses is that it allows the displays to be very close to the eyes, and having the weight closer to the head is better for comfort.
00:22:14 ◼ ► The downside of pancake lenses is that they swallow much more light of the light coming off the displays than Fresnel."
00:22:21 ◼ ► Fresnel, yeah. It's those lenses that are flat, but they look like they have a bunch of concentric circle ridges on them.
00:22:26 ◼ ► Okay, or other aspheric lenses as well. "Even if the displays are 5,000 nits, once you add color filters, polarizers, and the pancake lenses, the brightness we see can still end up very low.
00:22:36 ◼ ► The other consumer headset using pancake lenses and micro OLED displays is the big screen beyond 3, which I had never heard of, and it is very dim, especially if you turn down the brightness to get acceptable persistence."
00:22:46 ◼ ► Chase continues, "I believe Apple is pushing persistence further than they should in order to get more brightness back because they want to push HDR as a thing on the Vision Pro."
00:22:56 ◼ ► So on this topic, for the motion blur in motion, I wish I had known to look for that when I had my demo, because I would have.
00:23:03 ◼ ► I didn't notice it, but clearly Marco has, and I've heard it from other people as well.
00:23:08 ◼ ► And I do wonder if, I still wonder if this is what they're talking about. So the sample and hold thing, this happens on OLED TVs as well.
00:23:16 ◼ ► The deal with OLEDs is you light up a pixel and it stays whatever color you made it until you change it, and it changes color really, really fast.
00:23:25 ◼ ► And you're like, "That sounds great. This is a great display technology. What's the problem?"
00:23:28 ◼ ► The problem is, if you watch something like a 24 frames per second movie, it will show a frame, and the whole TV will show that frame, just the exact frame, exactly the way it is, until the next frame comes.
00:23:46 ◼ ► Well, not really, because if you think about what a movie projector does, or what a CRT television does, is both of those things will show the frame, and then they'll be, it will basically like blast it onto the screen, like boom, here's the frame.
00:24:00 ◼ ► And then the frame will either fade away or quickly be replaced by black, like with plasma, if you watch it in slow motion, it blasts color at the screen, and then it just fades away.
00:24:08 ◼ ► Sometimes plasmas would blast some of the color, then the second part of the color, and both of those will fade until the next frame appears, and a movie projector would show one frame of film, but then there'll be nothing as the next frame slides into view, and then it will blast that frame on.
00:24:23 ◼ ► So what it's really showing you is bright light, bright light, bright light, bright light, and in between the bright light, there's either total blackness or a fade to black.
00:24:33 ◼ ► And I think what our brain does during these intervals is say, okay, well, there's like a train going across the screen, bright light, oh, there's the train, and then there's nothing, or blackness, and then a second picture of the train appears, and now it's moved a little bit to the right, and our brain goes, oh, in between when I saw that first picture of the train, and then there was blackness, and then I saw the second picture of the train, I guess it must have moved between those two parts.
00:24:55 ◼ ► With sample and hold on an OLED, where it just shows the train in the first position, and just holds it there for 1/24th of a second, and then immediately shows the train in the new position, what it looks like to us, and you will see this on an OLED television if you have it set up "correctly", is it's stuttery, it looks like it's moving in segments, it looks like chunk, chunk, chunk, chunk, it's like, why doesn't it look smooth, I watched the same movie in the movie theater, the train smoothly moves from left to right, but suddenly when I watch it on my OLED TV, it's stuttering or something, and it's not stuttering, it is, carefully, if you have it set up correctly,
00:25:24 ◼ ► it's showing 1/24th of a second, and then 1/24th, and the thing is, it never goes black between the frames, it instantly changes from frame number 1 to frame number 2, instead of showing frame number 1 for a tiny fraction of a second, and then showing blackness, and then showing the next frame.
00:25:39 ◼ ► So this has been a thing for headsets since they've been rolled out, and one of the innovations of Oculus, you can see John Carmack talking about this, we need displays that can blast that frame really brightly for a tiny, tiny fraction of a second, and then fade to black, and do nothing until the next frame is ready, because we want the brain to essentially fill in the blanks, because if we show the frame the whole time, until the next one is ready, even though we can do that with OLED screens, it looks jerky,
00:26:07 ◼ ► because your brain doesn't get a chance to fill in any of the intermediary spots, like if you think about the train moving, you see the train in position 1 and train in position 2, but if you blank out in between then, your brain will fill in train in position 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, your brain will fill those in for you, those frames don't exist, but your brain will fill you them in.
00:26:24 ◼ ► But if you never do that, your brain will say, train is in position 1, still in position 1, still in position 1, oh my god it's in position 2, what happened in between, it instantly moved to position 2, and that appears jerky. This is a big thing with OLED televisions, which is why some people say I have to turn on motion smoothing, I can't have it set up "correctly" because it looks wrong to me, because when there's a slow panning shot, I see every one of the 1/24 frames that it looks jerky to me.
00:26:49 ◼ ► So that's what I would expect you would see in the headset if that was the problem, Marco would be saying, I turned my head and everything looks jerky, but that's not what people are saying, they're saying it looks blurry, maybe it's the same thing, maybe it's a misinterpretation, again I wish I had known to look for this, I didn't notice either jerkiness or blurriness, but my eyes aren't great and it was just a half an hour demo, so I'm interested to see how this develops, but this story about Apple pushing brightness rings true to me because things are very bright in there.
00:27:18 ◼ ► And obviously you can get more brightness by holding that image longer and not fading to black as long.
00:27:26 ◼ ► I'm curious John, because when I went from plasma to OLED, I noticed this too, I remember watching The Office, this regular TV show shot, I assume on film or whatever, but I remember panning shots, I noticed immediately the difference, like oh wait motion looks bad on OLED, everything else looked great but motion looked worse.
00:27:47 ◼ ► And my OLED, it's probably now seven or eight years old, so it's nowhere near cutting edge now, but I'm wondering, do modern OLEDs today, are they better with things like black frame insertion, because I believe mine was one of the first ones that supported it, but it just is not fast enough of a TV, like I tried it and it just looked terrible, I could almost see the black frames, it was not smooth enough, is it better now?
00:28:11 ◼ ► So, modern TVs are better at black frame insertion than your old ones, but still not good enough that I think you would ever want to use it.
00:28:18 ◼ ► Because the nature of OLEDs is they change really fast, and I think that makes it harder to do black frame insertion, like the way they do it now to try to make it better is they like double or triple the frame rate so that the black frames are like faster, but OLED's "problem" is they change so fast.
00:28:37 ◼ ► Like LCDs, there's all these tricks we have to play to make the pixels change from one color to another really fast, OLEDs you don't need to play any tricks, they change really fast.
00:28:45 ◼ ► So that means they're changing really fast to blackness, which means you have only a brief time that the light exists, and then immediately it's completely 100% black, and that's why you felt like you could see the blackness, because it's not like it smoothly fades like a CRT, like a dying star, that's not how it works.
00:29:08 ◼ ► No, I was saying, can you just insert a faded frame, and then another faded frame, and there'd be a heck of a frame rate.
00:29:16 ◼ ► Yeah, so what you're getting at there is alternate solutions, which is basically what they do, but just to finish the black frame insertion, there are ones now that are fast enough that you can't see it flickering, but they do hit the brightness, and for the most part you don't want to make your TV dimmer, especially OLEDs, right?
