571: Adding Some Carrot
26 Jan 2024Much more information about Apple Vision Pro.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: YouTube updates
- Follow-up:
- SCSI DB-25 was on the back of Macs, not DB-50
- iOS Screen Sharing is a thing
- On Apple’s 30% cut and payment processing fees
- The Art of the Possible (John’s blog post)
- Whose customer is this, anyway?
- Apple’s compliance with EU law is likely to go exactly as expected
- Apple Vision Pro optics (via Todd Zarwell & jkahnk)
- Apple’s software workaround for Masimo-related import ban
- Apple Vision Pro preorders
- Accessories
- Battery
- Belkin Battery Holder
- Travel Case
- Light Seal
- Light seal sizes? (via Quinn Nelson)
- Light Seal Cushion
- Solo Knit Band
- Dual Loop Band
- Optical inserts (readers or prescription)
- Please don’t break one 💸
- Weight
- You have to pair the optical inserts
- Launch inventory was 80,000 units?
- Reseller market is optimistic
- Apple Vision Pro Guided Tour
- Sorry, non-🇺🇸
- Accessories
- Ask ATP:
- Does the Apple Vision Pro work like a camera viewfinder? (via Nigel Warren)
- Do we do anything to back up our emails? (via Lawrence Koteff)
- Do we use iMessage Contact Key Verification? (via Severin)
- Post-show: Family Apple Vision Pro vibe check
Sponsored by:
- Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code ATP.
Become a member for ad-free episodes, member specials, and our early-release, unedited “bootleg” feed!
Chapters
- ATP-on-YouTube updates
- Connector Tier List correction
- iOS Screen Sharing
- App Store and the DMA?
- Masimo/Watch updates
- Sponsor: Squarespace
- Optometrists on Vision Pro
- Vision Pro ordering
- ATP Membership
- #askatp: Why no Vision Pro diopter?
- #askatp: Email backups
- #askatp: Contact Key Verification
- Ending theme
- Post-show
ATP-on-YouTube updates
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wow, we’re gonna get to bed tonight before 10 o’clock.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am very happy about this because daddy didn’t get a nap today.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I usually try on ATP days. I usually try to get a little snooze in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did not have the chance. This
⏹️ ▶️ John would be a lesson to me because I cut off some follow-ups and I’m like, we don’t have time. We got so much stuff, but I could have left it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in. Oh, no, John. This is not the lesson you should take from this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The last thing this episode needs is more follow-up. Yep.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, I hear we have some YouTube updates you would like to share with the class.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, as we said last episode, YouTube has a thing where they’ll read your podcast RSS feed and make
⏹️ ▶️ John little quote unquote videos out of each podcast episode. There’s nothing in the video except for the logo of
⏹️ ▶️ John the show. There is no actual video component, but at least the audio is there. And we did that because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s, you know, it doesn’t require anything of us. It’s just RSS feed like any other podcast and YouTube,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, consumes it and does this it’s like great because we know some people like to use for whatever reason
⏹️ ▶️ John they like to use YouTube to listen to audio and so now they can with our podcast a
⏹️ ▶️ John few updates on that first is that YouTube will import the
⏹️ ▶️ John quote unquote descriptions of the video from the RSS feed so basically our show notes that have all
⏹️ ▶️ John our links YouTube will import that our show notes are in HTML the the YouTube podcast
⏹️ ▶️ John RSS ingestion thing I don’t know what it’s doing, but it ends up taking our
⏹️ ▶️ John HTML and turning it into plain text filled with tons and tons of blank lines.
⏹️ ▶️ John It looks awful. I don’t know what it’s doing. I mean, obviously it extracts all the URLs and puts
⏹️ ▶️ John them out longhand in the thing. So there’s no like link that you don’t know where it’s gonna go. Everything is HTTP code, like you
⏹️ ▶️ John can see the URL. So it does that with the links, which also lengthens it a little bit, but then it put tons
⏹️ ▶️ John of blank space in there. So I wrote an automation to get rid of all the blank space. Then the second problem was,
⏹️ ▶️ John if my automation didn’t run fast enough to sort of slim down the show notes
⏹️ ▶️ John to get rid of all the blank spaces, sometimes they were too long and YouTube would truncate them for
⏹️ ▶️ John us, helpfully, by just cutting them off. Apparently, YouTube can host petabytes
⏹️ ▶️ John of video. I forget what the absurd number is, like how many gigs of YouTube videos are uploaded per
⏹️ ▶️ John second. It’s some ridiculous number. But the descriptions are limited to 5,000 characters because they don’t want to waste
⏹️ ▶️ John space. You really have
⏹️ ▶️ John think about the space efficiency. You know, if you let everybody put, I don’t know, like four kilobytes
⏹️ ▶️ John of text in there, what’s gonna happen? Anyway, and so
⏹️ ▶️ John I was fighting with that with my automation. And then someone suggested that it wouldn’t be great if YouTube,
⏹️ ▶️ John when they ingested the RSS feed, would also understand our chapters, because we
⏹️ ▶️ John put chapters in the podcast, because YouTube now supports chapters, and wouldn’t it be great if they could just take our chapters and stick them in there?
⏹️ ▶️ John And so all of this conspired to make me eventually decide, you know what, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John just gonna put a link to the show notes. So it just says show notes, colon, HTTPS colon slash
⏹️ ▶️ John let’s say, tp.fm slash 1234. And then you can just get to the show notes
⏹️ ▶️ John that way and they’ll be correctly formatted and you’ll see all of them and they’ll never be truncated. Well, then the chapter stuff turned out to be super
⏹️ ▶️ John easy because I already had a script that was modifying the description. Apparently
⏹️ ▶️ John the way chapters work on YouTube is you just put some text in the description that looks
⏹️ ▶️ John like a chapter list.
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, yeah. YouTube parses that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, the time, you like put timestamps as text, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep, that’s it. That’s literally. Yeah, Overcast also parses that. That’s their system. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m like, oh, great. So now I know what all the show notes will be. So I’ll just replace all the show notes with show notes colon link
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey then chapter, chapter,
⏹️ ▶️ John chapter, chapter. So for people who are listening on YouTube, now you get access to chapters too. Here’s
⏹️ ▶️ John one caveat though. to do all this I had to use the YouTube API, which is like, you know, part of the Google,
⏹️ ▶️ John some Google developer platforms. So I have to like get a Google developer account and say I wanna use the YouTube
⏹️ ▶️ John data API V3 and deal with OAuth and do all sorts of crap like that. And
⏹️ ▶️ John then I’m writing my script and I’m debugging it, I’m trying to get it to work, right? And every time I did this, I’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ John doing this for like four days now, I blow through my API quota.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like there’s a number of requests per day that you’re allowed to use. And the first time I blew through it, I was like, I didn’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John there was a quota. Well, I guess there’s a quota. I’ll just be more careful tomorrow, right? But every single day I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John worked on this, I’ve blown through my quota within like less than an hour. You can, I was like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll just pay the money. Here, Google, here’s 10 bucks. Give me more API requests. I just need this for a few days to
⏹️ ▶️ John finish development of this thing. After that, I’m not gonna need a lot of requests, right? But apparently they won’t take your money.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you have to request more API access. And there’s this form that you fill out.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, tell me about your application. What are you using it for? How many people are using this? Can you send us your source
⏹️ ▶️ John code? Why do you need to use this API? If you didn’t use this API, what would happen? Like, they just wanna know so much about
⏹️ ▶️ John you. Like, where are your parents from?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco How are you feeling
⏹️ ▶️ John right now? Have you ever spoken to anybody about this script? Has anyone seen this script? What are you gonna use
⏹️ ▶️ John it for? It’s like, can you just give me more requests? Anyway, they came back to me
⏹️ ▶️ John today and said, can you send us the source code to the script that you use to upload your videos?
⏹️ ▶️ John What? For the umpteenth time.
⏹️ ▶️ John upload my videos. as I said at length last time I wrote to you and filled out your giant form,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s your feature that’s reading my, I don’t upload the videos, they’re already there, I just wanna change the descriptions. Oh my God,
⏹️ ▶️ John it sucks. I’m never, they’re never gonna give me more requests. Anyway, final thing is you may be wondering why are you blowing
⏹️ ▶️ John through your API requests? Are you just doing something dumb? On the first day I was like, oh, I must have just, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John had some loop that looped too many times and burnt, you know, when you’re just writing code, I didn’t know there was a limit, I probably did something dumb. But
⏹️ ▶️ John now I’ve realized that I have no idea how the things I’m calling relate to their API
⏹️ ▶️ John queries or whatever. Because as far as I’m aware, and I’ve stepped through it in the debugger, here are the calls.
