MacBreak Weekly 874 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

Leo Laporte (00:00:00):
It's time for MacBreak Weekly. Andy Ihnatko's here. Alex Lindsay's here. And most importantly, Jason Snells here back from his visit to the Apple campus. He has his first person hands-on. Look at the Apple Vision Pro will also talk about the other Macintosh computers. Apple announced last week and the future of the iMac. All that and more coming up next, my Mac Break. Weekly podcasts you love

Jason Snell (00:00:28):
From people you trust.

Leo Laporte (00:00:36):
This is Mac Break. Weekly episode 874. Recorded Tuesday, June 13th, 2023. Distracted by the dinosaurs. Mac Break Weekly is brought to you by Express VPN N. Using the internet without express V P N is like forgetting to mute yourself on Zoom. And then everybody hears you trash talking. Your coworkers not good. Protect your online privacy by visiting express vpn.com/mac break, and you can get three extra months free with a one year package. And buy HelloFresh America's number one meal kit. Get farm fresh pre-portioned ingredients and seasonal recipes delivered right to your doorstep. Skip the grocery store and count on HelloFresh to make home cooking easy, fun and affordable. Go to hellofresh.com/mac break 16 and use the code Mac Break 16 for 16 free meals plus free shipping. And buy Zoc when you're not feeling your best and just trying to hold it together, finding great care shouldn't take up all your energy. Go to zoc.com/mac break and download the Zoc app for free. Then find and book a top rated doctor today. Many available within 24 hours. It's time for Mac Break Weekly, the show. We get together with all the crew and talk about Apple and Jason Snell's back from his little sojourn at the Yes. The Apple campus

Jason Snell (00:02:04):
That where the, out where the sun shines in the fog does not eclipse the summer in the South Bay. It was so warm and nice in Cupertino other than it rained at one point and everybody at Apple didn't know what to do. Basically <laugh>. I'm like, what do, what do we do with this? There was a man with a squeegee trying to wipe things down. It was very condition. Did it

Leo Laporte (00:02:23):
Rain? When did it, did it rain during the event?

Jason Snell (00:02:26):
It No, it rained at that time. The next day, the next day day when I, when I was sitting waiting for my Apple Vision Pro HandsOn experience. Yeah. The sky just opened up and the man with the squeegee was trying to squeegee the entrance to the special lounge where we were all sitting and it was, he

Leo Laporte (00:02:43):
Was

Jason Snell (00:02:43):
Like with the squeegee. Yeah. He just was never gonna win that paddle.

Leo Laporte (00:02:47):
He's a human windshield.

Jason Snell (00:02:48):
Anyway, it was

Leo Laporte (00:02:49):
Weird. Is what he is. Yeah. Andy and Gbh bus and parts elsewhere. Hello, Andrew. Hey there. Heather. Heather,

Andy Ihnatko (00:02:58):
I'm, I'm already, I'm, I know. We're all excited to hear like Jason's firsthand reports of Vision Pro. I'm already excited to see that there are no longer any red marks around his face where it met him. So, <laugh>, any worries that, like, it causes an allergic reaction that would last at least a week. Absolutely. Dispell today. What a relief. We're on the board already.

Leo Laporte (00:03:15):
What a relief. And Mr. Alex Lindsay, office hours.global. Hello, Alex. Hello. Hello. It's good to see you.

Jason Snell (00:03:25):
It's good to be here.

Leo Laporte (00:03:27):
So, Jason, you got to try 'em on. In fact, your six colors article, eyes and head on, get it with the Apple <laugh>,

Jason Snell (00:03:36):
Took it head on Fit red in the forehead. I I could never get it to fit exactly right. I came out of there feeling like I was really, it didn't sit Fall Brower sit

Leo Laporte (00:03:45):
Nicely. I couldn't get on

Jason Snell (00:03:46):
Your face. I couldn't get, I mean, that, that's happened with other VR headsets. I've tried and they've got, they, they made the claim that they've got this one piece that fits the light shield that is like, they're gonna be a lot of sizes of them, but they didn't have that many sizes of them. Right. For whatever reason, I could never really get comfortable with it. Didn't

Leo Laporte (00:04:00):
They say they were gonna scan your head and then Oh

Jason Snell (00:04:03):
Yeah, they did create, they did custom, but like let, if their plan is to have 15 sizes or 12 sizes at launch and they've only got four now. Right, right. Then they scan my face, which they did do very much like face id. And then I guess they looked at it and said, wow, I don't know what to do here. Just stick bob stick the medium on and see what happens. You got

Leo Laporte (00:04:21):
Jason

Andy Ihnatko (00:04:22):
Neanderthal Snell

Leo Laporte (00:04:23):
Over here. You got any beetle brow or face masks

Andy Ihnatko (00:04:26):
There? There's also something interesting that someone on social media pointed out that I missed in the keynote. Some of like the canned, like the canned like fake living room videos. They have like a, a strap over the strap, the top of their head. Yeah. We all had that. We never talked about y'all had that. Yeah, absolutely.

Jason Snell (00:04:41):
It was a Velcro top strap to help with, you know, help with stabilization, just the weight off and carrying the, carrying the weight across your whole head. And, and yeah, they did have that. And, and it was, I wonder why they didn't all the materials. You, you'll be sur surprised. I don't know why. It's, who knows? They, you'll be surprised to hear that the materials made in the headband and the strap are of the highest quality. They're very, very well made. Made with the best cause. It's apples lint, of course,

Leo Laporte (00:05:05):
From the finest

Jason Snell (00:05:06):
Thread. Corian leather. Yes. Yeah. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>

Leo Laporte (00:05:08):
Yeah. Oculus Pro or whatever they call it. Meta Quests Pro Quest Pro has an optional top strap and I actually don't use it. But I don't wear it for very long. So I think for length, lengthy periods of time, you might want to have that. Yeah. Top strap. So that's not an option. That's something that comes with I

Jason Snell (00:05:24):
Sounds like. I think so. We don't know.

Leo Laporte (00:05:25):
Don't think so. Yeah. It's hard to know.

Jason Snell (00:05:27):
But yeah, there's so much we don't know about this product. We only know what Apple wants us to know about this product. Right. <laugh> and even barely that

Leo Laporte (00:05:32):
I am, I am I have a new bet that they will not ship it with spooky eyes, but I'm just, that's my <laugh> my guess

Andy Ihnatko (00:05:40):
That is, that is, that is not a, that's, that is not a bad guess. Yeah. I, I don't, I'm don't know for sure. I'm I'm just saying that that's, they got a lot of gamble. They got a lot riding on that. It's got either work completely 100% non goofy, or let's just wait

Leo Laporte (00:05:56):
Before it, and then you must add a little bit to those lenticular screens must add a bit to the bill of materials. And

Jason Snell (00:06:04):
I'm sh I'm sure it does. I mean, it's very clever. And they, they've said like, you know, you can't just put a screen on it showing eyes because if you're off access, it looks red. It looks like a screen showing eyes like they're following you or something. It's weird. So they did this lenticular thing, but I will say again, nobody has seen that feature. Right? Yeah. It's in some of those videos, I'm u unclear whether they actually are even there. You don't

Leo Laporte (00:06:26):
See it in your

Jason Snell (00:06:26):
Demo. Nobody saw it in person. Interesting. I, the only, the closest we got is that in the demo we did get a FaceTime call from somebody who was using a digital persona. Presum. Presumably the same technology that creates the digital persona face creates the little eye Yeah. Area that gets put on that display

Leo Laporte (00:06:47):
Because those eyes aren't aren't a picture of your eyes. They're a digital persona of your eyes.

Jason Snell (00:06:53):
Yeah. They're scale. Well, I mean, they're taking picture of your expressions from your eyes and using it to do it. But I it's not a one-to-one very in

Leo Laporte (00:07:00):
Ram emoji fashion.

Jason Snell (00:07:02):
Yeah. In a high, think of a very, very high res emoji. Although I'll say like, I, I had a very positive experience with the headset. I think that as a piece of technology, the Vision Pro is remarkable. A and that's the combination, the apple combination of the hardware and the software. Incredibly impressive piece of technology. However, and we can talk about it or not what, how, whatever you like. But I will say the one place where I went, whoa, now <laugh> was the digital persona, which during the, during the keynote I read it, I was, I was more optimistic than some of the people around me. I was sort of like, it might be okay. And other people were like, oh, hell no, basically. And then I, I saw it in the demo and I was like, oh, no, no, no, no. It, it is, it is the uncanniness of valleys. It is you know, the, the person I was talking to made a facial expression and I was like, no, no, you weren't. You know, no. Well

Leo Laporte (00:07:50):
It's interesting

Jason Snell (00:07:51):
Cause Satan, they

Leo Laporte (00:07:52):
Made, they made an interesting choice with FaceTime. That FaceTime would not be a legless immersive experience in, as in the meta experience. It would be FaceTime with a screen. But then they still have this issue with there's no camera on you. Well, so they have to fake you. Right. And the fake you, it sounds like it's not very good. I'm gonna say this, this really strikes me as a concept car. You know how in the Detroit Auto show, they show this car that you go at. It's so wonderful, but they never ships. And I think this is their concept car. And you now explain to me why we never saw anybody Tim Cook on down wearing these,

Jason Snell (00:08:33):
Because No, cuz that's that feature doesn't, even the

Leo Laporte (00:08:34):
Spooky eyes weren't there. I wonder if it's spooky

Jason Snell (00:08:37):
Eyes were it doesn't work yet. Yeah,

(00:08:38):
I don't, I mean, you're right. I think you're right. I think the question is, you know, how committed are they to this hardware being final? They may be across that line, but, but you're right in spirit, because a lot of the stuff that's in here is very much beholden to Apple's concept of what this thing is. Right? So the eyes are there, the eyesight thing is there because Apple is trying to send the message that they want you present in the world. That this is an AR product. And that, that if you can see out, people can see in, right. And, and that the, it's an indicator that they can see you. And like, I get it. I get it entirely from a philosophical point of view, but I have with some of these features, I wonder, the FaceTime is like this too. I wonder whether at some point the initial philosophy will get overridden by user reaction and they'll realize, oh, like the dogma we went into when we designed this product is actually not how users feel.

(00:09:33):
And then they change the product. It may be too late for this one, but I, that's undoubtedly gonna happen. I think the FaceTime in a window is a great example of that, where I'm actually not convinced that that's the only way they're gonna do FaceTime. I'm convinced that's the only way they wanted to show FaceTime last week. Right. Because we're talking about a lot of time here, there are so many things that I'm sure that they have very carefully omitted entirely because either they're not ready to show them or they don't want people talking about them when they, when they're talking about this product and you know, they've got, this is unusual for Apple and that they've got, you know, six plus months of runway here so that they can be very picky in what they disclose now versus in six months.

Alex Lindsay (00:10:13):
I think, I think it's the least compelling thing that they showed there. And the most absurd, like, it, it, and it, and it, it's not like, I think there's a lot of things about the vision headset that work. The moment I even saw it in the keynote, I was like, oh, it's gonna be a bad idea. <Laugh>. Like that's gonna, like, it is gonna really, it's, it's, it was like polar express, you know? And you know, it was about, about the Polar Express level. And, and I think that they just, it's so hard to do. I thought, I really thought that they were gonna use emojis. Like I thought that emojis was the answer to that. That's why they mm-hmm. <Affirmative> had us all building them. That's why they got, and I bet you that there's going to be an option, I'm

Jason Snell (00:10:45):
Sure emoji.

Alex Lindsay (00:10:46):
Yeah. And everyone's just gonna go to, I'm just gonna use my emoji and we're all gonna be fine. And cuz everything about emoji works and

Jason Snell (00:10:52):
They're just too proud of this. And so they don't want you to think about emoji because that, that's like the fallback. They're so proud of this thing. And I think either it's gonna have to get a lot better or they're gonna have to just say, well, yeah, it's, if you, if you find this uncanny, you can just use your mimo. Yeah, yeah. Which is, you know, because all the mi mimo, it is also reading your face and generating a facial expression based on it. It's just much less of an attempt for it to be real

Alex Lindsay (00:11:14):
By lowering that resolution and making it not look exactly like you, you bo your mind immediately. It's why, in why you watch a Pixar face as soon as you get to the point where you're real, the only, the only folks that have, the only person that has figured this out in my opinion, is James Cameron and maybe Weta <laugh>, you know, in the world with millions and millions and hundreds of millions of dollars. They figured out how to get that to work.

Andy Ihnatko (00:11:35):
And not in real time.

Alex Lindsay (00:11:37):
Right. And not in real time's. Exactly.

Andy Ihnatko (00:11:39):
And, and as the, it's the famous as Scott McLeod understanding comics like transition where it's like there's a point, there's a point between absolutely abstract smiley face and absolutely photographically real, where you're the best of both worlds where it's a cartoon version of somebody with just enough details. You absolutely emotionally connect to it, not so much that it has to be now spot on. And I think that's, so I, I got the, I mean, I got the impression from that from everybody's hands-on experience that maybe Apple's real goal, this with that release, excuse me, with, with that demo with that with that thing was to make sure that the information comes back. These displays are incredible. I can read text at any size, any distance. The 3D effect is impeccable. And not quite. And also not quite so many people come back saying, after half hour I got nauseous or I got headaches.

(00:12:36):
Right? Because just, just like with the Apple Watch, so long as they get the hardware right, they can b they can build the software, they can fix the software, they can hold back software features until they're ready. But the thing that will cause this to be an absolute utter first day failure is if people put it on and say, my God, this isn't nearly half as good as my $500 Quest. This isn't nearly, I don't, I'm not gonna put this on for more. I'm gonna, I can see I'm just ha having this for games, but the, the Apple thinks I'm gonna use this as my 4K Mac monitor and use this like all afternoon. No way. Yeah.

Jason Snell (00:13:06):
They wanna dazzle you with their tech prowess. Right? That's number one thing they're trying to do here is have everybody go, wow, look at Apple. They were capable of making this product, which by the way, I admit to be dazzled, right? Like, I think this is an incredibly impressive product. Let's separate their two stories here, right? There's, will it sell and do people want it? And there's what is this product? And this product is amazing. It is an amazing work of technology and also of user interface. The software in it is incredible. But like what we got last week was one Apple showing you their tech skills and doing this thing. And then all of us who tried it could see that it's got, it's incredibly, the refresh rate is amazing. It looks not like reality, but like very close to reality when you're using pass through, through mode, all that stuff is impressive.

(00:13:47):
And then the other thing that we're trying to do is, I think blunt criticism of the story that would be Apple wants to cut you off from the world. So everything Apple did was like, no, no, we are being humane here. I, the word I keep coming back to is humane. It's like the headband is soft woven material. We can see your eyes, when you can see us, you, everything is a default to ar, not vr. Everything defaults to you seeing everything around you. They had that ridiculous shot in the promo video where somebody is packing their suitcase while wearing the headset <laugh>, which is just like, it's bananas. But I know why it's there. They're, it's there because they want to say, look, you're in the world with this thing <laugh>. And I think that literally was their number two goal with this product, is to stop people from saying Apple wants you to put a thing on your face where you never see anybody ever again. Because they don't want to be seen as being kind of a detriment to society. And I think that that was what they were going for.

Andy Ihnatko (00:14:41):
I think. I think, I think they, part of it was just like, oh, these, oh my God, they're so comfortable in language. I forgot I had them on. Yeah,

Jason Snell (00:14:47):
Exactly.

