0:00:00Jon, it's time for everyone's favorite corner. It is time for Random Anniversary Corner. Are you excited?
0:00:07Oh no. What's worse, this or lisp-puns? Those puns are worse. Oh, come on! That's heartless, Jon. Heartless. Oh no. Do you see how they're worse? Do you see it now? Well done. All right, concentrate people. So, on ATP episode 476, dated the 30th of March 2022, two years ago now, Jon absolutely blindsided us.
0:00:36By announcing he had gone independent. So Jon, how have the last two years been? Really? Is that, was that a date? Yeah. That's what I wrote down anyway, so I sure hope I'm right. Jon, haven't you learned by now? Trust Casey with any kind of anniversary. Chances are he knows it better than we do. Yeah, no. Trust but verify. Let me check. Maybe that's when I talked about it on the show. Is it March 30th? You're right, because I did the blog post at the same day. How's the last two years been? Yeah, you can tell I'm not very into anniversaries, because if you had asked me how long it is, I'd be like, "Oh, I'm not sure."
0:01:06I'd be like, "It's got to be over a year now, right?" But apparently, I have no idea how the passage of time. I guess it's going okay. Like the only thing I have to think about is like, okay, there was the tax year where I had jobby job income plus self employment income. Then there was a tax year where I just had self employment income. And though I remember those two things as being different, because taxes are always annoying. But yeah, otherwise, I don't know, like, we're hanging in there.
0:01:34Surviving, doing the thing. Paying big college bills, thinking about the second kid entering college at the same time. The first one is still in college is slightly terrifying. So yeah, that's happening.
0:01:47ATP.fm/join-through. You're enjoying life. I mean, I'm not actually here to interrogate your finances, despite what it sounds like. You're enjoying life, you're still happy. You're taking your afternoon siestas every day.
0:02:12Let's say I'm still going through that period.
0:02:14What does that mean?
0:02:17You get used to, I don't know, I guess there was an acclimation period for me essentially having a regular job and self employment income, which is very hectic, but then eventually it was just too much. And getting used to the idea that the only income you have is your self employment income is, I think, difficult, like balancing how frantically you are trying to work to make that happen and looking for other things or whatever at the same time is, I don't know.
0:02:46I would imagine that I would have less stress than I am currently experiencing, but it's still less than when I was doing two things at once. So it's been a net positive.
0:02:56Let's do some follow up. We have breaking news. We have WWDC lottery results and I am overjoyed to tell you that for me, it's the same as it ever was. No invite for me.
0:03:07I also don't have an invitation.
0:03:09And I was also not invited. Three for three.
0:03:12The lottery, how many people did they say it was? It was maybe 2,000, 2,500-ish. It's like half the number, less than half the number that used to be when they had WWDC not at Apple Park. So it's very few tickets for a very large number of applicants so it is to be expected. Oh well.
0:03:30I can't complain because I have gone to so many WWDCs. I still absolutely love whenever we get a press invitation. That's wonderful. I kind of feel bad taking one of the developer tickets.
0:03:44Because there are so many people who I think deserve it more than I do because I've been to so many. So I'm glad on a level that I didn't get the developer ticket because I'd rather that go to someone who it's their first time or whatever else. I hope to get press access because that doesn't take a developer ticket.
0:03:59Anyway, John, you have some feedback with regard to Affinity Designer. What's going on there?
0:04:04We talked about this in the After Show last episode of my struggles with this vector drawing app and how it didn't seem like a bunch of the operations that it had. They conflicted with each other. You could do one thing and not the other.
0:04:15You could do them separately but when you combine them one cancels out the other. It was about stroking a path on the outside of a shape but then once it stops being a shape the stroke moves to be centered on the path instead of on the outside. I was finding that frustrating.
0:04:28A couple of people wrote in with possible solutions. Like I said, it was too late for the actual shirt designs because they had long since been completed and submitted. We're still working on that so stay tuned.
0:04:38But anyway, I was curious to know how to do it. So Marco's suggestion, he used the terminology from Paint Code I believe. That will work. It was just different vocabulary because every app calls it something different.
0:04:52One thing that was tripping me up in Affinity Designer is there is a thing called Convert to Curves that will take a shape and convert it to a bunch of line segments. I was hoping that would do it for me but it didn't.
0:05:01The thing I needed to use was called Expand Stroke in Affinity Designer. It's not like I don't know about that feature. I had to use that feature when I made the ATP Pixels shirt that we sold on our last sale. Expand Stroke was the key for me for getting that to work.
0:05:16So I was making that shirt and now apparently Casey liked it. I totally forgot about Expand Stroke and just kept being obsessed with Convert to Curves. Convert to Curves wasn't doing it.
0:05:24What Expand Stroke does is it takes whatever your stroke is. So you got your shape and you're stroking on the outside of the line. When you say Expand Stroke, it takes that stroke and turns it into a funny shaped closed polygon.
0:05:40Expand Stroke is an outline around the stroke. If you draw a stroke that was just a line, it would be a single line segment and a fat stroke centered on the line.
0:05:48When you turn it into Expand Stroke, that turns it into a rectangle. The line through the middle is gone and all you have is the rectangle that outlines the stroke. Expand Stroke will do it.
0:05:57Once you do that, you lose the ability to edit the stroke as a stroke. Lots of people suggested that when they do it, they always save the stroke in a layer below it.
0:06:05You can just hide that layer. There's all sorts of things like that. So that's one. Expand Stroke.
0:06:10Vitor wrote in with a solution using an Affinity Designer feature called Offset Path using the Contour tool.
0:06:21This is important if you want to draw a path around the line and you don't want to stroke the outside of the line. You can move the path inside the shape by an arbitrary amount.
0:06:36You can do that to simulate the outside stroke because now you control how far from the original path the line is. When it recenters itself, if you move it out half a distance, it will recenter and still be on the outside.
0:06:45That was interesting. I'm not sure I would use that because it might be a little fidgety, but it's good to know because the solution that I thought was the most interesting and maybe Affinity Designer only was from Julian Kissman who suggested using Create Compound.
0:06:59Which is a feature in Affinity Designer where you take a bunch of shapes and instead of using the Boolean operation on shapes where you take a circle and overlay it with a rectangle and do a subtraction and then the rectangle takes a chunk out of the circle.
0:07:13Those features all exist in Affinity Designer but they're destructive. You can apparently put them in a nested layer and essentially do non-destructive Boolean operations.
0:07:21All these layers apply with these Boolean operations giving you a resulting object that retains all of its flexibility.
0:07:30It's one object cutting out another object, cutting out another object, but it's non-destructive. All the objects are still in their whole editable form and you're just seeing the union of them.
0:07:42I didn't actually try any of these on the project side. I had already messed up all of my paths and mutilated them until they worked the way they did.
0:07:52I will try to remember all of this for the future. By the way, Create Compound is also a place where offset path comes in handy because if you're having a regular shape, like the example I saw in one of the demo videos is a snowman shape.
0:08:05You can see the three balls on top of each other. They're all stuck together like a snowman. If you were to try to draw a big snowman and then a little snowman inside the big snowman such that when you put the little snowman inside the big snowman you get a stroke along the outside.
0:08:19You'll very quickly find that the only shape that works with is a circle and any shape that is not a circle, if you simply scale the shape and put it inside itself you won't get an even stroke all around because that's not the way geometry works.
0:08:33You'll instead have to have a specific tool that lets you offset the path. So if you use offset path to make your smaller snowman shape that will work.
0:08:40And finally, Christian Meyer said "I can confirm that Adobe Illustrator has also treated open shape and closed shape strokes differently for the last 20 plus years."
0:08:50So apparently this is a cultural tradition maybe in vector drawing programs but if you don't know it like I didn't it is quite surprising and annoying.
0:09:02Sounds fun. I am glad that you are doing that so I don't have to.
0:09:06I'm just looking for another shirt where I'll get to use my new compound and expand stroke skills if I don't forget them all between now and the next shirt.
0:09:15Oh my word. Alright, we got some feedback about real time OS's and cars. I think this was toward the end of the main show last week.
0:09:25We were discussing what's real time OS, what's not and where does CarPlay sit, where would this new CarPlay version 2 or whatever they're calling it, where would that sit.
0:09:33And a friend of the show, Sam Welsimid from Wheel Bearings wrote in to say "The typical architecture is that Android Automotive runs in a container and the real time OS, usually something like QNX, Wind River or Green Hill software, runs in another container with an underlying Linux distro and all of it is running on a Qualcomm Snapdragon Cockpit 8155.
0:09:54The real time OS controls the instrument cluster display and in many cases Android Automotive will project data to parts of the cluster such as showing Google Maps on the Volvo.
0:10:02The hypervisor makes sure that the real time OS gets priority which is required to meet federal motor vehicle safety standards requirements for displaying driving info like speed and warning "lamps" which themselves are now usually virtual.
0:10:15There's some anecdotal data from a handful of people who said "Hey, when my infotainment crashes" which seems to be a common thing on cars other than Tesla's, it turns out, that often times their gauge cluster will show a speedometer or sometimes even will continue to do, if I remember this anecdotal data right, will continue to do "autopilot" or "assisted steering" or what have you even when the infotainment has crashed.
0:10:39I mean that makes sense, right, they should be two totally different systems but yet they feel so intertwined when they're all sucked into that same main display. So, there you go.
0:10:48Yeah, the people saying that when one thing crashes the other thing stays up, that doesn't mean either one of them is real time, that just means they're two separate systems.
0:10:56It's interesting that the real time OS is controlling the cluster but allowing stuff from non real time OS's to display itself into it, the example they gave here was maps, but I do wonder how much of the stuff displayed in the instrument cluster is coming from a non real time OS and when that OS crashes, some people said the instrument cluster then displays some stuff on its own.
0:11:18I'm also kind of interested in, I didn't quite understand this arrangement of real time OS and hypervisor or whatever, I kind of get it, it's running two containers, one is running Android Automotive which is not real time and the other is running like say QNX which is real time, and the hypervisor makes sure that the real time one gets a reserved slice of those resources so the real time OS is still real time and the other thing isn't, but boy it's getting complicated in there isn't it.
0:11:42Another thing that throws Apple's iPhone thing into the mix is I'm not sure what the status of any kind of real time subsystem is in iOS, Apple is not particularly forthcoming with technical details like that, but it seems to me that what would be happening there is that the iPhone would be projecting whatever it's drawing onto the instrument cluster which may be run by a real time OS, but if Apple is covering the whole thing, if every pixel of the instrument cluster is produced by the phone,
0:12:11is the real time OS simply acting as a video ferrying device until and unless the phone crashes or disconnects at which point it takes over and shows a cruddy speedometer, I don't know, it's still kind of mysterious.
0:12:21And finally, I did try to look up in the United States Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards to see if I could read the text of these standards to see what does it say about the speedometer and warning lamps and everything that would either necessitate a real time operating system or be well suited to real time operating system.
0:12:40I confess I drowned in the legalese. There's a lot of words in there and weird language and there is all sorts of stuff about lamps and stuff like that, but I didn't, I couldn't find anything that was like, oh, I can see to comply with this standard real time OS is either necessary or would be the easiest way to do it.
0:12:57But I'm sure I gave up before I found whatever regulation is the appropriate one. I did find a lot of regulations related to it, but maybe not all of them. So yeah, I'm glad I'm not making a car and probably so is Apple.
0:13:12Good news. This is our DCS Sendero segment and that's a reference for some of you. Error network changed. The fix is in the Chrome one 24 beta. John, are we pulling our party poppers? Are we excited? What's going on here?
0:13:28The scare quotes around the word fix document here. So if you get Chrome beta, which I did, it's the Chrome version one 24 beta that includes this change. And what I did was I pulled up Gmail, which is constantly sending requests in the background.
0:13:46I pulled up the dev tools and I filtered the output to see only errors. And I waited to see if I saw any error network changed. I also like repaired my iPhone with Xcode and did all the things to try to induce the error. And I ran it for a day and a half with that dev tool window open the entire time.
0:14:03And I never saw error network change from like, Hmm, I think they did it. But keep in mind when we talked about the fix, we looked at like the diff and how they're doing it. They're looking for a specific interface that is like, okay, if an interface appears and it's one of these and it's an IPV six and it's a local thing and it's this and it's that, then don't freak out. Otherwise freak out.
0:14:23So it didn't happen to me in 24 hours of trying, but since this fix went out in the Chrome beta, somebody in the, uh, the, you know, bug tracker comments that, Hey, I'm using the beta and it did happen to me.
0:14:36And then the person asks, can you tell me a bunch of information on your system or whatever? And I think it's because they're supposed to fix is just sort of putting an include list of like, look, if this very specific things happen, happens, ignore it. Otherwise do what you normally do.
0:14:50And I think that's the wrong way to fix this problem. Like, cause you're just going to be chasing these for others. It's like, Oh, this person had their, you know, home kit thing come online. And this person had, uh, something else happened.
0:15:00Like who knows what will happen on these people's systems based on network stuff that's happening. You'll, you'll be chasing these forever. It's better to, I would think it's better to figure out, look, what kind of changes the network does Chrome actually care about and only flip out when you see one of those and ignore everything else.
0:15:17So I hope this is an evolving system. Anyway, I'm, I'm continuing to run the beta because Hey, I didn't see it in 24 hours. And I did an AB test. I had the beta and the non beta running at the same time, both open to Gmail and boy, it's still there in the non beta.
0:15:28It's just filled with their network change. Like after a few hours of running, the screen was just filled with their network change to errors, you know, from top to bottom, whereas the other window didn't have in 24 hours.
0:15:38So I think they're making good progress. I'm not sure if this fixes the right fix, but if this is happening to you, try the Chrome one 24 beta.
0:15:46We were brought to you this episode by Squarespace, the all in one website platform for entrepreneurs to stand out and succeed online.
0:15:54Whether you're just starting out or managing a growing brand, Squarespace makes it easy to create a beautiful website and engage with your audience.
0:16:01And you can sell anything on your site from products to content to time all in one place and all on your terms.
0:16:09Squarespace just recently launched a new blueprint system. This lets you start a completely personalized website with a new guided design system.
0:16:16So you start with a professionally curated layout and styling options, and then you can build your unique online presence from the ground up, tailored to your brand or your business and optimized for every device.