⏹️ ▶️ John List videos in playlist, right? And it’s 50 per page, so I got to call that 10 times because they have a paging
⏹️ ▶️ John system, right? So that’s 10 requests, 10 or 11 requests to loop through all the 500 and
⏹️ ▶️ John something videos, right? But that’s five calls to the Google API
⏹️ ▶️ John function. I’m doing this in Node, right? What I think is maybe, yeah, I’m calling a function five times.
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe each one of those calls fires off a hundred API requests or something.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then while I’m looping over them, the only thing I ever do is I loop over the things that I’ve just got from this query,
⏹️ ▶️ John each, you know, 50 at a time, right? And I look at them and say, do I need to update this description? And if I do, I call it update
⏹️ ▶️ John API once. And I say, update this description, right? But somehow I blow through
⏹️ ▶️ John my daily quota of 10,000 requests within an hour. I’m like, there’s no way I made 10,000 function calls.
⏹️ ▶️ John And now I’m thinking like, Is there some internal retry logic that I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John understand? Anyway, I’m almost done with this script, but of course I can only work on it for a few hours
⏹️ ▶️ John a day before I blow through my quota. So tomorrow I get 10,000 new requests. All right. See if I can manage
⏹️ ▶️ John not to blow through all of those. But I did manage today to update all the descriptions. So they’re all up there on the
⏹️ ▶️ John off chapters. Please do enjoy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wow. We appreciate your service. Salute emoji.
⏹️ ▶️ John By the way, here’s what the limits are. Queries per minute, 1.8 million.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco queries per minute per user, 180,000.
⏹️ ▶️ John Queries per day, 10,000. What? So
⏹️ ▶️ John you can do 1.8 million queries per minute for a fraction of a second.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then you’re done for the day.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, genuinely, I know I sounded sarcastic a moment ago, but truly I do appreciate your service because this is a pain in the tuchus that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am pretty freaking confident I can speak for Marco in saying, I would have given up on this long ago and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said, hey, you should be using that used Hube anyway. Tough noogie.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco So. I would never even attempted this. Right, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Again, we appreciate you, John.
Connector Tier List correction
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, we appreciate you even though apparently you don’t know what the back of a Mac looks like. Tell me about this, please.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, during our connector tier list thing, I had said that the DB 50 connector was
⏹️ ▶️ John the SCSI that was on the back of the Mac. And that’s not the case. It was DB 25, which of course looks exactly like DB 50,
⏹️ ▶️ John but a little bit narrower. And when things aren’t really to scale on a bunch of little thumbnails, it’s hard to tell. I apologize
⏹️ ▶️ John for this mistake. I think the last time I plugged in a SCSI DB 25 connector was many decades ago.
⏹️ ▶️ John So what can I tell you?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We regret the error. The offending party has been sacked. John, if you haven’t heard this episode
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and don’t know what the crap it is we’re talking about, what can you do?
⏹️ ▶️ John You can go to atp.fm slash join and become a member. We have these member specials that we do and
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re silly and fun. And the last one we did was ranking various computer connectors.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey a blast. You should
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. It was a lot of fun. If you go to atp.fm slash join, then you can not only get access
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to this member special, but all the member specials that preceded. And at this point we’re building up a fair
⏹️ ▶️ Casey repertoire, not repertoire, a catalog is what I was looking for and so you might want to check those out. agp.fm. Bye.
iOS Screen Sharing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iOS screen sharing. We were talking about how to help perhaps in a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey relative that is a bit older and less tech savvy, or maybe just someone who in general who is less tech savvy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And John, you said something that I would have called you on had I realized that you were wrong, but I thought you were exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. It turns out we were both wrong because as it turns out, iOS does have screen sharing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can you tell me about this, please?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, some people are saying this was rolled out in iOS 15, although I think it might be older than that. I’m not sure when it rolled out. But
⏹️ ▶️ John yes, you can do screen sharing in iOS, but screen sharing in the way
⏹️ ▶️ John of they can share their screen with you so you can see it, which don’t get me wrong, is very helpful.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you can’t control it. I didn’t think there was any way to control it. But then someone named Jenga said,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no remote remote control unless you’re on the same Wi Fi network with the same Apple ID
⏹️ ▶️ John and switch control is enabled. Well, those things are probably not going to be the case if you’re trying to help a relative
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey because if you’re on the same Wi
⏹️ ▶️ John Fi network, just walk over and help them with their thing, right? And the same Apple ID, they’re probably not using your Apple ID.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s interesting to know that that is possible to remote control it under this narrow circumstance. But with regular screen sharing,
⏹️ ▶️ John all you can do is see their screen and then just try to talk them through it, which is again, way better than
⏹️ ▶️ John not being able to see their screen. But the beauty of the Mac one is you just get to take over because a lot of the times, they’re not interested
⏹️ ▶️ John in learning how to fix it or what went wrong, they just want you to fix their computer. And that that is made so much easier
⏹️ ▶️ John by just, Okay, you know, hit the accept button and now I’ve got control of your computer and I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John fix it for you and you’re done. Indeed.
App Store and the DMA?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, we had a fair bit of feedback about our slash my rant
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about Apple and their 30%. Uh, and I think John, you had maybe not corrections, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some notes you would like to add.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, obviously we’ve talked about this topic tons and tons of times in the past. And very often when we talk about it,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, for the 15th or 16th time, we don’t say all reiterate all the same things. I know it sounds like we
⏹️ ▶️ John do, but we don’t actually say all
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey the same things that we said last time,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then people write in to tell us about them. And in this case, we got a lot of people coming back to say, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, the the fee that Apple charges for its in-app purchase, whether it’s 30%
⏹️ ▶️ John or 27% or whatever, that’s not for payment processing. So I don’t know why you were talking about Stripe and how much they charge and that they
⏹️ ▶️ John would make a replacement purchase thing or whatever. Because Apple’s not charging you for payment processing, they’re charging you for
⏹️ ▶️ John access to their intellectual property, you know, hosting and distribution, marketing, whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever thing people thought like, they were we were explained to us, and then presumably we would hear them and say, Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John we hadn’t thought of that. You’re right. They should get 30%. And obviously the stripe comparison, but stripe
⏹️ ▶️ John is a payment processor. Like what we were saying, a stripe would do all the same things Apple does in terms of API APIs and so on and so forth. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John But here’s the thing. And here’s, this is the reason I keep mentioning and linking my stupid blog post about this, that
⏹️ ▶️ John apparently is not clear enough for people to understand what I’m saying, or maybe they just don’t read
⏹️ ▶️ John it, which, you know, fair enough. But the thing is, Because it doesn’t really matter
⏹️ ▶️ John what Apple thinks the 30% is for, or what you think the 30% is for, or what the 30%
⏹️ ▶️ John is actually for, or whether it’s for payment processing, whether it’s for access to intellectual property, or it’s this, that, the other thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John None of that matters. The only thing that matters is how do people feel about paying the 30%?
⏹️ ▶️ John The people who have to pay the 30%? How do they feel about paying for it? Do they feel like, eh, it’s a fair price?
⏹️ ▶️ John Or do they feel terrible about it and they resent it? And it’s fair
⏹️ ▶️ John for you to try to convince somebody who resents the 30% that they shouldn’t be resentful.
⏹️ ▶️ John They just need, maybe they just didn’t know that they’re actually paying for access to Apple’s intellectual property. And maybe you think you
⏹️ ▶️ John can convince them and then they will feel okay with it. But I can tell you that all the arguments
⏹️ ▶️ John put forward by people saying, here’s no, here’s what Apple’s 30% really is for, have thus far
⏹️ ▶️ John not proven convincing to the developers who resent their percentage. And then the second thing I’ll say
⏹️ ▶️ John is that Apple itself really does not spend any time at all trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to convince developers that 30% is the right amount.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like you see much more from people who are trying to explain on Apple’s behalf what they think the 30%
⏹️ ▶️ John is quote unquote for, but how much do you see Apple making an effort to explain when
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re not on the witness stand in a court case? Why it is that they think they should get 30%
⏹️ ▶️ John and that I think might contribute to the dissatisfaction. That’s what it boils down to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do you think any answer they would actually give would actually make people all of a sudden be, oh, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I guess I will pay it. Like, I don’t think the people who don’t wanna pay it would be satisfied by any explanation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple could possibly give.
