00:00:00 ◼ ► Hey, so let me just go on an apology tour right now, because we were supposed to record yesterday at the normal time, and Tuesday I woke up and I felt like a truck had ran me over. Wednesday the truck backed over me, and I was like, fellas, I cannot do this today.
00:00:15 ◼ ► And so my many thanks to my beloved co-hosts for being flexible. We are recording this on Thursday, and we are doing it during the day, which generally speaking we don't like to do, because oftentimes there's like leaf blowers, or sometimes there's weed whackers or whatever, and all sorts of background noise.
00:00:34 ◼ ► Yep, the barking dogs, you'll probably hear Penny pawing at the office door trying to get in. So all this to say, if the audio sounds like garbage, Casey's fault. Not Marco's fault, Casey's fault.
00:00:45 ◼ ► So that's my bad. We didn't want to record this time, but I begged my beloved co-host to do it earlier in the day to ensure that I stayed awake for all of it, which they were gracious and kind enough to do.
00:01:02 ◼ ► I mean, it'll probably be fine, because first of all, iZotope exists, and it's awesome. But also, you know, in typical Casey fashion, you are throwing yourself so far under the bus before there's even a problem, and there probably won't even be a problem. So it'll probably be fine.
00:01:21 ◼ ► All right, let's do some follow-up. And a little birdie has told me, because John did not tell me, that John has received some new presents.
00:01:27 ◼ ► Oh, yeah, in my continuing saga of Vision Pro stuff arriving at my house, a couple things. I did get my lens inserts. Did I talk about that on the last episode?
00:01:37 ◼ ► You mentioned you were going to get the lens inserts. I don't think we know that you did.
00:01:40 ◼ ► Yeah. Anyway, I did get them. They work well. I'm actually kind of surprised that the balance between me trying it with my mismatched contacts versus my correct lens inserts, because the mismatched contacts are not quite right.
00:01:53 ◼ ► One of my eyes has slightly the wrong prescription, but they have the advantage of not having a second pair of lenses in there.
00:01:59 ◼ ► And the second pair of lenses does add more internal reflections and also external reflections for light leaking through, which is another issue we'll get to in a second.
00:02:07 ◼ ► So it actually is interesting. Like, I really have no choice. I can't do the contact thing, because I would have to put the contacts in, put the Vision Pro on, take them off when I take it out, because I can't, because my vision is bad.
00:02:16 ◼ ► And my contacts that are calibrated to our distance, I can't look at the computer or my phone, and that's not good. I have to get reading glasses.
00:02:23 ◼ ► Anyway, so the inserts are way better. Now I can just put the thing on any time I want. It makes all that much better.
00:02:28 ◼ ► But yeah, the internal reflections, which is one of the things that bothered me even before I got the inserts, they are actually a little bit worse.
00:02:36 ◼ ► And as for, and when I mean by internal reflections, I mean light from the screens somehow bouncing around inside the lenses and causing little, like, glowy things inside the lenses.
00:02:47 ◼ ► But what I mean by quote-unquote external reflections is when light gets into the Vision Pro from the room and bounces off the lenses and does things.
00:02:55 ◼ ► And you can tell when it's an external one, because if you block that gap between the light shield and your face, the thing goes away.
00:03:01 ◼ ► When it's a reflection coming from the screens, even if you're in a pitch-back black room, you still see them.
00:03:08 ◼ ► But the external ones, like, if only the face shields fit correctly around your face and didn't have any gaps, then no light could get in there.
00:03:15 ◼ ► And the face shield I got, like, the process for determining this is when you go buy it in an Apple store.
00:03:23 ◼ ► Like, they're trying to get a scan of your face, and they say, we think you should get this light shield.
00:03:31 ◼ ► By the way, I've learned that that kind of obscure number-letter combination is kind of obscure for a reason.
00:03:36 ◼ ► Because Apple didn't want to give people a complex about, like, you've got a fat face, right?
00:03:40 ◼ ► Like, they didn't want to make it, like, they didn't even want to do, like, small, medium, large, or, like, inch measurements or whatever.
00:03:46 ◼ ► So the only part that is distinguishable is the last letter, which is, like, W or N for wide or narrow.
00:03:58 ◼ ► And even though it's represented by one number, that one number is just a lookup, an index on a lookup table, as far as I can tell.
00:04:04 ◼ ► And on that front, I mentioned that I had, like, gaps by my temples for the face shield that I have.
00:04:14 ◼ ► Go to the, in typical Casey fashion, go to the Apple Store app and make like you're going to get a Vision Pro and put it into your cart and see what it says and whatever.
00:04:41 ◼ ► Anyway, I think I got two different answers from those two scans in terms of, like, what size should your light shield be?
00:04:50 ◼ ► And I thought maybe they're different because the second time I said I was going to have lens inserts and it wants to accommodate for them or something like that.
00:04:56 ◼ ► Fast forward to now me using your Vision Pro with my own face shield that was 25W, I think.
00:05:10 ◼ ► And one of the things I discussed with them was the fit in the gap and asking them, like, what their experience is with fit and the sizing and all this other stuff.
00:05:37 ◼ ► Oh, the other thing I complained about, by the way, was that a Vision Pro would complain,
00:06:19 ◼ ► would probably do if I was buying one of these, is you can buy one of these in an Apple store.
00:06:23 ◼ ► And if you go into an Apple store and you're going to buy one, you can ask to, like, try on the different size face shields.
00:06:31 ◼ ► But you can also say, can I actually try a 23W with, like, your Vision Pro as, you know, the display one or whatever?
00:06:37 ◼ ► Because you're about to spend $3,500, probably they'll, you know, they'll let you try different sizes on.
00:07:04 ◼ ► Yeah, and, you know, it's just a 3D model of the Vision Pro, and you can look at it or whatever.
00:07:07 ◼ ► But it made me appreciate something I also appreciate when I look at the widgets, like, paying pictures, virtual pictures on my walls and stuff like that.
00:07:15 ◼ ► Kind of like in special effects and movies, there are things you can do to make things convincing that pay huge dividends for a small effort.
00:07:29 ◼ ► Like, a lot of the magic of the Vision Pro, like, that looks like it's really in my room.
00:07:33 ◼ ► It's not because the rendering is, like, amazing with ray tracing and, like, amazing textures and stuff like that.
00:07:40 ◼ ► And they get the lighting right because they know everything that's going on around you with all those cameras everywhere.
00:07:45 ◼ ► And the model of the Vision Pro, yes, it's a high-resolution model with lots of polygons and high-resolution textures.
00:07:50 ◼ ► And you can zoom it to make it real big, and you can get to the limits of the textures or whatever.
00:07:54 ◼ ► But the reason it looks so convincing is because they light it with, even as just as simple as, like, white balancing to the same white balance in the room, that goes so far.
00:08:03 ◼ ► Like, anytime you've ever seen, like, quote-unquote bad special effects in movies, especially if you're my age and have seen bad special effects in the age before computers, merely getting the white balance slightly wrong will make two things look like they're not in the same place.
00:08:16 ◼ ► Getting it right makes even the lowest polygon, lowest-resolution textured thing look like it's really there in the room because, apparently, in our perception, getting the white balance and, obviously, the perspective and stuff right and having to be stable and not jump around, which all of which the Vision Pro does, makes it very convincing.
00:08:33 ◼ ► So, surprisingly, looking at the model of the Vision Pro, which is just, you know, it's a 3D model, the thing you've already got on your face that you can see in real life, was fascinating and interesting.
00:08:42 ◼ ► Of course, the 3D model also had the dual-knit band on it, so they have updated the model a little bit.
00:08:49 ◼ ► I did watch the Flight Ready short today, and I thought it was fun, although, because I watch all the sailing channels on YouTube, I almost kind of wish they concentrated more on the aircraft carrier than the airplanes.
00:09:01 ◼ ► We got an incredible piece of feedback sometime over the last week, and I couldn't be happier about it, at least as I sit here now.
00:09:19 ◼ ► Forgive me for being late to this particular feedback, but I only recently became a member and started listening through the back catalog of member specials.
00:09:24 ◼ ► As I recall, one of Syracuse's primary complaints about CDRs that kept them out of the S tier was their reliability and their degradation over time.
00:09:38 ◼ ► Each show would result in hundreds of photos, so in the early years, the best way to distribute those photos to people was to burn them to CDR and hand them out directly to people.
00:09:45 ◼ ► I also keep all the exported files and various hard drive-based storage solutions that have been moved around over the years.
00:09:49 ◼ ► I pulled hundreds of images off a cheap, ordinary CDR that I burned 16 years ago, and I did a bit compare to files that I've kept on spinning hard drives for the same time, and they are absolutely exactly the same.
00:10:04 ◼ ► The existence of a cheap, easy-to-produce product is what allowed me to run the business that I did for years before the internet made it more reasonable for everyone to just download the files.
00:10:16 ◼ ► So, I know you're a sickie, Casey, but I'm going to ask you to maybe try doing the work for me.
00:10:49 ◼ ► We've had people write in before to say, I know you think CDRs are unreliable, but I got a bunch of CDRs and they're all fine, therefore you're wrong.
00:11:01 ◼ ► If only there were some way to determine the reliability of CDRs rather than just our individual stories.
00:11:08 ◼ ► And, of course, we believe our own experiences are much more important than anyone else's experience.