00:29:30 ◼ ► Because up until recently, OLEDs have not been, you know, people would consider them not bright enough for a very bright room. Now they are very bright, but then their competition is brighter still.
00:29:40 ◼ ► Anyway, what they actually do, the actual solution to the stuttering problem is, the good televisions have essentially added a form of motion smoothing that is like the most delicate form, like you don't detect it as a soap opera effect, but it smooths that out just enough for it to not look jumpy to you.
00:29:58 ◼ ► So it's basically like motion smoothing, but turned down to the lowest possible setting, lower than you'd ever imagine, and that basically cures the problem, and what that is doing is instead of making faded frames, it is essentially interpolating between frames, but just barely, just barely enough to make it, because it doesn't take much, 24 is close, like if the motion picture, or even 30 frames, which is probably what the office was, you don't need much more frame rate above that, so they don't need to fill in a lot for it to just smooth out.
00:30:27 ◼ ► I still watch mine in straight up 24 frames per second mode, I can still see it on slow panning shots in movies sometimes, but it doesn't bother me as much as it bothers some people, but yeah, that's one of the reasons you want a fancy TV, because they will have a setting that says, "Motion smoothing for people who hate motion smoothing."
00:30:42 ◼ ► And it's like, turn it up to one, or low, or super low, or whatever, and sometimes they also separate the different aspects of motion smoothing, so you don't have to apply both of them at the same time, or you can set them to different values, that is essentially the solution to dealing with 24 frames per second content if you are sensitive to it, or 30 frames per second in the case of the office, I imagine.
00:31:03 ◼ ► Speaking of display technology, and screens, and trade-offs, and the Vision Pro, as we were speaking about a minute ago, there's been this great series ever since the Vision Pro was announced, and everything, there's a blog called "KG on Tech" by somebody named Karl Guttag, and Karl goes through and is very knowledgeable about VR, and displays, and hardware, and optics, and how all this stuff works.
00:31:27 ◼ ► This kind of helps show the various trade-offs involved in the Vision Pro's screens and optics, and what it does, why it is limited in certain ways, what the other, you know, headsets like the Quest and other things, like what they do sometimes the same way, or certain choices they make differently, and why they choose differently, and what the trade-offs are there.
00:31:47 ◼ ► It's very, very interesting. So Karl had this article the other day about some of the trade-offs about the resolution inside the Vision Pro. There was a shot in the iFixit teardown video, the second iFixit teardown, where they actually show the raw image on the actual little tiny screen panel, and the image looks like it's being viewed through a fisheye lens.
00:32:10 ◼ ► It's like, you know, very, it's curved, it's warped, with a whole bunch of, you know, resolution spent on the middle of it, and towards the edges it warps out.
00:32:19 ◼ ► The screens have to kind of warp the image to make up for what the lenses in front of them are going to do as they, you know, project the image around so it looks like a giant field of view around your eye, to give you that whole immersive effect.
00:32:31 ◼ ► Since the image on the screens has that fisheye warping effect, whatever is in the center of the screen has way more resolution than what is in the periphery of each eye.
00:32:46 ◼ ► So I think this kind of helps explain, first of all, some of the, you know, optical effects that you see when you're using a Vision Pro, but also I think this might be part of my problem with the max screen mode.
00:32:58 ◼ ► Whatever you're looking at in the Vision Pro, when you are looking straight ahead, that, it has way more pixels, like per degree, than whatever is on the edge of the screen.
00:33:08 ◼ ► Now if you turn your head, obviously, you're going to turn the high resolution part of the screen towards what you're looking at.
00:33:13 ◼ ► But if you are looking towards the corners of the screen, only by moving your eyes, and not by turning your head, then what you are looking at has way less resolution than what's in the middle of the screen.
00:33:26 ◼ ► And also other, you know, there's other kind of optical trade-offs that you get when you're looking near the edges.
00:33:31 ◼ ► So for instance, when you're looking towards the middle, both eyes can see what you're looking at in their respective screens.
00:33:38 ◼ ► Their screens don't overlap perfectly. The left eye screen can see a little bit further on the left, and the right eye screen can see a little bit further on the right than their opposite screens can.
00:33:50 ◼ ► If you're looking past, like, the overlap area, where, like, if you're looking, you know, far to the left, only your left eye might be seeing that in its screen.
00:33:59 ◼ ► So that's even less information it's getting. And it's in the lower res, you know, warped edge of the screen optic trade-off, you know, pipeline.
00:34:08 ◼ ► So I think maybe my problem with the Mac screen mode is that you don't have to think about that kind of stuff when you're using a physical monitor.
00:34:17 ◼ ► A physical monitor has the same resolution across the whole thing. And you can just move your eyes and not move your whole head, and you will see pretty much the full resolution.
00:34:27 ◼ ► I mean, yeah, your eyes aren't super perfect in all ways either, but they're, you know, I think they have fewer trade-offs than the Vision Pro screens do.
00:34:33 ◼ ► That's what we said last week. I was saying about, like, when you move your eyes, your field of view moves with your eyes.
00:34:38 ◼ ► So even though your eyes only see things that are in focus that are directly in the center, you can move that center.
00:34:43 ◼ ► But when you're in the headset and you move that center by moving your eyes, the screens don't care.
00:34:47 ◼ ► They don't, it doesn't, imagine if that high res center of the screen followed your eyes as you move them around.
00:34:55 ◼ ► Like maybe the screens are motorized, they're saying in front of your pupils or something. That's what happens in reality.
00:34:59 ◼ ► In reality, you move your eyes and, you know, your field of view is just as janky, even probably jankier than this screen, which is why foveated rendering works as well as it does.
00:35:08 ◼ ► But you get to move it wherever you want. And so you can take the dead center, highest resolution part of your eyes and point it at the Apple menu.
00:35:15 ◼ ► But if you keep your head dead straight and you point your eyes at the Apple menu inside the Vision Pro,
00:35:21 ◼ ► yeah, that Apple menu is probably going to look pretty janky because it's on the corner of the screens and the screens didn't move when your eyes did.
00:35:27 ◼ ► I've been trying to figure out, you know, ever since I got the Vision Pro, why is it that everyone else says the max screen is sharp and it's not that sharp for me?
00:35:34 ◼ ► And I think this might be one of the reasons. I think the people for whom it's working well for, maybe they are just moving their head more.
00:35:54 ◼ ► But maybe are you turning your head because you're used to having your three 5K monitors, you're constantly turning your head in real life so you're used to it?
00:36:01 ◼ ► I guess. I mean, I haven't really thought about it that much. But yeah, I mean, it stands to reason that's true.
00:36:05 ◼ ► I mean, again, I was using this earlier today and I thought to myself, like, what is Marco talking about?
00:36:12 ◼ ► Supposedly improve this in the 1.1 beta, like the max screen sharing is a little bit sharper for people. So when that update comes.
00:36:20 ◼ ► And just to be clear, I'm not trying to imply that Marco you're full of it or lying or anything.
00:36:24 ◼ ► It's just, it's so funny to me that this device is so personal and based in a way that I don't think that any of us have ever really dealt with.
00:36:33 ◼ ► It's based on your own like body's abilities and physiology. Is that the word I'm looking for? You know what I mean?
00:36:41 ◼ ► Right. And so I think I made a big stink about this last episode. I'll just briefly say again, like I'm not trying to imply Marco that you're wrong or you're lying or anything like that.
00:36:49 ◼ ► It's just so weird to me that your experience does not match mine on what is effectively identical hardware.