⏹️ ▶️ John And with Apple attempting to explain it, at least there would be some kind of conversation. Obviously, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John part of the… Here’s the thing. That’s why I was talking about game consoles. Apple developers,
⏹️ ▶️ John some of them resent the 30%, but game console developers resent it less,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey That’s the 30% that they
⏹️ ▶️ John pay. Not to say they don’t resent it, but they resent it less. And that must seem unfair to Apple. But I would say to Apple, have
⏹️ ▶️ John you made any effort whatsoever to try to figure out the origins of the dissatisfaction
⏹️ ▶️ John and talk about it? Not that you’re gonna be able to talk them into it or whatever, but the first step
⏹️ ▶️ John along that road is communicating about it. Whereas Apple’s like, how about we just say nothing and continue
⏹️ ▶️ John to insist on 30%? And that of course leads to more resentment. And this doesn’t seem fair. It
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t seem like, well, that’s not, you’re not being fair at why do they not like it? But that’s what I tried to write about
⏹️ ▶️ John in that blog post. Like at this point, with this going on for so many years, for so long,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s clear that for whatever reason, there is resentment about the amount
⏹️ ▶️ John of money that Apple asks for. Is it fair? Is it unfair? Should people not feel that way?
⏹️ ▶️ John Should people feel that way? The fact is they do. And so far, nothing,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s been getting worse and not better. And that may seem like not right to certain people,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it is what it is. That’s what the art of the possible post is about. It’s like, you may not think
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s fair, Ab, but you may think you’re justified, but there is resentment there. It is an unhealthy relationship
⏹️ ▶️ John that is not getting better. So something has to change if you want this
⏹️ ▶️ John resentment to go away. And that’s what I would say to all the people who say, you don’t understand. The 30%
⏹️ ▶️ John is not for payment processing, it’s for X, Y, or Z. Doesn’t matter what it’s for. It only matters if
⏹️ ▶️ John people are OK with it. And people are less OK with it than Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John wants them to be. And it fosters a relationship where there is a sort of distrust and resentment
⏹️ ▶️ John between the two parties. And that has ramifications, like, for example, the Vision Pro launching without a Netflix, YouTube,
⏹️ ▶️ John or Spotify app on it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I talked about this a little bit on the talk show coming up soon. But I think Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does not know how to either court developers or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to negotiate when they are not in a position of power, which is basically any negotiation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because Apple, what they know how to do is dictate, and they know how to be fond all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over. But when people aren’t busting down the doors to get into their app stores and to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco participate in their new platforms, they don’t know what to do. They don’t negotiate.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They don’t really do a lot of outreach or trying to build those relationships.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All they do is manage when people come to them. And even that, it’s really more of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a dictation scenario.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re very controlled in their messaging and they don’t get roped into arguments they don’t want to have, which is just good PR,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? But you’re right, the thing I was talking about, they don’t spend any time trying to convince people
⏹️ ▶️ John that they should feel better about the deal they’re getting. That’s what they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t do. I’m convinced they really do not know how to negotiate or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco build those relationships because to a large degree, they never really had to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So much of Apple in the last 15 years or whatever, during
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much of that time, they have been in the position of power in the areas that they would need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this skill potentially in. So they really haven’t had to use any kind of negotiation or relationship
⏹️ ▶️ Marco building, developer outreach, even developer relations is fairly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco minimal in its interaction with most developers. So Apple doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know how. They just think everyone just comes to them all the time. And they seem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco genuinely surprised when they put something out there and it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco goes kind of poorly with some people in the community or with certain developers or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever. I don’t think they know what to do because they literally do not know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how to negotiate. They’ve never really had to in most ways. And if you look at the ways that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are not in power, app stores for lesser platforms that don’t have the massive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reach that the iPhone has or whatever else. Like if you look at certain content deals,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in many of those other areas, they actually don’t do very well. They don’t succeed very much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they don’t have this skill. So when it comes to this, the 30% thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are just so accustomed to being able to dictate whatever they want for the iPhone and have people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco grumble and bend over backwards to accommodate them because the iPhone is such a big market that when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it comes to something like the Vision Pro launching No wonder so many developers, especially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the big companies, no wonder they’re like, why should I work with you? There’s not the big audience here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make it worth it. So why should I give you more power when I’m kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tired of what you’ve done with your power?
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s Apple’s usual move, their main negotiating tactic is, well, we’ll just sell as many of these as we can. If we make a good enough
⏹️ ▶️ John product, we’ll make the market big enough that you’ll have to pay attention to us. And that is an important strategy
⏹️ ▶️ John and a good idea. It’s just made more difficult by the fact that you don’t have as much help from third party
⏹️ ▶️ John developers as you could have if you had a better relationship.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s also not negotiation. That’s literally just dictating to the
⏹️ ▶️ John market. But it is a form of saying, a form of saying, can we make this more attractive
⏹️ ▶️ John to you? And one way to make it more attractive is that, well, we Apple, it’s our job to make a product that people wanna buy. So
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ll say, we’ll sell a billion of them, that’s on us, we’ll do that. And that will make the platform more attractive to you. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not taking away the bad, it’s not taking away the stick, it’s adding some carrot. Anyway, one final
⏹️ ▶️ John thing on this. We also, the last episode we were talking about the whole, hey, you wanna use a link out to a third
⏹️ ▶️ John party payment thing? You can do that, but you still have to pay us pretty much the same amount you always paid us.
⏹️ ▶️ John We talked about that last episode. And I saw some discussion online of people saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, given all of this, given that it’s just like the Dutch dating app thing or whatever, like why would anybody choose
⏹️ ▶️ John to use a third party payment processor? Because it just seems like more work and you pay exactly the same amount.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s like, even if they’re complying with the letter of law, which Epic says they’re not, but
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll see how that goes in court. Who would choose to do this? It’s like they’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John given an option and they’ll have zero people who wanna do it. And as we’ve discussed
⏹️ ▶️ John many, many times in the past, but didn’t mention on last episode, we will reiterate, the
⏹️ ▶️ John one remaining important motivating factor is when you send somebody through a third-party behavior processor
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, have them pay on your website, unlike with the App Store, you now quote unquote own that customer.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know who they are, you know what they paid with, you probably have their email address. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John when someone does something through in-app purchase, Apple owns the customer, Apple knows who they are, you don’t know, you just get
⏹️ ▶️ John the money, the 70% or whatever of the money they gave you, but you know nothing about them, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John That if you have the type of business where quote unquote owning the customer in that way is valuable,
⏹️ ▶️ John you may be willing to pay exactly the same amount as you paid before, do a lot more work,
⏹️ ▶️ John subject yourself to audits from Apple, also now you can own the customer. And what
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of business, it might be really important that they own the customer? Probably businesses
⏹️ ▶️ John that are gonna make some money on the side selling information about you or spamming you or doing other things. So
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, there is a reason somebody, a company might want to go through these hoops to do this,
⏹️ ▶️ John even though they’re paying Apple exactly the same amount, it’s just to get ownership of the customer, ownership of the customer’s information,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And with that in mind, I’m happy to report that the rumblings about how Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will handle this forthcoming EU law about sideloading is that they’re going to be extremely—oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sorry, breaking news. No, they are not going to be extremely generous. My mistake. They are going to continue to be petulant
⏹️ ▶️ Casey turds. According to the Wall Street Journal, which writes, Apple is planning to add new fees and restrictions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when it begins allowing people to download apps outside of the iPhone’s closed ecosystem. Apple’s approach to the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey EU law will help ensure the company maintains close oversight of apps downloaded outside the app store, a process
⏹️ ▶️ Casey known as sideloading. The company will give itself the ability to review each app downloaded outside of its app store.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple also plans to collect fees from developers. Of course they are. That offer downloads outside
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the app store said people familiar with the company’s plans. Who to thunk it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, we don’t know a lot about this yet. But I think anybody who is surprised
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey think is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco paying attention. Because we have seen over and over again, if a a regulator
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or a lawmaker passes some law that says like they have to somehow give up some of their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco controller money in the App Store, they will do it only kicking and screaming and only the bare
⏹️ ▶️ Marco minimum they need to do and they will make it as absolutely painful as possible. So with the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco EU DMA and you know, forcing, you know, side loading by law, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t imagine Apple’s going to just say, okay, well, I guess we have to allow it and just throw their hands up and say, all right, done.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’ve seen they’re going to make it as incredibly hostile