00:11:12 ◼ ► Because certainly in my experience, I have so many completely unreadable CDRs that, yes, that does color my view because it is my personal experience.
00:11:21 ◼ ► My opinion of the reliability of CDRs, and by the way, there are other factors that kept out of S tier as this feedback notes.
00:11:34 ◼ ► And we've discussed ad nauseum all of those factors that go into them being unreliable.
00:11:50 ◼ ► I think the problem is that Jonathan was clearly using a PC, and you were using Macs, and the Macs were just not as good at it.
00:12:07 ◼ ► Yeah, the termination was a black art, but I did eventually get it right, and that wouldn't cause write problems.
00:12:28 ◼ ► Like, am I the type of person who abuses the things that I own, especially the computer stuff?
00:12:32 ◼ ► Like, these things were handled like they were, like, in a clean room and, like, a silicon fad.
00:13:01 ◼ ► My basement is better dehumidified than the rest of the house because the giant dehumidifier we have is only in the basement.
00:13:13 ◼ ► And, like, towards the end of when I was making CDRs, when I had already had some go bad, like, over the lifetime of the existence of CDRs, and I was getting super paranoid about it.
00:13:21 ◼ ► I mean, I was already buying, like, the best ones I could get, make sure there's the name, brand, whatever the thing is about, you know, the best ones you can get.
00:13:29 ◼ ► No, of course, never writing on them because you would never write on a CDR because the back surface is where the stuff is.
00:13:35 ◼ ► And any kind of damage to that back surface is actually worse than damage to the front surface, right?
00:14:01 ◼ ► And still, so many of them were dead last time I checked, which must be, like, five years from now.
00:14:34 ◼ ► You can already learn iPad apps on your Mac, but sometimes it's a little bit weird when you're using a mouse cursor with an iPad Mac.
00:14:44 ◼ ► And I'm not saying you're going to be able to draw on the screen with the Apple Pencil and make your laptop tip over or whatever.
00:14:48 ◼ ► What I am saying is that whether or not Mac OS is updated and to what degree it might be updated to accommodate touch, iPad apps are already made for touch.
00:15:00 ◼ ► I think all of the weird ergonomics of touching your Mac screen precisely and frequently, I think will make that no good.
00:15:16 ◼ ► But there are certain interfaces and iPad apps that are just more natural with touch, like pinch to zoom or something like that.
00:15:22 ◼ ► I'm not saying suddenly you're not going to use the mouse cursor with your iPad apps on your Mac.
00:15:26 ◼ ► I'm saying that there are instances where it would be more natural to use touch, and now you can.
00:15:31 ◼ ► I lamented last episode that the Synology drive icon that I put in my sidebar was full color and did not fit well with the rest of my sidebar.
00:15:49 ◼ ► So I made a symbolic link to the OneDrive cloud storage folder and called it whatever I wanted.
00:15:55 ◼ ► The sidebar item opens OneDrive like normal when clicked, keeps my new name, and only shows a boring folder icon, not the OneDrive icon.
00:16:22 ◼ ► But, you know, if you do something a little bit off the beaten path, like, use a sim link for its files.
00:16:34 ◼ ► But the beauty about this is that he's not actually, Casey's not changing Synology Drive.
00:16:41 ◼ ► This sim link is a thing totally off the side that Synology Drive has no idea it even exists and doesn't need to know or care about.
00:16:46 ◼ ► Its only function is to get him the correct icon on the sidebar and to open the thing when it's clicked in the finder.
00:16:57 ◼ ► If it ever breaks, what's going to happen is Casey's going to click on it on the sidebar.
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00:19:14 ◼ ► In the last episode, you mentioned that Apple's new auto-generated chapter markers won't have much impact on ATP, but you do release a podcast without chapter markers, the bootleg.
00:19:23 ◼ ► It'd be great to get those for the auto-generated chapters for that feed, for those of us that listen to the bootleg before the edited feed is released.
00:19:32 ◼ ► And what he meant Matt means by that is that when we release the bootleg, which is shortly after we finish recording,
00:19:38 ◼ ► there are no chapters in the bootleg, obviously, because it's just straight from a recording dumped out there.
00:19:49 ◼ ► But if the edited episode has not been edited and has not been published, there are no show notes.
00:19:53 ◼ ► So there is this gap of time where you have the bootleg, you can listen to it, but there's no notes whatsoever,
00:20:06 ◼ ► But yeah, they can auto-generate chapters for you, presuming it's able to do so on a private feed, which I'm not sure how that works.
00:20:13 ◼ ► Yeah, so far, when Apple has done things like transcription, which I assume the auto-generated chapter feature is being done in the same process,
00:20:22 ◼ ► and is most likely using the transcript as input to, like, I'm sure it's probably feeding the transcript to an LLM and saying, you know, summarize this and tell me where the breaks are, basically.
00:20:34 ◼ ► Yeah, which is great. And that's a great idea. And in fact, I'm frustrated because they beat me to it, because that's totally my idea.
00:20:42 ◼ ► You should be a billion-dollar, multi-billion-dollar corporation. Ever think of that, Marco?
00:20:49 ◼ ► In the meantime, so what Apple Podcasts has done to date with their transcript feature is it only applies to public feeds.
00:21:05 ◼ ► And Apple Podcasts has never wanted to involve themselves in the dealings of private feeds.
00:21:11 ◼ ► They just kind of pass it through to the app and don't touch it server-side or anything like that.
00:21:15 ◼ ► And so also, if you would do private feed transcription and stuff, you would have so many more.
00:21:30 ◼ ► So there could be orders of magnitude more feeds with different episodes to transcribe.
00:21:40 ◼ ► Yeah, think about, like, the New York Times just moved all of their podcasts, including, like, The Daily, Ezra Klein, like, you know, big shows.
00:21:51 ◼ ► And the New York Times just moved all of them to the model where, like, you get the first few episodes for free.
00:22:26 ◼ ► And you figure, like, their value of, like, the processing power they would spend server-side to transcribe something for one person is a lot less valuable to them in, you know, in an environment where you don't have infinite resources.
00:22:42 ◼ ► But anyway, it's a lot more valuable to them to transcribe public feeds because many more people will benefit from that.
00:22:49 ◼ ► So I wouldn't expect this feature to work on private feeds in Apple Podcasts, at least for a while.
00:22:56 ◼ ► Maybe down the road, they'll start doing it for all podcasts, or they can start doing it device-side.
00:23:01 ◼ ► But even then, like, doing it device-side, that's, again, you might think, great, do it locally on the phone with the local LLM, local transcription API.
00:23:12 ◼ ► And you can't really do a lot of it in the background, either, because background time limitations and background processing limitations.
00:23:19 ◼ ► And so it's not the kind of thing that can be gracefully done locally on device, on iOS, with the current limitations.
00:23:35 ◼ ► And, yes, Apple could, if they wanted, allow you to submit a private feed and then have it indexed.
00:23:40 ◼ ► And, like, it should, like, ideally would recognize that the audio file is the same because we don't do dynamic add insertion.
00:23:51 ◼ ► These are all things that could happen, but I'm guessing that they are not currently happening with the system as it exists.
00:23:56 ◼ ► Yeah, but I bet down the road, I bet they eventually get there because transcripts for podcasts are a major feature.
00:24:06 ◼ ► Plus, once people get accustomed to navigating within a podcast app by the transcript or being able to jump over to it, it's weird when, you know, if you subscribe to the paid version of something, it's weird that, like, oh, I just can't do that with this show.
00:24:23 ◼ ► So once people get accustomed to transcripts being very popular, which is already happening thanks to Apple Podcasts, like, we're already on that path.
00:24:41 ◼ ► Additionally, Stephen Robles writes, Apple will pull chapters from ID3 tags and JSON just like before, but also plain text timestamps in an episode description, kind of like YouTube.
00:25:06 ◼ ► What he's referring to is Apple's thing where you pay Apple using, like, iTunes, whatever.
00:25:31 ◼ ► Apple has historically stripped the embedded chapter info from MP3s uploaded as subscriber-only audio files.
00:25:41 ◼ ► But there's now the option to add chapters to subscriber audio as plain text timestamps in the episode description.
00:26:14 ◼ ► Also, like, keep in mind, like, you know, the world of big podcasts that uses dynamic ad insertion and everything,
00:26:24 ◼ ► they've never supported chapters because the DAI platforms don't support the insertion of chapters
00:26:57 ◼ ► But because it's so rare that any of those big podcasts have ever even considered the idea of chapters,
00:27:04 ◼ ► because of that, there's been no pressure on the DAI, like, software serving side to support that very basic math.
00:27:17 ◼ ► They already have to modify the tags at the beginning of the file to properly account for the length, which they used to not do, and it caused a lot of problems.
00:27:31 ◼ ► They just don't care because no one in the world of big podcasts has ever heard of chapters.
00:27:36 ◼ ► And every time a German tech fan tells them, it just falls on the floor and they ignore it.
00:27:39 ◼ ► So that – you wouldn't believe how many times over the years people have proposed, quote, new standards or have pitched me on ideas for some kind of new standard they're going to do that puts markers in podcast files at certain times to do something, maybe show some kind of metadata at certain times in a file.
00:28:01 ◼ ► I've had so – so many people have had this idea over and over again over the years because they don't know about chapters and no one knows about chapters.
