00:00:14 ◼ ► Oh yeah. I remember. This is the day John Gruber sent his minions after me. Just kidding.
00:00:19 ◼ ► No, I had published a video, I think, about why I didn't think that the iPhone XS was a
00:00:29 ◼ ► saying, "100 bucks says this guy buys the iPhone." And well, I made it my mission for 12 months
00:01:05 ◼ ► No, I do. But you know what? This guy was rude. And the backstory, as I recall it, and again,
00:01:12 ◼ ► at this point, my recollection might be a little fuzzy, but I saw the video. I sincerely thought
00:01:29 ◼ ► And I looked at your YouTube channel, and that's Snazzy Labs. And what? It would have taken me,
00:01:34 ◼ ► what, 30 seconds to somehow find Quinn Nelson as the star of Snazzy Labs. But I didn't.
00:01:44 ◼ ► Well, it worked out in the end, and I hope we can be pals. But you were right, and I was wrong.
00:01:59 ◼ ► Let's start with that, though. Because I've become, in the years since, I am an enormous
00:02:09 ◼ ► I believe it's funny. I feel like everything is getting better as Twitter slowly breaks up,
00:02:24 ◼ ► right? To me, Twitter is sort of collapsing like the ice sheafs down in Antarctica. It's
00:02:30 ◼ ► not going all at once. It's going slowly. And I think that this new world of Mastodon and
00:02:38 ◼ ► more diverse forums for people to spend their Twitter-like time on places other than Twitter,
00:02:48 ◼ ► I feel like it's all for the good. But on the other hand, now that it's all sort of splintered,
00:02:58 ◼ ► That's my long way of saying I think it's on your Mastodon handle. I guess I could look it up right
00:03:04 ◼ ► now, but I try to be honest here on the podcast and go with what's in my head. But somewhere,
00:03:10 ◼ ► I think it's on your Mastodon profile. You link to your YouTube channel, and the description just
00:03:38 ◼ ► producing YouTube videos or being a "YouTuber" is dismissed by a lot of traditional journalism,
00:03:45 ◼ ► and a lot of times for good reason. I mean, there's a lot of YouTubers out there that are
00:03:50 ◼ ► no good. But for everyone that does a terrible job, I think there's at least a few that do a
00:04:02 ◼ ► Well, it's a weird racket to be in, and it is hyper-competitive. And it is, I think, a sort of
00:04:15 ◼ ► generational divide. And I hope, I don't know, I hope I'm humble enough, but I can kind of see it
00:04:25 ◼ ► where—I just turned 50—I think that for people who are, if we roughly define a generation as
00:04:34 ◼ ► 20 years, people who are around 30, YouTube is the primary indie media outlet, right? It's not
00:04:47 ◼ ► blogging anymore. And what's happened with YouTube is what I expected to happen with blogging 20
00:04:56 ◼ ► years ago. When I started Daring Fireball, I expected by this time, 20 years hence, that
00:05:04 ◼ ► almost—I just thought that the future of people who were talented at writing and had the draw to
00:05:12 ◼ ► write, the compulsion, which you kind of, in my opinion, you kind of need to have to do anything
00:05:16 ◼ ► in the media. Otherwise, you burn out. I just thought that almost everybody doing it would
00:05:23 ◼ ► be doing it on their own blogs under their own name by now. And it clearly did not turn out to
00:05:30 ◼ ► be the case. I think there are fewer people blogging like I do independently. Whereas with
00:05:37 ◼ ► video, to me, there's clearly far more people who are making a full-time career on YouTube as
00:05:47 ◼ ► independent media outlets like Snazzy Labs, MKBHD, iJustine. If I sit here and list them, I mean,
00:05:55 ◼ ► we'd use up the whole two hours of the show. But YouTube is the outlet for video that I thought
00:06:03 ◼ ► blogging would be. And I'm not quite sure why that didn't work out for writing because there's still
00:06:08 ◼ ► just as much writing going on. But it seems to me like people do it for outlets. They get a job
00:06:14 ◼ ► working for such and such website and they do it. Whereas YouTube, there's far more people doing
00:06:31 ◼ ► - I kind of fell into it, I think. I started producing YouTube videos. I don't know that
00:06:37 ◼ ► you could call it producing. I started recording YouTube videos when I was 15. So I've been doing
00:06:42 ◼ ► this, I guess at the end of the year, I will have been making videos longer in my life than I haven't
00:06:48 ◼ ► been making videos, which is wild. So I'm almost 30. I turned 30 this week. And I think that--
00:06:57 ◼ ► - Oh, thank you. And I think that I am maybe biased a little bit into the older generation
00:07:04 ◼ ► slightly of blogging and that kind of tech publication style because that's what I grew
00:07:10 ◼ ► up with. I grew up reading Daring Fireball and listening to podcasts from a bunch of different
00:07:16 ◼ ► networks years and years and years and years ago. And that in many ways fostered my love and
00:07:22 ◼ ► interest in technology and eventually kind of compelled me to do stuff on my own. And when I
00:07:29 ◼ ► was 15, I had no idea that it was certainly, certainly no idea it was going to become my
00:07:35 ◼ ► career, but I didn't even think it was going to become a job. In fact, I don't think that I knew
00:07:39 ◼ ► you could monetize videos on YouTube when I started making them. It was totally something
00:07:44 ◼ ► that I wanted to do because I thought it was cool and fun and interesting. And I liked listening to
00:07:50 ◼ ► podcasts and reading tech articles, but didn't have an outlet to do that. I wasn't sophisticated
00:07:55 ◼ ► enough to set up my own CMS and publish my own site. There was no place where any sane place
00:08:02 ◼ ► where a 15-year-old was able to have the keyboard and write articles, right? So YouTube kind of
00:08:07 ◼ ► became that outlet and that's very luckily, I guess, grown with me over time. It provided a
00:08:13 ◼ ► good healthy job when I was in college. And then when I graduated, I decided to go full time and
00:08:18 ◼ ► that was five years ago. And it doesn't look like it's going away anytime soon, but it is a lot
00:08:24 ◼ ► different than kind of the self-publishing method that I wish in many ways was tenable for video,
00:08:32 ◼ ► because I think that being in control of your audience is really valuable. But I also think
00:08:38 ◼ ► that platforms like YouTube have permitted a much greater number of people to find success because
00:08:44 ◼ ► doing what you do, and I'm not trying to pat you on the back and say good job, but I think
00:08:49 ◼ ► doing what you do is a lot harder because not only do you have to provide engaging and interesting
00:08:55 ◼ ► content, but you've got to find that audience to begin with. And I don't really have to do that.
00:09:15 ◼ ► Every once in a while, I just sort of wake up and I just have that fear. And it's weird
00:09:27 ◼ ► when you don't see your audience. I do my live once a year talk show with the audience and I
00:09:34 ◼ ► get nervous as hell for that. But if I start thinking about it, even right now during the
00:09:46 ◼ ► show, now all of a sudden I'm freaking myself out. I'm like, who are these people that are
00:09:50 ◼ ► opening up their web browser and typing D-A and it auto completes to Daring Fireball and they hit
00:10:03 ◼ ► but you don't see them. But it is different. And I'm not sure that I would deal well with the stress
00:10:09 ◼ ► of doing it on YouTube because like you say, people don't start typing S-N-A to go to Snazzy Labs.
00:10:21 ◼ ► They type Y-O to go to YouTube. When you come out with a new video, I get suggested because
00:10:31 ◼ ► their algorithm is pretty good and they seem to know what I like. It doesn't seem like I miss
00:10:35 ◼ ► your videos, but you're at the mercy of the algorithm, right? Yeah, you absolutely are.
00:10:44 ◼ ► I guess you live and die by the sword, right? As long as you're doing what YouTube wants and
00:10:49 ◼ ► expects, then you receive reward and viewership. But it is spooky. I can look in my dashboard. I
00:10:55 ◼ ► don't know the number off the top of my head, but I think the percentage of returning viewers
00:11:00 ◼ ► I have is fewer than 40%. And I think the number that are actually subscribed that have gone and
00:11:07 ◼ ► hit the button that says, yeah, I would like to see this. I think it hovers around 25%.
00:11:11 ◼ ► So the vast majority of viewership that I receive are people that have A, not subscribed to me,
00:11:18 ◼ ► but B, don't even know who I am. They watch one video and they go, cool. And they leave.
00:11:24 ◼ ► And that's really spooky because as soon as YouTube decides, ah, he's not that interesting
00:11:31 ◼ ► or his metrics are no longer as strong as they used to be, then they just stop recommending the
00:11:36 ◼ ► channel. And it's happened to people time and time and time again. And I like to think that I've been
00:11:41 ◼ ► strategic enough to notice trends on YouTube and adapt my content to them, but I am at their mercy.
00:11:50 ◼ ► And that's something that has terrified me from day one. And it's something that I, in the last
00:11:55 ◼ ► couple of years have been more actively working towards avoiding. So that should YouTube go belly
00:12:02 ◼ ► up or should I become unfavorable in the eyes of YouTube? I might have to let go part of my staff,
00:12:08 ◼ ► but at least all, we still have some form of living. Yeah. I think that the fear YouTube
00:12:16 ◼ ► itself clearly isn't going to go away. I think, but I think that the possibility is that what
00:12:22 ◼ ► YouTube is morphs into something incompatible with the range of things that you can do and that you
00:12:33 ◼ ► want to do. Right. Because one thing that sticks out to me about the YouTube professionals like
00:12:39 ◼ ► you and MKBHD, I just seen that I like is that you're clearly not catering just to the algorithm.
00:12:49 ◼ ► Right. And you can see when you look over in the sidebar and it's like, I don't know who that is,
00:12:55 ◼ ► but it's like just pure YouTube bait for lack of a better word. Right. Yeah. Like I always say,
00:13:03 ◼ ► it's like one of my repeated mantras that it's not just like, what are your top three priorities?
00:13:10 ◼ ► The order of those priorities makes a profound difference. And obviously one of your priorities
00:13:16 ◼ ► is to be popular on YouTube because it's your career, but it's very clear to me that you have
00:13:22 ◼ ► a higher priority, which is that you only want to produce videos you're proud of. Well, I appreciate
00:13:28 ◼ ► it. I certainly hope that that's what people perceive. There's a lot of, I don't want to
00:13:35 ◼ ► bad mouth anyone. There's a lot of desire from other YouTubers to game or hack the system, to
00:13:42 ◼ ► produce content that is designed purely to be clicked on. And I don't want to say that that's
00:13:48 ◼ ► not hard because I actually think that it is, but it's just soul sucking. So I frequently try to
00:13:57 ◼ ► convince myself when a video doesn't perform to expectations or when we have a couple of months
00:14:03 ◼ ► that are slow, where I'm feeling down creatively that, Hey, you know what? You can look back and
00:14:09 ◼ ► still be proud of this this information and this content it's useful. There were people that learn
00:14:14 ◼ ► things. And I try to convince myself that if I was purely motivated by money and viewership,
00:14:20 ◼ ► that I would be a lot more successful on YouTube than I am. Yeah, but it's just not something that
00:14:27 ◼ ► I have any interest in making. So yeah, one thing you guys get, and I know from talking with Rene
00:14:33 ◼ ► Richie, who's now he's at YouTube, but I'm familiar enough with how it works, but you guys get explicit
00:14:42 ◼ ► details on which videos perform. I mean, absolutely. And that's one of those areas where
00:14:59 ◼ ► I could find out if a certain article gets shared more, but I don't look at that. It's like, I just
00:15:09 ◼ ► look every once or twice a month, I'll look at the overall number of hits coming to the website,
00:15:16 ◼ ► but it's like I've turned off Google Analytics a couple of years ago and I don't really get fine
00:15:20 ◼ ► grain details. And even when I did, I didn't really look at them and it never really showed
00:15:25 ◼ ► anything. I'm lucky that Daring Fireball's homepage is a destination. And that's the one thing I look
00:15:35 ◼ ► at is do people still go to my homepage? Because that's sort of in my mind how people read the
00:15:42 ◼ ► site. You guys though, you get like, oh, I thought this video was, this is like one of my favorite
00:15:50 ◼ ► videos I made this year. And it's like half the traffic of my average. And not only that,
00:16:02 ◼ ► people decided to stop watching the demographics, where people are located, their age, their
00:16:08 ◼ ► interests, other videos that they've been interested in. I mean, the amount of granularity
00:16:13 ◼ ► is pretty insane. It's actually overwhelming. And there are, I think there's three stages.