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and painful and expensive as possible because they don’t wanna be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing this. And honestly, for this particular case, like I feel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very differently as we talked about last week about whether apps should be able to link out to external payments, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for side loading and third party app stores, I really don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is a great idea for iOS. I’m worried about what it could do, especially with, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco imagine, we don’t have to imagine, it’s been in the news, a Facebook app store, or excuse me, a meta
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app store. There are so many ways that can go badly for users and developers. I really don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want that to be the case on iOS. So I’m not surprised Apple is gonna be,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, probably very painful on this. And in this particular case, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not gonna be upset about it. But certainly if you were just, if you were hoping that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they would just allow you to download something off someone’s website and that’d be it and it’d be super easy and you can totally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bypass the app store review process or code signing with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple or rules or whatever, and especially bypass any kind of financial arrangement with Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that’s only going to happen through a lot of painful lawsuits and legislation again down
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the road, but for now, Apple’s going to do the bare minimum they can and make it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so hostile and expensive that nobody will do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John It does make me wonder, like, the people who are writing these laws, like, is this just like an example of regulatory
⏹️ ▶️ John cap, regulatory capture, where the regulated company is really running the show here because it’s just a bunch of rich companies
⏹️ ▶️ John and people who are in suede, rich companies sort of arranging for them. We’re going to pass this law, which looks
⏹️ ▶️ John good to our people, but really behind the scenes, Apple, you can just do whatever you want. You’re still going to get all your money. You’re still going to have all
⏹️ ▶️ John your control. It’ll be fine. Just go with it. Or did they actually try to,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, pass this digital markets act that would like increase competition for apps on the iPhone and just did
⏹️ ▶️ John such a bad job of it that Apple’s approach, as described in this rumor, complies with
⏹️ ▶️ John the letter of the law. Because if Apple’s still controlling everything about it and still getting the
⏹️ ▶️ John same amount of money, how is that competition like how you haven’t made the market? And like,
⏹️ ▶️ John what was your what were you trying to do? You is presumably trying to increase competition, right? People can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John put their apps on the iPhone unless Apple says they can. So let’s fix that by allowing Apple to decide what
⏹️ ▶️ John apps can go on and collect money. I find it hard to believe they would have done such a terrible job
⏹️ ▶️ John that all this would be allowed. But maybe they did and maybe it’s just a bad law anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or maybe this rumor is not true or maybe this is what Apple wants to do. But you will say no, that doesn’t fly.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ll see how it shakes out. But it is baffling to me. But I will say one thing, just like I said before,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, why would anybody do this with that with a third party payments? The answer was to own a customer. There is still
⏹️ ▶️ John one thing that this EU law and this approach to satisfying it
⏹️ ▶️ John would provide that didn’t exist before. And that is, and again, this is another assumption based on
⏹️ ▶️ John information we don’t know, the assumption being that even though Apple gets all its money and gets to like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John check the apps for malware and do whatever, still, I would assume that the whole point of this
⏹️ ▶️ John is that if you want to put an app on, if you want to put an app on your own app store on the thing and Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t want that app to be distributed, they can’t stop it. So like, if you want to put up a Nintendo emulator or
⏹️ ▶️ John some other app that Apple refuses to put in there, you want to have a different web browser engine or something like that, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John What this would allow is, yes, Apple gets the same amount of money. Yes, Apple still does code signing. Yes, they scan for malware,
⏹️ ▶️ John but Apple can’t actually stop you from putting up an iOS version of Chrome that uses the
⏹️ ▶️ John blink engine, for example. If they can stop that, then this is totally pointless. And I don’t know why they did it at all, but
⏹️ ▶️ John that is the one additional thing even this terrible solution would provide if there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John an app that Apple wouldn’t let you put it on an iPhone now in theory you can get it on
⏹️ ▶️ John there through one of these third-party app stores because Apple well I wouldn’t say You can’t stop it, but Apple won’t stop
Masimo/Watch updates
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Speaking of Apple and legislative and related issues,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apparently their workaround for the Massimo-related import ban on the Apple Watch is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey software. So over at Daring Fireball, John Gruber writes, Apple refuses to say so, but it seems
⏹️ ▶️ Casey clear that this is a software change. These new watch units still have the blood oxygen sensor, but the sensor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is disabled by software. This workaround definitely does not apply to the already sold watches, even after those watches
⏹️ ▶️ Casey upgrade to future versions of watchOS. The reason why is that the ITC injunction is an import ban.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple is banned from importing watches that violate Massimo’s patents. Units that have already been sold aren’t affected by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an import ban. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what we were wondering about last time. This seems like pretty solid info, even though it’s not officially confirmed by Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, if you go to Apple’s website and you go to the Apple Watch page, you’ll see a big blue banner
⏹️ ▶️ John on the top that fades to black after a few seconds that says, Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 no longer
⏹️ ▶️ John include the blood oxygen feature. I presume you won’t see that banner if you’re not in the US, But if you are, there
⏹️ ▶️ John it is, boom, right at the top of the page before it fades out. Never mind. It might come back.
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Optometrists on Vision Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then we have some information from some, I’m going to call them optometrists, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re ophthalmologists. I always get them backwards. I’m so sorry. But people, eye professionals, eye care professionals, let’s go with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. Todd Zarwell writes, as further proof that you have a listener in every profession, I’m an optometrist,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there we go, who has been listening to you since the days of Hypercritical and Build and Analyze. Here’s some information about the math of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey focal distances. If you’re using metric measurements, the additional close power is just the reciprocal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the focal length in meters. If you’re correct about the Vision Pro, excuse me, the Apple Vision Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey having focal distances of 1.3 meters, then you’ll need 1 over 1.3 or about 0.7 diopters
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of additional power or add power over your normal distance correction. So if you usually wear a negative
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 6D prescription for distance, you’ll need about a negative 5.25D to see effort free
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at 1.3 meters. If you wear a plus 2D to see far, you’ll want a plus
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 2.75D. And if your glasses prescription includes astigmatism, this adjustment will only affect
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the sphere power. Of course, this is assuming you want the lenses to do all the focusing work for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you. Most people under 40, womp womp, or the three of us, can do all the focusing they need to see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things up close. And I’d even say many people under 50, woo, could focus up to 1.3 meters
⏹️ ▶️ Casey without additional add power. But trying to sustain that focus for long periods of time could become uncomfortable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’d be curious to learn how the folks at Apple will approach this. Will they just use the distance prescription? Will they automatically adjust it by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey adding 0.75? Will it be age-dependent? For example, under 40 years old, no adjustment, 40-45 year old plus 0.25, etc.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have a hard time believing that they’d want people to get specific glasses prescriptions that are adjusted to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey focus at 1.3 meters, though. The easiest thing to do would be to just extrapolate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from the distance prescription. Dealing with people’s reading prescriptions, computer prescriptions, etc. would just introduce a lot of confusion
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into the process. process.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this this brings up one point that I saw people asking questions about they’re like, why would it be a focal distance of 1.3 meter,
⏹️ ▶️ John no one’s going to have glasses that are calibrated to 1.3 meters, they’re going to have their distance classes and their reading
⏹️ ▶️ John glasses for like reading distances with the ad power that we talked about. And I was talking about like, well, you can go to your eye doctor
⏹️ ▶️ John and just tell them what normal distance you look at. The important point that’s put out brought
⏹️ ▶️ John up by Todd here is when you adjust prescriptions, like if you have, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John regular eyes with lenses even if you’re an old person, you still have the ability
⏹️ ▶️ John to use the muscles in your eye to squish your eye lens into a different shape, to change your
⏹️ ▶️ John focal distance. Like that gets worse as you get older, but it doesn’t go away.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you don’t need a prescription exactly suited to your
⏹️ ▶️ John eyes in a total relaxed state at 1.3 meters. That’s what I was saying about accommodation, right? Like you could
⏹️ ▶️ John get that. You could say, give me a prescription that lets me see 20, 20 at 1.3 meters without me having to do anything
⏹️ ▶️ John with my eye muscles, right? But most people, you know, have some ability to
⏹️ ▶️ John change their focal distance by using their eye muscles. It just decreases how much and how far you can go. So you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John need glasses calibrated or prescription calibrated to 1.3 meters. You can have it calibrated
⏹️ ▶️ John any distance away from that that you can accommodate by squishing your eye muscles to
⏹️ ▶️ John focus on that. And again, as you get older, that the amount that you can squish gets worse because
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess your lens gets harder or whatever, because you’re getting old and you’re just getting crusty. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why old people need two sets of glasses, because they can no longer change their focal distance as much as they could
⏹️ ▶️ John when they were young and healthy and vibrant. Yes. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco hey, I’m still
⏹️ ▶️ John mostly healthy and vibrant. As Todd points out, if it’s near the edge of what
⏹️ ▶️ John you can accommodate, like you really got to use your eye muscles to really squish your hard little lens to see it.