00:28:10 ◼ ► So it is kind of fun that Apple is finally – and granted, Spotify did this first and I think YouTube is even doing stuff like this now.
00:28:22 ◼ ► Like that's it because chapters are very useful for the audience and they love them and, you know, so we're just going to do it and you're going to basically suck it up.
00:28:33 ◼ ► So overall, this is a great way to go and I think it will dramatically improve the podcast listening experience.
00:28:57 ◼ ► Yeah, and by the way, the timestamp thing Stephen was talking about, I was quoting from his YouTube video.
00:29:06 ◼ ► So do we, except his YouTube version is video because he's a YouTuber and our YouTube version is just audio because we're a podcast only.
00:29:12 ◼ ► Anyway, we do publish ATP on YouTube for people who want to listen there, and we do translate the chapter markers into the format that YouTube wants, which is they just want in the description of your video.
00:29:27 ◼ ► So if you look at the description of all of our videos, what you will see is the description is go here for the show notes and then timestamp chapter name, timestamp chapter name, and YouTube parses that and implements chapters.
00:29:37 ◼ ► So the YouTube version of ATP does in fact have chapters, but of course, it's only the public version because there's no way to do a member only one without, I believe, paying Google a cut.
00:29:48 ◼ ► We are sponsored this episode by Grammarly, the essential AI communication assistant that boosts your productivity so you can get more of what you need to be done faster, no matter what or where you are writing.
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00:31:46 ◼ ► Apple is working on a revamped M6 Pro and M6 Max MacBook Pro with an OLED display, thinner chassis, and touch support.
00:31:54 ◼ ► But it was curious that Gurman didn't say anything about the MacBook Pro with just the vanilla M6 chip.
00:32:02 ◼ ► Yeah, I wonder if that's an omission, but it's worth – I just put this here now because I feel like Tim at MacRumors is maybe reading a bit much into it.
00:32:10 ◼ ► It's true that when Gurman talked about this, he only talked about the Pro and the Max models and did not talk about the plain no-suffix M6 getting a new thinner chassis and an OLED screen or whatever.
00:32:20 ◼ ► Would Apple bifurcate the MacBook Pro line into the two good ones with the Pro and the Max and an OLED screen and a touchscreen and a thin chassis?
00:32:28 ◼ ► And then the no-suffix one doesn't get an OLED screen, doesn't get a thinner chassis, doesn't get touch?
00:32:48 ◼ ► Because there's been lots of times over the years when the least expensive computer named MacBook Pro in the lineup was pretty different from the others.
00:33:05 ◼ ► Even before the M4 generation, there were more limitations on ports and monitors and stuff, right?
00:33:20 ◼ ► And obviously, the un-suffixed one usually had one fan instead of two, so that was an internal difference.
00:33:29 ◼ ► And then before this entire, you know, body style of the MacBook Pro, you had the MacBook Escape, the one that didn't have the touch bar.
00:33:37 ◼ ► And then before that whole era of, like, those unibody-body ones, you had the MD-101, the one that had, like, the optical drive forever, like, long after optical drives were gone from the lineup.
00:33:55 ◼ ► But anyway, like, you've had frequently in Apple's lineup of MacBook Pros, you have, like, the one that's, like, $1,200 to $1,400 that is stripped down or is an older generation, but businesses and schools and stuff keep buying a whole bunch of them.
00:34:11 ◼ ► So Apple keeps selling them, and they make a bunch of money from that getting older but still being sold.
00:34:17 ◼ ► So I can totally see a plausible path here where if they're about to, you know, do some pretty big component updates and maybe a design update to the MacBook Pro higher-end models, you can totally see modern Apple saying, all right, we're going to keep this – the cheapest model, we're going to keep that on the old design.
00:34:36 ◼ ► And maybe for possibly years to come, and we're going to have the higher-end models, which we make more money on, we can help pay for that OLED screen and, you know, help justify the case redesign with those higher margins.
00:34:55 ◼ ► So, like, the absence of Gurman mentioning something doesn't really mean that that is also absent in the reality of the thing.
00:35:03 ◼ ► So we'll see how this goes, but that is extremely plausible because Apple's done it a lot in the past.
00:35:14 ◼ ► Apparently, Discord is using a custom-forked version of Electron, and they cherry-picked the fix.
00:35:21 ◼ ► Also, Discord has since updated the app such that the Electron version detector no longer flags it.
00:35:28 ◼ ► The cherry-picking the fix is a Git parlance or maybe predates Git, but it's basically like they have, you know, they have their own custom version of Electron that has some changes to it.
00:35:38 ◼ ► And rather than updating Electron to the new version that has the fix that we're talking about that doesn't slow down in Tahoe,
00:35:42 ◼ ► they just take the code that implements the thing that avoids that bug and stick it into their custom version.
00:35:49 ◼ ► But anyway, since then, they seem to have actually fully upgraded to a newer version of Electron,
00:35:54 ◼ ► and so now the Tahoe detector app does no longer flags Discord as being a problem, but it wasn't actually a problem before that.
00:36:01 ◼ ► That's the limitation of this AppleScript thing that checks whether you have Electron apps that might have this bug.
00:36:14 ◼ ► Then Adam1 adds, the reason Microsoft Teams Classic has that crappy older Electron version is that development is ended for the Classic version of Teams.
00:36:29 ◼ ► I don't know why this – often, when we record the show, we get feedback about something that I either knew or intended to say, and then the conversation moves on, and it would be weird to bring it back around.
00:36:43 ◼ ► But I full well knew that the following was the thing, and I don't know why I didn't bring it up.
00:36:50 ◼ ► Well, I mean, maybe it didn't seem that relevant, but the reason I put it in follow-up is because if you are not like me and Casey and are fully aware of this, it's good information to know.
00:36:58 ◼ ► So Matt Rigby writes, with regard to emoji picking in macOS, you can summon the buggy macOS emoji picker by hitting control and command and space.
00:37:07 ◼ ► And it will automatically suggest emoji based on the last word you typed, similar to LaunchBar.
00:37:22 ◼ ► And the built-in picker also has two modes, which is like the small palette that has just like recent stuff or whatever, and then the expanded one.
00:37:30 ◼ ► So sometimes you might do the expanded thing, and then it's not small anymore, but you can switch it back.
00:37:36 ◼ ► Try it in a decent Mac app that uses like native text controls, and you'll get a nice emoji picker.
00:37:52 ◼ ► However, I find it really clunky, and it is both slower and it takes more keystrokes and just is generally a little bit more friction.
00:38:02 ◼ ► Yeah, it brings up a UI that you then have to interact with versus like a LaunchBar type thing, which is like I just get to keep my fingers on my keyboard, right?
00:38:31 ◼ ► So, like, if, you know, if LaunchBar stopped working and no other such app could possibly provide something like this, sure, okay, I'd start using the system one.
00:38:51 ◼ ► The system now offers clipboard history if you upgrade to Tahoe and you can – or to 26, whatever.
00:39:02 ◼ ► Like, you know, so the OS has offered a, you know, standard or basic version of these app launchers functionality for a while.
00:39:10 ◼ ► But we use these app launchers because we think they're better or they're faster or they have more capabilities or they kind of just fit our mental model or they fit our muscle memory better.
00:39:39 ◼ ► And so you type semicolon in basically any text entry field anywhere on the Mac and start typing the name of the emoji, like grimacing is a great example.
00:39:49 ◼ ► So semicolon, G-R-I-M, and then it'll filter down to grimace, you know, or grimacing emoji, whatever it's called.
00:40:09 ◼ ► So this was from Overtime last week, and we were talking about the Neo household, quote-unquote, robot.
00:40:15 ◼ ► And, John, you had brought up that there was some, like, Pogo Stick Robot sort of situation, and you couldn't let it lie, so you did a little research.
00:40:28 ◼ ► I did, after we had finished the show, tried to actually find this episode of the PBS series Nova that was about robotic stuff in, like, the 80s or 90s.
00:40:37 ◼ ► I was describing how, like, that's – that was so clearly a breakthrough to my – when I saw that, I'm like, they're on the right track with how to make things that move around.
00:40:49 ◼ ► And I talked about these scary Boston Dynamics robot dogs that we've seen in the modern era and everything.
00:41:09 ◼ ► And apparently that robot was from something called the MIT Leg Lab, founded by Mark Raybert in the 1980s.
00:41:50 ◼ ► This was not just Trey writing in that this is definitely, like, this is, this can happen.
00:42:04 ◼ ► Because if you miss, if you lose the hang-up race, which you're like, oh, where is that red X button?
00:42:14 ◼ ► In fact, I think this is, this exact issue was suggested at that time of, like, game programming techniques for user interfaces to make them feel better or be less error prone.
00:42:22 ◼ ► And one of the ideas is when you just transition a screen, like, there used to be a full screen overlay showing, like, the call and, like, the red X button and everything like that.
00:42:30 ◼ ► But the other person hangs up and suddenly that overlay goes away, revealing the phone app beneath it with maybe your list of favorites or whatever.
00:42:36 ◼ ► Ignore all taps for the next 300 milliseconds or something to make it so that if you see, because it takes a while for your brain to go, I'm going to hit the red button.
00:42:45 ◼ ► Then it sends nerve impulses down your arm and to your hand and then your finger has to start moving and then it has to move and move and move and hit that, like, that is a large amount of time to the computer.