00:37:04 ◼ ► This can all be solved by screens that are four times as big with eight times the resolution.
00:37:13 ◼ ► I think there's always going to be certain trade offs. You know, there are, for example, like certain principles of optics that are going to make some of this stuff more difficult.
00:37:20 ◼ ► But certainly the higher resolution they can get those screens, you can paper over a lot of those problems or you can you can dramatically minimize them.
00:37:28 ◼ ► Kind of like on the iPhone screens where, you know, I think most modern iPhone screens essentially use the pen tile sub pixel pattern where you don't even get an R, a G and a B sub pixel for every quote unquote pixel on the screen.
00:37:38 ◼ ► Right. Like if you zoom in on the screens that they use this pattern where, like, I forget which one is, but one of the sub pixels is shared with neighboring pixels.
00:37:44 ◼ ► You're like, how can that look good? What a garbage screen. They couldn't even give every pixel an RGB. That must look terrible.
00:37:50 ◼ ► And the answer is no, you can't tell they're so small. And like, nope, nobody notices. Nobody cares. Right. Because they're so small.
00:37:56 ◼ ► Yeah. I mean, even like, I mean, please, designers out there, cover your ears for just this moment. When I like draw icons and think about like font weights and icon stroke widths for my app, you used to have to think about like, are you going to make everything like exactly, you know, like 1.5 points or three points or whatever it was.
00:38:17 ◼ ► So it would perfectly line up on pixel boundaries, integer multiples. Yeah. Like, and so it would look good on retina screens and non retina screens and it would perfectly align with everything. And these days, I don't think about that anymore.
00:38:27 ◼ ► Like once we went to 3x density iOS screens, which I believe happened at the same time. I believe that was all with the iPhone 10 and forward. I have yet to find any stroke width that I choose to use that that looks blurry or bad compared to other ones.
00:38:42 ◼ ► So now I just I just do this mentally. I'm like, all right, I want this this this icon to be semi bold. I want this one to be medium. You know, I just do that and kind of let the system do what it wants with thicknesses. And they are not always perfect integer multiples.
00:38:54 ◼ ► And it turns out it's totally fine because we have such incredibly high density on those screens now. So I think with Vision Pro, I think you're right. Once down way down the road, I don't think this is coming soon, but way down the road, maybe 10 years from now, when they can, you know, double the resolution of the screens or more.
00:39:11 ◼ ► I think a lot of these problems will get a lot less noticeable. But until then, it's just going to be trade offs that we live with. And that's just the reality of the technology we have so far.
00:39:20 ◼ ► Tony de Taranto writes, adding to the categories of ATP listeners with jobs in every profession, I am a professional choral conductor and long time listener to the show. This is my favorite corner. It really is. I had a funny thought while listening to John describe window management VisionOS in episode 574, specifically about how our eyes normally function as input devices, not output devices.
00:39:42 ◼ ► In the course of my work and in my professional training at music school, I've learned an important thing that most people who aren't conductors don't think about when giving cues, conveying information.
00:39:51 ◼ ► It's important what you do with your arms and hands, but it's arguably more important what you do with your eyes. Eye contact and directing your gaze is an even stronger form of communication and control than arm and hand gestures.
00:40:02 ◼ ► From when I first studied conducting technique in college, I had to train my gaze as much if not more than my gesture to achieve the desired result from the group. I just wanted to provide this as an example of how, although I'm no Superman, I feel like I use my eyes as an output device for my work.
00:40:20 ◼ ► Those conductors, they just see all the people in the chorus or the orchestra as tiny instruments to be controlled by their eyes.
00:40:32 ◼ ► Well, there was a line for the movie, wasn't it? They play the music, I play the orchestra or something like that.
00:40:37 ◼ ► atp.fm/join. David Schaub writes, "What frustrated me is that dropping files on the Mac OS dock breaks Fitz's law. If you drag a file to the dock, you can drag it past the icons, which, according to David Schaub, is ridiculous."
00:41:02 ◼ ► It is ridiculous. It's a long-standing thing. It's kind of like when you put a folder alias on the dock, you can't drag things into it. It's one of those things that could be fixed in numerous ways. For example, you could just disallow dragging folder aliases into the dock if you're not going to support it.
00:41:16 ◼ ► But it hasn't been because apparently nobody cares. But yeah, dragging things to the dock, we get away with it because in the grand scheme of things, the dock is pretty big on most people's monitor. I bet most people don't have their dock smaller than the menu bar.
00:41:27 ◼ ► But yeah, try it. Take something, if you have a folder in the dock, take a file and try to drag it into the folder and go past the folder. Go all the way to the screen edge and you'll notice the folder is like, "Nope, nothing's on top of me anymore."
00:41:38 ◼ ► It's crappy. I might have even filed a feedback on it years ago. Maybe I'll file one again. I'm sure other people have, but I don't think Apple cares. But it's sad, they should.
00:41:48 ◼ ► Apple, this is wildly unrelated. Apple extends their modem licensing deal with Qualcomm through March of 2027. So to recap, Apple bought Intel's modem business a few years back.
00:42:02 ◼ ► Right. And they said, without saying, "Oh, we're going to make our own modem so we don't have to continue to pay Qualcomm."
00:42:09 ◼ ► And then they realized, "Oh, this is harder than we thought." And they continued to pay Qualcomm. And now they've apparently realized, "No, it's still harder than we thought."
00:42:15 ◼ ► And so they are extending their deal even further. Reading from MacRumors, "Apple has extended its modem chip licensing agreement with Qualcomm through March of 2027.
00:42:23 ◼ ► Qualcomm said today, during its first earnings call of 2024, Apple's existing agreement has now been extended for two years, so we can expect to see Qualcomm modems the next several iPhone generations."
00:42:32 ◼ ► Yeah, not great for Apple. I still think they really should make that modem and maybe think about integrating it into the SoC or near the SoC, but first they got to make one that works. Good luck.
00:42:43 ◼ ► I keep in mind also, just because they have a license to deal with Qualcomm through 2027 doesn't necessarily mean that Apple is not going to ship its own modems before then.
00:42:53 ◼ ► It probably means that, but this could be like Apple is going to need Qualcomm's chips through March of 2027 for some parts of their lineup.
00:43:05 ◼ ► So it's possible that next year one of the iPhones gets it, or some variant of it, whether it's the iPhone SE.
00:43:11 ◼ ► Yeah, but they're going to want to start this slow, I think. It's not going to debut in the Pro phone, probably. I think they're probably going to be wary and put it out in the SE first or something.
00:43:20 ◼ ► I don't know what they're going to do, but given how hard it's been, I don't think this is a bet your flagship product on. I don't think they can make enough of them. I guess the TSMC would do it for them or whatever.
00:43:31 ◼ ► But yeah, I think given how this has gone, a gradual rollout of Apple's modems is a good idea. Remember, last time they used Intel modems in their phones, and what was it? You could either get the Intel modem or the Qualcomm one, and nobody wanted the Intel one because it wasn't great.
00:43:53 ◼ ► Not a good one. It's tough, so I hope Apple does take this slow. Keep extending that deal, lock in whatever deal you have to get with Qualcomm. I know these two companies hate each other, but you kind of need cell modems for cell phones.
00:44:06 ◼ ► Indeed. Going back many episodes now, probably five or ten episodes, we were talking a lot about patents, and an anonymous person wrote in to say, "Apple employees are heavily incentivized to file patents. It's one of the few ways to make additional income at Apple outside of your normal job responsibilities.
