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394: ‘An Impossible Balcony’, With Matthew Panzarino

 

00:00:00   What do you think? It's like talking to a bug. I think that's what Ben said. I did the same thing

00:00:06   for dithering when we recorded last night. So I don't record video for this show, so nobody knows

00:00:13   exactly what's going on here, but for the recording in this web-based app I use StreamYard, there's a

00:00:19   video and I can see Matthew and Matthew can see me and I'm... Well I could see, I could see someone.

00:00:26   I can see someone. Yeah. Now do you have, you don't because it doesn't know that I'm there

00:00:34   so it doesn't have the eyes on, right? It doesn't have eyesight. No, exactly. And Ben was thrown off by that too.

00:00:41   And it reminded me last night while I was like halfway through, well I wasn't halfway through

00:00:49   done writing, but I was halfway through whatever my process is. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Halfway through a

00:00:56   thinking about it. But it did serve to remind me that part of the, I would just say problem with

00:01:04   eyesight is that you on the inside have no idea when it's on, what it's on. You don't know what

00:01:12   people on the outside are seeing. And that's, it's just a really weird thing that you don't know what

00:01:21   other people see on your face. I don't know that there's any experience in the world quite like it.

00:01:27   Well I mean maybe having some food in your teeth, right? Yeah, yeah. Like you had no idea that

00:01:32   something was stuck in your teeth and somebody's, "Hey you gotta think," you're like, "Oh my god, I had no idea."

00:01:36   All right, hold on a second here. I'm gonna take my headphones off first and then then the Vision Pro.

00:01:41   Hold on. Okay. It's like Clark Kent taking off his glasses. My headphones even fit better now.

00:01:50   Well, of course, I didn't invite you until yesterday. But I'd been thinking

00:01:54   for months that I would like to have you on for this episode of the show.

00:02:00   And that's just standard procedure. So my first, I'm sure you have a lot of questions

00:02:07   for me, but my first question for you is, do you have FOMO? Yeah, of course, of course. How could you not?

00:02:15   I mean, you know, it's sort of I knew that this is the deal. I went into it with eyes open, but when

00:02:20   the time comes, it's always, you know, it's always kind of a bummer. I mean, I definitely think I would

00:02:25   have had less FOMO. And we'll see come September, but like if this is a new iPhone, some great upgrades,

00:02:31   whatever, to an iPhone, that's an existing category that I've covered a lot and thought about a lot.

00:02:37   But as a new category device, it would have been nice to kind of, because I've been following,

00:02:42   as you have, following this kind of journey of Apple's trembling towards spatial computing for

00:02:48   six, seven, eight years. And so it would have been nice to kind of like get into the first

00:02:53   review cadre and have a chance to check it out. But at the same time, I actually got a good night's

00:02:57   sleep last night, John. And I woke up and I had some coffee and I got, I was just, I read some

00:03:02   reviews. It was actually, I was like, is this, is this how it feels? This is awesome. It's relaxing.

00:03:10   I got about four hours of sleep. Yeah, I know that feel. I mean, it's always worse for me too,

00:03:19   right? Because the West Coast time zone is the, it's the worst. Right. Right. How did you use to

00:03:24   manage that with the TechCrunch CMS? Would you cue it up and set it for the embargo time or would you

00:03:33   not trust the CMS's, hey, don't publish this till this, to the time and wait until two minutes before

00:03:40   the embargo and then get it all queued up and hit what, which way would you do that? A variety of

00:03:45   ways over the years, but I don't think I ever really felt completely happy or trusting of

00:03:51   WordPress's scheduling. WordPress scheduling is notoriously flaky. And so most of the time it was

00:03:58   a manual press of the button. Sometimes me sometimes up at 3 a.m. just pressing the button.

00:04:03   And then I would literally just crank, go through all of the post review post published things.

00:04:08   People have questions. I'm like, oh, let me add that. I'll add a bit about that. Right. And kind

00:04:13   of update the article or just handling Q and A and all of that stuff. And then I would just crash,

00:04:18   you know, in the early afternoon for a while. But a lot of times, yeah. All right.

00:04:24   Right now when I'm recording this podcast. Yeah, exactly right now. But a lot of times,

00:04:32   thankfully I had really great publishing partners, like my operations director,

00:04:35   Henry Picklebet, who would be a champion and be like, hey, Henry, I've just turned in my last

00:04:40   words of this. Could you please get this in ship shape? And he would handle getting all of that

00:04:45   done and orderly and then published on time so that I could crash and then wake up and do the

00:04:49   whole thing. So it was nice not to be a one man show in those moments. Well, my advantage is,

00:04:55   of course, that I never quite make the embargo deadline. So I don't have to worry about trusting

00:05:01   any kind of thing, but I would never trust it. I don't even think the way I don't even think I can

00:05:06   forward publish things automatically the way I have movable type set up. It's so it just it just

00:05:12   doesn't it just never even occurs to me. Right. And it's such a modern tool. Well, I'm sure they

00:05:21   have it. I'm sure there's a way to do it. And I'm yeah. And I'm I'm sure I guarantee there's a way

00:05:27   that I could jury rig it, which might be what I would do anyway. But I don't have to worry because

00:05:32   I'm not sure I'm ever going to hit one of these deadlines. I did read I have not read others

00:05:37   reviews extensively. I skim Joanna's and watched and saw that she actually wore it skiing. God

00:05:45   bless Joanna Stern. Yes, I am so glad she didn't Sonny Bono herself. Yeah, no, she did great. And

00:05:52   in some ways I'm glad I didn't do a review because I guarantee you I would have put cooking in my

00:05:57   video. So I'm glad she did it. It's it's well executed. She did a wonderful job. And I was

00:06:02   like, this is great because it was a really great example of how to use it. Yes. So yesterday I did

00:06:07   something like and you know, little details that you know, it there's so much even when you when

00:06:12   I write, I think I get wound up at like 7000 words and I left lots out. You just have to try things

00:06:21   and then you sort of circle back to what do you think the main here's this big soup of all these

00:06:27   experiences I had over the last week. What are the ones that actually make a story? What are the ones

00:06:32   that are important? But Apple showed that right right at the key at the WWDC keynote when they

00:06:37   announced this product, they showed a woman packing a suitcase for a trip while she's wearing it. And

00:06:42   then she got like a FaceTime call while she's packing and answers it and is like, Oh, hello,

00:06:47   you know, I'm packing for the trip or whatever. And I remember I think we were sitting next to

00:06:52   each other. And I remember thinking, that seems like an odd context to wear this product. So

00:06:59   yesterday, the dishwasher needed to be emptied. We had a bunch of dishes from the night before

00:07:03   that needed to be put in. So I just did a whole bunch of that type of thing, emptied the dishwasher

00:07:10   put them away, got a bunch of dirty dishes, loaded them in the dishwasher, hand washed a bunch of

00:07:16   pots and pans that kind of don't go in the dishwasher. It was okay. And stuff like reaching

00:07:24   out and grabbing a glass, you know, something where if you were a fraction of an inch off or

00:07:28   something where you might knock it over that none of that stuff is a problem. Like, yeah, okay. The

00:07:34   latency is not perfect. And you really notice it like you notice it. I wrote my review, even just

00:07:41   walking at walking pace, it's enough motion to blur the image a little bit where it's not bad.

00:07:49   And it's not for me at all nausea inducing, but it no longer looks like pass through vision.

00:07:55   Whereas when you're you and you remember this from your times demoing it when you're just

00:08:00   sitting down and looking ahead. The pass through is uncanny, right? But I'm not quite sure what the

00:08:07   point is though of doing it for household chores right now. Cooking is different, right? Because

00:08:12   cooking you can imagine, anybody can imagine somebody who doesn't cook much can imagine that

00:08:16   doing a recipe type thing where you don't have to touch anything like an iPad.

00:08:23   It seems like a huge use case. I mean, it really does.

00:08:27   Chris Bounds Yeah. I mean, I think that sort of reference, right, I think is the most common way

00:08:36   or common way to phrase it like an umbrella phrasing is if you have to reference something

00:08:43   live, whether it's instructions or a tutorial video, as an example, like I could see it like,

00:08:48   oh, you got to repair your iPhone. Just a close to home example. If you want to change the screen out

00:08:54   on your iPhone, like having that hovering there while you have your hands on the device,

00:09:00   both hands on the device, you're not playing and pausing. And you're not trying to say, wait, wait,

00:09:04   what was that? You could just pinch your fingers to pause and then go right back to fiddling.

00:09:08   There's some cases where I could see that that would happen. But yeah, the case where I was like,

00:09:13   hold on, let me take a video call while I keep packing. That seemed like a little bit of a

00:09:17   stretch. I don't know if that's the way I would go about that. Because I just don't see why I would

00:09:23   ever have it on while I'm packing. Right. I might be listening to a podcast while I'm packing,

00:09:27   but I would just put AirPods in and play it from my phone. And in some ways, while I was doing

00:09:34   my kitchen cleanup with it, I actually was listening to a podcast I had Overcast,

00:09:40   which is not a native vision app. It's, you know, it runs in what they call compatibility mode,

00:09:46   which is the iPad app in some way. And Overcast works fine like that. In general, iPad apps,

00:09:53   unchanged work really well. I mean, this was my impression from demos with Apple. It's what I've

00:10:00   heard through the grapevine. And in the last week, it's been my experience of all the ways

00:10:05   that Apple has enabled in recent years. Oh, you can run apps for this old platform on this new

00:10:13   platform without changing it like iPhone apps on the iPad that are unadjusted. And sure, it looks,

00:10:19   you know, it looks stupid because they're a little iPhone sized window on a big iPad screen, or you

00:10:24   can run them in 2x mode where everything is way too big. And then the whole run iPad apps on Mac

00:10:32   through catalyst without doing any kind of Mac-ification just sort of hit recompile and

00:10:39   Xcode. This is the best of any of those. And if these were the only apps available, it would be

00:10:46   a little surprising for Apple, but it would be credible. And in fact, a lot of the system apps

00:10:51   from Apple are like that right now. Maps, books. I forget which other apps, maps and books,

00:10:58   calendar, which seems like that's a surprising one to me, given that there's sort of a work

00:11:04   productivity focus on like they have a native keynote app, but no native numbers or pages.

00:11:13   They're very credible. They don't even even the way that iPad apps are kind of clearly iPad apps

00:11:19   on Mac. These apps kind of look like they could be native if you didn't know how much cooler native

00:11:26   apps look right. The look and feel of the of the truly native apps is the biggest tell. But here's

00:11:33   where listening to podcasts with it, actually, it was almost too fancy because there's a spatiality

00:11:43   I don't know if that's a word, but a spatialness specialness,

00:11:46   a broadness to the soundscape. Right. But if audio is playing from an app window,

00:11:54   you hear it in true spatial audio. So if I move the overcast window off to my left,

00:12:02   which is where I had it, then while I'm in the kitchen emptying the dishwasher and whatever,

00:12:07   the podcast sounds like it's coming from that window.

00:12:11   Right. Whereas normally you would expect it to come in both ears wherever the window was.

00:12:15   Yeah. Right. And I've listened to so many, I was going to say hundreds, but I don't know,

00:12:21   maybe thousands of hours, I guess, thousands of hours of podcasts at this point in the aggregate.

00:12:27   And I'm just like a thousand hours of podcasts listening, whereas I twist and turn my body,

00:12:34   the audio doesn't have any spatial aspect to it. And so it just, I was just like, what is this?

00:12:42   How can I turn this spatial audio off? And I don't think you can.

00:12:45   Yeah. Yeah. It's almost seems like there should be like a stereo listening mode,

00:12:50   you know, just to be simple. Yeah. Yeah. So adherence to the, like say adherence to

00:12:57   their philosophy, right. Of the overall spatial computing philosophy. It's like over adherence to

00:13:03   it. I think that will be the norm for a while, right? Because they sort of have to establish

00:13:07   the rules and then pull back the rules. Like this is iOS seven all over again. It's like,

00:13:12   establish the new rules and then we'll, Hey, we're going to pull back from the brink

00:13:16   of all of those new rules to a place that feels good.

00:13:19   Yeah. Conversely, I guess I'm skipping all over the place, but I, I had a three-way FaceTime call

00:13:26   with two reps from Apple, somebody from Apple PR and someone from product marketing for vision.

00:13:32   And this was a scheduled, but it was optional. You know how this is listeners don't, but they'll offer

00:13:37   reviewers, something like that. And it's sort of, you also know this part it's like by the letter

00:13:44   of the NDA I signed, I wasn't supposed to do a FaceTime call with the persona with anybody.

00:13:54   I think, I think that was on the list of the NDA that I didn't really ignore, but like technically

00:13:58   it would have been an NDA violation for me and Joanna and Neelay to FaceTime each other. But of

00:14:04   course, of course we FaceTimed each other. And I think Neelay said that they all put them in their

00:14:10   videos too. They were just like, come on, this is a joke. But as a courtesy, if you want to pretend

00:14:15   and, and they don't assume that any of us reviewers are friends with each other, even though they know

00:14:20   a bunch of us are friends with each other, but I guess they kind of have to offer it. So they,

00:14:24   you know, offered a call and I took it, you know, I was like, I'll see what this is like.

00:14:28   And so with three people in the call, the spatial aspect and everybody wearing Vision Pro,

00:14:34   so everybody was a persona. The spatial audio aspect of it was one of the best parts,

00:14:41   like the persona part we could, we could just go right into right now is really uncanny and kind

00:14:47   of weird. But in a half hour call, five, six minutes in, you just get over the weirdness,

00:14:54   you know what I mean? It's like, I don't know, it's like jumping into the...

00:14:56   I mean, it just looks like one of those things that just is gonna get better, right? Over time,

00:15:02   they'll get better at it. They'll render these things better and better until the point where

00:15:05   we're like, oh, look at skin textures, all that stuff. It's all fine. But for now,

00:15:10   I think the beta tag is well earned, right? The visual aspect anyway.

00:15:14   Yeah. Oh, definitely. I mean, it, and in fact, if you even look, and maybe I'm reading a little

00:15:19   too much into it, but I almost feel like they've done the Apple equivalent of underlining,

00:15:25   bolding, and italicizing the word beta. They drew a circular pill around it and knock out

00:15:32   the background like it's... Yeah, put a beta watermark across people's faces.

00:15:37   Right. I almost feel like they wish, you know, like back in the day, I don't think developers

00:15:44   really talk like this anymore. But like when I first started getting into app development,

00:15:50   nerdery, there was alpha testing before beta testing, right? You do like alpha one,

00:15:57   alpha two, and alphas were like pre-beta, whatever beta is to release software.

00:16:03   Alphas were truly rickety, right? You expected them to break continuously, et cetera.

00:16:08   Right. Alpha is like when you're building a house or an extension to the house and you just see the

00:16:13   studs and the woodwork, right? And you can, and you just have to pretend there's a wall here,

00:16:18   you know? Yeah. You do your walkthrough and you're like, "And we're going to put the vanity over here."

00:16:21   It's just an empty wall. You see the trees outside. Yeah. Yeah.

00:16:24   Yeah, exactly. And you see like empty coffee cups and cigarette butts from the workers in between.

00:16:31   Dirty pictures drawn on the studs. Yeah.

00:16:33   I almost feel like they wish that was still a term of art so they can call this alpha.

00:16:36   Yeah. Yeah.

00:16:38   You know, and in the past, they have occasionally,

00:16:44   the software to support a feature of hardware has lagged behind. And I would say a canonical example,

00:16:53   and you come to mind, it would be the first iPhones with portrait photography, right?

00:16:57   Right. Because it was several weeks after launch. Yeah.

00:17:00   Yeah. I forget which phone that was. Maybe it was like iPhone 7?

00:17:04   iPhone 8? 7? No, because 8 came out alongside the 10. So I think it came out.

00:17:08   Yeah, 7, I think. Yeah. So iPhone 7 introduced portrait

00:17:13   photography and/or portrait mode. And they were like, "Coming later this fall."

00:17:19   And then you got exclusive pre-release OS update or something and got to shoot with it.

00:17:27   It was portrait. I know there was something that you got exclusive access to.

