542: Penguin Camel Monkey Shark
06 Jul 2023Living in a vacation town, who the Mac Pro is for, more on Reddit, and Vision Pro’s top “four” challenges — not including price.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show:
- How did we celebrate the Fourth of July?
- Member Episodes Survey
- Follow-up:
- As per anonymous, Ternus received our Mac Pro shirt. 🫣
- Adam Eccles expands the ATP Listener Universe™
- Yes,
Full Photos Accessgives apps carte blanche (via Peter Gertsen-Schibbye) - Desktop widget chaos whimsy (via Danny Lin)
- A contradictory perspective on the Reddit protests (via Lee Abraham)
- Who is the Mac Pro for, anyway?
- Top Four Vision Pro challenges
- Post-show: Threads
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Chapters
- Living on paradise
- Member specials
- “Believe” was received
- Listeners in fun places
- Sponsor: Notion
- Location & photo-library access
- Sonoma desktop widgets
- Reddit follow-up
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- Who’s the Mac Pro for? 🖼️
- Sponsor: Trade Coffee
- Vision Pro’s Top Four Challenges 🖼️
- Ending theme
- Threads
Living on paradise
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, I have a question for you. Yes? When you live in paradise all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey year round… On paradise. What?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I walked right into it. I walked
⏹️ ▶️ John right into it. This must be just like living on paradise, you know that song?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know living on a prayer. When you live in, on, around, or near paradise all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey year round, what do you, what does one do for summer vacation and or Fourth
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of July? Now, I did not go to a beach for the Fourth of July. I went to our little community
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pool that we joined last year that has been a really pivotal, a positive change, but a pivotal change in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the List family, I don’t know, situation. And I’d like to also know what John did for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Fourth of July, but Marco in particular, when you live on the beach, in the beach, near the beach, around the beach,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey beside the beach, what, how do you celebrate the Fourth of July other than apparently calling the cops
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on people who are trying to light your house on fire?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weird, you know, there’s lots of weird things about living in a vacation town, you know, because that it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a summer vacation town, it’s a beach town, and so all winter long it’s there’s very few people here, it’s kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a ghost town, and then all summer long it is packed, and it is most packed on,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first of all, weekends, and then second of all, most, most packed on holiday weekends, and of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco holiday weekends, the most, most, most packed one is the 4th of July. So most crowded
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with drunk idiots. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a couple of side effects to that. Number one, you tend to close up and keep the air conditioning on,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not necessarily just for heat, although it does tend to be very hot, but also just because at night
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s drunk idiots walking down the streets and yelling at each other, and they’re like, you know, 15
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feet from your house. So if you have your windows open, you’ll just hear drunk idiots yelling all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco night long, you won’t get any sleep. Number two is all of your favorite restaurants become effectively
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inaccessible because every place in town is packed full all the time. Number
⏹️ ▶️ Marco three, even walking in the downtown area becomes challenging. It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco walking through Times Square. It’s not a pleasant walk because there’s so many people around,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but on the other side, there are festivities. There’s a Fourth of July parade. There’s different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things that some of the businesses do. There’s like a little dot concert downtown. So like, you know, on one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hand it is annoying because you are trying to do your everyday stuff like go get your mail
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s difficult. But it’s also like very festive and fun. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nice seeing your town thriving and seeing the businesses that you like thriving. So it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of a mixed bag. What I actually do on Fourth of July mostly is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stay inside on the main weekend days, whatever the nearby weekend days are, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go out for the surrounding weekdays when most of crowds have subsided. And, you know, go,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, hang out at the restaurants and stuff then and, you know, go buy a t-shirt or whatever, like to support the businesses. But it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mostly like try to avoid the peak crowds. And it’s, it’s kind of like, in general,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco living in the beach town, you kind of feel like you, your everyday life is everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else’s vacation. And that’s mostly a good thing. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the downside is that everyone else you see is in vacation mode and so if you are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not in vacation mode if you are trying to get work done or whatever it can be a little a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little much but for the most part it’s you know it’s fun because the great thing about you know being on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in vacation mode is that most people are not super angry or bitter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or unfriendly like they’re all happy they’re at the beach they’re having fun they’re on vacation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so from that point of view it’s actually very nice so anyway all that is to say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s It’s fun, but it gets very, very crowded and I tend to stay in for the busiest days just because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t like waiting for an hour to sit down at a restaurant. That being said, I’m happy to report that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the camera that is meant to deter people from peeing under my house actually seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be doing that finally.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, this is deep, deep, deep follow-up. I had forgotten
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco all about this. Yes, yes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because this is like the peak time of the year for that. And there have been some peers, but it’s been…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The camera more often, I moved it down to eye level, and I have adjusted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the landscaping in the most common path that people would use to get under my house, to kind of funnel them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into a narrow pathway where you have to walk directly past the camera at eye level right next to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you. Because look, the whole point of the camera is not to get video footage of college kids drunk and peeing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on my house. The whole point of the camera was to deter them from doing it. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that has largely worked, because now that the camera is at eye level in this one narrow path, they’re kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forced to walk through way more of them are actually seeing it and then like, dude, oh, dude,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bro, turn around. Then they go, but then they go to, you know, probably pee in my neighbor’s house.
⏹️ ▶️ John They have those little yard signs that I see all the time. The little yellow yard sign. I don’t know if they have them in your area, Casey,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe, but like on people’s lawns that they’re, they’re yellow squares and they have a little like circle with a line
⏹️ ▶️ John through it, showing a dog peeing. And it says like, be respectful, don’t pee here or whatever. And they put them like every four feet
⏹️ ▶️ John on their lawn. And of course it doesn’t stop the dogs. They pee there and no matter what, but if you can buy those same
⏹️ ▶️ John signs and put them on there. No peeing here, please, be polite, don’t pee here, be respectful. They come in varying levels
⏹️ ▶️ John of formality and humor.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So as a dog person, those signs kind of irritate me. Now I will try to generally drive my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dog away from those yards because I’m just, fine, if they care that much, fine, I don’t care. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s weird to me that you care so much about dogs peeing on your lawn that you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco decorate your house with a bunch of signs of dogs peeing on your lawn. And that, like, I don’t want that to be how
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it’s kind of like the plastic on the furniture, like you’re protecting the furniture so it’ll always look nice, but your furniture
⏹️ ▶️ John never looks nice because it’s always in plastic. So you want your lawn, and I kind of get it with lawns, because you want the lawn to look
⏹️ ▶️ John nice. But to do that, you put a bunch of yellow things on it. And you say, well, these yellow things don’t make your lawn
⏹️ ▶️ John look nice. So what you can take the yellow things out, whereas if they pee and kill the grass, those are dead spots and they’re hard to deal with. So I kind of get
⏹️ ▶️ John it. But especially if you’re one of those people who puts it every four feet, you become the dog don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John pee here house and not the house with the nice lawn. And I guess
⏹️ ▶️ John some lawns, dogs like to pee on more than others, but I don’t know if I could go in that direction.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the other strategy people use, which this may be a legitimate or may not, and may help you with your
⏹️ ▶️ John house, and Marco may not, and I’m sure you’ve seen this Casey, are the ones who put the similar yellow signs on their lawn, but
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t say, please don’t pee here. What they say is like, our lawn has been treated with pesticides that are dangerous to
⏹️ ▶️ John pets. So don’t put your pets here, right? Is that true? Who knows? I mean, it might be true.
⏹️ ▶️ John It probably is true in a lot of cases. A lot of cases, people probably do treat their lawns with chemicals that aren’t good for pets. But I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John that works better as a deterrent than a sign saying, be respectful, please don’t pee here.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because people worry about their dog’s health, but they don’t care about your lawn.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I feel like, I mean, so first of all, the general idea of me putting signs that are legible, like, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have a sign. I put up signs under the house that say something like, you know, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like cameras, you know, So like it’s alerts into the presence of
⏹️ ▶️ John You just need a big sign that says camera with an arrow pointing to the camera. That’s it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Nope, but trust me, that’s not enough. Because they don’t see that. Maybe the text isn’t big enough.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but like where I don’t have signs is facing the outside because I don’t want to be that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco house. Because there are houses in town that are like under 24 hour surveillance. Like I don’t want my house
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to look like that. You know, as soon as you are in a spot you shouldn’t be, I’m fine having you see a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sign like that. But I don’t want that to be like what my house looks like to the outside. That’s not my style.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I was thinking though, when you were saying, worrying about the health of their dogs, I wonder, given the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco caliber of people who pee on my house, I think maybe if I can have a sign
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that somehow suggests that they might reduce their manhood
⏹️ ▶️ John think that’s too sophisticated of a judgment for anyone who’s drunk and peeing under your house to make.
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t think there’s any threat to their health or masculinity that you can make that will register at that point, because they
⏹️ ▶️ John just have to pee and they’re drunk.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, what did you do for the 4th of July?
⏹️ ▶️ John Nothing. I think I watched a movie. Fun. Sat in the air conditioning. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sprite? Did some programming stuff, no Sprite. Oh man. Chasing some bugs, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John just same old day. Living it up, living it up. Actual bugs? No, just
⏹️ ▶️ John the programming kind.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve been chasing actual bugs too, but.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fun. Mixed results
⏹️ ▶️ John there. We get a little bit of an influx of ladybugs in the house lately. I’m not sure what the deal with that is. I’ve chased a few of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve been trying to figure out like mosquito trap situations or mosquito deterrents that are not just neurotoxins
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because yeah, spoiler alert, any kind of mosquito thing that works is usually a neurotoxin. And I’d rather
⏹️ ▶️ John They have the CO2 emitters.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yes. Lots of mosquitoes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, well, so I tried one of those this spring. I don’t think I ever talked about it on the show. Maybe I cut it out, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I tried the mosquito magnet this spring and I could not get the thing to stay lit for whatever reason. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s too harsh of a wind sometimes. Maybe the propane that I get out here is not pure enough. all these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco troubleshooting steps. I tried them all. Nothing worked. I had to eventually return the thing. And now I have those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like those fan traps that are basically just like a giant purple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco UV light and a big computer fan under it basically that sucks the bugs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in. But that one catches moths too. Like I don’t want to kill a bunch of moths. They’re beneficial. So I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I haven’t I haven’t solved this problem yet. But I don’t and I don’t want to gas my yard or my my dog.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I’m not sure there’s much you’re gonna be able to do about insects living on the seashore. It’s really losing battle there.
Member specials
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, you’ve been doing some statistical analysis and data gathering
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and whatnot. Would you like to tell us about this, please?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, after our most recent member special where we ranked every iPhone into a tier
⏹️ ▶️ John list, I figured we had done enough of these member specials over the many months that
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ve been doing them that it would be good to try to figure out if we’re doing the right things.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I decided to make a little survey to ask people whether they’re a member or not. I think that’s the first question
⏹️ ▶️ John in the survey is, are you a member? What do you think of our members special? If you’re not a member, you’ve heard about them on
⏹️ ▶️ John the regular show. And if you are a member, presumably maybe you listened to some of them. So I wanted people, I wanted to know what people
⏹️ ▶️ John thought of them if we were on the right track or whatever. There weren’t a lot of questions. I was like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a five question, one page survey. I think we have enough responses now that we don’t actually need anybody who’s listening
⏹️ ▶️ John to this to answer it. But if you do want to answer it, feel free. I’m kind of curious if the answers will change
⏹️ ▶️ John at all. The URL is atp.fm slash survey. So it’s easy to find.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the reason I don’t think they’re gonna change is, again, I never get around to looking up what this is called in statistics or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John but as the answers come in, I posted this on Macedon, by the way. So as the answers
⏹️ ▶️ John come in, it’s like, oh, two people have answered, 10 people have answered, right? And you look at whatever questions you have and whatever graphs you
⏹️ ▶️ John have related to them, and you see like the kind of the shape of the graph of these different things. At a
⏹️ ▶️ John certain point, the shape of the graph doesn’t change anymore. And you would think, oh, that’s gonna happen after you’ve had thousands of responses, then
⏹️ ▶️ John probably it’s not gonna change anymore. But what I’ve found is the shape of the graph after like 10 or 15
⏹️ ▶️ John or 20 responses doesn’t actually change that much, let alone after 100, 200. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John at this point, when I update the graphs with new data, I have to double check to make sure, did
⏹️ ▶️ John it actually update? Like literally nothing moves. You know, hundreds of new responses come in and literally nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John changes. So I have a feeling that if people go there and fill it out, nothing is going to change. But there is a free
⏹️ ▶️ John text thing at the bottom for asking for suggestions. So obviously you can put whatever you want in there. That’s something that doesn’t show up in the numbers.
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, here’s what I was asking more or less. I was asking, you know, I’m asking if people
⏹️ ▶️ John are members and if they aren’t members, if they were members in the past and then I wanted to know what they thought of the three
⏹️ ▶️ John different kinds of member specials we have done. We have done a single tier list, which just kind of throws it
⏹️ ▶️ John off because, you know, do you like our tier list? Well, we’ve only done one, so whatever. But anyway, the
⏹️ ▶️ John ATP eats things where we eat stuff and ATP movie club where you watch a movie and talk about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we’ve done multiple ATP Eats and multiple ATP movie clubs in the one tier list thing. And so I wanted
⏹️ ▶️ John to know, rank them. What’s your favorite, second favorite, and third favorite?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Should they make a tier list?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Well, it’s not a tier list. It’s forced ranking. Because if there was a tier list, they could have ranked them all two. But they
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t do that here. Although, I tried to do this with SurveyMonkey, but SurveyMonkey wants so much money. So I had
⏹️ ▶️ John to use Google Forms. SurveyMonkey wants so much money just to get the basic features. I had to use Google Forms. But
⏹️ ▶️ John because I want people to be able to pick NA for all of them, because what if you never listen to an Eats and you never listen
⏹️ ▶️ John to a movie club, but you just listen to the cheer list, right? I still wanted you to be able to rank the ones you’ve listened to. Like if you just listen to two kinds, you could
⏹️ ▶️ John just don’t. Anyway, there was no way in Google, uh, forms to allow
⏹️ ▶️ John NA to be a choice, but to also force people to pick one, two and three. You could have ranked everything one, watched
⏹️ ▶️ John everything to rank everything through, but don’t do that. Follow the instructions. Um, that’s part of the test. And then the
⏹️ ▶️ John final question before the free form one was, what is your preferred mix of technology and non-technology
⏹️ ▶️ John topics and member specials? And this is another one that was tricky to get because I wanted to have like two
⏹️ ▶️ John text fields that they have to add up to 100 or something but Google Forms didn’t let you do that. So I just did a 1 through 5 So basically 3
⏹️ ▶️ John deads in the middle would be exact 50-50 split between tech and non-tech 5 would mean all tech
⏹️ ▶️ John and 1 would mean all non-tech So here are the results. I’m pretty confident again. I’m pretty confident
⏹️ ▶️ John the results feel free to fill out the survey I don’t think the results are going to change the what kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John things we do eats movie club or tier list Everyone likes them pretty much exactly the same,
⏹️ ▶️ John which I mean, it’s not super helpful because if everyone said, we love, you know, ATBs
⏹️ ▶️ John but we hate movie club, like it would let us know for future directions we should do something different or balance them differently
⏹️ ▶️ John but just across the board, pretty much exactly even for all three of them,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, within tiny percentages of each other. So that’s boring, but you know, good to know. For
⏹️ ▶️ John the desired percent tech and member specials, All these graphs looks,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I broke these down by people who are currently members, people who are not members, people who are formerly members, but
⏹️ ▶️ John the breakdowns weren’t particularly informative. So tech versus non-tech. These graphs look
⏹️ ▶️ John like pretty nice bell curves with a fat lump just left of center. So what people
⏹️ ▶️ John want is the desired percent tech is around 44 to 45%.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that means people want mostly non-tech, but 44, 45% tech.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s not what we’ve been doing. So we’ll make an adjustment based on that, because like
⏹️ ▶️ John Movie Club is non-tech, Eats is non-tech, and Tier List was tech. So we’re way oversubscribed on non-tech.
⏹️ ▶️ John So we’ll try to rebalance that going forward based on requests. And then the final question was,
⏹️ ▶️ John what kind of other stuff would you like us to do in member specials? Again, the survey is open to everybody, whether you’re a member or not.