00:44:21 ◼ ► Apple has an entire department, an online portal, to streamline the process. I can't find the exact numbers right now, but I believe employees receive at least $1,000 if a patent is accepted and approved.
00:44:30 ◼ ► The caveat, of course, is that Apple owns all of the intellectual rights to the invention." I don't mean to sneeze at $1,000. $1,000 is a lot of money, but like…
00:44:46 ◼ ► That's Apple's M.O. Their whole rep is that they don't pay as much as their competitors because everyone should just be happy to be working there because of Apple, but yeah, $1,000 is like, "Why bother? Give me one share of stock."
00:44:56 ◼ ► We are sponsored this episode by Celtrios. This is a shmup, a shoot-em-up game. They actually sponsored us a while ago, and they are back with even more updates.
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00:45:20 ◼ ► You can play Celtrios over and over again as long as you want with lots of customization options to keep it fresh, and Celtrios is available exclusively for Apple platforms.
00:45:30 ◼ ► Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV. So Celtrios has 13 different stages. You can start from whichever one you want. You can also, of course, resume play later if you quit the app.
00:45:40 ◼ ► You have a million different possibilities when you're configuring your ship, dozens of abilities, and then, of course, randomizing options, full-screen options, huge amount of ways to play both mechanically and then also just how your ship is configured. It's great.
00:45:54 ◼ ► Celtrios also has a huge high-quality soundtrack with over 45 minutes of music, and Celtrios keeps expanding. There have been over 75 free updates to it so far, and the entire thing was made by an independent developer.
00:46:10 ◼ ► So, of course, this is right in my heart, you know? So Celtrios supports one or two players at a time. On the Mac, you can do various input methods. With iOS, the second player needs a game controller, but hey, it works.
00:46:19 ◼ ► So it's just a great shoot 'em up or shmup kind of game. I love this genre of games. It's so fun. It's like the old arcade games taken to the extreme with all the modern capabilities. It's wonderful.
00:46:29 ◼ ► So get Celtrios if you love traditional shmups or you just want a quality game that's fun to play again and again with none of those usual annoyances of other modern games.
00:46:39 ◼ ► Mac-only Celtrios is available on Steam with a free demo, or head over to the Apple App Store to get Celtrios for iOS and tvOS. Thank you so much to Celtrios for sponsoring our show once again.
00:46:50 ◼ ► Harvey Simon writes, in regards to the magnetically attached Apple Watch bands that are rumors, "Magnets screw with compasses. Apple Watches have compasses. Ergo, Apple is unlikely to add magnetic attachments for Apple Watch bands."
00:47:09 ◼ ► So, I mean, I'm not an expert in magnets, but that makes sense to me. If you're waiting for extremely powerful magnets to be connecting your Apple Watch band, maybe that won't work well with the compass feature of the watch. Time will tell.
00:47:25 ◼ ► I think working around magnetic strength limitations is not that hard, because, again, I'm not a scientist, but I'm pretty sure magnetic strength falls off dramatically with distance. And if you have fixed magnets inside the Apple Watch that are always in the same position, I would expect it would not be super hard to just calibrate that out from the sensor.
00:47:47 ◼ ► Hmm, third-party watch bands might throw a monkey wrench into that. Well, it depends, like, where are the magnets? Are the magnets in the body, or are they in the band? I would imagine they have to be in both places, kind of like the MagSafe cases, you know, like the ones that work well. The cases also have magnets in them, and third-party ones tend to be stronger than Apples in my experience.
00:48:03 ◼ ► Hmm, maybe. But, like, I think if they're in the watch body, which, I mean, actually, does the charging disk on the bottom, are there any magnets on the watch side of that? There probably are, I would imagine. There's electricity, so there's also magnetism. It's complicated.
00:48:17 ◼ ► Yeah. Anyway, so, I think they could design around this. I don't think it would be that big of a deal.
00:48:37 ◼ ► Fair enough. All right, and then, finally, for follow-up this week, more on the line or letter of credit from Brian Coffey. "As someone who also works in commercial banking, specifically problem commercial loans, I need to clarify the comments on the requirements to get a letter of credit."
00:48:51 ◼ ► "Drawing a letter of credit. Yes, Apple could draw on the letter of credit, but in the agreement, they must have a good and valid reason. The typical use for a letter of credit is for international shipping, where you ship the goods before getting paid.
00:49:01 ◼ ► The letter of credit ensures the overseas recipient won't stiff you. The shipper who got stiffed must go to their bank to work with the ship ease bank to claim that the shipper never got paid.
00:49:10 ◼ ► And with regard to getting a letter of credit, a letter of credit is a credit product of the bank. Once a letter of credit is drawn upon, it instantly becomes a loan.
00:49:18 ◼ ► A company can get an unsecured letter of credit if they're producing enough cash flow to show their 'good for the money' if the letter of credit ever gets drawn upon.
00:49:26 ◼ ► If a potential borrower doesn't have strong enough cash flows to support this, there are alternatives. Smallish businesses could put up their homes or retirement accounts as collateral.
00:49:33 ◼ ► You could also be 50% secured or really any percent secured, depending on the strength of your cash flows.
00:49:38 ◼ ► All this is to say, you don't absolutely have to put a million in cash in the bank, but you do have to show a bank that you could reasonably come up with a million if you had to and prove it.
00:49:48 ◼ ► So it's not exactly handing the bank a million bucks or a million euros, but it's not that far away either.
00:49:54 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean, like any bank thing, if you can convince some bank to do something for you, then fine. But yeah, I feel like the bank basically wants to know if you have something that we can get a million dollars from, even if we need to repossess your home or whatever.
00:50:07 ◼ ► So it's not as bad as you must have a million dollars in cash, but I feel like you still kind of have to have some way to get a million dollars for a bank to agree to this, because that's kind of the whole deal.
00:50:17 ◼ ► Unless you have a really friendly bank and it's like, "We like your face. We think it's fine."
00:50:22 ◼ ► Yeah, we'll front you a million bucks because we like your face. That sounds reasonable.
00:50:26 ◼ ► Alright, let's move on to some topics, and of course we have a little bit more Vision Pro to talk about. And Jon, you seem to be very enthusiastic to talk about personas, baby. So what you got?
00:50:37 ◼ ► This is kind of like when we talked about eyesight last week. The reason this feature exists is obvious and I think is not really going to go away.
00:50:45 ◼ ► So personas are the little fake computer people that you use to represent yourself when you're on a FaceTime call, and the reason for them is obvious.
00:50:53 ◼ ► Being on a video call in a Zoom meeting for your work in a FaceTime or whatever, it's so common today, it's a very common part of using computers, that if you've got weird ski goggles strapped to your face, how do you get yourself into a video call?
00:51:07 ◼ ► Do you let your Mac's webcam show your weird ski goggly face? I think people would find that off-putting, even with the creepy eyesight things on it.
00:51:16 ◼ ► So Apple's solution is, "Hey, we'll make a little computer version of you, and when you're in your FaceTime call or your Zoom meeting, the little computer puppet of you will talk."
00:51:24 ◼ ► And that problem is not going to go away until we're actually wearing glasses that just look like regular glasses, which is many, many, many years in the future, if it ever comes in any form.
00:51:36 ◼ ► So you're going to need some way to show your face in these meetings. I guess the other solution is, "Oh, we're having a Zoom meeting. Why isn't your video turned on? Oh, I'm wearing a headset, so you can't see me. I'm not sure that's necessarily going to fly."