⏹️ ▶️ John It might be uncomfortable a long period of time. So you want some prescription that’s close to 1.3 meters, but don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John think that you have to get a prescription that’s exactly 1.3 meters. When I was a younger person, I just had one pair
⏹️ ▶️ John of glasses and I could see every distance with them. And I didn’t have any ad power in my prescription. I was a young person,
⏹️ ▶️ John I had supple lenses, I would say, here’s my prescription, and I can see right in front of my face and all the way down
⏹️ ▶️ John the road. And that just changes when you get older, right? So that’s the important thing to remember. Your
⏹️ ▶️ John eyes do focus themselves. They have the ability to do that. Most people’s eyes anyway. I think if you
⏹️ ▶️ John get like cataract surgery and they put like solid lenses in there, you might lose a lot of that ability, but anyway. So
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t think you need some special prescription. And I’m also curious about what Apple’s doing because I
⏹️ ▶️ John would imagine they’re just using your distance prescription, because for most people with your distance prescription, you
⏹️ ▶️ John can do 1.3 meters. For me, it’s borderline. If I put on my distance prescription, I can
⏹️ ▶️ John focus at 1.3 meters, but it hurts my eyeballs because I’m old. So that’s kind of at the limit of my, but anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t think you have, you don’t have to buy glasses for every focal distance. Your eyes will do some work themselves. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just a question of how old are your eyes and how much work can they do?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then jconk writes, optometrist here, you mentioned the focal distance of the Apple Vision Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey excuse me, of Apple Vision Pro. Hi, I’m Casey. Being 1.3 meters, ad powers are written as the inverse
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of a meter or one over 1.3, which is about plus 0.75. So people looking for a typical
⏹️ ▶️ Casey single vision correction at 1.3 meters would be their distance prescription plus 0.75. We typically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey add, or excuse me, we typically test ad powers at 40 centimeters, making one over 0.4
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or plus 2.5 a common reader prescription. However, this all assumes the patient has no
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accommodation or eyes focusing power that they are adding. Younger, thankfully,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jay Conkay provided a pronunciation guide, which I will now butcher. Younger presbyopes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey still can accommodate or focus some, so the bifocal strength is less. I think that, John, this is what you were talking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about. Interestingly, the Apple website instructs people to pick the reading insert that matches their prescription,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I’m sure that if the lenses are compensating for the difference in the Apple Vision Pro, sorry, in Apple Vision Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey focal length versus how it’s typically measured. Either way, I’m really curious to hear more about the Vision Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sorry, about Apple Vision Pro insert process. It’s so awkward, why do they make us do this? As well
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as feedback on the visual experience. Also, it’s worth noting, I didn’t realize this until
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just earlier today when I was doing research for the episode. There are two different kinds of inserts,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I think we’re gonna talk more about this later, But there’s reader inserts, and that’s Apple’s word, where you just, I guess
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you kind of just tell them what kind of a script you
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s like the kind of glasses you can buy at the drugstore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, because you don’t need a prescription to buy reading glasses in the US. You just know, oh, I’m a plus 1.5
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever, you know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, right, right. And then there’s what we have already been talking about, the full-on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey scripted prescription inserts, which is what I think Todd Zarwell
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was talking about, and it sounds like Jay Conkay is more talking about the reader inserts. I wish
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had given that context before, I apologize. But anyway, there you have it.
Vision Pro ordering
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s talk Vision Pro, baby. So the pre-orders have happened.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did notice, by the way, that the URL for the Vision Pro is not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apple.com slash Vision Pro, but rather apple.com slash apple hyphen vision hyphen pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because of course, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John nevertheless,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pre-orders happened. We’ll talk about what we did or did not order in a minute and whether or not we caved
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or you’re kept up to our theories from last week. But let’s go through what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was available to order. There were three storage tiers. The default was 256 gigs, which came in at $3,499.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then 512 gigs, so doubling that is an additional $200 to basically 3,700 bucks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And a terabyte is plus $400, so doubling it again. So a total of $3,900, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a lot of money. Then AppleCare Plus is $500
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or maybe 499, or alternatively 25 bucks a month.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then there’s a litany of accessories that you can order. So gentlemen, please jump
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in and interrupt me when you’re ready. We start with an extra battery that is $200.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s a travel case, a bespoke travel case, which is also $200 flippin’.
⏹️ ▶️ John like optioning a Porsche, everything is at least $200.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, it’s so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco true. It’s so true. Yeah, the travel case in particular, like, ooh, that’s a lot of money for that. It’s made out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And annoyingly, I knew that, I think it was Spigen, Spigen, whatever they’re called, came out with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a travel case that was something like 30 to 50 bucks. And I saw that it was a thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And if I had ordered a Vision Pro, I should have ordered it. And so I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey regret not having done so, but that’s neither here nor there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Don’t worry. Like, I mean, so keep in mind also, like, you know, stuff that’s not proprietary to the Vision Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a case, you know, anybody can make a case very easily for this. Or a battery probably. Possi- well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. I think it has a custom connector. We’ll see how it goes. Yeah, but anyway, any of these things,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re basically paying for day one, Apple Nice version of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this, it’s always gonna be a huge premium. Whereas if you just wait a few months, at most, you’ll be able
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to buy a million $30 versions on Amazon of things like the travel case and stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I looked on Amazon to see if there was anything there yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, look, I know what you got to in a second, of the Belkin battery holder,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is basically a plastic bracket for the battery that’s $50. For your $200 battery. Yes. Oh yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we didn’t actually put that in the show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John notes. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t put third party stuff in there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but that’s barely third party. Yeah, they work with Apple on this for sure. But you can get a Belkin piece
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of plastic with a belt clip for the battery for $50.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because of course, the battery, in typical Apple design, the battery is just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a smooth, featureless blob of metal. And you can sell it, even in the Vision Pro travel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco case for $200. To hold the battery, they have to strap it in. Because they designed this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco blob of the battery that has zero way to attach anything to it. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the only ways to attach it to things, or to attach things to it, are incredibly inelegant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wrap around, or straps, or plastic kind of things. They couldn’t have just put
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a mounting hole, or a slot, or just the air tag. Naked robotic core.
⏹️ ▶️ John You add what you want to it, but we’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey gonna tell you you need a clip. What
⏹️ ▶️ John if you just want a slippery little stone? You can’t make it smaller, but you can always make it bigger. Buy this $50 case.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, all right. So then light seals are $200 a piece. So
⏹️ ▶️ John now let’s look at this here. We have a piece of electronics, the battery. We have a piece of cloth,
⏹️ ▶️ John the case, and we have a cushiony thing. All of these things are $200? Really?
⏹️ ▶️ John These are equally valuable, equally,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just. The light seal, that seems especially egregious because it’s like- It’s a wear part.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is. Well, not I mean the thing on the front,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John but actually it’s not the cushion. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the cushion is what touches your
⏹️ ▶️ John face. Oh, if you’re thinking by the way, oh light seal, that’s the thing that goes in your face. No, it’s an extra $30 to
⏹️ ▶️ John get a complete thing that goes in your face.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, no, it says it says it includes the cushions in two sizes. All right. All right. Anyway, replacement cushions are 30 bucks. Yeah, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it but like if first if for instance, you need to change the size of the light
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seal, like if you’re if you’re adding another person to it or giving it to someone else or selling to someone else,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they probably have to spend $200 for a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey different light seal. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s just like, I mean, what is this made of? It’s like, you know, probably some kind of like, you know, rigid, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plastic frame with cloth wrapped around it. Well, it’s 80% recycled
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey looks real nice. For what it’s worth,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t really begrudge Apple for this being not cheap, but this is quite expensive. So yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I don’t know what to make of it. But But anyway, so light seal, which by the way, a friend of the show, Quinn Nelson pointed out to me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey somebody M1Astra on Twitter pointed out, there appear to be, according to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this individual, 28 light seal sizes. My word.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why they don’t list them. I put the sizes here, but when you look at the light seal, when you’re trying to buy it, it says what
⏹️ ▶️ John size is available. They’re going to make you measure your face with their
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey scanner thing. You
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t get to pick from a pop-up menu of 28 sizes. You use, and what it gives you is like a number
⏹️ ▶️ John and a letter, like, you know, we’ll talk about it with the ordering processes later, but like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it just tells you the size. And presumably when you go to the store, they’ll do the same thing. Scan your face with the face ID scanner, and
⏹️ ▶️ John then it comes up with the size. And obviously if you’re at the store, you could probably try it on, if you’re doing a tryout thing and decide it doesn’t feel
⏹️ ▶️ John right or whatever, but yeah, a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sizes. Indeed. Then the Light Seal Cushion as discussed is $29.30. Sizes N, N+, W, and W+.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess normal and wide?