⏹️ ▶️ John We got lots of suggestions. A lot of the suggestions are things that we ourselves have talked about on past episodes that
⏹️ ▶️ John people said, yeah, that thing you said, you should do that. And then we hit all sorts of waggy suggestions
⏹️ ▶️ John like that we should review roller coasters or going to cross country road trip and all sorts of stuff like that. That’s probably not going to
⏹️ ▶️ John happen, but it’s fun to hear. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Whoa, slow down. I am here for the cross country road. Road trip.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I am. My body is ready. Yeah. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re all like old men with kids. Like when are we going to have time to take like two
⏹️ ▶️ John weeks off when our kids are all in college or gone away or something, and we’re 60 years old, we can take the world’s
⏹️ ▶️ John longest road trip where we stop at every rest stop to.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, if this is still a thing, then first of all, I’ll be overjoyed. And second of all,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am ready. I am absolutely ready.
⏹️ ▶️ John know, whatever gigantic electric Luxo yacht Marco has at that time. There you go.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I love long, you know, 40 minute or recharging breaks to recharge the 200 kilowatt
⏹️ ▶️ John hour battery and as a giant electric bus.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would totally get that.
⏹️ ▶️ John So anyway, like I said, if you want to fill it out, ATP dot FM slash survey. But those are the results. And that
⏹️ ▶️ John will probably influence what we do going forward. Oh, and the free form question stuff, as you would imagine, And it’s a bunch of individual
⏹️ ▶️ John answers, right? I thought about trying to categorize them, but they’re just everywhere. So just to let you know what
⏹️ ▶️ John the world thinks of their random suggestions, whatever you want to see at
⏹️ ▶️ John a member specials, there’s someone who wants the exact opposite. And they would often come in pairs, right? So there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John really no consensus. Just stay away from controversial topics and then someone will say, you should talk
⏹️ ▶️ John about religion. You know, I hate it when you talk about tech. I love it when you talk about tech. You
⏹️ ▶️ John should always talk about tech. You should never talk about tech. Again, but the multiple choice answers show
⏹️ ▶️ John that on average, it’s a nice, even bell curve distribution. So we can’t please
⏹️ ▶️ John everybody, but it’s good to know what things people do agree on
⏹️ ▶️ John and what we can get from the aggregate of the data.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. Hey, John, if you weren’t a member or forgot how to become a member and you were a member in the past,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how would you go about signing up? And do you get all the past specials? How does that work?
⏹️ ▶️ John At the very top of the survey, it tells you this.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey There’s a link
⏹️ ▶️ John to ATP.FM slash join, which is where you go if you want to become a member. And yes, you can just, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John people have done this. I’ve suggested it and people have done it. Become a member for one month, listen to all the existing member specials, unsubscribe.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then you could wait again. You know, people like, it’s for some people, it’s too costly and I understand
⏹️ ▶️ John that, but you can like just do it once a year. Just do pay one month out of the year, become a member, listen
⏹️ ▶️ John to all the member specials since last year, which is not gonna be that many of them. And then you’ll be done. You’d be missing out obviously on the
⏹️ ▶️ John bootleg and the ad-free feed and all that stuff. But yeah, please sign up if
⏹️ ▶️ John you would like to become a member. And like I said, the survey is open to people who are members or aren’t members, doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, well, thank you everyone who filled that out. It is informative, like John said. We will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey try to balance as the masses would like us to. We probably won’t do a perfect job,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but we’re trying. And we’ve come up with a couple of pretty solid ideas for future member
⏹️ ▶️ Casey specials, I think. No timing as yet, as I’ve said many times. We aim for about one a month.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It doesn’t always work out, but that’s the goal.
“Believe” was received
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We got a piece of astonishing feedback. I don’t know how this came
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in, but it showed up in the show notes for the very first time in the last few days. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reads from Anonymous, I just got confirmation, confirmation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that Ternus actually received your shirt. This is amazing. I’m so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey overjoyed by this. I’m assuming this came to John because I don’t remember having seen this at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John I had the venue in the notes, but I figured for OPSEC purposes it’s best to hide the venue. But this message
⏹️ ▶️ John came in on June 2nd and I just totally missed it. So this is before WWDC. Oh my word.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s nice to know. It’s nice to know that the shirt arrived there. If he just threw it immediately in the trash, oh well. But I’m glad
⏹️ ▶️ John that our little gag, you know, connected.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m happy to report that I also heard the same thing from a reliable source. MCGREGOR
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This genuinely makes me incredibly happy. Well, except for the fact that apparently you two have birdies everywhere, and I got none,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but that’s beside the point. This makes me incredibly happy. And I hope it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was received in the spirit in which we meant it, and I hope he got a chuckle out of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, even if he did immediately put it in the trash or donated it. CARRINGTON
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, yeah. I mean, when it was sent, I was way more optimistic than after the MacPro was announced. It was It was definitely sent
⏹️ ▶️ John in good spirits. I didn’t send a revised note that said, no, not like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco characterize the feedback from my source as having had a positive opinion of it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Good. Either way, it’s an optimistic shirt. It is like, thumbs up,
⏹️ ▶️ John keep doing what you’re doing. And from all accounts that I’ve heard, is a backer of the Mac Pro, so we need people like
Listeners in fun places
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Adam Eccles has expanded the ATP listener universe. Adam writes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did iOS development for a while and I’m currently a senior technical project manager at another big global
⏹️ ▶️ Casey computer company. And I also used to be a chef. I cooked dinner for David and Iman Bowie once.
⏹️ ▶️ John cool. Wow. This was in reference to previously when I was saying like we have people who did everything and I tried to come
⏹️ ▶️ John up with some ridiculous thing. Like imagine if we had someone who’s an iOS developer and used to be, and I came up with chef, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is not, I think I said master chef, which is not that obscure of a thing, but it’s still kind of obscure. So
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, he just wanted to write in and say, yeah, that thing you use as an example of something absurd, you’ve got one of those listeners too.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t, didn’t Hello Internet do this? We talked about this in the past, right? I think Hello Internet did this at one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time ago, yeah, they did. They had like astronauts and stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This makes me so happy that we have people listening to our plucky Apple podcast
⏹️ ▶️ John But the angle we’ve got on it is like, okay, so you listen and you do have an interesting profession or whatever. The whole idea is like, not only
⏹️ ▶️ John do I listen and have an interesting profession, but I’m also like, I’m also, you know, an iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John developer or I do tech stuff or whatever. So obviously you expect tons of people who do development to listen to the
⏹️ ▶️ John show. And maybe if you’re a general interest show and you’re popular, you’d have people who have interesting hobbies. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I like the combination of, you know, I have interesting hobby slash former profession
⏹️ ▶️ John and currently I am a tech nerd. And there’s a lot of that. And I mean, for people who are, you know, young and they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John wondering like, oh, do I have to get a CS degree to be in tech or whatever, especially in my generation of people, tons of the
⏹️ ▶️ John people in tech either don’t have any college degree at all, or their degree
⏹️ ▶️ John is in like physics, music theory, like something totally unrelated. They went to business school
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, and then they end up as a developer. Like, I feel like computers has that effect on people is that
⏹️ ▶️ John you might have like, you might not know that computers are gonna get their hooks into you, and you might have another life plan
⏹️ ▶️ John for yourself. Like, I’m going to be, you know, a lawyer, or I’m gonna go into business, or I’m gonna do this, or I’m gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John do that. And then at at some point a computer enters your life and it says, nope, change of plans. You’re going to be
⏹️ ▶️ John a developer. And you really have no choice in the matter. Kind of like people who feel a calling to
⏹️ ▶️ John creative professions, right? That it’s not like they make a choice to do that. It just draws
⏹️ ▶️ John them to it. And lots of people in computer field are like that. So if you go to any big tech company, but especially Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you talk to a bunch of people and you’d say, you know, what is your degree in? What did you think you were gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John do with your life? You’ll find people with all sorts of different backgrounds. Even people who had a career as whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John a non-tech related profession for like a decade, and then said, you know what? I
⏹️ ▶️ John want to write iOS apps. And that’s their career going forward. So it’s a really interesting field in that way. You tend not to see
⏹️ ▶️ John that in medicine, where, yeah, I spent my first 10 years
⏹️ ▶️ John as an iOS developer. And then I became a doctor. Now we’re going to get someone who’s going to write and then say that that happened to them. I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any absurdity. I think people have gone the other direction.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I know of people that have gone the other direction, MD to development. I don’t know of any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that went from MD to development. Well, what’s it Arnold Kim is the guy, is he the guy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who started MacRumors? He was an MD here in Richmond if I’m not mistaken.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Oh, I didn’t know that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And he went and started MacRumors. Yeah, I met him, actually saw him at the airport, the Richmond airport that is, before
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one WWDC years and years and years ago. But yeah, I’m pretty sure he was like a general practitioner or something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like that here in Richmond and then started MacRumors as a side gig. And then within a couple of years
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that became his whole gig as far as I’m aware.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I feel like that happens a lot with doctors and lawyers, because there’s a lot of societal
⏹️ ▶️ John pressure to be those high-profile, lucrative professions, even if you don’t really like
⏹️ ▶️ John it. So a lot of people start off either going to law school or becoming a lawyer, and then decide,
⏹️ ▶️ John nah, this isn’t for me. Even if they’ve already done it. They’ve passed the bar. They are a lawyer. They’re a working lawyer. And they say, you know what?
⏹️ ▶️ John I want to be something else, whether it’s not tech-related or whatever. The other thing we should mention is the reverse
⏹️ ▶️ John of this is true for subsets of people that don’t have the same experiences
⏹️ ▶️ John as the, you know, the straight white men who enter tech as women in tech historically
⏹️ ▶️ John and other people in tech enter tech because they love computers and they get there and they don’t like the treatment they receive and they
⏹️ ▶️ John end up leaving after a few years because they’re like, screw this, I’m out of here. And that is a problem in our industry.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that is something that we need to fix. But it is a thing that happens. So if you’re looking for people who go the other direction, I
⏹️ ▶️ John was in tech and then I left to do something to save my sanity. Guess who that happens to? Yeah.
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Location & photo-library access
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. In the context of full photos access or full library access, I believe this was an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ask ATP of last week. It was. And I have some experience with this, but off the top of my head, I couldn’t remember
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the particular details. And the question was in short, does full library access
⏹️ ▶️ Casey give an iOS developer, an app developer, basically carte blanche to all of your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey info? And I had said on the show, I’m pretty sure it does. And a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of people wrote in to say, oh, yes. Yes, it does. We got some particularly good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feedback from Peter Gertsen Shibby. I apologize if I got that wrong. But anyways, Peter
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wrote, I’m an iOS developer for Framio, which is a Wi-Fi photo frame app. Speaking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from experience, the full library access gives you unlimited access to the user’s photos and the photo metadata, including
⏹️ ▶️ Casey photo GPS location, despite not having asked for location access. I can verify that this is a security
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hole that has been there for years, if not since iPhone OS 2.0. At
⏹️ ▶️ Casey WWDC 2023, I asked the Apple developers for PhotoKit why this security hole was still a thing and whether it had been fixed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in iOS 17. The answer was a bit muddy and unsatisfying. What data to expose was decided
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a long time ago, the data is on the image itself and it’s difficult to filter out. There are two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ways to access location data and photos. One is the EXIF data on the image file itself. Extracting that is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey taxing on battery and network resources. However, the second way is through a database-like query API,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which offers a goldmine for data brokers. I find this to be the scariest since it’s fast and light on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey resources. Why Apple hasn’t fixed this yet is beyond me. I knew about the,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that was the end of Peter’s stuff. I knew about the Exif data thing. I am not familiar with, not to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say that Peter’s wrong, I’m just not familiar with this database-like query API. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sure it’s a thing, but I didn’t bump into this when I was developing Masquerader
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Peakview. But yeah, this matches my expectation, which is certainly anything on the photo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey itself, have at it, baby, it’s all yours for the taking. Which I can understand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey both sides of this, right? Like, is it really a security hole? Well, kinda, yeah, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re giving location access, but it is part of the photo, so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, I don’t know. I see both sides of this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I mean, I think the way I would look at this, First of all, I think Apple has it wrong. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Peter’s right. The way I would look at this is, when people say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yes, I’m giving access to my photos, do they fully understand that they’re also giving access
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the history of every location you have ever taken those photos in?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think the answer for most people is no, they wouldn’t think of that. And so I think that should be a separate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing. I think that Apple should put in the work, they know how to do it, it’s not that hard,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put in the work to not expose the GPS field and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the exit data of those photos unless the app has also gotten some kind of special location
⏹️ ▶️ Marco access and I would even word it in a very scary way like location history just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and maybe even show a map on the dialogue you know they already index this data
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like show a map of all the different dots that you’re gonna get you know have a different permission level that’s like okay you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can read the photo data but not the location data because again this is an area where user expectations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of what they’re saying yes to I don’t think line up well with what they’re actually saying yes to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And Apple, and you know the fact that Apple has done it this way all this time, that’s not an excuse to keep doing it this way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’ve tightened things down in OS releases all the time. They frequently will take something that used to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no permission dialogue or used to have a certain level of access and starting with iOS X plus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one, no longer. Now you you have to ask for that. They have a large history of doing that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the user’s benefit and for the sake of matching user expectations. And so I think they need to do that here.
Sonoma desktop widgets
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Desktop widgets on Sonoma. Danny Lin on Mastodon
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has recorded a quite funny video of what happens if you have a metric
⏹️ ▶️ Casey crap ton of icons on your desktop, which in and of itself gives me the hives. But nevertheless,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco that and then start… I never look at my computers. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like 10 to 15 right now, which is like 8 to 12 more than I should
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as far as I’m concerned. as far as I’m concerned, but nevertheless, this is a 14 second video and it shows dragging
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a clock widget through this just sea of icons and them moving around
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a truly absurd way. It is quite funny and quite delightful. Oh, this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John’s. Wait, you put this video up,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey this YouTube video.
⏹️ ▶️ John So, Danny Lin posted this on Twitter, but as we know, Twitter is a trash fire. Oh, okay, okay. I
⏹️ ▶️ John confidence that people would be able to see his video on the tweet, So I downloaded
⏹️ ▶️ John the tweet and put it up on YouTube on my channel on an unlisted URL, just because I wanted people to see it. His description
⏹️ ▶️ John of it as whimsical chaos is great. So for people who don’t know, since you can have widgets on a desktop in macOS
⏹️ ▶️ John Sonoma, you can move the widgets around. And the widgets are, you know, they’re on your desktop, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And so are your icons though. So to prevent the situation where people with messy desktops have icons
⏹️ ▶️ John like overlapping their widgets, the icons flee from the widgets when you move them, right? The
⏹️ ▶️ John icons are trying to get out of the way, But the way they do it is hilarious and
⏹️ ▶️ John worth watching. I mean, it’s a hard problem. Like it’s not, you know, I understand what Apple’s doing, which is by the way, why dashboard was great
⏹️ ▶️ John because the icons came in from the outsides of the thing and then they left. And now, but anyway, now they’re permanently on your desktop
⏹️ ▶️ John but the icons have to stay away from them. So when you place them or when you move them, the icons have to scatter
⏹️ ▶️ John like scared, very confused animals. Please watch the video, it’s hilarious. It’s 14
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m assuming they’ll work on this a little bit for the release, but maybe not, I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, what you need to do is have some sort of video or extremely brief chapter API for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Overcast so you can put 14 seconds of video as chapter art.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I did one time do that with the theme song, remember, with Jonathan Mann’s keyboard song
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the butterfly keyboard? And I did a chapter every two or three seconds.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so it had like 90 chapters, and it broke Pocket Cast. They were really mad at me. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Whoopsie-dipsies. I do remember that vaguely.