00:51:53 ◼ ► And you wouldn't want it to, because there's a lot of bandwidth, a lot of communication that happens from your facial expressions.
00:51:59 ◼ ► So Apple's solution to this is these weird, creepy computer models, and as weird as they are, I think Apple's going to keep plugging away at this.
00:52:12 ◼ ► They've taken a lot of flack for this during the rollout, because they do look kind of creepy and scary.
00:52:18 ◼ ► I don't think Apple is going to be scared away, nor should they, because I think video conferencing is not going away, and it's going to be a long time before these things on our face don't look like sea goggles and hide most things about our face.
00:52:39 ◼ ► And as for how embarrassing it is, like last episode, when we tooted about it, we showed Casey's persona and the graphic for that episode.
00:52:48 ◼ ► They look silly, but I think you have more appreciation for them if you have any experience with this type of thing before.
00:52:58 ◼ ► And most of my experience with this type of thing comes from video games and similar tech, where they would put your face in the game, make a skin for your player character or whatever.
00:53:08 ◼ ► And the things that have been built into games have been so much worse than what Apple did.
00:53:13 ◼ ► They really are one of the best instances I've ever seen of this particular technology.
00:53:34 ◼ ► Yes, they all blur the edges to hide their sins or whatever, but they do an amazing job with a face scan that you can do, not a professional scan.
00:53:41 ◼ ► Go look at things where they have a famous Hollywood actor in a video game and they have that person go into a full motion capture studio and have them stand there with balls on their shoulders and lasers shooting them for a million angers.
00:53:53 ◼ ► It's an incredibly controlled environment where they spend the entire day getting their face scanned and they put them in the game and they look awful.
00:53:59 ◼ ► And this is, oh, just hold the ski goggles in front of your face for two seconds, turn to the side, and Apple's doing a better job.
00:54:06 ◼ ► But the second thing is, it's demoed in this video, how well it tracks the expressions you're making with your face.
00:54:13 ◼ ► So you're wearing ski goggles and you're raising your eyebrows and you're blinking and you're twisting your mouth and you're sticking out your tongue and you're smiling and you're frowning and you're furrowing your brow.
00:54:24 ◼ ► And somehow Apple's able to detect all those things. Some of those things are happening inside the headset, some of those things are happening outside the headset.
00:54:37 ◼ ► You know, it's got fake, everyone's got the same perfect fake teeth and everyone's got the same weird artificial tongue.
00:54:43 ◼ ► And it's not, you know, if you can make the W shape with your tongue, the avatar is not going to, right?
00:54:47 ◼ ► But like, it does a really good, I think it does a good enough job, kind of like a really well articulated puppet would do, of letting the people who are on the Zoom call with you or whatever, know what expression you're making.
00:54:59 ◼ ► Are you, you know, are you happy about that? Are you skeptical? Are you angry? Are you not paying attention?
00:55:06 ◼ ► Like, I feel like they do an amazing job of matching the movements of the various parts of your face and reflecting those.
00:55:14 ◼ ► No, it's not perfect. It's not capturing all the subtleties of your acting performance. It might not even really look like you, but kind of like I was, you know, talking about the cartoon eyes, sometimes just sort of a, not a cartoon eyes, but like a decomposed, less granular version of you captures a lot of it.
00:55:33 ◼ ► It's the reason animation can look so good. Animation doesn't look photorealistic, but the right lines in the right places can be very expressive in animation.
00:55:41 ◼ ► And I feel like that's what Apple's going for. This isn't exactly you, but if they catch enough, if they put the right lines in the right places, they can convey most of the information your face is expressing.
00:55:52 ◼ ► And again, I'm really impressed that some of that expression is underneath these, the goggles, and some of it is outside and they put it back together into a cohesive whole.
00:56:01 ◼ ► So I don't relish seeing one of these personas talking to me, but I think this is just one of those hard problems that Apple and anybody who wants to do what Apple is doing has to be resigned to tackling over the next several decades, because it's not going to go away again until we just get plain old glasses.
00:56:18 ◼ ► Until then, people are going to want to be in meetings and people are going to want to see their faces and they're going to want to be able to use their faces, again, talk about our coral conductor, as an output device, because that's part of the way we communicate with other people.
00:56:32 ◼ ► You want to be able to scowl at someone meaningfully and have that have an effect on them in the meeting.
00:56:37 ◼ ► Yeah, no, I want to build on what you were saying earlier, like as a technical achievement, it is stunning how good these are at expressing what your face is expressing.
00:56:50 ◼ ► Because remember, you've got cameras on the inside that are figuring out when you're blinking because the persona reflects that, that figure out when you're raising your eyebrows because the persona reflects that.
00:57:05 ◼ ► And it's certainly, you can turn your face left and right and up and down and then your smile, like that's happening outside the device.
00:57:12 ◼ ► And granted, there are cameras pretty much everywhere on this thing, but still, it's outside the device that you're smiling or sticking your tongue out, like you had said.
00:57:20 ◼ ► And whether or not, leaving aside the creepiness factor or the uncanny valley, which again, just like I was saying in the beginning of the show, that's a big thing to just push under the carpet.
00:57:30 ◼ ► But leaving that aside, the technical achievement is really just phenomenal and stunning how good it is.
00:57:41 ◼ ► We had one this morning and because we're both idiots, we jumped on the call, unbeknownst to either of us, but I think we both kind of assumed it.
00:57:48 ◼ ► We jumped on the call, started off the calls in our vision pros with our personas and so on and so forth and had a good laugh about it and chuckled about how ridiculous we both look.
00:58:02 ◼ ► But I think if we had stuck with the personas, it would have been awkward for a few minutes, and this is a very common refrain from people who've done it.
00:58:09 ◼ ► It would have been awkward for a few minutes and then it would have felt pretty normal all in all.
00:58:17 ◼ ► I'm not saying it's not weird, I'm not even necessarily saying it's not creepy, but I don't know, you settle into it and again, as a technical exercise, it is beyond compare.
00:58:28 ◼ ► Did you look at the Charlie Chapman video, by the way? The one I was referring to? Did you have a chance to look at it?
00:58:37 ◼ ► Some of the things he does, for example, are like puffing air underneath his, like, into his, behind his lips and into his cheeks, and also talking out of like the side of his mouth.
00:58:48 ◼ ► Like, that's what I'm talking about, where it's not just like a puppet where it's like, "I can tell when you're opening your mouth and you said a T sound, so I'll make it look like you're making a T sound with your tongue."
00:58:56 ◼ ► Like, you can do weird stuff with your face that is not normal, like, you know, puffing your lips up and, you know, talking weird, like, and it's, I mean, is it tracking it exactly?
00:59:06 ◼ ► No, but they're accounting for the fact that you might do that, and they're mapping it to whatever their little puppet model is of your face, going far beyond just simply making it so that your mouth moves when you talk.
00:59:16 ◼ ► Please, everyone should definitely look at this video. And again, ignore the fact that his whole head is all fuzzed out and he looks like a weird death mask of himself.
00:59:25 ◼ ► I mean, but I think you are correct at how incredibly impressive this accomplishment is, but it's still not good enough, and I think this is kind of, this is largely the story of Vision Pro in general right now.