00:17:31   Yeah. Yeah, I think portrait mode. And it was enabled. It was like 2016, right?

00:17:37   Yeah. And then I think it was the 7 Plus. Remember?

00:17:41   Yeah. It was only the pluses.

00:17:42   Mm-hmm. The 7 Plus.

00:17:43   And the 8 Plus. But yeah, it was. It was a few weeks after. And they put a special version on my

00:17:49   review device of the OS, sent me a link and put a special version of it on. And then the software

00:17:56   didn't ship even then for a couple of weeks after that. So I was seeing, I think, what they shipped

00:18:02   or essentially what they shipped. But it was before they shipped it to the public and well

00:18:07   after the phones were released and iOS was released for the new phones. Yeah.

00:18:11   Right. And so clearly they had hoped to have it ready to ship on day one of customer delivery.

00:18:18   It was a couple of months behind. And it's such a not big deal in hindsight that even you and I are

00:18:25   struggling to remember exactly when it was. Right? In the moment, these things always seem shocking.

00:18:33   Here's this flagship camera feature of this brand new flagship, most expensive iPhone ever made. And

00:18:41   it's not even ready yet. Oh my God. What are we going to do? I can't wait. Can't wait.

00:18:44   And I think it's kind of a sign of how much we have to worry about these days, John,

00:18:48   that those things don't even seem to make a deal anymore. But yeah, yeah, true. And they could have

00:18:52   done that here. Right. They could have said coming soon and just kept iterating. But I honestly think

00:18:58   like, I think you mentioned in your review, which I read just before this as, as homework,

00:19:03   but in your review, which is excellent, by the way, I think it's, it was really well done.

00:19:08   You mentioned that they didn't, you feel that they didn't do the Memoji option, which would be just

00:19:15   to put people's custom crafted, the Memoji that you create on your phone as the overlay, which

00:19:21   they do already. You could do that. You send a message to somebody they've got enough tracking

00:19:26   in there to give you a rough, like Muppet style conversation with a Memoji back and forth over

00:19:31   iMessage or things like that. But they chose not to do that here. And your take is they didn't do

00:19:37   that because in business contexts, it would be like, you'd be having some serious discussion

00:19:43   about like the company's going under or we're laying you off or whatever. And you've got to

00:19:48   be emoji flapping at you instead of like a person's face. Right. Right. Or I don't have a job

00:19:55   job like that anymore, but I can imagine working in a certain, certainly just very large corporations

00:20:03   where you often have meetings with people who are not, you would consider friends, right?

00:20:07   Maybe you regularly have meetings with colleagues or managers who don't even know you until this

00:20:14   meeting. Or external calls, right? Not even at the company, it's a sales call or a business call

00:20:18   or whatever. Right. And I even use the word client, right? You've got a client call. Well,

00:20:23   then you may not want to show up as a cartoon. I mean, in my world, I can't imagine a scenario

00:20:30   where I couldn't just be a emoji, but I can certainly imagine and remember when I did have

00:20:34   a job job that that time for me was before video conferencing was a thing, but I can imagine it

00:20:42   now. And it would be like showing up to a real life meeting where everybody is wearing dress

00:20:50   clothes or work clothes. It's Kermit behind the desk. Or like you've got like-

00:20:56   Kermit the Frog. We're starting to see you can lead off.

00:20:59   You've got like swim trunks and a tank top on. Flip flops.

00:21:03   Yeah, that's true. Yeah. The context is, it's a context mismatch. Right? But you could imagine,

00:21:11   though, a future of this where you could maybe toggle your Memoji off. That seems,

00:21:15   if you're talking with your friends or FaceTiming with your friends, it seems like it would be fun

00:21:20   to do that. And I would estimate that the beta is all about, "Hey, we're going to make these

00:21:24   faces better. We're going to add more features long term." But yeah, honestly, the reviews that

00:21:32   I read so far seem to jibe with what you were saying, though, which is that there tends to be

00:21:38   an immediate sort of, "What is this?" And then it kind of fades out as you talk and the spatial

00:21:43   audio kicks in and you're like, "Oh, that person is over there and this person's over here," etc.

00:21:48   Yeah, that's where I was going. Especially the three-person call where there's two,

00:21:56   they call them tiles. They're sort of like windows, but I think they call them tiles because they're

00:22:01   not really resizable, like when you're FaceTiming someone and they're just sort of like squares.

00:22:05   And the two of them are perfectly aligned. And there's a spatial element to it that putting

00:22:12   aside the... And I think I used the phrase twice because I felt like it was so apt that it's deep

00:22:20   in the uncanny valley, right? These personas are deep in the uncanny valley. They're very

00:22:26   unsettling. Put aside that uncanny aspect of them. Overall, though, the feature and the spatialness

00:22:34   is better. It's better than what you and I are doing right here in this flat browser window.

00:22:42   And especially with three people, because you get a spatial element to the sound and they can even

00:22:48   see which person you're making eye contact with. I tested them. I was like, "I'm looking at you,

00:22:54   or I'm looking at one of you. Can you guys both tell which one I'm making eye contact with?"

00:22:58   That's cool. That's very clever. I mean, that requires obviously some foolery on Apple's part

00:23:05   to sort of take the position of your eyes and assign it to the appropriate tile and then

00:23:12   transmit that through to the person. That's really cool. I like that.

00:23:14   Yeah. And I don't know. I forget. I don't even know what the limit is. Can you add...

00:23:18   I guess you can keep adding people to FaceTime. There must be some number of people you can add.

00:23:22   Oh, I think it was like 16 or 32 last time I checked. I can't remember.

00:23:25   Yeah, because I remember there was a demo they did at a keynote and it was a lot. They were

00:23:30   very proud of it. 32.

00:23:31   Yeah. Well, that's a lot. So, I'm sure with 32 people, you can't make eye contact with people.

00:23:36   Or it doesn't really matter that much, right? Like, it's such a small shift of your eye.

00:23:41   Right. So, putting aside the verisimilitude of the actual animated persona, overall, it's a great

00:23:51   device for video conferencing, right? But it's a big thing to put aside.

00:23:56   Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Put aside the face. The face stuff is good. You can move the tiles

00:24:03   separately. Can you put one person over here? Can you rearrange?

00:24:07   I think so.

00:24:07   Or are they grouped together?

00:24:09   I don't remember.

00:24:10   Okay. Yeah. So, file that under, I don't know. Overall, again, I jumped right into this. And

00:24:19   even though I'm always notoriously, I mean, the bastards at 9to5Mac, did you see what they did?

00:24:25   They had a review roundup. And then at the bottom, they said, "We'll keep updating this page with

00:24:30   other reviews as they come in throughout the day, asterisk." And then it said, "John Gruber's review."

00:24:37   That's funny. Okay, that's very funny. Come on, you have to admit.

00:24:40   I did. It made me laugh. It actually made me laugh. But it also made me a little embarrassed.

00:24:46   It's the embargo and the Grubergo, right?

00:24:48   It made me laugh and it made me slightly embarrassed. I'm not proud of this.

00:24:52   I'll say this in my defense. If I weren't embarrassed by the fact that I always missed

00:24:58   these, and if I didn't think each time, "I think I've got a chance to actually make this one,"

00:25:02   God only knows how much later I'd actually be.

00:25:07   Yeah. I mean, I've missed them before too. I do think it's good though, that you take the time

00:25:14   you take and then you set yourself in a category where... I used to do this with embargoes,

00:25:20   not on Apple stuff, but way back in the past, I used to kind of mess around with my timings on

00:25:26   that on purpose. Not early, obviously, if I agreed, I agreed. But if I was late to an embargo,

00:25:32   sometimes you give it some air. And then, especially if you had a take where you're like,

00:25:37   "I really don't think anybody's going to take this angle," right? You give it a little air and it

00:25:42   gives yours time to breathe, space to breathe and exist on its own. And I think that people have

00:25:47   come to expect that. So I don't think it's a bad thing at all. I think the expectation is kind of

00:25:51   nice to have built into your audience because they're like, "Oh, cool." And then I get like

00:25:54   an amuse-bouche or a reverse amuse-bouche dessert with Gruber's review.

00:25:59   One of these times though, I'm going to hit the embargo and everybody is going to be surprised.

00:26:04   All right, let me take a...

00:26:06   I'm going to keep that in your pocket.

00:26:08   Let me take a break here and thank our first sponsor. It's our good friends. And I have a

00:26:12   VisionOS message to go with it. Adblock Pro. Look, triple Apple recognition for Adblock Pro. This is

00:26:20   very hard for me to say. Adblock Pro has earned itself a spotlight by Apple on the App Store,

00:26:26   not once or twice, but three times in the Safari extensions category.

00:26:31   Now, timely news, not just for this week, but this episode, unlike a whole bunch of apps like

00:26:38   YouTube, Netflix, which aren't there on VisionOS, Adblock Pro is there on day one. It is coming

00:26:45   to Vision Pro. It is there right now. And those things like autoplay videos, those deceptive

00:26:53   little tiny X buttons to cross out. It's like the two little pixel X that you can tap to delete a

00:27:02   popover ad that's blocking the content you actually want to read. Adblock Pro takes care of all that

00:27:08   type of stuff. And just by blocking all of this crap and all sorts of stuff that you don't even

00:27:14   see, the trackers that are out there running JavaScript code behind the scenes on the web

00:27:19   pages you load, Adblock Pro estimates that they can make web browsing up to two to three times

00:27:24   faster and slash your data usage by up to 60%. And less data usage, honestly, often means extended

00:27:32   battery life. Really, there's just much less to process. And web browsing is actually significantly

00:27:39   processor-intensive. So, you can say no to trackers, maintain it, it improves your privacy,

00:27:45   increases the speed of the web, increases the readability of the web, all sorts of great

00:27:51   features. The stupid allow cookie notifications, it gets those too. All of that stuff. It's also

00:27:58   multilingual. They've fine-tuned their service for a vast array of languages spanning from English to

00:28:04   all the way to languages like Vietnamese. So, you can experience Adblock Pro's ad blocking

00:28:09   absolutely free. And for the cost of just two coffees annually, unearth a treasure trove of

00:28:15   premium features that will transform your browsing journey across your iPhone, iPad, and Mac. And the

00:28:22   cherry on top with family sharing, which is great, one subscription covers up to six accounts. And

00:28:28   there's even a lifetime payment option if you don't want to pay for a subscription. They get it.

00:28:33   So, just jump to the App Store and search for Adblock Pro and you will find it and transform

00:28:40   your Safari experience today. This was super convenient because I saw that as one of the

00:28:46   sponsors for this episode yesterday when I was like, "Hey, before I go overnight into deep dark

00:28:52   review writing mode, I got to set this up." I pinged you. I set this up. And I didn't have

00:28:58   ad blocking at all in Safari on VisionOS. And I was trying to do some things and it's like,

00:29:04   "Oh, I'm trying to review this product." And Safari is maybe the best app on the whole product. I

00:29:11   didn't even mention that in my review, but it's a really good implementation of a web browser.

00:29:16   But I totally was like, "Oh my God, without any extensions in Safari, the web is unusable."

00:29:22   I mean, I'm not just saying that because I've got Adblock Pro as a sponsor, but

00:29:27   you've got to have something. I mean, it's crazy how bad so many websites have gotten.

00:29:33   Really nuts.

00:29:33   Yeah, it's unfortunate. I mean, obviously you and I both know that there's a variety of things that

00:29:39   have to do with the business of media that has caused this current issue. But it's interesting

00:29:47   how much we've come to rely on extensibility in Safari over the years and how deep it is in their

00:29:56   DNA. And then the moment it's you're like, "What? What happened?" It's kind of crazy.

00:30:03   I know that a lot of times, and even recently, and maybe at the end of this episode, we'll have time

00:30:09   to touch on all this EU nonsense, which it's crazy how much stuff has gone on in the last week. But

00:30:14   a lot of times when I hear people talk about Safari competitively, it is from sort of the

00:30:24   Nerdist sphere. And it's from the context of web developers who, because they're web developers,

00:30:31   are more into Chrome because Chrome caters more towards leading edge web developer features.

00:30:41   And a lot of web developers think, and perhaps with some justification, that maybe one of Apple's

00:30:47   motivations for keeping Safari behind the bleeding edge of web rendering APIs is to

00:30:56   tilt the scale in favor of native apps for their platforms. But I think there's a lot more to it.

00:31:03   And you and I, you know this, that one of the differences is that the WebKit team has a much

00:31:09   bigger priority on battery life and energy conservation. It's been years. I've been thinking

00:31:16   last week that I should redo the test, but years ago I wrote my own little

00:31:19   AppleScript test. Pretty simple, but just go through the same list of URLs in Safari

00:31:26   until the battery dies, then go through the same list of URLs over and over and over again until

00:31:32   the battery dies in Chrome. And it was like, I think it was like 2017 or so when the last time

00:31:38   I did it, which is admittedly six years ago, but it was like a 1.5x factor in difference.

00:31:44   In other words, if all you do is use Safari instead of Chrome, you could save it's 1.5x

00:31:51   longer battery life. Significant, not 5% or 10%, but at least at that point it was 1.5x.

00:31:57   More than that though, it's just having their own native rendering engine has been such a boon

00:32:06   to Apple over the years. I mean, and again, go back to the original iPhone, which launched without

00:32:12   native third-party apps for an entire year because they could say, "Well, just write web apps." And

00:32:17   we've done some things in the original 1.0 version of iPhone Safari to let you sort of make fake

00:32:24   native-looking apps as web apps. And it just, there was so much content for the original iPhone

00:32:34   that went through Safari. I mean, it really was one of the, if not, probably for me, the most

00:32:40   used app in Safari for the whole first year. Yeah. Yeah, I know. And the state of Safari today is

00:32:49   actually really excellent. I mean, I was a Chrome user for many, many, many years, like very rabid

00:32:56   Chrome user because of its good integrations with Google services, obviously. But then also it just,

00:33:02   it felt speedy and it rendered well, and it had all kinds of weird wonky stuff that you

00:33:08   could plug in. Like the extensions universe of Chrome is, it's wild. It's amazing, right? Like,

00:33:14   it's a really great ecosystem of stuff. Everything from checking prices on a cart to a developer tool

00:33:21   to Web3 stuff, whatever. Like you could, you name it, you can find it in the extension store or in

00:33:27   somebody's hacked together on GitHub. And I think that's really fun and cool, but I came to a point

00:33:32   in my life where I realized that A, it was a memory hog, B, it's like eight battery, like crazy,

00:33:39   and then C, like a lot of the really edge case wonky stuff, I only used a handful of days out of

00:33:45   the year. And so if I needed it, Chrome could always be there. I usually install Chrome on my

00:33:51   devices or my computers, but I use Safari because it's faster, it's like slicker, it's smoother,

00:34:00   it uses less memory, it never crashes. Like, never, Reno.

00:34:04   - I'm laughing because you and I are talking using StreamYard right now.

00:34:08   - No, I know it's so ironic because right now StreamYard does not run on Safari.

00:34:12   - Right, it does not run on Safari.

00:34:13   - I opened Chrome for this month.

00:34:15   - Like as a lay person's rule of thumb for why at a nerdy type level, people might prefer

00:34:25   Chrome or Chrome based browsers over Safari, it is because inside as a web app, it enables more

00:34:32   native app type things. So like a service like StreamYard where we've got video streaming and

00:34:37   we're recording audio at a high quality and stuff like that.

00:34:40   - Yeah, with local storage and all of that cool stuff that PWAs bring along, yeah.

00:34:44   - Yeah, and the tinkering type stuff that you said, we're in the same way that like when you're at

00:34:49   the command line and you can type defaults right, some obscure command in the Mac OS terminal,

00:34:56   you can do weird things in Chrome with extensions that you can't do in Safari.

00:35:01   - Yeah, Chrome is like ready for you to turn its guts inside out at the moment's notice, right?

00:35:05   Like you put in the right string in the URL and you're looking into the deep workings of

00:35:10   how the browser renders and all kinds of fun stuff. And that's great if you need that.

00:35:14   - Right, that's a more googly approach to the web and Safari is a very, very appley approach

00:35:21   to the web. But overall, wow, what an overlooked, I think people just overlook how good an app Safari

00:35:29   is and how essential it is each time Apple bootstraps a new one of these platforms,

00:35:35   like the iPhone 16 years ago, or I guess 17 years ago at this point.