00:16:19 ◼ ► There's people that are on YouTube purely to attain viewership and create wealth that totally
00:16:26 ◼ ► design their videos to perform. You have the middle section, which is people that are probably
00:16:32 ◼ ► smarter than I am that go, okay, we liked bits and pieces of this video at four minutes and 20
00:16:39 ◼ ► seconds. There was a drop. Let's analyze why this was, oh, we decided to do a little bit of a
00:16:44 ◼ ► montage and there was 15 minutes of silence. People don't like that. So let's, let's cut that out for
00:16:48 ◼ ► the, I don't really look at analytics at all. I will. And what I don't want to imply is that I
00:16:56 ◼ ► don't. Strategically create an and release content because I absolutely do because unfortunately I
00:17:03 ◼ ► can't as much as I would like to release a video willy nilly about one of my weird, unique interests
00:17:11 ◼ ► because it's just not going to perform on YouTube. So there's a lot of stuff that I just,
00:17:25 ◼ ► But I don't get so into the nitty gritty that I let my videos be dictated by past analytical
00:17:32 ◼ ► performance because I think once you start to do that, you lose the artistry and you lose the fun
00:17:38 ◼ ► and you lose the love of, of just making interesting stuff. And it becomes more of a game
00:17:42 ◼ ► of, of how do I beat the system? And, and there's a lot of people that like that, but I, I don't,
00:17:47 ◼ ► I think it's terrible. I, and I, I don't think it's sustainable. I don't either. I think the
00:17:53 ◼ ► people who play it that way tend to come and go and it's, it's always fresh faces and it just isn't
00:18:00 ◼ ► sustainable. And some people will hit it big. I mean, they'll, they'll come in and they'll,
00:18:06 ◼ ► they'll go like crazy for four or five years. They make millions of dollars in cash out.
00:18:22 ◼ ► But that's now we've come full circle though. And now you're speaking my language, right? Where
00:18:27 ◼ ► it's like, I just got done doing taxes for the year and I've had the same account since I started
00:18:33 ◼ ► and was making no money from the website. And I had to tell him, Hey, I'm starting this thing
00:18:37 ◼ ► on the side. I guess hoping it'll become a business and here we are. And I've sustained
00:18:43 ◼ ► my family with it, but basically once it got to, Hey, this is a nice income for the family.
00:18:49 ◼ ► I was like, okay, I'm done with that part of it now. Just concentrate on the work and good enough.
00:18:55 ◼ ► All right, let me take a break here and thank our first sponsor. They are back and they are
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00:21:27 ◼ ► but your recent videos, it's like, bing, bing. Oh, I would love to talk about that on my podcast.
00:21:37 ◼ ► Well, thank you. That's a good thing. I guess. Oh, no, definitely. Really is. One of your recent
00:21:43 ◼ ► videos was sort of a deep dive. Let's just start with this because WWDC is coming up in what,
00:21:56 ◼ ► rumored Apple headset. Right. Can you summarize? This is a tough ask, but can you summarize your
00:22:04 ◼ ► video about the headset before, before we continue talking about it? Yeah, we mostly just talked
00:22:10 ◼ ► about the rumored specifications. There's been so many rumors from so many people over years,
00:22:16 ◼ ► this thing has been rumored. Right. And so we tried to take everything that was out there and
00:22:20 ◼ ► distill it into something that was intelligible, trackable. And then also I tried to explain what
00:22:28 ◼ ► some of those rumors may suggest or may mean, because there are several features of this
00:22:34 ◼ ► headset that if Apple can pull them off, would not just be a first for the industry, but, but
00:22:48 ◼ ► So one of the biggest kind of headlining features that they're expected to provide the,
00:22:53 ◼ ► one of the major holdups with ushering AR and VR into, I should say beyond gaming and very specific
00:23:16 ◼ ► pixels on a flat plane. Once you put lenses in that distort the shape of those, those displays,
00:23:43 ◼ ► you can no longer distinguish greater pixel density is about, I should look my numbers up
00:23:48 ◼ ► before I say them. I believe it was about 160 pixels per degree. Current VR headsets right now
00:23:54 ◼ ► are about a quarter of that. So we're still very much in the, in the phase of displays are getting
00:24:01 ◼ ► more dense. They're getting more impressive, but you still clearly can tell that it's not real life.
00:24:07 ◼ ► Right. I mean, you're, and if you focus on pixels, you can see them. The, the rumored Apple headset
00:24:14 ◼ ► is alleged to have 4,000 pixels in each direction per eye. So there are two square displays,
00:24:21 ◼ ► 4,000 by 4,000 per eye, which would give you an effective if you're to kind of translate in that
00:24:27 ◼ ► into a 16 by nine, understandable resolution, it'd be an 8K display. Current headsets right now are a
00:24:34 ◼ ► fraction of that. There are a few really niche, really expensive headsets that can push closer
00:24:40 ◼ ► to what Apple's numbers are suggesting, but mass kind of consumer, VR and AR headsets are barely
00:24:46 ◼ ► pushing over 2000 per 2000 or 2000 by 2000 per eye. So quite literally double the pixel density
00:24:54 ◼ ► per eyes of four X, the number of pixels in a headset that's not running off of some insane
00:25:03 ◼ ► desktop gaming computer. It's something that's allegedly supposed to be self-contained.
00:25:07 ◼ ► And in order to make that even viable, they have to do a bunch of stuff that other manufacturers
00:25:15 ◼ ► have started doing that works really, really well. I mean, the PlayStation VR does what they
00:25:36 ◼ ► you can get away. You can still make it look realistic by rendering stuff that's further
00:25:42 ◼ ► away from where your eyeballs are focused less accurately. You save on your GPU and your compute
00:25:51 ◼ ► Foveated rendering has been a thing in VR for a few years, but it's only worked typically in
00:25:56 ◼ ► the center because that's where your eyes tend to look. But if you shift your eyeballs in your
00:26:00 ◼ ► eye sockets, moving your head, that effect starts to diminish in quality. With the PlayStation VR,
00:26:06 ◼ ► they use infrared iris trackers to look where your pupils are focused and then to redirect the
00:26:13 ◼ ► foveated rendering circle to that area. And the effect is remarkably convincing when you have that
00:26:18 ◼ ► set on, you can't even tell, but when you're, I don't know if, if, if you looked at the display
00:26:24 ◼ ► when Jonah or someone else was using the the headset, but it's wild because you can tell
00:26:29 ◼ ► exactly where they're looking in the headset on the TV, because it's the only part that looks sharp
00:26:35 ◼ ► and everything else looks awful, but in the headset, you have no idea because you're not
00:26:39 ◼ ► focused on it. It's pretty cool. Yeah. It is. It's a fundamentally different way of approaching
00:26:47 ◼ ► displays. Right? So I'm talking to you right now in front of my studio display, which I love,
00:26:55 ◼ ► absolutely adore this, I guess now exactly. Well, no, it didn't get to me till June, but
00:27:06 ◼ ► It's from corner to corner, the same resolution and it has to be right. And I know this sounds
00:27:13 ◼ ► like, duh, of course. And your TV is the same way. Like the far upper left corner of 32 by 32 pixels
00:27:22 ◼ ► up there in the corner is exactly the same brightness, pixel density, et cetera, as the
00:27:28 ◼ ► pixels right in the dead center of the display because the display has no idea where you're
00:27:47 ◼ ► graphical computing, you could render the whole thing at full resolution and full brightness. And
00:27:52 ◼ ► that if you have the battery and have the graphics to do it, sure, why not? It wouldn't hurt to render
00:28:01 ◼ ► your peripheral vision at a higher resolution. But in the real world where this is pushing the
00:28:08 ◼ ► limits of graphic cards that you could conceivably fit in something you're supposed to put on your
00:28:14 ◼ ► head. And again, rumors, here we are spending a whole show talking about this thing that
00:28:25 ◼ ► Right. But the rumors are that it gets only about two hours of battery life with sort of
00:28:43 ◼ ► Yeah, pretty beefy. Some kind of battery pack that you would put in your pocket or put on your belt.
00:28:48 ◼ ► I don't know what we're supposed to do with it. It seems a little awkward to me, but we'll see.
00:28:51 ◼ ► But the battery's got to go somewhere. But even with an external battery, let's just say the
00:28:56 ◼ ► rumor is true. You have to wear an iPhone-sized battery or two iPhone-sized batteries in your
00:29:02 ◼ ► pocket and have a cable going to the headset. And you still only get two hours of battery life
00:29:07 ◼ ► if that rumors are true. It would be a complete waste of that battery life and the graphics to
00:29:14 ◼ ► render the full field of these 4,000 by 4,000 displays at full resolution. And it turns out,
00:29:22 ◼ ► that's how our eyes work. I'm intimately familiar with it. I've had retinal detachments in both eyes.
00:29:28 ◼ ► I don't want to go into- But I've learned a lot about how our human vision works over the last
00:29:33 ◼ ► 10 years. And it's exactly how human vision works. Your peripheral vision as a human being is so much
00:29:42 ◼ ► worse than your brain has convinced you that you think it is. And because our eyes have seemingly,
00:29:51 ◼ ► again, it's an illusion. Our eyes don't have zero latency. They have latency, but our brains
00:29:58 ◼ ► have completely convinced us that they don't. And so everywhere you think you see in your
00:30:02 ◼ ► peripheral vision, as soon as you shift your gaze over there, it's all just focused on the center of
00:30:10 ◼ ► your retina, which is called, I should know, the macula. And effectively, that's what VR is doing.
00:30:16 ◼ ► Your macula is in the center of your retina is really the only thing that sees anything
00:30:30 ◼ ► I think that that's what Apple is going to do with this headset. I think it's fascinating.