Andy Ihnatko (00:14:48):
You know, they say, yeah, they, they've integrated into my

Leo Laporte (00:14:50):
Lifestyle completely. Yeah. You know, they say a, a camel is a horse designed by committee. I think Apple has created a camel here where a lot of different inputs created, or somebody else called it the Homer Simpsons car, <laugh>. They created this, this thing. And they, and they wanted to say, I wanna show sweater. I wanna show. And, and I mean, it's a, it's a tough category when you're already, before you even release the product, saying No, no, it's not like, it's not like what you think <laugh>. It's a really tough category. Yeah. Yeah. It's a, I wonder if so let, let's do some specifics. Y you wearing glasses, did they Yes. Did what? Did, did you get the Zeis lenses put in and all that? They,

Jason Snell (00:15:35):
They basically had lens crafters on site. I mean, they had a guy, they had a guy who, who took my glasses and scanned them. And so they knew my prescription. And they, they then presumably had a bank of the magnetic snap in. Yeah. adjusters that they found, the ones that cl most closely matched it. And there was a, I mean, the way it worked is you walk in, they scan your face, they scan your glasses, and then you sit in something that's very much

Leo Laporte (00:15:56):
Like, what do they scan your face with air? They scan your face with a headset,

Jason Snell (00:16:00):
With an iPhone, actually, and this is gonna be, the way they're gonna do it when you buy this thing is that it's gonna be integrated with the Apple Store app. And they will actually, they scan it like face id. You, you know, you turn your face around. So you'll

Leo Laporte (00:16:10):
Have to get fitted at an Apple store to get this

Jason Snell (00:16:12):
Well, you could do it in the Apple Store app if you don't want to go visit. They said they anticipate most people will wanna actually try this before they buy it. Go figure. But if you just wanted to buy it site unseen, you would scan with the Apple Store app

Leo Laporte (00:16:23):
On your iPhone,

Jason Snell (00:16:24):
On your, on your iPhone at home. And it would send that data, or it would send what your, what your size choice was. And that's for that Light shield, I think, more than anything. And

Leo Laporte (00:16:32):
You would send them your prescription

Jason Snell (00:16:34):
Or? Yeah, and well, I think not them. I if it's anything like what Meta does, I think I, I used, I mean I literally used an online glasses retailer, so I sent them my prescription and they sent me the adjusters for my Quest two. So, so I imagine it would be like that the people

Leo Laporte (00:16:49):
Buy will have to be extremely motivated <laugh> to, to wear

Jason Snell (00:16:54):
It, right? Yeah. I mean, if you need a glasses adjustment, you'll have to order that. And and then yeah, you have to do this. I mean, the sizing thing is probably not a big deal. Apple said they figure about half of the addressable market is people who wear glasses. So, yeah. If you, if you're in that half like I am, then, I mean, all I did was literally forward the PDF of my prescription to, you know, whatever eyeglasses, discount, you know, whatever the one is that Meta uses as their partner. And Apple will do the same.

Leo Laporte (00:17:21):
I can put the Quest Pro on over my glasses and I actually do that, which I know is stupid. But I,

Alex Lindsay (00:17:26):
I did, it just, it just slowly destroyed my glasses. Yeah. It's not

Leo Laporte (00:17:29):
Like, it's not

Alex Lindsay (00:17:29):
Ideal, you know? And so, and that's actually the primary reason I stopped using it. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:17:33):
Cause I'm not committed enough to buy lenses for my MedQuest Pro. So what?

Alex Lindsay (00:17:38):
And the fact that they didn't have a, you know, and I think that Apple, I mean, I, I'm curious about this. So, so with Jason, the, it's a, it's a magnetic, just the lenses snap in, snap out.

Jason Snell (00:17:47):
That's, that's what they say. But again, the way this worked was they measured me that I sat in the airport lounge while behind the scenes ELs. And they were like with an assembly line or putting 'em all together for the rooms. Cuz it's, remember it's like an individual demo. So there were just a bunch of rooms and a door, you're led to a door and there are, there's a PR person and a product marketer inside and the headset. So they, it was already set up for me by the time I walked in. Sounds like severance. This is Apple. This is <laugh>. It was, I don't know. I mean it, I guess a little bit, like I said, I think it was more like a, like an airport lounge. Yeah. And then you led into a kind of fake living room. And it was very homey for a temporary structure built on the soccer field at Apple Park. It was very homey.

Andy Ihnatko (00:18:27):
How many demos do you think they gave? It's, it really seemed like they were, it, it wasn't like the iPhone. Did they

Leo Laporte (00:18:31):
Have an omelet station? That's what I wanted know. It seems

Jason Snell (00:18:33):
There

Andy Ihnatko (00:18:34):
Were, that seem like they got as many people in, they

Leo Laporte (00:18:35):
Got hundred in, right. It looks

Jason Snell (00:18:37):
Like there were very light snacks. I would say that that venue could probably do, it was a half hour actually in the room. There's probably a reset, but let's ballpark it and say that maybe it was 25 an 25 an hour. Nice. and they did it for several, you know, at least two days. But still that there's a limit there. That's, that's what whatever that is, that's a few hundred. That's four or 500 people. That, that at most, and maybe they had some other stations elsewhere for developers that were not part of the pr queue that I went through. But like, it's a very small number because this was a super, I mean, literally every single person had a PR handler and a product marketing person, vision Pro. It was a two to one ratio. College students know that's pretty good if you've got two instructors and one student. Yeah. <laugh>. It was pretty wild.

Andy Ihnatko (00:19:31):
So they're, they're, they

Leo Laporte (00:19:32):
Missed a bet. They shoulda had a severance, got his own defense. They should have had a severance egg bar though. They really missed a bet. It would've, they could

Andy Ihnatko (00:19:38):
Have. I don't, I don't know. I I don't, I don't think they covenant people getting loaded up on, on grease and protein just before trying on the new VR headset.

Jason Snell (00:19:45):
You

Leo Laporte (00:19:45):
Gotta do the cross promo thing. Smooth. Really do smooth jazz. Smooth jazz. So you liked wearing it. You, as you point out in your article, you have experience with the PlayStation VR and the Meta Quests two. Yes. so you, you know, you, you're known newbie to this experience. Was it? Yeah.

Jason Snell (00:20:03):
I didn't see the Quest Pro, but, but I've seen those other two differently.

Leo Laporte (00:20:05):
Yeah. I feel like the Quest Pro is just like, a little bit better

Jason Snell (00:20:08):
Higher Rez Quest two. Yeah. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:20:10):
So

Jason Snell (00:20:11):
Yeah, I, I think it's really good. I mean, I think that the, the, the imagery is really great. The 3D effects we're good.

Leo Laporte (00:20:16):
What's, what stands out? What is the difference between this, I guess and the quest?

Jason Snell (00:20:21):
I'll, I'll tell you. Well, I mean, the philosophical difference that it st it drops you into ar it drops you into the world that you're already in, where you're seeing your surroundings. And that's pretty

Leo Laporte (00:20:29):
High quality. Cuz that's one thing with Quest Pro. It's not, it's, it's still an outline.

Jason Snell (00:20:33):
No, it's, it's so the real world, instead of being in what meta drops you in a virtual world, right. Apple drops you in the real world. It is extremely high quality. I've seen some people say it's like reality. It's like, well, no, it's a lot softer. I mean, 4K is great, but it's not reality. It's not not reality. Reality is the highest resolution of

Leo Laporte (00:20:48):
All. No, the Quest Pro has a pass through mode, but it's not, it's not at all realistic. It's

Jason Snell (00:20:53):
Just not No apples. Apples is very, very good. And then that, and so they want your, by default, your experiences are, are going to be in that augmented space. And then there's the little dial, little digital crown Yeah. That you can turn to, to shut yourself off from the world, essentially. But that, that is, yeah, I mean, the 3D was good. The pass through mode was very impressive. The immersive stuff like the sports, I know Alex and I have been talking a lot about immersive sports on this thing. Like that's slam dunk and that, that it's an air fielding era at Fenway Park <laugh> the word just spec. I, I wanted to reach out and pick up that baseball but it was in play, so I would've gotten in trouble <laugh> just really remarkable. But I'll tell you the thing that impressed me maybe the most is the UI on it.

(00:21:38):
That they, it, it feels like Apple's best ui people spent five years on this because it felt like a natural extension of a lot of things we've learned from iOS and iPad os that the gestures seem very natural. The fact that their eye tracking is so good that they are rel, you know, we think about the size of touch targets on an iPad or an iPhone because they gotta be the size of your dumb, meaty finger. Right? well, turns out our vision is way more precise than that. And they're doing eye tracking and machine learning stuff to get it to be they know where you're looking and it's really uncanny. Once you get it, you look at the closed box and, and you know, tap your fingers together and it's closed. That's it. You look at the move little move handle on the bottom of the window and you pick up a window and you just move it somewhere and let it go. And it all happens. So it doesn't ha it doesn't have lag. Like they built a really nice computer user interface. It's one of the reasons why I think they want to call this a spatial computer, is that they built a good computer UI for it that uses your gestures and, and your vision.

Leo Laporte (00:22:37):
So there's no, so the way it works with the Quest Pro is you have to kind of point at, and there's a little dot and point at an icon and you press and hold and it looks, so you're saying, and are the icons fairly small? You're actually, you can actually really tell that you're looking at that. Yeah. Not the one that actually, I mean the

Jason Snell (00:22:52):
App icons. The app icons aren't small, but the close box is quite small. It's a little circle. And when you look and you can really tell you're looking at turns into an X Yeah, it absolutely works. Yeah. There's no laser beam coming out of your pointer or anything like that. <Laugh>, you literally, like, just look at it. I, I didn't do this, but a friend of mine Mike Hurley, he, he took a he took an image off of a webpage and literally grabbed it and dragged it into another app. And it just worked. You know, he grabbed it and it does start to feel tactile. Like I'm literally moving this, this picture from place to place. So as a computer UI and the eye tracking stuff in it, it's very, very good. They did a great job. Again, you did this, it spare no expense.

Leo Laporte (00:23:28):
You did this sitting down, right? You, there was no, mostly, mostly. So you were able to stand up.

Jason Snell (00:23:32):
There was a standup component. So at the end, they do this dinosaur thing where basically they draw a portal into the wall at the far end of the room. So since it's augmented reality, they're able to basically layer their 3D content onto a physical object. So it looks like a dinosaur is looking through a window in the, in the room. And at that point they said, why don't you get up and interact with a dinosaur and <laugh>? And so I walked over and nice. And the frame, honestly, the frame rates were good. I, I walked too far, so I walked into the dinosaur <laugh>, and then it, it was like, they're like, you're gonna step back, get out, get out of the way of the dinosaur, get your head. What

Leo Laporte (00:24:05):
Happened when you walked into it?

Jason Snell (00:24:07):
It it got it. I think it kind of grayed out. It clicked and it was like a, it was like an yeah, it was basically saying, you have, you, you're occluding the, the object basically. I, I, you know, I'll take, I'll take the, that one. I, I I was too energetic. No, but these are at the wall.

Leo Laporte (00:24:22):
So look, this is the thing that's most valuable is you have a subjective experience of this. So that's what I'm interested in. What is it, what was your subjective experience

Jason Snell (00:24:30):
With it? And what I would say is that I think that the, the latency, like it was, I don't think people are gonna, I mean, somebody will, but I don't think people are gonna get carsick with this thing because the latency the field of view was all very good. In fact, there was only one time in the entire demo where I could actually see the system struggling. And at the beginning of that dinosaur encounter they had, there's a butterfly that flies into the room. Into the room, right. <Laugh> and they say, put your hand out and it's supposed to land on your hand. And it did land on my hand. And then I move my hand like, you know, back and forth a little bit. And the, the butterfly lagged. Yeah, the butterfly was a little bit behind. But it, it struck me that that was the first time I'd had the illusion broken in the entire half hour.

(00:25:10):
Wow. so, you know, again, they put a lot of, there's a lot of money in this thing. There's a lot of hardware in this thing. And that's why I think that it's worth having those two conversations about like, will people buy it? Versus like, what is it as a tech accomplishment? Because they spent so much time and money and threw so many resources at that. And I'll tell you that eye tracking, that moment where I realized that I, I, I need to stop looking for the cursor because my looking was the cursor <laugh> that, that was when I went. Oh, oh, I see. And then the gestures are all like, I mean like, you bring two fingers together to, to tap. You bring two fingers together and move it left or right to swipe. You move 'em up and down to scroll. Like it's all basically iOS gestures, really familiar. So yeah, as a, as a a 3D computer they really built a a, it's a remarkable user interface. I think they did a great job. Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko (00:25:58):
I really wanted to ask you though about about Mike's experience about drag and drop. Like, was the dragging part of it done with his eyes or with a gesture?

Jason Snell (00:26:06):
No, it's with a, the dragging is with a gesture. In fact, my favorite, like my favorite thing was moving a window. I still, that's the one that I keep thinking of a week later, is moving a window where I looked down at the, at the move the move line, it's like the little indicator at the bottom of an iPhone. And I looked at it and I grabbed it with just by putting my two fingers together, at which point I could just move it wherever I wanted with my hand. But you used your hand and then, and then I, I actually like moved it to the right and then I pushed it back a little bit further cuz I wanted it deeper into the room. Nice. And then you just let go and it stays there. It's like you moved it physically. So you, you know, there are accessibility stories here. There is a vision only mode you can use if all you have is the ability to point your eyes because you've got motor issues. There is a version of that. There's, they, they never showed Siri. But I have no doubt that you'll be able to use voice commands on this. They just didn't want to talk about Siri. I wonder why

Andy Ihnatko (00:26:58):
They mentioned there of they could look at a text

Leo Laporte (00:27:00):
Field and say a search, but they never showed you that. Yeah.

Jason Snell (00:27:04):
Yeah. I never, I never did that. And there's also a keyboard and the, and I was gonna ask that. And again, you can, you can interact, you can stick your hand on something and interact with it. You could probably stick it on safari and like like scroll it if you wanted to. It's, it's just that, I don't know if you'd want to for most things because the way I try to describe it is if we think about direct interaction with the iPhone, where you're putting your finger on the software essentially, and it's this, we don't need a cursor anymore. We've got direct interaction. This is like direct interaction at a distance. It's almost like you've got magic <laugh> where you can just be like, oh yeah, scroll that. And you just move your hand and it scrolls it. You don't, you don't need to reach out and scroll it. You can just sort of like do it in your lap. And, and once you get used to the fact that you can just leave your hands down on your lap and you can still make all the gestures, cuz it's, it, it knows, it's looking down there and it knows when you're making the gestures, that's all very effective. I mean, yeah, it's, they, they threw a lot into this. That,

Andy Ihnatko (00:27:55):
That's, that's another thing that think is gonna be really interesting to find out about. Like the idea of having a completely virtual keyboard. Like are they, yeah, literally gonna say here is a completely fake one we've projected on the surfers. But the o and the other thing is that like, I'm sure that anybody who is actually gonna want to be doing like real typing productivity is gonna want to have like, you know, a stock keyboard. But wouldn't be, wouldn't be wouldn't it be great if like, if Apple, like you looked at it Oh, oh, I know exactly what that is. I'm gonna create you a virtual one of you, you, you feel it even though it's not really there, your digital

Jason Snell (00:28:24):
Vision. Well, it it may not even be. So I think you're right. They actually said, especially in the context of using a Mac, that you could just use a keyboard and a track pad and on the screen of the Mac. Yeah. And it will work perfectly normally. And I think that that's, that's what they'll do. I know Meta does this, I believe with the Quest Pro, this idea that it has object detection. So I believe with the Quest Pro and correct me if I'm wrong, Leo, but it detects when you've got a keyboard and it actually like does a, a breakthrough so you can see the keyboard. In reality, I have never

Leo Laporte (00:28:54):
Tried that because the notion of productivity in those things,

Jason Snell (00:28:58):
I know, right? I have friend, I have weird friends who have tried these things and have meetings. I should in the, in the Quest Pro.

Leo Laporte (00:29:03):
Yeah. I, I apologize. I should have. Yeah.

Jason Snell (00:29:05):
But that tech is because they are already doing the person breakthrough, where if you're in a completely immersive setting and somebody is looking at you and sort of leaning in, they appear, sort of appear through the mist. So that you, so that you can see them, which I think is admirable. The idea that if somebody wants to talk to you while you're using this thing, the the system will show them to you and say, Hey, Bob is over there. That's great. Yeah. But I think they could absolutely do that. And I would be surprised if they don't that if you're in an immersive environment, it would show you the keyboard. But I I I would also say there are probably layers of immersion where, you know, first off, maybe you're not in an immersive environment, all, you're in your regular room and you're seeing your keyboard, or maybe you're seeing sort of an immersive environment in front of you, but not all the way around. And when you look down, you see your keyboard. I, but I would, I I think that Apple will absolutely do that sort of thing. So if you want to use a physical input device instead of reaching out and tapping on the virtual keys, which I am very skeptical of, I think that you'll be able to do that.

Leo Laporte (00:30:03):
So it does, the more you talk about it, and the more I read, the more I think that this is Apple. This is a concept card. This is Apple trying a lot of things. Yeah. And seeing what the reaction is.

Jason Snell (00:30:15):
Seeing what sticks. Yeah. Yeah. Seeing

Leo Laporte (00:30:16):
What sticks, seeing what, even if

Jason Snell (00:30:18):
They ship this concept car, I do feel like they're gonna learn a lot about it. I think

Leo Laporte (00:30:22):
They plan to ship it. Yeah. Maybe not exactly as is, but they plan to ship it and, and are watching carefully. It sounds to me like the piece they really got right is spatial computing.