00:35:39   - And now how much of a competitive advantage it is to have like an anchor.

00:35:43   - Right. - For experiences across the web, yeah.

00:35:45   - And now with Vision OS today, one of the, in the last two weeks, one of the big stories was the

00:35:51   fact that two big services not only don't have native Vision OS apps, but don't even allow their

00:35:57   iPad apps to run in Vision OS, are Netflix and YouTube. And so if it weren't for Safari being,

00:36:06   hey, it's at least both of those services are pretty, they're good enough in Safari. I mean,

00:36:11   they're not great, but imagine if you couldn't watch Netflix or YouTube at all, right? I mean.

00:36:17   - Yeah, I wouldn't have put it past them to be honest. I think that, like YouTube especially,

00:36:25   maybe Netflix is like, all right, I guess you can watch it in the browser,

00:36:28   but YouTube is like, no, no, thank you. - I almost feel like it would be too spiteful,

00:36:33   right? Like it's, there's a line that that would cross, right? And that's sort of, I don't know,

00:36:39   I think they would have to resort to old school Bill Gates is in charge of Microsoft trickery

00:36:46   to break it, right? Like they couldn't just put up a thing that says, YouTube.com is not available

00:36:53   on Vision OS. - Polite fictions is the name of the term, right? Polite fictions, where you basically

00:37:00   are able to publicly say, oh, we want to provide the best experience for our users. And so we will

00:37:07   evaluate the platform going forward, blah, blah, blah. What you really mean is we're not going to

00:37:12   build something that makes your thing better, forget you, right? It's like those polite

00:37:16   fictions are able to hide behind. - Right, or introduce a couple of glitches that actually

00:37:20   make it render broken. I mean, that's what Microsoft used to be accused of doing. I mean,

00:37:26   I don't know how much truth there is to it, but the rumor, maybe it's true, maybe it's not,

00:37:29   but the rumor I remember when I was young, really young, was that Microsoft had an internal,

00:37:35   additional, the fact that it's talking about DOS, not Windows, will tell you how old it is,

00:37:40   but that there was an internal slogan at Microsoft, DOS ain't done till Lotus don't run.

00:37:46   And the idea was that like DOS 5.1.3 would go out and however you would get, you couldn't download

00:37:56   patches, then you'd go to like your user group and get a bunch of floppy disks to update. And then

00:38:01   all of a sudden Lotus 1, 2, 3 wouldn't work, right? And then you'd be like, "Ah, but Excel

00:38:08   works fine." I think that that speaks to, again, I'm rhapsodizing about Safari specifically, but

00:38:17   the web overall and what a small miracle it is that we have this universal open computing platform

00:38:25   that we just expect to be everywhere, right? And that didn't have to be that way. I think

00:38:32   I don't know, rolled the dice on a couple of different multiverses forking around the early

00:38:39   nineties. And I think you can very easily get to the year 2000 without the worldwide web.

00:38:45   Microsoft certainly was against it at the beginning, right? And even Apple,

00:38:51   even though they were foundering at the time, their ideas were things like HyperCard,

00:38:55   which were always Mac specific, right? Apple never had any interest in any kind of cross-platform

00:39:00   stuff. However lost Apple was for a long number of years there while Jobs was in exile,

00:39:06   part of Apple was always, "Well, we're only going to build stuff for our platforms," right? So,

00:39:10   Apple wasn't going to build, you know, some hypothetical Apple that tried to make HyperCard

00:39:15   cross-platform maybe could have built it, but companies weren't interested in it. Honestly,

00:39:21   Microsoft and Apple weren't even all that interested in TCP/IP networking. You used to have

00:39:28   to get like a freeware system extension for Mac OS 7.5 to get TCP/IP. Everything was proprietary

00:39:36   networking protocols. It's a small miracle that we have this and that however spiteful or whatever

00:39:43   else, whatever the reasons are that drove Netflix and YouTube to not even allow their iPad apps on

00:39:49   Vision OS, you can use youtube.com and netflix.com. And once you break out the video into a full

00:39:56   screen window, it's not that different from a native app.

00:39:59   Ben

00:39:59   Sure. Sure. Yeah. I mean, the web is the great equalizer and the great accessor,

00:40:04   which is why I think people with some knowledge of the past, the commentators who have kind of

00:40:11   seen a thing or two, definitely have their pitchforks out over anybody that tries to

00:40:16   disintermediate the web because it is the connective tissue, right? And at the end of

00:40:20   the day, if you can browse on a device, then that device has some access. It may not be best in

00:40:26   class access. It may not be the ideal user experience, but has some access to all the

00:40:31   services of the world. Right. And I think that's a, that's an important distinction to make when

00:40:36   you're like, Hey, we're not launching a native app. Okay. But we're not blocking vision pro on,

00:40:42   on the web browser with a user agent of vision pro. So like, I think the polite fictions part

00:40:48   of it is like, Oh, we haven't had the time to build this, or it's just not a priority for us or

00:40:53   whatever. But at the same time, I think that having it on the web is sort of fine with me.

00:40:58   Like they don't have to, right. It's up to Apple to make the thing compelling from an addressable

00:41:06   audience standpoint and an experience standpoint to where Netflix says we have to support this.

00:41:13   We must write our, our users want it. It's a wonderful experience. It drives subscriptions

00:41:20   and or whatever. And of course the whole app store rules and all that stuff comes into play. But

00:41:25   the fact is, is that it's up to Apple to make this thing compelling. I don't think it's on anybody

00:41:31   else to support this thing until Apple gets it to a place where people are like, I got,

00:41:36   where's Netflix. Like we all have vision pros. Where the hell are you Netflix? That kind of thing.

00:41:41   Trenton Larkin Yeah, I totally agree. And I don't think it's a big deal in the long run. And like I

00:41:50   said, both services work okay going through Safari. So it's not the end of the world. But I do think

00:41:56   there's a little bit of a, like all the canaries in the coal mine aren't dead, but there's, hey,

00:42:01   there's two of them. The ones labeled YouTube and Netflix, right. And it's just sort of a,

00:42:07   like a bad, so it makes my spidey sense tingle about Apple's, for lack of a better word, arrogance.

00:42:14   And what I've heard, little birdie wise, is conflicting. Well, one thing is that I know this

00:42:22   for a fact that internal to Apple, until two or three weeks ago, anybody inside Apple had access

00:42:30   to the entire App Store library of iPad apps to install on Vision OS, because there wasn't

00:42:37   any kind of opt out for developers yet, because it hadn't gotten to that point. And it was obviously

00:42:44   only available to Apple employees, right? So they can do all sorts of things with iPad apps that

00:42:50   can't be done outside the company. And that internal to Apple, they just assumed, you know,

00:42:56   they might have been mildly disappointed that Netflix didn't have a native Vision OS app. And

00:43:00   I guess they knew that they wouldn't because they knew that Netflix wasn't coming into the developer

00:43:06   labs with any kind of work. They weren't answering their calls. But there's, there's lots of streaming

00:43:12   services, most of the streaming services, I'm not sure if there are any, I don't know if there are

00:43:17   any other exceptions. But I know the ones I've looked for so far, as I've been testing it have

00:43:22   all been there as iPad apps, Paramount, Peacock, I don't know, I haven't looked for Amazon,

00:43:27   Hulu, but Disney Plus. Yeah, well, who Yeah, Disney Plus is native and Hulu is there as an iPad app.

00:43:34   But that Apple people were, I'm not gonna say shocked, but they were surprised that Netflix

00:43:41   click the checkbox to opt out of putting their iPad app, because they thought, well,

00:43:48   A, they thought, hey, we've been using it, and it's pretty good. You know, or somebody, one,

00:43:53   one person told me it was good, just not even pretty good, but good. And B, from Apple's

00:43:59   perspective, they, they, I just don't think that they could even believe that anybody would not

00:44:04   want to be on Vision OS on day one. That's the perspective that worries me like that they just

00:44:09   think, well, of course you do this thing is amazing. Wouldn't it be great if I were outside,

00:44:15   I'd want to be on this amazing platform. So therefore, everybody wants to be on this amazing

00:44:19   platform. And then when you're actually outside Apple, and you are Netflix, and you're like,

00:44:23   why in the world are we going to spend all this time on a platform that might only have 200,000

00:44:29   users right now at launch. And Netflix in particular already, like their Apple TV app,

00:44:35   is a native Apple TV app, even though all their TV apps for all the other boxes and the smart TVs out

00:44:42   there all sort of from the same code base, which is a JavaScript based framework that they can't

00:44:48   use on Apple TV, because it's like against the App Store rules for Apple TV. So they already build a

00:44:54   custom app for Apple TV, and they know how much they know exactly how much effort it takes to

00:44:59   keep that up to date. And I think that factors into their decision here on how many people there are.

00:45:05   Steven: Yeah, it's the reason that a lot of games don't chip on Mac, right? Because you have to,

00:45:09   there's obviously the big AAA developers have to be engaged in different ways. But there's a very

00:45:15   long tail of really clever and interesting games that come on to Steam that, you know, every day

00:45:22   that have some of these Steam games over the last year are really fascinating because there'll be

00:45:27   like two or three developers, sometimes even a solo developer, that will launch a game on

00:45:32   Steam that will get millions, millions of concurrent users like incredible or, or hundreds of millions

00:45:38   of downloads total over the space of years is really pretty fantastic success stories there.

00:45:44   But almost all of these developers do not ship a Mac version, because they know they have to buy

00:45:51   Mac hardware, they have to pay for the license, they have to get it registered by Apple,

00:45:55   start up a developer account, do the port, get it over there. And that's just a lot of effort,

00:46:01   right? Now, if you can convince them like, hey, this is a new audience for you that will

00:46:08   expand your horizons and make you more money and blah, blah, blah. That's great. But Apple's been

00:46:14   unable to do that in gaming. And then with streaming, of course, they had to like,

00:46:18   you have to support the iPad, you have to support the iPhone, because it's literally billions of

00:46:22   users. But Vision Pro doesn't have any of those hooks. I work at a startup now. So I know very

00:46:27   well, you got to convince everybody every day that you have any right to exist, or that you have any

00:46:32   right to their attention. And I think that the arrogance that you spoke about is worrisome,

00:46:38   because you have to keep that hustlers mentality, like the initial YouTube app, which Apple said,

00:46:45   we know that you don't want to do this. But we need YouTube, we need a video app on the phone,

00:46:51   we feel strongly about it, we'll build it for you, which is what they did. We'll make you a nice

00:46:55   icon, we'll build it for you, all you have to do is provide us the API's, and we'll get you all set

00:47:00   up. And of course, that came along with the search deal and all that. But like that was hustling,

00:47:04   right? That was admitting that you have something that you need something from them,

00:47:08   and hustling and convincing and selling yourself all that. And of course, once you're the biggest

00:47:14   company in the world, the natural inclination is to rest on your laurels and to assume that

00:47:18   everybody is going to approach the throne and kiss the ring. And you have to be careful about

00:47:21   that mentality creeping into especially such an important new platform. Yeah, and I hate to bring

00:47:28   out the Steve Jobs card, but I'm going to bring it out because I kind of feel like if there's a

00:47:34   lay person's understanding, they might, especially maybe even younger people for whom Steve Jobs is

00:47:39   more of a mythical figure, like Walt Disney was for us growing up. Yeah, you can see him on Twitter,

00:47:45   they talk about him like, oh, you talk about this like you talk about Jurassic Park. Yeah,

00:47:49   or the Jurassic era. I think maybe in the mythical viewing, he was so such a singular genius and so

00:47:58   arrogant and cocky that he exemplified Apple will just do it its own and force people to bend to

00:48:06   their will. But I think in practice, one of his many geniuses was the way that he could ingratiate

00:48:13   himself with partners when he felt like Apple needed it, right? Convince them. Yeah, I'm not

00:48:20   quite saying if Steve Jobs were still running Apple, I mean, so many things would be different.

00:48:23   But I do feel that at some point, not like two weeks ago or 10 days ago, but a time when they

00:48:31   could have gotten it done months ago, if he would have found out Netflix wasn't planning on a native

00:48:36   app, he would have got like Ted Sarandos on the on the phone said, Ted, let's get together and

00:48:43   get together and and sell him on doing vision OS and say, you know, and and I don't know what he'd

00:48:50   have to do to sweeten the pot. They didn't do another keynote for this, you know, giving

00:48:55   somebody a keynote spot, like the singular CEO and the iPhone introduction. Right, right. You know,

00:49:02   that was obviously one thing that Jobs could do to sweeten the pot. But there are even without

00:49:07   keynotes, there's things that he could do something to make them feel special that will put it in

00:49:12   commercials. I don't know what, you know, they'll do something to raise them up and say, this is a

00:49:19   big world. We've got TV Plus, we know that. But you know, we're not Netflix, we need, you know,

00:49:23   Netflix is the best and Netflix deserves to be on vision OS. Let's make this work. Work it out.

00:49:28   Yeah. Yeah. And you don't want to describe all arrogance to Apple, right? There's definitely

00:49:33   Netflix has pride. They're the biggest streaming platform. They're the truly the monster there and

00:49:38   innovative, initially innovative approach that that one right there won the market share.

00:49:45   And I'm guessing there's all kinds of like ego going on there. One thing I have learned

00:49:51   in covering business and talking to many dozens of millionaires and billionaires and CEOs

00:49:57   is the one thing that I think people still can't internalize when I talk to them about it or tell

00:50:04   them about it, they don't believe me. But how much of these decisions just come down to individual

00:50:08   egos? Like individual people just annoyed, right? Or they're just like irritated or they

00:50:15   don't like someone. And it's like crazy to think somebody would overlook or pass by potential

00:50:22   opportunity for millions or even hundreds of millions of dollars in income or revenue or

00:50:26   whatever, whatever you want, however you want to, to scope the opportunity. But they do all the time

00:50:34   for really petty, silly reasons. And sometimes those reasons are about conviction, right? And

00:50:41   about personal values and in the way that they see the world. And that's look, that's why they

00:50:47   lead the company or the way they founded the company. That's the responsibility that's

00:50:50   invested in them by board of by the board or the shareholders, et cetera. However,

00:50:56   a lot of times it's just petty, it's petty stuff. We were big, where the, you should have come to

00:51:01   us. You should have asked us and the controversy is true on the other side. So sometimes it's just

00:51:06   like petty silliness. Nobody answered an email or didn't feel like it or whatever. It's kind of,

00:51:11   kind of crazy. I think when the Apple TV launched, remember there was something that went down.

00:51:17   It wasn't with Netflix. I can't remember what it was. Do you remember? And it may be was quasi

00:51:24   non-public information, but there was like some stuff that went down with basically broadcasting

00:51:29   and like partners to, for the, for launching the Apple TV, like the obvious people that should have

00:51:34   been there or should be there. And I remember some stuff went down and it's just like, look,

00:51:38   so-and-so was mad. And then they had to send Eddie in and he fixed it or whatever, you know,

00:51:43   it's like, it's one of those things where a lot of these big time business decisions

00:51:47   get over logic by all of the people who are punditizing about it. They're out there writing

00:51:54   treatises on what the logic of this decision or that decision was at the business level and saying,

00:52:00   oh, they must want to do X, Y, or Z, or they're trying to use it for leverage for ABC. And it's

00:52:05   like, no, man, we just don't like each other. Well, I would say that the, the controversy is

00:52:11   also that Jobs understand that, right? He understood spitefulness, right? And he understood

00:52:16   the power of the billionaire CEO that the buck stops here. And I think he understood that the

00:52:21   opposite, which is that if he could just go direct to them and sell Ted Sarandos on, you guys need to

00:52:28   have a vision OS app that he could make it happen, right? He's like, cause he knows a strong CEO when

00:52:33   he saw one and could know that if Ted Sarandos, if every person lower, like in that sphere of Netflix,

00:52:41   just looked at like engineering and design allocation and the time that they can estimate

00:52:49   that would take, cause Netflix is a really strong engineering and design company. You know, they've

00:52:54   got rock solid infrastructure. Their apps are very good. I might disagree with some of the design

00:53:00   decisions they make, but they're all very thoughtful, right? It's, you know, they're Netflix

00:53:05   because they're good and that they could run this through a formula and conclude logically that it

00:53:14   doesn't make sense for Netflix to jump on vision OS on day one. But if Ted Sarandos came in and said,

00:53:19   Hey, I just talked to Steve, we got to get on this and we need it by Christmas. Then it happens,

00:53:25   right? No, there's a sprint. Everybody works on weekends. There's no questions. It just happens.