00:30:36 ◼ ► Yeah. I think it's the only way they can get away with using a display that's that high resolution
00:30:41 ◼ ► and make effective use of it. It's just to render a very small portion of it at one to one, and then
00:30:46 ◼ ► everything else make it blockier and crappier because you won't really pay attention. But you can
00:30:52 ◼ ► move your eyes and look in a new direction and it'll update and re-render stuff faster or as fast
00:30:59 ◼ ► as your eyes can track anyway that you won't even really believe it's happening. So that rumor,
00:31:05 ◼ ► I think, is really interesting and really exciting. Additionally, because Apple... Again,
00:31:10 ◼ ► this is all conjecture and rumorings, but Apple's rumored to have partnered with Sony to use Sony's
00:31:16 ◼ ► OLED micro displays. And there's a bit of marketing hubbub surrounding the term micro OLED,
00:31:25 ◼ ► because there's micro OLED, which is the idea that you put the pixels on the silicon substrate
00:31:34 ◼ ► directly, which allows you to achieve a much higher pixel density and a much smaller scale.
00:31:50 ◼ ► And Sony's OLED micro displays are micro OLED, but they call them micro displays because they're
00:31:58 ◼ ► physically really, really small. I mean, their largest micro display they sell right now,
00:32:15 ◼ ► And because they're OLED, they can make them pretty bright. They can make their pixel density
00:32:20 ◼ ► really high. Their refresh rate is incredibly impressive. And the only thing at Kossia is an
00:32:26 ◼ ► arm and a leg. And so there are rumors that Apple is working with Sony to create an OLED
00:32:33 ◼ ► micro display for this headset, but it would be a technical triumph because all that Sony has
00:32:40 ◼ ► been able to produce so far is about a one inch by one inch 1080p display. So if Apple is intending
00:32:47 ◼ ► to go 4K per eye, that's quite literally four times the number of pixels in a display that
00:32:56 ◼ ► And so, yeah, it'll be unbelievable. That's why these rumors that they almost sound too good to
00:33:05 ◼ ► be true. But I also think that one of the reasons that Apple has held off for years and years and
00:33:11 ◼ ► years of allegedly having been developing this for almost a decade, that they needed to wait until it
00:33:19 ◼ ► was convincingly ready to rumble. And that may be that point in time, but I still think that it
00:33:25 ◼ ► may be too early. I don't know. Well, that leads into my next question about the displays. And I
00:33:30 ◼ ► wonder, so in hindsight, it's funny to me what we're looking at 2007 to 2023. So this will be
00:33:42 ◼ ► the 16th year of iPhones, that there were only three of them before the retina display, right?
00:33:49 ◼ ► There was just the iPhone, the iPhone 3G, and then the 3GS, and then it went retina with the iPhone 4.
00:33:56 ◼ ► And what I find so humorous about that is that when the iPhone came out, it was at 163 pixels
00:34:03 ◼ ► per inch. It was the highest, maybe not the highest density display in the world, but it
00:34:12 ◼ ► Right. It was a much nicer display. The Macs at the time were somewhere around like 100 to 120
00:34:21 ◼ ► pixels per inch, depending on which model or whether it's a laptop or a standalone display.
00:34:32 ◼ ► here's this thing in my pocket and it has a better display than my big ass computer. And then only
00:34:57 ◼ ► And I just remember being at the hands-on area. The iPhone 4 was the last one that debuted at a
00:35:06 ◼ ► WWDC. Also the last one where Steve Jobs was there. But it was June 2010. And I just remember very
00:35:14 ◼ ► vividly that the hands-on area for the people in the press who were there was in the hallway
00:35:19 ◼ ► outside the big keynote hall and on the upstairs of Moscone West. And everybody was doing this same
00:35:27 ◼ ► thing. Everybody had their personal iPhone 3G or 3GS, whatever they had, and looking at it side by
00:35:34 ◼ ► side with their demo units and being like, "Huh, my phone is garbage." Everybody. It's like, it's
00:35:40 ◼ ► one thing to have Steve Jobs tell you on stage that it's four times the pixels in double
00:35:54 ◼ ► And then pretty quickly they moved the Mac there. The Mac couldn't move to retina displays with the
00:36:02 ◼ ► snap of the finger like the iPhone could. And even still to this day, there are people out there,
00:36:07 ◼ ► I'm sure there are people listening to us who have non-retina external display. You can't buy
00:36:12 ◼ ► a MacBook without a retina display, but you can certainly hook up a 4K display that's technically
00:36:19 ◼ ► sub-retina. The Mac's a little different than the iPhone where the resolution is flexible.
00:36:24 ◼ ► But where I'm going though is that effectively once the iPhone went retina, we got spoiled and
00:36:30 ◼ ► everything had to be retina. And so what I'm curious about with the headset is, is there some
00:36:39 ◼ ► alternate world where they'd shipped the headset years ago and it was only 1080p and you could see
00:36:46 ◼ ► pixels and we just had to wait four years to go to retina? Or is there something about the VR
00:36:54 ◼ ► experience that demands retina display? That being able to see pixels takes you out of it
00:37:06 ◼ ► in a way that's inherent to the VR experience? Yeah, I think with early VR headsets, so
00:37:13 ◼ ► 2016 you look at like the HTC Vive, one of the reasons why it was so pixelated or perceivably so
00:37:21 ◼ ► was that it was an OLED display using a pen tile sub-pixel arrangement. And so you didn't really
00:37:27 ◼ ► have a red, blue and green for every single pixel. And the spacing that they had in between the
00:37:33 ◼ ► pixels as a result of having to use Fresnel lenses and basically magnify into these displays was
00:37:39 ◼ ► something that they called the screen door effect. And it's quite a literal term where if you're
00:37:44 ◼ ► looking through a screen door that's supposed to stop bugs and mosquitoes from coming in your own,
00:37:49 ◼ ► you can still see out and through it, but there's kind of this like gray moiré kind of,
00:37:55 ◼ ► it's like you're looking through a screen door and that translated into VR. And very quickly,
00:38:02 ◼ ► in order to pursue higher refresh rates, which are important to decrease nausea, because when you
00:38:09 ◼ ► move your head, you want the display to refresh at the rate that your eyeballs would expect
00:38:14 ◼ ► the real world to, and to get rid of that screen door effect, most VR headsets move over to LCD.
00:38:20 ◼ ► And so the Valve Index and a couple of still the highest end headsets on the market are high
00:38:26 ◼ ► refresh LCD, but LCD comes with its own downsides, right? You can't get true blacks out of LCD. And
00:38:36 ◼ ► it's not very convincing to have your blacks be colored gray, because you do still have the
00:38:43 ◼ ► ability to look beyond the field of view of the headset. So if you really move your eyeballs,
00:38:49 ◼ ► you can see past the screen and it's just black because that's the end of the display. And so
00:38:53 ◼ ► when you have the true black of a non-display area, and then a very, very, very bright gray
00:38:59 ◼ ► that's trying to simulate black because of an LCD, it's just not a very convincing effect, but
00:39:03 ◼ ► it's better than having to deal with wanting to hurl because the display is too slow or making
00:39:10 ◼ ► it look like you're looking through a screen door. Well, I'll just say on that point that I think
00:39:15 ◼ ► that explains why Apple Watch has always been OLED. I don't think there was any chance possible that
00:39:21 ◼ ► they were ever going to launch Apple Watch with an LCD display, because especially in the first
00:39:27 ◼ ► couple generations, the way that the black bezel around the display is indistinguishable from the
00:39:34 ◼ ► black of most of the Apple Watch faces completely hides where the display is. And especially on the
00:39:42 ◼ ► like series one, two, or zero, one, two, and three, the screen was just a perfect rectangle
00:39:48 ◼ ► with a sharp corner and you never saw it though. It was completely, it created the illusion that
00:39:56 ◼ ► there was no display. And I kind of feel like you need that same effect with the goggles.
00:40:01 ◼ ► Yeah, I think so too. It's not completely necessary, but it certainly helps with immersion.
00:40:08 ◼ ► Where people I think get fixated, and this is where I'm really interested to see where Apple
00:40:12 ◼ ► goes with this, is convincing a greater number of your senses to a greater effect that it's real
00:40:20 ◼ ► life. The best VR experience I've ever had, and I've yet to go back and replicate it by any other
00:40:28 ◼ ► newer headset, was clear back in 2018. There was this company called The Void. They've since gone
00:40:34 ◼ ► under. But what they did, they were trying to work with amusement parks. They were in downtown
00:40:40 ◼ ► Disney for a while. And I know about them because they're a company that was based not too far from
00:40:44 ◼ ► where I'm at. And they would trick a greater quantity of your senses because they knew that
00:40:50 ◼ ► putting a pair of goggles on wasn't convincing enough. So they would allow you to track your body
00:40:56 ◼ ► in a warehouse. So rather than stand in this little five by five square, you would be in an enormous
00:41:04 ◼ ► space and it would be able to see wherever you were going and it would translate that into the
00:41:08 ◼ ► game that they had developed. And beyond that, they had trackable objects. So this was all in
00:41:14 ◼ ► a black room, but one of the most kind of impressive, convincing things about this was that
00:41:22 ◼ ► you put the goggles on and you were in this rain forest approaching the entrance to a cave. And as
00:41:28 ◼ ► you walk towards the cave, you saw a torch that was on the wall. And there was a little prompt
00:41:32 ◼ ► that said, "Grab the torch." I had gloves on and the gloves were tracked in VR. And as I went to
00:41:38 ◼ ► grab the torch, it was just a little piece of wood shaped into the shape of a cone. But as I grabbed
00:41:44 ◼ ► it, I saw my hand grab it in virtual reality. And not only was I able to feel the torch, but they
00:41:50 ◼ ► had a little bit of an infrared heater at the top of that piece of wood. And so there was heat
00:41:56 ◼ ► coming off of the torch. And there were a bunch of other tricks they did too, where you'd approach a
00:42:01 ◼ ► river and they had a fan that was turned on that was blowing steam at you or mist. And so it was
00:42:06 ◼ ► kind of this effect of, "Oh, I'm close to the water. There's water splashing on my face."
00:42:10 ◼ ► And it did a really good job at convincing you that this was real, even though it was a lot of
00:42:17 ◼ ► cheap gimmicks to convince you that you were in the real world because the headset was kind of
00:42:21 ◼ ► crappy. And so even if you have something that doesn't quite convincingly get you there, there
00:42:27 ◼ ► are a lot of other things that they can do to make it seem more real. The Valve Index a few years ago
00:42:38 ◼ ► they're capacitive buttons, right? So you can rest your finger on the button without pushing it.
00:42:47 ◼ ► convincingly distract you from the fact that your vision isn't quite what you get in the real world.
00:42:57 ◼ ► contextual and kind of environmental stuff that they can do, sound is another big one. If they can
00:43:03 ◼ ► do a bunch of these small things to distract you from the idea that, yeah, even at 4k, this still
00:43:10 ◼ ► isn't quite as good as human vision, but it doesn't matter. And I think that they will be
00:43:14 ◼ ► able to pull it off if they can do even a remotely decent job. Because with most headsets nowadays,
00:43:20 ◼ ► I think that it's kind of like you mentioned, where you your eyes fool your brain into thinking
00:43:26 ◼ ► they're better than they are. It's the same thing with the headset. Once you've put a headset on for
00:43:31 ◼ ► 15-20 minutes, you put it on at first, you're like, whoa, this is not really what real life
00:43:35 ◼ ► looks like. But after 20 minutes, your brain just remaps what your vision is inside of the goggles.