00:42:55 ◼ ► And it would be great if there could be some, a little bit of forgiveness for when the screen transitions and just ignoring taps after that.
00:43:01 ◼ ► On the other hand, if you have lightning fast reflexes and the second the screen changes, you hit the button and it doesn't register, you're like, this phone feels broken.
00:43:07 ◼ ► But I do feel like in this case, butt dialing mitigation is worthwhile for that extra delay.
00:43:14 ◼ ► I mean, they already do delay stuff like that with the, it has to tell whether you've double tapped the side button.
00:43:18 ◼ ► So the first tap of the side button doesn't count until it has waited X number of milliseconds to see if there's another tap coming.
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00:45:31 ◼ ► Okay, so like I said at the top of the show, I was really sick the last couple of days.
00:45:47 ◼ ► No, I woke up, what was this, yesterday, I believe, as we record this, and there was like some sort of weird, like, sock-looking purse thing that Apple announced, and they dropped this, I think, first thing in the morning.
00:46:16 ◼ ► When I first breezed by this, it was, I think it was like early in the morning or something, or like I had just woken up from a nap or something.
00:46:23 ◼ ► I was like a little bit tired, and I hadn't been near the computer for a while, and I was kind of catching up on whatever had happened.
00:46:28 ◼ ► And I scrolled past that, and I got the same instinctual feeling in my mind as I do on April 1st.
00:46:36 ◼ ► And I'm scrolling through the news, and I see some weird thing, and I just instantly classified it as, that's a parody, that's a parody, that's a joke.
00:46:42 ◼ ► Like, I just kept going, and I saw the same thing like three times from different people as I'm scrolling up, and I'm like, wait a minute.
00:46:57 ◼ ► So, Issey Miyake and Apple today unveiled iPhone Pocket, inspired by the concept of a piece of cloth.
00:47:11 ◼ ► Its singular 3D knitted construction is designed to fit any iPhone, as well as all pocketable items.
00:47:16 ◼ ► Beginning Friday, November 14th, it will be available at select Apple locations and on apple.com.
00:47:21 ◼ ► iPhone Pocket is the short strap design, in the short strap design, retails at $150 American dollars, and the long strap design at $230 American dollars for a Mankini.
00:47:36 ◼ ► Yeah, well, to describe what this looks like, it's like a long sort of pleated, like the pleated part of the sock when you pull up your socks.
00:47:43 ◼ ► It's a long version of that with like a slit in it, and you can put the phone into that.
00:47:48 ◼ ► It's not bent like a sock, it's just like a big rectangle with a slit in it that you can shove a phone into.
00:47:52 ◼ ► And everyone immediately, especially older people, said, that reminds me of iPod socks.
00:47:57 ◼ ► Well, one person, Paul Kafasa, said it reminded him of a Mankini, and he did a blog post with, who is that, Borat?
00:48:40 ◼ ► When they were introduced, even the people who were in the room with Steve Jobs thought it was a joke because he very often has a slide in a presentation and it would be like, oh, we did this.
00:48:51 ◼ ► When he did the iPod socks, you can hear the room like laughing and tittering and not being like, this is a joke, right?
00:49:00 ◼ ► They released socks, again, not like foot-shaped socks, but just basically like a tube, the tube part of a sock that's closed on one end for you to put your iPod in.
00:49:25 ◼ ► Issey Miyake is the person who designed the black turtleneck, the signature black turtleneck that Steve Jobs used to wear,
00:49:36 ◼ ► In the world of high fashion, like we complain about Apple's RAM prices, but in the world of high fashion,
00:49:40 ◼ ► everything costs a huge amount of money because there is really no connection between the cost of manufacturing or materials and the price.
00:49:47 ◼ ► The price is the price, and it has to do with brand and image and fashion and absolutely nothing to do with what the things are made of or how they're made or anything like that.
00:50:05 ◼ ► Those bands, you're not paying that much because they're made of special leather at the cost of a billion dollars just because they're a fancy brand.
00:50:23 ◼ ► I will say that it's easier to get your phone in and out of this than it is for the crossbody strap that Apple made for less money.
00:50:42 ◼ ► Apple was just Apple and they made the iPod and they were, the iPhone didn't exist yet.
00:50:48 ◼ ► So they could sell you socks for 30 bucks and it seemed kind of expensive, like 30 bucks for the top portion of six socks.
00:50:53 ◼ ► But I can tell you, as someone who's bought socks recently, uh, in 2025, regular men's socks, uh, 30 bucks for six of them is actually a pretty good deal.
00:51:21 ◼ ► Uh, and I got her at some point later that year, I got her the box of iPod socks and she kept it in the, I think it was the teal one that she uses.
00:51:42 ◼ ► Apple did a fashion collab with a fashion house that, you know, they're going to sell a couple hundred of these things.
00:51:51 ◼ ► Um, however, I, I will say if any of our listeners buy one of these, I would love to see it worn like Borat.
00:52:06 ◼ ► Someone, someone's, I mean, some YouTuber will probably do it, but like someone's got to spend the 200 bucks to, to get that for that picture.
00:52:16 ◼ ► Like there's all sorts of, so, and what we've been told apparently, like I saw a few people, a few things breeze by on Mastodon and stuff that like apparently similar types of things have been, you know, getting some traction in different markets.
00:52:28 ◼ ► It's usually not in the U S which is why a lot of us like haven't heard about it, but similar types of things have gotten traction similar to like the crossbody strap.
00:52:35 ◼ ► When that came out, you know, a few months ago with the phone, everyone's like, yeah, okay, good job, Apple.
00:52:39 ◼ ► You're taking, you know, you're kind of entering a market that was already proven in certain market in certain other markets.
00:52:47 ◼ ► It'll go in like, you know, the dustbin of Apple history with like weird things they've made in small volumes for a lot of money, like gold Apple watches and the made an Apple book.
00:53:11 ◼ ► So, oh, if we can get a picture of somebody wearing one of these Borat style while also wearing a gold Apple watch.
00:53:23 ◼ ► And then also like carrying a MacBook in that, in that $300 MacBook leather sleeve they made about.
00:53:31 ◼ ► That $300 leather sleeve sounds like a bargain now with $250 piece of cotton sock or whatever this thing is.
00:53:47 ◼ ► Um, one, one cute thing from the iPod sock announcement with Steve Jobs is, uh, a sign of the times, uh, different, different times technology wise was that, uh, he mentioned, and it will also keep your iPod warm.
00:54:02 ◼ ► Now I know phones don't like to be super cold and people who live in very, very cold climates say, well, actually I do have to keep my phone warm.
00:54:14 ◼ ► Uh, and, uh, many of them, including the one in the picture had mechanical hard drives in them.
00:54:18 ◼ ► And so keeping them warm, even in mildly chilly winter, winter temperatures was probably a good idea.
00:54:23 ◼ ► So the sock was actually performing in a function to keep things warm, but I don't see them selling, for example, a MacBook Pro case that's designed to keep your MacBook Pro warm.
00:54:30 ◼ ► Unless again, you're using it outdoors on a, on a film shoot or something, but you know.
00:54:43 ◼ ► It's a, you know, that someone's going to write and say, we are shooting these videos in, uh, Alaska and we need to keep our MacBook Pros warm.
00:54:50 ◼ ► So John did me personally a great favor by adding a whole bunch of information about some new gaming hardware releases that I have no opinions on.
00:55:02 ◼ ► Well, you're recovering from a illness anyway, but still, I think you might have some interest in some of this stuff.
00:55:09 ◼ ► At first I was going to save it until next week, but I think it's just, it's of the moment.
00:55:12 ◼ ► It was announced yesterday, I believe, uh, valve announced, uh, the company behind, uh, the steam, uh, store.
00:55:19 ◼ ► We used to, you used to say valve, the company behind a half-life and portal or whatever.
00:55:23 ◼ ► But now we just say valve, the company behind steam, which is where people buy PC games.
00:55:27 ◼ ► Um, they have a existing hardware product called the steam deck and they have a VR headset called the, was it the valve index or something?
00:55:39 ◼ ► They made a big announcement where they're releasing a bunch of new hardware products and they're very interesting.
00:55:45 ◼ ► But before I get into the products, I want to just give a brief aside about valve doing this and how it's, how it's different.
00:55:59 ◼ ► Um, great to, to, to be clear, what, um, what, uh, what valve's hardware does like the steam deck, for instance, steam deck is the handheld gaming thing.
00:56:09 ◼ ► And by PC games, we need, we mean games that run on windows PCs running on x86 processors.
00:56:16 ◼ ► That's an, uh, and the steam deck runs them, but it doesn't run windows and it doesn't have an x86 processor.
00:56:33 ◼ ► It's like, how are they running windows games, windows, quote unquote, PC games on Linux.
00:56:37 ◼ ► And as we've discussed in the past, when talking about Apple, similar technology, they have a thing that I think they call it proton.
00:56:43 ◼ ► That's like a translation layer that understands the like direct X API calls or whatever inside of windows x86 binary and translates them to calls into their own Linux native library for doing 3d stuff.
00:56:54 ◼ ► And that way they are able to sell a platform that plays games made to run on windows, but they don't license windows and they don't have to, you know, be involved with Microsoft in any way.
00:57:08 ◼ ► And obviously also there's the steam store, which is an online store where you can buy games.