00:53:29   And like I was saying on the last episode of this show with Marco, like with YouTube,

00:53:33   I think I said it there, but it's super telling with YouTube. We're back with the original iPhone.

00:53:38   I know that Google and Apple had a bit of a falling out under Steve Jobs because of Android

00:53:43   and talking about spite and bitterness and stuff, but they were literally before there was an app

00:53:49   store. They had a built-in version of YouTube in the system software written by Apple with Google's

00:53:56   collaboration for the backend for three or four years before they spun it out of the OS and said,

00:54:02   okay, now you guys just make your own app. And I remember when they did that and what a-

00:54:06   Yeah, you remember why too, right?

00:54:07   Wait, I don't remember why exactly.

00:54:10   It was because they wanted to insert ads.

00:54:13   Yeah, that's it. That was it. Yeah, that was it. It was ads, right? Cause it got big, right?

00:54:17   Yeah.

00:54:17   It turned out a lot.

00:54:18   And all of a sudden it was a thing. It was like, oh, we need to be, we didn't have control over

00:54:22   it. Injecting ads in the video player and the video player at that time was just the system

00:54:27   video player.

00:54:27   Right. Yeah, that's exactly. Yeah. Now I do remember that. Right. Cause it, in 2007, 2008,

00:54:33   2009, it was just sort of a curiosity. Hey, you can actually watch YouTube on your phone. If you

00:54:38   have an iPhone, it's actually, it's actually kind of cool.

00:54:40   And YouTube was much smaller then. So it was like really kind of channel based and it was like,

00:54:43   oh, watch gadget coverage or watch. Yeah, exactly.

00:54:47   And then Google could obviously see which way the wind was blowing and figured out this was,

00:54:52   this is maybe where the majority of YouTube viewing was going to go.

00:54:56   Yup. And then like, wait a minute, we make money off of them.

00:55:01   All right. What else do you want to, do you have any other questions about the vision?

00:55:05   Can you unlock your phone?

00:55:07   Where? Ah, so I had, that's one of the things that fell on the cutting room floor. I

00:55:14   hopefully will get out. I'm thinking of doing it in just bullet list format.

00:55:18   Like yeah, yeah. Dude, just do a details.

00:55:20   Just yeah, just a details thing tomorrow. But one of them is, and it's incredibly frustrating.

00:55:26   When you want to do something on your phone and you know the fastest thing would be to do it and

00:55:33   you can see your phone or your watch pretty well through the vision pro. It doesn't look perfect.

00:55:40   There's a, you know, pictures of pixels on pixels thing to it, but it could work, but

00:55:47   it all falls apart because face ID doesn't work. And every time it just gets me every single time

00:55:54   I've been doing it. I've probably done it 50 times in the last six days where I've thought,

00:55:59   oh, I'll do blank on my phone. Or I see an alert on my phone or something like from an app that I

00:56:04   don't have on vision pro while I'm using it. Pick it up and nope, nothing. And I'm like, what? Why?

00:56:11   Because I'm so used to face. I'm so used to face ID working seamlessly.

00:56:14   Well, it's a testament, right? To how good face ID really is. And everybody was so worried about

00:56:19   it. And it's so automatic now. It's so automatic. You're like, what the hell?

00:56:23   It's so automatic that my brain or my instincts think it doesn't exist. It's as though my phone

00:56:30   just is unlocked and just swipe up and I'm in and every single time in vision pro. And

00:56:36   when you're sitting down and you're static, you just sort of forget that you don't forget.

00:56:41   You've got a weight on your face, but you just kind of forget that you don't look like you and

00:56:45   you've, you've got a big black mask on. So no, your phone does not unlock. I kind of hope that

00:56:52   this is, you know, so my second, my follow-up on that is that I hope that they're working on

00:56:58   something like the way that your watch can unlock your phone when you're wearing like a COVID face

00:57:05   mask. Right? Remember for a long time, you've been able to, maybe even since Apple watch came out,

00:57:10   you've been able to unlock your watch with your phone. So like when you wake up in the morning

00:57:16   and your watch is locked, you put your watch on your wrist. You don't have to type the code on

00:57:20   your wrist. You can just pick up your phone and do face ID there. And then you get a little

00:57:25   notification at the top. Your app, John's Apple watch was unlocked with iPhone. And now after the

00:57:32   whole 2020 thing where people started wearing face masks all the time, they added the feature that

00:57:39   works the other way where if you want, you can opt into if your Apple watch is on your wrist and has

00:57:47   been unlocked, then you can unlock your phone while you're wearing a mask, something like that.

00:57:52   - Well, Optic ID is their scanning method for determining it's you, right? And the Vision Pro,

00:57:59   it's there, it uses the cameras in the headset to recognize your iris and says, this is uniquely you.

00:58:05   And if that's true, it seems like your phone could say, hey, the headset is currently on

00:58:12   and authenticated by this user, so I will unlock, right?

00:58:16   - Yeah. So maybe it has to have occurred to people at Apple, right? Every single person

00:58:22   it's what we're talking about has probably been discussed ad nauseum. So there's probably

00:58:26   a simple reason that they didn't launch it yet and that's because they didn't finish.

00:58:30   - Yeah. But it has to be on their list. If they had the feature, I don't think they would quite

00:58:37   brag about it because they don't want to insinuate that there's anything you would need to do on your

00:58:43   phone while you're in Vision Pro, right? But the truth is-

00:58:46   - It would just work with quietly, you know?

00:58:48   - Yeah. Honestly, one thing I would like to do with it is I would like to use the keyboard,

00:58:54   to be honest. You know how, did you ever do that with Apple TV?

00:58:58   - Mm-hmm. Totally. All the time. Because I use a third-party remote. I don't even use Apples.

00:59:03   - I have a system that-

00:59:06   - So you can't talk to your remote or-

00:59:08   - Eaten.

00:59:09   - Yeah.

00:59:09   - Yeah. It's got its own thing over the top. I forget what it's called. It's,

00:59:13   anyhow, it doesn't matter. But it's an integrated system and it's got,

00:59:16   it has its own voice recognition, but it doesn't integrate with Apple TV directly that way.

00:59:20   So I always use my phone. And so if I'm typing or whatever, it's my phone.

00:59:24   - Yeah. I forget some of the contexts where I need to type on Apple TV. I guess sometimes

00:59:29   we'll like when it has-

00:59:30   - Passwords for sure, or-

00:59:31   - Well, passwords, so I usually can unlock from the key chain, but sometimes you can't.

00:59:36   And sometimes it's like your app forgot and wants you to go to a website and get a six-digit code

00:59:42   and type this in. And it's, oh, it's so much easier to just pick up your phone and it just

00:59:47   switches and you can just type on your phone. I would love to do that with Vision Pro because

00:59:52   typing on the virtual keyboard is so tedious. So that would be one, but that's a very good

01:00:01   question. What else? I guess that leads into the sort of crappy typing experience on Vision OS.

01:00:09   - Yeah. So the peek and poke, right? Like that's the main keyboard option is just the look and poke,

01:00:18   right? Or look and pinch.

01:00:20   - Right. Right. It's one of the few things in the system, and I mentioned it, but I'm not quite sure

01:00:27   how clear this is, right? And you remember this from June, like when we first tried it.

01:00:32   Everybody's first instinct when they try this thing is you're like, wow, this looks amazing.

01:00:37   And then you get, oh, and they're like, press the digital crown and it makes the home view

01:00:41   of apps appear right in front of you. And then you're like, oh, I want to launch Safari. And

01:00:46   you reach out and poke at the Safari in front of you. And your finger, it's close enough to you

01:00:51   that your finger goes right through it and nothing happens because that's not the interaction model.

01:00:56   You don't poke at Safari's icon in front of you. You just stare at it and do the little

01:01:03   index to thumb finger at your waist and it launches. And then you get, that just takes

01:01:08   minutes to get the hang of. You're just like very quickly, you're like, oh, you don't actually poke.

01:01:11   - Yeah, poking only seems right until you have to do it for more than five minutes. And you're like,

01:01:16   wait a minute, this is exhausting.

01:01:17   - But when you get the virtual keyboard, you can do it either way. You can actually poke

01:01:23   your index finger at the keys on the end. It does place the keyboard lower. It's down sort of by your

01:01:30   rib cage. So you're not poking out in front of you because then it would obscure the window you're

01:01:35   looking at, right? So the window that you're trying to type in is at eye level. And then a

01:01:41   keyboard appears where you look down a little bit, but you just sort of poke your fingers at it.

01:01:47   I always heard that's how Tolkien typed, that he just typed with his two index fingers.

01:01:52   And he wrote these massive books. I mean, God only knows how to got them all ready.

01:01:55   - God, the Silmarillion, two fingers at a time.

01:01:57   - I don't know. I don't know if that's true.

01:01:59   - Yeah.

01:01:59   - But you can also look at the keys and pinch them. But as far as I can tell, either way,

01:02:06   it's incredibly inefficient. I mean, it's really not much better than poking at the tiny little

01:02:13   pencil tip keys on the Apple Watch keyboard. It's just, I don't know what else they could do,

01:02:18   though. I mean, there's no...

01:02:21   - It seems like people were expecting the most common, I don't know either, right? I have played

01:02:27   with a variety of virtual keyboards over the years, given that the Quest keyboards, they have their

01:02:33   own approach. The Meta's approach is to use the remotes as pointers, right? And then the clicks

01:02:40   as type, the click of your trigger finger, which doesn't work too bad. Once again, it limits your

01:02:45   arm motion, right? You're sort of like just twisting your wrist and then you click to type

01:02:50   out. It's still not ideal, but it is relatively... It's okay, right? You could type 25 characters

01:02:59   and be okay, but you could never type 200. It would feel awful, right? I think the one thing

01:03:04   that I think most people or the paradigm that most people expected to see or were hoping to see,

01:03:10   if they were hoping anything at all, is the keyboard projected flat on the desktop

01:03:15   with the ability to tap on it as if you were typing on any other keyboard. And it seems like

01:03:21   that could theoretically be possible with Apple's hand occlusion, which is quite good. So it would

01:03:27   pass the keyboard through your hands and you could see what was going on. But I don't know how it

01:03:31   would work in practice, but I'm guessing that they've tried it internally. It seems like they

01:03:35   would have attempted. - And there's a bunch of features

01:03:40   when you're doing X, Y, or Z where you reach up and if your hand obscures it, they'll just make

01:03:46   your hand disappear, like if something's close enough to you. But it's super unsettling when

01:03:53   your hand disappears. I swear, it's like there's a part of your lizard brain that just says,

01:04:00   "Oh my God, I lost my hand." Right? It's like we're not hooked up, like millions of years

01:04:10   of evolution have not hooked up our brains to accept not seeing our hands when it's literally

01:04:16   in front of our face. And so I feel, and I also think there's just too many people who need to

01:04:22   look at the keyboard while they type. And I've even noticed, I mean, I obviously have written

01:04:30   a lot over, typed a lot over the years. I can type with my eyes closed or without looking at

01:04:36   the keyboard, but I realized this week that I do look at the keyboard. I just don't even realize

01:04:43   that I do. I don't need to, but I do sometimes. It's weird having the windows you're typing into

01:04:50   be so far away from the keyboard you're typing on. I mean, and there's other contexts where people

01:04:55   do this. You can hook up a keyboard to an Apple TV, or you can have a computer with a TV set,

01:05:03   or somehow have a display for your TV that's not even close to the keyboard. But with VisionOS,

01:05:10   it's just a little unusual. I don't know. They do a neat thing with the hardware keyboard.

01:05:16   I wrote my review where they put like an autocorrect bar above the physical keyboard,

01:05:21   which is cool. Yeah, that is neat. I mean, I don't know. Obviously,

01:05:26   smarter minds than ours have probably tried a variety of permutations inside Apple. And

01:05:31   what they came up with was just to use a Bluetooth keyboard, right? If you really want to go at it

01:05:36   typing. Yeah. And I don't know. I'm sure somewhere, I'm sure Apple's been working on it. Like you

01:05:42   said, I'm sure every company has been working on somehow a projected virtual keyboard on a tabletop

01:05:48   forever. But I think there's just so many problems with that. And you get, I mean,

01:05:53   we could go off on our own tangents about our love of mechanical keyboards or whatever.

01:06:00   But having no feedback at ever, right? To, you know, like a keyboard with that,

01:06:04   that makes the old butterfly keyboards from Apple seem like they're super clicky.

01:06:08   Yes. Seem like miracles of responsiveness. Yeah.

01:06:11   Wow. That is the clickiest ass keyboard I've ever used.

01:06:15   Yeah. Look, I have some used those laser projected keyboards before. They don't work very well,

01:06:21   but I've used them. I'm probably one of a handful of people that have ever tried those dumb things.

01:06:26   Have you? And it's interesting.

01:06:28   It does work, but the, the lack of feedback is a huge issue.

01:06:32   Have you ever, uh, you're probably too young. Do you remember the Atari 400?

01:06:39   No, no, I never had one. I didn't have a TV growing up, so I also didn't hold any console.

01:06:47   Well, Google it right now. There were two, there were two sibling computers from Atari. These,

01:06:52   these were like Apple two competitors, not game consoles. They have 400, the 400 and the 800 now.

01:06:59   Okay. Now like any good computer, I recognize these now. Yes. Now, like any good computer

01:07:05   company, the bigger number was the better computer. And so the Atari 800 is what you

01:07:10   think of as a mid eighties home computer. It was age. It had a keyboard, it had a bunch of

01:07:16   weird buttons. That's all right. 400 was cheaper. And the keyboard, I mean, how would you describe

01:07:22   this? Oh, you know what it is? It's the old style McDonald's kiosk. Yes. Yes. They're like,

01:07:30   Oh, big Mac. Hold on. Oh, no cheese. But they're constantly pressing with their thumbs, right?

01:07:40   Gripping the side of the register because it's so hard to get it to register all the key.

01:07:45   I will not, I will not only I'm making a note to myself, I will not only put this,

01:07:49   a link to this in the show notes. I will try to get this as the album art for this segment

01:07:54   of the conversation. So you could just, just look at the album art in your podcast pair. It's just,

01:08:00   they didn't click at all. You can't quite tell that they don't click, but it's,

01:08:05   and I re I didn't own one of these, but I remember seeing him in a store and all,

01:08:10   every one of my friends, even ones who weren't as enthusiastic, well, none of them were as

01:08:15   enthusiastic about computers, but even the least enthusiastic about computers, friends that I had,

01:08:24   everybody agreed. This was the stupidest keyboard ever made. Well, let's think about keyboards. It's

01:08:29   so weird. You can argue the refinements all you want, right? You can argue all kinds of different

01:08:37   things like, like switch clickiness and types of switches and butterfly versus not and throw and

01:08:44   all of that stuff. However, if you throw a keyboard in an average person, they can make a very valid

01:08:51   and honest assessment of whether or not it's easy for them to type on it. Because none of that

01:08:57   matters if it's not easy to type on it. Like you can research the most wonderful click and all that.

01:09:03   And if that's your bag, go at it, you know, have fun, right? Enjoy. But every individual person

01:09:10   can make a very sound assessment of their own response to that keeper. They're like, Oh,

01:09:15   I don't like this. Right? Do like my wife is, you know, hates the short throw keyboards does not

01:09:19   even really a huge fan of the longer throw new ones because she likes a deeper, a deeper press,

01:09:25   which I empathize with. I do too, but she also hates clicks. So it's like a weird thing. It's

01:09:31   a dichotomy, but every person gets sort of evaluate that that's why user interfaces like this.