00:43:45 ◼ ► I don't have tons of experience with VR, as I said, but one of the experiences I did have was
00:43:52 ◼ ► a couple years ago, it was 95% sure when the iMac Pro came out. And they wanted to, it was at Apple's
00:44:04 ◼ ► semi-secretive New York mansion that they don't want people posting pictures of, etc. But
00:44:19 ◼ ► rooms with different stations showing how great the iMac Pro is. And the developer one was really
00:44:28 ◼ ► interesting just because it was like compiling an iPhone app, a big iPhone app with lots of
00:44:42 ◼ ► And in the windows, they were compiling like a C++ app at the same time while exporting a 4K video.
00:44:50 ◼ ► And the demo for the press was come behind here and put your hand on it and feel how cool it is.
00:44:57 ◼ ► And it's not making noise. The iMac Pro, it was Intel, but it presaged where Apple wanted to go
00:45:05 ◼ ► with their own Silicon. We'll get to that later in the show. But they had a VR room and it was the
00:45:10 ◼ ► HTC Vive, but hooked up to, I think to the iMac Pros. And they had a couple of demos they let us
00:45:17 ◼ ► play. And like you said, I don't know, at least 20 minutes. When I took them off, I was so
00:45:22 ◼ ► disoriented. And it was so, but there were the, one of the weird parts of it was with the Vive.
00:45:29 ◼ ► And there was like sort of a guitar hero game that I was playing where it was like music and
00:45:35 ◼ ► things are coming at me and I'm like slashing at these things. Yeah. I think that might've
00:45:40 ◼ ► been it. But whatever it was, I didn't have legs. And it sounds funny. Like we're saying this,
00:45:46 ◼ ► and if anybody's out there and they've never really used a VR headset, it sounds funny to
00:45:50 ◼ ► complain about the lack of legs, but it's really weird. It's because you put it on and you're like,
00:45:59 ◼ ► okay, instantly you're like, this is weird. I'm looking in a goggle and blah, blah, blah. And
00:46:05 ◼ ► if it works within minutes, you're, you are immersed to some degree or another. And once
00:46:11 ◼ ► you're immersed, I don't have legs. It's so weird. And you do, but this is where I'm so interested
00:46:20 ◼ ► to see what, as I've written about at length, what the hell does Apple think we're going to do with
00:46:24 ◼ ► the headset? Right? Because there's weird things like everybody always goes to the Star Trek
00:46:29 ◼ ► Holodeck, which was a great gimmick for the show. A fantastic gimmick, right? Where, Oh my God,
00:46:36 ◼ ► we've got to do 20 episodes of Star Trek a year. Where are we going to come up with these stories?
00:46:48 ◼ ► but you could walk around the holiday. You actually, the gimmick, I mean, they always sort of
00:46:57 ◼ ► ignored the fact that eventually they'd walk into the walls, right? Cause it was like gymnasium size,
00:47:02 ◼ ► but there are walls, but it's weird. You put on VR headset and you might want to play a game or
00:47:10 ◼ ► something where you move, but you can't actually walk right. Cause you'd be like walking into your
00:47:16 ◼ ► desk or walking, walking into people or, or something. It's it's very, I guess for games,
00:47:27 ◼ ► it makes a lot more sense if it's a vehicle game where you're the pilot of a ship or driving a car,
00:47:36 ◼ ► Yeah. Although there are, there are newer, I mean, newer headsets can, can track a lot really well.
00:47:45 ◼ ► What was always weird about those early headsets is, is you actually were able to move around
00:47:50 ◼ ► in a space and you could play a game. You lay down on the ground and your, your vision is going to go
00:47:56 ◼ ► down to the floor in the game, but you look down and all you see is some weird floating hands that
00:48:01 ◼ ► are disembodied from the rest of your, and you're like, hold on. But more recent headsets,
00:48:06 ◼ ► particularly with the meta quest pro. Not only did they have hand tracking already that Apple
00:48:12 ◼ ► is alleged to be implementing and they actually even have the same engagement mechanism.
00:48:17 ◼ ► Gurman said that the, how Apple intends to have you interact with the UI is to take your thumb
00:48:23 ◼ ► and your index finger and pinch together. And when you pinch that basically acts as a click,
00:48:32 ◼ ► And it works actually pretty well. And you can track your fingers remarkably well in this,
00:48:38 ◼ ► in the Facebook headsets. And they even have full body tracking now. So you can see your arms and
00:48:43 ◼ ► you can see your legs in VR and it doesn't have the same. It can't perfectly emulate the mobility
00:48:50 ◼ ► of your legs, but it does a convincing enough job that you're like, yeah, I'm there. And so that's
00:48:56 ◼ ► where I'm really interested to see what Apple has planned for this headset, because the hardware is
00:49:07 ◼ ► they're already there. They could release the same headset that Facebook has out. They could release
00:49:11 ◼ ► the same headset that valve has out and it would be sufficiently good to fool the senses where that
00:49:17 ◼ ► convincing ends is once you enter the, and you said it yourself, what am I supposed to do with
00:49:24 ◼ ► this? Because if you have a limited games catalog, or there's very few applications for where this
00:49:30 ◼ ► might work, or it's just a display for your Mac, but instead of looking at the display on your Mac,
00:49:35 ◼ ► now you're looking at a bigger display on your goggles. I don't know if that's a convincing
00:49:40 ◼ ► enough reason to want to get and utilize the headset. And I think that developers, as always
00:49:46 ◼ ► has been the case in Apple's kind of product lineup will come up with incredible ideas and
00:49:52 ◼ ► applications for this headset. But I also think that Apple has to sell people from day one,
00:49:58 ◼ ► because we've known this has been coming for years. And so they can't say, Hey, this is really
00:50:02 ◼ ► powerful. We don't really know what to do with it yet, but here you figure it out. They've got to
00:50:07 ◼ ► have something that, that has to blow the mind. And based on again, Gurman's latest rumors from
00:50:14 ◼ ► power on that, they have dozens, he said of experiences because they know that they can't
00:50:21 ◼ ► release it with the shallow to empty catalog. There's gotta be a reason to own one from day one.
00:50:26 ◼ ► Yeah. I kind of feel like that's the long story short of why did this product take so long to
00:50:34 ◼ ► come out. Right. It's been rumored longer than anything. Maybe if we make an exception for the
00:50:41 ◼ ► car, but the car, but the car project by all accounts has never really coalesced around a,
00:50:55 ◼ ► but there's a basic idea that you're going to, it's going to be expensive. You put it on it's,
00:51:00 ◼ ► it's not glasses. It's full on immersive VR. And then if you do see through to the real world for
00:51:07 ◼ ► an AR experience, it'll be cameras shooting out, projecting the real world into the goggles in
00:51:15 ◼ ► front of you. I think the biggest reason it's taken so long is building up the library of
00:51:22 ◼ ► experiences. Right. And I hope, yeah, I hope to, I hope I really not. Oh yeah. But I, I do think
00:51:31 ◼ ► it is sort of a, if you're looking for, and I guess maybe that that's the trap I've fallen into
00:51:40 ◼ ► is with my writing speculating, what would the use case I'm looking for like the heroic, this is the
00:51:47 ◼ ► one thing you're going to want to spend all this money to get this thing for. And maybe that's the
00:51:52 ◼ ► wrong way of thinking about it. Right. It's like, Hey, it does a dozen interesting things. And for
00:51:58 ◼ ► you, maybe it's numbers five, seven and nine out of the 12. And for me, it's two, four, and six.
00:52:05 ◼ ► And these are the things I really want to do. And I guess that's true of like most Apple products,
00:52:12 ◼ ► right? Everybody who uses a Mac does different things on it. Right. You Quinn Nelson are keenly
00:52:18 ◼ ► interested in the performance of exporting 4k or I don't know, do you shoot 8k? I mean, but high res,
00:52:26 ◼ ► but high res video. Right. And there's lots and lots of millions of Mac users out there who never
00:52:33 ◼ ► export a video in their life. Right. They might shoot video on their phone and all they do is
00:52:37 ◼ ► sync it to their photo. So I guess that's the sort of thing, but I really, I still don't know.
00:52:50 ◼ ► rare exceptions where we, I guess it's not a rare exception because it's often that we know what the
00:52:56 ◼ ► hardware is going to be before we really know what the software is going to be because supply chain
00:53:00 ◼ ► links are, are so much harder to kind of buckle down than, than internal to Apple. But it's really
00:53:06 ◼ ► the first time that we don't really know anything about the, the way that it will be navigated from
00:53:13 ◼ ► a user experience standpoint, how the UI is going to work, what API's will be available. And so
00:53:26 ◼ ► I really hope they hit the mark. But and this is where maybe the Apple apologist in me will
00:53:33 ◼ ► come out. There's been the, the wave has passed for money in VR. So if Apple was focused on
00:53:45 ◼ ► they would have released a headset three, four years ago when the second generation of,
00:53:51 ◼ ► of kind of PC VR headsets were coming out, but they didn't. And right now is not the time to
00:53:58 ◼ ► release a VR headset. VR is dying pretty much everywhere. But the fact that Apple seems to be
00:54:06 ◼ ► ready to do it doesn't make me think that it's a sunk cost fallacy because look at the car.
00:54:11 ◼ ► They have no problem deferring stuff for years if it's not ready. So I think it is, but I just
00:54:17 ◼ ► don't know what ready is because we have no context for what it's supposed to be because
00:54:22 ◼ ► no one's done a good job with it yet. And that makes it really, really exciting to me anyway.
00:54:28 ◼ ► Right. There's a fundamental and like you said, there's it sounds like Apple fandom to say,
00:54:35 ◼ ► I just have faith that the people who have that decision-making authority, Jaws and Federighi and
00:54:44 ◼ ► even up to Tim Cook that there's, is this good enough? And if it's not, then don't release it.
00:54:53 ◼ ► Right. And their Apple's not a struggling company. Right. So they're not under desperate pressure
00:54:59 ◼ ► for that. But on the other hand, maybe, right. That's sort of the excitement is what if,
00:55:06 ◼ ► what if, what if they are too insular and they've convinced themselves that this is a thing
00:55:14 ◼ ► and they release it and it's not a thing. Right. Yeah. And by all accounts, it's not like the iPod
00:55:22 ◼ ► or the watch, which was like, Hey, for the first generation, take a flyer and buy this thing.
00:55:28 ◼ ► It's 400 bucks. Supposedly it's $3,000. Even if that's off by a factor of two. Right. And it's a
00:55:36 ◼ ► $1,500 headset, which would be impressive, an impressive win versus the rumors. But still,
00:55:43 ◼ ► that's a lot of money. A $1,500 headset is a ton of money. It is. And there's no way it's going to
00:55:53 ◼ ► there's projections that even at the $3,000 expected sales price, it's going to be a loss
00:55:59 ◼ ► leader. They're not going to make it. Oh, well, they break. They're not even breaking even.