00:57:18 ◼ ► And the way that a lot of people buy games, it is one, it was one of the very early app stores, even before the iPhone, I believe.
00:57:34 ◼ ► It's like the app store, but before the app store and for PC games, the PC games used to be a pain in the butt to install and they would fight with each other and steam like made it.
00:57:48 ◼ ► What, what got me sold on steam back then was the lack of all the stupid copy protection crap that the, that the real games would install.
00:58:01 ◼ ► First of all, you don't have to like go to a store and buy a disc and then you wouldn't have the disc constantly checking it for self for disc protection and all that crap.
00:58:07 ◼ ► And then like, if you went like somewhere else, like your friend's house, you could log in and just download the game there.
00:58:12 ◼ ► And as long as you weren't playing it at the same time as you were in your home computer, you could play your games there.
00:58:33 ◼ ► Cause like, you know, basically CDRs did a number on game sales because again, ST area coming back to the CDR.
00:58:52 ◼ ► Like, all right, we're going to store like this protection data in like this weird sub channel of the CD.
00:59:00 ◼ ► And then, and of course then you'd have, you know, apps that would be able to rip that sub channel data and then burners that would be able to burn it.
00:59:06 ◼ ► And you had to, okay, you had to get this version of Nero burning ROM to rip the disc and then burn it with this one Plex store CD writer.
00:59:14 ◼ ► And then as a result of, you know, that, that cat and mouse game, the copy protection got so invasive.
00:59:19 ◼ ► It started basically being like a root kit on your computer and there were all these different schemes that different companies would use.
00:59:24 ◼ ► It was a nightmare to both try to be a pirate during that time and also to be a regular customer during that time.
00:59:31 ◼ ► Yeah, because you had to deal with all the stuff that was meant to make pirates' lives more miserable, but it made your life more miserable too.
00:59:39 ◼ ► We're going to do online activation based DRM, but which worked just fine, but it was way less invasive.
00:59:47 ◼ ► They were ahead of their time with the, you're going to, you're only selling digitally.
01:00:01 ◼ ► And so the thing that, that strikes me and has always struck me about Steam and doing all this is that the Microsoft of my youth would never have allowed this.
01:00:11 ◼ ► Because the Microsoft of my youth, the Microsoft, before it lost an antitrust case against the U.S. and had all the baggage, when it was the dominant company and the dominant thing, which was personal computers, all before mobile, before all of that, that Microsoft would never have allowed another company to make and sell a platform where you could run Windows games that didn't give Microsoft any money, that didn't run Windows, that didn't need Microsoft's permission.
01:00:43 ◼ ► They would constantly be modifying their APIs in such a way that it would break the proton layer.
01:00:52 ◼ ► But they would leverage their strength by saying, company, we will only license Windows to you if you promise to never do business with Valve in any way.
01:01:02 ◼ ► And like, we will only let you ship your game on Windows if you promise you will put in this code that will cause it to not function on Steam.
01:01:10 ◼ ► Because Valve is selling hardware and selling games through their own app store that runs apps not made for their operating system.
01:01:42 ◼ ► And Microsoft, probably because they've been chastened by their antitrust case, probably because the PC is not that important of a platform, so they just ignore it, has allowed them to exist and expand.
01:01:53 ◼ ► So much so that Microsoft is currently, over the past several years, deciding whether or not they still want to do that whole Xbox thing.
01:02:04 ◼ ► They entered the console space, they did amazingly well for years and years, but they're not the top of the console space.
01:02:10 ◼ ► The highest they probably got was a 360, and they've had a bunch of poor choices since then.
01:02:19 ◼ ► But Valve is coming and saying, oh, hey, Microsoft, you're getting out of the Xbox space, and you're just going to do PC games?
01:02:29 ◼ ► And it's weird that people are still writing games for x86 Windows, but we can run them on our Linux platform, and gamers seem to like it fine.
01:02:39 ◼ ► And our store is the only gaming store that matters, even though you have your own store.
01:02:46 ◼ ► And now, with these announcements, you'll see they're basically looking to fill the gap that will eventually be left by Microsoft, either radically changing and de-emphasizing the Xbox or abandoning it entirely.
01:03:14 ◼ ► It just looks like an Xbox or PlayStation controller, but it's got two big square touchpads on it.
01:03:21 ◼ ► Most of the things that they do, like their Steam controllers, are made for, quote-unquote, PC games, which means they expect you to have a mouse.
01:03:30 ◼ ► Steam Deck also has two big square touchpads on either side of it because these games are made to use for the mouse cursor.
01:03:36 ◼ ► They're PC games, and so you need a touchpad to basically be, you know, to be the mouse cursor on a system that doesn't have a mouse cursor.
01:03:47 ◼ ► So that includes a Mac running Steam, a PC running Steam, any of the hardware that we're going to talk about, or the Steam Link app.
01:03:59 ◼ ► It's got infrared LEDs that will make it trackable by the VR thing that we're going to talk about in a second.
01:04:08 ◼ ► The technologies for how little joysticks and controllers work, even today, like the PlayStation, I think, also the plain Xbox one, the controllers use sticks that have things rubbing up against each other inside them.
01:04:24 ◼ ► And anything that rubs up against each other, if you use it long enough, the rubbing will cause, you know, friction and damage, and it will stop working.
01:04:31 ◼ ► And so you get things like stick drift in the Nintendo Switch because things wear out over time.
01:04:36 ◼ ► There are technologies that allow joysticks to work without things that touch each other.
01:04:39 ◼ ► One of them are the Hall effect sensors, which use, I don't know, we'll put a link to the difference between the Hall effect and the thing we're about to talk about.
01:04:48 ◼ ► They just pass by each other and through magnetic fields or whatever determines where the stick's pointing.
01:04:52 ◼ ► The Steam Controller uses TMR, which is tunnel magneto resistance, which is slightly more accurate than Hall effect and a little bit better.
01:05:02 ◼ ► Again, they'll be in the link in the show notes about these details, but the point is Steam Controller, they're using the very best kind of like joystick thumbstick technology that is available today that will last the longest.
01:05:12 ◼ ► The Steam Controller, like everything else we're going to talk about, no pricing released, but pricing probably won't be too bad.
01:05:18 ◼ ► 30 to 40 hour battery life, a magnetically attaching combo charger and wireless dongle.
01:05:30 ◼ ► If you leave the little magnetic charging thing flat on your desk and you put the controller flat on your desk and then you just push slide the controller along the desk towards the magnetic thing, the magnetic thing will leap from the desk surface and stick to the underside of the controller.
01:05:44 ◼ ► And that magnetic thing that charges it is also the wireless dongle that you as a cord that plugs into the back of your thing for the like low latency wireless signal.
01:05:55 ◼ ► I think it looks kind of uncomfortable to use, but you got to have some compromises for to be able to use PC games on it.
01:06:01 ◼ ► Second thing they're releasing is called the Steam Machine, which is a six inch black cube.
01:06:17 ◼ ► And I had some pictures of what is on the inside of this thing that I will try to find, but it's pretty nice looking inside.
01:06:26 ◼ ► It is, um, it looks almost kind of like something Apple would make when you open it up.
01:06:40 ◼ ► And the whole rest of the thing is filled with like heat sink that the fan is pulling air through.
01:06:59 ◼ ► And the thing they described was like, say you want to download a game on steam, but it's taken a while to download.
01:07:08 ◼ ► But anyway, if you have, uh, this steam machine hooked up to your TV, uh, you can go just go watch a TV show or something.
01:07:24 ◼ ► It runs steam OS three, which is an arc based Linux, ARCH based Linux with KDE plasma as their desktop environment.
01:07:44 ◼ ► I mean, they've always been like this cause this is, they're a PC company and they're like, look, this is, this is just a PC.
01:08:10 ◼ ► Um, another from bit from the marketing steam machine keeps cool and runs whisper quiet, even when running the most demanding games.
01:08:27 ◼ ► They, the performance they describe as quote 4k gaming at 60 frame per second with FSR, which is one of those technologies that does like upscaling or whatever.
01:08:36 ◼ ► So it's not going to do native 4k 60 frame per second, but you won't notice the difference.
01:08:39 ◼ ► Um, the specs, it has a, what they describe as a semi-custom AMD Zen 4 processor with, uh, six, they say 6C, 12T, uh, six core, 12 thread, I guess up to 4.8 gigahertz, 30 Watts, TDP.
01:08:57 ◼ ► So I'm assuming this AMD Zen processor thing, I'm assuming it's like one of those AMD, uh, CPU, GPU combos, kind of like what the PlayStation has.
01:09:10 ◼ ► Uh, your choices for storage are five, 12 or two terabytes as a micro SD card slot, a wifi, six E Bluetooth 5.3, a dedicated antenna for the steam controllers built into the steam cube.
01:09:22 ◼ ► So you don't need that, uh, the, the dongle thing, um, display port is 4k at up to, uh,
01:09:27 ◼ ► to, uh, 240 Hertz or 8k at 60 Hertz supports HDR free sync and daisy chaining HDMI 2.0 port at 4k at 120 Hertz supports HDR free sync and CEC.
01:09:38 ◼ ► It's got two USB a 3.2 ports, one USB C 3.2 gen two port and two USB a 2.0 points and gigabit ethernet.