⏹️ ▶️ John and wide. Not normal. Let’s not be normative. It’s narrow and wide.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then we have the Solo knit band. So this is the one that goes behind your head, if I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John mistaken. This
⏹️ ▶️ John is the one that looks like it’s the one Apple wanted to make.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s the one that looks cool. It looks less cumbersome.
⏹️ ▶️ John Less slapped together in the last minute.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. So that’s a hundred bucks, which honestly, that seems more in line with what I would expect because that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey appears to be a relatively complex thing to make. an inert
⏹️ ▶️ John piece of fabric with adjustable straps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for $100. It has a knob on the side. All right,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it does seem complicated to construct. But yeah, 100 bucks in sizes small, medium, or large.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then there’s the dual loop band. Now this one, to your point, John, does look like they threw it together at the last
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s got twice as many loops and it’s the same price. What a bargain.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s also small, medium, and large. Then the optical inserts reader style are $100. optical
⏹️ ▶️ Casey inserts full on prescription style are $150 and both of those are for pairs. So $100 per pair, $150 per pair.
⏹️ ▶️ John just to be clear, when you buy the Vision Pro, you get a battery, you get a light seal with a cushion, you
⏹️ ▶️ John get the solo band and the dual loop band, you don’t get the optical inserts of any
⏹️ ▶️ John kind. So it’s not like you have to add all these numbers that you put up together, you pick your storage size, which who knows how anybody knows
⏹️ ▶️ John what storage size to pick because we don’t really know what we’re going to be storing on it. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John if you want to travel case you can add that on and if you need optical inserts you can add them on but everything else
⏹️ ▶️ John comes in the box with it. So it does have a lot of stuff like it does come with both the straps which is nice you don’t have to pick one of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes at these prices it comes with $600 of accessories in the box. Yeah well
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t afford not to buy one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my gosh you’re not kidding are you? Holy smokes. No I’m not. Oh yeah yeah. Alright so Marco what’d you order?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I got the base model. What? You? I didn’t get any glasses I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get any extra storage. Do you not need glasses with it? I don’t think so So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know if we’re correct that we’re roughly doing like a you know, 1.3 meter focus distance here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t need the only glasses. I need are reading glasses for up-close stuff and my my minimum focus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco distance is Still less than my arm length. So I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m fine I don’t think I’m gonna need any kind of reader insert But just if for some reason I do I can always just get those afterwards.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah Yeah. Well, you heard it here first. Marco bought the base model of something. I know I am
⏹️ ▶️ John shocked on purpose for himself.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I don’t tell it. So I’ll tell you why. So, okay, first of all, I didn’t get Apple care
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s $500 and I don’t see myself taking the vision
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pro many places. And I think by the time I am using the platform
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that much, if that time ever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there will probably be another model out that I will probably want to upgrade to. I think this is going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be a fairly slow build up in the app ecosystem and stuff like that. So I didn’t necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think AppleCare was worth it for $500. Also I’m pretty careful with my stuff most of the time so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t see myself breaking it. Anyway, on the storage tiers, I got the 256 base model
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I’m considering this basically like an iPad. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think, how do I use iPads? I don’t foresee myself loading
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it up with a whole bunch of stuff to take on a plane that would actually exceed that level. And if it’s anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other than like loading it up with media, I don’t know what I would use that much space
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for. You know, it’s like I didn’t want to like super option up this one and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then have all these resources I never used. And then when I want to buy the next one, that’s even better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in two years to have invested so much in this one for stuff I never used.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think you should be like ashamed or kicking yourself or whatever about getting this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s yeah It’s just extremely out of character, and I’m very proud of you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well I mean, and you know when I buy iPads and stuff. I don’t I don’t ramp up the storage that much
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s I mean it’s kind of like you know you like you said you you know how you’re gonna use an iPad It’s a known quantity
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that’s the problem with the storage in this one nobody knows like Is storage gonna be important or is it gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ John like the Apple TV where it is mostly a non-issue? We don’t know we don’t know the app ecosystem is gonna look like and so
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone especially when you see these prices, you’re like, let me just get the base one. Like, it’s cause like you said, Mark,
⏹️ ▶️ John if it turns out that you’re wrong, you’re like, oh, I shouldn’t have got that one. It’s constantly being filled up. By the time you’re annoyed by it, you’re just
⏹️ ▶️ John going to get the next model anyway. So. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And, and I mean, and to be fair, like, I do expect media for this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to be large. You know, if they had a 128, I wouldn’t have gotten that one, you know?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Like a, like a 3D movie. Cause it’s gotta have basically a separate movie for each
⏹️ ▶️ Marco eye. Or even, you know, what I, what I expect to enjoy on this a lot is like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco immersive experiences, put me on a mountaintop or whatever, that I expect to enjoy a lot. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, how many of those am I gonna have on there at once? Like how big can they possibly be? I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think 200 gigs of free space should be plenty for what will,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for my purposes, mostly be a dev kit and a messing around occasionally kind of device.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, we still have like questions like, but what if you turn on iMessage in the cloud? Oh, all your storage is gone
⏹️ ▶️ John now. But that’s definitely not a problem because iMessage gives you lots of ways to control how much space it takes up in your
⏹️ ▶️ John devices. So don’t worry, it’ll be fine. No, it doesn’t. It just takes all your space and there’s nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so for me, I also ordered the base model. I did not get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any accessories. I did not get AppleCare, although I’m thinking I might actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey add AppleCare because I saw-
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Well, we get to the repair prices. Yeah, I saw the repair prices,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which we’ll get to, but suffice to say, I think I might add AppleCare. And the part of the reason I think I might add AppleCare
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is if you’ll permit me a slight tangent, I’d like to tell a funny story. So I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at a friend’s house. It was a total of four couples, inclusive of Erin and myself and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the associated children. We were hanging out at somebody’s house. This was, I think, the day of pre-order, the day after, or something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like that. I forget exactly when it was. But we’re all hanging out, and they’re all just beating me up in a friendly way about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey spending this pile of money on this thing that I may or may not even want. And that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was totally justified for the record. But nevertheless, it was clear pretty quickly the conversation that as much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as they’re giving me a hard time about it, everyone in the group was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at least intrigued by this thing. And I started to explain, well, here’s the thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey though. I don’t know if you could try mine. Like I’m happy from like, I’m happy to have you try
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, but it may not be a particularly great experience because your faces may be differently shaped
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than mine. While they are differently shaped than mine and you know, the light seal may not match.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So then that got into a conversation about what, what the hell does that mean? What are you talking about? Blah, blah, blah. Well, how do we figure out if what we,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if what you got works for us? Well, come to think of it, why don’t you all bust out your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhones and go and pretend like you’re buying a vision pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John And so the next thing you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I wish I had taken a picture. I didn’t have the presence of mind to take a picture, but the next thing you know, our video would have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey been even better. All of them are looking at their phones doing the, and I know this is not a video podcast, but doing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the thing for, for scanning your face, like face ID like Face ID style in order
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to get their size. And so everyone was checking out, pretty much at the same time, checking out what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey size light shield they would need so they could see whether or not they could have a good experience testing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out MyVision Pro. And the answer was of a total of eight people, inclusive again
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Aaron and myself, and they were all boy-girl couples as it turns out,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all but two of the women could use my, or were sized to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the same as me. Even though these body types are wildly different
⏹️ ▶️ Casey among the people that are allegedly the same size as me, uh, the body types are wildly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey different, which I thought was quite funny, but yeah, just imagine a total of eight adults, you know, all of us, pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much all of us in our early forties, just doing the thing all at once, trying to size ourselves.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maybe it was one of those experiences you had to be there, but it was hilarious to be watching all this go down. Uh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but yeah, I, I bring all this up to say, and this is relevant for the AppleCare Plus thing, because even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey though all of them are probably better with their stuff than I am, I just have a vision of like, I have a vision ding
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of handing, you know, handing the Vision Pro from one person to the other, and it dropping on some tile
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or something like that. And holy monkey, we let’s just skip forward to the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the repair cost.
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t you want to know if I ordered one?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, did you order a Vision Pro?