Jason Snell (00:30:35):
Yeah. Ui, their UI stuff. That's the stuff I came away most impressed with is this idea. And that's why, again, we were listing the reasons, the ways they wanted us, the takeaways they wanted from last week. Right. Right. They wanted the takeaway to be the attack is impressive. They're humane. And I think, I think the other one of <laugh>, the takeaways was this is a computer judge it as a computer. Yeah. Which is weird and interesting, but like, I get it. Having used it, I get it. That they're like, that's a place they're comfortable. And the idea that they're trying to sell at least somewhat a productivity story to say this, basically it runs iPhone apps, it runs iPad apps. If you look at your Mac, it pops up a 4K virtual window of your Mac and you can control it. And like, and they're good, they're good at computer interfaces. Right. In in a way it's the metaphor that they understand the most. So of course they're leaning on it. And

Alex Lindsay (00:31:22):
I thought, oh, I'm sorry. Go ahead. All I was gonna say is that, that one of the things that was interesting, I had spent a lot of the weekend watching WWE Z sessions to kind of get my head around that, by the way, so much nicer to watch pre-recorded WW c sessions than the ones on stage <laugh>. Yeah. I mean, the audio is better. The the presentation's better. I just, you can move through it at speed. And so so anyway, so I think that the, a lot of the vision ones are really good. The, the interesting thing that I found was number one is their concepts of the space. So you have you have windows, you have volumes, you have spaces like, and so they, and they kind of define those for you. Okay, you're gonna have a bunch of windows and they're go, this is how they work.

(00:32:01):
Th then they have these volumes that are, that are the objects that you're going to be using or things that you can move around. And then the space is the thing you're inside of. And it's just a really nice way to they, and a lot of things all feed around those, those three concepts. But the, and, and, and it's just what it, what it showed was really, I'm, I'm, we think of it that way, but I've never seen anybody describe it with such clarity, you know, like, like for developers, like understanding this is how you're going to do these things. The other thing is, is that the fit, it's not just the fit and finish that they put on the end interface. It's the fit and finish of the developer tools. I mean, the developer are very well developed. And I mean down to, I mean I, so I used to develop, help develop a nodal compositor.

(00:32:47):
And, and I've worked on lot in lots and lots of nodal systems. A nodal composite of course is, you know, or nodal systems are, are, you know, you have boxes and you tie them together with little noodles and you build things out. Well, reality Composer Pro uses a, a nodal compositing system, or no nodal system to drive it. It is the nicest nodal system I've ever seen. And I know that seems like a really odd thing, but to go down to the developer tool and make it the most functional version of that concept that I've ever seen was kind of amazing to look at. And it was just, and so there was so many things about it. And, and the way that compo, you know, com reality Composer Pro Works the way that they're thinking about video, like video is, so many of these things are not big steps for the developers.

(00:33:31):
If you're already an iOS developer, there's so much of this, and this is what's missing. I mean, I've developed apps for Oculus, <laugh>, <laugh>. It's not that way. <Laugh>. Like, it's not like the, you know, it is, it is like, it's like building a a, it's like building a cabin in the forest, being attacked by bears, you know? And so <laugh>, so the, you know, like, and so the thing is, is that, is that you're constantly trying to figure this stuff out. And so, and there's no native platform like this that's built for the developers to put those things together, which I thought, you know, they've really done that, that exceptionally well. The video stuff is just, it's just h l s and Oh, right. We built a whole new format. That's the one little glitch that we have right now is the M V H E B C is their new video format.

(00:34:12):
I, we were wrong last week, by the way, or I was wrong. It's not 83 frames a second, it's 90 frames a second, and it is 96 frames a second for film. And the reason they do that, of course, is so that they can equally show all the frames and they're not doing some kind of weird roundup. It's easy. Multiple of 24. Yeah. Three. Yeah, it's four times. And so, so the, so anyway, so the, I I get an F in math. Thank you Alex. <Laugh>. <laugh>. Yeah. So, so the so great frame rates. And then, but also the, the, the funny thing about it for us that are doing live, I think we're, we don't know, a bunch of us are talking about like, how do we do 90 frames a second? Like there's no systems that do that, you know? And so it'll probably be 60 for a little while. But anyway, but the point is, is that all these platforms, as I watched it, I, what I could see is that they didn't, they don't make you learn something completely new. If you're an already an Apple developer, you're just adding on little bits and pieces and then they're doing those add-ons in a very, very clear way. So, so anyway, did you watch the

Leo Laporte (00:35:09):
Track on Unity? How, cuz one of the things they said is, well, if you're not gonna use our tools, you're gonna have to use Unity.

Alex Lindsay (00:35:16):
Yeah, I think that, I mean, I think that I mean you can use, I mean, I think that the misguided tack that Epic fired off has, has, has now, has now fired, you know, has, has now shown itself, which is none of us knew whether they were going to keep on building their own stuff or whether they were gonna Unity Unity's a a solid platform. Is it as good as Unreal? I don't, I don't think so, not right now, but it now has a huge shot in the arm from Apple that, that it didn't have a week ago. And so it, it's not so much that Unity is going to take over Unreal or Epics at any kind of trouble whatsoever. They've got a great platform. A lot of people are using it. It's just that, it, it, it emboldens their chief competitor a lot and will flow a lot of money into what, what they're doing. And so it's just, it's not, it's not an, and, you know, it's not a huge mistake, but it, it's, it's gonna cost epic billions, you know, as this goes

Jason Snell (00:36:09):
Forward. <Laugh>. So by the, by the way, speaking of things Apple didn't talk about last week, that they don't want us talking about in context with this product for the next six months. Games is actually one of them. The only game context they talked about in the keynote was you could play like an iPad game with a controller in a virtual like what? But, but clearly there are. So there's the shared space that multiple apps can run in. There's the equivalent of full screen mode, which is you can, apps can be all alone in an AR space, and then there's immersive and of course you can play fully immersive games in this thing. There is a question about whether the hand tracking that Apple's doing is going to be so precise, or whether you're gonna have to buy an ad on controller for certain kinds of games. I'm sure it's, you beat Saber, it's probably gonna be able to do it or something like that. But like it's absolutely gonna do that. You can see it in the sessions that it's gonna be able to do that. It's just not what Apple wanted to emphasize. I think that's kind of interesting that every other VR system has been talked about in the context of immersive gaming and Apple's like, like privately, they're like, yeah, it does that, but we're not talking about it right now. It's fascinating.

Leo Laporte (00:37:12):
I want to get more of your subjective points of view, especially about the field of vision, things like that field of view. We're gonna take a little break. Jason Snell has tried it on and we're talking about Vision Pro last week, Jason, just fyi, <laugh>, we debated whether anybody buy this and so we're not gonna talk. That's, we thought we did that.

Jason Snell (00:37:31):
Yeah. And I think the jury's out on that point, right? Yeah, I can, I

Leo Laporte (00:37:33):
Don't know. We don't know or even what this is because I think there's a lot of things that could change in the next six to eight months. But we, we at least know what they showed. And, and the other thing, and I had said this before the event, was we wanna listen very carefully to how Apple positions it. So I want to go more into that. You started that conversation, I think that's really interesting. Our show today brought to you by Express vpn. Have you ever, would you ever forget to mute yourself on Zoom and then I don't know, <laugh> say, say or do something your coworkers probably don't want to hear. Yeah, you probably have using the internet without express VPNs. Like, like that <laugh>, you're out in the world and you forgot to mute. Sure it's just a bit of harmless banner.

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Jason Snell (00:42:00):
Yeah. I I'm a firm believer. I know we've said this cause we've been talking about this product before, like for six months or a year before we even knew what it was. One of the things that I, I really do believe is that Apple is playing a long game. A an extremely long game here and like this one, like, like you said, Leo, it's kind of the concept car they're going to put on sale, but it's going to sell in small numbers for a high price. But they're gonna learn a lot. And I think that within Apple, you know, I just get the sense that they are going to do kind of what they do with the Apple watch and say we're gonna learn how people use it and what people want and what turns people off and what expensive piece of hardware have we built into this thing anticipating that people would use it and then it is not used and we can just dump it.

(00:42:42):
Yeah. Because we've reconceived of this and then I would be very surprised if in four years or five years the vision os category, whatever it looks like at Apple, doesn't look remarkably different than this. Cuz this is the product of Apple internally. And remember they don't do market research and stuff like that. It's, it's Apple all in black boxes inside Cupertino. Spending five years envisioning this product and now it meets the real world. Now the fun begins, right? And I think that people, even people inside Apple who are like, I don't know about this feature. I'm not so sure. Pick your favorite, pick your least favorite feature, whether it's the eyesight or it's the digital persona or something else. And they're undoubtedly there were disagreements, right? And then this is where reality hits the product. And somebody inside at Cupertino is gonna be like Ahha told you so and things will change. Yeah. This is

Andy Ihnatko (00:43:32):
Apples course

Leo Laporte (00:43:32):
Will happen. Think it's designed by a committee. It really is. Andy, I can see you wanna I'm sorry,

Andy Ihnatko (00:43:36):
Chime in. I'm sorry. I thought, I mean it's, it's that's, I think that's absolutely true. I think this, I think Jason was absolutely 100% correct that this is like, even with the, even with the iPhone as revolutionary as it was, they had to deal with the fact that, okay, we know, we know how to make this thing fail hard. Let's not do any of those things. Whereas this is, there is no market for this. We are really free to decide an an absolutely optimal product because as I I'm sort of disappointed by a lot of the conversation about saying, oh yeah, but that's, they said, they said that they, that the iPhone would never sell. They'd never said, said, okay, well the, what people need to understand is that at the time in the months before the iPhone launched there had been 830 million cell phones sold in history, right?

(00:44:22):
Whereas today there are 65, only 65 million users of ar not just like people who have bought these, just people they're considered by market analysts have used it. That means that, as we've been saying all along, we don't know exactly what people are gonna use this for, but that if Apple, apple is the one of those few companies that has the ability to treat this like an opportunity that says, look, we can, we can, we can basically do the chess move where we keep our finger on the, on the piece. See we haven't gone yet. We haven't moved yet. That doesn't count. Cause they know they have five years to really figure out like what our people are even marginally interested in buying. So do they

Leo Laporte (00:44:56):
Really have five years? I know they can afford, they have the runway, but do the will the public give them five years?

Andy Ihnatko (00:45:02):
I think so. I mean, again, if it's it's so long. I think that there, that it's been demonstrated, there's still, there's definitely a market for this within the fi, within the realm of researchers, within the realm of people who are doing who are vertical industries that do a lot of training medicine. A lot of

Leo Laporte (00:45:18):
These cabinet, remember though, apple is a publicly held company. If this sells below expectations next year they

Jason Snell (00:45:25):
Make so much money that their shareholders, nobody's gonna care all latitude. All the latitude they want, and they want, and they're believers. The shareholders are generally believers who are like, we believe that Apple is really going down a new path here. Plus they're still throwing off profits everywhere else, so they're gonna give 'em all the rope they need for this. But, you know, Andy, I, I agree with Andy. I think also that some markets will present itself fairly quickly. I've already heard from several people who went through that demo experience, like me, who said they think that 3D movies and immersive video at sporting events and concerts and things like that will sell headsets on its own. Plus you talk about,

Leo Laporte (00:45:59):
Wait, like you go to an event and, and wear it, or people will wear it at home. No, you

Jason Snell (00:46:03):
Wear it at home and you're there and you're completely immersed, like, like a sporting event or a, or a concert. And then also the travel, like road warrior kind of thing, where you're like, you're in hotels and you can bring, you've essentially got an iPad with you with a giant screen. And if you open up a Mac now the Mac is controlling it too. You can have multiple windows up and all of those things. Like, will will somebody wanna work eight hours on this thing? I don't know. I mean, how long

Leo Laporte (00:46:25):
Did you get to wear it? You worked? Dunno, half an an hour. Half. And, and did

Jason Snell (00:46:29):
You feel fatigue? It

Leo Laporte (00:46:29):
Didn't worse in any way.

Jason Snell (00:46:30):
No, no. It, it, it hurt from the beginning till the end. But that was just, like I said, it just, I, I kept adjusting it and it just was shoe

Andy Ihnatko (00:46:38):
Title. It hurt from the beginning to the end,

Jason Snell (00:46:40):
So it didn't get worse. I think that's a positive that it didn't get worse, but I did not have a good fit. Anyway, I think there will be some markets that we will be surprised by where, where somebody will be like, well, wait a second. I'll just, I'll just buy it to watch those movie or that. Well, Taylor

Leo Laporte (00:46:53):
Swift fans and all of that. We'll easily spend 3,500 bucks for a good seat at the concert.

Jason Snell (00:46:58):
This was a conversation that I had with some people last week, which is, there's probably a price between watching it on TV and buying a Taylor Swift ticket. Right. That gets you the immersive well, Taylor Swift concert experience after the fact in on the, how is the sound

Leo Laporte (00:47:14):
3D? Does the sound good?

Jason Snell (00:47:15):
The sound? It's a lot like the quest. It sounds good, but it's speakers right. Over your ears. Yeah. So if you were really wanting to block out the world or have the best sound, you would pair it with some, some AirPods. But it, it, can you, you know, I again Yes you can. Okay. But again, what Apple wanted to show is you are hearing the world around you and you're seeing the world around you. Yeah. They

Leo Laporte (00:47:34):
Didn't wanna isolate you unless you're hearing

Jason Snell (00:47:35):
The Yeah, yeah. Right. They wanna have both of those things going in there. But you totally can do that and put in some AirPods and have it be noise canceling and completely immersive that way too. Sure.

Alex Lindsay (00:47:44):
Yeah. And, and I think that, I think it's probably gonna be a version of this that is the form factor that we see now for quite some time. And it's going, there'll be other versions that are lighter, other versions that are less expensive that'll all come out. But this is the pro version. This is like the cheese grater, and this is going to continue to be there because they're not gonna be able, they're just gonna keep increasing their performance. They're gonna, they're gonna probably get a little lighter prob I'm, I'm guessing that within two or three versions you'll see it be 25% lighter, but not, not significantly less. And then there'll be a light version, there'll be an a r version. There might be, you know, all these other things that they've done with everything else that they do. But there is a, I think there's people who are gonna want to have the higher performance. I mean, this is good performance. It's not incredible performance for a headset. It's the best performance in a publicly available headset. But getting to six to eight K per eye, 120 frames per second is gonna be probably within two versions of this. And at that point, it's pretty compelling. And the people who use that one aren't gonna want to use the little ones <laugh>, you

Andy Ihnatko (00:48:40):
Know, like, and so,

Alex Lindsay (00:48:41):
So I don't think that I, and I think that what Apple did that the other companies haven't done is take away the cost constraint. There were so many conversations related to these, these headsets of how do we make it $300 or $500 or $1,500, or whatever it is. And they take things out. And they also aren't chip designers, you know, so, so they weren't able to, you know, do, you know, do it at the level that Apple was doing it at. And so I don't think Apple has to go crazy. And this, this one I think is still gonna sell again next year. They'll sell as many as they can make. I don't think that that is very high. Andy, you

Leo Laporte (00:49:13):
Had a story

Alex Lindsay (00:49:13):
On coming back to that

Leo Laporte (00:49:14):
On that, that Sony said. What, what did they say about the screens?

Andy Ihnatko (00:49:19):
They said like, I think I found the original article, but they basically, there was an analyst that were saying that a, that Sony will probably not, the, the number of screens they will be able to ship in any one year is in the hundreds of thousands, not close to the millions. So that will be probably the, the big limiter on how many of these they can sell. Yeah.

Jason Snell (00:49:35):
900,000 a year according to display daily. And so that's, that's, if Apple bought every single one, that's, that, that's 450,000 a year at this point. And I mean, honestly,

Andy Ihnatko (00:49:46):
This is hundred thousand, 200,000. This story is

Leo Laporte (00:49:48):
Also from the elect that Apple asked them to be able to make more. And Sony said, no, <laugh>.

Jason Snell (00:49:54):
Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, apple gets what it wants eventually, but this is one of those things where, how do you create a market for a display like this? Well, one, you, you do this, you make a product that requires it, and you go from there. And Apple and Sony will either be good partners or Apple. You know, it wouldn't surprise me if we're reading that story that Apple has already got a different partner for a future version. And they're, and you know, it is, apple is not likely to be denied, but because they've got all the money and they'll find a way. But yeah, I, I would imagine this thing is gonna be supply constraint. Honestly, that may be one of the reasons it costs what it does. Not just that it's made out of extremely com expensive components. But because you sh you know, if they know how many they're gonna be able to get, you should price it. So, you know, you, you, you limit demand, right? Because you can't sell, well, they could price it for 2000. Sure. and that would be great. And they could sell 2 million of them, but they can't make 2 million of 'em. So why would you price it that way?

Alex Lindsay (00:50:51):
Yeah, exactly. I think that, I think that they will, they would sell the exactly the same number next year at 3,500 or at a thousand because they're at 3,500, they're still gonna max out the number the nu number that they can make. And so, to your point, you know, I think that that, that, that was a better situation for them. And I think it also gives them some cover, like, Hey, we're making, we're selling 'em as fast as we make 'em. Oh know, say that

Jason Snell (00:51:12):
On the, on the analyst call. Right? We were, we sold out.