01:10:23 ◼ ► Like is a valve is going to replace Xbox as the third company, or are they just going to
01:10:38 ◼ ► That's where, you know, PC games are made are more complicated, have more features, require
01:10:44 ◼ ► And here's valve out here with the, the dominant PC gaming store selling a handheld PC that you
01:10:50 ◼ ► And now a non handheld PC that you can play games on that looks a lot like a game console.
01:10:59 ◼ ► Uh, the guess, uh, for people looking at this is that it's not going to be super expensive
01:11:18 ◼ ► Like Marco, you just talked about all the things that you liked about steam and how annoying
01:11:31 ◼ ► They play, you know, they're going to play on it because it's made by the same company.
01:11:41 ◼ ► Should I go to PC parts picker and start designing my small form factor PC and make sure that it
01:11:49 ◼ ► Steam machine, something like this is the closest I've ever gotten to considering having a gaming
01:12:01 ◼ ► I have in particular, I have no place for a gaming PC, but this thing is a fricking six
01:12:05 ◼ ► inch cube and I can put it right next to my PlayStation and connect it to the same monitor
01:12:20 ◼ ► Um, but close, uh, a few months ago, I bought a small form factor gaming PC for our house
01:12:29 ◼ ► here because Tiff and Adam were basically like, you know, everybody wanted one more PC in the
01:12:33 ◼ ► And at this point, almost all of our, uh, Razer laptops are dead except for mine, but the one
01:12:44 ◼ ► And so I like, there was this company that I found on Amazon that basically sells almost like
01:12:50 ◼ ► shoe box sized, uh, you know, little, it's like, it's basically, it can fit a full size
01:12:59 ◼ ► Um, so it looks almost like a PCI enclosure, but it's the full, the full computer in there.
01:13:05 ◼ ► Um, anyway, so we bought one of those and that's, it is currently connected to the TV with wires
01:13:26 ◼ ► is way smaller and it will have, it will have like, you know, the, the steam OS kind of,
01:13:32 ◼ ► you know, like the, the shell and the software environment that is made to be used on a TV,
01:13:42 ◼ ► So you hook this thing up to your TV, you sit on the couch with a controller and you launch
01:13:47 ◼ ► So there's no question in my mind that if that was available at that time, we would have
01:14:03 ◼ ► It looks very Apple, like on the inside, maybe not quite as neat and beautiful as the Apple
01:14:09 ◼ ► I forgot to mention in addition to the customizable led strip on the front, it also has very much
01:14:18 ◼ ► So you can have different face plates and brand them and put stickers on them and have color
01:14:23 ◼ ► The default one is a cute little, you know, black cube, but you can, that front part can
01:14:35 ◼ ► Although basically my P my PS five looks like my PS five is an AMD combo CPU, GPU with an
01:14:54 ◼ ► And this thing plays quote unquote PC games, which how long before they're called steam games
01:15:03 ◼ ► Like they're emphasizing, like, look, gamers can build their own monster gaming PC and that
01:15:22 ◼ ► Uh, this is not something I have a need for today, but it would not, I, it's only a matter
01:15:42 ◼ ► Like if your kid wants to just play PC games and you don't have to think about it, you just
01:15:47 ◼ ► Like even if you just hook it up to like a monitor in his room or hook it up to your TV
01:16:07 ◼ ► This is for people who don't want to do that and who don't want, who either, either don't
01:16:19 ◼ ► And the beauty is, as I'm sure Valve would tell you is say you build your small form actor
01:16:24 ◼ ► PC or say you build your monster PC, you don't, you can install on it, SteamOS, which is free.
01:16:29 ◼ ► And now you have, now your PC connected to your TV has a nice convenient interface that you
01:16:37 ◼ ► Like they are the, the Microsoft of PC gaming, which sounds weird to say, like, isn't Microsoft
01:16:46 ◼ ► Well, they don't, Microsoft didn't give away windows for free, but like a Linux based operating
01:16:56 ◼ ► Like trying to provide a unified experience without giving problems, but also being open
01:17:02 ◼ ► Like the old Microsoft was intentionally breaking stuff, but still like if these games are still
01:17:11 ◼ ► There's still this like other shoe waiting to drop or Microsoft could wake up and go, why
01:17:16 ◼ ► Why, why are they allowed to take all the profit and market share by selling a machine that doesn't
01:17:31 ◼ ► I think it's, I know it doesn't run like it's, it isn't like natively in Steam, of course,
01:17:45 ◼ ► And the answer at the time was like, you can sort of try, but it's very hacky and it would
01:17:51 ◼ ► And like there would be like there was, you had to like, you know, leave the walled garden
01:17:58 ◼ ► Yeah, I think, I think what I saw from people who had talked to Valve in this product release
01:18:02 ◼ ► is that like, there is still a way, like their games are like, this is certified to run on
01:18:07 ◼ ► But if you have a Windows game that's not certified to run, you can still just ask it to run.
01:18:21 ◼ ► And I think Minecraft probably falls into that category of like, you know, it's not Steam certified
01:18:29 ◼ ► So this next one is where things get really interested in, and there's more of an Apple
01:18:57 ◼ ► I know nothing about the Snapdragon line, but from what I've gathered, this is a basically
01:19:07 ◼ ► And Valve has added a translation layer that translates x86 to ARM, just like Apple has done, and just
01:19:19 ◼ ► Valve says that there's a 10% to 20% performance hit for code that is being translated, but that
01:19:25 ◼ ► is only code that is running on the CPU, and that is not part of an API that has a native
01:19:30 ◼ ► So for example, all those DirectX calls or whatever, those get sent to native ARM implementations
01:19:44 ◼ ► They describe the Steam frame as having roughly Steam Deck levels of power, like if you were
01:19:50 ◼ ► to run a game on the Steam frame, it's, you know, which means it's six times less powerful
01:20:05 ◼ ► According to Dave2D, we'll put a link to his review as well on YouTube, Valve has touted
01:20:14 ◼ ► They control the hardware, the OS, the drivers, when explaining why they were able to do this
01:20:32 ◼ ► But Apple, the gold standard for take a binary written for a different CPU and make it run amazingly
01:20:52 ◼ ► And Apple, of course, has its own similar technology, similar to Proton, similar to Crossover, similar
01:20:57 ◼ ► to all these other things where you can run a Windows x86 game on an ARM Mac through that
01:21:07 ◼ ► They're like, well, when we have a problem, if we see a game that has a performance problem
01:21:10 ◼ ► or a hitch or something, we have all the code for the OS, we have all the code for the drivers,
01:21:20 ◼ ► In theory, that's true of Apple, but Apple doesn't care about games as much as Valve does.
01:21:39 ◼ ► If you have all your games and you downloaded them, like huge games, you downloaded them,
01:21:43 ◼ ► and you want those games to be on your headset, yes, you could download them to your headset
01:21:49 ◼ ► Take the SD card out, stick it in your headset, and now the games are there without having you
01:22:00 ◼ ► They all have a micro SD card slot, although it's not SD Express, which is kind of a shame.
01:22:08 ◼ ► It has Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.3, and a dedicated Wi-Fi 6E radio just for the wireless adapter,
01:22:25 ◼ ► Like, the ski goggle part, you pull the face shield off of that, it attaches with magnets.
01:22:33 ◼ ► This thing, when it's, you know, if you put it on your face, you can pull the front part
01:22:41 ◼ ► So, it's got the CPU, the lenses, the screens, all the compute, like, all that stuff comes
01:22:45 ◼ ► But the rest of it is, like, the strap that goes around your head, the equivalent of light
01:22:55 ◼ ► Instead of having, like, on the Apple thing, the ski goggle part and the little temples,
01:23:09 ◼ ► And supposedly, it says, well, if we come out with a better one that has higher CPU, you
01:23:14 ◼ ► Or if you like a different strap or whatever and different speakers, because, again, the speakers
01:23:29 ◼ ► They're, like, in the, basically what you would imagine would be the light shield on a Vision
01:23:32 ◼ ► They're force-canceling, kind of like the Sonos subwoofers that you two like, which means they
01:23:42 ◼ ► Because when they didn't do this, the vibrations would throw off the display for, like, tracking
01:23:48 ◼ ► And that makes me wonder if the reason Apple put the speakers in the Vision Pro in those
01:24:02 ◼ ► Because Apple doesn't have, like, you know, force-canceling speakers, as far as I know.
01:24:13 ◼ ► So, you know, two different possible approaches to the same problem, which is, hey, speakers
01:24:22 ◼ ► Valve left them in, like, the front sort of light shield part, but made them force-canceling.
01:24:29 ◼ ► It could also just be, like, getting them closer to the ears the way Apple does is, of course,
01:24:37 ◼ ► But it also probably involves costing complexity that maybe Valve's product couldn't bear that
01:24:42 ◼ ► Yeah, and it makes it, like, the one piece, like, the non-replaceable piece, it's more stuff
01:24:47 ◼ ► Like, Valve's whole idea is, like, maybe we didn't get this whole strap and speaker part
01:24:54 ◼ ► You can replace all those things, whereas those are, they're stuck to the Apple headset.