⏹️ ▶️ John No. Did anyone in your family order one? No, but I did go through the order process to get my size. You
⏹️ ▶️ John should just tell the people Oh, don’t worry if you want to try mine out just buy a new light seal for 200 bucks. All right
⏹️ ▶️ John Just 200 bucks to try casey’s headset,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right? Right and then I would have a collection of them at the end Uh, oh for the record, not that it matters, uh solo knit band
⏹️ ▶️ Casey small do loop band small light seal 21w. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John someone was saying That they were getting different size measurements when they
⏹️ ▶️ John whether or not they said they had prescription lenses But they could have just been variability in the face scanning bit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I actually heard that a lot as well. In my understanding, which I am not sure is correct, is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it actually accounts for a little bit of depth for the inserts if you’re getting inserts. Again, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know if that’s true. I could be accidentally lying to you, but it does stand to reason that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe that’s true. I don’t know. Just a theory.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s why, I mean, obviously I didn’t order one, but if I had, had I ordered one, like it would just make me
⏹️ ▶️ John feel a lot more comfortable to be able to sort of try on, to know. Oh yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially since we don’t know what the return exchange situation will be like. Because of the variability,
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s just your phone scanning your face, because some people have reported, I guess if you’re on a borderline between two
⏹️ ▶️ John different sizes depending on what mood it’s in and when you scan your face, if it’s going to put you on one side or the other,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like trying on jeans. I mean, you can know your jean size, but it really helps to try them on first.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I’m very curious. And I think, Marco, you had told me privately you’re doing some in-store
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pickup somewhere. Is that correct?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, because I basically figured if for some reason the light seal doesn’t fit right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I figured that’s a lot easier and they might even, you know, like depending on what the process is for in-store pickup,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they might even have me take it out and try it on there before I go. So that I figure in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco person is probably best for something like this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I feel the exact same way in that and partially because my delivery schedule for UPS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and FedEx seems to be at the end of the day and partially because it just seemed like a smarter
⏹️ ▶️ Casey approach. I am also doing in-store pickup. And so, uh, by the time I got through the ordering process,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which we should briefly talk about actually, but, um, I went through the ordering process as quick as I could, I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trying to toggle between, or I was alternating between my iPad, my iPhone and my Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it’s so happened that the iPhone landed first. And that was excellent because that seemed to be the thing that was most equipped
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to scan my face and so on and so forth. Uh, it took a little while to scan my face, I think in part, because I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was in a relatively dark room in the house, I was in the office and it was, you know, still dark outside
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or maybe it was an overcast day, I don’t recall.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you may be hearing this and say, but Casey, Face ID doesn’t need light. It just uses infrared. What
⏹️ ▶️ John difference does it make what the lighting was? Well, I can tell you that the scanning that you do in the Apple Store app
⏹️ ▶️ John on your phone demands that your room is well lit. I don’t know why it does, but I just
⏹️ ▶️ John tell you for a fact that will tell you that your room is too dark and Face ID will never tell you that because Face ID, I believe, does not
⏹️ ▶️ John use the plain old light camera. It uses the IR spreader entirely. So whatever they’re doing for
⏹️ ▶️ John this thing, apparently it also wants to actually see your face. You need to be well lit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It also, it threw me off too, because this one made me do just up, down, left,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right, not a big circle. So I kept doing it wrong and it kept yelling at me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Same, exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John the same story. You trained
⏹️ ▶️ John us for years to do the roll your head around to loosen up your neck muscles and now you gotta go up, down, left, right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, I screwed up, particularly I think, they have you scan it twice and I think it was the second time. I don’t know why I did it right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the first time and not the second, but I screwed up the second time because I was doing the role just as you were saying, Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that is an important point, John. I appreciate you jumping in there. Yeah, I definitely got yelled at once or twice that the room
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wasn’t bright enough, but nonetheless, it was really easy for me other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than my own issues, following directions and doing up, down, left, right, or not doing up, down, left, right, and rather doing a circle.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was pretty easy. I mean, I didn’t get the eight o’clock time slot, which is a little bit of a bummer, but I I’m a big boy. I can wait 30
⏹️ ▶️ Casey freaking minutes. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, I, I’m, I’m five stars on the ordering process. I thought it was really, really straightforward. I heard a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people had problems, particularly in busier stores, where they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would go to, you know, pick a pickup slot appointment, whatever. And then during
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the time they’re doing the financial portion of the checkout, then the pickup slot would run out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of like available spots. And I guess it was presented as a payment error, but really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the issue was that the, the P the pickup slot had been snatched out from under them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And this is huge Apple energy to show either no error or an incorrect error. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something wrong, but I didn’t have that problem. Like it was lickety split for me. Uh, but I did hear a lot of reports
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of that, but I don’t know of anyone that I had seen that was deeply interested
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in getting one that in, in, in plan to get one that wasn’t getting one either day
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one or, you know, within the first week or something like that. And, you know, friend of the show, Alex, Alex Cox, they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ended up ordering one late on launch day, if I’m not mistaken. and still was able to find
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a day one delivery. I don’t think it was first thing in the morning, but still a day one delivery, which is pretty cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, we’ll get to the rumored sales numbers a little bit, but I hoisted up the repair costs so we can talk about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ah, yes, thank you. I got myself sidetracked. So yeah, so as I was saying, as all of my friends are scanning
⏹️ ▶️ Casey their faces and we look like a bunch of dorks, nevertheless, it occurred to me, I will be potentially passing this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey backward and forward, and I think I will probably go on at least a couple of trips with this thing. And at first
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought, there’s no way I want to pay $500 for AppleCare. And then I saw the repair prices.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Cracked cover glass, $800. With AppleCare+,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the extraordinarily affordable $300.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It only saved, it doesn’t even save you the entire price?
⏹️ ▶️ John Of course it doesn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’re paying $500 for this AppleCare+, to save you a few hundred dollars? Well, wait for the next repair though.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then additionally, what we assume to be a full replacement due to quote, other damage.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey $2,400 if you do not have AppleCare.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey $2,400 if you do not have AppleCare.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But it is comparatively genuinely affordable at $300 if you do. Oh my God.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for me, I think as long as they let me retroactively, you know how they typically in the first month
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. I think I’m probably gonna be adding AppleCare cause holy jamolis.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, well, so here’s the thing. If you crack the cover glass, wouldn’t you just leave it cracked? Who cares if people
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey eyes? As long as everything else works fine, I think people are
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna be like, yeah, I’ll pass on the $300 with AppleCare glass replacement
⏹️ ▶️ John so people can see my computerized eyeballs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But like, what if it affects the cameras and stuff? That’s the question. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John here’s the thing, like the two categories, we’ll put a link in the show notes to the webpage. The only two things you can
⏹️ ▶️ John pick are crack cover glass and other damage. And other damages covers everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John What I’m wondering is like, okay, but what if there’s no damage? What if just like something goes wonky, like your R1 chip fries
⏹️ ▶️ John itself or something? Is that also a $300 repair? Is like, is any kind of thing $300 with AppleCare? Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that would be warranty for, you know, the
⏹️ ▶️ John first year. For the first year, yeah. But after that, anyway. So I don’t know. I don’t know how to gauge
⏹️ ▶️ John the AppleCare on this. I remember when I noticed that the AppleCare had run out on my 2019 Mac Pro, which happened
⏹️ ▶️ John several years ago at this point. And I was like, because if anything breaks on this thing, it’s also like a bazillion
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I guess this argues for the doing the $25 a month thing instead, so you can just continue it indefinitely. But for this
⏹️ ▶️ John particular product, if you make it for the first two years, you’re probably buying a new or better one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Potentially.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, because I can’t imagine like, if you get really into this two years from now, there’s gonna be a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better one that you’re gonna want. And you’re gonna want it, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey David Schaub in the chat makes a good point. They only have one part other than a full hardware replacement. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s probably why, at least for now, it’s cover glass or anything else.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just like the Apple Watch. They don’t even replace the cover glass in that. It’s just total replacement. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, the weight. So let’s talk about weight. This is in grams, all right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I’m gonna start with other things and end with the Vision Pro. PlayStation VR2, 560. Valve Index, 810.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey MetaQuest 2, 503 grams. MetaQuest 3, 515 grams. MetaQuest Pro, which is the closest,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think most analogous device to the Vision Pro, 722 grams. The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple Vision Pro, I’m sorry, not the Apple Vision Pro, Apple Vision Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 600 to 650 grams, depending on the light seal on the headband. But John, you helpfully reminded
⏹️ ▶️ Casey us of something. Can you tell me about why these numbers aren’t really fair?
⏹️ ▶️ John So some of these, in fact, other than the valve index, all these headsets
⏹️ ▶️ John have their batteries built in, whereas that Apple Vision Pro weight is just the weight of the Apple Vision Pro, not including
⏹️ ▶️ John the weight of the battery. And I think that’s fair because the point is that Apple didn’t put the battery
⏹️ ▶️ John on the headset, you put it in your pocket or wherever else you’re gonna put it with that $50 clip. And so the
⏹️ ▶️ John weight actually isn’t in the headset, but you can see it’s pretty heavy.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, the MetaQuest 2 and 3 are lighter and they have the batteries with them. So the MetaQuest 2 and 3 are 503, 515,
⏹️ ▶️ John and the Apple Vision Pro is 600 to 650. And those Quest ones have the battery in the headset.