Alex Lindsay (00:51:16):
We, we, we, we were doing the best we can. It's a new, it's a new vertical, and we're still working out some of the kinks, but we're selling everyone that we make. And, and that's, you know, for an analyst call, that's pretty, that's a pretty good signal.

Leo Laporte (00:51:26):
It's expected they'll make a hundred thousand. Sony says we can make 800,000 screens a year. That's 400,000 devices at max a year. If they buy all of Sony's supply 50,000 to a hundred thousand 50. So 50,000 to a hundred thousand devices per quarter according to the elect. Right? Yeah. So, and a hundred thousand is not an unreasonable amount. It's not enough to move the needle. I mean, this really is a developer tool.

Jason Snell (00:51:53):
It, well, that's when Andy mentioned Pro, one of the, one of the pros that are gonna be using this product Andy and Alex both touched on it, it's developers, right? Like the, one of the things that's happened, and I know David Smith, who's an iOS developer, wrote a really nice essay this week about about why he's very excited about developing for this platform. It is, you know, if, if this is going to be big eventually, one of the things that Apple has as an advantage is the app store and its app developers and people who are familiar with its platforms developing software for it. And I would imagine that a lot of the sales of this thing, there will be a developer edition. Apparently this is something that's come out, that there will be a developer kit that will be available to approve. They'll need

Leo Laporte (00:52:34):
To do that because they want to reserve a certain number, make sure developers get 'em.

Jason Snell (00:52:38):
Absolutely. Yeah. Yes. So they are gonna ship some of these hardware, whether it's the final or a semi-final version. I think that later this year, developers will be able to ask Apple and they'll look at their track record, and then they'll approve them individually and someone will come to the house and who knows how that will work.

Leo Laporte (00:52:54):
So Haylight will get one that will happen. That's what you're seeing. Yes.

Jason Snell (00:52:56):
<Laugh>. Yeah. Yeah. And David, I think David Smith will get one right? For his now, now that he's written that essay and he's proven himself with, with widget Smith and a bunch of other his popular apps. I think he will do it. But that's the other role this product plays is it is gonna get this in the hands of developers to write the software. And, and

Leo Laporte (00:53:12):
Now are the people stop complaining, macros, stop complaining about the store and start saying how great Apple is. If you wanna get your tip <laugh>,

Jason Snell (00:53:20):
Well, it'll be a year or two before they complain about the Vision Os App store and what the rules there.

Alex Lindsay (00:53:25):
Right. And and the, the, the interesting thing is, is that it, it is you know, for developers, it's a pretty, it's pretty green field because you're gonna have a bunch of people who, let's say tens or hundreds of thousands of people who had the money to buy a $3,500 headset and will buy most of the apps that are developed for it. It's true. Just to see what's going on. Yeah. You know, like, they're just gonna be doing research. They just wanna see what's going on. They wanna see the next thing. And so for a developer, you know, to, to push into that market, the risk is actually lower than it seems just because you have people with money that are ready to spend money and, and neat and want to know if there are other developers, if they're, they're gonna wanna see how everybody's doing. Everything. You can

Leo Laporte (00:54:02):
Almost guarantee you'll sell 50,000 units for sure. Of anything at some point. You're right.

Alex Lindsay (00:54:06):
Yeah. If you write it reasonably well, if you follow the guidelines, then you can. Yes.

Leo Laporte (00:54:10):
Everybody isn't, you're pretty good.

Alex Lindsay (00:54:11):
And so,

Leo Laporte (00:54:12):
I guess really I've been asking the, I've been saying the wrong thing and asking the wrong question. It's not really what the public reception for this is

Alex Lindsay (00:54:21):
At all. Not yet.

Leo Laporte (00:54:22):
It's how much Apple's willing, how, how long Apple's willing to go how many years, how many versions are they willing to develop Absolutely. To get it to the point where people do want it.

Alex Lindsay (00:54:34):
I think they're 50 billion in,

Leo Laporte (00:54:36):
I I'm sure you're right. We know that that has spends 10 billions a a year on its, I I

Alex Lindsay (00:54:42):
I think that Apple spent a lot of money on this. I think that they're in, you know, that's the one thing that we, we see. I, I think that, but I

Leo Laporte (00:54:47):
Think they'll spend another 50 billion in marketing over the next couple of years. I mean, probably they're gonna spend some, you're gonna see a lot of ads for this.

Alex Lindsay (00:54:55):
Yeah. They're, they're, they're, I mean, they're mo they're need

Leo Laporte (00:54:57):
To create a new

Alex Lindsay (00:54:58):
Market thing is is that it's not, it's a computing platform to them. It's the next computing flat platform. Right. You know, it's another place to be, to do your work. And, and I think that, and, you know, do work, do everything you're doing. You know, it's not, it's not a place to play games or a place to d disappear. You're gonna, you know, it's a computer. Yeah. Yeah. And so I think that they're, they're looking at that as a, you know, and if you look back at the 1.2 million iPhones that were sold, that was a, you know, good start <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:55:25):
Right. <laugh>

Alex Lindsay (00:55:26):
Compared to what they, what they did. Now, what they do now, I

Jason Snell (00:55:29):
Leo I think it would take a complete rejection of the product. Right? Like, if they can't find a market for it, if everybody, like nobody buys it and everybody looks at it and says, this isn't good for watching sports. It isn't good for watching movies. It isn't good for doing video conference. Like, if there is a complete utter rejection of it, that people just like all their assumptions were wrong, I could see a scenario where they walk away in a few years. But I think I, it feels to me like it's gonna take years to even find out if that's true. So they're in, they're not gonna lock, they're not, after doing seven years of work on this, they're not gonna walk away in the short run. No. It's gonna be years. I think it's gonna take an extended belly flop for them to get there. And honestly, I think it might take so long, because I really do believe that in the back of their minds, what they're thinking is eventually we're gonna get glasses people can wear out in the world that augment reality. And that's the prize at the end of this. It's kind

Leo Laporte (00:56:18):
Of like what you've heard. And we

Jason Snell (00:56:19):
Spent 10 years nuclear

Leo Laporte (00:56:20):
Fusion. It's,

Alex Lindsay (00:56:20):
It's, and you

Jason Snell (00:56:21):
30 years away, it's 30 years away. Someday just around the corner.

Leo Laporte (00:56:25):
Someday you will. It's gonna be big. When it though, I, I wonder if the other thing that might happen is that if the vision transmogrifies, I mean spatial, I, you know, I'm kind of, of the opinion that there isn't really a market for a computer. You strapped to your face that that's really not the form factor anybody wants. So I'm wondering though, maybe you could, maybe spatial computing could be expressed in some other form, maybe, right. Maybe you could project screens without wearing it. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> project them. And I could still use the gestures and the eye track. There might be other forms that you could do without having this strapped to your face, which they could. I don't really, and maybe it's just cause I just have a visceral reaction every time I do this. I just don't like it.

Jason Snell (00:57:03):
I, I had a conversation last week with somebody who said the exact same thing, Leo, the idea that what if this tech has other ramifications Yeah. That we haven't really talked about. Like, I, I'll just throw one out there. What if, what if you had a, a big screen in front of your Mac Exactly. And it had a, it had a sensor display on it and that you were able to actually like, move the windows and gesture and scroll and, and do all sorts of stuff with your hands instead of using a track pad. That would be interesting. Right. And like, they have the technology to do that. They bought

Leo Laporte (00:57:33):
The company that does that, you

Andy Ihnatko (00:57:34):
Know.

Leo Laporte (00:57:36):
But what was the name of that thing they had? I had it, I still have it somewhere. A little brick you'd put in front of your computer and you could gesture with it. And then they bought the company. So they own this technology. Yeah. Or Tom Cruise and Minority Report picture wall into where he's going like this and he's got the screens. You know, I think it's just as like,

Jason Snell (00:57:56):
Your hand gestures are a lot easier than those <laugh>. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:57:58):
They're better than that. Right. Those, they're better, they're much more subtle. Yeah. You know, you're down here going, me, me, yep. I, I really think that there is a mark that is something that people would want. So, and this is just, and I think, I think Apple, I hope that person you talking to is really a smart, savvy person.

Jason Snell (00:58:16):
It was Okay. Only smart and savvy people were allowed in <laugh>,

Leo Laporte (00:58:20):
Because I really think that app, that's how Apple's thinking also is we want to create, we wanna test some technologies and spa, I note that they say spatial computing a lot. I think that that's very interesting to me.

Andy Ihnatko (00:58:32):
Yeah. I'd say I, I'm still on the fence on that term. It's like I don't know how much this is. I'm, I'm very, very impressed with, especially after watching all the videos and the from developer week about how well they've thought out the idea of what doesn't interface that exists in three dimensions look like. I've seen this from Apple in a way that I haven't seen from any other maker. Nonetheless, apple, they are the king of spin. They are the kings of, of managing perception. And I'm trying to figure out if they're just trying to bamboozle people into thinking that No, no, no, we're not competing with anybody because we are, they're just doing virtual screens. We are doing an entirely new paradigm for computing. And you don't want to like, you don't wanna be fooled. You don't wanna be a boob. You don't, well,

Leo Laporte (00:59:16):
Mark Zuckerberg doesn't think they're competing <laugh>. He says the Vision Pro, he told us at an all hands meeting, verge the Verge got the text of it. It could be the vision of the future of computing, but like, it's not the one that I want <laugh>,

Jason Snell (00:59:31):
You know, I mean, what, first off you're talking, you're Mark Zuckerberg, sorry. And you're talking to your employees and you want to, you don't want to be sad. Don't worry. Cuz Apple is born. Otherwise,

Leo Laporte (00:59:41):
None of them welcome apples. Seriously.

Jason Snell (00:59:43):
<Laugh>. Although his vision, he said, we're all about connecting people. I'm like, really? Also, and the, and, and Facebook's like, we have values. And I'm like, really, really? Facebook, you have values and you're about connecting people. I mean, Apple's whole presentation was actually about being present in the world and not cutting yourself off by default. But what Mark Zuckerberg means is we think that you should, you know, be little mimo teeter-totter action figures in a virtual meeting somewhere in a virtual office. And here's the

Leo Laporte (01:00:13):
Reasons

Jason Snell (01:00:13):
Are very different.

Leo Laporte (01:00:14):
Here's the quote that's true. Zuckerberg said the question is about quote people interacting in new ways and feeling closer. The quest, while also being active and doing things. By contrast, every demo Apple showed was a person sitting on a couch by themselves. Stroke. I mean, that could be a vision of the future of computing, but like, it's not the one that I want, is that lonely computing. I

Jason Snell (01:00:35):
I would be shocked if there isn't fitness and people moving around in, in this product by the time it launches. The only thing I thought, when people talk about fitness, I was just like, if I put a, I buy a $3,500 headset, I don't want to get sweaty.

Leo Laporte (01:00:47):
Exactly. It was just like, I was like,

Jason Snell (01:00:48):
I, I immediately was like the sweat shield,

Andy Ihnatko (01:00:50):
Oh, sorry, we, we, we saw the red dot on the side of this thing. So congratulations. We'll sell you a new display panel for $2,800.

Leo Laporte (01:00:57):
Well, to that point, he says, from what I've seen initially, I'd say the good news is there's no kind of magical solution that they have to any of the constraints on the laws of physics that our teams haven't already explored and thought of. There you

Jason Snell (01:01:09):
Have it.

Leo Laporte (01:01:10):
They went with a higher resolution.

Jason Snell (01:01:12):
The laws of physics

Leo Laporte (01:01:12):
Can't break them. They went with a higher resolution display in between that and all the technology they put in there to power it to cost seven times more and now than our low

Jason Snell (01:01:21):
End product, than we just pre announced

Leo Laporte (01:01:22):
Our cheap product and now requires so much energy, you need a battery and a wire attached to it to use it. They made that design trade off, and it might make sense for the cases they're going for. But look, I think that their announcement really showcases the difference in the values and the vision that our companies bring to this values. You know, that's fine though. I mean, that's, you should, guys, you should compete if this category is gonna succeed

Jason Snell (01:01:44):
And he's trying to pump up his employees. I totally get it. I totally get it. I just, from the, from the outside, I, I roll my eyes at like Facebook's values, right? That's just, that's so, that's so rich. And, and I, I like, and he compares it to the, the Hastily Preannounced Quest three rather than their pro product, which was originally 1500, which is how great you have. I will say my friend Mike Curley, who I do a podcast with every week, he tried it. He also owns a Quest Pro and has used it extensively, including in meetings. And he said, you know, it's more, it, it's not just two or three times better than the Quest Pro <laugh>. It's like 10 times better than the Quest Pro. Well, it

Leo Laporte (01:02:17):
Has to be. That's the old can. That's the old story is that, I can't remember who it was. Some management consultant said, if a new product isn't 10 times better than an existing product, it's going to disappear. It has to be an order of magnitude better to, to, to make people make the move.

Alex Lindsay (01:02:34):
The issue is also is, is that when you talk, when you talk about your employees, one of the reasons you gotta keep on pumping up your employees is that employees, you know, it doesn't really matter how many headsets they, they work on, it's how cool the project is, especially for programmers and developers don't leave. And, and I guarantee that everybody, everybody at Meta working on Oculus is looking at the schedule on their stock options. You know, like, you know, like they're just looking at like, am I in, am I in year three or am I in year four? Am I, am I in year one? When is the, you know, what, what's the quarterly? You know, because you know, Apple's gonna, if this as this starts to turn, Apple's gonna turn into a huge Hoover machine looking for the best. Well, there's another and they're gonna start poaching everybody. You know, there's

Leo Laporte (01:03:12):
Another angle on it, which is that arguably Meta's vision has failed. That this is not a success. Yeah. And it's I mean, I don't think it is. And I bought 'em and I bought, I bought the first Oculus Rift, the one that was on the Kickstarter. I bought pretty much all of this. I mean, this

Alex Lindsay (01:03:29):
Gets,

Andy Ihnatko (01:03:30):
This was very much a Facebook sort of perspective where they're not a hardware company. Their hardware exists to Right. Get you into using their service. So their perspective is going to be let's make this as affordable as possible so that as many people can get these as they can, so that once they get right, once they learn that, oh, I've got, all my core friends are, are basically getting together in this Facebook VR sort of thing, meta vr, Hey, I want get on that too. So it's, and I, it's the, we're doing it collectively, not just the people in this conversation, but we're doing we're doing this reaction, which is a very American thing where there's a winner and then there everyone else, or losers. It's, it's gonna be very, very possible that it could be just like the, the phone market where there's the iPhone and then there are people for whom the iPhone is, and, and other thousand dollars smartphones are dramatic overkill for what they want to do with it. And they're gonna be the ones who buy the $400, $500 headsets cuz they just want a game or they just wanna have these entertainment experiences. So there could be a lot of different interpretations of this. This is why the next five years are gonna be so interesting.

Alex Lindsay (01:04:29):
Well, and it's, and it's so important for Apple for that to exist because that is what's kept Apple out of an enormous amount of trouble. <Laugh> up until now is Android. Android has been a gift to Apple, even though Steve Jobs took it really badly. Android is a huge gift to Apple because it, it, it really blunts a lot of the antitrust stuff because they, there is another market that is actually bigger than, than Apple's market. And so, so I think that that it, it is it's very important for Apple, for those others to succeed for Facebook and others to, or meta and others to succeed. I think that it is. But I, you know, I, I do think that it's going to be something like, you know, when it, the hard part is, is that this is a real contrast between move fast and break things and fit and finish <laugh>.

(01:05:17):
You know, like, and, and I think that that, you know, and, and I think Apple couldn't come out with anything less than high fit and finish. Absolutely. When they, when they did this, they, they had to do the Apple version of this and they couldn't put something out early that said they had to put something out eventually, because, you know, no plan ever you know, no plan ever survives meeting reality. And so they could do as much as they could and, and show that they can do something great, but they have to have people interact with it, have them see it. And so, and they don't, I don't think that they need more than a couple hundred th thousand people to buy it for the first couple years. I don't think this is, yeah, I I definitely don't think this is the product that they envisioned when they, seven years ago when they started it. I think this is the product that, that they knew they could get to probably five years ago. I think, you know, like,

Andy Ihnatko (01:06:01):
I think the essential thing was making sure they got developers on board as quickly as possible. And that wasn't just getting the hardware out. That's showing off what they did last week, which is just my goodness. I mean, I've written just a handful of Swift apps, but it got me and just basically test apps just to, just to get used to like writing iPad apps and thinking that, I mean, I was watching videos thinking that, gee, I don't think it would take me more than a day to adapt like, the three apps that I built, like for VR and not just this lame, oh, instead of having an iPad app, now you've got the, the, you've got the ornaments that are hanging from the bottom. Like, no, I could see how, well if I wanted to if I wanted to actually add this feature that I thought was kind of interesting, I don't think it would be, it would take very long because I already know the Swift, I already know this app. This app is already running on iPad and they seem to have outlined very, very easily how the skills that I already have are easily transferrable to basically enhancing these things. That's, that, that was part of the most powerful part of last week's announcements, was just simply convincing even people like me that who are not professional developers, that, hey, look, creating really good VR apps is accessible to you and get you excited about doing it.