00:56:03 ◼ ► Right. Every headset loses money. So that really even further convinces me that Apple thinks it's
00:56:14 ◼ ► Right. At $3,000, it's not going to become the next iPhone, but if it can lay the foundation
00:56:20 ◼ ► for what will be in three or five or 10 years, then that's sweet. They've got to hit it out of
00:56:27 ◼ ► the park from day one. Otherwise everyone's going to go, yeah, well, I don't want a cheaper,
00:56:51 ◼ ► Yeah. Let's see here. Well, it's something like $7,000. So imagine if Apple came out with a new
00:56:56 ◼ ► computer today and it was $7,000. That's the entry model. That's it. There's no way cheaper. People
00:57:03 ◼ ► would say, oh my God, you're out of your mind. No one's going to buy a $7,000 computer. But that's
00:57:08 ◼ ► what the Macintosh costs in 1984. And it took a long time for computers to be of interest to the
00:57:17 ◼ ► general population. And I'm not saying that this headset is going to take 10 years before it hits
00:57:32 ◼ ► Yeah. Super exciting. All right. Let me take a break here and thank our next sponsor. It's
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01:00:10 ◼ ► John Green Yeah, you don't strike me as a... You've got natural energy. Me, I need it. I need
01:00:14 ◼ ► the caffeinated boost. Another of your recent episodes that I really liked, and it felt...
01:00:22 ◼ ► It was a little sad. You tied it in with Gordon Moore's passing. It was a little serendipitous.
01:00:27 ◼ ► I get the feeling you were working on a video about Apple Silicon, and it just so happens that
01:00:33 ◼ ► Gordon Moore happened to die. It's not... He lived a wonderful life, died a billionaire,
01:00:40 ◼ ► at age 91 in Hawaii, surrounded by his family. We've all got to die at some point. That seems
01:00:48 ◼ ► Pete Laskowski Yeah. No, that video... Not only did we start writing that video when Gordon
01:00:53 ◼ ► Moore was still alive, but that was a video that had been scrapped and then salvaged and then
01:00:58 ◼ ► scrapped again. I probably started that script eight months ago and just never got it in a spot
01:01:04 ◼ ► where I was happy with it. And so I'd come back to it and then try to rework it and finally got
01:01:15 ◼ ► going back to when I first started talking to you about the art of being a professional video maker
01:01:20 ◼ ► on YouTube is... It's probably too for writing too. I aim to write articles that go down easy.
01:01:33 ◼ ► you're at the end. You can't help yourself. And videos are sort of like that too, right?
01:01:40 ◼ ► Right? And it's counterintuitive. The better your video is, the less likely someone who enjoys it
01:01:49 ◼ ► is to say, "Wow, you must have spent a ton of time on that." Because instead it feels like, "Oh,
01:02:07 ◼ ► ongoing themes of the current moment, this decade, is Apple's shift to their own silicon for the Mac.
01:02:25 ◼ ► Verge so much and Monica Chin is like their PC laptop reviewer. And I don't want to single her
01:02:32 ◼ ► out too often. But I do feel that for anybody who's trying to maintain cross-platform, not objectivity
01:02:44 ◼ ► per se, but objectivity, but also just the overall keep your feet or keep some of your fingers on all
01:02:53 ◼ ► sides of the industry and knowing the state of the art of PC hardware and Mac hardware, I feel like
01:03:00 ◼ ► it's broken people's brains how far ahead Apple Silicon is over the state of the art in the Intel
01:03:11 ◼ ► Yeah. And it's interesting because they're ahead in areas where I think people often don't realize
01:03:30 ◼ ► If you have the money, you can get a much faster Intel chip for not even just a desktop,
01:03:36 ◼ ► but for a laptop. The difference is that they draw incredible amounts of power, they create
01:03:43 ◼ ► incredible amounts of heat. And there are areas where the Apple Silicon chips, for reasons that
01:03:50 ◼ ► we can get into just frankly, outperform chips that are designed for general purpose compute.
01:04:00 ◼ ► no single company ever had a fork like this, where the performance metrics of the silicon just
01:04:09 ◼ ► are so totally different. It really is like two universes at this point. Because in the Intel
01:04:15 ◼ ► world, and I'm saying Intel just to mean x86, because x86 seems like more of a mouthful, but
01:04:22 ◼ ► it's like you said, you can buy a faster computer, but it has the trade offs that we spent 50 years
01:04:31 ◼ ► or longer, you know, whenever you want to go back to the beginning of the semiconductor industry
01:04:35 ◼ ► with Gordon Moore in the 1960s. Faster means more power, more power means if it's battery operated,
01:04:43 ◼ ► shorter battery life, and it means more heat, right? You go and if you want less heat and
01:04:50 ◼ ► longer battery life, then you get a slower computer. And these trade offs were very well
01:04:56 ◼ ► understood. And Apple Silicon really is the sort of you can have your cake and eat it too. And you
01:05:03 ◼ ► get very good performance, excellent performance. And they run incredibly cool and they last
01:05:11 ◼ ► laughably long. Like it's ridiculous how long my MacBook Pro lasts on battery. It makes me laugh.
01:05:20 ◼ ► I still vividly remember how cool it was to be able to watch video on a laptop while flying on
01:05:31 ◼ ► an airplane and not being at the liberty of the seat back, which may or may not even have an
01:05:35 ◼ ► entertainment system. It's like, I can watch my own movies. But like a flight from Philadelphia
01:05:40 ◼ ► to California used to, if you got like a half an hour before they let you take your laptop out,
01:05:48 ◼ ► and then you start watching and then you get close to landing and they're like, put everything under
01:05:51 ◼ ► the seat or whatever, the battery would be dead if you were watching movies on a cross country
01:05:57 ◼ ► flight. Now it's like your battery's fine. You could get off the plane and sit down and do work.
01:06:01 ◼ ► For people who aren't, and I know it's, again, it's decades long that there are some people who
01:06:10 ◼ ► just don't like Apple products. And for good reasons, perhaps that they just don't like the
01:06:15 ◼ ► way Mac OS works. They prefer Windows or a big reason for people who are enthusiasts is gaming.
01:06:30 ◼ ► Windows PCs when we talk about PC gaming. But it just feels like there's a sort of denial
01:06:42 ◼ ► about how far behind the Intel state of the art is silicon wise on these price per performance
01:06:54 ◼ ► because it's so perfectly Apple. I mean, for years, take the 2016 MacBook Pro, there were years
01:07:04 ◼ ► where you and I, and pretty much every other person was saying, these computers are too hot.
01:07:10 ◼ ► They don't have sufficient cooling. It's so bad and they get so hot that it starts to destroy the
01:07:15 ◼ ► keyboard that's not very good. And there's all these problems associated with trying to get rid
01:07:21 ◼ ► of this heat. It's affecting the battery life, please, Apple just make thicker laptops. It's
01:07:26 ◼ ► not that big of a concession. It'll just make the experience better. Meanwhile, they were rapidly
01:07:32 ◼ ► working as fast as they could to say, No, no, no, that's not what you want. You just need a
01:07:38 ◼ ► processor that draws one fifth the amount of power of what your current one does. And then it can be
01:07:43 ◼ ► thin, and then it can be light. And you can still have all the battery and all the thermal headroom
01:07:47 ◼ ► and everything that you could ever want. And that's why they've been so impressive. And then
01:07:53 ◼ ► you consider the fact that Apple is, as we approach quite literally processes that are at an atomic
01:08:04 ◼ ► level, we can't really make chips that much more dense. This and that's why I talked about Gordon
01:08:10 ◼ ► Moore, this idea that every two years, the transistors doubled, that's not happening anymore,
01:08:14 ◼ ► because we're at three nanometers and rapidly shooting, you can't get smaller than an atom.
01:08:18 ◼ ► Unless we get to the point where we're not even relying on silicon. And there's some new black
01:08:26 ◼ ► Swan of a technology that comes out and says, yeah, everything you think you know about chip
01:08:34 ◼ ► in the next few years, and it still might be 10 or 15 or 20 years, but in the next couple decades,
01:08:40 ◼ ► we're stuck. And so it has to get to the point where the software defines what the hardware is
01:08:49 ◼ ► going to be not the other way around, which is how it's been for decades where we can just say,
01:08:53 ◼ ► yeah, whatever the software does, we can run it on this hardware, we can throw power at it,
01:08:58 ◼ ► and we can throw our spy. And these general purpose cores are going to do that work. Now,
01:09:03 ◼ ► there was a time when that started to deviate, you look at GPUs that are now used for compute
01:09:09 ◼ ► purposes. And, and, but there's becoming more and more sub processes, hardware blocks and
01:09:17 ◼ ► co processors that are making their way into the server industry. You've got AI accelerators,
01:09:29 ◼ ► and it does it really, really, really well. Apple's done that with Apple silicon, they've
01:09:34 ◼ ► got the neural engine, they've got an AI accelerator, they've got a co processor to handle
01:09:41 ◼ ► image rasterization and sharpening. They've got, I'm blanking on all the stuff that they've got
01:09:46 ◼ ► hardware accelerators for video, they've got that pro res media engine, they've got an h.264 engine.
01:09:52 ◼ ► And so that's not going to cover everyone's use cases. But we showed in a video we did last year,
01:09:59 ◼ ► that even though in benchmarks, and entry level, a 1000 ish dollar PC will still outperform a $1,000
01:10:07 ◼ ► M one Mac Mini. Once you start doing something like exporting a video, the Mac Mini will crush
01:10:14 ◼ ► it even though from a benchmark standpoint, it should perform worse. And it's because that
01:10:20 ◼ ► hardware from within Apple silicon is utilizing specialized API APIs to run on specific hardware
01:10:29 ◼ ► in a particular way that's designed for a specific task. And I think that's where stuff is going to
01:10:49 ◼ ► we don't care about power consumption, watts, that doesn't matter how many watts we're drawing
01:10:59 ◼ ► We haven't gotten that. And it seems that they're kind of struggling at being able to pull that off.
01:11:11 ◼ ► because it's in this run up to WWDC. I mean, clearly, we all expect the headset. And if the
01:11:17 ◼ ► headset does not come, if WWDC's keynote comes and goes, and there's no mention of the headset,
01:11:22 ◼ ► all any of us are going to be talking about at 12 noon Pacific, as Tim Cook says, thank you and have
01:11:29 ◼ ► a great week at WWDC. All we're going to be talking about is where the hell was the headset? Where's
01:11:34 ◼ ► the headset? Right. So let's just assume the headset is coming, right. And it's obviously
01:11:39 ◼ ► going to be a flagship announcement, a huge chunk of the keynote, software story, presumably we'll
01:11:46 ◼ ► see Mike Rockwell, their head of VR, he was on my show, I think 2018, which was a long time ago.
01:11:53 ◼ ► Clearly all of the AR stuff they've been working on with iOS over the years is moving. It's all
01:11:59 ◼ ► setting the stage for a device that's AR first. It's not supposed to be what you do on a little
01:12:05 ◼ ► five inch phone. But I do think we're so head, again, we just spend an hour talking about the
01:12:09 ◼ ► headset here on the show. But I think the Mac Pro is coming too, right? Because if not, again,
01:12:16 ◼ ► if the WWDC in six weeks comes and goes, and there's no Mac Pro, where the hell is the Mac Pro?