Reddit follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, and then with regard to Reddit, Lee Abraham writes, yes, some subreddits
⏹️ ▶️ Casey went dark, private, not safe for work, et cetera, but the regular Reddit user base is overwhelmingly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey against it. Something like 5% of Reddit users use third-party apps, the rest don’t care. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yes, this was good for the mods, but the Reddit community as a whole, no, it’s been pretty bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Posts supporting the mods are downvoted into oblivion. I am, again, as I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think I said last episode, I think I’m the heaviest Reddit user of the three of us, I am at best a moderate Reddit user,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I think that’s probably a bit exaggerated. So that’s a bit of an exaggeration. But, um, I have no idea
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if this is factual or not. So I’m going to take Lee at, at their word, uh, and assume that this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is true, but that slightly bums me out. I mean, it’s understandable, but it slightly bums me out. I don’t know, John,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it seems like you have some thoughts on this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So this is the nature of any of these types of things, right? So who, who
⏹️ ▶️ John brought made the subreddits dark or private or labeled them as not safe or whoever who’s doing that. Like it was
⏹️ ▶️ John it was the moderators the people the people who maintain order on these subreddits Especially the very popular
⏹️ ▶️ John ones as lots of people reading them lots of people posting to them These are communities and there are people in
⏹️ ▶️ John charge of the community in charge of maintaining order So it doesn’t just you know get spammed to death or just become off topic
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever Those are the moderators and the moderators also have the power to Change the settings on the channel
⏹️ ▶️ John to you know, anyway, they’re the ones who did this Moderators are a tiny tiny tiny fraction
⏹️ ▶️ John of the people who read reddit in millions and millions of people read reddit every subreddit has a handful of moderators.
⏹️ ▶️ John These are unpaid people, they’re not Reddit employees, they do not get paid for what they do, they’re doing it because they want to maintain
⏹️ ▶️ John a community, you know, whatever. And they’re the ones doing this, right? And so
⏹️ ▶️ John this person saying, Lee’s saying, well, you know, the people who read Reddit, we don’t want these things to go
⏹️ ▶️ John private, we wanna be able to read our things in r slash funny or whatever, like we’re against it. So
⏹️ ▶️ John just because the people who, you know, so few people use third party clients, setting aside whether it’s actually 5% or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John or more percentage of traffic or whatever. But the people who read Reddit, we don’t want these
⏹️ ▶️ John things to go dark. We don’t want this stuff to happen. So don’t believe the
⏹️ ▶️ John hype. This is really a rebellion by a small number of people. This is always how it is though,
⏹️ ▶️ John with things like labor strikes or disagreements between management and labor. Like, so for example,
⏹️ ▶️ John imagine a transportation strike. People who drive the trains and drive the buses. They have some disagreement
⏹️ ▶️ John with the government slash their management slash whatever, they go and strike. We want more sick days. We want
⏹️ ▶️ John our hours to be reduced, whatever. We don’t have to work long hours. We want better overtime pay,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever their demands are. And they go on strike. People who drive trains
⏹️ ▶️ John are a very small percentage of the population that uses trains. And so you’re just a commuter.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re one of the millions of people who takes the train to work. And you’re pissed. I just want the trains to work. Why? I don’t care about
⏹️ ▶️ John your stupid labor dispute. Why can’t I just get on the train and go to work? And now it’s inconvenient for me, and I have to find a ride, or I have to take
⏹️ ▶️ John an Uber, I have to take a bus or have to do something else, or even if it’s just to reduce, I hate it. I’m mad.
⏹️ ▶️ John In this case, the labor, albeit unpaid labor, are the mods. And so yeah, the quote unquote
⏹️ ▶️ John passengers, the people who are just reading Reddit or whatever, are annoyed the same way people who take the train are annoyed.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that’s what sort of management is hoping for in any kind of labor dispute.
⏹️ ▶️ John The people going on strike saying, hey, we’re going to cripple your city because now the trains won’t run. And management saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, but we have more money than you and now you’re not getting paid, so let’s wait it out And by the way, all the citizens
⏹️ ▶️ John hate you because they can’t get to work, right? And we’re just going to tell them, oh, this strike, it’s the fault of the greedy people who drive
⏹️ ▶️ John the trains, right? This is just a dynamic of, you know, conflicts between labor and management.
⏹️ ▶️ John In this case, it is voluntary labor, it’s unpaid labor. And,
⏹️ ▶️ John and the third party apps are a separate thing that, you know, they’re, them disappearing doesn’t change things one way or the other about
⏹️ ▶️ John the subreddit shutting down, the people shutting down the subreddits and the mods. So I just want to say this is not a, this is always how it’s going
⏹️ ▶️ John to be when there’s any kind of conflict like this. Most people just want to ride the train. They don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John care. They just like I want the train to show up. I want it to be on time. I want it to be clean. I want it to be nice. I want
⏹️ ▶️ John it to be safe. I don’t care about the details, right? That’s the vast majority of the population for Reddit
⏹️ ▶️ John for trains for anything. But that doesn’t mean there’s not legitimate conflicts between the people who
⏹️ ▶️ John run the train systems and the people who drive the trains. Are they being asked to take, you know, 48 hour shifts in
⏹️ ▶️ John there, you know, too tired to be safe? Are they being asked to work in terrible conditions with
⏹️ ▶️ John no air conditioning? Is the infrastructure falling around them? Are they like the actual train drivers with the Amtrak strike
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, not allowed to have like a single sick day the entire year and they get their pay docked and like, those are
⏹️ ▶️ John legitimate issues. And you as a writer of the train might not care about them, but they’re still real. So it’s always going to
⏹️ ▶️ John be a majority, a minority of people, a small group of people, a small group of people who are integral
⏹️ ▶️ John to the running of the thing as mods are integral to the running of subreddits. That will be the ones who
⏹️ ▶️ John will strike. So I totally believe this is true. And I believe it is an unavoidable
⏹️ ▶️ John part of the phenomenon of most people being passengers and only the people who are involved in the maintenance and creation
⏹️ ▶️ John of that community to be the ones who have a conflict.
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Who’s the Mac Pro for?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There was a pretty funny and well, sad, funny and pretty good article
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over at the Verge. I believe this happened shortly before we recorded last week, but we didn’t have a chance to talk about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is an article by Monica Chin, which I could summarize as, hey, the Mac Pro is kind of bullshit,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey isn’t it? But really, it’s the question it’s asking and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey attempting to answer is, hey, what is the Mac Pro really for? the official title
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is, The Mac Pro’s Biggest Problem is the MacBook. John, I keep calling on you for this episode. I apologize,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I feel like so much of this is irrelevant, or your opinions to so much of this are very relevant. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey care to tell me who the Mac Pro is for, John? I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, this article, I feel like is, we didn’t, we skipped over it last week at least,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I would just as soon have skipped over this week, but you two wanted to talk about it. Casey wanted to, of all things.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you listen to the show, there’s nothing in this article that’s news to you. And on top of that,
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like what this article does is it’s kind of more like a human interest story. It’s not trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to be like hard reporting or trying to tell Apple they should do something. It’s just a fun human interest story because they just talk
⏹️ ▶️ John to a bunch of people and say, hey, what do you think of the Mac Pro? Hey, what do you think of the Mac Pro? But it’s just a bunch of random people. And they say the things
⏹️ ▶️ John you would think they would say. It’s good to see mainstream coverage of this computer being potentially
⏹️ ▶️ John disappointing to its target audience or people being confused about who who the target audience is. Like I’ve watched
⏹️ ▶️ John tons of YouTube videos about the latest line of Macs, because that’s what I do on YouTube, in addition to watching car rebuilding
⏹️ ▶️ John videos. And they, you know, everyone is aware of the exact thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that we talk about. Hey, there’s this giant expensive computer that costs $3,000 more than a computer that is exactly as fast,
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty much. Like tons of people on YouTube are testing it, like, but shouldn’t this have lower temperatures or shouldn’t it have better
⏹️ ▶️ John sustained speed than the Mac Studio with the M2 Ultra? Like, shouldn’t there be some advantage?
⏹️ ▶️ John And the answer is pretty much no. Like the Mac Studio is amazing. It’s a tiny little computer.
⏹️ ▶️ John They seem to be clocked the same. The temperatures are very similar. Neither one of them throttles. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John even where there are temperature differences, it’s like, yeah, but they’re still really cool. And the Mac Studio is still very quiet.
⏹️ ▶️ John And obviously we talked about this before, there’s a bunch of card slots in there and there’s no card slots in the Mac Studio. So
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s differentiation, but people still are struggling with the idea of like, okay, but
⏹️ ▶️ John if I can’t put GPUs in there, what would I put in there? And who wants to use it? Like, the answers are what they are.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ve talked about it a million times in the show. There’s no getting around it. It’s a weird machine whose
⏹️ ▶️ John target market or whose ideal customer is a narrower slice than it was before
⏹️ ▶️ John because the previous Mac Pro that was in this case could do all the things this one can do
⏹️ ▶️ John and more. And obviously that one’s old and slow now, but they waited many, many years to replace it. And they replaced it with one that
⏹️ ▶️ John does less. So they’re further narrowing the market for the Mac Pro. And on top of that, the Mac Studio, which
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t exist when the 2019 Mac Pro came out, the Mac Studio exists, and the exact same SOC,
⏹️ ▶️ John the exact same limits on RAM, CPU, all that other stuff, and it’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, I mean, and this article’s like, oh, but most people just buy MacBooks. Yeah, of course they do. Like, we know, like, most people
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t buy Lamborghinis, right, we know. Then, and the problem is that, as Marco’s pointed out many, many times in the show over
⏹️ ▶️ John many, many years, the laptops are so good now, and Apple’s chips are so good in laptops
⏹️ ▶️ John that people who previously needed to get a desktop performance don’t even need to do that anymore. And
⏹️ ▶️ John in that environment, the Mac Pro has not moved up market to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you know what, now the Mac Pro is gonna be even more insane and it’s gonna be so incredibly fast. And nope,
⏹️ ▶️ John nope, it’s not as fast as a Mac Studio. It’s just for people who want card slots. So, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I will probably, I mean, I feel like we’ll probably end up reissuing some variant of the Mac Pro Believe shirt in four years
⏹️ ▶️ John when the next rumors of the replacement Mac Pro come around, because honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ John we need, I think, we need a better Mac Pro than this. In the meantime, I’m glad
⏹️ ▶️ John this one exists instead of none, but boy, we need something different so that
⏹️ ▶️ John we don’t have to see YouTube videos and articles like this one that say, what’s the deal with the Mac Pro? It seems kind of weird.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you know what? I agree, it is kind of weird, not great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think that one way to look at this is, first of all, the answer to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who is the Mac Pro for, I don’t think the Verge article really did a good job of answering it because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I’ve been told over and over again, especially from people who work in this area or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from various Apple people, the answer is basically recording studios. Like this is a computer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is a Mac, it’s a Mac studio, ironically, for recording studios.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or video people, that’s like Apple gave, you wanna capture 24K streams at the same time, this is the only Mac that can do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, and so it’s for a very small percentage of people, but I think the way to look at it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, It’s, you know, in the same way that Apple has, in recent years, made a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rack mount version of the Mac Pro. Well, who is that for? The answer is very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco few people, but whoever it is for, they probably buy a bunch of them, and so it’s worth making that configuration
⏹️ ▶️ John Like that person said last time, the guy who said he doesn’t understand why they make the tower one, because as far as he’s concerned,
⏹️ ▶️ John he’s only interested in the rack mount one, because the tower one is just inconvenient, because he’s going to put it in a rack, and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John where all his other crap is for his audio thing. And so he was like, why do they even bother making a tower? It’s so dumb,
⏹️ ▶️ John just give me the rack mount.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, and if you are using it in a recording studio, guess what they’re full of? Racks. Tons of recording studio equipment
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is rack mount, and for all the same reasons that we use racks in data centers, because when you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bunch of stuff, and it works better, and it’s more convenient, and offers a lot of advantages.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, so in the same way that there has been this rack mount configuration of the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro, that’s gotta be a super low volume product that almost no one, relatively speaking, to the whole market buys.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s still worth them making it. I think similarly now, we have to look at the Mac Pro itself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe as the PCI slot version of the Mac Studio. Like that is just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a configuration of the Mac Studio that happens to add these fairly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco expensive components. Like I know people were trying to justify the price a little bit by looking up like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the PCI bridge chip they’re using in there. I think it’s like a $700 part. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco power supply they’re using in there is a massive, You know, it’s like a 1400 watt power supply.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the same one from my Mac Pro. They didn’t change it because you know, why was it kind of like when they didn’t change the power supply on the
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Mini when it went to Apple Silicon. Right. It’s like, well, we’ve already got this one and it’s over provisioned by like 10X.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the only reason the power supply is so over provisioned is if you assume that the cards can’t use that power.
⏹️ ▶️ John In my Mac Pro, you can use all that power. You can put in giant GPUs that suck the power up, but I think you might have trouble
⏹️ ▶️ John finding non-GPU PCI cards, enough of them if you fill every single slot to
⏹️ ▶️ John use up that power supply, because I’m pretty sure it’s exactly the same one in mine. And so it is more than, and
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s just cost savings. Like why bother making a different power supply? We’ve got one, it’s more than enough, just keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like they fitted the power supply to that that’s like the most power you can draw out of a US 15 amp circuit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s like, so they will never need a bigger one for most US uses. So like, all right, fine, we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fit this and it’ll be fine. And yeah, and now, as John said, like I don’t know how you’d even use all that power with the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco small number of cards that are gonna be compatible with this thing. But it’s there. And so there are some reasons, just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like for the RackMob version, there are some reasons for this to cost more than the Mac Studio,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but none of those reasons are relevant to almost any Mac buyers anymore. That doesn’t mean there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco aren’t any for whom they’re relevant, but as we’ve discussed, the market for that is getting smaller and smaller
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and smaller. And I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. You know, I don’t want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a giant tower if I don’t need one, if it doesn’t offer any benefits to my life, and it doesn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t even, as we were saying, I don’t even run a desktop anymore. I have a laptop that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco serving as a desktop, and then when I go on trips, I can bring it with me. It’s amazing. And it’s like most people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will have their needs totally well-solved without going to something like the Mac Pro, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s fine. I do think they still need to make it and keep that category healthy,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco though, and that’s what we were saying over the last few weeks about this. I don’t think they’re doing a good job
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of keeping that category healthy. But that being said, they have more data than we do. They probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see as well, they see way better than we do. That it’s a very dramatically shrinking category.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they would be totally happy to just sell like all their awesome laptops
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a small number of mass market desktops like the iMac 27. Like they’d be totally happy to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just sell those forever.