01:09:35   I think people get to especially computer people get so defensive about, Oh, look at all the design

01:09:42   that went into X or look at all of the energy and behind the scenes effort that made X or Y or Z

01:09:48   happen. This is very similar to the whole era of short throw MacBook keyboards, right? The easily

01:09:54   jammable keyboards, slimmest ever most beautiful design, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It didn't

01:09:59   work. Right. People use it and it doesn't work. So something like keyboard like this,

01:10:04   I'm sure somebody in Atari was like, look, there's less moving parts in this than ever before.

01:10:09   There's less wear and tear. This is a miracle of design. And then somebody uses it the moment they

01:10:14   look at it and even look at it, they're like, it's not going to be easy to use.

01:10:17   - Yeah. That keyboard was clearly designed and sold by an accountant at Atari. Right?

01:10:25   - Right. Because one single panel of pressure sensitive membranes versus key individual keys,

01:10:32   and they're like, Oh my God, we can roll this off of a sheet. It'll cost us pennies on the dollar.

01:10:36   - Right. And it was probably waterproof. I don't know. Or at least it was waterproof.

01:10:40   If you drop water between the keys, cause there's plastic membrane covering all of them.

01:10:44   - It was probably selling point. Like I mean,

01:10:47   - What flat keyboards that do work, I guess the iPad is a good example. Right. And the phone,

01:10:53   but even there because it's software, not just projected, you get the popovers to tell you which

01:10:59   keys you're pressing. So it could work. I don't know. I don't know. I'm sure Apple has thought

01:11:04   of other ideas, but I'm not surprised that the keyboard in the air from VisionOS is not great

01:11:11   to type on. And again, if you just need to enter like a B right there, or I don't know,

01:11:17   up to 10 characters. - Yeah. Or a six digit passcode or something like that.

01:11:21   - Oh yeah. And for example, I think when it first boots up, just like the other devices,

01:11:27   you can't use optic ID the first time after a cold boot, you have to type in your six digit passcode.

01:11:33   So typing a passcode six, or even if you set it to eight digits or whatever, to be more secure,

01:11:38   that's not too bad. But actually writing, or even just having a messages chat where you're,

01:11:46   maybe you're writing brief sentences, but you're going back and forth, it's not gonna fly.

01:11:51   What else? Cameras. I didn't really talk about the cameras in my review.

01:11:57   - Are you talking about in terms of recording? - Yeah, recording, like shooting.

01:12:02   - Yeah, okay. Gotcha. - And that was one of the things that made it,

01:12:06   that I had to cut. Well, I didn't have to cut, but I mean, I gotta draw the line somewhere.

01:12:11   But it is unusual because there's only two hardware buttons on the Vision Pro, right? There's

01:12:16   the digital crown, which spins and you'd spin it mostly to go in and out of reality. And if you

01:12:23   just adjust your eye a little bit, when you start spinning it and it adjusts the immersive

01:12:30   environment you have currently selected, and right next to it is a volume indicator. And if you just

01:12:36   look at the volume indicator instead, then you're spinning the volume. Very nice. Two things. One,

01:12:42   on the left is your visual immersiveness and on the right is volume, spinning the crown. Tap the

01:12:49   crown, it takes you to what they, it's not the home screen, it's the home view because it always

01:12:56   is super important. You know, your apps don't disappear. On the iPhone, you hit home, you go

01:13:01   home and your app disappears and you go to the home screen. In Vision OS, the home view is like

01:13:08   a temporary HUD that appears in front of whatever you're doing at any time. That's a single tap.

01:13:14   And a long tap on the digital, this is all through the digital crown, long tap re-centers your current

01:13:20   view. So if you've turned to the side, if you were previously laying in bed and now you're sitting up

01:13:28   in bed and all your windows are now in the wrong position, just long press it where you want them

01:13:33   to be centered, where your current gaze is and it goes there. So for the most part, the only button

01:13:38   I ever touch on the thing is the crown. I tap it, I long press it and I spin it. The other button,

01:13:45   which they just called the top button, I love it. I wonder, I always wonder how much time and I,

01:13:53   you know, I think they probably spend a lot of time. Like, should they give it a clever name?

01:13:57   - Dozens of names and somebody's like, just call it the top button.

01:14:00   - Yeah. On the iPhone, it's just the side button. So the top button is hardly ever used.

01:14:09   The most common use case I've had for it is taking screenshots. You take a screenshot by pressing

01:14:14   both buttons and releasing at the same time. But if you just single press it, it's like a capture

01:14:19   button. That is my guess as to if there was a specific name for the top button, they were

01:14:26   gonna call it the capture button, which some people like, I forget who, if it was Gurman or somebody

01:14:31   else who's rumored that the iPhone 16 next year is going to have a quote unquote capture button.

01:14:38   But you single tap it and it takes you into capture mode. So camera is not an app in Vision

01:14:47   OS. There is no camera app. And I checked with developer friends, there are no APIs to access

01:14:54   the camera. So you can't make a camera app. I mean, maybe someday, but as of right now,

01:15:00   you couldn't have Halide for Vision OS because there are no APIs for the camera.

01:15:05   And I believe that that's entirely about privacy and not wanting to avoid the,

01:15:12   like when, I guess it was like what, 10, 12 years ago, whenever Google Glass came out

01:15:21   and there was this sort of society wide, well, not all of society, but the sort of society who might

01:15:29   encounter a Google Glassware in person. This idea that, hey, this is creepy that these people have

01:15:36   a camera on their face and they may or may not be recording you or taking your photo and you don't

01:15:41   even know what they're doing. And I remember it was a thing. I mean, I'm sure you remember too,

01:15:46   like in San Francisco in particular, there were bars that put up signs like no Google Glass.

01:15:51   - Right. Yep. And I think-

01:15:54   - One of our reporters famously got kind of accosted over it, but back when he was at a

01:15:59   previous publication, but still, yeah. It was definitely a thing, a social thing that I think

01:16:04   Apple wanted to dodge very, very crisply as they're trying to roll this thing out. They didn't want

01:16:09   to, you were going to have to tackle how to handle those social norms and how to talk about that kind

01:16:15   of thing. But if you're going to do that, you should do these things one at a time. Right?

01:16:19   - Right.

01:16:19   - Which I think like Meta is doing it very cleverly with the Ray-Bans thing. They have

01:16:25   these Meta glasses. They do record, but they don't do squat else right now. But they have these

01:16:31   internal AI features that they've been testing and playing around with. And you know that, oh,

01:16:35   you can do all kinds of other assistant things with them. But right now, all they do is their

01:16:40   camera glasses. And Snap broke that ground for them to Snap's credit. And like everybody kind

01:16:44   of goes, oh yeah, those are those glasses cameras and probably some Google Glass stuff woven in

01:16:50   there. Right? But like, I think that's not a battle that Apple wanted to tackle with this phase

01:16:56   of this thing. They got so many other things to convince people up with this.

01:16:59   - Yeah. What they've done, so by making it sort of a system level thing is, and again,

01:17:05   it's very hard for me to, I guess I got to stand in front of the mirror and play with it more to

01:17:10   see it because you can't see what other people see. But what I've seen in Apple's own media demos to

01:17:17   me is that when you Snap a photo using the camera button, so you hit it once to go to capture mode.

01:17:25   And then there's just a simple two-way segmented controller, video or still, or I guess photo,

01:17:32   it says. And then you can just stare at whichever mode you want, photo or video, and do a finger

01:17:38   tap and it turns yellow. And it does have the camera app UI aesthetic with the sort of etched

01:17:46   Leica style version of San Francisco as the font. But it's really super simple. All you,

01:17:53   there's only two modes are photo and video. It only shoots spatial photos and spatial videos.

01:17:59   There's no other way to shoot. And if you're taking a still photo, then to shoot it, you

01:18:06   select photo in the mode and then you tap the button again and it takes a still photo.

01:18:11   And what happens to anybody who's looking at you is that the screen on the front of your Vision Pro

01:18:17   flashes white, like a flash. If you see a white flash while they're tapping a physical button

01:18:27   on top, they can't. And I think that is part of the part of it, the bigger sign, because nobody,

01:18:34   a lay person has no idea what the white flash means, but they do know that you're pressing

01:18:39   a button right above your eye, right up right above your left eye, which kind of looks like

01:18:44   snapping the shutter button of a camera, right? I mean, there's the physical press of the button

01:18:49   is the bigger hint, you know, as to what you're doing. And then when you shoot a video,

01:18:55   I forget what it shows, but it's some sort of like a Cylon animation that's white that goes back and

01:19:01   forth across the visor to show that you are recording a video at this time. So there is some

01:19:11   visual indication, but it's because it's completely abstract. I'm not quite sure how like a lay person

01:19:17   out on the street would know, oh, this creep with the weird goggles is shooting a video because his

01:19:22   visor is showing a white light, but they do traveling back and forth, but they do show

01:19:28   something. Right. And, but the bigger thing is that you have to press this physical button.

01:19:32   You can't just like the rest. Your hands gotta be up at the level of your eyes and like doing

01:19:37   the thing. Yeah. Much in the same motion as you'd have with a camera, not an iPhone,

01:19:42   but a real Tesla or whatever. Yeah. So the photos and videos, they're not quite what I expected.

01:19:51   It's weird because they so perfectly match your first person perspective within the headset.

01:19:58   When you replay them in the headset, it's, it really is like being there. It's way more like

01:20:07   being there than when you look at the spatial videos that you have shot over the last two or

01:20:12   three months on your iPhone 15, because it's, it's like a one-to-one match of what you would see

01:20:18   anyway. And so if you sit in a seat and you stay perfectly still, and you're looking at, say your

01:20:26   living room with vision pro on your face, and then you go into capture mode and shoot either a still

01:20:35   or a video and you don't move at all. And then you look at that still go to the photos app and open

01:20:42   up that still, and you still haven't moved. It looks like you're looking at reality because it's

01:20:48   exactly what you would see if you weren't looking at a photo. Right. And then if you move your head,

01:20:54   even just a little, it is like, Whoa, what's wrong. This device is broken because all of a

01:20:59   sudden it doesn't move or it doesn't move to match your head. Right. It's, it's really weird in the

01:21:06   moment to go back and review the photo because it just, it doesn't look like you're looking at a

01:21:10   photo or a video. It just looks like you're, it looks like you're looking at a replay of what you

01:21:15   just did. That is interesting because the FOVs match precisely and you've got a stereoscopic

01:21:24   capture mode and a stereoscopic display mode. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I don't know. I'm

01:21:29   not quite sure what to make of it. And I still think like when I wrote about the spatial video

01:21:33   experience shooting with iPhone, I think it's so hard to judge in the moment because I think all

01:21:37   of these things, their true utility is really only going to happen when they're old enough to have

01:21:44   any kind of nostalgic value. Right. Right. Like test shots in the moment or whatever,

01:21:49   like it just happened. I just saw it happen. But it's, Oh, this, you know, my kid's 14 and they

01:21:54   were six in this picture. That's a lot different thing. But it, but it doesn't because the,

01:22:00   the perspective and you can't zoom in or zoom out. It's, it's just capturing the first person

01:22:06   perspective that you naturally see with the field of view that you're supposed to have

01:22:10   while doing pass through video. So it's not, it's not something you'd really want to use

01:22:19   as a camera. Right. Like I kind of, and I almost. I always had a hard time envisioning that. I mean,

01:22:26   I know that they wanted to build this and they needed to build the functionality to shoot spatial

01:22:30   video in which makes total sense. I just am not going to run and grab that headset and put it on

01:22:37   to take spatial video, walk around the house. I just don't see it. I could be wrong. Mine comes

01:22:42   in a couple of weeks. We'll see, maybe it'll happen. I mean, it'll certainly happen when

01:22:46   I'm testing it. Oh, do it on purpose. Right. Because I'm me. Right. But are you telling the

01:22:52   average person that they're going to say, Oh my God, we're going to do the blowing out of the

01:22:56   candles now. Hold on. Let me go get my headset. Yeah. Yeah. With your iPhone, I guess. Yeah.

01:23:02   There's something interesting. There's like a mismatch between the social nature of photos,

01:23:09   how we all like show people photos on our phone or the slide shows where that we send to each other,

01:23:16   like the daily slide show, which by the way, is probably one of the best acting Apple features

01:23:21   I've seen built in a decade as far as photos go. Anyway, those daily slide shows that it delivers

01:23:27   you, that it auto creates you incredible work by that team. So whoever's working on that good job,

01:23:32   because those things hit you right in the fields, man. Oh my God. They're sometimes

01:23:38   they're devastating. I mean, in a good way, hopefully. And years into that feature,

01:23:44   I still, at this point I'm like, well, they surely they've run out of photos that are going to give

01:23:48   me the fields from my library and I'm going to start getting reruns and no, they just dredging

01:23:54   up these pictures of my son when he was three years old in 2007. Oh my God. I don't even

01:24:01   remember that trip to the slide show of your son. And then in the background, it's a father and son,

01:24:07   but I can't see if it's just something you're like, Oh my God, I'm dying over here. Anyhow,

01:24:11   long story short, like those kinds of experiences I think are one of those things where you're

01:24:16   sharing it with somebody or you send it to your wife or you send it to a group of friends because

01:24:20   they were on that trip or whatever. And it's just the vision pro, which you mentioned in your

01:24:25   review, which I think other people did as well. It is inherently an isolating experience, right?

01:24:30   To some degree. Now the pass through attempts to mitigate that by showing you the world around you.

01:24:35   And of course the eyesight is for the other people so that they don't feel isolated from you,

01:24:40   even though you have it on, but it's inherently a singular solo experience for now until they figure

01:24:48   out the interconnectivity of it all more or make it so that opening multiple of these in a household

01:24:53   is more likely AKA it's a lot cheaper and a lot lighter, but that's kind of where the taking

01:24:58   photos and looking at that kind of mismatches with the reality of how we actually do those things.

01:25:04   IRL. Whereas that kind of feature that, that look back feature, a slideshow feature

01:25:09   that matches exactly how we consume photos. It hits us personally. And then we're able to share

01:25:15   with others in the same state that we look at it. Cause it's like, if you send a spatial video that

01:25:20   you shot to somebody they're like, cool, this is a regular video shot, just maybe slightly lower

01:25:24   resolution. Whereas you looking at it, at it in your vision pro, you're like, no, it's really

01:25:29   cool. Look, you can do all this. And then, but right now that's a solo isolated experience.

01:25:35   Trenton Larkin Yeah. I sort of feel like I was thrown off with my expectations where

01:25:40   I remember back in June when they announced this thinking, I wasn't alone. I think probably half

01:25:46   the people watching the keynote all had the same thought at some point towards the end of the

01:25:50   vision pro segment, which was, Oh, wouldn't it be cool if the next iPhone could shoot video like

01:25:54   that? Right. I mean, it's kind of obvious that if it wasn't coordinated to come two or three months

01:26:01   later with the iPhone 15, that it would come with the iPhone 16. And it did. And it was pretty cool.

01:26:08   It is pretty cool. I'm glad I shot, I've shot some over the last few months, especially at family

01:26:13   of things with kids. But I've been thinking the whole time that shooting spatial video with the

01:26:20   phone is the B team spatial video. Cause it's with the phone and the lenses are too close to

01:26:26   each other. And the one lens is really only a 0.5 with a small sensor and blah, blah, blah. So it's

01:26:33   only 10 ADP and it's only 30 frames per second. And it's the sort of graininess cause they've

01:26:41   got to do this tight sensor crop on the ultra wide to get an image like the 1.5 or the 1.0,

01:26:47   blah, blah, blah. And boy, when we get the vision pro, however goofy it'll be to shoot video while

01:26:53   you're wearing this in a social situation, that'll be the really good spatial video.

01:26:58   And I kind of think, no, I actually don't think the spatial video is better. I think it is more

01:27:04   personal and it is more, it is certainly more first person perspective, but I don't think

01:27:10   it's better. And I think the only time I'll end up using it is when I happen to be already using

01:27:18   vision pro and something serendipitous happens. Oh my God, I got to get a picture of that guy.