01:12:22 ◼ ► Right. I mean, yeah. Well, it's already a year behind, right? Right. I mean, I saw an article
01:12:31 ◼ ► the other day, I think it was Mac Rumors that said it's been 530 days since John Turness said
01:12:37 ◼ ► the Mac Pro's for another day. Yeah. I can't believe it's that long. I guess so though.
01:12:42 ◼ ► Because it was, well, yeah, it was late 2021. Right. But he said it as they debuted the Mac
01:12:56 ◼ ► Gurman's reporting is, and I'm not sure on this front, whether Gurman is sourced or he's sort of
01:13:06 ◼ ► put on his pundit hat, right? And I feel like that's where Gurman often falls short is where
01:13:12 ◼ ► he's drawing conclusions as opposed to just reporting what is incredibly well-placed sources,
01:13:20 ◼ ► right? I mean, unprecedented sources. But I'm curious your thoughts on, so the Gurman line
01:13:28 ◼ ► is something to the effect that there was a, I don't know what adjective they would have put
01:13:37 ◼ ► the way that the M1 Ultra is like four M1s put together. Right. There'd be one with like eight
01:13:44 ◼ ► or 16. I don't know. The Jade 4C, I think the internal name was. Yeah. And that got scrapped
01:13:52 ◼ ► or wasn't feasible, whatever, something, something happened and it's left them in a situation where
01:13:59 ◼ ► the most technically advanced Mac pro wouldn't be that much more technically capable than a M2
01:14:09 ◼ ► Mac studio. And so therefore the Mac studio might skip a generation to let the Mac pro have its
01:14:22 ◼ ► No, I was going to say my question becomes why, because what's the point of the Mac pro if it
01:14:28 ◼ ► doesn't do anything that the studio can't? Right. It doesn't make sense to me that it even exists.
01:14:32 ◼ ► Right. If you can put it into an adorable little Mac studio sized case, why not? And I know the
01:14:41 ◼ ► John Siracusa in me, anybody who's sensitive to noise, the Mac studio when pressed makes noise
01:14:49 ◼ ► that other, other, you know, cause it's pushing the limits of Apple's Silicon. So one argument
01:14:57 ◼ ► would be, well, yeah, that the fact that it does make some audible noise, right. Our standard is
01:15:02 ◼ ► no noise at all. That's where we are with Apple Silicon. Right. So yeah. So why not make it a
01:15:08 ◼ ► little bigger, but to me, that just means make the Mac studio a little bigger light. And, and
01:15:13 ◼ ► it is in, I always say Cupertino ology is it's kind of my racket. This is what I do is sort of,
01:15:23 ◼ ► but it's, it's like, and when I was a kid and the cold war was going on, they called it Kremlin
01:15:28 ◼ ► ology, right. Where there were experts in the U S state department or governments all around the
01:15:33 ◼ ► world who read Pravda. And you, every single headline was technically a lie, but you could
01:15:40 ◼ ► read between the lines and figure out the truth. Right. So Apple doesn't lie, but they give clues.
01:15:45 ◼ ► John Ternus saying that we've got one more thing to come the Mac pro, but that's a story for another
01:15:51 ◼ ► day. Why would he say that that's so on Apple? Like, unless he knew it's coming. And even though
01:16:00 ◼ ► did he know at that time it was still over a year away or did something happen in the intern?
01:16:09 ◼ ► what we do know is that fabbing and bending Silicon is extraordinarily hard, especially
01:16:16 ◼ ► at the scale that Apple is doing it. And the chip design is by design to try and reduce the
01:16:25 ◼ ► error rate that you have by making a crazy. Enormous chip, right? Cause you're going to have
01:16:31 ◼ ► failures. I mean, if you look at the, they call it Silicon binning, that's why Intel processors are
01:16:38 ◼ ► generally the same socket size and they have the same number of pins because an I five processor
01:16:45 ◼ ► was an I seven that didn't make the cut. Right. And then they just disable sectors of the CPU
01:16:49 ◼ ► that didn't meet the expectations to make it an I seven that effectively. Is what Apple has done
01:16:56 ◼ ► in the past. And it's what they're doing with the M one acts versus M one pro the M one itself is a
01:17:04 ◼ ► separate chip, but the, the max and pro those are just bin chips. And so it's possible that
01:17:08 ◼ ► the chiplet design is okay. Let's take four M one maxes or M two maxes or whatever it's going to be
01:17:14 ◼ ► at this point and glue them all together. And then we'll just make a mega chip. It's possible
01:17:19 ◼ ► that that didn't end up being as easy as they thought I was going to be, but it does seem
01:17:24 ◼ ► strange. The only way I can envision a Mac pro coming out without any additional hardware
01:17:30 ◼ ► features, it's just an M two max studio is if not only did they make it quieter, but they make it
01:17:36 ◼ ► silent. If they were able to, and the TDP would allow for it. They could make a larger tower
01:17:43 ◼ ► that is truly fanless zero noise. It doesn't make any noise because there's nothing spinning.
01:17:49 ◼ ► There's no moving parts at all. I could see that maybe being a pitch for, Oh, look at us,
01:18:01 ◼ ► we care about that, but that also doesn't really seem like a pitch for a much more expensive,
01:18:10 ◼ ► already have. So I think what's. I think the rumors have to be wrong because it just does not
01:18:18 ◼ ► make sense. What I could see happening is that Apple wanted the M one extreme or whatever they
01:18:25 ◼ ► were going to call it. The Jade four C to happen. They couldn't make it happen. And they said, okay,
01:18:29 ◼ ► we've got to operate within the limitations of the Jade to see that we've got within the,
01:18:36 ◼ ► the M one ultra, but what else can we do to make this more performant? And I think there's two
01:18:41 ◼ ► options. One is support standard off the shelf. AMD GPUs, they're already doing it on the Intel
01:18:50 ◼ ► Mac pro and they'd have to write all of the driver firmware and work with AMD to make that happen.
01:18:56 ◼ ► But in theory, they could release a computer that fixes Apple Silicon's biggest limitation. And
01:19:03 ◼ ► that's graphical performance, right? Option number two, which I can see them doing is, and this would
01:19:08 ◼ ► be wild, but maybe I don't know, is they'll never say this on stage, but they basically say something
01:19:15 ◼ ► to the effect of, Hey, so we couldn't glue these all together and put it in a single chip, but
01:19:19 ◼ ► here you can buy the ultra and then you can buy accelerator. You can put in another ultra, you
01:19:24 ◼ ► can put in another M one max, and these are specialized sockets. And yeah, these, you can
01:19:28 ◼ ► only buy them for us, but it's because it's a, it's a, it's a unique kind of device. And, and
01:19:33 ◼ ► there will be limitations that come from doing that. One of the benefits and argument for Apple
01:19:39 ◼ ► Silicon, putting everything in the same package is that everything's super close to each other.
01:19:44 ◼ ► You don't have to deal with travel distances and memory sinking issues. It's just all right there.
01:19:50 ◼ ► Maybe they can detune a couple of chips and then say, yeah, well, it's not as good as putting it
01:19:54 ◼ ► under the same package, but if you need that extra headroom, You can sock it in a few extra
01:19:59 ◼ ► M series chips into the machine to give yourself more compute or more GPU. Those are the only two
01:20:04 ◼ ► scenarios in which I can see a Mac pro existing. That's different from what we would expect a Mac
01:20:10 ◼ ► pro to be, which is a larger, hotter, faster chip than what we've already seen. Cause otherwise,
01:20:16 ◼ ► why? Right. And that's where I am. I'm exactly aligned with you where I have no little birdies
01:20:24 ◼ ► telling me anything about this. I kind of feel like experience says that because the Mac pro
01:20:42 ◼ ► by that Apple can therefore keep it secret and has in the past, right? When, when the current Mac
01:20:49 ◼ ► pro the one, the Intel one you can buy, nobody knew what it looked like before it came out.
01:20:54 ◼ ► It's and they can do that. Well, they announced it long before it released. Right. So maybe the
01:20:59 ◼ ► same scenario. Well, I think that might be true too. Right. Like, so if you know, like Gurman's
01:21:04 ◼ ► like, Hey, I don't even think they're going to talk about the Mac pro at WWDC. That might be
01:21:15 ◼ ► for the same reason that they announced it and I think like five, six months, like they said,
01:21:21 ◼ ► like later this year, which often for Apple means the very end of the year. Right. Yeah.
01:21:26 ◼ ► Get ready to do your review around December 4th. Right. But I could see that that's what I think,
01:21:37 ◼ ► something, something like that, where don't get, I think we shouldn't. And again, this isn't based
01:21:44 ◼ ► on sources, just as my own speculation, but it's the only way it makes sense is that there's a very
01:21:50 ◼ ► different Silicon story for the Mac pro compared to everything else, which is that everything isn't
01:21:57 ◼ ► on one SOC. Right. That's all the, the whole Apple Silicon story from that, when they started making
01:22:03 ◼ ► those chips for the phones 15 years ago has been, there's a system on a chip and that everything is
01:22:12 ◼ ► there. And in, before the M1 came out, integrated memory was a dirty word, right? The integrated
01:22:21 ◼ ► memory meant it's a low cost device or a low power device with poor graphical performance.