⏹️ ▶️ John As we pointed out before, it’s kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy though. They keep making this computer and have it just in turn fewer and fewer people and
⏹️ ▶️ John they sell fewer and fewer. And by the way, from what I’ve seen in Apple’s casual statements, the Mac Studio seems
⏹️ ▶️ John to be selling well. They don’t tell you sales numbers, but from what they’ve said in the press,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ve bracketed the Mac Studio saying like that, it’s selling well, or are we happy with how
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s doing, or we were surprised at how well it’s doing, because I think the Mac Studio, we haven’t talked about this too much, but the Mac Studio
⏹️ ▶️ John fills an important need, because Apple had just basically been selling laptops, because that’s what people want, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And then there was this huge jump to, oh, and if you want a desktop, the only one that we still sell is either the all-in-one
⏹️ ▶️ John iMac, which is kind of like a more consumer thing, or this gigantic, increasingly expensive tower. And the Mac Studio is perfect
⏹️ ▶️ John because people are like, I just want this to put this on people’s desks for them to use whatever the application
⏹️ ▶️ John is at work. And I don’t want it to be a giant tower. I don’t need it to be a giant tower, but laptops have a screen that
⏹️ ▶️ John people aren’t gonna use, a keyboard they’re not gonna use, a trackpad they’re not gonna use because they’re all using tablets or whatever. Mac Studio
⏹️ ▶️ John is an important product for Apple. It is a taller, more powerful Mac mini, and I
⏹️ ▶️ John think it is perfect for tons of use cases. And it does take some pressure off of the Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John in my opinion, it should free up the Mac Pro to be even more insane and have a, you know, the quad
⏹️ ▶️ John CPU in there or whatever. And that’s, as we talked about when the 2019 Mac Pro came out, you don’t design
⏹️ ▶️ John this case and get the manufacturing facilities for it and ship it on a single computer. So pretty much no matter what
⏹️ ▶️ John they did, if the Mac Pro was not canceled, the next one was gonna be in this case. And lo and behold, it is. Because that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not Apple’s way to go with these tower cases. They don’t make one of these towers. They did way back in the day, like the
⏹️ ▶️ John G3, G4, you know, quicksilver mirror drive door, they kept revising that, it was kind of the same
⏹️ ▶️ John case, but they did make lots of revisions. If you look, compare the blue and white G3 all the way up to whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John the last one was, which was, I think the mirror drive Darwin. There are actually a lot of differences in the
⏹️ ▶️ John case, but in general, the general shape was the same. But this giant case, it’s dumb to put an
⏹️ ▶️ John M2 Ultra in there. Like it’s a waste of space. They have way more cooling than they need. They did weird stuff, like they moved the
⏹️ ▶️ John SSDs out of a place where they had air blowing over them to a place where they don’t, probably because I
⏹️ ▶️ John guess they don’t need it, but it is weird. Like the SSDs are now where the RAM used to be, but there’s no air
⏹️ ▶️ John blowing on them. Anyway, this case is massively over-provisioned and overpowered
⏹️ ▶️ John for what they put in it. But what that means, since I’m not getting rid of this case, is if they keep making Mac Pros,
⏹️ ▶️ John they can’t, they have a chance, the next time they make a Mac Pro, put tons of stuff in there that can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John fit in a Mac Studio. Put the quad in there. So how are we gonna cool that thing? That’s what this case is for. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John huge, it’s got three gigantic fans. It’s got so much room, so much space for so much cooling,
⏹️ ▶️ John So much power with that power supply, right? So much expense, because you know, this is your top price
⏹️ ▶️ John product. And this one is cheaper than the previous one because the previous one you can make really, you know. So this case
⏹️ ▶️ John is sitting there waiting for Apple to make a computer worthy of it. Not worthy of it, but that takes advantage
⏹️ ▶️ John of it. And the M2 Ultra does not take advantage of it. The M2 Ultra is perfectly
⏹️ ▶️ John happy in the M2 Studio. Again, I encourage people to take a look at some YouTube videos where they check the temperatures. The
⏹️ ▶️ John M2 Ultra in the studio stays so cool and the fans stay idle and it never throttles.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like in that tiny little cube. So of course it doesn’t have any problems in this huge case, it’s like la-dee-da.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like again, half the fan, two out of the three giant front fans are just blowing air through nothing out the back.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I really hope that, you know, if you build it, the nerds will come. Like they built this case,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s sitting there waiting for something to come. Even the PCI chip marker that you mentioned, the expensive PCI bridge thing, like the
⏹️ ▶️ John M2 Ultra does not have the number of PCI lanes that the Xeon did even. And so they
⏹️ ▶️ John have all those slots in it. The reason they’re able to have those slots is they have multiple slots feeding into a single PCI
⏹️ ▶️ John switch inside, not a single switch, but there’s a switching fabric inside the M2 Ultra. So
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t have like all the 16X slots, you can’t have all of them having 16X speeds at the same time because they’re sharing
⏹️ ▶️ John bandwidth. That wasn’t the case with the Xeon because they had enough PCI express lanes
⏹️ ▶️ John for all those slots, right? So it’s not even like the M2 Ultra is able to correctly support
⏹️ ▶️ John the number of slots they put in this thing, but they just, you know, they did what they did. And they said, well, I hope you’re not using them all at the same time
⏹️ ▶️ John at maximum bandwidth. And if you are, you’re gonna get bottlenecked a little bit. So I really hope they
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually make another Mac Pro worthy of this case. Otherwise things are looking grim for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and I think, you know, when you look at, you know, I was just saying how many of us are just totally fine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with laptops now who used to need desktops for our work. You know, when you look at how the M1
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Macs in the Pro laptops compares to the M1 Ultra in the Studio and Mac Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a 2X chip. You know, you can get twice the cores if you go to the desktop Mac Studio or Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro. Well, if the Mac Pro is able to offer the quad at some point, then,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you can get another jump of 2X the CPU and GPU power by going from the Studio
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the Pro, that gives the Pro a lot more reason to exist. And if you look, like I, they had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this, they had like a disassembled new Mac Pro in the hands-on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco area in WBC this year, and took a couple of pictures, and there was no heatsink attached
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the M1 Ultra chip in it. So you could see how much space the M1 Ultra takes up in that case,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it takes up like a quarter of the motherboard. Like it’s not a small chip, it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John chip. But that’s the whole computer. Like the rest of the motherboard is empty.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so with some engineering, like they probably couldn’t put one like in front of the PCI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slots, because that would block the length of the slots, But in that upper right area where the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hard drive bracket goes that you have, they could move stuff around to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fit two of these in some form. However they would interconnect, whether it be one giant quad or whether it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be two of these side by side with some kind of interconnect between them, I don’t know. but there is room
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for it, but you can tell, like you actually do need a case of this caliber, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of this size to be able to fit two of those M1 Ultra dies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and also have card slots. So like it would make sense for the case to be this big if that was the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco goal. It makes no sense for any other reason. But again, maybe that’s the future plan here. Maybe they couldn’t get it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco together for this one, but maybe that is the future plan where you have kind of, you know, the M1 Max offering
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, 1X of this big performance, you have the Mac Studio
⏹️ ▶️ Marco offering 2X, and then you have the Mac Pro offering up to 4X. That would give this product
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a great reason to exist. Until then, we patiently wait and hope it doesn’t
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Vision Pro’s Top Four Challenges
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apparently we are playing top four today because in the show notes it says Marcos top four vision
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pro challenges and price ain’t one of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah I’ve been kind of waffling on this topic for a little while kind of drafting it in my head and I finally took some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco notes on it and wanted to actually bring to the show so I’m gonna do this in the in the in the spirit of my other show top four.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Start with honorable mentions. Yes so as Casey said this is top four Vision
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro challenges. This is like things I think will be challenges for the Vision Pro and price
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not one of them for this discussion. It’s not to say it won’t be a challenge, but I think these are like the kind of bigger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco picture things that even if the price comes down, I think these are still going to be challenges.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So first off, honorable mentions. Scrolling.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Over the last few days I’ve been asking various friends who had the press demo, how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco comfortable is it and how easy is it to scroll a lot on Vision
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro? Because when you look at the smartphone era and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of course it also applies to iPads but especially on phones, scrolling, especially vertical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scrolling through a feed or a list is like the primary
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interaction of smartphones. Whether you’re browsing a social feed and you’re just kind of doom scrolling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or scrolling forever or whether you’re you know scanning through a list of email or whatever, list views
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everywhere. Scrolling is like the primary interaction method on phones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The way Vision, I’ve been watching the Vision Pro demos, I have the simulator installed and obviously it’s nothing like using the real thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because you’re using a mouse and in my case a PS5 controller to, which works great by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way, thank you for that last week. Scrolling though, for whatever it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worth, everyone I’ve asked this question to has said it’s fine, that scrolling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is is totally comfortable, but everyone only had like 30 minute PR demos.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think scrolling is gonna be a little bit less comfortable and less
⏹️ ▶️ Marco awesome to do a large amount of with the interaction model, the physical interaction model of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Vision Pro. And I think that’s going to dramatically change how apps have to be built,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how they have to be laid out. And the sessions even back this up in terms of like layout and design suggestions that Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco making. And also just what kind of apps will succeed on this platform.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And largely I think that might be a very good thing in the sense that like I think the era of doom scrolling forever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on our phones has overall not been positive for society I don’t think. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s something interesting that we’re having this major platform come out where one of the most common interaction patterns
⏹️ ▶️ Marco may not be comfortable or practical or nice to do a large
⏹️ ▶️ John Can you describe the two mechanisms, I think there’s two of them that I’m aware of, to scroll on Vision Pro?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Are there two? The one I know of is, obviously you look at what you want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco select, you look at it, and then you pinch your fingers together, and the way you scroll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apparently is you just kind of grab it with your fingers as you’re looking at it, and just pull your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hand up. As if you’re picking up a piece of string off a table, that kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of motion. Forgive me, I could be wrong. I didn’t go to demo. But I could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be wrong. But it seems like, so John, is there a second way to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it? What’s the second
⏹️ ▶️ John way? Yeah, so that’s the one. And I’ll tell you the second way in a second. But I was also thinking exactly the
⏹️ ▶️ John same thing when I saw the demos. I didn’t mention it on the show. But I was like,
⏹️ ▶️ John scrolling stuff might be weird. Because if you think about it, so you mentioned the smartphone. Obviously, we sit there. Most people scroll with their thumbs,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? It becomes an unconscious thing. We don’t think about it. on the personal computer front,
⏹️ ▶️ John in the laptop world, in the Mac world anyway, two fingers scrolling on a trackpad becomes second nature
⏹️ ▶️ John once you’re used to it. And even before that, for the entire world on desktop computers, we have the mouse
⏹️ ▶️ John wheel, where once you get used to having a wheel on your mouse and you’re looking at a webpage or something,
⏹️ ▶️ John you scroll without even thinking, your finger just finds the wheel, or if you have an Apple mouse, you swipe across the surface.
⏹️ ▶️ John Those are all actions that we do without thinking about it. It is an unconscious,
⏹️ ▶️ John total disappeared interface for all those different things. Phone, laptop, desktop, we scroll
⏹️ ▶️ John without thinking. This one, I can imagine getting to a similar place, but the difference it has with
⏹️ ▶️ John all those ones I just described is it’s way larger motions, right? So yes, you
⏹️ ▶️ John look at the thing you wanna scroll, you make the pinch. So far, all those motions are tiny. But now, once you’ve made the pinch,
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to move the hand that you have pinched up or down to scroll up or down. And unlike
⏹️ ▶️ John all the other ones where we’re just gonna swipe, swipe, swipe, you know, with two fingers on a mouse wheel
⏹️ ▶️ John on the actual screen. I think you would have to like release the pinch, go back down,
⏹️ ▶️ John pinch again, pull up, go back down, pinch again. It’s the most complicated and largest motion, which is why I think they added
⏹️ ▶️ John the second way to do it, which is, and again, I have not tried this, but I believe I’ve read about this,
⏹️ ▶️ John is that you can just take a finger and swipe like you’re swiping a screen. Now you don’t have to reach your
⏹️ ▶️ John hand out and touch the virtual like screen floating in front of you. I don’t, just like the pinch, It doesn’t matter where your hand
⏹️ ▶️ John is. You can leave your hand in your lap, but I believe there is a motion that is a lot like swiping at,
⏹️ ▶️ John let’s say, the screen of an upright iPad that happens to be an inch away from your finger, and you can
⏹️ ▶️ John scroll like that. And I think that, if that is real and I’m remembering correctly, will be way easier than the
⏹️ ▶️ John look, pinch, grab, unpinch, look, pinch, grab, or, you know, forget about the looking, just pinch, grab, unpinch.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’d be like moving a mouse on a very small mouse pad. We’re gonna have to constantly pick it up and reposition it. That’s how we used
⏹️ ▶️ John to scroll. We used to grab the little scroll thumb and we’d move it up and down, but that has the same problem as pinching,
⏹️ ▶️ John is that, okay, well, I ran out of mousepad and I gotta move up again, whereas spinning that wheel, you don’t need to move the mouse at
⏹️ ▶️ John all, and you get as many spins as you want, and you never run out of mousepad. And same thing with swiping. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think swiping will be better than pinching, but both swiping and pinching, I think, will
⏹️ ▶️ John be more difficult to become second nature, just because, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, these things work by cameras looking at your hands, which is harder problem than a wheel,
⏹️ ▶️ John knowing when you’ve spun it or two or a trackpad, knowing you swipe two fingers across it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. So if if that whole flick thing that you’re talking about, if that works, that’s great. I didn’t know about that. So that that would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco largely improve this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Please, someone who had a demo, please write in and tell us if I’m imagining things. But I’m pretty sure that was the thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. But I think overall, though, like what you said earlier is is important, though, which is I think what we don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a good idea of yet by not having used one is how much hand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco movement is actually required to trigger a lot of these gestures. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s got to be, because it’s camera based, it’s got to be a little bit less precise with very small movements
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than a mouse or trackpad or touch screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you’re going to run out of room no matter what. Say they made it like, oh, you don’t need to move your hand a lot. If you move your hand
⏹️ ▶️ John an inch, that’s a huge amount of scrolling. It’s like, well, I don’t want that because now I have no precision. It’s like, okay but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John very precise oh but now I have to move my foot and my hand up and down two feet to scroll that’s the beauty
⏹️ ▶️ John of swipes on a screen or on a thing is you can just repeatedly do that gesture
⏹️ ▶️ John you can do a long swipe a bunch of little short ones it is very flexible in terms of not
⏹️ ▶️ John requiring you to do any large motions whereas no matter what choice they make for for the
⏹️ ▶️ John for the pinch and move motion they’re gonna have some problem if they make it so you don’t have to move a lot now there’s no
⏹️ ▶️ John sensitivity if they make it sensitive now you got to move a lot, which is why I hope that swipe thing. I’m not just imagining
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Yeah. So anyway, that remains to be seen. One of the wrong were mentioned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before I move to the actual top four is people’s physical spaces. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we this is another thing where we don’t really have a good idea yet of some of the details. Like for instance, we mentioned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco airplane seats how like well, there’s lots of places in real life where if you’re trying to get this AR mode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you know, this blended view of reality and your windows and stuff, many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco physical places where people do work are not set up to have this much space in front of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the user. I mean, honestly, most people’s desks, if you think,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco figure most people’s desks, my desk included, the wall, I mean, the monitor in front of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me is about an arm’s length away. The wall is about a foot behind that. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t actually have enough space in my desk chair in front of me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before I hit a wall to actually have the proper like roughly two meter focus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco distance to not cause VAC like we talked about last two weeks and I think most if in general
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you have a desk against a wall or cubicle you’re gonna have the same problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and most people’s desks are against walls I think so so you know I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think there’s gonna be and you can say look then you can turn on Mount Hood or whatever you can have half Mount Hood in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco front of you and that’s the whole point well, then you lose a significant value
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the pass-through. You lose orientation in your space, you lose some of your awareness of your surroundings.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There is a significant trade-off to turning on those virtual environments that I think most people doing most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of their work most of the time are not gonna want that. They’re gonna want the pass-through mostly and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then put windows around their room. But I think this is gonna be fundamentally, physically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inconvenient for a lot of people’s actual workspaces. So, you know, that again remains to be seen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, to the actual top four. This is what the show is like
⏹️ ▶️ John too, by the way. And you’re like, what, did he just do two? No, he didn’t. Those don’t count. Is
⏹️ ▶️ John it top six? Is it, whatever, just go with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Number four, text input. This, I think, still largely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco remains to be seen. Now, if you look at text input on Macs, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhones, and iPads, and hell, on the watch, you know, the watch basically doesn’t have it because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it sucks and that’s fair. You know, the physical realities of that are pretty harsh.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so there’s a reason why we’re not typing long documents on our watches. Vision Pro supports
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Siri dictation, of course, in a nice integrated convenient way with like search fields and stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s fine. As we know, Siri is awesome and never gets anything wrong and it’s super reliable and fast.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Correct. That’s great. So we’ll probably all be using Siri 100% of the time, but for the small percentage of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time where that may not work for us. Obviously, you can do the thing where you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco connect a physical keyboard. And I think that’s going to be what most people do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in their workspaces. If you’re actually going to have a desk or a table set up where you’re going to be using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Vision Pro a lot, I bet most people are going to connect a keyboard if they’re going to actually be using it for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco productivity tasks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re just using it to watch movies and stuff, who cares? It’s fine. But if you’re actually using it for productivity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tasks where you’re going to be typing in documents and emails and stuff, I think you’re gonna probably want a physical keyboard connected.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I think other than that, like for situations where you don’t have the Bluetooth keyboard connected,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’ve seen they have like kind of an in-air keyboard that you can kind of poke at. I don’t think that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to provide any kind of level of speed. I think it’s gonna be a lot like, you know, you use your two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco index fingers and you poke, poke, poke, poke, like alternating between your two index fingers. That’s gonna be kind of what that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keyboard is like in all likelihood. Now again, we’ll see when we get them. I could be wrong. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could be a lot better, and in fact, you know, I give them credit. Usually their stuff is better than I think it will be before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve tried it. So, give them credit. This might not be a big problem, but I think text input is going to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very clumsy on it. We also have issues like cursor movement, selection,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things that go along with not having a keyboard and mouse that, you know, again, when you, when we saw the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and iPad come around, they had to deal with these things. They still have to deal with them on some level. They’re still not perfect. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still not convenient. But doing a lot of text work is still way better on a physical keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and with a mouse or trackpad than it is on a touch device.