0:16:27You can easily launch your website and get discovered fast with integrated optimized SEO tools. So you show up more often to more people and grow the way you want.
0:16:37And for your business, of course, they have flexible payment support and amazingly seamless checkout experiences for your customers.
0:16:43These are simple and powerful payment tools. You can accept credit cards, PayPal and Apple Pay, and in eligible countries offer customers the option to buy now, pay later with Afterpay and ClearPay.
0:16:53All of this is backed by their modern fluid engine, the next gen website editor from Squarespace. So it's never been easier to unlock your unbreakable creativity.
0:17:04It's an amazing way to build a website on Squarespace. I strongly recommend, anybody needs a website, whether you do or someone else in your life does and they're asking you, the computer nerd, how to make a website, have them or have you try Squarespace.
0:17:17You can do everything you need to do in trial mode. It is wonderful. You can see how it is for you.
0:17:22So start that free trial at squarespace.com. When you're ready to launch, go to squarespace.com/atp to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain.
0:17:32Once again, squarespace.com, start that free trial. When you're ready to launch, squarespace.com/atp for 10% off. Thank you so much to Squarespace for sponsoring our show.
0:17:46Bilal Khan writes, "Regarding the conversation about multiple monitors, has Casey tried turning the two side monitors to portrait orientation? I find this incredibly useful to have Safari windows open as reference and not need to scroll them, especially useful for dev documentation. Having them in portrait orientation also reduces the impact of head turning significantly.
0:18:02I use BetterTouchTool keyboard shortcuts to move a window to a specific monitor, which makes window management much simpler."
0:18:08So this is one of those things that on paper 100% could not agree more. I absolutely agree that it makes sense for one, if not all three of my monitors should be portrait.
0:18:20I would make a strong argument that the Xcode designated monitor, which is the one directly in front of me, that should probably be portrait, except then my main monitor is portrait and that feels super icky and weird.
0:18:32I have briefly tried to do this in the past and I just can't. It just feels so wrong. I wonder if maybe I forced myself to stick with it for more than half an hour. If maybe it would get good to me and maybe I would enjoy it.
0:18:46So maybe I should give it another shot at some point. But it's one of those things where it almost gives me the heebie-jeebies. It just looks so incredibly incorrect.
0:18:56Even though, again, for all the reasons that Bilal cited, it makes perfect sense. So I don't know. We'll see. Maybe if I'm having a quieter day, maybe I'll mess with myself and turn one of my monitors vertical and see what happens.
0:19:09I don't know. I feel like our field of vision, our two eyes have a place where they overlap, but then there's a place that's exclusive to the left eye and exclusive to the right eye.
0:19:19So I feel like our field of vision better matches the landscape display and I also feel like it's maybe slightly more comfortable to move your eyes side to side than up and down.
0:19:28Even for things like Xcode, there's only so much code you can take in at a glance. It's good that you don't have to scroll and I guess it's good that the console and the bottom can take up room and stuff like that.
0:19:40I still feel like I'd rather arrange things side by side than top to bottom unless there's a case where I really do need to see two vertically stacked pages and something that's going to be printed like in a print layout or something like that.
0:19:51Again, that's kind of the origin of back in the old days. The Mac had a portrait monitor that you could put one 8.5 by 11 page on at wussy resolution.
0:20:01And then they had a two page monitor which could fit two pages side by side, but I don't think anyone ever wanted a monitor that could fit two pages top and bottom.
0:20:10Although I've seen, we talked about this in the show once, like a square monitor, literal square aspect ratio monitor. That's super weird.
0:20:19I don't think I'll be able to find the link to put it in the show notes, but somebody in the last year came out with, like John was saying, I believe it was a square aspect ratio, but it was designed to be effectively two landscape monitors.
0:20:31Did it have a hinge in the middle or something like that? I forget exactly what the situation was.
0:20:36No, the one thing that was actually kind of small was a weird small square monitor.
0:20:39Never mind then. But anyways, it's weird that way.
0:20:43I don't object to the portrait monitors, but I think it does definitely take getting used to it at a certain point that become really silly.
0:20:49I think we talked about this when we first got our XDRs, but the Pro Display XDR can go into portrait mode.
0:20:54And I turned it in that direction when I first got it and it's hilarious.
0:20:58Does it hit your ceiling?
0:21:01It feels like I need to get a step ladder to reach the Apple menu.
0:21:07Goodness gracious. Simone Rizzo writes, "Regarding your idea for an Apple ID verification via a 'real ID' passport, etc., my guess is that Apple may not want to have this option for privacy reasons.
0:21:18If the 'back door' of moving ownership of an Apple ID is technically possible, it might be used by governments, by law or judicial order, to transfer ownership and obtain private info."
0:21:29When we talked about this last time, we were saying an ultimate safeguard if someone steals your Apple ID or whatever. If you had previously verified with your government ID that this belongs to you, you could get it back.
0:21:40The technically minded were thinking, "Wait a second, how would Apple give it back to you? Apple doesn't have any power over your Apple ID. They don't have a secret back door that they used.
0:21:48And it seems like making the system would have to give Apple a secret back door."
0:21:53Yes and no. There's a way you can do this that is more secure and less secure. The less secure way is, "Hey, Apple has a master key to everyone's Apple ID who does this."
0:22:00That's not great. We don't want that. Because then Apple could get a subpoena and get access to your stuff without you even knowing it. The government could force them to do it and Apple would have the power to do it.
0:22:08And Apple could say, "Okay, well if that user signed up for this system of verification and showed us their passport, then we do have a key to their stuff. But if they didn't, then we don't."
0:22:19But the slightly more secure way to do this, and I say slightly, is to instead, when you do the ID verification, like you go to the thing and you show them all your IDs and you prove that it's you or whatever,
0:22:29what happens is that they would put essentially an unlock key in the secure enclave on your devices, like iCloud synced, you know, end-to-end encrypted iCloud synced,
0:22:39so that all of your devices in the secure enclave, there was a key that Apple could get, but only if it had access to your device.
0:22:48So if the government came to Apple and said, "We need to unlock this person's thing here as a subpoena," and they'd be like, "Apple can truthfully say, 'We can't do that. The only place our Apple key exists is on their device, and we can't reach out and get it off of the device.'"
0:23:01"It's locked inside their device or whatever. Maybe we'd have to be locked in a device with a backup code or whatever."
0:23:06Anyway, I say it's slightly better, because at least Apple couldn't do things behind your back, but only slightly because the government can just come to your house and take your phone.
0:23:15And force it to open with Face ID and do all this. I read a story recently where the FBI raided some person's house, and the person answered the door with their phone in their hand,
0:23:24and their phone was unlocked at the time they answered the door, and the FBI yanked it out of their hand, so now they had the person's unlocked phone.
0:23:31So many loopholes with like, "Yoink! No, we didn't force you to unlock it, but we got it, and now it's unlocked."
0:23:39So having the keys only on your individual devices in the secure enclave in a place that Apple can't get it at remotely means that Apple doesn't have a master key back at headquarters, but it doesn't actually protect you that much more.
0:23:49But yeah, this is the tradeoff between convenience and security, and I think it's a tradeoff that I personally would make, and as long as it's opt-in and only the people who care about this would have to do it,
0:23:58I would give Apple the ability to unlock my Apple ID for me. I would give them the key, they can keep it in their headquarters,
0:24:06just to save my butt in the future if I prove that I'm me, right, because I trust Apple to do that,
0:24:10and I would prefer that to totally losing access to everything associated with my Apple ID in an unrecoverable way.
0:24:18But lots of other people wouldn't prefer that, so that choice is up to them.
0:24:22Alright, and with regard to Apple IDs, Eric writes, "Apple IDs are not required to be email addresses.
0:24:28I still use an Apple ID like 'JSmith' and I hope I don't have to change it to an email address if the rumor about Apple accounts turns out to be true."
0:24:35I thought this was still legacy accounts, I thought that they were still allowed to do this, it's just that Apple really, really encourages you not to, but yeah, we'll see what happens in the future.
0:24:47Yeah, the reason we all forgot about this is because developers were literally forced to not do this,
0:24:53so everybody that we know had to change all our old non-email address Apple IDs if we wanted to continue to be Apple developers.
0:25:01They did not log into any of Apple developers stuff, which you needed to do to do stuff like release apps on the App Store, right?
0:25:06So I avoided it for a real long time, but there was just no way, eventually, this was years ago, there was no way around it,
0:25:12but I had forgotten about, hey, if you're not an Apple developer, and I guess if you never touch anything that makes you change it,
0:25:20that you just continue to use your phone or whatever, you could have an Apple ID like 'JSmith' and still exist, wow, that blows my mind, but I guess they're still out there.
0:25:29And then finally for follow-up, Ben writes, "Is iOS podcast transcription Apple's first real attempt at heavy cloud computing?
0:25:36iMessage, Apple Music, Mail, etc. are all massive, but not compute-intensive. All the other cool stuff like photos, metadata, spotlight, and news aggregation seem to happen on device.
0:25:44If I'm not missing anything, this seems to be a good low-stakes test for cooler AI stuff to come." That was a really good point, I didn't think about that.
0:25:52The more we've learned about the podcast transcription they're doing, this is not just them running a whisper model and calling it a day,
0:25:59because even that is, that would be substantial for the amount of data that they're processing, believe me, I know from experience,
0:26:06because of course, immediately upon launching this, I thought, oh boy, I have to do this now, I have to match this feature in Overcast.
0:26:13And so I looked into it, what would it take to match this feature in Overcast? I already have the knowledge of which podcasts are subscribed to,
0:26:21I know when new episodes come out for each one, so I could theoretically do something like this, but they're not just running whisper.
0:26:29From what I gather, they seem to have bought a company that was working on podcast transcription a few years ago, this is like a few years-long effort it seems,
0:26:38and they're doing a lot of very specialized processing. It isn't just a basic transcription model that's off the shelf, they've customized it like crazy,
0:26:50and they seem to be running a whole lot of this stuff all on their server. So first of all, good on them, that's a great feature for accessibility and navigation and everything else,
0:26:59and for me to congratulate Apple Podcasts on a new innovative feature does not happen that often, because they are a direct competitor,
0:27:06and the whole reason I made Overcast is because I didn't like Apple Podcasts very much. So they did a really good job on this,
0:27:14and I have no ifs, ands, or buts about it, I cannot fault them for anything they've done here, it's really impressive, and for the time being I can't match it,
0:27:21and I don't know when I'll be able to if ever, but this is going to be just Apple Podcasts is going to win with this feature compared to Overcast for the foreseeable future.
0:27:30And so to answer the question, yeah, this actually is a surprisingly big deal for Apple to be doing this much server-side advanced AI type processing,
0:27:40I don't know if there's really any other efforts they've undertaken that at least have such visible results.
0:27:47So yeah, this is new, and it is, I think, because this is very specialized to podcasts, keep in mind the scale we're dealing with here.
0:27:57We are not dealing with content that's being created by every iPhone. So if you think about like, oh, would they ever run photo recognition server-side?
0:28:07No, because think about the data volume of that, even if you can get around the whole privacy and encryption angles, which you can't,
0:28:13but even if you could, the data volume of every photo ever taken on every iPhone in the world is way bigger than podcast episodes that get released.
0:28:23So this is a big step, but I wouldn't necessarily extrapolate it to much else that Apple could be doing server-side in the near future for their other products,
0:28:34because most of their other products, the area of use of this kind of computation would be so massive that we'd be talking about a whole different ballgame.
0:28:43We were talking about Apple potentially licensing Google Gemini or ChatGPT for an open AI, and it's like there is sort of a difference in difficulty.
0:28:56So Apple has many things that are iPhone scale. iMessage is the example I gave last time. iMessage is iPhone scale. A lot of iPhone users use iMessage, surely billions, right?
0:29:04And there's a lot of traffic on that, but computationally, ferrying the messages around, even though they're like end-to-end encrypted, most of that is done on the end devices anyway,
0:29:13and dealing with the key management, it's not that big a deal. It's shuffling bits around, some small, fast computation on optimized hardware, that's it.
0:29:22Something like transcription is not like that, which is part of the reason it's untenable for Marco at this point.
0:29:27It's not like, "Oh, I'll just run a one or two second little job every time an episode comes out." It's going to take you longer than that.
0:29:32It's going to take a lot of CPU time for a unit of podcast listening time.
0:29:38And the AI stuff, we were talking last time about how does inference, which is like when you ask an AI model a question,
0:29:48how expensive is that compared to training, and training is obviously more expensive, but how much more expensive is it?
0:29:52But setting all that aside, comparing the cheapest thing in the large language model world, which is inference,
0:29:58comparing that to shuttling an iMessage from one user to another, doing the LM thing has got to be so much more expensive in terms of how many CPU cycles do you need.
0:30:10The question, bringing this up with the transcription, is has Apple ever attempted anything at iPhone scale that is computationally difficult,
0:30:18that is not just moving bits around, sending small packets of data from place to place?
0:30:23Even things like iCloud photo library and stuff, you take a picture, a bunch of computation happens on your phone,
0:30:30but then when the picture's done, it's just a bucket of bits that they shove up into S3 or whatever they're using on the back end.
0:30:36Computationally, not expensive, but all this large language model stuff, the stuff that can't run on the phone,
0:30:41that uses really large, large language models, that has to run on a server or podcast transcription,
0:30:47I'm not sure Apple is equipped or prepared or has invested enough to do that type of computation at iPhone scale.
0:30:55So podcast scale is less than iPhone scale, as Marco just pointed out, so this is kind of a good start for them.
0:31:01Maybe I'm forgetting something, maybe there is something that Apple has been doing that is both computationally expensive and also at iPhone scale,
0:31:06but nothing is occurring to me right now, so this is a good point by Ben.
0:31:09Alright, moving on. John, do you really need me for this one? Because this is basically Mac Pro corner, isn't it?
0:31:16Well, it's Mac Studio corner.
0:31:18Alright, so there's been some theorizing going around that there is no UltraFusion interconnect on the M3 Macs,
0:31:28and there's a lot of stuff going on that we can tell. So, John, can you remind us what this UltraFusion interconnect is in the first place and why it's relevant?