01:22:26 ◼ ► Whereas with Apple Silicon, the shared memory, the fact that the GPU and the CPU share the same
01:22:32 ◼ ► memory is a huge performance win. But it also means though you can't like, if you're, if you're
01:22:41 ◼ ► Mac pro use case is your aerospace engineer, there's a guy named Craig, I forget his last name,
01:23:02 ◼ ► That use case might be, I don't really need more CPU or GPU. What I need is as much RAM
01:23:10 ◼ ► as possible. I just want to stick. I just want to stick, right. I want to spend $25,000 on Ram to
01:23:17 ◼ ► stick in here. The, everything is on a system on a chip design doesn't scale to that because
01:23:23 ◼ ► you know where we are with the Mac studio, the highest performance Mac is the M1 ultra in the
01:23:32 ◼ ► Mac studio where you keep adding GPU and CPU and neural engines and Ram, even if you only need the
01:23:40 ◼ ► Ram or super common use case in today's world. Perhaps the common use case of high-end no budget,
01:23:57 ◼ ► Again, I don't think Apple's going to do that and support AMD graphic cards just because
01:24:03 ◼ ► culturally I think Apple is, is against it. I don't think they like AMD. I think there have
01:24:12 ◼ ► been reports for, I don't know, close to 20 years now that they just do not get along with their
01:24:16 ◼ ► engineers. The driver support's always been a weird thing. I don't think they're going to do it,
01:24:21 ◼ ► but if they did, you're like, Hey, here's scenario one. It would be a crowd pleaser, right? Like the
01:24:28 ◼ ► developers in the, on the lawn out there and the live stream of the video on keynote day,
01:24:35 ◼ ► they're going to applaud for that because there's a lot of people who'd like to see that happen,
01:24:46 ◼ ► up until now secret project to have for pros, a way to modularly upgrade what you need,
01:25:04 ◼ ► Yeah. I think and hope that's the case too, because if you look at who purchased the 2019
01:25:10 ◼ ► Mac pro who are the pros to Apple, the overwhelming majority of people that I think were purchasing
01:25:18 ◼ ► that machine were developers and the Mac studio mostly resolves that problem that most developers
01:25:26 ◼ ► had. So that, that narrows the already narrow market even further. Right. Right. One of the
01:25:30 ◼ ► other reasons that people were critical of the cost of the Mac pro when it came out, the 2019 one
01:25:36 ◼ ► was that it had eight full-size PCA slots. That's very unusual. Most PC motherboards will have
01:25:42 ◼ ► six, maybe seven, but only two or three of those are full-size Apple had eight. It was really
01:25:49 ◼ ► weird, but one of the reasons, and they never referenced this publicly, but one of the, one of
01:25:54 ◼ ► the major markets that uses a bunch of PCA add on cards is musicians and people in music because they
01:26:01 ◼ ► have accelerators and there's a bunch of cards that are utilized by specific audio engineering
01:26:08 ◼ ► software. That's designed to work with cars. Now, many of them by force and by necessity have moved
01:26:14 ◼ ► to Thunderbolt because Apple just didn't make a PCA based Mac for years, right? From 2013 to 2019,
01:26:22 ◼ ► they didn't have one. So a lot of stuff started moving over, but much of it didn't. And the other
01:26:28 ◼ ► kind of cascading effect of that is there's several DAWs audio engine, audio workstation
01:26:34 ◼ ► apps designed for audio engineering that just never, they kind of became abandoned where on
01:26:38 ◼ ► the Mac because there was nowhere to do that. And then the 2019 Mac pro came out and they
01:26:47 ◼ ► And so maybe potentially if there's nothing special about this new computer, it could be,
01:26:53 ◼ ► okay, yeah, this is for people that need PCA expansion, not graphics, but other stuff. But
01:27:04 ◼ ► are, yeah, the people that need all of that GPU compute and where this gets even more complicated
01:27:08 ◼ ► is I've talked in my research to a couple of people that are innately familiar with working
01:27:16 ◼ ► on a Mac. And there's someone that I've worked at, they're a 3D graphics engineer, and then there's
01:27:22 ◼ ► another developer downtown that does, they do game development and they're doing 3D model and asset
01:27:28 ◼ ► creation on Macs because they like a Mac. In both of those instances, one of them was still using
01:27:35 ◼ ► pre, was it Mac OS Catalina? Pre Catalina machines, because those were the last machines
01:27:47 ◼ ► old, like four or five years old. And they were using old GPUs, but they're like, yeah, we just,
01:27:52 ◼ ► Nvidia cards work better on the software we're using. And we don't want to move over to AMD
01:27:57 ◼ ► cards. The other people had moved over to AMD cards on 2019 Mac pros. And then in some instances
01:28:05 ◼ ► on eGPUs, but they said that we want to move to Apple, Apple Silicon, but the applications that
01:28:16 ◼ ► that they need to be able to do all of this stuff graphically. There's not enough compute.
01:28:20 ◼ ► And so they're like, we're in this awkward no man's land where even if a machine does come out
01:28:25 ◼ ► with this capability, it's going to take a couple of years probably to port these apps reliably over
01:28:30 ◼ ► at Apple Silicon. We can't wait that long. We're already at the last thread and we might have to
01:28:35 ◼ ► move. We might be forced to move to PCs until that can become a thing because Apple already took too
01:28:42 ◼ ► long to do what we wanted them to do. And so they're in this really tough spot. And I agree
01:28:47 ◼ ► that they can't just come out and say, here you go. It's what you've had, but bigger. There's got
01:28:53 ◼ ► to be something that we're not understanding because otherwise why do it at all? Yeah. So
01:28:59 ◼ ► my bet would be that we're going to get a new Mac studio and then they're going to say, and
01:29:05 ◼ ► something, something, John Turnus, something, something, the Mac studio has been a terrific hit.
01:29:10 ◼ ► Our developers love it. And here's, they'll have three different use cases and show these
01:29:15 ◼ ► professionals doing it. And then they'll say, but, and they'll act like it was an all new idea
01:29:20 ◼ ► to maybe have a Mac pro. Right. And they'll act like this is a genius idea. We're going to have
01:29:27 ◼ ► a Mac pro for people who the Mac studio isn't even as great as it is. They need more. Right.
01:29:33 ◼ ► And I think we're going to get it. And I think there will be some sort of expansion story. And
01:29:39 ◼ ► I know that here too for Mac Silicon or Apple Silicon hasn't had any expansion story at all,
01:29:45 ◼ ► or other than Thunderbolt, but I just, just to wrap a bow on it. I don't think that Apple's
01:29:53 ◼ ► late year Intel designs were of a different mindset than what they have now. Right. It's
01:30:16 ◼ ► I don't think Apple shifted. I mentioned the Mac pro, iMac pro, right. Which was a weird one off
01:30:22 ◼ ► computer. There was only one iMac pro. Did you have one? It seemed like it might be something
01:30:32 ◼ ► they were so proud of the thermal characteristics of the iMac pro and that philosophy clearly
01:30:39 ◼ ► carries through to Apple Silicon. Right. Late the last five years of Intel Macs were so much about
01:30:49 ◼ ► modularity. They emphasized the word modular, modular, modular. So I really do think that
01:31:09 ◼ ► that's going to be really interesting. Whether the industry supports it with their software,
01:31:16 ◼ ► like you said, with these, these pros, you know, who, who are literally sticking with years old
01:31:22 ◼ ► versions of the, the OS so that they can use Nvidia graphics because that's what the software
01:31:27 ◼ ► supports. So will the software industry embrace this? It's surely Apple's will right. Final cut
01:31:34 ◼ ► and logic are going to take advantage of these. And if I'm right, that you can expand the RAM
01:31:40 ◼ ► and the graphics without adding entire systems on a chip to the thing. It's an open question,
01:31:52 ◼ ► It will be interesting indeed. Although I, I, my prediction is that they do come out with a Mac pro
01:31:58 ◼ ► this year, but that they don't update the Mac studio. I think it'll become a every other
01:32:02 ◼ ► generation type thing. Cause the market's so small that having successive releases, I think just
01:32:08 ◼ ► probably doesn't make sense, especially from a binning standpoint. I think just the quantity
01:32:11 ◼ ► of chips that will be able to do what Apple needs them to be is not that high. And so they'll just,
01:32:17 ◼ ► yeah, yeah. And it wants a Mac studio two years and look how much faster. That's the other thing
01:32:23 ◼ ► they'll be able to do that they love to do is say it's 25% faster than the previous Mac studio.
01:32:28 ◼ ► Right. So I could, that would be my second guess would be, there is no new empty. There is no M2
01:32:35 ◼ ► series Mac studio, but they'll keep the Mac studio. I don't think the Mac studio is going
01:32:39 ◼ ► anywhere. No, that's not a one-off that's a, that's a computer here to stay, but they'll just,
01:32:44 ◼ ► but then they can breeze past it in the keynote and say, it's been a big hit. It's got these
01:32:49 ◼ ► great performance characteristics, but now here's the Mac pro and it's so much faster in every way.
01:32:53 ◼ ► Right. Knock on wood. I really, I really do think that that's what we're going to see. All right,
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01:34:40 ◼ ► to me, a slightly unusual demo that founder Imran Chaudhry did at TED over the weekend last week.
01:34:50 ◼ ► As far as I know, as you and I record, the TED video is still not available, even though there
01:34:56 ◼ ► was some speculation it was going to come out on Monday. It didn't. There's like Ray Wong at Inverse
01:35:06 ◼ ► collected as much information that came out on Twitter. So there there's enough to get a sense
01:35:10 ◼ ► of the demo, but not the product. I'm curious your thoughts. What did you think? Be honest.
01:35:24 ◼ ► I I'm going to ditch my smartphone for that. The idea of having a conversation with your shirt
01:35:32 ◼ ► is not appealing to me in any way whatsoever when you can just do it quietly on a phone. Now,
01:35:37 ◼ ► I do think that they're them tapping into AI and machine learning based stuff is, is pretty clever,
01:35:46 ◼ ► but I'm not confident that they're going to be the ones to pull it off. If that makes sense. I mean,
01:35:53 ◼ ► they can make the hardware, but ultimately they're going to be using presumably chat GPT or someone
01:35:59 ◼ ► else's engine to do all of the kind of natural language processing. And then at that point,
01:36:04 ◼ ► they're effectively a hardware device that, you know, and then some of the stuff like the
01:36:08 ◼ ► projector, like that's just gimmicky. It looks like a monochrome display. Someone sent me a message on
01:36:16 ◼ ► Mastodon that made me laugh that said, wow, who would have figured that a hand was a worse screen
01:36:21 ◼ ► than a screen. And it's just like, why? I mean, it's a very great demo, but it reminds me of like
01:36:28 ◼ ► early 2000 slash early 2010s, like magic leap S kind of like, this is the future before anyone
01:36:34 ◼ ► stops to think, but do we actually want that? I don't. There's the famous, I think he said it,
01:36:42 ◼ ► or he's attributed to him multiple times, Steve jobs saying that such and such is that's not a
01:36:48 ◼ ► product that's technology. I know supposedly he said that to the Dropbox founders at some point
01:36:54 ◼ ► in some alternate universe, maybe I, you know, it's what's Apple's standard PR line when they
01:37:03 ◼ ► acquire a company and usually they acquire companies and they don't even want anybody to know,
01:37:07 ◼ ► but if it does leak, they say Apple acquire smaller companies from time to time. And our policy
01:37:13 ◼ ► is generally not to talk about why. And that's not verbatim what they say, but whatever it is,
01:37:19 ◼ ► it's like a copy and paste. They have like a text expander snippet to send that out. There's some
01:37:25 ◼ ► universe where Apple bought Dropbox, but obviously they didn't in hindsight. And at the end of his
01:37:34 ◼ ► life, the last few keynotes, Steve jobs did, I think it's, I have always thought that he repeated
01:37:41 ◼ ► it, that sort of Apple exists at the intersection of the liberal arts and technology. And
01:37:49 ◼ ► not to be too morbid, but time has passed and it's the book came out, which is wonderful.
01:37:55 ◼ ► The literally wonderful make something wonderful. It's a little less sad to talk about, but I feel
01:38:00 ◼ ► like it was his parting message to the world. Right. And that's why he ended a couple of
01:38:04 ◼ ► keynotes with it, but it does come down to the same idea that technology is not enough.
01:38:10 ◼ ► You don't start with technology and then package it as a product. You have to start with a vision
01:38:15 ◼ ► for the product and then figure out, Oh, but we can't, this is our idea for how a phone would work,
01:38:22 ◼ ► but we don't have a screen that does touch with zero latency. Well, let's make it right.