⏹️ ▶️ John On these things on the keyboard, by the way, that’s something that I believe nobody got a demo of. Like, the demos
⏹️ ▶️ John did not include that keyboard that floated in the air, so nobody has tried it. I guess it just wasn’t ready yet.
⏹️ ▶️ John And related to cursor stuff, there were some Mass Advanced from Steve Troughton-Smith, I’ll try to get
⏹️ ▶️ John the links into the notes, where he figured out how to turn on mouse emulation in the simulator. I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John if this is going to be a thing in Vision OS. No one has Vision OS. We just have the simulator. But you can get
⏹️ ▶️ John a cursor in the simulator that looks a lot like the iPad cursor. And
⏹️ ▶️ John so if you had a physical keyboard, you could also, in theory, at least with the simulator, have a physical mouse and move around the cursor. The interesting
⏹️ ▶️ John thing he noted about the cursor is that you can’t make it leave the app.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the cursor is like you can’t drag the cursor from one floating window to like you’re in Safari
⏹️ ▶️ John and you’re moving this cursor around. you can’t move it over through 3D space to like your music player window. So
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like, it’s a captive cursor, like in games? Right, unless you look at music, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey So if you look at the next
⏹️ ▶️ John window, then all of a sudden your cursor is there. And the cursor can move within, like you can have, you know, they have those little floating ornaments,
⏹️ ▶️ John like the little side panels and stuff. You can move the cursor to those, fine. But this is basically to prevent your cursor
⏹️ ▶️ John from being lost in the ether, because the cursor, a mouse is a 2D, you know, pointing
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco device, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John If you had the cursor suddenly be like in 3D space, how do I get to the window that’s like back there? You can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t push the mouse in Z direct, you know what I mean? So the way they do it is It’s a 2d
⏹️ ▶️ John cursor for your 2d window and if you want to be in a different 2d window look at that window and now Your cursor is
⏹️ ▶️ John over there But I have no idea if this is just a thing for the simulator or for a real thing But in those
⏹️ ▶️ John situations like you said where you’re sitting at a desk and you have a physical keyboard I think people would want a physical mouse and by the
⏹️ ▶️ John way if they had that it would solve the scrolling problem because they would Just use the scroll wheel or the scroll surface on their mouse.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is another mystery. The mode is there it seems like it would be useful. I hope it
⏹️ ▶️ John is enabled in the real device.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, me too. All right, number three. And this, I think I might have actually ranked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this too low, but we’ll see. Number three, digital personas.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So this is a multifaceted feature. One part of it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the view of your eyes that is shown on the exterior screen to everyone around you. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the other part of it that we’ve seen demoed so far is how you look to other people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in FaceTime calls when you are using a Vision Pro. Because they don’t have actual,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like full light and cameras to look at your eyes and face to see what you are actually looking like because you’re in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a dark headset inside. So, they read your facial expressions, presumably with like the IR sensors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever inside, and then they have this computer generated, simulated, like 3D rendering,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of deep fake version of you. And the impressions that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people reported from the press demo that had a little bit of this seemed to be all over the place, generally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not good, or at least neutral. I think the digital
⏹️ ▶️ Marco personas are going to have significant drawbacks. The biggest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem is it doesn’t really look like they’re talking really to you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It looks like a deepfake AI version of you, and that is going to,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first of all, cause a bit of a problem in the sense that if you’re on a FaceTime call
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you’re the one person in Vision Pro everyone else is going to look better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to you because they’re going to be the regular video heads they’re going to look better to you than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you are to them. Will people feel comfortable talking to your digital
⏹️ ▶️ Marco persona and not to you? Will you feel pressured or will there actually be policies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to not use a Vision Pro when you’re on a work call call or maybe a call with your significant other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you’re traveling or something like that. Like the other option is you can
⏹️ ▶️ John use your Memoji, which I feel like is better in some ways, but way worse than others. Can you imagine being
⏹️ ▶️ John on a call with your spouse with your Memoji? They’d be like, get this thing out of my face. I’d rather not see you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And just imagine like if you’re talking about something serious, like, you know, you got to talk about like, you know, like a parent has cancer and it’s your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Memoji talking about your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John cartoon head. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, you know, that’s horrendous, right? So like, I think the digital personas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are going to not be well liked by the people you’re talking to who are not Unvision
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pros. And I think that’s going to cause significant ostracization.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have to say that. You’ll be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey ostracized.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ostracization. You will be ostracized
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them. And I think you might not want to use it for a lot of your calls, which will then reduce the utility of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think that will harm its spread.
⏹️ ▶️ John We talked about this when it came out that the thing that Apple did not talk about at all that Facebook
⏹️ ▶️ John and I think maybe even Microsoft have talked about a lot is the idea of digital presence where you feel like you’re in a room
⏹️ ▶️ John with people you have your avatars in the room and it’s being controlled by you and their avatars in the room and it’s being controlled
⏹️ ▶️ John by them and you’re both sitting at a virtual you know conference table and you’re having a work meeting and it feels like
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re both there sharing a physical space and Vision Pro and their demos and in their presentation had
⏹️ ▶️ John literally none of that like even the thing where you’re talking about the digital personas was explicitly not
⏹️ ▶️ John to feel like you’re both in the same space. What it feels like is you’re sitting on your couch and there’s a disembodied floating hologram
⏹️ ▶️ John head like you’re being spoken to in Star Wars or Star Trek, but they’re not there. They’re clearly like,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is a projection of my head and shoulders floating up in the air in your living room. It is not, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John this feeling of presence where we’re both sitting at the same conference table. Because for multiple people in VR headsets,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially in a work environment, the feeling that you are both on even playing field in both sharing
⏹️ ▶️ John this fake digital space with each other is a, for the people who have tried it, have said,
⏹️ ▶️ John it is, you know, it is much better than talking on a Zoom call, right? Probably not as
⏹️ ▶️ John good as actually being in the same physical space, but for people who can’t physically be in the same space because they’re in different offices, on
⏹️ ▶️ John different coasts or whatever, being at a virtual meeting room can feel better and higher bandwidth
⏹️ ▶️ John and more comfortable and more effective for communication than just
⏹️ ▶️ John looking at each other’s head and shoulders in a Zoom call. but Vision Pro does none of that. And they could
⏹️ ▶️ John like it could the Apple could have pitched it as like, hey, everybody in your organization gets Vision Pros and then you can have meetings around a virtual
⏹️ ▶️ John conference table. It has a technology for it. There’s no reason they can’t do it, but they didn’t. That’s not a thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that they are pitching this device for. And it’s not a thing that at least in as far as we know, this device is capable
⏹️ ▶️ John of without some kind of third party thing. But that for everything you’re talking about, Marco, this presence thing
⏹️ ▶️ John is predicated on the idea that every other person who is, quote unquote, present with you also has a headset on. So
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re on an even playing field. but for family calls, nobody wants to do a FaceTime call with you where they can’t see
⏹️ ▶️ John your face. When you’re calling with relatives, they wanna see you. No matter how terrible your lighting is
⏹️ ▶️ John and how you can’t hold the phone steady, they still wanna see you. They wanna see the junk that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John on your couch. They wanna see you. They do not wanna see the digital version of you at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John They certainly don’t wanna see your Memoji. And in work context, it’s less
⏹️ ▶️ John important, and that’s why they’re pitching, like in work context, it’s important for the other people to see your expressions. So in that
⏹️ ▶️ John case, an Emoji may actually even be better than a digital avatar because the facial expressions are more exaggerated.
⏹️ ▶️ John But honestly, I think the people at work would get more information out of your actual face as well. And you know what? They can’t see
⏹️ ▶️ John your actual face when you’re wearing a mask over it. I mean, I do wonder if people would say that would take a FaceTime call with
⏹️ ▶️ John the headset on. Because then at least people can see like Batman style, like the lower part of your mouth, and they could tell if you’re George
⏹️ ▶️ John Clooney or Val Kilmer or whatever, or Michael Keaton. Because at least they can see some part of your face and the rest of you would
⏹️ ▶️ John look silly and dorky. But I feel like I’d rather see that than, uh, than, you know, your, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John your me from Nintendo or whatever. Although I do feel like me’s are a better system than the memoji.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let me give you, let me give you a hot take from everything I’ve seen. And granted, I, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did not try the device. And certainly I agree with what Marco said that the, the opinions have been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mixed on this more negative than positive, but based only on the keynote and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, whatever associated videos came out immediately thereafter from Apple, I didn’t think it was that bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought it actually looked sufficient. I don’t necessarily disagree with anything that you guys
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said. You know, obviously it’d be better to see a real person, especially if you’re discussing something that’s really deep and personal, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think for everyday use, it’s that bad. I really, really don’t. And we’ll see. I have a feeling I’m going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to eat these words when they come out or whenever I have a chance to actually try one, even if it’s in a year and a half
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or two years. But I was not as turned off by this as a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lot of other people, especially Mike, like I was listening to upgrade earlier today. And Mike
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was briefly I think it was upgrade, maybe it was actually a thoroughly considered it was apparently an all Mike day here for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me at the list household. But anyway, I was listening to something that Mike was was on and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he was saying again, how he was very, very turned off by the whole persona thing. And,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I trust his experience. And certainly he has actual experience with it. But it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really honestly did not seem that bad to me.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, one of the things that Apple is leaving on the table with this whole digital version
⏹️ ▶️ John of yourself is Apple historically has not been super – with an emoji there, a little bit into this, but not really.
⏹️ ▶️ John The idea of having an avatar, having some kind of image that represents you
⏹️ ▶️ John in the world of the computer is ages old, right? Even the term avatar is – I forget how dated it
⏹️ ▶️ John is, but it’s from many decades ago, right? And historically on the internet,
⏹️ ▶️ John people have used the system of having avatars and usernames to the same extent, as a way
⏹️ ▶️ John to present themselves differently than they present in the real world.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because in the real world, you don’t know how much of a choice. You look like what you look like, you are what you
⏹️ ▶️ John are. You can pick your clothes and everything, but in general, you have limited control over your appearance in
⏹️ ▶️ John the real world. But in the virtual world, you could be anything you want. On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John You could present however you wanted. You can try to make yourself look better, taller, more sophisticated, cooler,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, whatever thing you want to do, you can present as a different gender, as a different, you know, race, as a different
⏹️ ▶️ John location, you could pretend you could be an AOL chat room and you’re 13 year old and you’re pretending you’re 23 and you’re from a city
⏹️ ▶️ John and you’re really from the country, right? That whole phenomenon of being able to present a different you to the
⏹️ ▶️ John digital world, things like headsets and virtual avatars are perfect for that. And I think part of what you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John seeing about the, the, uh, virtual, what is it called again? The digital persona personas,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, is that it is kind of an idealized representation of you. It’s very symmetrical.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just kind of a scan of your face with kind of an idealized body behind it. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can look better in your persona than you do in your real life where your hair is not combed. And you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John like you just woke up and you’re wearing an undershirt with stains on it or whatever, but hey, your avatar
⏹️ ▶️ John looks the same as always. Fresh and chipper and the exact amount of stubble that you want and your hair
⏹️ ▶️ John is the way you want it to be. And you got to rescan your face five times. And if Apple wanted to, they could say, you know
⏹️ ▶️ John what? You can change this a little bit. Oh, do you wish your ears didn’t stick out quite as much? Hey, just move this slider and push your ears in
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit or whatever. Memojis let you do that. You can present a Memoji as a penguin. You could be a camel, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John You can be whatever you want. And maybe not the Memoji, like the, what are they called? The emoji ones?
⏹️ ▶️ John They have some flexibility there to present differently, albeit within the limited world of cartoon stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. But in general, Apple has wanted to go there. They give you the ability to look kind of silly
⏹️ ▶️ John and to be a penguin or a camel. They give you the ability to make a cartoon version of yourself
⏹️ ▶️ John as long as your head shape is the one head shape they offer, which is the major weakness that Memojis have over Mii’s and
⏹️ ▶️ John Nintendo’s Mii’s. Because Nintendo’s Mii’s, I could make one that looks like me because my head is long and skinny and I got a big nose. You
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t do that with Memoji. There’s no long and skinny heads, right? And you can try to make your nose big, but it just makes everyone
⏹️ ▶️ John have this little button nose and it just makes the button bigger. It’s not, you know, it doesn’t look anything like me. It just looks
⏹️ ▶️ John like a generic doll with one doll mold, right? So I do feel like Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John is kind of, you know, not leaving money on the table, but like
⏹️ ▶️ John not reaching for a thing that is within their grasp, which is, okay, the limitation is people can’t see your real
⏹️ ▶️ John face. That’s a bummer and it excludes a lot of things where people will wanna see your face. But
⏹️ ▶️ John what about scenarios where not seeing your face is a feature, not a bug? Where not seeing your face is good,
⏹️ ▶️ John let people use this amazing technology you have to let people present themselves as something different
⏹️ ▶️ John than they are with higher fidelity than they’ve ever been able to before. Not limited to
⏹️ ▶️ John just penguin, camel, monkey, shark, but just let them pick anything they
⏹️ ▶️ John want. I guess this might be a third party opportunity or whatever, but that’s another area that Apple didn’t go into.
⏹️ ▶️ John They didn’t say, this lets you present a different face to the world. They didn’t say, this will let you be the tiger
⏹️ ▶️ John that you’ve always wanted to be and hang out with your other jungle pals in the giant jungle together
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco where you have this amazing sense of
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco They could have done that,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they didn’t. Even for games, like tons of games that you build your character. My Destiny
⏹️ ▶️ John character looks nothing like me. It’s a character that I built, I picked the fashion for,
⏹️ ▶️ John I pick all the shaders or whatever. That’s part of the game. Part of the game is doing that. And then this would have a way to
⏹️ ▶️ John do that for yourself, for your entire body, because they can’t see your actual body. But so far, Apple has not wanted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. All right, we’ll see how that goes. But yeah, digital personas, honestly, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has a lot of potential to really hold back this product in some of its
⏹️ ▶️ Marco initial use cases, and especially socially, FaceTime, other social things, but especially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco FaceTime. So anyway, and even, I would extend the digital persona challenge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to also the display of the eyes on the outside, because that is based on, I believe, the same kind of thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s gotta look really good for that feature to justify existing. If it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look really good, people are gonna think you’re, look, people are already gonna think you’re a weirdo wearing this thing for a while,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think it’s going to increase the weirdo risk and increase the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ostracization risk.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I gotta find a different word.
⏹️ ▶️ John You preaching for that one?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If the eye display on the outside is not really, really good and doesn’t look really
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not gonna look really good.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco The reasons,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, like the lenticular display, we know what lenticular displays look like. They give multiple, you can put multiple images,
⏹️ ▶️ John each of which is viewable from a different angle, but the number of angles is not unlimited. The number of angles is very limited.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the fact is that the image is several inches away from where your eyes are going to be. So I don’t think it’s going to
⏹️ ▶️ John look good, but it does have a functional component that I think probably justifies its existence.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the functional component is to let the people who are around you know whether you can see them or not. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the function of that. And they could have put two cartoon eyes there. In fact, they probably have a Memoji version that did that, right? That’s the function.
⏹️ ▶️ John If it’s all wavy, searing dust or whatever, they know that you can’t see them.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if it’s eyeballs, they can see you, right? And same thing with the breakthrough. when you walk up to them and you break through, you will suddenly
⏹️ ▶️ John see their eyes and they’ll be able to see you. And by the way, since it’s their actual eyes and they look at you, you’ll be able to tell they’re looking at
⏹️ ▶️ John you. So I don’t think it’s gonna look good, but I think the functional part of it is important enough that
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s good for them to do as good a job as they can. And in all the videos also, by the way, it’s kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing that they would do in movies where the special effects aren’t that good. It’s like, well, just this scene will be in the dark.