0:31:33Yeah, so when we were looking at the M3 and the M3 Macs came out, and we were looking at die shots, pictures of the silicon die of the M3 Macs,
0:31:43and those are those rainbow-y looking pictures with lots of little tiny features, looks like a city from a view from above, right?
0:31:49We were looking at the layout of the chip, and what I said at the time was,
0:31:54when you look at the M3 Macs and you look at the M2 Macs and the M1 Macs, the layouts are pretty similar in terms of where the big rectangular blobs are,
0:32:01where the major structures are. The structures themselves are different, there's different cores, different amounts of stuff, different GPU cores,
0:32:07like the things are different, but they're laid out very similar.
0:32:10And both the M1 and the M2 Macs were constructed so that you could take two of them, stick them end to end,
0:32:19and make either an M1 or an M2 Ultra. So when the M3 Macs came out, we said, "Well, this M3 Macs looks just like the M1 and M2 Macs,
0:32:25so probably they're going to take two of these M3 Macs, stick them end to end, and you'll get the M3 Ultra."
0:32:33And when you stick them end to end, the thing that connects them is that Apple's branded UltraFusion interconnect,
0:32:39it's a silicon interposer that lets them weave together these two chips into a single Ultra chip.
0:32:46So my expectation for the M3 was it'll be the same thing as the M1 and M2.
0:32:51And what that also meant is probably there won't be any kind of M3 extreme that's like four of them connected or whatever,
0:32:58it just looks like the M1 and M2, you'll be able to stick two of these end to end.
0:33:02So somebody posted on Twitter, in Chinese, which is a barrier for me to understanding this,
0:33:09a picture of the M3 Macs die compared to the M1 and M2 Macs. And if you compare them,
0:33:16and the M1 and M2 Macs picture is at the bottom of the die, you see this long strip that is that UltraFusion silicon interposer thing.
0:33:25It looks kind of like the very tiny pinouts on a little thing that you slide into a slot, but it's just a bunch of little,
0:33:30a strip of little connectors or a strip of little contacts. Those are all the wrong words because this is microscopic stuff.
0:33:36It's just a strip on the bottom where you connect them end to end, except the M3 die shot does not have that strip at the bottom.
0:33:42Now, did someone just crop it out of the M3 Macs picture? I don't know. You can't tell.
0:33:49And the Chinese text translated by competing translation things, Google Translate and like the Twitter Translate thing were like,
0:33:55"There is a wiring layer," and then in parentheses, "although wiring layer peeling is not listed on X."
0:34:03And the other translation is, "with wiring layer, although wiring layer peeling is not included in X."
0:34:08I don't know what that means, but some people like MacRumors and a bunch of other like MaxTech or whatever took this ball and ran with it and said,
0:34:15"M3 Macs has no silicon interposer. M3 Macs doesn't have UltraFusion."
0:34:19And they spun that out to mean that the two M3 Macs will not be stuck together to make the M3 Ultra.
0:34:25And in fact, what will happen instead is there will be a new chip called the M3 Ultra that is not the Macs at all,
0:34:32but a new chip entirely. And what they were saying about this new chip based on some other vague rumors was that the M3 Ultra will just be one big standalone chip,
0:34:41not two of anything stuck together, and that one big standalone chip will not have any efficiency cores because it doesn't need them as a desktop-only chip.
0:34:48No efficiency cores, only power cores and a bunch of them.
0:34:52So if you can imagine the M3 Ultra being like a bigger chip than the M3 Macs with all the efficiency cores removed and that new space taken up by just having the power cores
0:35:01and then if you take two of those Ultras and stick them together, you would get the M3 Extreme, which would then go in the Mac Pro.
0:35:10I want to believe this rumor, but basing it on an image posted in a language I can't understand on Twitter where someone might have just cropped out the interposer is not reassuring to me.
0:35:24I wanted to talk about it now to say, "Hey, hope springs eternal." And despite the rumor we had a while ago that nothing good will ever happen to the Mac Pro until after the M7,
0:35:34I keep reminding myself, who knows, maybe there's a possibility, a WWDC presumably, the new Mac Studio and maybe new Mac Pro will be announced,
0:35:42I would love to see an M3 Ultra chip that is not two of anything stuck together that had no efficiency cores, that had only power cores,
0:35:51and I'm not going to be able to do them to be stuck together to make an Ultra in the Mac Pro. That would be super cool.
0:35:55Fingers crossed for the WWDC that I'm currently not going to be able to attend in person.
0:36:00This is the kind of thing I would love for this to be true, but I can't imagine that they're doing enough sales volume of these very, very large chips to make it worth custom engineering to make a custom chip.
0:36:14If that's wrong, I would love to be proven wrong on that. But so far, the amount of effort they have shown so far for these very high-end chips is not large, let's say.
0:36:26And so I just have doubts. But that being said, if you look at the M3 series, keep in mind this is the first time that the M3 Pro and Macs are actually fairly different chips.
0:36:40For the M1 and M2 Pro and Macs, the Pro was basically a chopped-off version of the Macs that chopped off some of its GPU cores and maybe had some disabled CPU cores for binning reasons.
0:36:51But the M3 Pro is a totally different and custom design compared to the M3 Macs and the regular M3. It's closer to the regular M3, but it's still a very custom design.
0:37:04It is not just one of those with something chopped off or disabled. So they are, with the M3 line, expanding it to more unique designs.
0:37:13So maybe this has some merit and some promise, but I bet they sell a lot more Pros than Extremes or Ultras or whatever.
0:37:22So I don't want to get my hopes up too much on this because it seems unlikely to be leading to anything that we actually want.
0:37:30Some of the other vague things that are making people hope about this is that in addition to the M3 Macs being separate from the Pro, the M3 Macs is also substantially beefier than the M2 Macs was.
0:37:41In terms of if you look at the scale, like you have a small, medium, large, whatever, the M3 Macs has lots of stuff in it and it's more powerful comparatively.
0:37:51For example, the M3 Macs is contending with the M2 Ultra in many benchmarks. Just one Macs compared to the M2 Ultra, which is not the thing you saw with the M1 versus the M2.
0:38:01The M2 versus the M3, a single Macs competing with the M1 Ultra or M2 Ultra.
0:38:07Not in GPU benchmarks I guess, but the M3 Macs does look beefier.
0:38:13I believe the whole no efficiency cores rumor was based on some kind of source code leak thing somewhere. Again, I can't lend too much credence to these things.
0:38:22That makes sense to me, both for the Mac Studio and for the Mac Pro. Those computers are never going to run on battery, you hope, if they're running off your UPS.
0:38:34Efficiency cores, especially a huge number of efficiency cores, is just wasted. It's wasted silicon. Not that the efficiency cores are bad or anything, but if you want to make a powerful machine like the Mac Pro, that case is huge.
0:38:45Efficiency cores are probably not a worthwhile use, especially if you have like 6 or 12 of them are worthwhile use of your silicon space.
0:38:55I kind of feel like no efficiency cores is too few. 12 may be too many, but 0 may be too few. But then I kept thinking, "Okay, but what would be the point of them?" I guess for heat maybe, or I don't even know.
0:39:08You don't really care about the power. It's not like you don't care about the electricity your Mac Pro takes, but one efficiency core ticking away doing some trivial job versus one power core ticking away.
0:39:22In the grand scheme of the power envelope of a Mac Pro, you're not going to notice that. I don't know. I'm intrigued by this rumor, and I'm anxiously anticipating new hardware at WWDC.
0:39:32So with that in mind, if you'll permit a slight tangent, what is your vibe check on replacing your Mac Pro? Last I remember you saying anything about it, which as we've already covered, my memory is garbage.
0:39:44But last I remember is you were going to keep on keeping on until you don't get Mac OS updates anymore, and then you'll start thinking about it. But what's your current thinking?
0:39:52Yeah, I'm still probably going to keep holding out until I don't have OS support anymore. Or I can smell not having it. Because I'll know that I don't have OS support before that OS is released, and then I'll make a decision.
0:40:05I suppose something could be released at WWDC that's so compelling that it would just make me want to get it. And it might even be just like an M3 Ultra Mac Studio or something, right?
0:40:17Because maybe I still wouldn't bother with the extreme because there's still the whole question of the gaming situation and what good is a giant GPU like that.
0:40:26Never say never, but right now I'm still going to keep holding out with this Mac Pro for as long as I can.
0:40:32Fair enough. Alright, it seems like everyone's getting a little bit of antitrust pressure because apparently Microsoft has decided to do what they've already done in the EU and split teams off from Office.
0:40:43So reading from The Verge, "Microsoft, possibly hoping to deflect the blow of an ongoing antitrust investigation in the EU, is spinning teams off from Office 365 to sell as its own separate app globally.
0:40:56A company spokesperson told Reuters it was making the change to its business chat and conferencing app "to ensure clarity for customers" after already doing so in the EU last year.
0:41:06So the background for this, for people who weren't working in jobby jobs in the past 5-10 years, is that Slack came out.
0:41:15And Slack was one of those sort of backdoor work items, kind of like the iPhone was and Macs in some cases, where employees start using it without the blessing or knowledge of management just to help them do their work.
0:41:27Because Slack was free, people could download it onto their computers if they were lucky enough to be able to install software on their work computers, which many people are, especially developers.
0:41:35And so they just started using Slack. And then eventually enough people used it, "Look, all our employees love Slack and it's helping them get their work done and they're more productive. We should get a license for Slack."
0:41:45And they would go to Slack and they would buy a license and however many seats they have to pay for for their company.
0:41:52And yay, the company is now using Slack. Employees are enjoying it and they're using emoticons, emoji reaction things and making custom animated rainbow dancing parrots they can put under messages and they're making all sorts of channels about the frisbee club at work.
0:42:10Everyone's loving it. Slack is great. Having lots of fun. I live this. It was a real thing. It was like IRC but for people who couldn't use IRC and it was fun and everyone was using Slack.
0:42:21Then what happened was Microsoft said, "We don't like it when other people pay somebody other than us for their office software."
0:42:29So Microsoft created Teams, which is a terrible, terrible Slack clone that everybody hates. As well they should. It is a very bad program.
0:42:38And what they said is, "Hey, company that's currently paying for Slack, you're already paying us for Exchange and Office because everybody is."
0:42:48So why are you bothering paying Slack? Because Slack is kind of expensive. Why don't you just use Teams? You get it for free with the thing you're already paying for.
0:42:59You're already paying for Exchange. You're already paying for Office. Guess what? Now you get Teams. No additional cost to you. It just comes free as part of the thing you're already paying for.
0:43:09That caused pretty much every company that has anybody who's in charge of finances to stop paying for Slack and force everyone to change to Teams.
0:43:19Because they'd say, "How much are we paying for Slack per year? How many millions of dollars are we paying for Slack every year? I can just cross that line item off the budget and I just save this company $1.5 million per year."
0:43:32And all I have to do is tell everybody, "Hey, you were using Slack. Now you're using Teams." And this happened to me personally. And when it was happening to me, I complained to it with my friends and they all said, "Yeah, this is happening to me too."
0:43:43So everybody said, all the employees were like, "But we don't want to leave Slack. We love Slack. What about all our chats? What about this? What about that?" All sorts of employee feedback sessions.
0:43:55The CFO would just point to $1.5 million per year versus zero. And that was an unstoppable force that met the very movable object of employee dissatisfaction.
0:44:06And so Slack was phased out, Teams was phased in, and the wailing of the masses who were forced to use Teams, which was and is incredibly buggy and was and is a pale shadow of Slack, happened across the entire universe.
0:44:20Apparently, and I didn't even know about this because I'm not paying too much attention after I left my jobby job, in the EU, they said, "That seems like anti-competitive behavior where you're using market power in one realm, like your office applications or exchange server or whatever, to force, you know, to gain leverage over another market, which is the market for these communication apps."
0:44:40Which, by the way, it totally is.
0:44:44So I talked about it on Macedon a little bit, and a couple of people asked questions. I said, "Well, wait a second. How is Slack or Teams separate from 'office'?" Because 'office' includes like Excel, Word, Outlook, PowerPoint, SharePoint, you know, Exchange Server.
0:45:06Yeah, but you're saying, "Office software is one market, but things like Teams and Slack are a different market?"
0:45:15And what I said to the person I was talking to, I said, "Microsoft would love for you to believe that all of these things are just 'office applications' because 'office application' is a flexible enough term to encompass anything anybody makes that is remotely useful to someone who works in an office."
0:45:32And the fact is, historically, we have allowed this to go on to the point where Microsoft Office and the Office suite of applications, or the 365, whatever they call it now, encompasses way more than it already should.
0:45:44But that's not a reason to say, "Okay, but they're allowed to do this to literally any other thing that, you know..."
0:45:49So Slack had a product that people were using because they liked it, and they charged people money for it, and Microsoft came in and said, "We will leverage our existing market power to essentially push you out of the market with a free application, Internet Explorer style."
0:46:01Because free is better than paying. And while I do see why that's bad, and it happens to me and it didn't feel good and it does feel anti-competitive, if you look at it from a logical perspective, what you say is, "Okay, but also, I see other things that happened in the past that Microsoft did that were also bad, and I agree with that."
0:46:17Like, how did we let them draw a line around everything that is currently in Office 365 or whatever and say that is one market?
0:46:26I think that is the result of doing this same thing multiple times in the past and getting away with it. That's not a reason to let them get away with it again, but it is kind of perverse.
0:46:34So the reason I put the line item in here is like, "Okay, EU did this thing, and Microsoft is saying, 'We're going to do this for the whole world.' EU made us split it out and charge money for it separately, right? And now we're going to do it for the whole world."
0:46:49This, of course, made me think of Apple in a couple different ways. One, self-regulation. We've talked about this about Apple many times.
0:46:57"Apple, the regulators are coming for it. People are upset. Governments are upset. How about you voluntarily do something to head them off in the past?" And Apple is like, "Nah."
0:47:06They're basically like, "Make me do it. Pass the law. Win the lawsuit. I'm not going to preemptively do something in the hopes that we'll keep you away." And this looks like Microsoft saying, "The EU made us do it. Maybe the U.S. is going to make us do it. Why don't we just preemptively say, 'Look, we already did it in the EU. Why don't we do it everywhere?'"