01:38:34 ◼ ► we need graphics to do this. We need screens that don't exist. We need integrated sound to do
01:38:46 ◼ ► I kind of feel, and again, I'm fascinated by humane and I know that a lot of what I've written
01:38:51 ◼ ► about them is snarky. When I made fun of the video, they came out with a couple of months ago,
01:38:56 ◼ ► just because I don't want to see a video from you don't. And they had like a merch drop a week or
01:39:03 ◼ ► two ago where they're selling sweatshirts and it's like, I want to see the product. Right. And,
01:39:28 ◼ ► here's these people who left Apple and made a new company or a new product. Tony Fadal is the,
01:39:35 ◼ ► the biggest counter example I can think of where he founded nest and I've got nest thermostats here
01:39:53 ◼ ► products in him. Right. He seems like this, a serial creator and, and it has like an itch
01:40:02 ◼ ► to make things, but where are the companies that are have X Apple people who are making cool
01:40:08 ◼ ► things? I know there's some X Apple people at Airbnb. I know that there are X Apple people
01:40:14 ◼ ► at other companies, but again, nobody's made like, I don't know, like back in the, the 1.0 era of
01:40:21 ◼ ► Apple people who left Apple went on to found general magic. And again, general magic wasn't
01:40:26 ◼ ► a hit product, but it sort of presaged the handheld communicator idea. They just were ahead
01:40:33 ◼ ► of their time. Totally. And so humane story where the founders were X Apple and they've hired tons
01:40:41 ◼ ► of X Apple people. Like, I don't know how many people work at humane, but, and what percentage
01:40:46 ◼ ► of them formerly worked at Apple, but it's a lot. Right. And that to me says interesting, but then
01:40:53 ◼ ► I see this Ted demo and I'm like, yeah, it, I mean, yeah. And that's the problem too. I think
01:41:00 ◼ ► because of what Apple is and because of how Apple's culture has been so carefully developed
01:41:08 ◼ ► over decades. I think that. Not that they almost did themselves a disservice because I know people
01:41:14 ◼ ► there. And I think that at least the ones I'm aware of are very talented people, but you almost
01:41:20 ◼ ► set yourself up for failure by you're going to be the company of X Apple people. And then I was just
01:41:27 ◼ ► confused by the whole, I know part of the, the Ted talkie stuff that came out was like, kind of a
01:41:34 ◼ ► leak, but not really. And then they kind of publicly said, Oh yeah, look, and there's a Ted
01:41:38 ◼ ► talk. It just seems like the weirdest way to like a Ted talk to talk about a new product segment in
01:41:43 ◼ ► 2023 is bizarre. Yeah. I mean, I, I think they, I made a joke. I said they should have talked to
01:41:50 ◼ ► Carl pay because at least he knows how to drive hype over nothing. I don't know. The whole rollout
01:41:56 ◼ ► strategy is bizarre. And so I I'm reserving judgment because I'm like, well, we don't really
01:42:00 ◼ ► know what this is yet, but based on what I've seen, I've been very unimpressed maybe. Yeah.
01:42:08 ◼ ► And it's just strange that there's no product name. He didn't take it out of his pocket.
01:42:15 ◼ ► It seems after watching it numerous times, you know, that it's a bigger device than you
01:42:21 ◼ ► might think. I think, you know, that there was custom tailoring on his jacket to hide most of
01:42:26 ◼ ► the device. You can see it. It looked like it was about the size of a knife on five. Yeah.
01:42:32 ◼ ► Big looking. Yeah. Or like one of those battery packs you can put on the back of an iPhone.
01:42:37 ◼ ► Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The magic, what do they call them? The max safe. Yeah. Whatever the magnetic
01:42:43 ◼ ► one. And I've maybe I'm too hyper-focused on it, but it seems like they're the ones who were all in
01:42:53 ◼ ► on the, you don't need your phone anymore. And like I, I quote tweeted Imran's tweet where,
01:43:01 ◼ ► where he thought we deserve better when he had the comparison of the fans at the Lakers game,
01:43:07 ◼ ► where thousands of fans had their phones out in front of them so they could record the video.
01:43:16 ◼ ► which in itself is a problem. It's concerning. Right. Like I know we're a decade past Google
01:43:23 ◼ ► glass, but you know, it, it, people aren't comfortable with that and it's a battery issue
01:43:29 ◼ ► and it's a privacy issue. But if you've got this thing on your chest, like a Star Trek communicator
01:43:41 ◼ ► hypothetically, if it's like, Hey, it's streams, it shoots video all day long and you've got your
01:43:47 ◼ ► whole life. And you can just say, Hey, what happened at 4.20 PM and go back and look at
01:43:52 ◼ ► the video. You're not going to get a good image from your chest perspective when you're at the,
01:43:57 ◼ ► if you want a photo from your seat at the Lakers game, you've got to hold a camera in front of you.
01:44:01 ◼ ► There's no way around it. Yep. Your, your hand is seemingly a bad display. Like it's just very
01:44:08 ◼ ► strange to me. And, and the demo he got, the AI voice said to him, you've got one new email and
01:44:15 ◼ ► Bethany sent you two photos. And I thought, well, that's a very strange message to demo.
01:44:21 ◼ ► She sent you two photos. Well, literally if you don't have a display, how can you see the photos?
01:44:33 ◼ ► whoa, play the voicemail. Or even if it's a text message, you could say, read, you know, as our
01:44:38 ◼ ► internet communicators do now, they can read your text messages while you're out and about
01:44:46 ◼ ► And there was a bunch of stuff like that where you're like at, again, from 10,000 feet up,
01:44:51 ◼ ► you're like, well, that's kind of cool. But then you think about it and you go, why? I mean,
01:44:55 ◼ ► the example of him receiving a phone call from Bethany too is what it like, he holds his palm
01:45:00 ◼ ► up and it says, Oh, call from Bethany. But the entire time he's interacting with the device via
01:45:06 ◼ ► voice and it responds. And so why could it not just say, Hey, Bethany's calling. Why do you
01:45:10 ◼ ► need to hold your hand up and go, Oh yes, Bethany. And then I don't know how you act on that. The,
01:45:16 ◼ ► the demo they used of translation was one of those other ones where at first you're like,
01:45:21 ◼ ► that's pretty cool. And then you think about it and go, well, wait a minute. Because in the demo,
01:45:26 ◼ ► he, he pushes the button, he holds this button down on the device that it appears you need to
01:45:32 ◼ ► hold it down for it to record your audio, or at least for you to prompt it. So he holds down
01:45:36 ◼ ► this button and says a sentence and then let's go. And the thing speaks back in French. And he says,
01:45:41 ◼ ► that was my voice that has been stitched together, speaking fluent French. But you're like, well,
01:45:49 ◼ ► hold on. Because at no point did he say translate this translated to French. Right. Right. It's
01:45:54 ◼ ► clearly, I mean, I think Nilay Patel made the joke on the verge in the comment section saying,
01:46:04 ◼ ► right? Just kind of true where I understand the, the ideology of thinking that smartphones are
01:46:14 ◼ ► endemic to society and they're ruining the way we interact with people. And that may well be true,
01:46:18 ◼ ► but part of the reason that they are so prevalent is because they're so useful. And so if you're
01:46:24 ◼ ► planning on replacing it, you better bring something good. Yeah. And I just don't know if
01:46:31 ◼ ► anyone can pull that off much less what we've seen demonstrated, but you can't help be curious just
01:46:37 ◼ ► because of who's made it up. And that's the other thing too, is if it were any other company,
01:46:44 ◼ ► came out with it, it wouldn't even get an article, but because it's a bunch of Apple people,
01:46:49 ◼ ► we're all talking about it. So, yeah. And I get the one, again, go up to the 10,000 foot view
01:46:56 ◼ ► overview. The idea of an AI first computing platform, it resonates with me that we're at
01:47:23 ◼ ► where this computation is happening to how we're consuming it and chatting and prompting the mid
01:47:29 ◼ ► journey and whatever else we're doing. We're doing it on these computers that were designed before
01:47:34 ◼ ► AI. Somebody is going to come up with an AI first computer. We don't know what it looks like.
01:47:40 ◼ ► All of these breakthroughs in history had nobody knows what are we going to do. The iPod was
01:47:47 ◼ ► effectively, the origin story was John Rubinstein was in Japan or somewhere in Asia and Toshiba had
01:47:56 ◼ ► these small hard drives. And they said, we've had like a breakthrough in how small we can make a
01:48:02 ◼ ► hard drive. We don't know what to do with it though because they're more expensive because
01:48:05 ◼ ► they're so small and laptop makers don't need them to be that small. And he comes back and says,
01:48:11 ◼ ► what can we do with this amazing technology? And they come up with it. The bitmap display was
01:48:16 ◼ ► where we got graphical user interface computing from. Nobody knew how that was going to look.
01:48:22 ◼ ► Somebody is going to come up with AI first devices, whether we call them computers or not,
01:48:47 ◼ ► more conspicuous, right? Like if you're out and if you're in your car by yourself, well then so what,
01:49:00 ◼ ► hundred at work anywhere, if you're always talking to it, it's weird, right? And you feel
01:49:07 ◼ ► self-conscious about it. And you might be doing things you don't want other people to overhear,
01:49:18 ◼ ► I am too. I do think that it has the potential to normalize itself. I mean, I remember,
01:49:23 ◼ ► remember how hard AirPods were to get when they first came out? I got them the week they released
01:49:29 ◼ ► and for months they just weren't available. And I remember wearing them around my university
01:49:35 ◼ ► campus thinking I look like an idiot and people would look over at me and they weren't like,
01:49:39 ◼ ► Oh, those are the cool new AirPods. They'd look at me like, what are those? And I saw one or two
01:49:44 ◼ ► other people on campus that had them too. And I said, they look truly stupid. And now we don't
01:49:49 ◼ ► give a second thought to it, right? Cause they're ubiquitous and they're great. And so maybe this
01:49:54 ◼ ► becomes that, but talking in public is a much greater barrier than something you might wear.
01:50:09 ◼ ► Well, and the thing I don't get about it is not having it be another satellite to your phone.
01:50:20 ◼ ► again, which is really weird that they demoed it and still didn't give it a name, but okay,
01:50:27 ◼ ► they're unnamed Humane device. To me, a lot of the stuff they're talking about are things that
01:50:31 ◼ ► we do with our Apple watches. Right. Yeah. And if Apple wanted to get more AI heavy on the watch,
01:50:40 ◼ ► they could. Right. Like you can, I do it. I I'll sign off from my phone and leave my phone
01:50:52 ◼ ► but I've got my Apple watch on. So if I do get an important text message, I can glance at my wrist
01:50:56 ◼ ► and see it. It just seems like the watch solves the problem of having a small, less obtrusive,
01:51:02 ◼ ► you're not staring at your phone all day device, but it works in conjunction with your phone.
01:51:16 ◼ ► our good friends. Let's see if I could do it off the top of my head. I suffer from podcast
01:51:21 ◼ ► amnesia. We had collide KOL IDE where you can get your fleet into compliance, trade coffee.
01:51:35 ◼ ► the talk show. That's where you can subscribe to get a coffee subscription. And last but not least
01:51:42 ◼ ► our good friends at Backblaze. Here I am cheating, looking at my notes. Online backup for your Mac or
01:52:15 ◼ ► Yeah. That's probably the easiest way to find me. I don't the whole at, at whatever. And the domain
01:52:21 ◼ ► is just too much. Yeah, but it works out. I always come. I remember it must be 15 years ago, Jason
01:52:28 ◼ ► freed at 37 signals observed that, Hey, we were going to buy, spend a fortune on a domain name.
01:52:36 ◼ ► I think it was like backpack was their product and they couldn't get backpack.com. And they were
01:52:41 ◼ ► like, Oh, we were going to. And he was like, you know what? Nobody even uses, they just Google for
01:52:46 ◼ ► backpack and know if it's backpack. I think it was like backpack.it.com was what they wound up with.