01:24:58 ◼ ► The Steam frame has, which is what they call this thing, has a 21.6 watt-hour rechargeable
01:25:10 ◼ ► Instead of being on a cord in your pocket or whatever, it's on the back, like, on the back
01:25:15 ◼ ► And lots of reviewers were sort of repeating the line that I'm sure Valve told them, and
01:25:29 ◼ ► And I'm like, look, it only balances it if there is a fulcrum in this seesaw, but there's
01:25:42 ◼ ► So I'm like, putting weight on the back and on the front, I guess it makes it feel like
01:26:01 ◼ ► So Apple is definitely out ahead on the strap technology, but I feel like this is surmountable
01:26:07 ◼ ► But yeah, the battery is on the back of the head, and it's smaller than the Vision Pro battery.
01:26:22 ◼ ► So probably in the same range as the Vision Pro, maybe a little bit better, maybe a little
01:26:36 ◼ ► It's half the weight of the, and it's half the weight of the Vision Pro, and the Vision
01:26:44 ◼ ► It's half the weight of the Vision Pro with the battery, but just stuck on the back of your
01:27:04 ◼ ► And LCD does not have per-pixel lighting control, and LCDs and headsets don't even have mini-LED
01:27:14 ◼ ► It's just one single backlight for the whole thing, which means when you put this thing on
01:27:27 ◼ ► So even though it's supposed to be pitch black in there like it is in the OLED Vision Pro,
01:27:38 ◼ ► Well, one reason is cost, because those OLEDs and Apple's things are a whole jillion dollars,
01:27:49 ◼ ► And for combating motion sickness and other, you know, motion artifacts and stuff like that,
01:27:55 ◼ ► what was discovered very early on in the VR world was the way to do that with current screen
01:28:06 ◼ ► So just say, boom, here's the image, and then turn it off the screens and then wait, wait,
01:28:11 ◼ ► wait, and then turn on, light up for the next thing and turn off the screens and wait, wait,
01:28:15 ◼ ► And the reason they can do that with LCDs is because LCDs can get really, really bright.
01:28:22 ◼ ► So rather than them having, like, for example, a 1,000-nit screen or a 100-nit screen, which
01:28:32 ◼ ► that's what the light output of this thing is, 100-nit screen, they said, how about instead
01:28:36 ◼ ► of 100 nits that we just show each frame at 100 nits the whole time, how about we show that
01:28:48 ◼ ► The reason they're doing that is because the way the human visual system works is it's much
01:28:53 ◼ ► better to show an image really, really bright and then show nothing for a long time and
01:29:04 ◼ ► Because they show the frame of film and then they show nothing and then they show the frame
01:29:08 ◼ ► of the next frame and they show nothing because while they're showing nothing, the next frame
01:29:22 ◼ ► Now, the Vision Pro has the OLED problem of like, what are they called, sample and hold.
01:29:29 ◼ ► OLEDs can turn on and off really, really fast, way faster than LCDs, way better than LCDs with
01:29:45 ◼ ► So they have to show the frame pretty much the whole time on an OLED and then OLEDs instantly
01:29:52 ◼ ► So you see one frame in a 24 frame per second thing for one-twenty-fourth of a second and
01:30:04 ◼ ► You see that frame briefly and then you don't see anything for a while as the next frame scrolls
01:30:18 ◼ ► And that makes for better, clearer motion and less motion sickness and less stuttery things.
01:30:23 ◼ ► That's why if you watch a 24 frame per second movie on OLEDs and don't have any motion smoothing
01:30:27 ◼ ► on, some people perceive a stutteriness because it is literally showing frame one for one-twenty-fourth
01:30:32 ◼ ► of a second never changes for that one-twenty-fourth and it is never black or anything.
01:30:37 ◼ ► That's why lots of T's have black frame insertion where they will show, OLEDs will show,
01:30:44 ◼ ► Like they're trying to make it so the frame isn't on the screen the whole one-twenty-fourth
01:30:48 ◼ ► Well, that cuts the brightness down and sometimes looks flickery depending on how you do it.
01:30:53 ◼ ► So anyway, these low-persistence LCDs, for all their terrible contrast and bad black levels,
01:31:01 ◼ ► They display each frame for around 300 microseconds, which they describe as a 3.7% illumination
01:31:07 ◼ ► cycle, which I think means for the length of each frame, only 3% of the time is the screen
01:31:18 ◼ ► The perceived total brightness of really bright frame for a short period for 3.7% of the time,
01:31:25 ◼ ► The contrast is way less than the Vision Pro, but within a dark headset, 100 nits is sufficient
01:31:39 ◼ ► Like the lenses in the Quest that are cheaper to make, they're like, I think they're plastic.
01:31:43 ◼ ► They're like, they have lots of like sort of concentric, ridgy rings on them, kind of like
01:31:48 ◼ ► They're cool and all, but they make things a little bit fuzzier, especially around the edges.
01:32:05 ◼ ► It's got pass-through cameras, so you don't like bump into things and so you can find your
01:32:15 ◼ ► And not only does it save money, but it's also really good in low light because if you don't
01:32:23 ◼ ► There is a port, a front port on the bridge of the nose where they say, oh, well, if you
01:32:28 ◼ ► wanted color pass-through, you could buy some sort of third-party camera module and shove
01:32:50 ◼ ► It's got IR illuminators for tracking pass-through in dark environments so you can still play
01:33:10 ◼ ► I just described like the ARM CPU and everything, but you can also run games on your PC, on your
01:33:25 ◼ ► Not by connecting your headset with a wire like the Valve Index, but instead, I think the
01:33:29 ◼ ► Valve Index uses wire, but instead by using a wireless protocol with a special USB adapter
01:33:58 ◼ ► Quest 3 you can stream from PCs and stuff, but it's not great because it's sharing that
01:34:17 ◼ ► And it also does foveated streaming, which means when it's streaming stuff from your Mac,
01:34:37 ◼ ► And unlike foveated rendering, the thing being streamed has no idea that this is happening to it.
01:34:47 ◼ ► They take the image as it arrives at them because when you're playing on a PC, it's not foveated
01:34:54 ◼ ► They take that whole screen image, but they don't send every single pixel from that image.
01:35:04 ◼ ► And as everyone who tried this out, this is a lot of, uh, you know, PC gamers first experience
01:35:09 ◼ ► with foveated rendering because not a lot of people have Vision Pros or the other fancier
01:35:15 ◼ ► Like the Valve did a demo where they, they were streaming like Half-Life Alex or one of those
01:35:20 ◼ ► And instead of foveated streaming, they did streaming where it literally sent blackness everywhere
01:35:27 ◼ ► Like, so just a little, like, you know, two inch postage stamp of where you're looking.
01:35:31 ◼ ► Like if you, when you looked at the mirror display, it's like you see a black screen with
01:35:46 ◼ ► I think with the blackness, I think you're, I think you can tell like in peripheral vision
01:36:06 ◼ ► And the thing about foveated streaming, like I said, foveated rendering, like in Vision OS,
01:36:12 ◼ ► Like the window compositor or whatever, whatever is, you know, displaying the UI in the Vision
01:36:22 ◼ ► foveated image, which is why you get a foveated image when you're mirroring it, because that's,
01:36:48 ◼ ► Um, they say you can stream from PC, Steam Machine, or quote, any device running Steam.
01:37:06 ◼ ► People can make cool theater apps and stuff like that, but this is not a priority for this
01:37:11 ◼ ► And to that extent, it comes with two controllers, two handheld controllers with a full set of
01:37:16 ◼ ► buttons and triggers for 2D games, which is not true of all the quests and other things
01:37:21 ◼ ► A lot of times they have controls for VR games, but they don't have sufficient controls to play
01:37:26 ◼ ► Or I know it's going to be a PlayStation game, but like a regular game, uh, console, like an
01:37:31 ◼ ► Xbox game expects you to have a certain number of triggers and buttons these days or whatever.
01:37:35 ◼ ► And a lot of times VR controllers don't have them, but the, uh, the steam frame does their
01:37:40 ◼ ► It's basically like a regular console controller split in half and there it tracks where your
01:37:49 ◼ ► The price of all of this, the headset, the controllers, uh, supposed to be less than a thousand
01:37:56 ◼ ► So people are just like trying to feel out like how expensive is it going to be or whatever.
01:37:59 ◼ ► The point is it's not vision pro prices less than a thousand dollars more than the quest.
01:38:12 ◼ ► You're playing windows games for a different operating system on a different architecture.
01:38:23 ◼ ► Steam deck two, but we can't wait to make more arm hardware so we can run x86 windows games
01:38:49 ◼ ► Now having a vision pro having Casey's vision pro now, none of the specs of this headset
01:38:57 ◼ ► I'm like, man, the, uh, the vision pro hardware is amazing, but it did make me think, you know,
01:39:08 ◼ ► If you could connect it to steam and if Apple knew or cared anything about gaming, they would
01:39:12 ◼ ► have long since made a deal that said, Hey, uh, if you get steam on your Mac or your PC,
01:39:22 ◼ ► Now, maybe the persistence isn't as good as the low persistence LCD or whatever, but, and
01:39:25 ◼ ► maybe the field of view is a little bit lower, but, and I would now Apple to its credit just
01:39:30 ◼ ► did come out with the, uh, ability to buy the PlayStation VR controllers for vision pro.
01:39:46 ◼ ► You get to play the games that are available on Apple's app store, which is a much more limited
01:39:50 ◼ ► And by the way, the PlayStation controllers probably don't have all the buttons needed to play
01:39:55 ◼ ► Now these three products, steam controller, steam machine, steam frame, and their existing handheld
01:40:10 ◼ ► They have, they are basically Sony, which has the PSVR and PlayStation five Microsoft, which
01:40:15 ◼ ► has quote unquote PC gaming and Nintendo, which has the switch combined into a single company
01:40:26 ◼ ► Um, playing games for an operating system that they don't control on an architecture that is
01:40:35 ◼ ► It boggles my mind, but like, I'm, I think they hit it out of the park with these products.