⏹️ ▶️ John So yeah, this puppet doesn’t look great, but it’s a dark scene, no one can tell.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so the eyes on the mask, like all the images I’ve seen, all the PR images, it’s very kind of like dark and smoky
⏹️ ▶️ John in there. And that hides the fact that it’s a lenticular display and it’s kind of weird and the fidelity is not great.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you know, it’s gotta be essentially a like night vision view of your
⏹️ ▶️ John eyes. Cause it’s not like they’re gonna shine lights on your face inside the thing. You know, speaking of movies, in every movie
⏹️ ▶️ John where someone’s like a space helmet or they’re underwater, there’s tons of lights inside the helmet shining on their face
⏹️ ▶️ John so you can see the actors acting, right? But in actual space suits, If they don’t have tons of light
⏹️ ▶️ John shining the astronauts eyes, they would be blinded in there. But in real spacesuits,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s different. Anyway, there’s no lights inside there shining on your eyeballs constantly. It would be blinding. Like the screens are
⏹️ ▶️ John the light shining on your eyes, but the screens may be showing something that’s dark at the moment. So it’s gotta be kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ John an IR night vision type of thing, images of your eye, that they then, I guess,
⏹️ ▶️ John artificially colorize or enhance the color aspect of it. Like that’s why the fidelity
⏹️ ▶️ John of the eye images aren’t great because it is an actual, I believe, actual live image of your eyes, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it is massively processed to try to make them look better than they would because
⏹️ ▶️ John your actual eyes are currently in darkness with tiny screens pointing at them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, if I had to guess, looking at this product and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seeing like, you know, here, this is this ideal feature that’s kind of,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has the potential to be a little bit off, putting a little bit weird in practice, kind of like when the Apple Watch launched and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it had all that digital touch stuff And it turned out that was kind of weird for most people. And it went away
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quickly. It would not surprise me if that eye display on the outside
⏹️ ▶️ Marco changes dramatically in the next one or two iterations of the product, and possibly goes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco away completely in favor of some kind of simpler indicator. Because I think that will prove
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be both maybe not worth its component cost, and also maybe just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little too weird for people.
⏹️ ▶️ John I could see it being cut for cost in a low-cost model maybe. but I think it’s hard to give up the idea of showing real
⏹️ ▶️ John eyes, just because it’s not just that you can see the eyes, it’s also where the eyes are pointing. And the easiest way to do
⏹️ ▶️ John that is to just show them the actual eyes. I mean, again, you could do cartoon eyes, I suppose, but I feel like that would be even weirder.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all right. That was number three. Number two, Vision Pro Big Challenge. This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a big one. The software ecosystem. This, I think, is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to, I haven’t heard a lot of people talk about this, but I think this is going to be the big story
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about it after like a year. When you look at the software ecosystem, the environment that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Vision Pro is running in, we don’t know much about what’s gonna be allowed and stuff, we don’t know things like app review
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and stuff like that, but we can be pretty sure, now that we have the SDK especially, we can be pretty sure generally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what it’s like, and we can make some pretty good guesses that I think are gonna end up being correct. So, number one,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is an iOS-based system, and it’s going to be app store only in all likelihood.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, when you’re looking at this as a platform, I think where this is going to fit in in people’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computing lives, it depends on who you ask and what their plans are. I think for many people,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s going to be a very nice entertainment device. That’s going to, and that’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if that’s all it ever is, if it’s kind of like an Apple TV, in that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you use this for a small number of consumption entertainment-based apps, and you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t do a lot of work on it, that’s still a big market, and that’s still a powerful product. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think that’s, I’m not trying to speak down about it in this way, I think we don’t know yet how this is gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco end up, but I think it’s gonna end up either being like the Apple TV, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad, or the Mac. And in all three of those cases, and maybe somewhere in between
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a lot of people, but in all three of those cases, that creates some difficult
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software environments. So number one thing is if you’re gonna use this thing for productivity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps, you’re gonna have many or all the same problems you have on iPads for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco productivity apps. So it’s again, app store only. That’s going to rule out a whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bunch of types of apps and a whole bunch of developers that don’t want to deal with Apple or don’t want to give them their cut. And they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just won’t be there. You’re not going to have like, you know, terminals and file system access.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’re not going to have third party system utilities. You’re not going to have stuff like Roga Meeba’s audio utilities. You’re not going to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco window management utilities. You’re not going to have, you know, cloud backup providers and stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No. If it can’t run on an iPad for policy or tech
⏹️ ▶️ Marco design reasons, it’s probably not going to run on Vision Pro. Complicating factor on that especially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco though is that the iPad launched to a fairly high volume
⏹️ ▶️ Marco market. This is not that. This is going to be a very low volume market. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to be pretty hard to make money there for a while. And it’s going to be pretty hard to have growth because it’s just going to be a low volume
⏹️ ▶️ Marco market for a while. Now, also compounding on that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as we’re playing with the SDK more and seeing how our apps look and everything, I think Vision
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro is going to end up kind of like the iPad in that you can run your iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco code fairly unmodified on it, but it’s not going to be good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if you actually want your app to be at all good and not look really crappy on this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco platform or not work really poorly on this platform, you’re going to have to custom design for this platform.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’re going to have to make tweaks, you’re going to have to maybe rewrite some parts of your interface or redesign whole parts of your interface.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not as easy as just porting over an iPad app with no changes. Also, what we’re seeing so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco far, non-native components will look and work even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worse in Vision OS than they do on iOS and the Mac. In my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco recent rewrite of Overcast, up until a few days ago, I was using a custom Toolbar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on top of my new three column layout that I’m writing and there were just certain like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Behavioral and appearance details that I could just not get to be the same as their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco default toolbars in vision OS and I just dumped my custom one and just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco started using the standard one because it was just easier and it ended up working better and looking better In vision OS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I lost some little details in the iOS version But not a lot and it’s it’s easier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to just use theirs for this purpose That pattern where you were doing something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco custom and it worked fine in iOS, but it doesn’t look or work right on Vision OS, that pattern
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will be seen a lot. That extends to not only just little design choices you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make in your iOS apps or little implementation details like, well I made this toolbar, it’s not really using a UI toolbar because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it had some limitations, so I made one that looks and works the same. Well on Vision OS it doesn’t. This extends
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even further to if you want to maybe say use something like Electron
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or some kind of cross-platform framework, those apps are gonna be even worse on Vision OS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than they are on iOS and Mac. They’re gonna stand out like a sore thumb, they’re not gonna work right, they’re not gonna look right,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even more so. And so when you combine all of that, you have a low-volume platform,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you need custom design for it, you’re gonna have to deal with the app store and all the restrictions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and all the fees therein. What you’re probably gonna see is pretty low adoption,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially by big companies. I seriously doubt that you’re going to see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Google, Microsoft, Adobe, you know, porting their big apps to this platform
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anytime soon. Maybe they’ll give lip service here and there to get in a keynote here and there, make some deal, but,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, Google and, you know, like, these big companies have enough trouble keeping up with the iPad as a platform.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They mostly do a pretty, you know, half-butted job of keeping up with the iPad. Vision OS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is going to be even worse because it is going to be a similar amount of custom work as keeping up with the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad, but with way less volume to make up for it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I think the software ecosystem is going to be very, very challenging. Now you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also look and say, well look, you can run your iPad app in a window. Well, are they going to let companies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco opt out like they did on M1 Macs? Because I’ll tell you one thing, I frequently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will go look for an iPad app so I can run it on my M1 Mac and it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there because the developer opted out. All the time. The bigger the company, the more likely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are to have opted out. But even a lot of small developers opt out. There are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so many iPad apps I would love to use on my Mac that I can’t because they just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unchecked that box that says allow me to run on M1 Macs. If there’s a similar mechanism
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for iPad apps on Vision OS, you will see just as many developers opt out. The software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ecosystem of Vision OS is going to be the big challenge that we will talk about for years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to come, just like we’ve talked about it on the iPad. Just as people are trying to like use iPads for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco productivity work over the years, and they’ve been oftentimes extremely hindered, not just by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the OS, which is a big part of it, but by the software ecosystem of not having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough good productivity apps, putting enough effort in to either be there at all, or to do a good job
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there, or to keep up with the features of the OS.
⏹️ ▶️ John In 13 years, we’ll have Final Cut Pro for the Vision Pro though. We only have to wait 13 years. We
⏹️ ▶️ John won’t ever have an Instagram app, obviously we know that, but in 13 years we’ll get Final Cut Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John Assuming Apple still makes it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and so I think ultimately what we should expect from the Vision Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software ecosystem is some things like the Mac and some things like the iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, the Mac market has many of these same problems. The Mac market requires custom development. It doesn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anywhere near the volume of an iPhone. you know, in terms of customer volume, but it’s been around for much, much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco longer, and it has way more product volume than the Vision Pro is gonna have anytime soon.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But at the same time, writing apps for the Mac is harder than writing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like if you already have an iOS code base, and you want to have a Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app or a Vision Pro app, the Vision Pro app is gonna be way easier to get than the Mac app,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unless maybe, you know, Catalyst makes things a little bit different, but it’s not that different. You know, and the Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, people don’t feel like learning AppKit because it seems like a dying platform relatively, or at least an unmaintained platform,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco relatively speaking. So it’s harder to justify working on a Mac app if you have an iOS,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, a mostly iOS-based app. But Vision Pro is gonna have many similar problems. It’s gonna have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of companies and developers looking at it and saying, you know what, this is too much work, it’s not worth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it for us. So I think that it’s gonna be a very, very challenging
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software environment for years to come. And I don’t think there’s much Apple can really do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about that, you know, like I’m not, this isn’t really an action item per se, I think this is, it’s more like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco setting expectations for ourselves that we’re not gonna be able to get all of our work done in Division
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro in all likelihood for a while. And depending on what your work is and what apps you choose or need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to use, that, you know, the amount of time on that will vary and it could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be forever for a lot of people’s needs. And that’s okay, you can still use your Mac and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever features they use to bring Mac apps in, it seems like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco initial launch is gonna have a fairly rudimentary version of that, where you can show a 4K screen on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your Mac. And so it’s probably just doing like AirPlay into a window in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Envision Pro. You can imagine in the future, maybe a better version of that feature,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where like in each individual Mac window might be able to be brought in as an individual
⏹️ ▶️ Marco window in Vision Pro, and you can move them around separately and not just have like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here’s a rectangle that your Mac screen will be mirrored into. You can imagine better versions of that feature
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that will probably come in future software updates. But until then, if you wanna get super
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good work done, you’re probably gonna be using Vision Pro native apps, and that’s gonna be difficult for all these different reasons.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s number two, the software ecosystem. I think that’s going to be the story for years and years to come.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, number one, Vision Pro’s biggest challenge. And honestly, to top digital personas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the software ecosystem, I think this is a big one, but I think this is the biggest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco challenge. Couples.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Vision Pro seems like a really cool thing if you live alone in a house with lots of space.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know how this is gonna go for couples. This is going to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the first mainstream digital device in a long time, if ever,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that there is really no way to have a shared experience with someone else. Like, if you are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watching a movie on your iPad, you can stick it on a table or at the end of the bed or whatever, and you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watch it with your spouse or partner. You can watch it with your kids, you can watch it with your dog,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever it is, it’s a shared experience. It’s easy to say, when you’re showing something on your phone,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hey, look at this. Or you can watch something together on your iMac the corner of your apartment or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There are so many good ways to do that. With this product, there is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no good way to make a shared experience. Now I have seen, like my kid uses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Facebook Quest or whatever, you can mirror it to a computer screen so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other people in the room can watch on a computer screen whatever you are seeing in the headset. In practice,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not only does that not work very well, just technically speaking, but it’s It’s very difficult
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to watch because you are watching someone’s like full head movement and like it’s like it moves
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around a lot and it’s you know it makes sense for them to have it be that way but for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you watching it it’s very difficult to really get that experience to to both appreciate it and to just deal with the reality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of all the motion and weirdness that comes with that. So some kind of like you know video mirroring solution
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here I don’t think is going to do it. So the lack of shared experiences
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being easily possible and convenient here. Again, and this is setting aside the price issue, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a really big issue because many people are not super keen to spend $3,500,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco excuse me, to spend starting at $3,500 for something that only one person can really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use in the family. That’s going to be a huge limiting factor, not just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by price though, just by simply like If you are in your Vision Pro, no matter how good your eyes look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the outside of that screen, you are disconnected from your family or your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco relationship. And that’s going to be a huge limiting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco factor on who can actually use this and when. And keep in mind also,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, this kind of even ties into the software ecosystem. The Vision Pro is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco such a, I think it’s going to start out being such a limited use product in the sense of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when and where you can conveniently use it. Whatever you invest in software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wise in it, whatever habits or apps you invest in software wise,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re only going to really get to use in it during those times. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you probably remember a few years back when I bought those Bose speaker
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sunglasses. They’re like sunglasses that had speakers in the sticks that would like fire sound into your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ears. They still exist sort of. I think Bose discontinued their line, but other companies still make stuff like that. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the problems that I have with my audio sunglasses is that sometimes I wanna listen to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco audio and I don’t wanna wear sunglasses. If it’s dark outside, if I’m going into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a building. There were lots of situations where I’m like, wait, I wanna keep listening to this, but I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wanna be wearing sunglasses right now, so I just no longer have headphones right now. Vision Pro, there’s gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco situations where you want the computing environment of Vision Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You wanna use some app you have in there, or you wanna access some data you have in there, but you’ll be in a situation where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can’t use it or you shouldn’t use it. And so again, many of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this, much of this is gonna be caused by couple dynamics or interpersonal dynamics. Much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it is gonna be just physical, environmental requirements, or it might come down to like comfort or battery life
⏹️ ▶️ Marco issues. But all of that, I know that’s kind of bleeding into my number two. But number one,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the couples thing, I think it’s going to be a massive challenge to this product.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Who’s gonna be able to get one of these? Well, if you’re a tech company employee and you’re being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco overworked in your workaholic culture tech company and you don’t have enough time to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything outside of work, this will be great. For the two seconds a day that you’re allowed to use it, this will be great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But for most people, they have other people in their lives. And this is going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be significantly challenging. Now, you can even project forward and say, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco once this thing is cheaper, maybe then both members of a couple, or a couple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and their children can all have their own vision headsets.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That sounds like a terrifying hellscape to me. Does that seem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco terrifying to anyone else? Maybe I’m just being a Luddite a little bit here. Maybe I’m just,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now everyone has their own phones and they’re all buried in their phones all day, So maybe this is not a thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worth worrying about. But that just seems really weird to me that everybody would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be even more disconnected from their realities and from the people around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them once this thing, if this thing actually does get mass market adoption and you do end up getting,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everyone in the house has their own one. But until then, until you reach that weird
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apocalyptic hellscape, you have this issue of, Well, whoever has one, whoever’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in their headset, they’re just not here anymore. They’re physically checked out of this space.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And yes, you can see through it, that helps a little bit, but it’s not gonna look that way to the people around you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that’s gonna be a significant problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the whole family were having it, then it would have the new problem of it should map the persona’s
⏹️ ▶️ John face on top of, say your whole family’s sitting around the kitchen table and you’ve all got these things on,
⏹️ ▶️ John or like sitting in the living room. Like Back to the Future? Yeah, you can all see each other because it’s in AR mode,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? But what you want to see when you look over at your spouse is not your spouse wearing a headset, but
⏹️ ▶️ John your spouse’s actual face. So they do digital face replacement for the persona of their face, you know?