01:27:22   Guy comes in, like I'm on the airplane. I put the vision pro on to set up and watch a movie

01:27:29   or something like that. And the guy next to me is taking his shoes off, picking his toes. And I'm

01:27:32   like, I got to get a picture of this pig. I can't imagine like the scenario they showed at WWDC where

01:27:41   the dad at the birthday party goes to get the vision pro and puts it on to shoot the birthday

01:27:46   cake. I can't see not using your phone for that. Even if it is slightly more three-dimensional

01:27:52   shooting from the vision pro because the cameras are eye width apart instead of right next to each

01:27:57   other. I don't think the quality is even better, let alone whatever weirdness people might feel

01:28:03   about being the dad at the party who puts a $3,500 headset on. I don't even think it gets that far.

01:28:09   I think even somebody who's not the least bit embarrassed about wearing it in front of a party

01:28:14   full of kids and other parents. This is a distinct benefit from that. Even if you're not the least

01:28:19   bit embarrassed or self-conscious about it, I still don't think you would do it, but we shall see.

01:28:24   If you want to long-term convince people to keep doing this, to keep shooting spatial video,

01:28:30   I think, and maybe this is just an iOS 18 thing, but you really need a display mode on the phone

01:28:37   that has parallax, right? You need to like be able to play back the video, tilt your phone,

01:28:42   and use the accelerometer in the phone and the depth information to basically give you a 3D-ish

01:28:48   video right on your phone. And it's possible. You can do it. I've seen it. I actually saw it happen

01:28:53   back when they first introduced the depth camera. There were some developers that hacked together

01:28:57   a version of that back then. So I'm sure Apple can do it now, first party in a much crisper fashion.

01:29:03   But I think it's a way to tell people this is a special kind of video. It does a cool thing. And

01:29:10   it's an advertisement for Vision Pro because they're like, "What if you wanted to see this

01:29:13   in real 3D? Like you wanted to step into the photo, go watch it on your $3,500 TV." So I think

01:29:20   it's, I think that's for me, bang for your buck, I think that will be coming, but it needs to happen.

01:29:26   - All right, let me take a break here. I'll thank our second sponsor of the show. And it is our

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01:30:57   phone browsers, tablet browsers as well. Safari on your iPhone. You can just design your entire

01:31:03   Squarespace site from soup to nuts right there on your phone. If you're like a phone first person,

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01:31:14   it's almost too good to be true for what you can do in a phone web browser. Why does Squarespace

01:31:20   keep sponsoring the talk show? Because people who listen to the show keep signing up for Squarespace.

01:31:25   So keep doing it. If you need a website or someone comes to you and says, "Hey, nerd,

01:31:30   what do I do to get a website?" Send them to Squarespace. Give them my URL. They'll know

01:31:34   they came here. Even if the person who came to you for help doesn't even know who I am,

01:31:38   go to squarespace.com/talkshow. Squarespace.com/talkshow. And by using that code and

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01:32:02   to squarespace.com/talkshow. So my gimmick, or I always say gimmick, but my framework for my review

01:32:12   was sort of shamelessly playing off Steve Jobs' "Three Things in One," because I really see this

01:32:18   as three things in one. There's this 1.0 hardware. There's the platform for spatial computing, where

01:32:26   you've got windows, you got notes, you got your mail, you got your messages, you got Safari,

01:32:31   you can make a new Safari window, you could have two windows, each of them with multiple tabs.

01:32:35   You can have a thing in the background. Who knows what other apps people are going to come out with,

01:32:39   but you can sit there and do your computing in VisionOS. It is super, super credible.

01:32:46   Credible meaning you can actually do it today. If you can work in iPad today, if you can get your

01:32:51   work done in iPad, on an iPad, in iPadOS, you can definitely get the same work done in VisionOS,

01:32:58   and I think be a lot more productive or feel mentally freer because you can spread out more

01:33:05   and have your app side by side. You don't have the single rectangle constraint where

01:33:10   you have to visualize that the other windows are left, right, top, or bottom, wherever they are,

01:33:17   which I grew used to. I spent many years working iPad first, anytime I was away from my desk.

01:33:23   And you're going to go used to it, like, "Oh, I know this stuff is over there."

01:33:26   You're invisible, but hanging out over there. And I know this stuff is invisible hanging out

01:33:30   over there, and I can quickly swipe to it. But with this, there's no swiping. They're just hanging

01:33:35   in there and always accessible. So it's even less cognitive load to remember the spatial relationship.

01:33:41   Cognitive load is the phrase I was looking for. That's exactly it. I think that iPad

01:33:47   productivity fans in particular are really going to love and sing the praises of VisionOS.

01:33:54   I like it, but I also at best like iPadOS, right? And then the third leg of my review,

01:34:03   and this to me is where the product is simply spectacular, is as an entertainment device to watch

01:34:09   movies and these 3D immersive things. And I've tinkered around with some games, but not a ton.

01:34:15   I just ran out of time and I'm just, I figured somebody else will cover the gaming part for today.

01:34:21   But the movie watching experience, I just can't let this podcast go by. I guess it's supposed to

01:34:30   be my job to put into words, hard to describe things. Isn't that so funny? Sometimes you just,

01:34:37   the words are, it's a weird thing because you know what the right words may be, but you also end up in

01:34:47   this place where you're like, but that seems too orderly. Those words in that order seem so obvious.

01:34:53   My job is not just to bring the words, it's also to put it in a unique way, unique order, right?

01:34:59   And you get kind of stymied by this, but sometimes the orderly sense, the orderly

01:35:04   order of the words is the right order. I just don't know how to convey in words how big

01:35:13   the movies, how legitimately like IMAX with an X, not with the Apple way, like a big IMAX movie

01:35:23   screen in front of you, big, like you just, it seems impossible that you can do this. And the

01:35:29   regular viewing of regular videos, like when you bust out a YouTube video from Safari into a

01:35:37   standalone video player in a window, or the way that the videos look when you play them from all

01:35:43   of these iPad apps like Peacock and Paramount plus, et cetera, are scaled to the size of your

01:35:51   physical environment. So you can make it as big as your living room wall, however big that is,

01:35:57   but that's the biggest it can get it because that's the context of the room you're in,

01:36:01   right? And that is huge. And like I wrote in my review, watching football on Sunday, watching the

01:36:08   first half of the one game in Vision Pro in my living room where I have a 77 inch OLED TV that

01:36:14   I spent $5,000 on a couple of years ago, expensive TV that at 77, I know it's not the biggest TV you

01:36:22   can get, but at the time it was the biggest OLED TV you can get. It's pretty, 77 inches is pretty

01:36:26   big, but to be able to watch this football game in a window that looked like four of them arranged in

01:36:36   a quadrant, maybe even bigger, I guess, even bigger than four of my 77 inch TVs, and then switch back

01:36:43   to watching on TV because my wife came downstairs and was going to watch with me and I wanted to be

01:36:47   a real human being and take this. Yeah, for an afternoon, while I'm in this crunch time where

01:36:55   she's really graciously tolerated an enormous amount of face time with me while I was wearing

01:37:02   the thing. Not uppercase face time, but just actual human being face time. So I took it off

01:37:08   and I was like, "Oh God, I'm not going to..." I didn't complain to her at the time because I

01:37:12   didn't want it, you know, she'd be like, "Oh, just put the damn thing back on." I really wanted to

01:37:16   watch these games with her, but I was sitting there thinking, "Oh my God, my TV is so small."

01:37:21   And that's the normal Paramount+ iPad app that I can only make the video look as big as my living

01:37:30   room wall. But that's big, the size of my living room wall, and that alone makes my 77 inch TV

01:37:38   look too small. But when you're in Apple's TV app and you go into their virtual theater mode,

01:37:45   it looks immense. You get two adjustments, you can go front row, middle row, back row,

01:37:53   and you can go floor level or balcony level. And I think, I actually don't know this, I

01:37:59   realized that while I was just saying that, I'm not quite sure if you can fake being front row

01:38:08   from the balcony, which really wouldn't be able to exist in a real theater, but I think that they let

01:38:12   you because why not? Why not give you an impossible balcony? But it's so big. Like when you sit in the

01:38:20   front row, the screen is... it's not like being in a bad front row movie seat, like when you go

01:38:26   to the movie theater. Is it more like IMAX? Because remember, even in the front row in IMAX,

01:38:32   you feel enveloped, but you're not craning because the IMAX screens, the real IMAXes,

01:38:38   they're like 75 feet from the front row, right? Like the actual surface.

01:38:42   JS - Yeah, it's a little more like that where it's like a generous theater that didn't put front row

01:38:47   seats neck craningly close, right? It's not painful.

01:38:51   JS - They don't have those floor seats that are right down there in the front. It's the front row

01:38:55   of the right above the handicap seats or whatever.

01:38:57   JS - Right. You know, I don't know. I think everybody's been stuck with like front row left

01:39:03   seats for a blockbuster movie. And you know, there's always somebody in the group or the

01:39:09   couple who's to blame for being a little late to the theater. Those dirty looks you get where

01:39:15   you're like two hours at this perspective. JS - My wife and I have definitely had discussions

01:39:19   where we're going to big opening night Marvel movies for the kids and I didn't buy the tickets.

01:39:25   And I'm like, I show up and we sit down and I'm like, so I'm just curious who chose the back row?

01:39:30   I'm just curious. Like kids, you know, we can't hear anything. We're out of the sound pocket,

01:39:35   you know, and you go on a diatribe about 3D sound.

01:39:38   JS - So it's it their virtual front row seat is like a front row seat.

01:39:43   JS - Always the best seat in the house.

01:39:44   JS - You might plausibly want. It defaults to floor middle, which I guess is their guess as to the

01:39:51   best for most people. I just can't convey how impossibly big the movie screen seems.

01:39:59   And you I know that they are little postage size screens in front of my eyeballs. And I

01:40:06   don't understand how in most of these other apps, I can only make video look 15 feet diagonal,

01:40:16   20 feet diagonal. It's all FOV, right? It's all I think obviously there's been you noticed it a

01:40:23   little bit. Some other reviews notice some fringing at the edges and some vignetting and things,

01:40:27   which is understandable given how broad the FOV is. But I think given the amount of resolution

01:40:34   that they have and how well that they have handled to the degree that they can, the ability to

01:40:40   display things edge to edge on those screens and like have them have it be viable. That's where

01:40:46   you get that extra because remember, on a stand on an HMD before this, but on a head mounted display

01:40:52   before the vision pro, including up to the most recent additions, you're using a very small patch

01:40:57   of the overall lens, because they could only the resolution is limited. And the foveation,

01:41:04   the edge to edge sharpness of it is tough, because you have to correct for all that aberration and

01:41:09   correct for all the curvature and all of that. And the processing power, this isn't there to do it.

01:41:14   And so you end up with the actually a much smaller angle of your eye of your vision.

01:41:19   That's actually able to be used. That's why you can see the headset around your eyes,

01:41:23   right? Like when you look when you're in there, and that is much lower to a much

01:41:27   lesser degree on the vision pro. Yeah, it's just incredible. But the catch is it is completely

01:41:35   isolated, right? And I don't even think I, you know, I didn't delve into this in my review,

01:41:40   but I know what everybody's thinking in the same way that everybody was thinking with the virtual

01:41:44   keyboard. Well, what about projecting a keyboard on the table? Everybody is thinking, Well, what if

01:41:49   me and my wife, or me and my spouse and my kids, we all get vision headsets, maybe three years down

01:41:56   the road when they're $1,000, or $1,500. And all three of us can have one on at the same time.

01:42:04   And we could use share play to watch the same movie at the same time. Maybe, you know, maybe,

01:42:11   maybe even your avatar is sitting next to you in the theater, whatever. Yeah, maybe. And yeah,

01:42:16   your persona is next to you. And you'll do that. That might be a thing. I mean, it's such an

01:42:22   obvious idea, right? There's every single person who's thinking about this problem of,

01:42:26   okay, this is an amazing movie watching experience, but it's completely isolated. How do you make it

01:42:32   social? It will give everybody a headset, right? And surely Tim Cook would be in favor of this too,

01:42:38   right? Oh, yes. One per person, not one per household. Right. Let's, you know, Tim,

01:42:46   we want to invest some R&D in a feature that would inspire families to buy a vision headset for

01:42:52   everybody in the family. I don't think that's a hard sell. Unlimited budget. I don't think you're

01:42:58   gonna have a hard sell with Tim on that. But is that actually sociable when you're sitting on,

01:43:05   in the real world, sitting on a couch next to your sweetheart? I don't think it is. I don't think it

01:43:12   is. I do think it is. Your son is off to college. If you want to watch a movie with him, you fire it

01:43:19   up. You both sit down, you watch Avatar together. He's a hundred miles away, 80 miles away. You're

01:43:25   in your living room, but you feel like you're there together. That's when it's social. Otherwise,

01:43:30   you should not be wearing, just take them off, sit on the couch together.

01:43:34   Right. And I do think that's insurmountable. I think it's part of human nature. Then if you are

01:43:41   on the couch with your sweetheart, or even a friend, even just a friend, a pal to watch

01:43:48   the game together, you want to be watching the same screen, not a simulation of the same screen

01:43:55   and two headsets. But again, you're right. You want to maximize the sociability of whatever it

01:44:00   is that's at your opportunity. And if the two of you are in the same room, clearly the most social

01:44:06   thing is to not have anything on your frigging face and just be together. But like you said,

01:44:12   perfect example, my son off in college in Boston, new season of Loki comes out or something like

01:44:18   that, that we would like to watch together. We could set up a shared time and do it. Then I could

01:44:24   see it being phenomenal. And that would be an improvement over what is available in the current

01:44:29   day. But I think that's, that's like the crux of it, right? You have to look, if you look at it

01:44:35   through the lens of like, why is this better than sitting on the couch next to somebody and

01:44:40   watching it? The very simple answer is it's not don't, don't, don't treat it as if it is right.

01:44:45   It's what does it do this different? What does it do this impossible? Now? Those are the things

01:44:50   it was built for. You don't, extremists can go into it going, I'm going to take this to the

01:44:57   extreme and I'm going to use it for everything. And I'm going to see, well, why is this better

01:45:00   than next? Well, the answer for a lot of those things is probably going to be, it's not, it's

01:45:04   not better than doing that. Yeah. And as much as I said, Oh my God, my 77 inch TV looks tiny.

01:45:11   And five minutes later, I forgot about that. You get used to anything. I've gotten immersed in

01:45:15   movies, watching on an iPad on an airplane before. I do remember John, we used to get immersed

01:45:20   watching on 24 inch tube TVs. It felt like the biggest cinematic experience we're watching.

01:45:27   Across the room. Yeah, exactly. You're watching Die Hard on that. You're just like, Oh my God,

01:45:32   what's next? And it's like this, this trinitron curved TV we're watching. So yeah, that's the

01:45:39   power of movies, I guess. One of my favorite stories from my childhood was my friend, Joey,

01:45:44   his dad was a lawyer. And I guess it was probably around 1982 or three or so. Empire Strikes Back

01:45:54   came out in 1980. And so this would have been like around our ninth or 10th birthday. And Joey's dad

01:46:02   was a lawyer, like a criminal lawyer, and he knew some people. And this is before good movies were

01:46:09   available to purchase on VHS. Okay. And Joey had a sleepover birthday party. And his dad said he had

01:46:16   a big surprise for us. And he had a totally illegal copy of the Empire Strikes Back on VHS. But

01:46:25   it was the full aspect ratio 2.35 to one, but it wasn't letterboxed. It was squished into a four to

01:46:37   three frame. Nice. Now where he got this, who would ever make this this way? I don't know.

01:46:44   And we didn't even know none of us had ever heard of the word letterboxing at the time.

01:46:49   Even though I was a nerd, obviously at the time, I'd never really thought about aspect ratios,

01:46:57   right? I'd just never really considered the fact that my TV had a different aspect ratio than movie

01:47:04   theaters and that Star Wars movies were different. It was so squished, but we were so excited because

01:47:11   it was an impossibility to watch a Star Wars movie at home. And the weirdest thing is as squished as

01:47:17   it was, 10 minutes in, yeah, we got used to it. And I just remember we spent like 10 minutes like,

01:47:24   "Where did you get this? Where did you get this?" He wouldn't tell us. He wouldn't explain it. He's

01:47:27   like, "Just enjoy some popcorn, have some soda. The pizza will be here in 10 minutes. I'll bring

01:47:31   it down." And we're all like, "Why is it so squished? Why is it squished? This looks weird.