01:40:42 ◼ ► These are coming in 2026, I think, but the rumor prices sound right and they all look really
01:40:54 ◼ ► Like, you know, I mentioned earlier, like the little square gaming PC thing looks great.
01:40:59 ◼ ► Um, and, and the, the headset, I mean, look what we see in the headset market, we see like
01:41:08 ◼ ► And then you have like everyone else here on earth, uh, they're using, you know, like you
01:41:14 ◼ ► This is obviously meant to directly compete with the quest and it seems like it is built
01:41:23 ◼ ► Which is great because like the quest, the quest is a very successful product line and it, and
01:41:43 ◼ ► And yeah, I'm sure there's more games than on Apple's platforms, but like steam is steam.
01:41:49 ◼ ► When Declan is going to be interested in playing games, it's going to be a quote unquote PC
01:42:00 ◼ ► And it, you know, the things about like using an LCD for the display, honestly, in with today's
01:42:05 ◼ ► technology, I think for most use cases, that might be the right move because look at what
01:42:43 ◼ ► That's why gaming, people who buy gaming monitors are getting OLEDs because if you try to run an
01:42:48 ◼ ► LCD gaming monitor at like 120 Hertz or 240 Hertz, which is what high end PC gamers want to
01:42:54 ◼ ► do, it becomes a smeary mess because LCDs cannot change from one color to another fast enough to
01:43:06 ◼ ► And inside a headset doing that thing where you show something 10 times as bright for one
01:43:14 ◼ ► So while game, every gamer in the world, including me, probably for my PlayStation six is getting
01:43:24 ◼ ► They just can't get bright enough to do the low persistence pulsing thing that you need to
01:43:33 ◼ ► It's like, I would wish it had an old, well, if you wish it had an old light control, it'd be
01:43:37 ◼ ► Because there's no, like the current hardware reality is if you want vision pro style OLED
01:43:46 ◼ ► And you're going to have the possibility of the sample and hold blur that you get inside
01:43:55 ◼ ► Yeah, I think this, it, this looks like they have made a very different set of trade-offs
01:44:02 ◼ ► than Apple and a slightly different set of trade-offs than meta, but I think it's going
01:44:14 ◼ ► Like there's no other competition out there in this market and, and valve's previous products.
01:44:24 ◼ ► They made various kind of Linux PC looking things or whatever, but they learned from those.
01:44:34 ◼ ► Like they've really nailed like kind of like game consoles do where it's like, we know what
01:44:48 ◼ ► These look, I mean, this is not for me today, but these all look really, really impressive.
01:45:12 ◼ ► Like in terms of like how big is it compared to computers, other, you know, gaming PCs, how
01:45:21 ◼ ► And like, it's going to be tiny compared to all those, just like, you know, all everything
01:45:38 ◼ ► game consoles sell people by a lot of playstations, millions of playstations, millions, millions
01:45:43 ◼ ► of Nintendo switches, which I know is kind of more of a steam deck competitor, but steam
01:45:53 ◼ ► And instead they said, how about we make one six times more powerful that connects to your
01:45:57 ◼ ► Um, what does the console market look like with the PlayStation six, probably still the Nintendo
01:46:04 ◼ ► And the steam machine with the Xbox essentially either bowing out entirely and then retiring
01:46:23 ◼ ► And for anybody who wants to play PC games, who does not want to deal with a PC who would
01:46:27 ◼ ► previously have bought an Xbox, even though Xbox doesn't run PC games or has Xbox games,
01:46:32 ◼ ► How about we just cut out that all, that all those nuances and say, this just runs games
01:46:40 ◼ ► And I really do think if depending on how much marketing valve puts behind this, they could
01:46:48 ◼ ► become the replacement for Xbox as the third player in the console market with PlayStation,
01:47:26 ◼ ► The reason we have so much money to make this hardware is we get a cut of all those things
01:47:34 ◼ ► And the margins on that service revenue, they're way better than on these Steam machines and
01:47:47 ◼ ► So maybe they're not incentivized to become the world conquering third console maker with
01:47:59 ◼ ► made a better non-Nintendo, non-Sony console than the Xbox, because unlike the Xbox, this
01:48:23 ◼ ► And I love to I love the idea of like, you know, the Steam deck has been great for this
01:48:28 ◼ ► so far of like creating a market for Windows games to run on a platform that's not Windows.
01:48:35 ◼ ► And, you know, as the Steam platform, SteamOS platform, as it gets more users, it gets more
01:48:48 ◼ ► And then, you know, if there's enough demand there, if it's a big enough user base there,
01:48:54 ◼ ► then not only will game compatibility be better overall, it'll be more ubiquitous and kind of
01:49:04 ◼ ► And as somebody who uses Windows only for gaming, like I don't use a Windows PC for any other
01:49:12 ◼ ► And dealing with anything about the PC that's not the game is a huge pain in the butt that
01:49:19 ◼ ► I love the idea of a console style experience, but having the high quality Windows games.
01:49:28 ◼ ► And the bigger and more powerful and more popular that platform gets, the harder it will be for
01:49:50 ◼ ► But yeah, there is the danger of them becoming the Apple, like in the bad way, the Apple of
01:49:55 ◼ ► I mean, so it's important to distinguish between Steam, the store, which is already massively
01:50:05 ◼ ► Well, the Steam Deck is doing pretty well, but there are other handheld gaming PCs from other
01:50:14 ◼ ► You can't just, unlike the Switch, where that's the only place we'll run Nintendo games, you
01:50:24 ◼ ► But Steam, the store, has been so dominant for years that when these days, when anybody talks
01:50:33 ◼ ► Like I just did a podcast where I was talking about Arc Raiders and Marathon and stuff, and
01:50:37 ◼ ► they're like, oh, you know, all these stories in the PC gaming press, Arc Raiders is doing
01:50:42 ◼ ► great, and Marathon is doing poorly, and Destiny has few users, you know, checking these live
01:50:47 ◼ ► service games to see how they're doing, like basically the ratings, like how are the games
01:50:55 ◼ ► A, because Steam publishes those numbers, and B, because they use that as a proxy for the
01:51:03 ◼ ► You can download games directly from a game maker and install them with their own janky-ass
01:51:15 ◼ ► But Steam has just used this, like, we just look at the Steam charts, because Steam shows
01:51:26 ◼ ► So, and every YouTube channel, they're showing charts from Steam to show how well a game is
01:51:36 ◼ ► So, this, Steam is the entire PC gaming market as far as we're concerned when we're seeing
01:51:43 ◼ ► All right, thanks to our sponsors this week, Factor, Grammarly, and NordLayer, and thanks
01:52:00 ◼ ► This week's Overtime is about Affinity's graphics apps are now going free, and people got upset
01:53:17 ◼ ► Marco, you noted in our internal show notes that you made a trip to Home Depot, which means
01:53:28 ◼ ► So I thought you would enjoy this brief story of me learning to do a very basic thing that
01:53:51 ◼ ► And the problem is there's not that many studs in certain spans that the shelves need to go.
01:54:11 ◼ ► I installed one set where like one of the two, like, I guess, arms of the shelf was in a stud
01:54:29 ◼ ► I'm like, all right, I'm going to install a bunch of horizontally installed one by four boards.
01:54:39 ◼ ► You were deriving from first principles, knowledge that is relevant to the industry that you are not familiar with.
01:54:51 ◼ ► But I'm like, well, how am I going to like, at some point, I'll like ask a friend who has a pickup truck or something.
01:54:56 ◼ ► If I can, you know, if they can give me a ride to Home Depot or something, or like maybe they'll deliver.
01:55:11 ◼ ► So, but I assume like there's no, like, you know, my car is not as big as a full-size SUV anymore.
01:56:01 ◼ ► Yeah, it's like, here is a full report of, okay, here's why you might want to use 1x4s versus 2x4s.
01:56:21 ◼ ► It's like, okay, well, you're going to want this kind of wood, you know, not pressure treated
01:56:44 ◼ ► So I went to Home Depot and I'm like, I almost felt like a kid in a cartoon walking into an adult space and trying to fit in and trying to play it cool and not be noticed.
01:57:05 ◼ ► And there seems to be like that entire like left side of the store against the wall seems to be all big stacks of wood.
01:58:03 ◼ ► Anyway, so all this is to say, I, in the most nerdy way possible, did research to figure out how to buy wood.
01:59:00 ◼ ► I used the fart drill for some especially difficult screws for some of the shelf brackets.
01:59:06 ◼ ► You know, I got to say that we were talking before we started recording about you doing
01:59:14 ◼ ► And I feel like Marco of five or 10 years ago would have been like, oh, I'll call somebody
01:59:27 ◼ ► And, and I think he now fully understands what are the downsides of having someone else do
01:59:33 ◼ ► Also like this, this is a really small job for like, if you're going to call someone like
01:59:45 ◼ ► And, and whatever it would cost it, I would be like, I probably should have just done this
02:00:08 ◼ ► Um, but I, I still have more to do, but like I've done the hardest ones that were above