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, obviously this is all, we assume a stop gap until they can make actual
⏹️ ▶️ John see-through glasses that look like eyeglasses that have the same resolution that maybe use that thing we talked
⏹️ ▶️ John about last episode with where things are different focal depths from you and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John but then you can see the person’s entire face because people wear glasses all the time and nobody feels like they’re hidden or whatever. And granted
⏹️ ▶️ John their face would be, maybe they’re not paying attention to you as they’re looking at like the virtual screen inside their glasses, but you can
⏹️ ▶️ John basically see their whole face. They can see you when they’re not looking at the screen through the clear glasses that
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re wearing and you can get their attention and blah, blah, blah, it’ll be fine. We can’t do that yet. We’re not there yet.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Apple has decided, we didn’t talk about this too much with the whole display stuff last episode, but
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has apparently decided that the fidelity quality of the display for
⏹️ ▶️ John the software is more important than the fidelity and quality of
⏹️ ▶️ John people being able to see your face and you being able to see the world right because if you had actual glasses the world
⏹️ ▶️ John is at 100% fidelity it’s just there you just look at it through the clear glasses right and your face is completely
⏹️ ▶️ John visible except for your glasses frames but right now the best technology we have for
⏹️ ▶️ John the display that shows into your eyeballs when you’re wearing regular glasses is not
⏹️ ▶️ John anywhere close to being as good as, you know, Apple’s display. With those, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John tiny little pixels and high brightness and contrast and OLED and blah blah blah, we don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John an equivalent of that. And the other thing I guess is that you can’t shut off the entire
⏹️ ▶️ John world as easily if you’re wearing just plain old glasses because plain old glasses don’t cover your entire eye. You’ll always be able to
⏹️ ▶️ John see, you know, stuff leaking out from the sides or whatever so you can’t get the same… watch a giant
⏹️ ▶️ John movie screen on top of Mount Hood you can watch a giant movie screen but you’re not gonna be on top of Mount Hood you’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John be sitting at your desk. So it’ll be interesting to see where Apple goes with this especially if this product
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t take off. I think they’ll keep trying and keep plugging away because
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think you get to the classes without the experience with the technology that’s available so I’m glad Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John is starting down this road but it’s really going to constrain what they can do with this product based on the
⏹️ ▶️ John choices they’ve made. And for the choices of using a piece of software or watching a movie,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think a completely face covering headset with a high-fidelity screen is the right choice. But
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s whole categories of things that are way harder and possible and I think the couple problem falls
⏹️ ▶️ John into that category of like, okay, how do you deal with your fact that your spouse is gonna hate it
⏹️ ▶️ John when you’re in that stupid headset? Right? Unless they’re asleep next to you in the bed, then fine you’re not disturbing
⏹️ ▶️ John them with flashing light, thumbs up on the headset, but pretty much any other time, unless
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re using it like sitting in front of your computer and it’s like the do not disturb Marco because he’s programming type of,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey his office doing his
⏹️ ▶️ John work, then fine, where the heck’s it, they don’t care. But if you come out into the living room for family time and you put that thing in your
⏹️ ▶️ John head, everyone’s gonna be like, eh, nope. I don’t care that I can see your eyes. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s, and you know, that is on top of the idea that oh, but everyone sits around our couch and they’re always looking at our phones.
⏹️ ▶️ John We are way more accessible when everyone is zombie like looking at their phones, because you can say hey and nudge somebody and they can turn and face
⏹️ ▶️ John you and you can, and then like you said, Marco, you can show them the funny TikTok on your phone and they can see it
⏹️ ▶️ John and you can laugh and you can see their face laughing and that is not gonna happen when you take the time to put this giant thing
⏹️ ▶️ John in your face. And by the way, what I thought you were gonna say with the couple’s problem is, so who gets to get
⏹️ ▶️ John it? For people who are not Marco and aren’t gonna buy two of these, you get
⏹️ ▶️ John it fitted for one person’s face, then I suppose you could buy more light shields for the other person, but
⏹️ ▶️ John then you have to adjust the straps too and you gotta put it in the prescription lenses.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you just think you’re gonna have one of them and share it amongst the couples, technically possible because all the parts that need
⏹️ ▶️ John to adjust can be snapped out and adjusted. But practically, you’re not gonna wanna go through all that, it’s not like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, let me look. It’s way easier to show someone your phone, to hand someone your phone, to show someone
⏹️ ▶️ John something on the iPad than it is to say, let me get this apparatus off my head and take this
⏹️ ▶️ John thing out of my pocket, get the new light
⏹️ ▶️ John take out my prescription things, put in your prescription things, So put it on, okay, let’s adjust the straps. Okay, let’s log
⏹️ ▶️ John in as you with your eyeball ID. Okay, yeah, no, this is what I was looking at. Oh no, I’m sorry, you can’t see it. You’re in your environment, nevermind.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, that even assumes a multi-user software environment that doesn’t exist.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I think it does have, I mean, that’s I think that’s what the iID thing does. We’ll see, we’ll see how it happens. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, there’s not multi-user environment in iPads either, but you can still show but somebody something.
⏹️ ▶️ John it really does make this, you know, very focused on the applications that they showed.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think even the thing with the dad recording the birthday is a more realistic scenario than you wearing
⏹️ ▶️ John this in a family setting. Because that’s, as we discussed in the past show, that’s like the dad whipping out the giant VHS
⏹️ ▶️ John recorder with a giant backpack and thing or whatever. And yes, it’s ridiculous, and everyone rolls their eyes when dad does
⏹️ ▶️ John it, but it’s a dad thing to do, and fine, whatever. Like, they’ll excuse that. But if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John just, you know, sitting around, chilling after dinner, and you’re like, okay, well, I’m gonna put this giant thing on my face, everyone’s just gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. I agree with everything you said, Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but when I, I want to say fantasize, but it has connotations
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t want. When I imagine using a Vision Pro, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t imagine myself in the living room, despite that unquestionably being
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what Apple seems to be imagining. I imagine myself at a cubicle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at work, which obviously isn’t my life anymore, which by the way, I skipped over that anniversary, but it’s been five years. Thank
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you to everyone at ATP.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Hey! Thanks for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey joining. But anyways, I imagine myself at a cubicle at work or,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, today, not literally today, but you know, these days, maybe at a library.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And again, as I’ve said many times, leaving aside the social, oh my God, look at this guy. Look,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who does he think he is? Leaving that aside for a moment. Like if I was impervious to that, which I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not, but if I was impervious to that, you know, going to a coffee shop or a library or something like that, or working
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at a cubicle at work, like how quickly all three of us forget, John probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey least of all, uh, how quickly we forget what it’s like to try to properly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sit there and crank on code when you’re getting interrupted every 15 seconds from everything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey between like, Hey, can you help me with this work related problem to, Hey, what are you doing this weekend, man?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like having that barrier between you and somebody else is actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of convenient in some of these settings. And again, like on an airplane, I was listening as well
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to a Gruber and Panzerino on the talk show earlier today. And they were talking about, and Gruber seems
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be really fixated. And I agree with him fixated on using this on the plane. Again,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey social stigmas aside, these are all, these are all occasions where that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That barrier between you and the people around you is an advantage. It’s a feature, not a bug. I agree
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with you that at home on the couch, it is a bug, not a feature. But there are a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of places I imagine where it’s a feature, not a bug. And when I envision using the Vision
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro—wow, that was a lot of visions and very little space—when I think about using the Vision
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro, again, I think about, well, I don’t really have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a need for it at home. I have a want in so far as like 3D
⏹️ ▶️ Casey movies or this supposed demo of like, you know, football or basketball or what have you, but I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have a need for it at home. And I don’t have a need for it at the library or the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey coffee shop or what have you, or the airplane, but man, I have a strong want for it there. It would be great
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to, instead of using just my 14 inch laptop screen, or instead of using my 14
⏹️ ▶️ Casey inch laptop screen and my 12 inch or 11 whatever inch iPad Pro kind of, you know, sidecar-ing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, what if I could just have a 4K display right in front of my face
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and everything around me goes away? And of course, that makes me ask myself, well, then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why am I going to the damn library in the first place? And it can be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco any number of reasons. And you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just go to your basement.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, exactly. And so I think that that’s a conversation we can have, but I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if it’s really pertinent, but suffice to say, sometimes I just like a change of scenery. And granted, that makes me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think, well, I could go to Mount Hood. But you know what I mean? I like the act occasionally. It’s funny
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how you enjoy the act of driving somewhere deliberately and going to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a different environment to get work done when you’re no longer compelled to do it
⏹️ ▶️ John every day. You can just say get away from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John your kids, it’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sometimes, yes. No, sometimes yes, but not always. And I know you’re being silly and that is absolutely sometimes the case, but it is not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey always the case. Sometimes I just want to leave the same, what is this, like 10
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by 12 room that I’m in all the time. and I just want to be somewhere
⏹️ ▶️ Casey else. And so, yeah, I think you’re right, Marco, that the couples and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey families, that is a problem, especially if it ends up that the best
⏹️ ▶️ Casey audio or indoor video fidelity experience you have for television or movies is the Vision Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which for a lot of us, that’s probably the case, for a lot of us.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would say for almost everyone, probably.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how many people have a better TV and audio setup than what you’re going to be able to simulate in the Vision Pro?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s probably going to be by far
⏹️ ▶️ John the best one. And Casey, you can put yours not over your fireplace then. Oh my god, I walked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right into that one too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be the right height. Or he could put it even higher virtually. You can just have it on the ceiling.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it’s on the roof. Just to make you mad. Just to make you mad. But I mean, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey honestly, Marco, both of us are exactly right. I think you are exactly right. Yeah, this creates a real big problem
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for couples or families or what have you. But it also is kind of a lifesaver,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe that’s a bit dramatic, but a lifesaver for when you wanna be out of the house but you don’t wanna be disturbed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by randos or maybe you’re even at work and you don’t wanna be disturbed by your well-meaning but ultimately
⏹️ ▶️ Casey constantly interrupting coworkers. Or maybe you’re on a plane and you just wanna be somewhere else for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the next six hours and you have three other battery packs that you can swap between.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can see those being very, very useful scenarios.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and to be clear, and you know, the reason I’m kind of going over these now is not to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crap all over this product. I’m actually extremely optimistic about this product and I desperately
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want one and I want to use it and I’m already developing software for it even though I shouldn’t really logically be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spending my time doing that right now, but I’m doing it anyway. It’s that I want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us to, you know, as tech fans and commentators and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enthusiasts of these kind of products, I want us to go into it knowing that certain things are going to be a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco challenge and not be surprised by them and to maybe try to start addressing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them as soon as we can. These things, I think they’re going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hit us immediately when we get this product. We’re going to instantly feel like, oh yeah, text input kind of sucks. Scrolling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is different. Maybe it’s fine, maybe it’s not. Digital personas are going to be very weird and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many people are not going to want to see our digital persona on FaceTime calls. the software thing is going to be a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mess. Like it’s going to be a wasteland for a while. You know, yes, you will have a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff on day one from enthusiasts, like enthusiast developers like me and like, you know, many other indies.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I think that the big company support is going to be very, very small for a while
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and possibly for a long while. And these problems are all going to,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re all going to make us want more. They’re all going to make us like, we’re going to be amazed by this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco platform and we’re going to want to use it more and more. but these problems will limit when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and how we can use it. And this will give us kind of a good starting point to say, look,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to kind of push on Apple in many cases or to push on the ecosystem, like, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s value here to unlock, but you need to put some work in to unlock it, or there’s gonna be some downsides
⏹️ ▶️ Marco until you unlock it or whatever the case may be. And in the end, this might end
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up being like the Apple TV in the sense that it has a full-blown computing platform,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but what most people use it for is just, you know, mostly content consumption. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, if that’s all this is, quote all this is, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still a huge market and immensely valuable in many situations, many of which Casey was just describing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, even if this ends up only being the best way to consume media on a plane,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s still a massive market.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s still media, but like it’s a $3,500 monitor. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like even that alone, look, it’s cheaper than an XDR. Like even that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And way more portable, way, way, way more portable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, yeah, like so even that, like that alone is a category
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is very valuable and that would be very successful for this product to fill.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I want it to be more than that. I want it to be another great computing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco platform, not just a monitor, not just a content consumption device. And for it to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, it has some major challenges and there’s no time in the present to start
⏹️ ▶️ Marco working on them. Thanks to our sponsors this week, Trade Coffee, Notion,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Squarespace. And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash
⏹️ ▶️ Marco join. We will talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental John didn’t do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any research, Marco and
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey wouldn’t let him Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental And you can find the show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-E-R
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental, they didn’t mean
⏹️ ▶️ John to Accidental, accidental, tech podcast
Threads
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You guys on threads yet?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I logged in just to see what it was like.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I logged in for a minute and it was fine for the literally 15 seconds
⏹️ ▶️ John I was using it. So then leveraging their Instagram social graph saying, hey, here’s all the people you follow on Instagram. Do you wanna
⏹️ ▶️ John follow them on threads? Even though they’re not on threads, when they come on threads, you’ll follow them. All right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is kind of funny for it to come full circle that like what initially launched Instagram’s success was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco largely the importing of people’s Twitter social graphs through their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And now they’re coming around and killing whatever the thing is that we’re calling Twitter now, whatever horrible shell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a thing that Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ John now is. Half functional, constantly changing, constantly broken.
⏹️ ▶️ John Inconsistent. Part of the reason we never talk about Twitter is disinterest. But other part of it is it’s not worth talking about
⏹️ ▶️ John because whatever we say, by the time Marco publishes the episode less than 24 hours later, might not even
⏹️ ▶️ John be true because things change every day with no rhyme or reason because it’s run by somebody who has no idea what
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yes. Indeed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. So anyway, yeah. I’m on threads now. I haven’t posted anything yet, but I don’t even…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the whole thing with whether they should federate or whether the Fediverse should accept them federating,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s just… I think it’s a whole bunch of hammering over
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s working as designed. The whole point is people can make different decisions. There is no one decision about whether they will
⏹️ ▶️ John federate with Facebook. Every instance gets to decide that for themselves, and instances get to make mistakes
⏹️ ▶️ John and change their mind about decisions or whatever, but it is not a central decision. It is a distributed
⏹️ ▶️ John decision. So there you go. Although I don’t actually know if this is one of the questions, will Facebook’s
⏹️ ▶️ John threads thing actually federate with anybody ever?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think they had stated somewhere that they plan to, they just haven’t yet.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Kind of like blue, kind of like blue sky. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John Blue sky, the decentralized network that’s not decentralized, but it will be. Trust us eventually.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Remember blue sky? No, I’m glad there is this much competition
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and this many options for people now. Like with Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dramatically changing and having initially been like the place for so many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people to go for so long and all the problems that it caused by having been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this one company, running this one product in this one way, it is nice to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bunch of options now. It is nice to have competition. There are some downsides. Like, you know, there are a lot of advantages
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to there being one big dominant thing where you know you can go there and quote everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is there. And Twitter, I think, way more than many other social networks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really achieve that. Like, you could go to Twitter and you could be sure almost any, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not real life person, but almost every, like, celebrity or media personality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or politician or company, like, almost all of them you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’d find them on Twitter. They would have a Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ John Even government stuff, local government, city government, state government, federal government, the president.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like you could be pretty reasonably sure for people you knew in your family or friends, they’d probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be on Facebook or Instagram or both, but Twitter was like everyone else, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the other companies, media, et cetera, all that stuff, that would all be on Twitter.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Nowadays, there really isn’t one place like that, And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, in many ways, it’s better being decentralized and not having this be all in a private company’s thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But we’re in a very different place now. It’s a lot better for some reasons. It’s a lot worse for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco others. But whatever it is, I don’t think we have much of a choice. This is the world that we’re in now. We have a world of multiple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco social networks. And for Facebook to come in here and leverage Instagram’s massively
⏹️ ▶️ Marco successful social network, to leverage that into a new, quote,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Twitter killer, or at least Twitter alternative or Twitter clone, how do I really want to look at it? I think it’s interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And while I have no respect for Facebook as a company, or its leaders
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as people, or even basic human beings, this is a formidable competitor and it’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bring a lot of people in. It already has. Like I launched the app, it came out like 20 minutes before I started recording, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I only launched it like once, and peaked around a little bit, and liked a couple of posts, and found a couple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of friends. And it was funny, like the app was a mess. It’s all these server errors being shown in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app. I granted it notification access. It sent me 46
⏹️ ▶️ Marco notifications in one minute, and I turned off notification access. Cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, obviously there’s gonna be some first day growing pains here,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we’ll see how it goes. And we’ll see, are they actually going to pull a bunch of people in from Instagram?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think yes, because Facebook is really good at that. Facebook is really good at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco leveraging Instagram success to boost things in other areas.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So right now, it’s a separate app. You think it always will be? Not a chance in hell.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know this is gonna be part of the Instagram app. You know they’re gonna start pulling in threads into the Instagram app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to juice engagement with them and to get more people over there. Like that’s what Facebook does. They’re really good at it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And to run more ads.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And to run more ads. And of course, that’s a good point. This platform
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is Facebook. So of course it’s gonna be full of tracking and full
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of ads and full of creepy behavior and full of unethical behavior. That’s what they do as a profession.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Facebook is basically the devil. So you can, you know, don’t be surprised when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Facebook does what Facebook’s gonna do. But ultimately, even all that said,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think this is actually still a benefit for, quote, the Fediverse
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and for like the Mastodon style networks and Mastodon itself, I think this is actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a benefit because the people who this is bringing over would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never have come over on their own. Never in a million years. They were never gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sign up for Mastodon ever, ever, ever. So if we can get some overlap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco between the rest of the massive world out there and the nerds like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us who use Mastodon, that’s fine. Mastodon might have to put in more controls
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for thing for you know, moderation blocking muting whatever that’s fine And they hopefully they should have been doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that anyway I See no other major downside Yeah
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Facebook is gonna crawl of our crap and use it for creepy purposes But everyone was already doing that like our stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on mass on is all publicly indexable on the internet Like there was no like whatever data we have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in Mastodon is already publicly accessible by anybody to do anything they want with so So that angle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it is there’s no change there. Facebook could have already been indexing it all for their own purposes. There’s no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco change there. So it’s just going to be more people who might at some point in the future
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when they someday federate might be exposed to other social networks out there. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this might end up being the big kind of, I hate to use the word meta, but the big kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco meta network. That would be the greatest success story of ActivityPub.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And having one giant player in the space doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco necessarily take over or ruin the space. You know, look at email. Gmail is by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco far the largest email service out there. And yet, the rest of us can still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have email and most of the time it’s not really a problem at all that we aren’t Gmail users. We still interoperate
⏹️ ▶️ John Gmail did ruin email a little bit. A little. You can’t get deliverability
⏹️ ▶️ John if Gmail decides they don’t like you and so you have to use is one of the big services, what we talked about when we talked
⏹️ ▶️ John about Mastodon originally, like email, even though it is completely interoperable, you end up with a few
⏹️ ▶️ John big players who dominate because in the case of email, you just can’t deliver email if
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re not sending from or receiving at one of the big players, but there’s not just one of them and it is an open protocol.