01:47:36   What's going on?" And then 10 minutes in, we just watched it for the next two hours and we're

01:47:40   excited. Yeah. I mean, that's the power of movies, man. And human adaptability.

01:47:48   Right. So no, the best way to watch a movie is I think right now that you can get in your home is

01:47:55   to go pre-order a Vision Pro right now. There's no way to watch a movie better right now that you

01:48:02   could buy. But the best way to watch a movie with people you know is still going to be to watch it

01:48:07   on your TV. Or in a movie theater. Well, or in a movie, yeah. In a shared space.

01:48:13   In a shared experience. Yeah. Hey, did you... This is a question I had about the movies,

01:48:17   because the clip that I was most impressed by and most excited about was a native

01:48:24   3D movie being displayed in native 3D on the Vision Pro and that was Avatar.

01:48:30   Yeah. Right. So Avatar specifically, I just, I love Jim Cameron. I love all of his movies.

01:48:34   I don't care what you think about Avatar. I love the Papyrus. I love all of it.

01:48:37   I'm fine with the whole thing. However, the 3D on 3D, like the shot for 3D, which Jim Cameron

01:48:45   actually shoots for 3D, not just post processes or thinks about it in hindsight or does it

01:48:50   begrudgingly, he actually treats it as a first party medium. So the shot for 3D experience

01:48:55   on the Vision Pro, did you get a chance to try any of those kinds of movies?

01:48:58   I watched like 10 minutes of Avatar Way of Water, which I haven't seen yet, which because my,

01:49:06   a, my wife is not an Avatar fan and I am... It's not my favorite Jim Cameron movie, but I definitely

01:49:14   want to watch it, but I've literally been saving it for this device. But in the process of this

01:49:21   concentrated six day review period, I've never had, there was never a point where I had three

01:49:26   hours to watch the whole movie. Yeah. It's just a light lift. I knew I wanted to try it before I

01:49:31   wrote my review. So I just fired it up and found a scene like 45 minutes, just, I have no idea what

01:49:38   was going on in the scene, but I watched five or 10 minutes of it in there in the fake Disney,

01:49:45   Hollywood theater. And it's really good, I think. And I hate 3D theatrical movies. I hate them.

01:49:55   Hate them. The only, I forget the last one I watched. I think the last one I watched was Up,

01:50:01   where, and it was, you know, when it was new and in the theater, that's a while ago,

01:50:05   but we went and we went to the 3D one because it was the only one we could get tickets for.

01:50:10   And I know, I mean, I don't, it's not like I can't watch them. And I remember coming out of it

01:50:14   with my wife and son. And I remember thinking like, I don't remember the second half of that

01:50:20   movie. And I've read about it since. There is like a cognitive thing where there's a certain

01:50:26   aspect of 3D movies where you're, you've got like sunglasses on in a movie theater to get

01:50:35   that effect, you know, and to separate the two channels. And it like, it doesn't give me a

01:50:39   headache, but it gives me like a pressure in my forehead. And like when I'm at Disney World and

01:50:47   we go on one of the attractions that has like a 10 minute 3D movie and there's a bunch of them.

01:50:54   Those don't bother me. It's like something about like getting a half an hour or 45 minutes in

01:51:01   that starts to like, I don't even know what just happened, but I just know that I didn't like it.

01:51:05   And I've always known that they look way too dim because you're wearing sunglasses.

01:51:11   I thought that Avatar, again, I only watched about five to 10 minutes of it. And I don't even know

01:51:17   what the hell was going on or who these, who the alien, I don't even know what, but I just was

01:51:21   just looking at it. I kind of forgot that it was 3D five minutes in, right? It just, and again,

01:51:29   cause the other thing too, that you get with vision pro watching an Avatar is there being in the best

01:51:35   seat of the house is really important because being off center or off access in any way in a 3D

01:51:43   movie really throws, throws the whole experience off because you get all sorts of distortion and

01:51:49   stuff like that. So I think, I think it's, it's going to make me rethink whether I'd watch a movie

01:51:57   in 3D or not. I'll definitely watch. One of the first movies I watch on this thing is going to be

01:52:02   way of the water, but I think it solves all the problems. I think cause you have a perfect

01:52:06   perspective, perfect brightness and no lenticular shutter glasses. And that's in the end that like

01:52:14   whatever else in addition to dimming it's it's I think the other cognitive thing is the way that

01:52:21   like your two eyes are like a 12th of a second off from each other or something like that. I don't

01:52:26   know what the math is, but right. Because it's like a, it scans like left to right. Yeah. Right.

01:52:31   Something like that. And you don't get any of it with this. And so I feel like, Oh, total win.

01:52:36   I did go through Apple's immersive 3D things that are shot for 3D or not all of them yet,

01:52:42   but they have a couple they're spectacular. They're stunning. And they are way more like IMAX.

01:52:50   If anything, they're like the Disney attraction, Soren. I know, you know, Soren.

01:52:55   But in the way that sore is sworn IMAX, I think it must be.

01:52:59   If it's not IMAX trademarked, it's, it's like the same sort of concepts. Right. And I'm almost

01:53:09   positive that Epcot's is IMAX. I am not totally positive if Disneyland is, but maybe it is.

01:53:16   Right. But for anybody out there who's never been on the ride, sore and S A U.

01:53:22   I say S O A R I N like you're soaring through the air. It's like a big, huge spherical IMAX

01:53:31   movie screen. And then you sit in like a, what would you call it? Like a gondola, a swing,

01:53:36   a big bench, a big long bench. And it takes you up in the air and it's supposed to simulate like

01:53:42   you're flying through these fantastic parts of California when you're in the California one.

01:53:47   And then in the Florida one, now you're all over the world, like Paris and Africa and wherever else.

01:53:53   And you don't wear 3D glasses on Soren, but they've got a couple of Disney tricks where they play.

01:53:58   Yeah. Cause they pull you up into it, up into the curve. Right. So they hang you inside the curve

01:54:04   of it. It is, it is IMAX by the way, in both iterations. And they've updated it since 2001,

01:54:10   obviously. But one of the things is there's three rows of seats. There's left, the left bank of

01:54:15   seats, the middle bank and the right bank. And I've been on that ride in Florida. I have no

01:54:21   exaggeration, probably like 30 times, maybe more. I mean, it's one of my favorite attractions. I just

01:54:26   my family knows we get to Epcot, daddy wants to go on Soren. I just love it.

01:54:32   But you've got a one out of three chance of being in the middle section.

01:54:38   Yeah. And the middle one's the good one. It's so much better because from either side,

01:54:45   it's all distorted. And all of a sudden the Eiffel tower looks like it's bent.

01:54:49   And technically you want the middle top. Right.

01:54:51   Because on the middle bottom, you got people's feet hanging.

01:54:54   Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You want middle top. So there's no feet, no flip-flops hanging in your view.

01:54:58   But this, you know, the 3D immersions that Apple has are like that where you're not looking at a

01:55:07   rectangular movie frame. Like when you look at Avatar, you're still looking at a 16 by nine or

01:55:12   whatever his aspect ratio is a rectangular movie frame in a movie theater. And everything is in the

01:55:17   movie. Everything is in the frame. Whereas these immersive things like this dinosaur thing that

01:55:22   Apple has, not that there's two, there's, it's confusing because they've got two dinosaur things.

01:55:26   They've got the app where the dinosaur comes through the wall. And then they've got this

01:55:31   other thing that Jon Favreau directed where it's more like a fake documentary as though you could

01:55:39   go back 300 million years and shoot a bunch of dinosaurs. But that one, you can turn your head

01:55:46   180 degrees. That's what brings Soren to mind where like you don't have to stare straight ahead and

01:55:51   look at a rectangle. You have like 180 degrees where you can like turn and look around and

01:55:57   you direct your gaze. You might miss some of the action of what these dinosaurs are doing in front

01:56:02   of you because you're looking over there on the side or something like that. Absolutely incredible.

01:56:08   And it just, it seems like you're in, I haven't been to the Vegas sphere yet, but it seems like

01:56:15   you're in something like that, like this giant, giant spherical screen projection thing. And it's

01:56:24   bigger than your entire house, way bigger than your entire house, this environment that you're

01:56:30   seemingly have a first person perspective in. And you can just turn your head around and see stuff.

01:56:36   And it seems impossible that there's that many pixels because you think you're because of the

01:56:42   foveated rendering, you think all of it, the whole 180 degrees spherical thing is all rendered at

01:56:49   this incredible retina resolution when in fact, of course it's not, it's all big fat blurry pixels,

01:56:55   except what you're staring at. But because it updates as soon as you move your head,

01:57:00   it creates the illusion that it's all rendered at high resolution. Absolutely stunning. I really,

01:57:07   I know, I get the feeling from the reviews I've gone through that there's sort of a consensus

01:57:13   that, geez, this is way too expensive overall as a device. But I really do think that for

01:57:19   entertainment purposes alone, like I said, I spent $5,000 on a TV a couple of years ago. I mean,

01:57:24   if you've got the budget for something like that, $3,500 just for watching movies alone,

01:57:32   if you're going to watch movies by yourself is not ridiculous. Even if it didn't have any of the

01:57:37   productivity stuff, it's a credible product just for watching movies and these 3D things. It really

01:57:43   is. And if you remember in the early days of home theater, I was at that time selling home theater

01:57:52   equipment. And so in the early days of home theaters actually being a thing that was

01:57:56   accessible, not just for millionaires, everybody was sort of building surround sound and home

01:58:02   theaters. We sold a surprising amount of really high-end speakers and a surprising amount of

01:58:09   these systems that allowed you to put hundreds of DVDs in them and basically choose a movie.

01:58:15   And then the carousel of DVDs rotate around and it would pick the movie and play it for you

01:58:20   automatically. And it seemed like a nonsense product that nobody would buy, but we sold this

01:58:26   surprising amount of them because there are people out there that just want the absolute best home

01:58:32   theater experience they could possibly buy, they could possibly achieve at home. And so I think

01:58:38   that there is absolutely a market in and of itself just for if you fixate the working stuff and

01:58:44   everything else. There's a bunch of people out there that are just going to look at this as

01:58:49   the best possible way to watch a movie and be totally okay with that being the problem.

01:58:54   Kevin Anthony Yeah, I really do think so. And it's,

01:58:58   I really think that's the number one way to sell these things or to, like I concluded my review,

01:59:04   if you're only going to try one thing, try that. And it's stunning. It's so hard to

01:59:09   pretend like I don't know what this is and what it costs. But if you had showed this to me

01:59:17   two years ago and didn't tell me it was an Apple product, because telling me it's an Apple product

01:59:22   would give me some clue as to a maximum price ceiling. Just let me experience this and let me

01:59:28   think that maybe it's from Bang & Olufsen or something. I don't know. And then you told me

01:59:35   it costs $25,000. I wouldn't buy it for $25,000. But I might think, oh, that's what it costs. And

01:59:46   that you could convince me. And again, the fragility, the overall fragility of the Vision Pro

01:59:53   wouldn't make sense to equip in a theme park. But if it was the same visual and sound experience,

02:00:02   but in a sort of, oh, we can have 5000 people a day come in and take it on and off for 10 minutes

02:00:09   at a time. And you told me that Disney spent $50,000 on each one of them or something like that.

02:00:16   I'd be like, oh, wow, that's a lot of money. But I guess that's the scale it costs to get

02:00:19   in an effect that compelling, right? It's that compelling of an experience. And I'm not trying

02:00:26   to tell people that you should think you're saving $20,000 because it's only $4,000 to buy it. But it

02:00:35   is a credibly tens of thousand dollars visual experience, at least in terms of my lifetime.

02:00:44   And from the starting point of what I expect from theater, it's not good. I guess that's about it.

02:00:50   I mean, I don't know. What's your sense of the overall take from the reviewers?

02:00:55   Jared: Yeah, I mean, I think it's nothing and nothing stuck out to me as shocking.

02:01:01   I think there is, those of us who had tried it, and then even those of us who had just been paying

02:01:07   close attention kind of assumed that it would be a product that showed real promise in some areas,

02:01:13   that showed a lot of opportunities to get a lot better before it's good in other areas.

02:01:18   I think that the sort of early adopters thing is always about the excuse. What is the excuse for me

02:01:25   to adopt this so early? And I think the average consumer, I'm not really sure there is a

02:01:30   compelling one. I think for anybody who considers themselves an early adopter, it seems so far,

02:01:36   the movies and TV viewing, that experience of being able to watch stuff at home,

02:01:41   that's your easiest excuse. And then the further down the line is the,

02:01:47   I think I could be more productive. And I know Apple wants that to be the number one excuse.

02:01:53   I could be more productive with this thing. That's what they're, it's a computer, they're

02:01:57   selling it as a computer that you could do work with. The good news is so far from the reviews

02:02:03   and what people have assessed with it, they spend most of their time talking about other stuff.

02:02:09   And just in passing, they're like, "Oh yeah, I read a ton of stuff on it."

02:02:14   Well, if you've used HMDs at all, or used headsets at all, you realize how

02:02:20   crap that experience normally is. It is normally not something you talk about with a normal headset

02:02:27   because it is impossible to do. Anybody that says, "Oh, I work in it and all these early adopters,

02:02:33   I know them, I talk with them, they're lovely people." I've had just as much experience with

02:02:39   headsets as anybody. And I can tell you that it's not good. You cannot read well on these headsets.

02:02:45   You can read painfully. You can teach yourself to adopt your views to much larger text sizes

02:02:52   and very specific views that allow you to do something in the work vein, but they're not

02:02:58   pleasant. The Meta3 is excellent in the games context. And in the casual viewing, it's cool,

02:03:06   it's fun, it's affordable, it's clever enough, and it's got enough developer support. My kid plays

02:03:14   Roblox on it. They play a couple of the great VR games that are just really well done in it, like

02:03:20   Cosmo Nius High, Vacation Simulator, both built by the same developer. But there's some good things

02:03:24   on there. Very clear use cases for a sub $500 device. You cannot read books on it. You cannot

02:03:33   read a spreadsheet on it. It's terrible. And anybody that tells you that you can is just

02:03:38   talking out their butt. They're lying to you. It's not good. And it's painful even to do.

02:03:43   So the fact that I think most of the reviewers just mentioned in passing, "Oh, I read a bunch

02:03:47   of websites. Oh, I looked at this thing and that thing," and then go on to talk about other things,

02:03:51   that's a win because it means all that stuff is just no problem. Like it's not even, "Oh,

02:03:57   I spent a lot of time reading and here's what I thought." It's like, "No, it was good to read.

02:04:01   Okay, now let's talk about these other things." That in my mind is a win from the reviews,

02:04:05   from Apple's perspective, in that people have accepted that the baseline of like you can browse,

02:04:11   you can read a bunch of text, you could do all that stuff like you would on a normal computer,

02:04:15   they passed that bar. Now, of course, becomes the journey towards making it a true productivity

02:04:21   machine, but the base coding of stuff that has to be there on day one, it seems most of the

02:04:27   reviewer consensus is that those things are there. Yeah. I think that one of the reasons that the

02:04:32   Quest 3, which I bought recently and I've played with and I kind of need to go back to now because

02:04:38   I've spent the last six days in this and I'm probably going to think, "Oh, man, this is trash,"

02:04:42   when I was semi-impressed by it as of a couple of weeks ago. But I think that the reason it's

02:04:48   primarily a game-playing thing for most people, it seems to me like, you know, and I told a couple

02:04:53   of friends I had it and it seems like people I know who have it use it for playing games,

02:04:57   but games you can get away with a lower resolution because there's motion and that's the motion

02:05:03   that keeps you from kind of noticing the lower resolution of the screen. I mean, it sounds,

02:05:10   you know, someone who considers himself a writer's privilege to say, you know,

02:05:16   "Reading is a very good stress test," but it is, you know. And, you know, I was laughing when you

02:05:22   were talking about, "Oh, well, you can read on it, you know, but do you want to?" And it always makes

02:05:26   me laugh thinking of John Siracusa's story from decades ago when he worked at like an e-book

02:05:31   publisher for the Palm Pilot and that he used to read books on a Palm Pilot like 160 by 160

02:05:38   monochrome display. You know. I unfortunately did as well. I read it. We are in the same,

02:05:46   we have the same proportions. Reading an entire book on that Palm Pilot screen would be both a

02:05:53   stress test of your eyes and your patience and also, quite frankly, a stress test of like the

02:05:58   button, the physical button you're using to page. Like how many times you have to click that button

02:06:04   to go through a book, let alone books, plural. I always think, at least our Ikea in Philadelphia

02:06:11   used to have a robotic butt and they'd, you know, the, what was it? I even know the name,

02:06:17   because I actually used to own one, the Po-ang, sort of the poor man's Herman Miller chair. And

02:06:23   they had a robotic butt that would just stand up and sit down on the chair over and over again,

02:06:28   behind glass. Yeah. And the robot had a little led counter that told you that it was like 106,721,

02:06:37   6,722 times that this robot had stood up and sat down on this chair. That's what I imagined the

02:06:44   button on those Palm Pilots you guys used to read books. So yeah, you can read on anything.