00:59:38 ◼ ► Most products, like most new groundbreaking products, you tend to have mostly, like, routine, you know, stuff that has been done before, plus, like, one or two big new challenges. That's not the Vision Pro. The Vision Pro is a very small number of things that have been done before, like, here's an M2-based, you know, iPad-based OS in a computing environment with Windows and stuff.
01:00:02 ◼ ► And then they tackled ten different massive challenges at least, and they have achieved remarkable things. They're way ahead of the industry in so many ways with the Vision Pro.
01:00:16 ◼ ► But the problem is, they're not selling the Vision Pro and pitching the Vision Pro to people in the VR industry. They're not selling and pitching the use of personas to only gamers.
01:00:29 ◼ ► They've tackled these massive problems, and they've done very respectable jobs in their solutions to them, but the problem is, they're still not where most people want them to be.
01:00:43 ◼ ► And they probably have some kind of, like, resentment whenever people criticize it on some level. Like, I bet there's people on Apple who are like, "How can you criticize the personas, because look at how amazing they are compared to the state of the art."
01:00:55 ◼ ► And that's true, but when you're presenting them as an alternative to people, then people are going to hold them to a much higher standard.
01:01:07 ◼ ► Like, the Vision Pro, in many ways, it's pitching itself as an alternative to various aspects of reality that people are very good at noticing the differences between the real stuff and the fake stuff, and they have achieved remarkable stuff.
01:01:26 ◼ ► And yet, it is still not good enough for what most people expect as, like, the basics. "Oh, you're going to show a virtual version of me? Okay, it needs to look like me." Like, it needs to be a stand-in replacement, and it's sort of, you know, it's in the ballpark for a lot of people, but it's not, you know, a stand-in replacement.
01:01:42 ◼ ► In many cases, it looks creepy and weird, and, you know, still, even with 1.1. And so, I think this is going to be, you know, just part of the Vision Pro's uphill battle over the coming years, is like, even though they have achieved remarkable things, they still need to push it even further than what they've already done to match what most people's expectations are, who are not VR industry pros.
01:02:06 ◼ ► Yeah, I think they picked mostly, like, the right challenges, because there are so many different challenges they could have chosen, and you might look at this, I think a lot of people look at the outside, like, "Why did Apple even try to do this?"
01:02:14 ◼ ► And the answer is, because this is one of the problems they eventually need to solve, and if you don't start working at it now, don't expect you're just going to snap your fingers sometime 10 years from now, it'll be perfect.
01:02:23 ◼ ► You've got to make the janky version first, right? So they do it, like, but they can't ignore this problem. Like, they can't ignore it unless they see a time horizon of just wearing, like, clear glasses instead of these goggle things.
01:02:34 ◼ ► Otherwise, this is just going to be out there as an issue, and so they better start plugging away at it, and I bet this was, like, a big time sink, and a big, you know, like, a lot of technology went into this.
01:02:44 ◼ ► And, to your point, Margo, a lot of technology and time went into it, into a feature that we know regular people are going to look at and go, "Ugh."
01:02:53 ◼ ► But it's like, you just got to, like, this is a problem that has to be solved. If you want to make this product, there are a small number of problems that you basically just have to solve, and you're not going to be able to do a great job on them,
01:03:03 ◼ ► even if you do better than anyone else has ever done before, but you better start cracking on it, because next year you make a better version, next year, like, they can't ignore this one.
01:03:10 ◼ ► They can't, like, even more so than eyesight, or eyesight where you can say, "Okay, we'll make the cheaper one without eyesight," or, "We'll use cartoon eyes," or whatever.
01:03:16 ◼ ► Like, you could maybe sweep that one under the covers, but people are on video calls all the time, and I don't think it's acceptable to them to say, either, "You just can't show your face," or, "Your face is going to have these giant ski goggles on it."
01:03:29 ◼ ► And all of those are less acceptable than even this janky thing, so they just have to be like, "Okay, we're going to put ourselves out there, and we're going to say we gave it our best shot, because we recognize this is a problem that we need to solve, and next year we hope we'll do better."
01:03:42 ◼ ► And, you know, it's going to be a while, but like I said, it is impressive from a technical perspective what they've achieved, and I think they struck a reasonable balance in the beginning.
01:03:50 ◼ ► People were like, "Why don't you just use Memojis?" I think Memojis would be worse. Like, I know they have Memojis, I know there's this whole scene kit versus reality kit, political, internal, API thing that they have going on there, but setting that aside, Memojis are not as expressive as personas are.
01:04:04 ◼ ► Again, watch the video, we'll link in the show notes, of Charlie Chapman showing his different facial expressions. Memojis are cartoons that are not what I was using before, the example of animation where you draw just the right lines to be expressive.
01:04:14 ◼ ► Memojis are not that. Memojis are bad, rigid-headed, Chuck E. Cheese, Pizza Time Band, whatever things.
01:04:21 ◼ ► And you know, Slack and the Memoji team, what they did is amazing too. Memojis had to walk so personas could walk a little faster.
01:04:28 ◼ ► But personas are better able to communicate you across a computer while you're wearing that goggles than Memojis would be.
01:04:40 ◼ ► And what people want is personas, but not bad. You could either just never ship, or you could ship what you have, which is personas, which are better than Memojis, but still not good enough.
01:04:55 ◼ ► So I give Apple an E for effort here, and if they have to choose where to add the resources to pursue better things, I would say put more resources into personas than eyesight.
01:05:10 ◼ ► Yeah, I don't know. I stand by eyesight as well, and we don't need to belabor this, but I get why people are turned off by both personas and eyesight.
01:05:21 ◼ ► But I genuinely think this would be a far worse product without both of those components.
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01:07:29 ◼ ► There was news today that Apple is already defending iMessage against tomorrow's quantum computing attacks. I'm sorry, what?
01:07:43 ◼ ► So Apple and security professionals have probably known about this for a long time, but I don't often have to think about this.
01:07:50 ◼ ► But one of the things that security professionals are thinking about is, "Hey, there will one day be a quantum computer."
01:07:56 ◼ ► And what happens if you somehow, probably, nefariously capture a bunch of encrypted traffic today, but what if you save it off for years and years and years?
01:08:08 ◼ ► And eventually, you finally get your hands or build that quantum computer, and you can go back to all of that years and years and years of data that you captured with our comparatively weak encryption that we use here in 2024.
01:08:25 ◼ ► Well, suddenly your quantum computer can just decrypt all of that, right? That's how it's going to work.
01:08:31 ◼ ► And nobody really knows if that's true or not. It certainly stands to reason that it's true.
01:08:35 ◼ ► And Apple is already starting the process of defending iMessage against tomorrow's quantum computing attacks.
01:08:41 ◼ ► So they had a blog post about this, which I'll link in the show notes, and The Verge covered it, and I will read from The Verge a little bit.
01:08:47 ◼ ► Apple's security team claims to have achieved a breakthrough that "advances the state of the art of end-to-end messaging."
01:08:55 ◼ ► With the upcoming release of iOS 17.4 and Mac OS 14.4 and the equivalent iPad Watch OS, the company is bringing a new cryptographic protocol called PQ3 to iMessage that purports to offer even more robust encryption in defenses against sophisticated quantum computing attacks.
01:09:11 ◼ ► So now from Apple's blog post, today we are announcing the most significant cryptographic security upgrade in iMessage history with the induction of PQ3, a groundbreaking post-quantum cryptographic protocol that advances the state of the art of end-to-end secure messaging.