0:47:27It's kind of like if Apple said, "You know what? Side-loading everywhere. The EU is making us do it, so we're just going to make it global." Apple has not done that, and arguably Apple has also not done that in the EU either, but we'll see how that turns out.
0:47:38So there's that one thing. But the second thing is I look at this and I say, "Microsoft doing this now is like, 'Okay, we used this strategy to push out Slack for years, and we got away with it.
0:47:56We've essentially won, and Slack has been pushed out. Yeah, sure. Fine. We'll make it separate.'"
0:48:01It's like if you let Microsoft do this for, I don't know, five to ten years, and they push out the competitor and hurt that company so badly that they essentially, like, all the companies that were going to use Teams simply because it's free, by now they have.
0:48:19The only ones still holding onto Slack are the few companies that can bear to see that line item, or maybe they don't pay for Microsoft Office or whatever. It's like closing the barn door after the horse has already left.
0:48:30When I look at this, I'm like, "Do you see Apple is a different way to be evil?" If you do the anti-competitive thing and get away with it for long enough, then you can "self-regulate" the first time you're forced to do this in any jurisdiction. Oh, the EU forces to do it. Now we'll self-regulate and do it globally.
0:48:51"Aren't we a good company?" That is so much of a better, more shrewd strategy than what Apple is doing from my perspective because you get to have your cake and eat it too. They got to crush Slack, right? They got to replace it in all these places.
0:49:05And now they also presumably will head off antitrust about this specific issue in any other country because, you know what, the EU made us do it, and we're voluntarily doing it everyplace else. That is just genius. Evil genius, but genius.
0:49:19And Microsoft is really good at that. Microsoft has also seen what the DOJ can do. They have been directly affected by it. We can quibble about whether the big DOJ/Microsoft case in the late 90s, what that actually did or accomplished, but the reality is Microsoft had to deal with it for a long time and it was a huge pain in their rear end.
0:49:39So they know what the DOJ can do. The difference here is that I think Microsoft, when they're doing things that are blatantly anti-competitive, they know it. Whereas Apple, I get the feeling still that Apple's upper leadership, and honestly many people in the company, but certainly the upper leadership, they are so convinced that they are completely entitled to do what they're doing.
0:50:03I don't think they even see the possibility yet that they could be wrong and that they could be forced to do other things. Even now that the EU has just forced them to do other things, I still think Apple is still going to fight tooth and nail.
0:50:17They're still going to never change their minds about what they are entitled to do. Similar to what Microsoft has now, I think it will take a new generation of Apple leadership before we start to see them play better ball with regulators.
0:50:35I don't see that happening with the current leadership. Not only just like Tim Cook in particular, the current generation of leadership. Everyone at the Apple SVP level who is over, say, age 60, which is I think most of them, or at least like 55, there's like one generation of Apple power that's really in right now.
0:50:57I think they will all have to go and be replaced before there's even a chance of the current entitlement culture being a little bit more pragmatic with the environment they're in now.
0:51:10That happened to Microsoft too. In the Ballmer era, it was just a continuation of the Gates era essentially. It took Satya Nadella to come in, among many other things, but he did many smart things to turn the company around. But that was the dividing line between old Microsoft and new Microsoft. Because Ballmer was just a Gates extension.
0:51:27And Nadella was like, "I have a new idea about how Microsoft can be." And I feel like Nadella also has a new idea of how to deal with regulation. With this self-regulation after already getting most of the benefits of being a monopoly. By the way, I think, don't quote me on this, you can read the article in the notes to find out the details, but I believe part of the thing of breaking it out separately was like all the companies that are currently getting it as part of their contract for Office, their price doesn't change.
0:51:53So it's only like for new customers going forward, not only did we get all those wins and push Slack out, we're going to consolidate them. Because if they went to all those customers and say, "Oh, and by the way, now Teams cost an additional $1.5 million per year," the employees would say, "Hey, wait a second! That was $0 on the budget, just went to $1.5 million. Can we just give that to Slack instead?" And they would be much rejoicing. But that's not what they did, I think.
0:52:14As Marco said, both of you really, I really wish that Apple had taken the initiative to self-regulate because I genuinely think if they showed even an ounce of, I don't know if contrition is really the word I'm looking for, but if they showed an ounce of responsibility and conceded even the littlest bit, that, "Hey, maybe we should pull back a little on our entitlement," which I know we've covered it a million times, but I'll say it again, I couldn't.
0:52:43I couldn't agree with Marco more, that they feel entitled. And so if they had shown even just the teeniest bit of willingness to give on this, I genuinely think that there would be considerably less antitrust pressure globally. But because they're being such petulant children about it, here we are. And so, you know, you F around and now they're finding out. So this is what happens.
0:53:09- Yeah, and again, I think it will take a generation of their leadership to turn over before we see the Satya Nadella of Apple. The newer generation, the more pragmatic for the current conditions kind of leader.
0:53:23You look at Apple now, and all those people who were in leadership positions at Apple now in that upper leadership, they were there when Apple was the underdog. And so they still have so much of that underdog mindset.
0:53:36But it's gonna take the rising through the ranks and the time for a new generation of Apple leadership who came up while Apple was already the big dominant, honestly, bully/monopolist, however you want to define it.
0:53:48It's gonna take that generation of leadership in the company to inherit power before we see meaningful change in this area. Because the current generation just will never ever see it that way.
0:54:01- You made the comparison to Ballmer, and look, I know Tim Cook did a better job by most measures than Steve Ballmer. But make no mistake, Tim Cook is a Steve Ballmer type.
0:54:11Doing a Steve Ballmer role, he's just doing it better. But it's exactly the same kind of transition, and Tim Cook is exactly the same kind of leader in a lot of ways. He just does a better job of it than Ballmer did.
0:54:23- And he has better values, I would say. Like Ballmer did not have a big environmental push.
0:54:29- Yes, but Cook still has many of the same strengths and weaknesses.
0:54:33- Yeah, it is definitely an extension of it, because he came up with jobs. And hopefully Apple won't have to experience a Microsoft-like transition, because part of Adele's transition was that Microsoft was essentially a fading star.
0:54:45- The place where it was dominant, like Office and PCs and stuff like that, became less important, and all of Ballmer's attempts to bring Microsoft into the future did not pan out. There was a lot of big acquisitions, all the attempts at mobile failed, buying Nokia wasn't a great idea, the Skype purchase didn't...
0:55:04Other people were doing things, and Microsoft was trying to do things the old way, Windows and Office, but also new stuff, and it just, you know, Windows everywhere, and it just wasn't working. Ben Thompson has written a lot about this, right? So the Adele's takeover was kind of like, "You should make me the new CEO."
0:55:18Because Microsoft, despite the stock price and the numbers that Ballmer were applying to to say, "I've been a great CEO, look at these numbers!" And Tim Cook has even bigger numbers to point to.
0:55:29And with all of that, the board could see that, like, "Look, Microsoft is not... Microsoft is not a cendant, right? Yes, they're making a lot of money, but they're making a lot of money, it's like a trailing indicator.
0:55:41They have a lot of existing businesses that have an incredible amount of inertia, and Ballmer was good at continuing to milk them and make tons of money and grow that business, but what does the future look like?"
0:55:52Microsoft had faded to the point where they wanted a new leader who could put the shine back on Microsoft.
0:55:59And I would hope that Apple doesn't have to get to that position where either the place where Apple was dominant becomes less important, which I don't think is any fear of happening anytime soon, or that Apple, like, is not seen as having a future beyond the stuff that it has done.
0:56:14And I don't think that has happened yet either.
0:56:17The generational thing was like, "Oh, Tim Cook will retire, and all those people will retire." But I think for the... I mean, that's the good thing about Apple.
0:56:24Because if they don't screw things up, and they certainly haven't, again, Tim Cook has done amazing things with every metric you could possibly measure at Apple.
0:56:31If they don't screw things up, maybe you just do need a generational turnover to say, "We're going to continue to do all the things that Apple used to do, but we won't be jerks about certain stuff."
0:56:42It's not a big change, but it is type of like, "You need a new sheriff in town," or you need a big change of heart from Tim Cook, which doesn't seem to be forthcoming.
0:56:49So I really hope it's not like Apple, the fading star, never got into Holo headbands. Their Vision Pro was a flop, but the Holo headband from some company we've never heard of is taking the world by storm.
0:56:59And yeah, Apple still has the phone market, but phones are less important now that we have Holo headbands. You know what I mean?
0:57:04That's where Microsoft was when Adele took over and said, "It's not going to be the Windows company anymore. We're going to ship Linux. We're going to put our software on every platform."
0:57:12That strategy, Ballmer would never have done that. Gates would never have done that. And there's all sorts of things that Tim Cook would never have done.
0:57:19But honestly, I don't think Apple needs that kind of turnaround. They just need leadership that takes a different view of their place in the ecosystem that they've created.
0:57:30It's a course correction, not a revamp. Because if Apple gets to the point where it needs a revamp, that means things have gone really badly.
0:57:38I mean, if they're 90 days from bankruptcy like they were in '97 or whatever, yeah, new leadership has a lot of leeway to do all sorts of great things. But I hope they don't get to that point.
0:57:49Well, two clarifications on that. First of all, I think we... The story has yet to be finished, but we haven't seen how Apple's handling AI stuff yet.
0:58:00And so I think that is one area where it could reveal problems if they really drop the ball on it. Now, we'll see what happens.
0:58:08Again, we have lots of strong rumors of big stuff coming in just a few short months, so we'll see. We don't know how that story ends yet.
0:58:17But that is one area where it is possible that Apple could still drop the ball and have a lot of the tech industry disrupt Apple's businesses by using that. So we'll see what happens there.
0:58:27But the reason I was thinking that wouldn't be as bad was because the thing that really hurt Microsoft was the rise of mobile.
0:58:33Yes.
0:58:34And mobile is the thing right now. So even if the current large language models are a big thing and Apple falls really behind in them, the phone is still the thing.
0:58:45And the iPhone is less valuable. It doesn't have a good L.M. You know what I mean? I can see how they can fall behind in this area.
0:58:51But as long as they continue their iPhone dominance at the same level or close to it, that's why I give the Holo headband fictional example.
0:59:01There's not some new realm of the tech sector, some new platform that is now the show. The phone will still be the show.
0:59:08Even with AI, it is a possibility that if they do such a bad job on AI, that will ding the iPhone or whatever.
0:59:17But there's so much else to recommend the iPhone that I don't think would hurt them that much.
0:59:20But maybe this is just me being the large language model pessimism. They're very useful and Apple should use that technology.
0:59:26But I don't think it's so revolutionary that if Apple does a poor job of it, it's going to hurt the iPhone in the same way that mobile hurt the PC.
0:59:36I mean, we'll see. I think you're probably right. I always say don't put it against the smartphone. I think you're probably right.
0:59:41But this generation of modern AI techniques and the types of models that are being created and deployed now in really compelling ways in a lot of cases,
0:59:52I think this is the most credible attack yet on the smartphone.
0:59:56Because in many cases, we talked about in ATP Overtime a couple weeks ago, the Rabbit R1 and its idea of the large action model.
1:00:05And yeah, there's a lot of reasons right now where we're looking at version one of this and saying, "Well, that has all these shortcomings. It probably won't be very good. Here's why we might not want to use it or where it might fail."
1:00:16But this is version one. The things we're seeing, look at the humane AI pin. That is something that I don't think has much of a use right now in what we see now, but that is also a direct attack on the smartphone.
1:00:31At some point, one of these attacks might actually succeed because we're seeing really only the very early versions of it.
1:00:37But if one of those does eventually take off and start really undermining the smartphone in some way, Apple better be there.
1:00:46So I think that kind of Ballmer moment could happen to Apple. We can see it. We can see how it could happen.
1:00:53If it comes from an area where Apple is not strong. And I think we'll see how that goes.
1:00:59When we talk about the Rabbit R1 and the humane AI pin, though, that stuff so wants to be on a phone.
1:01:04So I think the only way that would happen to Apple is it ends up being on Android phones but not on iPhones due to stupid App Store policy reasons.
1:01:10And that would hurt Apple, but those things so clearly want to be on a phone. It's just that the companies putting them out don't have a phone platform to put them on.
1:01:18So they're trying to go it on their own with pins and the little Playdate type thing.
1:01:23Those things just feel so naturally at home on a phone. And it remains to be seen, like we said when we talked about the Apple AI stuff most recently,
1:01:29is the AI stuff a commodity or is it a competitive advantage? Because if it's a commodity, Apple will just license it or make some of its own or whatever.
1:01:37But if it's a competitive advantage, how big is that advantage and how much is the way against all the other stuff?
1:01:42That's why I threw a whole headband out there because it's like, what if there's something that replaces the phone?
1:01:46But a lot of that AI stuff is going to be perfectly, its natural home is on the phone.
1:01:51It's a computing device that you already have that already has microphones, it already has cameras, it already is connected to the internet, you already pay for that connection,
1:01:57it already has a platform and software and CPUs in it, that's all the stuff you need and you just need to connect it to the AI large language model.
1:02:02And yeah, Apple could screw that up by being dumb and everyone else connects to a large language model and no one wants to license it to Apple or Apple has a cruddy one.
1:02:10But I just look at how much the terribleness of Siri has hurt the iPhone and the answer is not that much.
1:02:17The voice assistants on every other platform have been better significantly for years, it hasn't really hurt the iPhone too much.
1:02:23So I still feel like the, I keep saying hollow headband and people are probably thinking I'm saying Vision Pro,
1:02:28but I'm trying to think of some fantastical future thing that obviates our need to hold rectangles with screens.
1:02:33Well, and so this actually leads me into the second refutation or kind of clarification I want to make on this whole topic is,
1:02:39the way that I think we've all characterized it here and there in this conversation with Apple's behavior now,
1:02:46we've kind of said we wish they would be a little, let go a little bit or be a little bit nicer or more gracious with some of these app store related policies.
1:02:56The failure of leadership here is not that they are not being nice enough and for them to ease up their grip a little bit in some of these areas would not be them being charitable.
1:03:09Apple is actually strategically the right move to have done that for lots of reasons that would generally benefit the company and its users and developers all
1:03:17because the grip they have held has been so damaging to the entire ecosystem and to them and their products that has invited so much of this regulation
1:03:28and the regulation comes with it the possibility to significantly negatively affect them if, for instance,
1:03:37look at what the DOJ is asking for in their lawsuit. They're asking for some pretty significant changes to the way Apple makes integrated products.