Leo Laporte (01:07:07):
Well let's let's pause for a moment. We're gonna talk some more. Jason Snell has tried it. He is here to tell. I didn't ask about the field division. We'll, we'll get to the field of you in just a second. He's gonna tell us more about that. We should really talk about the Mac Pro <laugh>. I'm waiting for my 15 inch MacBook Air to arrive any minute now. You know? Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko (01:07:28):
Jason, how, how uncomfortable was the Mac Pro to wear <laugh>?

Jason Snell (01:07:31):
You know I chose to wear the Mac Studio instead because it's a lot lighter and it's the same processor. So you

Leo Laporte (01:07:37):
Know, the

Andy Ihnatko (01:07:38):
Code, the code name for that was Flavor fla, I believe. <Laugh> It heard from

Alex Lindsay (01:07:41):
Start to finish.

Leo Laporte (01:07:42):
Heard from Start to finish really should be the show title.

Andy Ihnatko (01:07:45):
Actually. It was

Jason Snell (01:07:46):
Kind of comfortable. You wear like a shirt, it's fine.

Leo Laporte (01:07:47):
Yeah. <laugh> Andy Ako, Alex Lindsay. More to come on Mac Break Weekly. I was hoping that, that the laptop would be delivered before the show was over. It looks like now up s is saying it, it's gonna come between two and five tonight. So if you wanna run over to my porch and steal it, that's your window of opportunity. Go on over and <laugh>. There goes, John Ashley, we lost him. Our show today. Oh, I hope you had a good lunch because what I'm about to do is gonna make you very, very hungry. Our show today brought to you by Hello Fresh. Oh man, I love our Hello Fresh box. It takes the work out of eating well. You can reach your goals. They have a, a variety of choices like they're calorie smart and protein, smart lunch and dinner options. They've got new vegan recipes too, which is awesome.

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They give you all the options right there. Hello Fresh. We love our Hello Fresh box. I look forward to it when it arrives. Era America's number one meal kit. Hello fresh.com/mac break 16. Use the code Mac break 16 for 16 free meals including free shipping. Okay, now really at least try this Hello fresh.com/mac break 16 and use the code Mac break 16 to get 16 free meals plus free shipping. That's a good deal. And my mouth, I wanna do the Braw Bar <laugh> caramelized onions. DJ SL pineapple relish. Yeah baby hello fresh.com/mac break 16. And the offer code is Mac Break 16. Thank you. Hello Fresh for supporting Mac Break Weekly. So Apple, it wasn't all Vision Pro all the time when we were there though. Jason, are you sitting through the computer announcements thinking we were thinking, we were sitting here thinking, are they gonna, it was almost what an hour and a half in. Are they gonna, are they gonna do the Vision Pro or whatever they're gonna call it? We didn't know the name at the point.

Jason Snell (01:12:33):
I, I think the fact that they announced a new MacBook Air lowered the price on their most popular computer up introduced a new Apple silicon chip, updated the Mac Studio and finally ended the Apple silicone transition to with the new Apple Silicon Mac Pro. And they did that in 13 minutes. I thought, oh yeah, there's gonna be a headset. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:12:51):
Cuz they moved through it pretty quick. <Laugh>. Yeah, <laugh>. But still, I mean that, you know, it's, it's a shame in a way. It's a shame because that was a, they really did a lot of stuff just independent of the Vision Pro.

Jason Snell (01:13:01):
I I I agree. I mean, not only do we get the map for like the future of their operating systems for the next year, which is always a big news. Yeah. But the Mac announcements, which didn't, and they weren't necessary. They just had 'em ready to go. So I guess they fired 'em off in 13 minutes. But like, they're not, like I said, like this is the first appearance of the M two Ultra. They finally closed the transition by doing a MAC Pro. They brought back the Mac studio for M two, which was a, an open question about whether that product was gonna get updated for M two. And then I think the most important things they did is they took their most popular product on the Mac side, the MacBook Air M two, and they cut the price by a hundred dollars, which I did not have on my Bingo card.

(01:13:42):
And did that 15 inch laptop that we've been discussing that's been in the works for a while now. And Mark Gurman from Bloomberg reported over the weekend that they had originally planned on that to come out last summer. And they just, they basically delayed it until now. They wanted to ship it with the 13 and next time they revise these, they'll probably ship together. But like a 15 inch laptop, it used to cost, it used to cost like $1,200 to get a laptop over 15 inches on the Mac side because you had to get a MacBook Pro. And most people do not need all the features of a MacBook Pro and now for $200 more, and it's actually 100 if they're con configured the same way. Because that, that, that 10 99 MacBook error is like, it's got too fewer GPUs and it's got the low power power brick. And like, it is not like it is, it is detent as the car people say <laugh>. So it's really like a hundred dollars price delta to get the bigger screen. I I mean I think that's the, I I honestly think that's the biggest impact news of the whole week in terms of like immediate real impact is that Apple's bestselling Mac is a hundred dollars cheaper and now there's a 15 inch option. Like that's huge. It's huge.

Leo Laporte (01:14:52):
Yeah. And in some ways it tells you how committed they are to Vision Pro, that they were willing to dilute what is really a big story <laugh> in order to get the Vision, vision Pro.

Alex Lindsay (01:14:59):
It's a big story, but it's not a new story. You know, they're like, I think a lot of times we go into WWE C looking for something new and, and this would've been like, yeah, it's great, but they're not, I have to tell you, they wanna launch something. People

Leo Laporte (01:15:08):
On the Windows side, people on the PC side are looking at that 15 inch inch MacBook Air, 3.3 pounds. They're thinking, oh my God. You know, you

Jason Snell (01:15:16):
Know. Did you notice Leo in the, in the keynote that they kept talking about switchers and it works with your iPhone. A lot of, I

Leo Laporte (01:15:23):
Thought was very

Jason Snell (01:15:24):
Clear message on the 15 inch MacBook Air that they think that there are PC laptop users who they can get with this product.

Leo Laporte (01:15:31):
I don't think I'm misquoting. Paul Throt when he said this is again gonna be the best computer for running Windows. It'll have to be Windows on arm. But it runs pretty well on my 13 inch MacBook Air. I think it'll run just fine on the 15. There is nothing there.

Alex Lindsay (01:15:49):
I mean this is

Leo Laporte (01:15:49):
Big. And then the PC market, by the way, and including the max has been going down after Covid by significant amounts. And it's hurt hp, it's hurt Intel, it's hurt Dell. So offering a laptop that makes people's mouth water is probably, I dunno

Alex Lindsay (01:16:08):
If it's just a laptop either. I mean, you're talking about a group of computers. Apple is no longer making something that's $60,000 or no longer really making that part of what they're doing. But you're looking at a group of computers that the value for the for, except for some specific verticals for most people, the the, the money you pay for the power that you get Yeah. Is very high <laugh>. I think there's a computer and very hard reproduce on a pc and that's from $12,000 all the way down to four, $600, right? There is an incredibly great value for desktop. There's an incredibly great value for mobile. So I think that it, it's, it's a real, they're really making that environment difficult for a lot of PC manufacturers.

Jason Snell (01:16:51):
Yeah. I love the Max Studio too. Me too. In terms of value, the, the power of the low end model, which is the, the, the max chip for $2,000. Like I bought one last year an M one model and like I love it and it, and it's very powerful. But, but the power price combination think was reasonable. And that ultra, I think the beauty of the M two Ultra Mac Studio really is that it's exactly the same speed as the Mac Pro. Like you don't have to buy a Mac Pro and spend that kind of money in order to get the fastest Mac that Apple makes, which I think is awesome. And then if you need the expansion and the extra io, like you can buy a Mac Pro and people will, some people who have lots of PCI cards they need to put in it, but like everybody else, like you just don't need it. You can just get the Mac Studio and you've got all that CPU and GPU power just the same. It's literally, cuz I talked to them about this when I was down there, it's literally identical in terms of performance. And they're not, there's nothing in the Mac Pro because they both have enough cooling that they run unconstrained. There is nothing in the Mac Pro that makes it go faster. It's all just about ports and slots.

Alex Lindsay (01:17:55):
I love that too. And I, I love the fact that, that they're just saying, Hey, if you need the pci, like I'm a person that is probably gonna get one cuz I need the pci, you know, slots and I need more, more of the thunderbolts. But if you need eight lanes of Thunderbolt, you need a bunch of a bunch of cards for a little bit more money, you can buy that. But otherwise it's the same. And I think that, I think maybe they learned that a little bit. I think we're seeing that with the phone as well, where they're ta they're not like holding back features from the smaller version of it. You know, you can get a big version or a small version, but they're both largely the same. And I think that that, I think we're, you know, I I think it's going down. I think that's the right direction. If you want those extra features, you can pay a little bit more for 'em and there will be people who need 'em. I mean, we have just stacks and stacks of those Sonic boxes because I don't have anywhere to put a cart. Yeah. So that's why I'm looking forward to those carts.

Leo Laporte (01:18:38):
So you, so that's interesting that the MAC Pro is no more performant than the M two Ultra Mac studio with a 24 course CPU 76 Core GPU 30. But it is a thousand bucks more for the slots, basically. Yeah,

Jason Snell (01:18:53):
Well, yeah, because you got, and then there's some extra port too because there's obviously, there's more that the Ultra is capable than, than it is on the Mac Studio's port Grid. But yeah, basically performance-wise, look what we've learned with Apple Silicon is that a, a chip is a chip is a chip. I keep saying like literally an M two in the 15 inch chair, the 13 inch chair, the iPad Pro, the ma the Mac Mini is the same. They're all exactly the same in terms of performance essentially. I honestly think that's a, it's a chip. As a chip that's

Leo Laporte (01:19:24):
A selling point. Because you look at the a MD and the Intel product grid, it's baffling, it's crazy. There's low power for mobile, there's high power for desktop. There's all sorts of, you know, weird features. And it's just, it's very, I mean I, it's confusing. I think for normal consumers, maybe gamers and, and pro users can figure out what they want. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. But it really is straightforward with the Mac <laugh>, it's like, yeah, here's your, here's your choice <laugh>. I don't feel, I don't feel like my M one studio is slow though. I have no desire to upgrade at this point.

Jason Snell (01:19:58):
No, I didn't. So I, I did a review of both these systems, which is funny cuz there's not a lot to say. There's really, it's other than the M two Ultra, which is a new chip, everything else seen before, but even, even sent, I mean it's, it's also the same story going from M one to M two, which is it's incrementally faster. Yeah. And that's great. But the, the audience for it is people who are still back on Intel. Right. Or who maybe want to change chip classes. If you've got an M one of anything, you don't really need the M two unless like MacBook Air, at least the physical characteristics change. But the Mac Studio, all it is, is a slightly faster chip. So the people who should buy the Mac Studio are people who are on Intel or who bottle up like a MacBook Pro but spend most of it attached to a display and maybe the studio would be better. Or maybe they got a MAC Mini and they're like, oh, maybe I'll go with a little more power and get the Mac studio. But like it M one day M two fundamentally, you know, it's only this incremental update. Yeah. I'm

Leo Laporte (01:20:52):
Kind waiting for this

Jason Snell (01:20:53):
Every already is

Leo Laporte (01:20:54):
Fine. I'll upgrade to an M three. Are they at a yearly cadence now? Are they gonna kind of get this all in order? And

Jason Snell (01:21:01):
I mean, M two debuted here last year and there was no M three, right? Yeah. So I think there, I think it's, we'll see, mark Erman says that the next air isn't gonna come until early next year. So that it may really be more of like an 18 month ish cadence for the chip generations. We'll see.

Leo Laporte (01:21:18):
Yeah. Yeah. Alex, the pro is cute. <Laugh> <laugh>, it's a little smaller, right Jason? It's not, it looked, it's hard to tell, but it looked like it was. No, it's not identical.

Jason Snell (01:21:29):
It smaller, it's same size. It's literally the same enclosure. In fact, I mean the motherboard and everything has obviously changed, but like the fans and the metal enclosure and the wheels on the bottom, if you buy those like,

Leo Laporte (01:21:41):
So $400 Yeah. A lot

Alex Lindsay (01:21:42):
Less expensive

Leo Laporte (01:21:43):
<Laugh>. Yeah. so we, so for you, just because of the slots a pro makes sense. Yeah. Slots

Alex Lindsay (01:21:49):
Are, yeah. I mean, you know, being able to put a lot of IO in there is definitely things that's something that I do. So, so we're, we use cards with what we're doing a lot. So being able to put in, you know, I can, you know, we have, when we want key fill outputs, we want to get a whole bunch of, like for instance for Zoom iso we can take, you know, in the current situation we can do it with the little ones, but it's nice to have a box that you could slide in that oh, I can, I can have a bunch of storage, I can have a much more ram. I could also output, you know, 16 Zoom ISOs or maybe even eventually 32, you know, if I was feeding those into some kind of you know, display system. You know.

(01:22:28):
So I think that there's a lot of opportunity, you know, for that to expand a lot. So, so I think that it's gonna be you know, we were already talking about the fact that not the bandwidth wouldn't allow us to do this with Zoom iso, but at some point it'd be great to be able to push, you know, 48 48 outputs of, of Zoom iso, which may seem like a crazy thing to do <laugh>, but if you're doing, if you're doing an event like a hybrid event, you wanna put a whole bunch of people on the screen having right now what that was is an army of small laptops with sonnet boxes, you know, that were all <laugh> and people have done this. Having one computer with just a bunch of STI coming out of the back of it would be, you know, super useful. And so that would, you know, so there's there there'll be people who buy it just for that kind of thing.

Leo Laporte (01:23:11):
So the New Mac Pro is designed in California is a product of Thailand with final assembly in the us So the Austin facility, the Texas facility is still gonna do final assembly. I don't understand why they say it's a product of Thailand. Does that mean everything's made in Thailand and they just screw it together in Austin?

Andy Ihnatko (01:23:33):
I think that's probably part of the agreement they made with the government. Yeah. Whatever benefits they needed to

Leo Laporte (01:23:37):
Get. Yeah.

Jason Snell (01:23:38):
Yeah. Some legal definitely

Leo Laporte (01:23:39):
They're gonna do as little as possible in Austin, Texas. I think

Alex Lindsay (01:23:44):
There is, I think there is a, there's a, I think there's some legal stuff about what, what percentage of the parts are created and what you call it. Right. You know, so I think

Leo Laporte (01:23:52):
Product of Thailand may assembled in the US Okay. Just so you know. I mean, I don't, who cares? Not China though, which is I guess Africa. Well

Alex Lindsay (01:24:03):
Applecare, that's gonna keep on going. I, I don't think we, I don't think we're gonna see, I don't think Apple's gonna keep on building on, I mean they, they, they're still building a lot of their core in CH in China because they have no choice. But I don't think they're gonna keep on, they'd love to get rid of it. Further development, get rid of that. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:24:17):
What about the iMac? Why did we not see an updated iMac? Did you ask anybody? Jason is it, is the iMac dead? Do you want us just to buy Mack studio and a monitor?

Jason Snell (01:24:28):
You know, I was in a briefing where somebody asked that question and they, they basically said a non-answer cuz they can't talk about future products. But they were very supportive of the iMac. I I think based on Mark Gorman's reporting on this, that the truth is that they just decided that the M one iMac was good enough and that they had other products they needed to build and that they would come back to it with M three. So I think I, I am a hundred percent confident that there will be an M three iMac and now with a bigger

Leo Laporte (01:24:52):
Screen.

Jason Snell (01:24:54):
I don't know about that. I think, I think they're very happy with that. And now that they've got the, the studio display, do they need a 27 inch iMac? And I, I've, I've, I've heard that there's a debate inside Apple about that. Mark Irman has reported that they've talked about building a larger one, but it was not a priority. And given that the 24 inch model wasn't a priority enough that it didn't make it to M two, I would be surprised if there were a bigger iMac than the 24.

Leo Laporte (01:25:19):
Yeah. They, they probably have done research or whatever ED is Apple does instead of market research to, and found that the, the audience for the iMac, the home audience is really happy with 24. They don't want a Yeah. Bigger screen or, or

Andy Ihnatko (01:25:32):
Or the, or the MacBook Air. So

Leo Laporte (01:25:34):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. 15. Yeah, cuz so, so Lisa has the, you know, the, probably a 5K iMac, the 27 inch and it's kind of on its last legs. I, I guess I wouldn't replace it. She says, I want another iMac. I said, honey, it's 24 inches. I think she screen real estate's important to her, so I guess she's really gonna be a MAC mini with a bigger screen. Yeah, that makes sense. And it's fine. Who should get a Mac Mini versus a studio? Is there a clear demarcation there?