02:06:50   Really. I was one of the weirdos that had the fold out keyboard and the little stand and I would type

02:06:54   on it, like take notes. Oh yeah. I used to have that keyboard. Yeah. If I was in high school and

02:06:59   I had an Apple watch I'd read, I, and I could get away if I was allowed to have my watch and not my

02:07:03   phone, I would, I'd read books on my watch. I mean, my eyes were a lot better back then.

02:07:09   Yeah. That's also true. Right. These were lower resolution, but our eyes were higher resolution.

02:07:14   Right. And then I wonder why my eyes aren't so good anymore.

02:07:19   Wait a minute. I think we're just realizing. No, it is. I won a little tidbit. I heard from

02:07:28   a little birdie in the last week and it's not anybody. It's somebody who's left Apple in the

02:07:32   intervening years, but somebody said that one of the, they, they were privy to the original plans

02:07:38   for this in 2018 and it sort of kicked off. And I think that was the year Rockwell was on the first

02:07:45   time he was on my live show after WWDC and AR kit was new and they started laying the groundwork

02:07:52   for the developer stuff. But that when this project kicked off, they sort of put together

02:07:57   these specs and they were like in 2018, they were like dream specs. Well, this would be impossible,

02:08:03   but I think this is the minimum of what we need. And he said, it really is. It's a testimony to,

02:08:08   this is what my, this little birdie told me that it's a testimony to how well run and maybe how

02:08:16   much good luck this project had over the years, that what they're actually shipping two days from

02:08:22   now or three days from now is remarkably close to what they specked out as a fantasy device in 2018,

02:08:30   in terms of, especially in terms of display technology. Like they needed all these things

02:08:36   that they couldn't possibly build at the time and they thought, well, let's shoot for the,

02:08:40   but that's how you make an amazing product is you have to start where it's impossible and then

02:08:46   build to it. What else? I guess that's about it. I mean, the only other thing I can say, and I hope

02:08:53   my review, like I said, I broke it into the segments so that I could complain about the

02:09:01   current hardware. Too heavy, too big. And the eye tracking is not quite precise enough. It's sort of

02:09:11   like a lot of targets, especially like browsing the web, like I said, using youtube.com in

02:09:18   particular is hard because there's too many little things in underneath the video player that are too

02:09:23   close to each other. And the eye tracking is good, but it's like the equivalent of trying to use an

02:09:32   iPhone with your thumb instead of a finger, right? It's like, you know, it's maybe not as precise

02:09:39   because it's your thumb and it's a fatter target. And just like how the iPhone had that famous

02:09:47   44 point sweet spot for the size of a touchable element that, you know, which is much, much bigger

02:09:55   than when you're using a mouse pointer, how small targets can be because the precision of a mouse

02:10:01   pointer is so high. The eye tracking is a little more like touch than it, or in fact, I'd say it's

02:10:07   a lot more like touch than it is a mouse pointer. But with touch, it's like you intuitively

02:10:15   understood from the first iPhone through today that your fingertip is in reality, a big fat

02:10:24   44 point circle. And so you, even today with as many advances as the iPhone has made in 17 years,

02:10:31   you still kind of need the same physical size for touch targets on a phone because your fingers,

02:10:38   our fingers haven't evolved. Right. Right. It evolved to be through the styli yet.

02:10:43   Right. Whereas even six days into using vision OS, I want the eye tracking to be even,

02:10:50   even more precise because my eye tracking is as accurate as my mouse pointing. It is pixel

02:10:59   perfect, right? I can look at a really tiny button on screen and I know that that's the button I mean,

02:11:05   and I want it to activate. And so the little things that go wrong is as I get more accustomed

02:11:11   to vision OS, I want to go through everything faster. And so it's like, I'm in Safari and I'll

02:11:16   hit the button to show all my tabs and I want to activate a tab. But if I'm looking too close to

02:11:22   the upper left corner, it closes the tab and then it's gone and there's no undo and it's shit.

02:11:27   So it's literally the worst tab I could close just closed because it was the one I wanted to activate.

02:11:34   Right. And it's not because the eye tracking is inaccurate. It's just not quite accurate

02:11:40   enough. And where I really hit those mistakes like that is when I'm feeling so comfortable,

02:11:46   I'm in the flow. Right. And it's, yeah. And I see that tab whipping from thing to thing. Yeah.

02:11:50   I'm like, ah, there's the tab that I could see from the thumbnail. That's the one I want. And I

02:11:54   disappeared. And I'm like, oh, I even saw the X light up right before it disappeared.

02:11:59   Like son of a bitch. Yeah. Just missed it. Missed it by that much.

02:12:06   So there's so much room to improve as future generations go on. But I hope I was fair at

02:12:12   sort of balancing the shit that's amazing and the yeah, this thing's got to be a lot lighter.

02:12:19   Yeah. Yeah. You got to go into these things making the fairs assessment you can because

02:12:26   progress is not aided by coddling. Right. It in this nobody understood this more than

02:12:34   than the man himself. Right. And Steve and that era of Apple was certainly not about coddling.

02:12:41   And I don't think it should be now. So you don't have to go, oh yeah, yeah, it's heavy,

02:12:44   but like it enables all these great things. No, look, it's, it's heavy. Weight is not subjective.

02:12:49   I mean, it is. It's subjective for everyone. Right. Everything is subjective, but weight is

02:12:53   weight. And the lighter something is, the less you pay attention to it as a physical object,

02:13:00   the more you could pay attention to the virtual interface. And that's the whole point of it. Right.

02:13:04   And it's the same reason that like iPhone size is still such a hot topic because it's like,

02:13:08   if you have to stretch to reach a button, is it really the ideal size for a phone?

02:13:13   And I think those questions will always be bantered back and forth and people will want this or want

02:13:18   that. But I don't think anybody's ever going to tell you that they want a heavier headset. No,

02:13:24   like I wish this thing was heavier. So I think it's fair and should be called out because like

02:13:28   those things are, even though they may be insurmountable at the moment, cause they're like,

02:13:32   Hey, we fit the most technology we could possibly fit into this thing. I don't think that that's

02:13:37   something that you can argue anybody, whatever you don't want not to be lighter inside or outside

02:13:43   Apple. Right. Progress happens and it'll happen year after year steadily, but it's like just

02:13:48   going through serendipity wise, having celebrated this max 40th anniversary, just the week prior.

02:13:55   And I like when I was doing the upgrade podcast with a panel of people celebrating it and we had

02:14:01   to pick like our favorite Mac of all time or, and stuff like that. And looking at some of the

02:14:07   old power books and it's like, Oh, and somebody would post in the group, you know, here's this

02:14:12   power Mac G3 from 1998 or something like that. And it's like, Oh, that can't be right. It wasn't

02:14:18   1.7 inches thick. What? And it's Oh no. Yeah, I guess they were 1.7 inches thick back then and

02:14:25   seven pounds. It was like, and I remember when they came out, we were like, look at how small

02:14:30   and thin the power books have gotten and they were six pounds. We'll get there eventually. And

02:14:36   it, I don't know. I I'm excited overall by I'll just leave it at that. I am terribly excited about

02:14:42   the future of this whole endeavor. I mean, I really do. I really do think they're onto

02:14:47   something with the basic interaction model. Hello there. Talk show listeners at your pal,

02:14:56   John here. Just wanted to let you know that our good friend Murphy, as in Murphy's law,

02:15:02   got us pretty good on this one. Something happened to Matthew's microphone towards the end of the

02:15:08   show and he needed to finish recording the rest of the show using his AirPods as his microphone,

02:15:15   which as you might guess, you're going to notice audio quality wise as the show completes.

02:15:22   We're sorry about that. We don't really know what happened, but it is what it is. And just figured

02:15:27   I'd break into the show here with a special bulletin just to let you know. So you're not

02:15:31   surprised. Thanks for listening. The talk show, the only podcast that blows somebody's microphone

02:15:39   battery. That's the advertising right there. I'm sorry. It's charging, but it looks like they gave

02:15:44   up the ghost on actually transmitting. So I'll finish off with my last AirPods gasp. Sorry.

02:15:50   Anyhow, what were we saying? You were, you were talking about the future. Yeah. Yeah. I was saying

02:15:56   I'm anxious to get my hands on it as well. I'm not in the first. French. I waited actually a

02:16:01   couple of days to order mine, so I'm not, I'm not getting my for a couple of weeks, but I I'm

02:16:05   excited to do some work in it to mess around in there. And I'm frankly excited for all the hacks

02:16:12   and things that will come along that people will mess with it. I think this is one of those things

02:16:16   where Apple will want to move at a certain speed so that they are cautious and that they roll things

02:16:22   out with care. And a lot of other people who have a lot of experience with head mounted displays and

02:16:28   with virtual environments already are going to want to play in this new playground and move a lot

02:16:32   faster than Apple. And so I'm anxious to see what a lot of people bring to the table, not just the

02:16:38   official third-party developer ecosystem, but also people just hacking on crazy projects and sending

02:16:43   me test flights and playing around. I want to mess with all that stuff. I'm really excited to see what

02:16:48   people come up with. Well, Matthew, thank you for joining me now before we go, instead of telling

02:16:53   people to go read your stuff at TechCrunch or wherever the hell it is used to work, you've got

02:16:58   it. You've got a new website, which I love. Oh, thanks. And I'm so mad that you're publishing so

02:17:06   regularly because I've had so much work to do over the last week. I'm like, stop, slow down. What do

02:17:13   you do? You didn't write this much when you were running an entire website. Yeah. It turns out that

02:17:20   managing 60 people takes time. What is your new website? It's called the Obsessor. Theobsessor.com

02:17:27   is the address. Feel free to go. It is free to sign up and there's plenty to read for free. I

02:17:32   do have a paid newsletter as well. They do want to make it sustainable long-term. I want to invest

02:17:36   some money into some special projects, video. I just put up a video for subscribers this past

02:17:42   weekend with one of my favorite family recipes and just a little bit of a video essay about it.

02:17:47   I want to do stuff like that. It covers all of the things that I love, cameras, watches,

02:17:55   beverages, and food, and fine craft items. Just things that are worth obsessing over. That's it.

02:18:02   I think there's a lot of things that just didn't fit into the bucket of, hey, I run a TechCrunch,

02:18:08   so I really should pay attention to X, Y, or Z things. But now I get to really go nerdy on

02:18:12   Imagineering topics and different things like that that I care about. That's awesome. It's fun. It's

02:18:17   fun building something from scratch and enjoying that. Mostly it's a nights and weekends endeavor,

02:18:22   which is great because it gives me a little bit of relaxation time to fool out because I have a

02:18:27   day job. But it's great. I find it relaxing. I'm lucky. Should we talk about the day job?

02:18:31   Yeah, yeah, sure. I joined a startup called TipTop. The premise is pretty simple. It's

02:18:37   anybody knows me or has followed my online presence at all. They'll know I'm a sneaker head.

02:18:43   I like to collect clothing and shoes and all that stuff. Part of which I write about, obviously. But

02:18:48   I have bought and sold a lot, like a lot of sneakers, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds

02:18:53   of pairs on essentially every marketplace out there. And of course, given that I'm an

02:18:59   Apple device addict, I've bought and sold a ton of electronics online.

02:19:06   Somebody sent me a prototype of this app. It was a beta. I thought, "Oh, this is interesting. I

02:19:11   see what they're doing here." It basically enables you to instantly sell your devices

02:19:16   with just one or two taps without all the rigmarole of listing it on eBay or meeting

02:19:23   up at a parking lot with a Facebook marketplace hooligan who's going to take your device and run

02:19:28   and all that stuff. And the job is just to make it as simple as possible. I talked with the founder,

02:19:34   Bastian Niemann. He formerly founded Dospeaks. This is his new baby who wants to do this thing

02:19:41   and create a new way of selling and buying. I really thought it was cool. So I said, "Hey,

02:19:47   I think I like this. Let's talk." We talked, we vibed, and now we're building it. It's so

02:19:53   fun to build. I spent a lot of years covering building from the other side. It's been really

02:19:59   enjoyable getting on a team of 10 people that are just all aligned and just hammering things out.

02:20:05   And things don't work until they do. And then they do, and you see some traction. It's just

02:20:10   very exciting. I'm having fun. It sounds like it. It sounds like something that you would have told

02:20:15   me while we were driving to an Apple event, that you had a dream that you went to work at a startup.

02:20:24   It's ridiculously aligned. It's wild. It really is. It could not be more Matthew Pansarino.

02:20:30   Yeah, I was very fortunate. Look, it's good people. I like Bassey a lot. I like the people

02:20:37   that I work with a lot. But more importantly, I believe in the mission. I have seen firsthand

02:20:43   how ridiculous it is, how the taxes and fees and selling issues basically make it so that you just

02:20:51   say, eh, I don't think I want to, I don't want to bother. Right. Or, or you're stuck going,

02:20:57   I really need this cash. Like these days people get laid off. They were seeing so much of it

02:21:03   happen. They have devices laying around. They're like, I really wish this was cash tomorrow so

02:21:07   that I could pay bills or whatever. And like that kind of thing is, has been pretty impossible to do

02:21:12   because it's a lot of hard work. It's a lot of logistics and hard work behind the scenes to make

02:21:17   it seamless for the user. And so we're not anywhere near where we want to be, but I think we're on the

02:21:23   way and I'm excited. It's been fun. Yeah. I know I don't sell sneakers, but my son's into the,

02:21:29   into that whole world. And I know, I know how competitive that whole market can be.

02:21:37   Yeah. It is. Yeah. Between bots shopping and all of that stuff, it gets crazy. And then the selling

02:21:44   side of it too. Like you grow out of certain things. Like you've got an old iPad and it's

02:21:48   been sitting in a drawer or you grow out of a pair of sneakers or you grow out of something that you,

02:21:53   that you were using and don't use so much anymore. And I think it's, I don't want to get too heady,

02:21:58   but there really is the, the thing that really attracted me to this is that there's,

02:22:02   there's the changing relationship people have with the things that they own.

02:22:06   Young people are owning less and renting more. And as far as homes go, we all know there's a ton of

02:22:13   socioeconomic things that go along with that. It's not completely by choice, but it is part of their,

02:22:18   of the mentality that's changing because you and I are probably the last generation that is going to

02:22:25   hoard a bunch of stuff that is going to keep stuff around forever. I got looking at the slow, you can

02:22:29   listeners can't tell, but I've got like stuff. I've got collections of stuff in my house. And,

02:22:34   and my, my parents, I mean, I dread going through all the stuff that they have collected.

02:22:40   And I think that people are being more comfortable with letting things come in and out of their life.

02:22:47   And there really isn't enough mechanics that enable that to allow them to go, look,

02:22:52   I purchased this, or I brought this into my life. I had it for a period of time. I enjoyed it,

02:22:58   but now I'd like it to move on. And there's just not enough liquidity or, or impermeability to that

02:23:04   ownership process. Yeah. It's just a different world today than, than when I grew up.

02:23:10   And learn my order, learn my hoarding ways. I know. I know. Yeah. All right, Matthew,

02:23:18   I will talk to you soon. Thank you. Appreciate it.