⏹️ ▶️ John So, you know, that’s my hope for the threads thing is that it gets more people into ActivityPub,
⏹️ ▶️ John that Facebook doesn’t outrun the Mastodon development, which I think they have, they could if
⏹️ ▶️ John they wanted to, They don’t wanna run the mass on development to do the brace extend extinguish thing that Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ John pioneered, that essentially interoperability with ActivityPub will
⏹️ ▶️ John continue to be the case. And kind of like Google Reader, where Google Reader didn’t embrace extend and extinguish RSS.
⏹️ ▶️ John So Google Reader growing away didn’t mean RSS had
⏹️ ▶️ John to go away whereas if threads becomes massively popular and they’re so
⏹️ ▶️ John popular, like we don’t, I know we started on ActivityPub, but we don’t actually need to federate with those
⏹️ ▶️ John loser services who have nobody
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco them. We’ve got
⏹️ ▶️ John millions of people. And so, and by the way, we need some more features for ad tracking. So let’s modify
⏹️ ▶️ John the activity protocol. So now, not only are we not federating, we couldn’t federate because
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re not interoperable with Mastodon anymore because Mastodon itself modified the activity
⏹️ ▶️ John protocol a little bit. And we’re modifying it too in incompatible ways. So sorry, Mastodon,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re leaving you behind. And now we’re not part of the federal, we don’t care because now we have basically by Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ John clone that we leveraged into with our social graph into the new dominant platform.
⏹️ ▶️ John But even if they are interoperable, there’s still a risk that they, that
⏹️ ▶️ John people start thinking that you have to be, kind of like people think, many people think that to use Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ John you had to use the official Twitter client. And we were all here for 16 years not using the official Twitter client
⏹️ ▶️ John and thinking people were silly to use the official one, but they didn’t know we existed, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So it could be threads becomes really popular and people have no idea that we’re able to read everything that they’re posting in the
⏹️ ▶️ John Mastodon client. They don’t even know what Mastodon is. They have no idea. And maybe when we reply to them,
⏹️ ▶️ John because they’re federated, our stuff shows up weird. And we can end up being as the green bubbles
⏹️ ▶️ John because our messages don’t show up the same inside the threads app, right? There’s lots of not great scenarios
⏹️ ▶️ John for this, but the good thing is at least it gives Mastodon ActivityPub a fighting chance
⏹️ ▶️ John because if they keep fighting the good fight and keep trying to enforce interoperability, And that’s why I basically,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you ask me, like, should people federate with or whatever, I think this is kind of an Apple China or like World China
⏹️ ▶️ John situation, where in the end, despite the incredible distaste and the terrible things Facebook
⏹️ ▶️ John slash China does, engagement is better than isolating them because isolating them
⏹️ ▶️ John lets them get more virulent and powerful in isolation, whereas engagement at least forces them to deal with
⏹️ ▶️ John you. You can’t change them to make them better, but constant engagement keeps them,
⏹️ ▶️ John keeps you in a scenario where you need each other, right? Like China needs us to buy all their stuff, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And we need all their stuff. So them blowing us up, they’ve just killed all the people who, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John buy their stuff from them. It’s not great. China’s not great. Facebook’s not great. Like, and I don’t want to draw a direct comparison
⏹️ ▶️ John to a genocidal authoritarian China and Facebook, a tech company that we don’t like.
⏹️ ▶️ John But in general, I think engagement with Facebook is, and we will federate with
⏹️ ▶️ John you because we want to try to force you to be part of this open ecosystem.
⏹️ ▶️ John However we can, like, can you shame Facebook into doing things? Can you, you’ll get, you know, if
⏹️ ▶️ John they start interoperating and then they break interoperability, that’s enough of a story that it will be in the tech
⏹️ ▶️ John press and maybe even in the regular press. And so engaging with them as in federating with them,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think is the move to, because it’s your only chance of trying to,
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to foster the creation of an open ecosystem. And yes, the downside
⏹️ ▶️ John is that it could become Gmail No one can deliver mail as they sending to or from Gmail. Like I understand there’s downsides
⏹️ ▶️ John to it, but they’re doing this whether you engage with them, whether you federate with them or not. So once they’ve decided
⏹️ ▶️ John to do this, I do feel like engagement, at least as the opening salvo is the best move.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because if you ignore them, that doesn’t hurt them. I know it feels like the right thing to do. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m gonna preemptively ignore you, forget it. But like, you’re not in a position of power to do that. They just have so much
⏹️ ▶️ John more money and so many more users that you’re gonna lose that fight. So I hope that
⏹️ ▶️ John there is engagement. I hope I start seeing, I hope my instance federates with them. I hope
⏹️ ▶️ John I start seeing thread stuff in my preferred activity pub client because Facebook’s client
⏹️ ▶️ John is garbage, just like Blue Sky’s client is garbage. But you know what? The Mastodon client ecosystem
⏹️ ▶️ John is filled with lots of cool clients and I’m using one that I mostly like. So I hope that that continues
⏹️ ▶️ John to be. And by the way, I read Blue Sky through my favorite Mastodon client now too because someone wrote like an adapter
⏹️ ▶️ John layer or whatever. And that’s not even an activity pub. So I hope
⏹️ ▶️ John this, I hope that engagement happens. I hope federation happens. The other alternative, obviously the best case scenario
⏹️ ▶️ John is threads just absolutely fizzle and disappears because that would be ideal for all of us. But, and
⏹️ ▶️ John not because I don’t want the normals coming over to activity pub. I do, I would just prefer them to come over
⏹️ ▶️ John under the control of anybody but Facebook.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But ultimately like, I think Facebook for all of their faults, they’re good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at large scale operational things. Mastodon is largely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco challenged by that. Mastodon does not deal well with large scale.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John It’s like three people. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so when we were all going over to Mastodon last fall, we were talking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about this. Mastodon does not scale well technically. It is significantly challenging
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to scale, both the protocol and the servers and everything, And also, content moderation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wise, it’s extremely difficult to keep up with content moderation for a social network.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, the Facebook solution is we just won’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but I mean, they do, like, you know, they don’t do a very good job of it, although I would argue no one does. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it might be impossible to do a very good job.
⏹️ ▶️ John know, but I mean, the problem with Facebook is, Facebook has to do it at scale. MassDOT
⏹️ ▶️ John instances don’t have to do it at scale. MassDOT instances just have to do it at the scale of their instance. And they’re gonna do varying levels
⏹️ ▶️ John of crappy jobs of it, but no one instance is ever going to face the challenge that Facebook is, which is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John hey, moderate the world. No mass instance will ever get that big.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, but Facebook, for all of their faults, they do have that infrastructure in place.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so we can quibble about how they, you know, the choices they make, but at least they have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco large infrastructure in place, both technically and with moderation. And if you’re gonna have it, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if all of these people, instead of having a Facebook app, By the way, and I know nowhere
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does this app say Facebook. They’re calling themselves meta, fine. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always gonna think of them as Facebook, the same way I don’t call Google Alphabet. I think of them as Google.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But anyway, so, and all over this app, they say it’s an Instagram app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s an app made by Instagram. And that’s a wonderful branding choice they’re making.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Good for them. I’m glad you’re trying to distance the incredibly toxic, hated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Facebook brand from the incredibly toxic hated company that it is.
⏹️ ▶️ John by tech nerds though, most people like Facebook.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think that’s necessarily true. Anyway, but this app, if all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of these people, instead of using a Facebook based app, if they all just came over to Mastodon,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this many people, this many non-technical people from this many different backgrounds,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think Mastodon would have significant challenges both technically and with content moderation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And Facebook, again, for all of their faults, again, this is a company I really strongly dislike,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they are not good at content moderation in general. However, they at least
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have the infrastructure in place to deal with it at this scale. And at Mastodon Instances, Mastodon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco itself can never have that kind of scale.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it doesn’t need to, though. Like the Mastodon, the ideal, I mean, these year, let’s say threads become successful. Mastodon needs
⏹️ ▶️ John many more years to build up its society, Not to build
⏹️ ▶️ John up its single instance, not to build up its software, but to build up the society. It’s had, like, you know, before, you know, again,
⏹️ ▶️ John My Account was created in 2017. Like, it’s had many years to develop so it was able
⏹️ ▶️ John to accept the people, you know, when Elon bought Twitter, we were able to go to Mastodon because it had been
⏹️ ▶️ John cooking for years. The society of ActivityPub and Mastodon Instances or whatever needs
⏹️ ▶️ John many, many more years to get a healthy society of instances. Instances
⏹️ ▶️ John need to figure out how to fund themselves. They need to figure out how to govern themselves. They need to figure out how to moderate, right? And
⏹️ ▶️ John all of them need to do that at a smaller scale than Facebook, but they haven’t even figured out how to do it that well at a small
⏹️ ▶️ John scale. And what I’m hoping for, again, optimistic scenario, setting aside if it just fails completely, which would be great,
⏹️ ▶️ John but if it doesn’t, and it takes off and it has all these people on it, those people are gonna go through a honeymoon period,
⏹️ ▶️ John threads is great, that’s cool, let’s hang out, let’s have fun, years of that, and then eventually Facebook will start doing
⏹️ ▶️ John annoying stuff. The client will get annoying. Like all the same stuff that happens with Twitter will happen with
⏹️ ▶️ John threads, right? But when that happens, because in theory, they’re built on ActivityPub, if
⏹️ ▶️ John they have chosen to federate during those years, hopefully the society of ActivityPub
⏹️ ▶️ John instances that are compatible with threads will exist and be out here.
⏹️ ▶️ John And when people get frustrated, it’ll be like, hey, by the way, I know you’re frustrated. Did you know there’s a place
⏹️ ▶️ John you can go and keep all your followers and keep your social graph and like, you know, you’ll get a better client.
⏹️ ▶️ John In fact, you’ll get your choice of clients and you’ll get your choice of instances. I know that seems confusing to you, but guess what?
⏹️ ▶️ John You don’t like the instance you’re on, that’s not your only choice. And that’s not something you can say about Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ John or Instagram for that matter. Those were your only choices. If you wanna leave, rebuild a new world elsewhere, but you
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t take your followers with you, you can’t take any of your data or anything like that with you. In Mastodon,
⏹️ ▶️ John in theory, you can take some of that stuff with you. Your identity is somewhat portable. Not as portable as it is in Blue Sky, but still
⏹️ ▶️ John somewhat portable. You have a choice. And then you’re gonna say, I have a choice, but what the hell is
⏹️ ▶️ John my choice? And hopefully by then, five years from now, it’ll be like, actually there are a bunch of viable choices.
⏹️ ▶️ John Here’s how instances fund themselves. Here’s the models that you can go in. Do you want to be one that’s run by
⏹️ ▶️ John volunteers? Do you want to be one that you have to pay for? Do you want to be one where it’s part of a co-op and you’re a part owner? Right, do
⏹️ ▶️ John you want to be on a big one that’s run by some centralized company? You know, that you would have different choices
⏹️ ▶️ John that are there waiting for you when you become dissatisfied, inevitably,
⏹️ ▶️ John with threads. Because, I mean, it happened with Twitter. We all liked Twitter, it was great, and then we would become dissatisfied and
⏹️ ▶️ John then we’d gradually stay, and we’d become dissatisfied and we’d gradually stay, and eventually there was a breaking point with the Elon thing. But
⏹️ ▶️ John we ran to app.net because we were so pissed off at Twitter at once, and then we ended up going back, so on and so forth. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I hope that if they actually federate with ActivityPub stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John that the world of ActivityPub will be ready in a few years to accept
⏹️ ▶️ John the migration in a way that we’re not now. Because like you said, they can’t all come to the one Macedon.social
⏹️ ▶️ John instance. It would be overwhelmed, right? And I don’t want them to all come there. And that instance, frankly, hasn’t figured out. No instances
⏹️ ▶️ John have figured this out, but instances are trying different things now, trying different ways of funding themselves.
⏹️ ▶️ John Hopefully, the people who are on Mastodon will also be trying different ways to fund the development of the software because there’s very
⏹️ ▶️ John few people and very few dollars being contributed to that, right? So that’s all stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John that we have, I guess, maybe five to 10 years to figure out. And the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m heartened by is the fact that we all checked out Mastodon in 2017 and we’re like, meh,
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, back to Twitter, right? But Mastodon didn’t die during that time. They just kept plugging away, right? And
⏹️ ▶️ John they got a little bit better and a little bit better. And so the next time we ran back, it was like, oh, remember Mastodon? Hey, it’s still there. And there’s a few more
⏹️ ▶️ John instances and the software has gotten better. And we came back to it and we said, this is pretty nice, but you know, you still need
⏹️ ▶️ John to fix X, Y, and Z. You still haven’t figured out moderation. What about the quote tweets, your search sucks or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John I hope when we come back or people come back in five to seven years, they’ll be like, oh, you know what? Mastodon’s even better than it was
⏹️ ▶️ John before. Like that’s the beauty of having something open that one company can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John lose interest or shut down or whatever, it’s still out there, it is a protocol, it is in theory somewhat interoperable,
⏹️ ▶️ John the software is open source, it has the possibility of being improved. It’s I think ActivityPub is
⏹️ ▶️ John part of the W3C, so it’s an open standard. So fingers crossed that the
⏹️ ▶️ John dumb limited protocol that obviously can’t scale will follow the other dumb limited protocol
⏹️ ▶️ John that obviously can’t scale, I’ve mentioned this before, HTTP, HTTP 1.0 sucks. but we built an
⏹️ ▶️ John entire web on HTTP 1.1, HTTP 2.0 is here. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John I have some faith that open protocols that don’t have a lot of features can eventually win.