1:03:45That is a massive attack on Apple's entire method of making products. It is a huge attack on key components of their operating system, their hardware, their integrations.
1:04:00If the DOJ gets what it wants, even if the DOJ only gets part of what it wants, it could really negatively impact Apple.
1:04:07And for Apple's leadership to have basically driven the ship directly into this and invited these attacks from governments by being so incredibly anti-competitive in so many areas for so long,
1:04:20I think that shows a failure of leadership and a failure of strategy.
1:04:25When I say I wish Apple would have avoided some of this by loosening the grip a little bit, I'm not saying that they should have been nice, that they should have been charitable, they should have been generous.
1:04:33No, I'm saying they actually made a strategic error that will cost them more in the long term in much larger areas.
1:04:39Yeah, we've been saying that for, it feels like for years now, but the problem is Apple disagrees with us so clearly.
1:04:45So characterizing it the way we do of like that they should loosen their grip or they should be nicer is trying to tell them what behavior they should change, but the argument has always been
1:04:54that Apple, if you do this, it will literally be better for you in the long run, right?
1:04:58Which I've always said is supposed to be, Apple's always going on about how like, we take a long view, we don't care about the ROI, we do what's right, and they have done, Apple has done, it's not just hype,
1:05:08Apple has done many, many things since the return of Steve Jobs going on for decades, including in the Tim Cook error, decisions that are bad in the short term, but good in the long term.
1:05:20Apple does that all the time except in this one area, and the reason is because they disagree with us, they don't think it's good in the long term.
1:05:26We obviously think it is, but we don't run Apple, so yeah, when we say they should be nicer, it's not because we're telling them to be magnanimous or to give up money or whatever,
1:05:33it's because we literally think it will make the company more money in the long run, like so many other things that they have done that were sort of counter to conventional wisdom,
1:05:41counter to what their competitors were doing, that seemed like a bad move that took years to come to fruition,
1:05:49so many of those are why Apple is where it is today, and we're trying to say this is another one Apple, and they're saying they disagree,
1:05:54and what Marco was saying, if he was ready to make this reference, he could have,
1:05:58was that the more Apple tightens its grip, the more developers will slip through its fingers.
1:06:03We are brought to you this week by ATP members. Please consider becoming a member today.
1:06:11You probably are not one, because one of the benefits of the member feeds is that you don't hear ads like this or the other ad in this episode inserted into the show.
1:06:19You also get bonus content as a member, so not only do we have the roughly monthly specials we've been doing for various tech and non-tech topics,
1:06:28but now we've introduced recently ATP Overtime. Every single episode now has member exclusive bonus content in the form of one extra tech topic that is stuck on the end of the show for members,
1:06:40so if you're a member, you get a little bit more ATP in every single episode, plus no ads.
1:06:44You also get access to the bootleg feed, because our unedited live stream, many people love listening that way.
1:06:49You get to hear the raw uncut show, it's released sooner than the regular episode, and it includes extra stuff beating an end,
1:06:55managing the live stream and choosing titles and stuff like that. It's kind of fun.
1:06:59You also get access to some merchandise discounts when we do sales, little stuff like that here and there,
1:07:03but for the most part, what you're paying for with membership usually is the bonus content.
1:07:08People love it. See for yourself atp.fm/join, and there you can see that you cost about 8 bucks a month for membership,
1:07:15and you have annual plans available, different currencies available, but basically it's 8 bucks a month, or close enough in your currency.
1:07:22Check it out today, atp.fm/join. Please consider becoming a member today.
1:07:28It is the best way to support the show. It supports us directly. There's no middle people taking a cut.
1:07:34It's not an indirect relationship. It's a direct relationship between you and us. You give us 8 bucks a month or equivalent,
1:07:39and we give you bonus content and the rest of the podcast with no ads, basically.
1:07:43So check it out today, atp.fm/join. Thank you so much for your consideration, and now back to the show.
1:07:49[Music]
1:07:53Apple Vision Pro personas can now be 3D and float freely across different apps.
1:07:59Like the Verge, starting today as Verge writes, "Vision Pro personas will be able to do more than hover like a ghost in FaceTime calls.
1:08:07Now you can use them in SharePlay-enabled apps to collaborate, play games, or watch media with other people.
1:08:12Apple is calling this a 'spatial persona.' The idea is to make it feel like you're in the same physical space as another user.
1:08:17It was part of what Apple showed in developer previews last year, but hasn't been available in the actual persona beta until now."
1:08:25I want to point you to this week's Connected, where they discussed this and had a really good conversation about it.
1:08:29I do plan on trying this in the next couple of days. In fact, I was trying to get some time with Mike from Connected in order to try this before we recorded,
1:08:38and it just, our schedules didn't work out today. And I apologize to all of you for not having been able to make that work, but you know, stuff happens.
1:08:45So yeah, check out Connected if you're interested in that. Marco, I'm assuming you haven't tried it, because you never asked me to.
1:08:51I'm not sure how many people you know with Vision Pro, so what is your understanding here?
1:08:56You're right, I have not tried it. In fact, my Vision Pro is not even in my house right now.
1:09:02I actually lent it to a friend for a few days, because I hardly ever use it.
1:09:10And I wish that this was not my answer to this question, but I don't think this is going to change my usage of the Vision Pro at all,
1:09:20because, I mean, first of all, I still can't get it to look right with my eyes.
1:09:23That's a separate problem, I guess that's a me problem, just like how AirPods never fit me until the AirPod Pros.
1:09:28The Vision Pro does not work with my eyes. And I know it's not my eyes' fault, because when I put on my son's $500 Metacwest 3, everything is tack sharp.
1:09:39I can see every single sharp edge of all those blocky pixels on those low resolution screens.
1:09:46With no adjustments, all I do, like I crank the little head thing back, because he's a kid so he has a head smaller than mine,
1:09:50so I just crank the little head thing back to make it bigger, stick it on my head. No adjustments, no setup, perfectly sharp.
1:09:56And I put on the Vision Pro, no matter what I do with the Vision Pro, I've tried everything, believe me, everything I've tried.
1:10:04And it is a blurry mess. And so I have a very hard time using it for anything.
1:10:11But even if I get past that, I think this is, first of all, I have major concerns with the Vision Pro.
1:10:17I'll get to those in a little bit when we talk about the soccer video. But I'm not motivated to use it.
1:10:22I'm going weeks at a time without even putting it on, because I'm just not finding those compelling use cases that fit into my life.
1:10:32Yeah, so recently, I don't know, maybe just a couple of months back, I added a shortcut to, and I think we might have talked about this on the show,
1:10:42I added a shortcut to both my iPad and the kids' hand-me-down iPad that will send me a push notification when either of those iPads falls below 20% battery.
1:10:50And I did that because even though the iPad is not an essential device for me, and is mostly not an essential device for the kids,
1:10:59I am never happy when it's completely discharged. And I would notice, probably relatively quickly, and probably at an inopportune moment,
1:11:08I have no idea what the battery state of my Vision Pro is ever. And that's mostly okay, because I'm just not using it that much.
1:11:20I think it's a few different reasons. You guys covered this really well from a developer and business perspective, or the most recent under the radar.
1:11:30There's obviously more to it than just the business perspective. But from a personal and user perspective, I do very much like the product.
1:11:41And I think it is, as everyone has said, a technological marvel. I don't have a lot of occasions for it in my life.
1:11:51And I think a lot of that is because it's so immensely antisocial. I think Apple did as good a job as they possibly could with making it social,
1:11:59but inevitably you have a humongous set of goggles on your face between you and your eyes, between your eyes and the other person's eyes.
1:12:10And that's just never going to work. You're never going to be able to watch something together, because my limited experience with SharePlay is not great.
1:12:16And what are you going to do? Are you going to have one person looking at a TV and the other person looking at the Vision Pro in the same damn room?
1:12:21Yeah, Aaron, why don't you sit next to me with these idiotic goggles on my face while we watch this movie together?
1:12:28Because the fidelity on the Vision Pro, you just don't understand, honey. It's just that much better.
1:12:33We're going to spend $7,000 on Vision's Pro instead of just using our TV together.
1:12:39And as we established, the fidelity actually isn't better if you have a decent 4K television that you're a reasonable distance from.
1:12:45Or a subwoofer.
1:12:47Yeah, exactly. So anyways, there are occasions when it is freaking magical. And I really do mean that.
1:12:54I will forever and always be dumbfounded and incredibly impressed by Mac Virtual Display.
1:13:01And the handful of times I've brought the Vision Pro to the library to work, I have used the Mac Virtual Display.
1:13:08And it is just chef's kiss. It is just incredible. I could not say enough good things about it.
1:13:14The problem though is that you're that idiot at the library wearing the Vision Pro.
1:13:19And so the only times I've been able to do it, because I just haven't had the gumption to do it otherwise, is when I'm in a private room that, granted, has glass walls behind me or whatever.
1:13:28But I'm facing an interior wall, and so the only thing that people can see as they walk by is the back of my head.
1:13:36And I am secluded from the rest of the library. And the other day I went back to Wegmans to work for the first time in a long time.
1:13:43And it's really delightful at Wegmans. There's really great WiFi. Not to say our libraries are bad by any stretch, but anyways, Wegmans is really nice.
1:13:51It's got comfortable chairs, really great WiFi, power all over the place. And if I'm thirsty or hungry or whatever, I can go and grab a snack.
1:13:58But I'm not going to use the Vision Pro there. It's just too "look at me, look at me."
1:14:04So I haven't had a lot of places where I think to myself, "You know what? Now is Vision Pro time."
1:14:10And the only times I can really think of, other than when I'm working privately, even in a public spot, is on the rare occasions that Erin has a social thing in the evening.
1:14:19So she's out, the kids are asleep, and then hell yeah, I'll put that on and watch a movie because I'll watch something in 3D or what have you, or I'll do something along those lines.
1:14:29And that's pretty cool. And bringing us to the next topic, the immersive stuff is just phenomenal, even though this new video kind of wasn't.
1:14:41So what am I talking about? When Apple first debuted the Vision Pro, there were several immersive experiences.
1:14:49There's 3D, where you're looking at, say, a rectangle, and there's depth to the images in that rectangle. But you can't change your perspective at all.
1:15:04You're still always looking at a fixed camera, you're looking at something that now has depth in a way that my television on my wall does not, but it's still a rectangle. There's nothing you can do about that.
1:15:18I mean, fixed camera, just to be clear, what you basically can't do is you can't move the camera forward or backwards, up or down, left or right, but you can rotate because the camera's field of view is larger than your field of view.
1:15:27So you can turn your head, imagine the camera is replaced with your head, you can turn your head, you can look up, you can look down, you can look up, you can look right, but you can't take a step forward.
1:15:35But you're getting ahead of me. I'm talking about just vanilla 3D, like Marvel movies is what I'm saying.
1:15:42Same answer though, same answer. If you're sitting close to the screen, you can't ever change your perspective in a 3D movie the same way.
1:15:48Even if you're sitting in the front row, you can turn your head to the left, you can turn your head to the right, you can look up, you can look down, but you can't take a step forward and see more of the back of something.
1:15:57Like, "Oh, I can't see what's written on the side of that truck, let me take two steps forward and now I can see it." That's not how 3D movies work, and that's not how Vision Pro 3D works for these things they're recording.
1:16:08Right, but just to make sure we're saying the same thing, 3D is when you're watching a Marvel movie or something along those lines, and there's depth to that movie in a way that there isn't depth in your TV.
1:16:18But you have zero control over the perspective of what you're looking at. You are along for the ride.
1:16:23With immersive stuff, and I think this is what you're describing, John, with immersive stuff, yes, you can turn your head, you can go up and down, left or right, and that will actively change what you're looking at.
1:16:36You are immersed in this environment, you have agency over where you're looking.
1:16:41Well, it's basically just because the screen is really wide and really tall.
1:16:44Yeah, it's basically using a 180 degree camera. It's like you're sitting extremely close to a very large 3D movie.
1:16:53So a screen that wraps around you.
1:16:56You can't shift your head left or right and look around objects. That's not a thing you can do. You're still fixed in what you are seeing, but your field of view is way bigger.
1:17:07And the comparison in the Vision Pro world is the immersive environments that are 3D modeled, where you can actually take one step forward before you go down or tilt your head to the side.
1:17:20Because those are 3D modeled and you're essentially changing the position of the camera because the camera is your eyes in those immersive 3D modeled environments.
1:17:27Right, so in any case, what we're talking about is when the Vision Pro was released, there were, I think, four off the top of my head immersive experiences.
1:17:37So there was a thing with a woman on a tightrope on a fjord in Norway, I guess. There was a completely computer animated dinosaur experience.
1:17:48This is not the thing that everyone got in the demo in June. This is like a video, effectively, but it's an immersive video so you can look around and change your perspective.
1:17:55There was a thing about rhinoceroses or something along those lines where this was a document, a very brief documentary.
1:18:03And then finally there was the, something like half an hour or 45 minutes, Alicia Keys concert where you're in a studio space and the perspective occasionally changes between cameras.
1:18:14And you can look around and if the bass player is just jamming out and doing something incredibly exciting, you can turn your head and watch the bass player, which is pretty freaking cool.
1:18:23So that was the only four things. And for the rhino one and for the tightroping one, they were listed as episode one back in February 2 or whatever it was that this came out.
1:18:37We still haven't gotten anything since. But last week, Apple released their immersive video sports film on Apple Vision Pro.
1:18:45And this was an immersive video featuring highlights from the 2023 Major League Soccer Cup playoffs.
1:18:51So this is the American soccer/football, what the Brits would call football, playoffs and finals.
1:19:00And the first time I watched it, I was really, really disappointed by it.
1:19:08And it's been talked about a lot. I forget specifically where. Jason Snell talked about it at Six Colors a bit and Ben Thompson talked about it on Stratechery a bit.
1:19:18And also I think it was covered on Dithering if I'm not mistaken.
1:19:22The problem with the immersive video, the soccer video, is that it was edited like a commercial for regular old TV.