Jason Snell (01:26:04):
I think there is. I mean the beauty of those two models is they encompass Apple's entire chip range. So it's M two, M two Pro M two max and M two Ultra. And the truth is, you know, it, it's gonna be what's it worth to you to have performance, but that is a pretty nice rising amount of power based on what you want. Power, memory, you know, two to graphics, all of those things. And then the price goes up as you go up there. So I think there's something for everybody there. I've talked to people for whom Bass Mac Mini is all they need. I've talked to people who are like, no, no, that Mac the M two Pro is like the sweet spot. It's like it's a Mac mini, but it's got more power and it does, it's, it's nice. It's, it's basically an M two max chip with some of the course turned off basically.

(01:26:49):
Right. So it's, it's pretty powerful for me because I do a lot of podcast and video where I'm doing like denoising and, and video encoding and stuff like that. For me, the max was the choice that I thought was like the best fit for me. And if you're a really high end user that has high end needs that Ultra is Mac Pro full on Mac Pro power. So like, I, I think there's a pretty good, I I think with the Mac Studio coupled with the mini Apples got a really nice ramp there that they didn't use to have where it's like, take your pick Compact desktop Max. We got 'em all. Yeah,

Alex Lindsay (01:27:20):
Yeah. And, and, and I think that the, it it's an, it's the best lineup they've ever had. I mean, they, they say that all the time, but it's really the cleanest lineup where you have this gradient that starts at fi $600 and goes to 12,000 and there is something there that you can just kind of place into it inside the desktop, inside of the, the, the laptops, and I think it does have partially have to do with the fact that they are no longer constrained to somebody else's chips. You know, like they're, they're now, you know, we're, we're on, we're seeing this kind of chaotic start of all these chips in all these different places and they're getting them done as they can get 'em done. And I think that it'll settle into you know, this year we're having, you know, I think it will settle eventually into the M three as in one year, the M four s in another year. And everything is very similar all the way through to the phone and the iPad. And, and it just really makes them much, much more efficient and it's easier to code for, it's easier to, you know, there's so many things that, that this makes efficient and it makes it, again, increasingly difficult to compete with.

Leo Laporte (01:28:21):
Mark Germond, by the way, is saying that the Apple's already working on a less expensive vision Pro. I wonder when it comes out, if it comes out in say, March of next year, if they might offer two versions by then, they might say,

Jason Snell (01:28:34):
Herman says it's, it's like a couple years off.

Leo Laporte (01:28:36):
Okay. All right.

Alex Lindsay (01:28:37):
It's, and and I don't think that, again, I think that there's a vision Pro. I think the next one will be the vision, right? You know, or there might be even another Vision Pro before the vision comes out. Because I think that they're, this felt like, I mean, for all the stuff that we know about video production and video and constraints and so on and so forth, this felt like a great step forward. That's a huge jump over where, where everybody else is. And like half a step short of what we know is kind of where a lot of people are gonna land, which is the one 20 6K or AK per I. And so, so we know that, that there, it's a little short. I think the Pro will probably close that gap either completely or partially on the next version to, to do that. Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko (01:29:15):
I th I think it's gonna be interesting to see if they if they decide to, if they decide to plan these things out the same way that they've done like the MacBooks where yes, they could be making 5, 6, 7, $800 MacBooks, they've decided that they never have to sell a MacBook for less than a thousand bucks or ideally, and the sweet spot will be 11 or 12, and that will be the floor for like, where the technology is. Or if they decide that it would behoove them to have a consumption only version of this that costs like that, that would be like the iPad version of this, where no, it's not really gonna be for, yeah, you can use it as a 4K display for your Mac. But it really isn't for like running its own apps. It really is just for being in full virtualized experiences, like Jason said, that they've got three different kinds of like basic apps that run one of them. This would be not the one that gives you a, a fully immersive environment running apps and virtual screens in front of you. This would be only for the kinds where, hey, watch this movie in 3d, or, Hey, play this game in 3d.

Leo Laporte (01:30:16):
I didn't ask you about the field of view again, Jason <laugh>.

Jason Snell (01:30:21):
We, I, I didn't notice any tunnel vision is the short version. Yeah. I didn't do like a real, like, glance around test, but I felt like I was in, in perfectly normal vision with peripheral vision and all of that. I can't, like I was tell, kind of distracted by the dinosaurs, but it seemed pretty fine for me. Show

Andy Ihnatko (01:30:37):
Title.

Leo Laporte (01:30:37):
Yeah. Well that's the point is if you didn't notice, you didn't notice. That's good. Yeah. And that's the real problem, by the way, with the Magic leap and the hollow lens is that they have these letter box more like mail slot views of the world. Yeah. And

Jason Snell (01:30:50):
That's no tunnel vision for me. I mean, I, I've heard it described that way and, and, and people worried about nausea again, like I, all I can tell you is it seems to me that Apple, I mean, they've designed an entire realtime operating system layer and a realtime processor in order to make sure that there's very little latency and that, I guess the chip is right on the back of the, of the displays in order to reduce latency there. Like, I, I didn't experience anything that I would say was like a red flag about it. It all seemed really, really, really good to me. That said, if you're super sensitive, I think the long, in the long run, you're gonna have to go to an Apple store and, and, and try it out to see. But it, it seemed like they nailed that experience.

Alex Lindsay (01:31:32):
I think it's frame rate, like I, I can just say that Yeah, generally

Jason Snell (01:31:34):
90 frames is pretty, pretty good. Yeah. Pretty darn good.

Alex Lindsay (01:31:38):
And so that makes a, I think that, that, that really does make a huge difference in how people perceive that that process and a resolution as well. Alex,

Jason Snell (01:31:46):
I'm curious not to hijack this, but I, I'm curious, what's the frame rate of reality or more, more to the point? What's the frame rate at which it's undistinguishable from reality for, for humans?

Alex Lindsay (01:31:57):
There's a lot of opinions about that. Okay. So there's, alright, so there's, so some people will say that it's 240 frames or somewhere in the vicinity of 240 frames. Most people think it's somewhere between in the mid nineties. So the mid, so the 96 frame, the, you know, so most people think that that's where it becomes okay, hard for most people to distinguish it. But there are definitely, like everything else, there's people who can hear further out. There's people who are more perceptive to those things. And so, so, but, but what we, what people find is that when they say it feels like real at a high enough resolution, it's about, it's in that 92, 96, 98 frames. They're very close at 120, they're going to, at 120, they're gonna be over what most people perceive as as real time there. There's a lot of idiosyncrasies, about 120 frames a second that we're still trying to work out. But there's, but at that rate, at that frame rate, which is what every monitor that you have, your phones, everything's kind of moving towards that, that frame rate. The you know, that's, that's where we really feel like it, it, it looks, it feels very fluid, but again, some people will say that people can perceive it even up to 480 frames a second. But most people aren't, aren't conscious to it. After somewhere in the mid nineties, I think

Andy Ihnatko (01:33:10):
This is, this is why I was really, really pleased that there were so many people out the got demos. And so like hundred, if, if it's true that hundreds of people got these demos, that's a very, very wide spectrum. Like Joanna Stern of Wall Street Journal is one of the, has one of the, had one of the most valuable write-ups, and she didn't have a great time with it. I mean, she didn't, she didn't, like, she wasn't blowing chunks or anything like that, but she was kind of glad to take it off at the end for exactly that reason. And I'll have to, I'll have to update my, my knowledge about frame rate. The last time I really looked at, like, research papers when they're doing it was a, there are a couple studies that did like, hey, we're gonna be putting a high definition, high frame rate monitor next in one, in some rooms we're gonna be putting a window in other rooms.

(01:33:48):
So we're gonna see who figures out that they're looking at a monitor and not and not at a window. And that magic number was in the 300 s but that's, that could have been a completely different set of set of constraints. It could have been. And also, I don't, it, I don't think if, if I remember correctly, that it wasn't, they weren't trying to say, well, let's keep reducing the frame rate to see like to to, to the, to the level that you're talking about. So I'll have to update my, my knowledge. I asked

Leo Laporte (01:34:13):
Chat G P t what the frame rate of reality is, and it refused to answer. So I'm canceling the subscription

Alex Lindsay (01:34:18):
Right next. I'm not gonna tell you, it's unreal.

Andy Ihnatko (01:34:21):
Matrix doesn't want you to know the tech details. They don't want you to see the product

Alex Lindsay (01:34:24):
Chart. The, you know, a big, a big piece of this is that it's, it's the return on on effort as well. So at, you know, it's not necessarily that's, that's why some people are saying you might need 480 frames to be absolutely to ha handle, but 99% of your perception at 120 frames per second is handled. And the amount of technical lift to go from one 20 to anything higher, the, the amount of technical lift to get to one 20 is a big deal for everybody right now. So, so I think that it's, I think that there a lot of folks are looking at you know, again, most people think that the, that that base rate of really people feeling like it's fluid is ni in the mid nineties. Yeah. yeah.

Andy Ihnatko (01:35:01):
But this, but this is a really big question though mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, because it's, it's one thing when you, it's one thing when you've got like a gaming headset where people are gonna be using it for half, however long it takes to entertain yourself in an airline seat, say. Whereas if Apple is really saying that, no, no, no, this is spatial computing. This is really a computing platform. We expect you to spend like a full workday or even half a workday parked with this thing on your, on your face looking at virtual screens. That is, that is the, the Ironman triathlon of this kind of technology where if it's, if it's good enough for two hours, it might absolutely be unbearable for three or four hours.

Alex Lindsay (01:35:35):
Yeah. I still think, I think that the weight is gonna be, you know, a challenge for them. I think that that for to, to leave it on for did it feel heavy all day? I think Jason

Jason Snell (01:35:44):
I didn't know. I mean, I

Andy Ihnatko (01:35:45):
Think about a pound from what I,

Jason Snell (01:35:46):
The meta aquest. Yeah. to, I thought it was not unreasonable, but again, I only, first off, I, I couldn't get it to fit. Right. And also I only used it for half an hour and half an hour session is not a two, as Andy said, it is not a two hour session, it's not eight hours. I will say that Apple actually suggested in their presentations that you could wear it all day and do work. And I find that fascinating and a, it seems like a wild claim to me, and it makes me think that there are people at Apple who use it all day and are fine. So, right. Like, and maybe those people are outliers. I don't know. But I was surprised that they actually seem to say, yeah, that's a use case. Use it all day for computing.

Andy Ihnatko (01:36:24):
You gonna buy one.

Jason Snell (01:36:26):
I mean, it's my job too. But I, I'll tell you after that 3D experience, if they've got lots of good 3D and immersive content, I would buy one anyway. Cuz the, I am one of those people who would be like, oh my God. Like I watched, I have watched movies on the meta quests too, and it's, its display is terrible, but the 3D movie experience is actually pretty good. And if I could do that, and then there's their share play, if I have friends who've got it, and like, I can see a use case there if they do a sports thing, if I can watch a baseball game every week in that immersive 3D environment, oh, it's gonna be tough for me to say no to. But it's also my job. So I I, the business will buy it and I'll write

Andy Ihnatko (01:37:00):
It off. I'm sure. And it's also, you spend a lot of your day alone in your garage.

Jason Snell (01:37:04):
So I, well, that actually, that's, I think that's an important point. It it's absolutely true that they, these are solitary experiences. I the movie watching, the problem with the movie watching thing is that I watch almost every movie I watch with my wife, and we're not gonna have two headsets and I'm not gonna watch it. Yeah. So, right, and, and so like, how much of this conception is people who are alone and what are the use cases? And the truth is, and this is the thing is if I had one, it's more likely I would use it for work than for pleasure only because I'm sitting at my desk all by myself all day working. And so if it was a productivity boost for that, you know, I just push my display away and use that instead. That would be fine if I could, if it worked. Right. A lot of ifs there. If you're somebody who, you know, maybe it is when you're watching on a plane or something like that, or I have a friend who watches most of his TV shows at night in bed after his wife has fallen asleep, right? Like, it's a thing, like I could see scenarios, but you do have to kind of come up with solitary scenarios for this stuff. And that's, that

Alex Lindsay (01:38:01):
Is weird. I did think that it was interesting that I suddenly realized, oh my goodness, they, they did the whole prehistoric thing in 3d. Like, like when they did that, I was like, that whole series is all gonna be like, they're gonna have experiences that are gonna, and to go through the, the amount of expense that it took to make that mm-hmm. <Affirmative> if they, and knowing, knowing what they know now, I suddenly realize a lot of things that they built may have, not necessarily all the video stuff, but a lot of the CG stuff that they've done could potentially be done in, you know, it could be re rendered or is already rendered in a stereo environment. And the, we, it is interesting that Apple TV is, is something that, because Apple spending money on that as well, c you know, building stuff for this headset is much more seamless than it is for meta. You know, like, it, it is, you know, like, oh, we can just shoot this, you know, because you can shoot, what does it take to

Leo Laporte (01:38:51):
Shoot it? Do you need the IMAX stereo cameras or what do you,

Alex Lindsay (01:38:55):
What would it take? Yeah, I mean, so, so for the, the level that they're doing it at, the real challenge you get into is that you need a lot of control over the cameras. It's a lot more complicated than putting the cameras next to each other because yeah, you have to manage both the, you have to manage the interocular distance, that's the distance between the i the eyes. And then you also have to manage convergence. So, and that is where the cameras, if they're sitting right, butted up against each other. You can't manage the convergence properly, which means that, because when we look at things, you know, if you look at something really close, your, see you're cross eyed because your eyes are converging on that, on that point. And so the issue is it's not straight out, it is converged on, on a piece.

(01:39:31):
And so you have some pretty complex systems. So what we tend to do is we have one camera looking through a, basically a teleprompter and, you know, a mirrored glass and another one looking up. And so then you have to build all the gears and so that they all work. It's kind of, it's a very, you know, you know, you, you, you reverse all of those. And so, so now you have these two cameras that are looking at it and they're in the right place. And now you can manage your focus, your, your your zoom and also your your convergence and, and all of that is pretty complicated. Now you can for 2D end up delivering just one of those eyes left eye typically. But the but so you can do that, that 2D delivery, which what's interesting is Apple's new video format is designed, the M V H V A C is designed to, if you only have a 2D display and they talk about it a couple times in their, in their delivery, they wanna make sure that you're gonna deliver one eye.

(01:40:27):
You know, when, you know, when you're, when you're doing those things, if you don't have stereo. So the stereo, it's a big rig. But you have to remember that we're not shooting live and there's lots of smaller rigs. So there's gonna be an experience. The Canon R five with its stereo, the Canon R five has a stereo lens that's 180 that works really, really well for doing vr. And I think you're gonna see a lot of little stuff done that way. We have to remember that Apple did, you know, so the 180 experiences are a different thing than movies. Right. and, and the other thing is, is you have to really decide whether movies are the right thing for someone to watch. Because in full vr, lots of cuts and big camera moves is, goes back to what we were talking about earlier. So frame rate is one thing. Moving the camera a lot is another. Yeah. And you can, you can make people feel pretty sick pretty quickly if you're not caring. Oh yeah. I get sick.

Leo Laporte (01:41:20):
Yeah. And that's why it has to be virtual on a regular theater screen, cuz the head bob and the movement makes me queasy. Right. Without

Jason Snell (01:41:26):
Wearing that. The virtual movie theater reduces that. Right. You actually put it in on a screen and as long as you have a frame and you're not hanging, you're in a frame, you can see seats around you. There's a reflection on the ceiling of the lighting from the, like you do that and it, and it feels okay, but is right. Apple actually built their own rig to do those 180 Immersives, which is interesting. But everybody's gonna wanna, you know, start exploring what that, it'll be interesting to see how that goes. And then to a footnote for what Alex said is if that sounds complicated and all that, that's why most Hollywood movies are shot in 2d. And then there's a 3D production house that creates, which

Alex Lindsay (01:41:58):
Is what killed it,

Jason Snell (01:41:59):
Killed 3d. A 3D version. Yeah. Cause it's not

Leo Laporte (01:42:00):
As good, right? It's not, it's

Alex Lindsay (01:42:01):
It's really not as good. It's not as as

Jason Snell (01:42:03):
Good. It's like those 3d comic books we used to see where there's like, there's just planes of depth instead of it being truly if you so sad. But if you look at, look, we've shot improper 3d, it looks like, does it look like this pizza coming out? <Laugh>? Oh yeah. Oh, is the future 3D house pizza of pizza Pizza? Oh, would you like some?