01:09:23 ◼ ► PQ3 is the first messaging protocol to reach what we like to call Level 3 security, which I'll explain in a second, providing protocol protections that surpass those in all the other widely deployed messaging apps.
01:09:34 ◼ ► To our knowledge, PQ3 has the strongest security properties of any at-scale messaging protocol in the world.
01:09:38 ◼ ► PQ3 employs a hybrid design that combines elliptic curve cryptography with post-quantum encryption, both during the initial key establishment and during re-keying.
01:09:48 ◼ ► Thus, the new cryptography is purely additive, and defeating PQ3 security requires defeating both the existing classical ECC cryptography and the new post-quantum primitives.
01:09:58 ◼ ► I thought that bit was interesting because basically they're covering their butts to say, look, what if we screwed this up? What if we came up with this new, you know, quantum, you know, post-quantum encryption, but we are, we have a bug in the implementation.
01:10:12 ◼ ► We're just rolling this out and oops, we got something wrong and there's some kind of bug or buffer overflow or whatever.
01:10:17 ◼ ► Making this additive to the existing encryption hopefully makes it so that if they really screwed this up and, oh, it's trivially easy to crack this post-quantum encryption because of a bug in Apple software.
01:10:29 ◼ ► Well, once you crack it, what you're left with is the stuff that was encrypted the way it's currently encrypted now.
01:10:34 ◼ ► Like that it's layered on top of it is my understanding, which I think is a really smart thing to do to sort of, you know, we all kind of wish we could do this.
01:10:42 ◼ ► Like you kind of want to have the old way there as a fallback, even if you totally screw up the new way.
01:10:47 ◼ ► I'm not entirely sure if that's true, but my reading this paragraph makes me think that it might be, and it's a clever idea, which is like belt and suspenders.
01:10:55 ◼ ► We're not getting rid of the old encryption. We're just encrypting it one more time, even better.
01:11:00 ◼ ► Yep. Yep. And so Apple, as mentioned, has come up with its own four plus stage, I guess five plus stage level system.
01:11:10 ◼ ► They've defined classic classical cryptography, which is not quantum secure. There's level zero, which is no end to end encryption by default.
01:11:17 ◼ ► And by the way, you can kind of tell it's kind of weird that like Apple's marketing department really doesn't ever really like to name competitors at all ever.
01:11:25 ◼ ► Like, even though we know what they're talking about when they allude to something, but whoever's doing the security blog has no problem naming names.
01:11:31 ◼ ► So underneath the level zero thing, level zero, no end to end encryption, they just name names, Skype, Telegram, WeChat, whatever that QQ is. Yep.
01:11:40 ◼ ► Level one, end to end encryption by default, which includes LineViber, WhatsApp, Signal previously, and iMessage previously.
01:11:46 ◼ ► Level two. Now that now we're in the post quantum cryptography or PQC. This is and also has an encryption by default.
01:11:53 ◼ ► So level two is PQC key establishment only, which is signal with PQXDH, whatever the heck that means.
01:12:00 ◼ ► And then level three, which is PQC key establishment and ongoing PQC rekeying, which is the new iMessage with PQ3.
01:12:08 ◼ ► And then in the future, not given a level, but I guess it would be level four, PQC establishment plus ongoing PQC rekeying plus PQC authentication.
01:12:20 ◼ ► I'm happy that Apple was working on this, even though I don't think anyone gives a crap about what I say in iMessage.
01:12:26 ◼ ► But I do think that that's really cool that this is something that they're actively working on, hopefully and presumably so long before it's ever going to be necessary.
01:12:37 ◼ ► If you read the big document, the blog post, they explain like that they essentially chose not to do the thing that makes this level four,
01:12:47 ◼ ► because it's just like level three, except for they add the PQC authentication and they explain why they chose not to do that.
01:12:58 ◼ ► And we don't think it's necessary right now because it happens. It happens in the moment.
01:13:02 ◼ ► So it's not one of those things. The authentication is like, you know, establishing authenticity of who you're communicating with before you start communicating.
01:13:09 ◼ ► And that has to happen each time. And so what they say is like, this is not like you could save this for later and then decrypt it later because you're not there's no useful information exchange yet.
01:13:18 ◼ ► So saving that, saving that, you know, that exchange is useless to you because that exchange has already happened.
01:13:24 ◼ ► So even if you crack the encryption out with your quantum computer 10 years from now, it's pointless.
01:13:27 ◼ ► There's no data there. And that conversation happened long ago and those keys are all useless. Right.
01:13:32 ◼ ► And so they said, well, until someone can get a quantum computer that can intercept your traffic and then in real time, crack it.
01:13:41 ◼ ► And the other thing they talk about in implementation tradeoffs is the post quantum cryptography stuff. The data is bigger, like the keys are bigger and whatever, whatever other info they have to exchange is significantly bigger than their old encryption scheme.
01:13:58 ◼ ► But to like basically tamp down on the bandwidth use of, you know, if you're going to tack something onto every message that sent that adds up real fast because a lot of my messages are sent per hour, per day, per minute, per second.
01:14:09 ◼ ► Right. So they say with the post quantum stuff, they only are going to do like the rekeying periodically.
01:14:17 ◼ ► And they do it based on an algorithm of like if you're on a crappy connection, we won't try to shove these new keys down as fast as we normally do.
01:14:24 ◼ ► If you're on a faster connection, we'll send them more frequently. And what they basically said is we're trying to narrow the window that an attacker could do something.
01:14:32 ◼ ► So if an attacker someday cracks this, the only thing that they'll be able to see is the brief period before we rekeyed.
01:14:40 ◼ ► They cracked just that little segment. So I don't know how big that is. They didn't actually say whether it's like two lines of text or five minutes or whatever.
01:14:46 ◼ ► But that's another tradeoff they made. And that's another fun thing of like seeing security people write something instead of marketing people, because they'll tell you here were the engineering tradeoffs and here's why we made them.
01:14:58 ◼ ► Instead of just saying this is the best and no one else has anything like this and it's super secure, let engineers write it and they'll tell you about the tradeoff.
01:15:05 ◼ ► So I thought this was super interesting. I highly recommend everybody read the blog post we link because it is, it might seem like it's kind of got a little bit of technical jargon, but they do a really good job of explaining it well enough for you to follow what they're saying.
01:15:19 ◼ ► All right. It's been a little while, so let's do some Ask ATP. And let's start tonight with Ian Nalkuszewski, who writes, "What is your advice on how to best communicate to non-tech people the value and benefits of native Mac-ass Mac apps?
01:15:33 ◼ ► I work at a small under 10 people company where everyone works on a Mac, but some are new to the platform and most of their software experience is using Electron apps and other apps that are at best so-so citizens of the platform.
01:15:44 ◼ ► We're contemplating hiring a developer to make an app to help us with an internal project and want to be able to make the case to hire someone who knows how to make good Mac software.
01:15:51 ◼ ► If I put an app like Fantastical next to Outlook, most of my teammates just see two calendar apps with cosmetic differences and shrug off the idea that there's anything notably different between them.
01:16:00 ◼ ► I'd love any advice on how to make the case to non-technical people that Mac-ass Mac apps have a real user-facing benefits beyond just feeling better."
01:16:07 ◼ ► Hot take, I don't know that you really want a Mac-ass Mac app in this context. If you're just writing stuff for your own team of 10 people, I wouldn't spend the time personally.
01:16:17 ◼ ► And I know that's probably going to make everyone shudder and hate me, but there are bigger problems and more important problems to solve than making a Mac-ass Mac app.