1:19:31So it was, "Oh, look over here, change. Look over here, change. Oh, look at this thing. Now look at that thing. Now look at this thing. Now look at that thing."
1:19:38Which is fine if you're watching something where you don't have any influence on what you're looking at.
1:19:45But so often I would be put in a situation where the players are walking onto the field on either side of me.
1:19:54You're at the edge of the field, the perspective of the camera is at the edge of the field.
1:19:56The players are walking by you to your left and to your right, going to the center of the field to do a coin toss or whatever.
1:20:01And you're naturally panning and tilting your head and trying to see different things that are happening in the scene.
1:20:08And by the time you're just getting a feel for like, "Okay, I see the scene, I get what's going on here, and I'm now going to concentrate on wherever the video appears to want me to concentrate."
1:20:19Well guess what? Now we're somewhere else.
1:20:21And what made it even worse was a lot of times there would be a soccer ball rolling down the field as people are kicking it down the field.
1:20:28And you would get this like view from way off in the corner and you'd be looking, "Oh, where's the soccer ball? There it is. Alright, I'm going to focus on the soccer ball."
1:20:36Which is approximately down to my left and then next thing you know, "Oh, now the soccer ball is over to my right."
1:20:42And it was infuriating.
1:20:45The second time I watched it, which was about an hour ago, knowing what I was getting into, I liked it a lot more, but it's still really damn annoying.
1:20:56Because the whole point of immersive video, where you can change the perspective by tilting your head all around, is that you want to give that some space and some air to breathe, you know?
1:21:06And you want to be able to look where you want to freakin' look.
1:21:10And the Alicia Keys thing did this so much better because they had, and I think we talked about this on the show, like several of these different cameras positioned throughout the studio space.
1:21:22They would cut between them, but they would do it like every minute or two.
1:21:26And so you can really settle in to where the camera is and look around and take in what you want to take in.
1:21:33And yeah, it occasionally was annoying if like you were positioned on one extreme end of the studio and that bassist who's just killing it is way on the other end of the studio.
1:21:41So they're far away and you can look over where they are, but they're far away.
1:21:47So it's annoying, but it's still nice that you have the space to settle in and look at what you want to look at.
1:21:53And with this, it was just rapid fire in a way that was extremely off-putting.
1:22:00So I have some quotes to read, but Marco, you said you did watch this, is that right?
1:22:04I have not. I mean, 'cause honestly, every time I've watched video on my Vision Pro, I've gotten eye strain and a headache and I have to stop.
1:22:14I can't get it to be that sharp. And again, I've tried everything. I have tried the reader lenses, I've tried different settings, I've tried the different hacks for the face shields, having no face shield, different gaskets.
1:22:28I have tried everything. It doesn't look good enough. I would feel a lot better just watching something on a laptop.
1:22:35That being said, this isn't particularly for me, 'cause I'm not a sports person. I understand what people are saying and what you're saying about how it's edited like a traditional video and it's not really edited for the new format.
1:22:48And I forgive them for that for the very first teaser or whatever, in most ways.
1:22:56I think the way that I have concerns, it points to the larger concern I have with the Vision Pro, which is, did no one at Apple think this was a problem? Did they watch it?
1:23:10Because so far, everyone who has watched it who knows sports and who knows the Vision Pro in our tech press group here, everyone's had the same feedback.
1:23:22Like, "Oh yeah, this is not the right style for this. It's disorienting, it's not good." Did Apple not know that? Did they not put it through a test audience of any kind?
1:23:30Apple's a big company, though, and I think the evidence that Apple institutionally does know this is all the demos they actually gave, and the Vision Pro thing, all of those had, not just the Alicia Keys thing, but the typewrote walker, all those things, had a stationary camera without lots of cuts.
1:23:47The people who made those must have understood that, because there was such a variety of content in the short little demo, and all of it was, like, the one thing that did move was, like I said, was the slow-moving drone shot that you see in the Apple TV screensaver.
1:24:02Just so slowly, like, no fast movement, no fast cuts. So somewhere in the organization, probably in the Vision Pro team, are people that know this.
1:24:11Who put together this MLS thing? Probably an entirely different set of people. And, you know, big companies, like, people in one org aren't communicating with people in another org, or if they are, they don't want to be told what to do.
1:24:23And that's where I give some forgiveness, because it's like, look, the people who did this either didn't know, hadn't taken on board the institutional knowledge that clearly exists in Apple related to Vision Pro stuff,
1:24:38they had heard that advice, but thought, well, but we've been cutting sports together for our entire careers, so we know better, so we're going to try it like this, right?
1:24:45And there is a little bit of a dance here, because the dance is between the person doing the editing and the person doing the watching.
1:24:51Casey was watching in the way that he chose to watch immersive content, which was finding the things that he wanted to look at and looking at them.
1:24:57You could also look at immersive content without moving your head at all, just look at what's in front of you and enjoy the 3D effect, which is the way some other people may do it.
1:25:06Obviously they haven't worked out the kinks here, but I think maybe if this knowledge was communicated, maybe the sports people said, well, that's too limiting.
1:25:15Yeah, that works fine for your demo, where you have a locked off camera and you change perspective, you change from one camera to another once every 90 seconds, but that's not going to work for an exciting sports thing.
1:25:25And by the way, I think the biggest problem with the sports thing was that it was a five minute highlight reel that is not teasing you for any longer content, because there is no longer content.
1:25:35And it's a five minute highlight reel for games that happened last year.
1:25:38It's a highlight reel, what would be great when you could watch the whole game in immersive video? You can't!
1:25:43So anyway, I hope this is just one of those stunning looks, but I will point out that how to handle making things exciting in video while also making it trackable is also a thing in 2D video.
1:25:58And despite the, by this point, 100 plus years of making moving pictures and how to edit them, still people get it wrong.
1:26:05And even the most recent example, I was thinking about this Casey when you were saying looking at the base player or looking off to the side of the soccer ball, the most recent example that people know from being on the internet and reading various articles and reviews about it is Mad Max's "Shirry Road".
1:26:17Have either of you seen this movie? Casey must have seen it, right?
1:26:19I've actually just rewatched it maybe a month ago.
1:26:22Arkow, have you seen it?
1:26:24Of course not.
1:26:27When that movie first came out, one of the many genres of press surrounding the movie was about the director and specifically about a technique the director used, and I'm sure there's a YouTube video showing it, where there's lots of quick cuts and lots of action.
1:26:41It's an action movie, people are fighting and jumping and crashing cars and shooting and doing all sorts of stuff like that.
1:26:47It does use a lot of fast cuts and the technique the director used to make it so that the audience doesn't get lost is that when they would do cut, cut, cut from one camera to another camera to another camera to another perspective to another perspective, he would doggedly keep the most interesting thing that you needed to look at dead center in the frame.
1:27:08Which is not a thing most people do. Most people are like, "Yo, we're going to compose the image on my frame and I'll use rule of thirds and I'll try to guide the eye to this thing or whatever."
1:27:17George Miller, I think that's the direction I correctly realized, that if I'm going to do lots of fast cuts and action and I want people to track it, I don't want them to have to every time there's a cut figure out where the point of interest in this frame is.
1:27:28They kept it dead center, which artistically seems like, "Isn't that so super boring? You're drawing a bullseye and you're like, "Look, when we go to this camera, whatever I want them to look at, I want them to see this hand punching this face, I want them to see this knife being stabbed in this direction, I want to see this guy..."
1:27:41Just put it dead center in the frame so you can put your eyes in the center of the movie screen or your television screen and endure incredibly fast, exciting cuts and never have to move your eyes.
1:27:53Whatever they wanted you to see most importantly was dead center in the frame. Maybe those frames aren't as artistically interesting if they had been composed in a more painterly manner or whatever, but it allows very fast action to be more easily tracked by the people watching it.
1:28:06It doesn't require them to do anything interesting.
1:28:10I would say that if you go into these immersive things and you never move your head and keep your eyes dead center, you're sacrificing one of the things that's cool in immersive video, but I bet they would actually work better.
1:28:24You don't get to look at what you want as cool, but at least you'll survive the cut. So maybe Casey, I was going to ask you, the second time you watched it, did you move your head less?
1:28:34Probably, yeah. I didn't think about it consciously, but yes, probably. It's too bad too because I am a very enthusiastic viewer of concert videos. In Plex I have probably a couple hundred different concert videos and only maybe a hundred of them are team Matthews concerts.
1:28:56Anyway, I really enjoy a concert film. I really truly do. And I would consider Hamilton, for example. I know it's not a concert, but I don't think it's too dissimilar.
1:29:06And I love a concert film. I love watching certain sports. And one of the most, did we talk about this on the show? I don't recall if we have, but one of the most, and I hate the way they use this term, but the most blowaway experiences I've had in the vision pro was when I used the app, which is currently in beta, I believe it's called Vroom.
1:29:30I don't know if I'll be able to put my hands on a test flight link or not because it's a test flight only at the moment, but what Vroom does is it lets you use your F1 TV subscriptions.
1:29:40This is where you pay to get, you know, kind of like, to get the F1 season that you can stream, you know, and watch later or watch live or what have you.
1:29:50F1 being super nerdy is all about data. And so they have immense amounts of telemetry that you can get from F1 TV. They have camera feeds and audio feeds for every single car on the racetrack.
1:30:02They have obviously the footage that's being broadcast on say ESPN, if you're here in the States.
1:30:08What it does is it says, all right, we're going to take the main feed and put it dead center in a rectangle right in front of your face, but you can optionally add several other panels around it. So you can do, I believe you could do two panels to the left of the main panel and two panels to the right of the main panel.
1:30:23So you now have six panels. So you have your main feed that's jumping between, you know, all the different racers and whatnot.
1:30:28And then upper left, you have your favorite driver, bottom left, you have that driver's teammate because there's, you know, two drivers per team.
1:30:35And then maybe upper right, you have your rival and bottom right, you have their teammate or, you know, however you want to do it.
1:30:40And then even cooler is below all this, you can optionally put a 3D rendering of the racetrack and you can see little dots racing around the racetrack.
1:30:48I cannot overstate how incredibly f***ing cool this was. It is unbelievable how cool it is.
1:30:59And so, and that's a thing that you can do. There's an app called Multi Viewer for the desktop that works okay.
1:31:08But I've tried it in the past and I have not had a good experience with it.
1:31:12You can't do this near as well on a desktop as you can with the Vision Pro.
1:31:20And this moment, these moments, like, and that's not immersive at all.
1:31:25Well, I get it's not really immersive in the way we're talking about, but a concert, an immersive concert is amazing.
1:31:32When you watch immersive sports, granted, I'm getting all these damn cuts all the time, but for the brief way, for the three seconds before another cut happens, it's incredible.
1:31:44And for me, I don't feel like I'm just up close to a screen the way that two of you guys have described it.
1:31:53And for me, I feel like I'm friggin' there. I really, really do.
1:31:56And at the end, you're in the locker room and the team is celebrating.
1:32:00And I'm glad I actually watched it again because I could swear that all these dudes had Vision Pros on, even though they're spraying champagne at each other and I was deeply confused by it.
1:32:08It turns out they just have some sort of goggles on. I don't know why. I don't know enough about soccer to know why those goggles were there in the first place.
1:32:15But regardless, in any case, you feel like you're there. You feel like you're in the locker room. You feel like you're about to get sprayed with champagne.
1:32:23It is immersive. That's why they call it that. And it has so much potential.
1:32:30It would be unreal. And I think Ben in particular has been banging the strum for a while. It would be unreal to have, say, court side seats in an NBA game.
1:32:39Just unreal. Because you can look up at the jumbotron if you want. You can look at where the action is.
1:32:44I don't know if this could happen live. And certainly, given that it took like three or four months for this to get put together after the MLS season ended, I don't know if it would happen in a timely fashion.
1:32:54But if it could, holy freaking smokes, it's amazing.
1:32:58So let me quickly read a couple of summaries from Ben and Jason because I think it's relevant.
1:33:03Jason writes, "As you might expect from the runtime, this video is a highlight package with lots of quick cuts. The video is all about quick cuts.
1:33:11But immersive video doesn't work with quick cuts, I don't think. Several times during the MLS highlights video, my head was turned in one direction, taking advantage of the 180 degree immersive space to watch something happening off to my left or right.
1:33:20Only for the vantage point to change to a different perspective. Now I was staring at nothing. It would take a few seconds for me to scan my surroundings and reorient, oftentimes a delay that led me to miss the highlight I was meant to be viewing."
1:33:30Ben writes, "In short, this video was created by a team that had zero understanding of the Fission Pro or why sports fans might be so excited about it.
1:33:39I had the opportunity to feel like I was at one of these games because the moment I started to feel the atmosphere, some amount of immersion, there was another cut. And frankly, the cuts were so fast I rarely, if ever, felt anything.
1:33:48This edit may have been perfect for traditional 2D video posted to YouTube. The entire point of immersive video on the Fission Pro though is that it is an entirely new kind of experience that requires an entirely new approach.
1:33:59I cannot overstate this enough. It is unlike anything I have done with just a 2D rectangle. No matter how great my 2D rectangle is, which my TV is pretty good and certainly was really good back in 2019 when I got it, this is just a whole different level.
1:34:14So Ben continues.
1:34:17[Ben speaking]
1:34:36It's more though. It's so much more than that though. I really think you're underselling it when you say that because with Avatar in 3D, you don't get to change your perspective. The perspective is your perspective.
1:34:49If you're looking at a 3D video, you can turn your head only. If Avatar was in 3D and you didn't have to wear polarized glasses, like if you could see Avatar, it's basically like Avatar in the Vision Pro but it wrapped around you like it wasn't a rectangle in front. It's just essentially a screen wrapped around you spherically, different picture for left and right eye, no brightness loss, and a high resolution.
1:35:07And that's not, I mean, I'm not saying just that because that is significant and that's why it is so profoundly different feeling, but it is essentially just different picture for your left and right eye.
1:35:17I hear what you're saying and that may be technically accurate, but the experience of it is vastly different than that.
1:35:23Oh yeah, because it's not flickery, it's not dim, and it's wrapped around you.
1:35:28You're too hung up on the technical aspects.
1:35:31But that is the difference. That is why it feels that, and I've felt the difference myself. I've watched tons of 3D movies and like I said when I was talking about the Vision Pro, it feels different. It's kind of like the touch screen on the iPhone felt different.