Alex Lindsay (01:42:24):
And the big question is what they do with these, you know, the big question will be what do they do with these two lenses that are at the top? And do they, do they either computationally match them or do they actually make another lens here? Yeah. So that the phone can generate 3d and if the phone can generate, if they, if the, if you can pick up a phone and go like this, and, and while this is much closer than interocular distance, the thing to remember is, is that the hydrogen, the, the, the red hydrogen was even closer than these two lenses are. And and so what that, you know, so that whole silliness of, I mean, not silly, but whole silliness of, of putting something, putting something onto to shoot something on a birthday is less silly if someone just picks up their phone and shoots stereo for the headset, sends it to their friends, and they're able to put that on and feel like they were there as a much that would

Leo Laporte (01:43:10):
Cooler

Jason Snell (01:43:11):
It's gotta be coming. Right? I mean, that,

Alex Lindsay (01:43:13):
That's,

Jason Snell (01:43:13):
I feel like that Apple, apple doesn't announce future products, but that was screaming, we are going to do 3D capture on the, on a future iPhone, if not this fall, the next fall. Yeah. Yeah.

Alex Lindsay (01:43:22):
It's, it's, it, it feels like it's gonna be such a bummer if they, you know, being able to have this phone right before the headset comes out and being able to generate all that content. It feels like a really missed opportunity if it doesn't come out this year. But it'll definitely, as you said, definitely by next year you'll be able to but you,

Leo Laporte (01:43:37):
But you could do it in this form factor. You think

Alex Lindsay (01:43:40):
You could, you could do it in that form factor. You wouldn't have to put it so that I, again, I shot or do you

Leo Laporte (01:43:46):
Put a second camera bump on the other end of the phone?

Alex Lindsay (01:43:48):
I would love, I would strongly prefer the second camera further apart because the 3D is way better. Right. But with computational photography, with the lidar, with a lidar things, you can, you can, they can do a lot of work on that. That feels pretty good. I think that, I do think that they might need a fourth sensor only because I think that they're gonna wanna have those two sensors. I think it's gonna be really hard to make those two sensors work perfectly together. You really want them to both be the same focal length. So the one X is, is both of those. So the 0.5 or whatever one they pick is there's two of 'em and they shoot stereo and then's the other two

Leo Laporte (01:44:23):
Take, who has it in our chat room, they sell two phones.

Jason Snell (01:44:27):
<Laugh>,

Alex Lindsay (01:44:28):
I've already built that. I got

Leo Laporte (01:44:29):
Your second iPhone so that you could shoot for the Vision Pro.

Alex Lindsay (01:44:33):
Have that rig around somewhere. Hold on. Actually,

Andy Ihnatko (01:44:35):
Do, I don't, I don't think that's, I don't think that's terribly silly either because I could, I could see having native 3D capture via, via two sensors as part of the pro phone line. But now you're getting into how much would it cost to have that extra lens array and that extra sensor into every phone that they're expecting everybody to buy. And are they gonna, are, is that gonna be what gets people to say, you know what, I don't wanna buy the pro, I'll buy the normal one, Mike. And the, there's also, and there's also, by the way, I've, I've, I've read another paper about an idea for using camera. Like there's a num there's a number of, there's some actual, like, you know, an unavoidable jitter, like when you're actually holding a phone and trying to shoot, there is an idea for an algorithm that would be able to essentially use that jitter to capture like acceptable 3D from a single lens. I would love to see an AI solution to that. Like something that builds a nerve.

Jason Snell (01:45:26):
Don't forget the, they have the lidar sensor on everyone, so they've got full depth data. They could do a, they could do a fake 3D based on the depth data. They just wouldn't be capturing sort of like behind the corners for the parallax, but they could definitely do it. I would say Andy. Yeah. I mean, I can imagine them doing a 3D photos a display on the iPhone as well. So the people who don't have a headset can still sort of like do that thing where you, you can kinda like tilt it a little bit and, and get that 3D almost lenticular kind of style effect. I could see them doing that as part of it. And, and that would be a right, because if, if it's this limited product and then they put this feature in the iPhone and you're like, well, yeah, but if I don't have that headset. But if you've got other ways to display it that are like, cool enough, yeah, you can get away with that iPhone. I

Alex Lindsay (01:46:11):
Think

Andy Ihnatko (01:46:11):
What only people are going, people are going to, I'm sorry, just quickly that I, I think that this is part of the halo effect of the of the Vision Pro that people are going to be capturing with these $3,500 devices that they already have all kinds of like, really cool content. And that Apple's going to want to figure out a way to give people on the ground, so to speak, the same experience with their phones that will get people to think, oh wow, I could be shooting video like this, or I could get, I could be seeing this much better than just simply sliding this <laugh>. Just, just like what the, what the Google Cardboard used to be. Where here's a series of, here's a headset, just slide your phone into the back of it. Right. And we will fake it for you.

Alex Lindsay (01:46:45):
Yeah. I I think that if they put another lens in which the, the, the hard part is, is that the, all the computational stuff looks okay. Even apple's computational stuff looks okay, you know, and I think that they wanna make sure that that experience on the headset is amazing. And I think that, and, and I don't think they'll put it in all the phones. I think this is the pro version, so that you put basically in the pro version is a 3D shooting option. And the other versions are not <laugh>. So, so I think that that's where you'd put it, you know, the, the, I don't, I couldn't find my headsets out in the garage. I'm not gonna go get it. But what I did is I built, I printed this, these two pieces. I printed a piece that had, you know, if you think about having the phone here, and after some iterations I learned, you know, so you have the two, the two here.

(01:47:27):
What you have to do is line these up. So then I had another one that was like this, and then I had the, the other phone. Oh, interesting. Like that you rotated it. Yeah. So I had to rotate it around, which worked, worked fine. Yeah. and so I just had a, a big <laugh> that looks pretty funny and goat rock up in, up in bodega Bay with someone walking around with this rig. People, I got a lot of attention anyway. But, but I was shooting some stuff here and it, it worked, it worked exceptionally well. It, you know, as far as stereo goes, cause I got, these were, when I printed them, I made 'em inter interocular distance. So they, they, they did what they needed to do. The problem is again, gets back into the finer things of convergence.

(01:48:07):
So they're both going straight. And getting both cameras to start at the same time was hard because they don't sync together. So you have to kind of hit 'em, and then you have to find the frame and you would go put your hand out in front and snap and then you go back and, and everything else. And so it's not, it, it's, you can jerry rig it, but it's, it's not a but Apple could obviously, I think when I started, when I started playing with it in stereo, I was like, oh, this would be really nice <laugh>. I

Leo Laporte (01:48:30):
Wonder how many it would be, I wonder if the memo went out to a, to producers for Apple TV plus just keep this in mind. Shoot it this way or, or something. You know, I

Alex Lindsay (01:48:39):
I think you have to really decide you're gonna do it. I think that they would, you know, and I think that the, it's a huge advantage for Apple to own the broadcast rights for mls. There is so much every time you start, that's, yeah, it is massive. Like that buy that purchase makes, that's why they do it a ton sense. Now it makes

Leo Laporte (01:48:54):
Sense because,

Alex Lindsay (01:48:54):
Yeah. Yeah. Because the thing is, is that being able to say, I mean, the amount of infrastructure that you have to deal with, with broadcasters, because their job is not your job. They don't care about you. Like I've done tons of 360 in stereo, at concerts, at you know, these things. And the fact that Apple can say, I have a piece of content that is paying for itself in some other way, and I can, and I also control it. So me saying, I, I'm gonna do an Ed Sheeran show, let's say, and I'm gonna pay for it and it's gonna get distributed on Apple Plus comes out of that budget. But oh, I have the ability to put the cameras exactly where I want them because I own the space is massive. You know, for, for Apple to be able to not have to deal with all the other things that we deal with when we're trying to shoot these, because people are like, well, you can only put the camera over here and you can only put, don't, don't put it in the wavy here. And people can't see if you put the camera there. All those things go away with Apple money and Apple infrastructure. And so the ability to generate some of this content is gonna be it's gonna be pretty, they have a much better chance of building compelling content because they have more control.

Leo Laporte (01:49:55):
I'm gonna defer a conversation much needed about the new iOS 7 16 17 and the new 17 and the new Mac Makos Sonoma love saying that till next episode, we'll save that. Cause we're running out time. There is a couple of Apple TV plus stories, though. There is a reason to finally finish watching season one of Foundation because season two is a minute. They've just released the <laugh>, the I don't know if I will they just released the trailer for the new season today. I'm gonna stick with to be honest with you the what do they call it? I want to call it Hole, but it's really silo, silo <laugh>. I'm gonna stick with Silo. And there is a note good job aunt. He has snagged Hugh Howie, the author of the novels that silos based on wool.

(01:50:52):
And so he will be on our, for the club members. He will be on a special club twit e event on June 29th, 1:00 PM So towards the end of this month, Hugh Howie Hughy Howie joins Aunt Pruitt in conversation. If you're a Silo fan or a Wolf fan, June 29th at 1:00 PM that's a good reason to join Club Twit. These are this is Anne is the community manager there, and he's been charged with making it sighting to hang out and club to it. And I think he's done a really fantastic job. We've got a bunch of events coming up besides that June 29th one Sean Powers Fireside Chat. He's the, one of the hosts of Floss Weekly will be Thursday at 9:00 AM the fall, June 29th, Thursday the Tara Formers Stacy's book club. And immediately, not immediately, but shortly after, on the same day, the fireside chat with you, Halle, and the booze fueled inside Twit after hours July 14th.

(01:51:55):
Rod Pue, a fireside chat on the 27th. What do you get with Club Twit? Let me tell you, you get ad free versions of all of our shows. You get shows that we don't put out for anybody. But Club Twit members like that. Hugh Howie interview hands on Mack with Micah Sergeant Home Theater Geeks with Scott Wilkinson, hands on Windows with Paul Throt on Title Lennox Show. I can go on and on. Those are shows that eventually we hope will become public, like this week in space, it started in the club. The reason we can do that is club members subsidize it. They they pay their seven bucks a month. They also get access to the Discord, which is really fantastic, a great community where you can chat about the shows, but you can also chat about other topics of interest to our audience which is a lot of fun. John, it's not gonna be booze Fuel, do you say? No, it's not <laugh>. All right. Well,

Speaker 5 (01:52:47):
Immediately maybe like 10%.

Leo Laporte (01:52:50):
10%. Okay, fine. Some of you will be booze fueled <laugh> and,

Speaker 5 (01:52:55):
And is bringing the, the whiskey.

Leo Laporte (01:52:58):
If you're not a member, we wish you're appreciated. If you join Club twit, TWIT TV slash club twit, I don't know if you've heard, but the podcast advertising environment has gotten tougher and tougher and tougher. And we see a time where Spotify, iHeart, apple, Amazon will eat up the podcasting space and all the advertising, but we wanna keep doing these shows. I I just would like to keep doing this. So the, it looks like the way forward really is gonna be club membership, so please tweet that TV slash club twit. It's a great way to get some, a lot of extra content, a lot of extra fun, but also support what we do going forward. Thank you in advance our picks of the week coming up in just a second. But first a word from Zoc.

(01:53:47):
When somebody's really good at what they do, you know, whether it's Jason's Snell at Six Colors, or, or a waiter who really is, you know, serving you and explaining what you're eating, things like that. Or maybe a doctor who really tells you what's going on, then you know that you've got, you're in good hands, right? A good doctor makes you feel, heard, makes you feel at ease, helps you feel better. But not everybody wants the same kind of doctor. Some people want doctors that, that are you know, give you all the options. Some people say, don't I just tell me what to do, doc. I don't have, I can't a absorb all of that. Well, you can find the right Doctor Fast with Zoc. Zoc is a free app, the only free app that lets you find and book doctors. But this is the most important part, who are patient reviewed, so you can see exactly how that doctor operates from actual patients.

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Also, you can search for a doctor that takes your insurance. It has openings when you need them, treats almost every condition under the sun. It's not just MDs. All c dentists chiropractors. I was looking for a gerontologist for my mother-in-law. It's fast, it's easy. You find the person that takes the insurance. No more Dr. Roulette and you, by the way, no more going out on the internet and looking for questionable reviews. These are reviews that are vetted actual customers, actual patients of the doctors. Zoc is your trusted guide to connect you to a new doctor or your favorite doctor you haven't met yet. In a few taps. Just go to zoc.com/mac break. Download the app. I know you, you can go to the app store and download it, but we want to get credit. So go to zoc.com/mac break and you'll get the link to the app store.

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From there, book an appointment with a few taps in the app. Start feeling better faster with Zoc, it's Find and Book a top-Rated Doctor today. Many available within 24 hours. So if you're not feeling so good right now, you could do it. Zoc, d o c.com/mac break. Zoc, they are fan, I've used them, they're great. Zoc.Com/Mac break. Let me thank 'em so much for their support of Mac Break Weekly. And again, I know you're smart. You could take your phone and download the app, but then they wouldn't know you saw us, you or you saw this ad. So please just do me a favor. Zoc.Com/Mac break. Alright, picks of the week time. Let's start with Alex Lindsay.

Alex Lindsay (01:56:24):
Hello. Hello. Hello, hello. So I have I'm hearing myself back. Oh, there we go. I only have a, an aspect ratio. Now. I'm fine now. Okay. I only have an aspect aspect ratio to, to, to share with you, which is oh nine, nine by 19 really, nine by 19,

Leo Laporte (01:56:42):
Nine by 19. What

Alex Lindsay (01:56:42):
That aspect ratio is.

Leo Laporte (01:56:44):
Is that your ca your camera phone? It's your,

Alex Lindsay (01:56:46):
Just your phone. Your phone. It's your phone screen. Oh. So nine by 19. If, if, so, if you're using Mid Journey <laugh>, remember that you can just set ar oh, you know, dash ar and the only reason I said this is that I had like one lock screen or two or three lock screens on my phone. And now I, I don't know how

Leo Laporte (01:57:06):
What Oh, drew me

Alex Lindsay (01:57:07):
Into doing it. So, so if you look at this, let's see here, let me, let me show you. This is like, I'll just show you some examples. I just started experimenting with it. So, so here you have like, oh, this's be like, these little pictures, little pictures, you know, like paint. This is like, these are all

Leo Laporte (01:57:21):
Mid, like

Alex Lindsay (01:57:22):
This is all mid journey. Oh, they're gorgeous. All of these are mid journey, you know, like you have these little I was playing with Octopuses for some reason. This is some more high, you know, ones there's, there's my that's a, then you have a shark. The shark, and, and these go together, I guess. Anyway, so, but, but it even does the little thing where it cuts the little bit of the nose out of the, out of the out of the oh,

Leo Laporte (01:57:44):
Look at that. So it's below the clocks.

Alex Lindsay (01:57:45):
Yeah. Yeah. So, so it's and then there's a couple more of these and the, and what's interesting about it, and then I, I, I got into these, all these geeky ones, and then my, my wife, I made some for my wife. Give me

Leo Laporte (01:57:54):
A prompt so I can enter it here. So it's ar

Alex Lindsay (01:57:58):
Well, you just do whatever you want. So, but how do you get

Leo Laporte (01:58:03):
I

Alex Lindsay (01:58:03):
Don't under oh, it's just dash, dash ar space nine colon 16

Leo Laporte (01:58:08):
Nine colon 16. I'm entering it in right now. Dragon

Alex Lindsay (01:58:12):
Scales.

Leo Laporte (01:58:13):
Oh, and do you do any special lightings

Alex Lindsay (01:58:16):
Products? In this one? In this one? You know, I think that this, you know, a bunch of these, oh, and by the way, this, to take it one step further, I was experimenting. I haven't gotten working yet, but this is the little square underneath the, the, that's made by Photoshop. So, so I said, oh, you just took it. I grabbed that, I selected that area and I said, produce an LCD screen that, you know, produce an LCD screen inside. So I gotta use Genitive AI in Photoshop to put a screen into the, which is easier than trying to get it to work. This, this was like a macro shot of you know, a ma overhead, macro shot steampunk circuit board. And then I gave it, I think I said something like a, a seven s3 you know, or, you know, just gave it a, you know, gave it some lenses and things, and that's what I ended up with, you know.

(01:59:03):
And but here's like, oh, I like this, you know, gears and scales. I love, I love like some these little things like this. And so it's, what's what's interesting about it is, is of course, it's not just that it's a photo or it feels like a photo, it's that it, it is it that it, it fits. So it's actually building the photo for the aspect ratio that you are you know, that you're doing. And so it, it's, you know, and for having fun, like in, in all of these, if you look at these, you know, all of these are like, that is a perfectly framed four <laugh>, my phone <laugh>, like,

Leo Laporte (01:59:38):
So, oh,

Alex Lindsay (01:59:39):
You know what I mean? They're all, they're all framed. They're all like, they're composed for that aspect ratio. It's not just cutting something out of a photo. It is actually being, you know, it's composing the photo, you know, for the, you know, for the frame that it has, you know. So anyway, it, it was one of those things that I, I don't know how I did it, or I mean, why I did it at first, but now it's kind of like I'm sitting in line somewhere, I'm waiting for something and I'm like, I'm gonna, I wonder what an octopus would look like underwater.