01:16:28 ◼ ► I don't think I'm going to disagree with you on this. It depends so much on the nature of the app that you're going to build. Ian said this is an internal app.
01:16:39 ◼ ► I think it will be challenging for the higher-ups to justify what it would take to make a really good "Mac-ass Mac app."
01:16:49 ◼ ► And what that means is basically native Mac code, native Mac controls, the standard Mac UI design paradigm, things like that, as opposed to things like Electron.
01:17:03 ◼ ► And I think for most software, let alone most internal-use software, it's very difficult to justify that kind of investment on the Mac.
01:17:13 ◼ ► Because, first of all, Ian mentioned wanting to hire someone who could do that. That's difficult.
01:17:19 ◼ ► There's not a lot of programmers out there who are qualified to make this style of high-quality, native, traditional-style Mac app. It's a very small talent pool.
01:17:36 ◼ ► It is. So problem number one is, could you even find someone to do this? Problem number two is, would you be able to pay them what they are probably worth?
01:17:44 ◼ ► And then problem number three is, can you convince the higher-ups in your company that that's worth doing?
01:17:49 ◼ ► And I think the only way that is really easily done is if the higher-ups in your company are Mac nerds and also not good business people.
01:18:01 ◼ ► Because what you're ultimately looking at, and by the way, I'm both of those things, so if it was my internal app, I would absolutely do this.
01:18:10 ◼ ► But the problem is, when you're talking about having that style of app with the realities of today and the markets and the tech needs around it today,
01:18:27 ◼ ► So if you're able to convince them, "Hey, indulge me in having this thing that we're going to build be very nice in these ways that you don't care about but I do,"
01:18:42 ◼ ► And then also, even if you can get someone to build it and you can get the higher-ups to agree to indulge you in this,
01:18:50 ◼ ► what happens down the road when you have to change it or update it? How hard is it going to be to get someone in to do that down the road?
01:19:05 ◼ ► These two just don't have enough experience dealing with giant corporate bureaucracies. Let me tell you how to do this.
01:19:10 ◼ ► So the first thing you need to do is establish things that are not in this question that aren't in the answer to.
01:19:20 ◼ ► For example, this seems to imply that you're going to hire a developer to make an app for an internal project and that you only need a Mac app.
01:19:27 ◼ ► If that's really true, confirm that and say, "Just so we're clear, we're not planning on making a Windows version of this app later.
01:19:34 ◼ ► It's an internal app. Are we ever going to need a Windows version? Do we need a Linux version?" And if you can get past that hurdle of clarifying the requirements and they say,
01:19:42 ◼ ► "No, no, no. We're never going to make a Windows version. We're never going to need a web version. This is going to be a Mac app.
01:19:47 ◼ ► It's an internal thing. We're just only ever going to run it on Macs. There's never going to be any other version."
01:19:52 ◼ ► Then you're set. Because then what you can do is not say what Marco just said because that will discourage them.
01:19:58 ◼ ► What you have to say then is, "Okay, if it's going to be a Mac app, the reason we want to hire an experienced Mac developer is because
01:20:07 ◼ ► the straightest path to make a Mac app is to use Apple's frameworks in a straightforward way.
01:20:19 ◼ ► Just use..." And you'll have to hash this out. Do they want you to use SwiftUI? Do they want you to use AppKit? Whatever it is they pick.
01:20:25 ◼ ► Whatever path you go down, find someone who will do that in the most straightforward way possible.
01:20:33 ◼ ► And the pitch is, when this person disappears, I want anybody to be able to look at this and say,
01:20:39 ◼ ► "Oh, this is a straightforward SwiftUI app, straightforward AppKit app that doesn't do any weird custom stuff,
01:20:45 ◼ ► that has no custom controls, that Apple's documentation explains how to do it, that it's really easy to find,
01:20:52 ◼ ► example code documentation, that it is straightforward and they're going to be done faster."
01:20:58 ◼ ► This was the old pitch with the Next stuff, when it was Next and Objective-C and everything.
01:21:03 ◼ ► "You can make a highly functional app with fewer lines of code and in less time because the frameworks do so much for you."
01:21:11 ◼ ► That's the pitch you make. Your goal is, "I want to get an experienced Mac developer in."
01:21:24 ◼ ► I'm just going to use the Quartz 2D drawing API and draw my own GUI because I don't know what this whole AppKit thing is.
01:21:29 ◼ ► It's confusing to me, but I'm a good programmer, so I'm going to make my own UI framework like Lauren Brickter out of OpenGL."
01:21:39 ◼ ► And you're never going to get to know the culture and the idioms, but at the very least you should get someone in there.
01:21:48 ◼ ► I know it sounds dumb, but I've seen corporate hiring and it's like, "Ah, you can figure it out. It'll be fine."
01:21:53 ◼ ► And someone comes in and says, "Oh, I've made a Mac app," and they show you an Electron app.
01:22:06 ◼ ► And that, I feel like, will be harder to wrangle because if you're making some kind of internal tool app
01:22:12 ◼ ► and someone uses Electron and it takes 500 MB of RAM when you just launch the thing, that's another case against it.
01:22:17 ◼ ► Just find a Mac developer who can make a straightforward, simple thing that will be done quickly,
01:22:33 ◼ ► Julian Gamble writes, "If you could ask Apple for one new API to help your apps this year, what would it be?"
01:22:38 ◼ ► Julian's guesses are Marco for Overcast, "WatchOS, an API to make syncing files, like podcast files,
01:22:56 ◼ ► And I know Marco says they should loosen up a little bit, but in the end, an API that did that would burn your battery pretty badly.
01:23:16 ◼ ► let me start a backroundable download that begins immediately and uses Wi-Fi if it has to.
01:23:24 ◼ ► Because right now, it will, you know, wait for a while and maybe do it later when I saw the charger,
01:23:33 ◼ ► And if a user, while using the app in the foreground, initiates a download, that signifies pretty clear user intent.
01:23:44 ◼ ► I'd make a pretty strong argument for that, but honestly, that is not my biggest problem on watchOS.
01:23:49 ◼ ► My biggest problem on watchOS is every few days when I get an email from a customer saying,
01:23:59 ◼ ► And the answer is, there is no API to do that. Apple released the double tap feature in the fall,
01:24:05 ◼ ► and they said, "Hey, third party apps, you can just let this do the default response on notifications."
01:24:31 ◼ ► My number one request at this moment is for SwiftUI's list to have feature parity with UITableView.
01:24:54 ◼ ► Julian said this year, that's what would help me is make SwiftUI lists have more capabilities.
01:25:00 ◼ ► For instance, one that I ran into most recently is the kind of drag to reorder mechanic in it,
01:25:09 ◼ ► In UITableView, you can pick up multiple items as you drag your finger around with the second finger,
01:25:41 ◼ ► It's just one case of many where I keep running into areas where SwiftUI list is oddly limited
01:25:55 ◼ ► Almost every app uses TableViews in some way, and UITableView has been added to over time like crazy,
01:26:43 ◼ ► Those are major areas, and I just keep hitting walls that just aren't there yet in SwiftUI.
01:26:54 ◼ ► it was maybe more than that, but somebody described all of professional iOS development
01:51:03 ◼ ► The panoramic display in the Vision Pro assumes that you have a very wide field of view.
01:51:50 ◼ ► and it does multiple 100-megapixel captures and stitches them all together just like a phone,