1:35:43The touch screen is just more responsive. Yeah, but when you cross this threshold, something happens that makes it feel different to your point, and I think that's the Vision Pro.
1:35:50Well, and I think the thing is that if you put me in an IMAX theater with, let's suppose I had perfect, no brightness altering glasses so that I got a perfect view of this IMAX screen that's wrapping all around me, I still would be hard pressed to feel like it would hit quite as well as the Vision Pro does.
1:36:12But that technology doesn't exist, that's why you've never felt that there.
1:36:14Well, even still, I cannot stress enough how much it is.
1:36:17That technology is just the headset. It's a pair of glasses with no brightness cut off and high resolution.
1:36:23Right, but all I'm saying is even if you're imagining a 3D movie where it wraps around you, I genuinely to me anyway feel like it's more than just that.
1:36:32Well anyway, to finish up, Ben continues, "Today is April 1, 2024. The Vision Pro is available to customers on February 2. In other words, it has been just short of two months and there isn't an episode two of any of these videos.
1:36:41There is, as noted, only one additional immersive video, that MLS highlight reel, that I am so disappointed by.
1:36:46This is, frankly, bizarre given that immersive video is arguably the single most important thing in terms of standing up the Vision Pro ecosystem.
1:36:53Maybe this is all still going to happen, but it is baffling to me that there's been such a paucity of new immersive content from Apple.
1:37:00But maybe this MLS clip explains why. Apple has what I think is compelling footage, but they didn't release it until it had been heavily edited.
1:37:08Because I guess they thought it looked better that way, even though I think it looks worse.
1:37:11This is the antithesis of a highly iterative experimental approach to figure out what works, but perhaps Apple isn't as capable of that as we might have hoped."
1:37:18I think the explanation of this is, you know, the sort of slow start is mostly explained by the fact that Apple hasn't sold a lot of these.
1:37:26And so the amount of money, I feel like it's a penny-pinching way to do things, but say, look, why are we going to spend millions and millions of dollars doing production on this stuff
1:37:36because the total potential audience, the TAM, as they would say in business speak, total addressable market, is so incredibly small that it's a rounding error
1:37:43because we just haven't sold that many of these stupid headsets. So it's like, wait, how much are we spending per Vision Pro user to make this sports video?
1:37:52And what I would say to Apple, and what Apple would say to itself, I was like, well, it's chicken and egg.
1:37:56Like, you're never going to get more Vision Pro users if you don't make those videos, but I know you don't want to make those videos at a cost of $1,000 per Vision Pro user or whatever it is, right?
1:38:05And so, yeah, Ben's point is like, they need to do it if only to get better at it, or at least to spread the knowledge about how to be good at it, to spread that around and to work out the things.
1:38:14But I still currently, I may be proving wrong, but I still currently believe that Apple does have pipelines of Vision Pro immersive content going.
1:38:22We just haven't seen any of those pipelines push the first things out the end. This thing seems like a one-off or whatever, but I feel like those pipelines are currently ramping up and running
1:38:33and I think they will start spewing forth content maybe sometime in the middle of the year or next year.
1:38:39And is that part of Apple's plan? Do they plan to have those pipelines coming out sooner? If they had gotten NFL Sunday Ticket, would it have changed their plans?
1:38:48Are they waiting until they have a few more Vision Pros sold? Are they waiting until version two? Like, there's all sorts of explanations that you might have for this.
1:38:55From the outside, it definitely looks like a miss. And it looks like a miss to people who own Vision Pros, right?
1:39:00Because they're like, "I bought this thing. It's sitting in my house. I would like to be able to use it for something."
1:39:05And Apple's like, "Yeah, yeah, we're getting to it. We're getting to it." Hopefully they're saying we're getting to it and they're not saying, "Oh, we never actually planned to make any immersive content. We assumed developers would do it because they love us."
1:39:13I mean, first of all, I think there probably is some of that for sure.
1:39:18I hope not. I hope not.
1:39:21But it's very difficult to look at the Vision Pro launch so far. Here we are two months out. To look at the Vision Pro launch so far and say, "This is going the way it was supposed to."
1:39:32I have a really hard time believing that. This is kind of a weird time in the sense that we haven't seen WWDC yet.
1:39:43However, that being said, given that it seems like Vision OS is just barely done now, I honestly don't expect a lot from what they're probably going to call Vision OS 2.
1:39:55Which will probably be debuting at WWDC and then coming out this fall. I wouldn't expect much from Vision OS 2.
1:40:02I think Vision OS 2.0 will come with the App Store, right?
1:40:06Because the thing is, if you look at it again, where it is now, it launched basically halfway through this Apple product year.
1:40:13It's barely at a 1.1 now, but logically it's still a 1.0 product. It barely is there now.
1:40:22So I don't see it somehow getting massively more mature in the next two months. That just seems too aggressive software-wise.
1:40:31If you look at where it is now product-wise, I wouldn't expect massive upgrades for 2.0.
1:40:36What about apps? Well, as I talked about on Under the Radar, as Casey mentioned, from a developer's point of view right now, the install base of Vision Pro owners is just so tiny.
1:40:51And it seems like very few apps really make sense on it right now that it's very difficult as a developer to justify working on it and porting an app or bringing an app or writing a new app to it.
1:41:03There's really not much reason for developers to give it any attention right now.
1:41:08Okay, so that kind of rules out developers. So there's also not that many apps for it. That kind of harms the computing angle.
1:41:16So then that brings us back to content. Okay, where's the content?
1:41:20That's still a big question mark. And, you know, Jon, I hope you're right that there's just a big pipeline and we're seeing none of it yet, but I keep going back to, why did they launch it?
1:41:30Most of the content that was there on day one, which is almost all of the content that is still there now, that was mostly what they had last June when they were doing the press demos.
1:41:40It seems like they haven't really put out much new content in not two months, but like seven months.
1:41:49And I don't know what they're waiting for. They have this big splash and they launch this big product and it's been crickets since then.
1:41:57There's no apps, there's no content, there's no users. It's very difficult for me to look at it right now and to see Apple putting what is necessary into this to make it succeed.
1:42:13It seems like they put it out there almost reluctantly and they just kind of hoped things would support it.
1:42:21And that's not going to happen because of the volumes and everything. So Apple has to support it. And where is that support? I don't see it.
1:42:30It seems like Apple itself is not giving the Vision Pro what it needs to succeed.
1:42:37I don't know what you're talking about, Marco, because I have almost earned back the cost of my developer strap from all of my call-sales sales. Almost.
1:42:45Two hundred and sixty dollars, baby. So I actually have another hundred to go, hundred and fifty to go, something like that.
1:42:50Don't forget tax.
1:42:53The reason I buy the Vision Pro is it is a new product and platform. First, I still do think there is a pipeline there and everything and the fact that it's such an expensive product, the pipeline could have been intentionally set up such that it doesn't really start pushing the content until they get the cheaper version out or whatever.
1:43:11But that just screws everyone who buys it now. Honestly, if you ask me, who should buy the Vision Pro right now, my honest answer is nobody.
1:43:19I wouldn't say that.
1:43:22Honestly, the more I've owned it, the more I've shown it to other people, the more we see that there's no content. Who should buy the Vision Pro right now? My answer really is nobody.
1:43:31No, I would disagree. I think it's frequent travelers who do not care about being that person.
1:43:37But it sucks as a travel device. It's too big and clunky.
1:43:41There's nothing equivalent to that except for other similar VR products. The VR experience in a plane, you need a VR thing to do. The Vision Pro is an expensive one and there are a couple of cheaper ones that are similar.
1:43:54I can see that. It's an early adopter product at this point. The reason I mention it being a new product is because one of the things that is often true about new products at regular companies, and this may or may not be true at Apple, I've never worked there so I don't know,
1:44:08is that new products have plans about their launch with predictions about what will happen.
1:44:15And very often the thing that happens next depends on how closely that product matched the predictions.
1:44:23So unlike something like the iPhone that doesn't really have to prove itself in the market because people continue to buy iPhones or whatever, they just really need to not screw up, right?
1:44:32This thing needs to come out and they said, "We think when this thing comes out we're going to sell this many this fast." And assuming we do that, then that will trigger this pipeline to start churning on this video or whatever.
1:44:42And it could be that this new product has not met Apple's internal expectations which has caused them to slow down on their "hold your horses on those plans."
1:44:53Like, "Yeah, we were going to invest $200 million into sports content starting on the day of the launch if the launch went like X but the launch was 10 times worse than we thought it would be. So maybe we'll hold back on that.
1:45:03Maybe the new plan is we'll hold back on that until the cheaper one comes or whatever." Because it's a new product, I think there may be benchmarks that it had to pass in order to get that next stuff ASAP.
1:45:18And the reason I think about this is something that came up earlier in the show. Podcast transcriptions. Doing that podcast transcription stuff is expensive. It's as expensive as probably spinning up one small pipeline of Vision Pro stuff, right?
1:45:32And that's for a free application, right? Apple Podcasts is not, despite the premium podcast thing they rolled out, I don't think is a huge moneymaker, right?
1:45:42But because it's part of the iPhone, and it's just like, this is just another thing that makes iPhones valuable. The iPhone is an established product. The iPhone, they're going to sell an expected number of them.
1:45:51And so someone had to get the budget to say, "Hey, we want to do podcast transcriptions. Here's how much it's going to cost every year forever and ever. To transcribe every single podcast. Here's how much it's costing computing or whatever."
1:46:03And what is that offset by? We think it will make the iPhone more valuable. No, we're not going to charge for this. It's going to be free for everybody. The podcast app is going to be free in the app store, right? We're just going to do it for free. For now, anyway, right?
1:46:15That is a big difference, but it does show that Apple, when it has a product that is performing as expected, is willing to put a fairly large amount of money into it, even with no return.
1:46:27Whereas this is saying, "Okay, why don't you just put a large amount of money in because it's going to make people buy more Vision Pros." And it smells to me like either the pipeline was always super delayed and they were aiming for when they get the cheaper one, or they were going to go like gangbusters until they saw the first month of sales and they're like, "You didn't hit expectations, Vision Pro executive."
1:46:45And so we're switching to the slower plan, the plan that spaces out the content production so that it lands closer to when we have version two or three of this and it's cheaper or whatever.
1:46:57With Apple secrecy, we don't know which one of these things is right, but what we do know is out here as people who own Vision Pros, it doesn't feel good. It feels like you've got a product and you're not sure what to do with it and it costs you a lot of money and it's disappointing.
1:47:11I think that is part of the risk of being an early adopter. It's a new platform. You don't know how it's going to do. You took the risk right along with Apple. You paid the money, you got the thing. By the time content appears, maybe version two is out and you're like, "Oh man, I really want version two, but I already spent all this money in version one."
1:47:27It's tough launching a product. Not every product is a guarantee to be a success, but I think for the most part Apple still has at least as much faith in this as they did in, for example, the Apple Watch and they're going to keep churning on it despite the fairly slow launch.
1:47:42Is this slow launch slower than they expected or is it exactly as slow as they expected? We don't know because again, they're not sharing their numbers with us.
1:47:51There was a ceiling on how much they could make just because of the screens and it seems like even if that ceiling wasn't there, they probably wouldn't have sold anymore, but it's a $3,500 weird headset that you have to get special try-on stuff and deal with prescription stuff and the batteries to purchase things are high.
1:48:05We are very far from the iPhone 6 moment. We're not even at the iPhone OS 2.0 App Store moment. That was the joke about the App Store.
1:48:14VisionOS already comes with the App Store, but you might be forgiven for thinking that it doesn't. What did iOS firmware 2.0 come with?
1:48:21iOS firmware 2.0 came with not too much past 1.0, but it did have the App Store and that was a big thing.
1:48:31I think we also have very low expectations for VisionOS 2.0 at WWDC, but I continue to think that if Apple sticks it out with Vision Pro, the year you should pick your head back up, I tell everyone they should go do the free demo because why wouldn't you use an expensive product for free and it's really cool.
1:48:46And to Casey's point, it does feel like nothing you've ever done before unless you've used another headset.
1:48:52And then wait a year or two and see how this shakes up because version 2.0 and 3.0 are going to be better, but I honestly don't even think the one that's really better than this is going to be out for several years because I think first they'll do the cheaper one that's about as good and then you'll get the more expensive one or the equally expensive one that's better.
1:49:10It's going to take a while for this ball to get rolling if it starts rolling at all and then we'll find out how big this ball is to torture this analogy.
1:49:18The Apple Watch did take off a lot faster than people expected, but it still seemed like it took years of the Apple Watch wandering the wilderness until people settled on, "You know, it's a rich person's fitness tracker."
1:49:29And that turns out to be a fairly lucrative niche, but it took a while to get there.
1:49:36As someone who didn't spend $3500 on this, I'm willing to give it time to grow and I'm going to check back in on it each year and see how it's doing and I don't have the bitterness of someone who bought one of these things, especially if you bought it for development purposes and now you sold two copies of your application, but welcome to my world.
1:49:52For the record, I'm not currently bitter about it. I'm bitter in general that it's so damn expensive, but I knew it going in and I'm not currently…
1:50:04You didn't even charge extra for your Vision Pro thing. You're just leaving literally dozens of dollars on the table.
1:50:09I don't want that. No, I mean, yes, that is true. I'm not bitter about it and I think the thing…
1:50:16If I'm bitter about anything, it's that there is, to my eyes, an immense amount of potential here and I can't get a good read, Marco, if you would agree with that or not.
1:50:28I'll give you a chance in a second, but I think there's an immense amount of potential here and there are moments where it is…
1:50:35I mean, life-changing is dramatic, I wouldn't say that, but I cannot… I mean, like that Vroom app, it is unreal and I don't particularly want to watch F1 any other way.
1:50:46I literally will sit in the family room, if that's where everyone happens to be, such that I am available to people and I will put the Vision Pro on to watch F1.
1:50:57And the vision is showing on the TV right there, the same thing I was making fun of people, you know, with this hypothetical me saying to Aaron, "Oh, I'm going to be my Vision Pro."
1:51:03I literally would do that for Vroom because it is that much better. It is that incredible.
1:51:07Anything else, I wouldn't bother. Like 3D avatar, eh, I wouldn't bother. I just watch it on the TV.