Leo Laporte (02:00:08):
That's a great idea. So,

Alex Lindsay (02:00:09):
So anyway, it's, it, it, I went from having none to maybe lots and then sending friends, some of them like, Hey, this one you probably like on your phone, <laugh>, like family, my, my daughter and my wife, son. So this is

Leo Laporte (02:00:20):
Really a tip, not a pick, but when you do your your image generation,

Alex Lindsay (02:00:25):
It's kind of a side. Yeah. Yes. It's good. Nine, when you're using

Leo Laporte (02:00:28):
Mid journey or your whatever in mid journey, you do the prompt and then you add dash, dash,

Alex Lindsay (02:00:33):
It's just dash R space nine, colon 16, very nice. I'm sorry, nine colon 19. And it will, it's, it's really 19.5. I did some research on it after I got going. And but it's

Leo Laporte (02:00:46):
But nine by 16 will work

Alex Lindsay (02:00:48):
Nine by 19. Nine by nine. Colon 19. Oh, I thought you said said 16. Nine nine. No, I, I, that's for TikTok <laugh>, but nine nine colon 19. Nine colon 19. Got

Leo Laporte (02:00:59):
It.

Alex Lindsay (02:01:00):
That'll, that'll be the same as your, at least my phone. My, I, I don't know if all the Apple phones are the same, but the, the, for the, at least the 14 Pro, that's, it's nine 19

Leo Laporte (02:01:10):
A computer motherboard lit from above dramatic lighting dash AR nine 19. I'm gonna try that right now.

Alex Lindsay (02:01:22):
Dash dash, it's dash dash dash dash ar space 9 19 19. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:01:27):
Thank you, Alex, Lindsay. Yeah, I'm gonna have some fun making wallpapers. <Laugh>. Very cool.

Alex Lindsay (02:01:35):
It's, I, I apologize to everyone for how much time that, that will

Leo Laporte (02:01:39):
Suck up if you start playing with it too much. It's too much fun. Andy and ACO Pick of the week.

Andy Ihnatko (02:01:46):
Very quick one. I, I'm a sucker for every single organization outlining notetaking tool that I ever, I've never heard of. Just discovered one last week called Bike and it's made by the same guy who did task paper. So really what I liked about it, it's really, really clean. It's not like Omni Outliner, which tries to be, it could be anything you want it to be if it involves organizing information. This really is a straightforward outliner. But the payoff for that is that it's very, very clean, very, very fast. I love that there's little animations that take you through the outline as you go very, very scriptable, very, very work flowable. And I've have, I've only used it for a week, so now it's, it's basically on my radar. But if there are times where I've recommended Omni the Outliner two people because it is, I think, one of the greatest apps I have ever used, you know, since I was a child in, in terms of this has transformed, like what I do, outliners kind of do that.

(02:02:42):
I think that Omni outliner is kind of the, the, the, the, the, the tops and all of that. However, it could be a bit much for some new users. And so if you're just looking for an outliner that is better than just simply down <laugh> hyphens this is worth looking at. It's licensed. It's licensed. You get a three day free trial, or I think two weeks free trial if you are downloading it through the App store. And it's 30 bucks a month, excuse me, month <laugh>, 30 bucks a year. So it's also less expensive than Omni Outliner Pro, not more expensive than the basic version, but less expensive than it's a

Leo Laporte (02:03:13):
Bicycle for your mind, right? Hog based software is Jesse Grogen. He's great. I love all of his software. He's been around for some time. One of the longtime Mac programmers. Yeah, this is a great little tool. Bike outliner. Bike outliner. Have you ever tried Loge? No. Oh, I'm gonna recommend this. I'll give you a little quick recommendation. It's very similar. It's an outliner. But it is, it stores as marked down in your on your hard drive. Well, let me op, let me open log seek and I'll show you how I use it. It, it's same kind of, it's not as pretty, you know, you've got the, the animations, but you, you know, this is line one, and then you can do it in line two. I'll show you what I did during the apple event. I did the outline here and I was able to put in the, the feature quilts as we're talking, paste them in and so forth. Yeah. it's a really, this is not web-based. This is local on my hard drive. It's an open source project though, so it's free, although I pay I actually contribute back to it so that I can do this sync. So it's, it runs on everything. I I have. Thanks. Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko (02:04:30):
It's multi, a multi-platform Beyond Apple, is it also like Yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:04:32):
Linux, windows, iOS, it's got a very Android, it's got a very good mobile. So that's the, that's the chief advantage to me. You know, I'm very cross-platform, so I have to be able to use, yeah, I can't use this.

Andy Ihnatko (02:04:43):
I, I gotta say Ulysses, Ulysses, text editor is, is getting me like, oh my God. It's gonna be another factor towards like, if I switch, if I switch back to iPhone, it's probably because Ulysses, I'm, Ulysses is becoming a bigger and bigger part of my workflow for everything. And it's a bummer that I can't like, check things out or add things to things or edit, like on my Android phone.

Leo Laporte (02:05:03):
Well, I know how you feel about that. And since you use Android and Mac this is a perfect log. Seek L O g S E Q. It is my, I've gone from Rome research. It's kind of a local Rome research notion. Oh, I've gone obsidian and this is the one I've really stuck with. It's really fantastic. There,

Andy Ihnatko (02:05:22):
There, there're people like us that, like, we, we've got what we want, but we're always looking for something.

Leo Laporte (02:05:25):
You're always looking for the next best one. Yeah,

Jason Snell (02:05:28):
That's right.

Leo Laporte (02:05:28):
Jason

Jason Snell (02:05:30):
Apple Vision Pro. Oh, no, I'll do, I'll do, yeah, I'll do

Leo Laporte (02:05:33):
A product. No, wait, wait till next year for that. Okay. That's,

Jason Snell (02:05:35):
Yeah. All right. Libby has, has been picked here before. Adam angst by my records, picked it in 2018. He was just recycling Andy's pick from 2018. But I'm gonna <laugh>, I'm gonna, it's been too long for me to tell people, cuz you should know about Libby because it matters for all of you. So Libby is an iPhone app, iPhone iPad app that is a front end to Overdrive, which is the system that most public libraries use to let you borrow eBooks. Yes. And this is a thing a lot of people don't even know that, you know, they're like, oh, I only read e books, my libraries irrelevant. It's not, most libraries have support for overdrive, which means you can check out a book, you can get in line

Leo Laporte (02:06:15):
If and audio books I might add, man. And

Jason Snell (02:06:17):
Yes, not only can you check out a book and send it to your e-reader, but it's got audiobooks too. And you just, it's an audiobook player, full featured audiobook player. So you can play it in the car when you're taking a walker, when, whenever you listen to audiobooks. The experience in the US, it's actually really great because it's got a send a Kindle. If you're using a Kindle. I use Cobo e-readers. They work all over the world with Libby, cuz they, they're integrated with Overdrive. Yeah. They're like a partner. I'm standing. Yeah, yeah. My understanding is that, and they used to be the same company Kindle, I think integration is only in the US so be warned. But if you have a Cobo, Cobos are awesome, by the

Leo Laporte (02:06:53):
Way. That's why I got a Cobos for Libby. Yeah. Yeah. Fair. Sonoma County Library Card <laugh>.

Jason Snell (02:06:58):
And the other thing I'll point out is you, even if you go to your local library and you're disappointed they don't have overdrive or whatever, you would be surprised, check around other libraries in your area. Because for example, if you're a resident of the state of Massachusetts, you can get a Boston Public library card. If you're a resident of the state of California, you can get a San Francisco public library card. Ah, you may be able to get, and also your library may have reciprocal arrangements with other libraries that you can put into Libby and search through those and find the book wherever it's available or available, the soonest anyway. And it's got a nice interface where you basically, if if you're, you have to get in line, it sends you a push notification when your book is ready, you can defer. If you're like, oh no, I'm already reading something.

(02:07:39):
You can say, you know, let me know in 20 days. And then you just, you stay at the head of the line, which is really nice. Lot of good stuff. Great for audio books. Highly recommend if you are a reader or a listener your local library is gonna give you access to stuff that you had no idea existed in Libya is, Libya is a great way to do it. So check it out. It's free from Overdrive. Very good. I love it. And it has dramatically increased. My, my wife is a librarian. She's always like, you want me to bring you a paper book home? And I'm like, Hmm, no, no. I, I'm done with that. I've moved on in my life, but now I use Libby all the time and I'm reading lots of library books on my Cobo.

Leo Laporte (02:08:18):
It worked for me. I agree with you a hundred percent. It's a, you know, it's a great way to to get a kind of unlimited amount of content. It's you still checking it out from the library. So there's all, it's like getting a library book, right? You have Yeah.

Jason Snell (02:08:31):
21 days. And if someone's waiting for it, you know, if nobody's waiting for it, you can renew. And it, you know, it works really well. It's great. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:08:39):
Libby overdrive.com or get a Cobo <laugh>.

Jason Snell (02:08:45):
Yeah, you just check it out right from your CoBoat. Yeah, too. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:08:49):
That is it for Mac Break Weekly. Thank you Jason, to give us for giving us your first person hands on perspective on the Vision Pro. I really appreciate it. Thank you. Next week. Thank you. We'll do Mac os Sonoma OS 17 for iPad and iPhone. I think there's some really interesting features in there. We can talk about that. And of course, all the Apple News. Jason Snell is@sixcolors.com. If you can't wait till next Tuesday, he's there all week long.

Jason Snell (02:09:15):
I, I am there all week long. I won't be here next Tuesday because my daughter's graduating from college.

Leo Laporte (02:09:19):
Congratulations. But that

Jason Snell (02:09:21):
Means I won't be here. Sorry about that. They put it on a Tuesday, literally during Mac Break weekly, so that's hysterical.

Leo Laporte (02:09:26):
Are you gonna go to it? Oh,

Jason Snell (02:09:27):
I I, yeah. Yeah. Going up to Oregon for that. Nice. So that's gonna be great. Nice. but yes, I will be writing lots of things on six colors and we'll be talking, I mean we have all summer to talk about those bands too, so I'm sure we'll keep talking

Leo Laporte (02:09:39):
About it. You also have an M two Ultram Max Studio review right now on six Colors, which is definitely, definitely worth checking out.

Jason Snell (02:09:46):
How do you write a review about something that didn't change very much? Well, you know, you try

Leo Laporte (02:09:50):
Yeah. <Laugh>, I've been reading all the 15 inch MacBook air reviews and it's like, well, it's

Jason Snell (02:09:54):
Bigger, even harder. It's bigger. Yep. <laugh>, it's bigger. <Laugh>,

Leo Laporte (02:09:57):
The screens 15 inch,

Jason Snell (02:09:58):
One louder, isn't it <laugh>?

Leo Laporte (02:10:00):
And as you say, sometimes bigger is better. Come

Jason Snell (02:10:02):
Is better. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:10:03):
Six colors.com/jason. He does a lot of podcasts, all of them. Wonderful.

Jason Snell (02:10:08):
Including

Leo Laporte (02:10:09):
This one. Well, this one is, you know, one of them <laugh>. It's one of them. There's a Six Colors podcast as an incomparable by Tuesday. I bet you upgrade with Mike Hurley. Was pretty interesting after you both tried the vision.

Jason Snell (02:10:25):
Yeah, we just did we did that episode in my office yesterday. Nice. So we both got to kinda exchange our experiences

Leo Laporte (02:10:31):
With that. That's right. Cause Mike's normally the uk. That's right. But he was here for WW C and Oh, that's awesome. And was sticking around. Fantastic. Awesome. Mr. Andy Naco AI for the rest of us <laugh>. When are you gonna be on G B H next?

Andy Ihnatko (02:10:46):
Well unless Trump gets indicted again, sometime next, sometime next week. I got,

Leo Laporte (02:10:51):
Did you keep getting pushed off for Trump indictments?

Andy Ihnatko (02:10:54):
This is, this is the second time I've been bumped because of Donald Trump being indicted for something like that. That was on, supposed to be on last Friday. And of course the indictments got broken like on Thur Thursday night. I'm like, you know what, I'm gonna continue to write up everything I'm gonna need for tomorrow, but I don't think I'm gonna have, I

Leo Laporte (02:11:12):
Have a feeling use this. Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko (02:11:13):
Yeah. So they might be able to get me back on on Thursday. Definitely gonna be on a week from Friday at 12, 12 45 pm at the Boston Public Library. So go to WGBH news.org to watch it live or

Leo Laporte (02:11:25):
Later. Very nice. Office hours.global is where you will find our good friend Alex Lindsay, really full of great information. What, what are you working on this week?

Alex Lindsay (02:11:38):
Oh, it's a busy week, <laugh>. So it's as always, but they're, they, you know, we, we've been really working on improving the, you know, every, every second hour we had, we talked about trademark law yesterday. Incredible attorney, interesting Gain answered our questions about copyright and trademark and understanding what those things are. We talked about 3D printing this morning, kind of an intro to 3D printing to get people. We're gonna be talking a lot about that over the summer and into the fall. Gain staging. The incredible subject of gain staging is tomorrow. So this kind of gives you the minutiae that we get into. And then we covered Segre about a week and a half ago. We're gonna talk about that on Thursday. And what we did in live views and cameras and stuff like that off how office hours actually works.

(02:12:17):
There's a huge machine on the backend that makes office hours work. So we're gonna talk about that on Friday with the team. And then finally, we're kicking off our disabilities our disability or accessibility focused series. So there'll be seven weeks of talking about disability awareness and etiquette as the first one. But we're not only talking about accessibility, but we're also experimenting with it. So you'll see us putting a s l into the, into the show, and we're gonna be working with captions and working with a lot of other things. So we're using it as kind of a lab on how to actually produce a show that is fully accessible as well as talking about those subject matters. And it, you know, it's usually when we do education education takes the summer off, the teachers take the summer off, and so we so we're moving to accessibility for the next seven weeks. Wow. So Saturdays a be really interesting.

Leo Laporte (02:13:06):
That's really good. I think that's a great idea. Lots of good stuff this week. Office hours.global. If you wanna hire Alex for your next event. Oh nine oh.media is his is biz. Thank you, Alex. Thank you Annie. Thank you Jason. Good. Congratulations on your daughter, Jason. That's wonderful. Yay. Thanks. Thanks. One less tuition check is always nice. Yep. Yeah, I remember that. <Laugh>, my daughter does, delivers her thesis defense for her masters on Saturday. Oh, see? And I think that will be the last tuition check. We'll see. Nice. You never know. Nice. She's, she's, she's hinting about getting a PhD, which would be funny to call her Dr. Abby. I think that would be fun. So maybe there'll be more tell your children. Think, think of, think of all. Think of all the dad jokes though. Dr. Dr. Herz when I do this <laugh>.

(02:13:57):
Don't do that. Dad, come on, let's just order. Oh, she needs no encouragement on that regard. <Laugh>, thanks for joining us, everybody. We do Mac Break Weekly on Tuesdays 11:00 AM Pacific, 2:00 PM Eastern 1800 UTC next week. I guess I'll have a 15 inch MacBook Pro to show you. I was hoping I'd have it for today. Macbook Air. I'm sorry, I was hoping I'd have it for today, but do Stop by. The live stream is at twit tv slash live. If you're watching Live Chat Live are open to all chat room is IRC TWI tv and of course, club members get their own special club level access at on the Discord. But I can't tell you where that is cuz you know it's private. You can just kidding. After the fact, you'll have to just go to twit tv slash club twi.

(02:14:45):
You'll find out after the fact. We do put the shows up on air online ads supported at TWI tv slash m bw. There's also a YouTube channel dedicated to Mac Break Weekly. Best way to get any show you hear on the network is through a podcast player like Overcast or PocketCasts or Apple Podcasts, that kind of thing. Find your favorite. You can search for Mac Break Weekly individually, search for TWIT as a whole. There's even a all of twit subscription you can do and get every show. It's nice to have that sitting there on your phone just waiting for you to listen to or watch whenever you're in the mood. But to please subscribe. That helps us too. Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time. Now get back to work. This break. Time is over. Bye-Bye.

Speaker 6 (02:15:33):
Hey, we should talk Linux. It's the operating system that runs the internet, but your game console, cell phones, and maybe even the machine on your desk, but you already knew all that. What you may not know is that Twit now is a show dedicated to it, the Untitled Linux Show. Whether you're a Lennox Pro, a burgeoning ciit man, or just curious what the big deal is, you should join us on the Club Twit Discord every Saturday afternoon for news analysis and tips to sharpen your Lennox skills. And then make sure you subscribe to the Club TWIT Exclusive Untitled Linux Show. Wait, you're not a Club Twit member yet. We'll go to twit.tv. Slash Club twit and sign up. Hope to see you there.