1:51:13But nevertheless, there are so many things about this device that are unreal.
1:51:19Again, Mac virtual display, for me and for my eyes in a literal and figurative sense, is incredible.
1:51:26The immersive stuff, if we can get more of it, is incredible.
1:51:30The Vroom app, as silly as it is to keep harping on this, it is that incredible.
1:51:35So there is so much potential here and I don't regret having bought it, but knowing what I know now, I don't know…
1:51:44Like, I think it was a professional responsibility, especially for the show, but to some degree for CallSheet, to buy one.
1:51:53Leaving that aside, I don't think it would have been a smart purchase and I don't think I would have purchased it were it not for my professional obligations.
1:52:00But I don't know, Marco, do you see potential here or do you think it's just a complete waste?
1:52:04I think it is possible for this product to succeed, but I am not yet seeing any evidence that Apple will be able to do what it takes to make it succeed.
1:52:18What I think it will take is Apple needs to dramatically over-invest in it in a way that does not make financial sense directly.
1:52:28In terms of content, apps, games, because what they've made here is a really great technology product that has absolutely nothing in its ecosystem.
1:52:39There is no content, there are no games, there are no apps, there are no users.
1:52:46So how do you solve this? You seed it somehow. You invest money up front as the maker of the hardware to fund the creation of content, to get users to buy it.
1:52:57And eventually, if you succeed at doing that, then you can start relying more on third-party investment.
1:53:05Like with Apple TV+, another great example. They put so much money up front, millions of dollars, to make those TV shows so people would buy their service.
1:53:13And that was a huge up-front investment that only probably now has started to finally pay off in terms of getting subscribers.
1:53:19Right. But what they have here is a totally clean slate that is empty.
1:53:27Like, when you turn that dial and you are put into the Mount Hood environment and you just hear the wind blowing by, that's what the content ecosystem is like.
1:53:40It's an empty field that just wind is blowing by and there's nothing there. Even the environments, there's still the two that are coming soon that aren't even there yet.
1:53:49Didn't say what soon meant.
1:53:51No, like, it seems like nothing is coming. And so hopefully I'm wrong. I'm just saying that's how it looks as an outsider and as an owner of this device.
1:54:02It seems like nothing is there and nothing is coming. And I can tell you for sure from the developer side, there's no reason to bring anything there.
1:54:10So Apple needs to see that ecosystem themselves. They need to maybe pay developers to make apps for it, maybe make more apps themselves.
1:54:20Even Apple's own apps are barely there. They have many of their own apps that are still in iPAQ compatibility mode for it or that aren't there at all.
1:54:28So it seems like even Apple isn't visibly investing in the content ecosystem. Maybe they are behind the scenes and we haven't heard about it, but it sure looks like they don't have their foot in the gas either.
1:54:40And one thing I have learned over the years is to not care about any of Apple's products more than Apple cares about them. That is a recipe for heartache. See also the HomePod.
1:54:52So whenever Apple doesn't care about a product that much, I shouldn't either. And so far it seems like we are just waiting for Apple to start investing in the content ecosystem of this.
1:55:04And until they do, I don't know why we should. So I'm very pessimistic on this product right now because I don't see the evidence that they're going to be able to do what it takes to make it succeed.
1:55:17And right now, the way it looks right now today, I would be surprised if they ever launched another Vision Pro product.
1:55:25Oh, I don't know about that.
1:55:27Now, hopefully that's wrong. But that's just how it looks now two months in. Again, this is still early days.
1:55:33But where are the signs that they are investing in what it will take to make this succeed? Right now, I don't see those signs.
1:55:42That's my concern, is that it seems like even Apple is having trouble justifying making software or content for this.
1:55:49And if they can't even figure out the reason, then we sure can't.
1:55:53So everything that I've said that I want to do with it, all the possible applications for it that I think I will have, that all depends on software and content coming out for it.
1:56:09And that can't happen yet because it makes no sense to get there until Apple really pushes and seeds the egos to themselves.
1:56:15So everything I hope this device could do, I still hope it can do it. But today it can't. Maybe someday it will.
1:56:24We just have to see what Apple will do to invest in it. And right now, we're not seeing nearly enough of that.
1:56:31So hopefully I'm wrong or hopefully they'll turn it around and we'll be looking back on this in a year and laughing.
1:56:38Because of today, right now, I think this product is a massive failure. So I really hope that it's turned around soon.
1:56:44I've always been on the three-year mindset for this product because I didn't think, like, "Oh, next year it'll be even better."
1:56:49I'm like, "No, next year." I think even something's gonna show back when it came out, "Next year it won't be that different."
1:56:53And in two years it probably won't be that different. So I'm on the three-year after launch timeline of saying, "Three years after this goes by, at that point there should be a new version of this hardware and the ecosystem should have moved a little bit."
1:57:06That's the second point. It doesn't mean that if three years they haven't done X, it's doomed or something, right?
1:57:10But in three years, assuming the product still exists and hasn't gone big home potted into the mystery closet before it pops out again, that'll be a good time to look at progress.
1:57:20Because I think it's unfair to look at this after one year. I think it's unfair to look at it after two years because it is an unproven product and an unproven market because Apple is not doing what all the other headset makers did and tried to make a video game thing.
1:57:33A mass market device that you can use for productivity. They're taking a different approach. So I'm gonna give them three years to figure out what the heck this is and to field new products and to update the OS.
1:57:44So we'll check in again. I guess three years from launch I can put a note in my calendar or something. What would that be? 2026? 2027-ish?
1:57:5227.
1:57:54But the problem is, yeah, sure, three years before it matures maybe, but...
1:57:59No, no, not matures. Three years before we figure out if it's gonna work at all.
1:58:05Well, but I think the big challenge is between now and three years from now, what will make people buy it?
1:58:11Yeah, I'm assuming Apple is going to continue to spend money on this for the next three years, if only out of sheer bloody-mindedness, as they say across the pond.
1:58:20Because Tim Cook is all in on this thing. This is the thing he shipped and not the car. I think despite the pace of investment being unsatisfactory to us on the outside, I believe there are at least three years of continued real investment in this product line from Apple.
1:58:35So that's why I'm putting the three-year timeline on it. If that isn't true and they stop funding it, well, no, because there'll never be another one.
1:58:41But I think there's three years of money backed up behind this sucker if all goes to plan.
1:58:47Yeah, you're right, because I think an alternative timeline here, I think in two months we start talking about iOS 18 and we never come back to this.
1:58:54Well, we may not come back to it, but I think there's people at Apple who are doing stuff and I think there's money being put towards it. We'll find out.
1:59:00Again, this is about internal benchmarks. If there was some benchmark that said we have to sell this number of these things this amount of time or others were canceling a product, if that happened, Apple's not gonna tell us immediately.
1:59:10If that happens, companies, there are consequences. They're like, "We're gonna put this out. Here's what we predict is gonna happen. And if it catastrophically doesn't, we're gonna have to have a serious meeting about the future of this product line."
1:59:19But you're never gonna know about that. For all we know, that's what happened with the HomePods. We were all talking about people buying HomePods two years after launch and they were getting a model that was manufactured two years ago.
1:59:28So that is a product that disappeared, but it came back, sort of. So who knows?
1:59:36There is one thing, though, that is, I think, a red flag in that. Did you see the other day that Woot had the Vision Pro on sale?
1:59:44No, yeah.
1:59:46That's not good. We were speculating for the last six months. We were saying the Vision Pro is gonna be backordered throughout this entire year. It's gonna be supply constrained. They're gonna be selling every single one they can make.
2:00:00That doesn't seem to be happening. And that doesn't seem to have been happening since launch day. Remember we were saying, "Hmm, there's really not a lot of lines. It's really surprisingly easy to get them."
2:00:11It seems like they're not selling to what they expected. And they already have discounted and gotten rid of a bunch of them through Woot. That's not good.
2:00:22So I am concerned. I really am concerned for this product. If I had to guess, it seems like it's selling well below expectations and Apple is not investing in it. And that's scary for two months out.
2:00:33You might have a collector's item.
2:00:35I don't want that. I want it to succeed.
2:00:38Really what's gonna happen is, John, you're gonna have a collector's item because Marco's gonna ship it to you as packing chips or packing peanuts in a few years.
2:00:46I never bought a G4 Cube either, but I did a review on it.
2:00:50Oh my god. I want them to get to version two so I can maybe have a chance of it being sharp for my eyes.
2:00:54Three years, Marco. Three years.
2:00:56Oh god.
2:00:58Alright, thank you to our sponsor this week, Squarespace. And thank you to our members who support us directly. We have a new member exclusive content area called Overtime.
2:01:09This is a bonus tech topic after the show that is member exclusive in each episode.
2:01:15This week's Overtime we're gonna be talking about an unpatchable vulnerability in Apple chip design and the XZ open source project backdoor that happened this past week.
2:01:25Two very interesting security topics, I think.
2:01:28So that'll be an Overtime this week. Join atp.fm/join to hear those Overtimes and all the other member perks.
2:01:34Thank you so much and we will talk to you next week.
2:01:38[MUSIC]
2:01:48[MUSIC]
2:01:59[MUSIC]
2:02:09[MUSIC]
2:02:21[MUSIC]
2:02:31[MUSIC]
2:02:41People just heard a new song.
2:02:44Yeah, yeah. So we had asked and been at, well we'd been asked many, many, many times to have our friend Jonathan Mann do something with the theme song that mentions Twitter.
2:02:55Because the three of us haven't used Twitter in how long?
2:02:57Yeah, yeah. It's not that, it was not from lack of desire, but first of all we didn't really want to put a lot of stuff on Jonathan's plate and we love the original so darn much that we really didn't want to screw with it too badly.
2:03:13But Jonathan reached out to us I guess a week or two ago and said, "Hey, I'm going to take another stab at it and see what I can do to make it sound a little different."
2:03:22And so, yeah, that's what you just heard unless you are listening to the bootleg in which case I'm not sure what you're going to do. But you're going to have to listen.
2:03:29Just go download the regular version and go to the chapter of the theme song.
2:03:32Yeah, there you go. Yeah. And literally the only change is we've changed the line about Twitter to not refer to Mastodon. That's it. Everything else is the same.
2:03:42Yeah, Jonathan did a more different version, but it turns out it's very difficult to, or at least difficult for us or for Marco, to blend vocals recorded a decade later with vocals recorded a decade earlier.
2:03:54Like your voice sounds different, you know what I mean? And so to try to get them to go together seamlessly turned out to be beyond our capabilities so we did the surgical strike.
2:04:05I have to say that when we talked about this before, I've saved a little link in my notes document that I send to people whenever they ask about the theme song. We did talk about it ages ago and one of the beautiful things about the original theme song is that, well, A, it's kind of like a nostalgic historical record and B, specifically the part about Twitter, it had one out from the beginning which is that if you're into Twitter it's a conditional so the conditional becomes false.
2:04:28And B, after we had talked about that, the guy renamed Twitter. So it's like not only does this have a conditional statement, it's a conditional statement about a thing that ostensibly doesn't exist but still does because he can't figure out how to change the domain name because he's an idiot.
2:04:48So I was perfectly fine having the historical theme song be there forever and ever and ever but now that we have a modified version, you'll see it's slightly modified.
2:04:59There are a few other modifications that I think would be useful but incorporating them is difficult so we still have the ability to modify it elsewhere.
2:05:07For example, the little verse with John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him as dated from back when they were convincing me to do a tech podcast with them and I was afraid I was going to burn out because I was doing too many things at once.
2:05:19Obviously that is not the case anymore, I don't even have my jobby job anymore but that thing is still in there and the out on that one, it's all past tense.
2:05:27Wouldn't let him in the past, didn't do any research.
2:05:30I love that you're lawyering our theme song.
2:05:33I have a modification that makes it even more clear that it was in the past but it still kind of works.
2:05:38Anyway, we love the theme song, we hope you love the theme song, we hope you love the new theme song and if we have to change it again in 10 years, I guess eventually we will.
2:05:45Extra, extra thanks to Jonathan Mann for first of all working with John but also for doing this in the first place 10 years ago or whenever that was and also doing it again now.
2:06:00We are very thankful, check out his work, jonathanmann.net, we love his stuff and I love the hero of the song for us and we've used it all this time.
2:06:08I think it fits the show very well and I know a lot of our listeners love it. So thank you very much to Jonathan for that again.
2:06:15For many of our listeners, the theme song is the only thing they like about the show and I'm speaking of people's children and spouses that are forced to hear a tech podcast in a car ride and they hate every second of it but they like the theme song.
2:06:29Or at least it sticks in their head.
2:06:31Jonathan's been writing a song a day for 15 years since January 1 of 2009. Gracious, that is a long time, a lot of songs.
2:06:46The funny thing too is years ago, if you notice that the ATP ad bumper music bits are actually parts of the theme song. That's because years ago when we first started doing basically audio bumpers into ads, I tried a few different sound effects.
2:07:06John hated them all and they were all kind of awkward and Jonathan Mann emailed me and said "here's the original logic tracks to the theme song, if you want you can use this to formulate some kind of ad bumper music."
2:07:22And that's how we got our music theme ad bumpers and it was great. So with this it was great. He literally just recorded a new song, new vocal tracks and he just gave me all the tracks again and we were able to just drop in the vocals and I was able to make some adjustments to make it match and it was great.
2:07:39But I also wanted to point out, because I have all the original tracks to it, I as a non-musician had no idea how many tracks are in a song like that. First of all, Jonathan is the only singer. But if you listen to the song, there's backing vocals.
2:08:01There's not just one backing singer. The backing vocals, there's like six different backing vocals that are all just him overlaid doing a six part harmony as backing vocals behind the main vocals.
2:08:16There's like 17 different instrument tracks. So to write a song every day, even just the writing part, the composition and the writing, the words, that's its own challenge. But then to actually record these many track compositions and recordings every single day is no small feat.
2:08:40There's so many layers, there's different instruments, there's all these seven or eight different vocals. It's really impressive. I don't know how he does it. The more that I dove into this Logic file, the more impressed I was.
2:08:56At least you're using Logic for what it's actually designed for, for once.
2:08:59Yeah, for once.
2:09:00(laughing)
2:09:02(beeping)