⏹️ ▶️ John The Valve Index is the big chonker, but it is also probably
⏹️ ▶️ John the beefiest sort of gaming thing and includes the battery inside. Anyway, I don’t think it’s outrageous.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the weight is reasonable. I think Apple did a pretty good job keeping it light. I think Apple made a wise choice not to have the battery
⏹️ ▶️ John as part of the headset. I just wish they had made the dangling battery a little bit bigger.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, this doesn’t seem that bad. I mean, like my big favorite headphones are 500 grams. So- Goodness.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, this seems like pretty normal for like high-end
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing you’ll have on your head. I mean, how much are the AirPods Max?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m trying to look. 384.8 grams. You are pretty darn close. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean, they feel really heavy on your ears for a long time, but again, that’s part of their design. Based on this, the Vision
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro doesn’t, excuse me, Apple Vision Pro doesn’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it is, you know, particularly heavy compared to its peers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then, apparently, attaching the Zeiss optical inserts to the Apple Vision Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there I go again, to Apple Vision Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John You don’t, they’re not the boss of you, Casey. You can say it however you want. They’re not going to come
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m trying to make a point. This is my…
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re making a point by obeying their marketing edicts?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I’m making a point that it’s so ridiculous that this is the way they want it pronounced when nobody actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pronounced it this way except marketing at Apple. Oh, it doesn’t matter. Attaching Zeiss optical inserts to Apple Vision Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey requires pairing. On 9to5Mac, they write, the pair of Zeiss optical inserts comes with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a quote, personal code, quote, to pair the lenses to Apple Vision Pro. After attaching the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey optical inserts magnetically to the headset, users will have to, quote, scan the pairing code on the card inside Zeiss optical
⏹️ ▶️ Casey inserts box to finalize the pairing process, quote. The code in question appears to be an app clip code
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that triggers a system action to pair the Zeiss lenses to the Apple Vision Pro. That’s interesting and kind of cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this brings up a point that was mentioned before, right? You
⏹️ ▶️ John may be wondering, and I don’t know if this is different in other countries, why can you get readers, like we were saying
⏹️ ▶️ John in the drugstore, like you don’t need a prescription, you just go buy them. whereas Apple is
⏹️ ▶️ John insisting that you have a prescription signed by a US
⏹️ ▶️ John qualified optometrist or whatever to be able to even buy these inserts. Like why
⏹️ ▶️ John all of the stricture around certain kinds of
⏹️ ▶️ John vision correction and not others? I don’t actually know the answer. An optometrist will write in maybe in next episode
⏹️ ▶️ John and tell us. Here’s my best guess. My best guess is based on what we were just talking about, like accommodation and everything,
⏹️ ▶️ John that if you have, if you put on a pair of readers and you pick the wrong one, you pick plus 2.5
⏹️ ▶️ John instead of plus point one or whatever, that it doesn’t cause
⏹️ ▶️ John as much eye strain. Like you’re not gonna mess up your eyes by doing it. It’ll just kind of like, things will be blurry and things close up
⏹️ ▶️ John will be bigger than they were or whatever. Whereas the prescription lenses that you need a prescription for,
⏹️ ▶️ John like these inserts for people who can’t just use readers, if
⏹️ ▶️ John you were to get the wrong prescription and wear them for a long time, that it could, if not mess
⏹️ ▶️ John with your eyes, then at least cause problems with your eyes in terms of like causing eye strain. And
⏹️ ▶️ John potentially, I suppose, mess with your eyes. I’ve seen a couple of stories recently about
⏹️ ▶️ John what causes nearsightedness, what causes people not to be able to see things far away. It was part of a
⏹️ ▶️ John scare story of like, oh, kids are staring at their phone screens up close. And if you do a lot of that, it will make you nearsighted.
⏹️ ▶️ John Kind of like the thing that your parents used to tell you, if your nose is buried in books, you’ll end up wearing glasses because you’re focused on things
⏹️ ▶️ John up close. And it turns out there is some medically explainable mechanism
⏹️ ▶️ John within how the eye forms and grows over time that lends some support to the idea that if you spend
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of time focusing on things really close, that your eyes can become misshapen in a way that makes you not able to see things
⏹️ ▶️ John far away. That’s my guess. If you’re an optometrist and you’re out there and you know why is it, is it just
⏹️ ▶️ John some historical regulatory thing doesn’t make any sense? Or is there actually a medical reason not to
⏹️ ▶️ John let people say, I know bioreprescription, it’s this, that, and that. Give me these lenses.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is that why we’re not allowed to do that in this country or is it just some weird thing? And anyway, this pairing process, you only need to pair,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think, the ones that, well, we’ll see when people get these. I would imagine you don’t need to pair the readers for
⏹️ ▶️ John the same reason that you don’t need a prescription to buy the readers, but we’ll see how that works out. If you do need to pair the readers,
⏹️ ▶️ John then I don’t understand this feature at all. You can even get these engraved, by the way, because it’s hard to tell, like, one insert from,
⏹️ ▶️ John one person insert from another, they like magnetically snap in, but I think you get free engraving on them or you can
⏹️ ▶️ John put your name on the inserts. So if you have a whole family using the Vision Pro and they have different inserts and presumably
⏹️ ▶️ John different $200 face shields, that’s how you can do it. Just look for the tiny, incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ John low contrast engraving that you won’t be able to see without your actual reading glasses and then you’ll know which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wonderful. All right, we made a brief mention of this earlier in the episode.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mark Gurman writes, I’ve been told that Apple’s initial inventory for launch weekend is about 80,000 units,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which the company sold out in the first hour of pre-orders. Is that true though? I don’t think that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, read the next rumor. These are all people guessing about how many units they have. Garmin is
⏹️ ▶️ John usually pretty well sourced, but you know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So then Ming-Chi Kuo writes, Apple sold between 160,000 and 180,000 Vision Pro headsets during its first pre-order
⏹️ ▶️ Casey weekend, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. I’m sorry, this is being recounted by Mac Rumors.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Kuo said that the headset sold out soon after the pre-order process opened with shipping times for all models slipping by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey five to seven weeks. While the instant sellout and extended shipping times appeared to be positive at first glance, Kuo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cautioned that shipping dates remain unchanged 48 hours after pre-orders opened, indicating that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey demand may quickly be tapering off after core enthusiasts place their orders.” Again, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hard for me to square this, which I’m not trying to say that they’re wrong, but square this with what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Alex had, where they were able to order, I think it was like my evening time, and still get a day one delivery.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John they think they just-
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re saying for the first weekend. The first weekend is two days, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Fair, yeah. It’s not like on the very first day. Like I
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t check, but if you were to go to order now, I’m assuming you can’t get day one delivery.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. I didn’t check either, but I presume
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John you’re right.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I mean, the thing we all don’t know, we’re trusting rumors like government, whoever to tell us is like, we don’t know how many have
⏹️ ▶️ John been made and are ready to ship to people. And you know, I presumably only
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, so I haven’t confirmed this, but Chris three in the chat, right. I just went on and could get one for the 3rd of February in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey store, but late February if shipped.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. That’s the other factor. Very often with everything that Apple sells. Uh, if you try to get it shipped
⏹️ ▶️ John to your house, you get one shipping date, But if you’re willing to go to a store and pick it up, you get a different one because I guess there’s different pools
⏹️ ▶️ John of inventory for retail stores. Like they always want to have stuff available in retail stores at the expense of people who are ordering
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No. So we’ll see what happens. And then of course we have to bring up the reseller market and there’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey post on nine to five Mac, which talks about this. And apparently, uh, based on both what nine to five Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is found and what we looked at briefly, it looks like generally it’s between five
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and $10,000. Yes, I said $10,000 for, uh, for one of these, I did try
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to look for completed auctions on eBay and I think I did find one for something like $5,000. So that’s the thing. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John I wish I had the link for notes of saying like, you know, that’s people who are
⏹️ ▶️ John wanting to resell this basically had found a way to automate the process that we all
⏹️ ▶️ John just described of like going through the Apple store app and scanning your face and buying one, apparently they found a
⏹️ ▶️ John way to automate that. I don’t know. I’m just picturing like mannequin heads or something or whatever. So they could order tons of them
⏹️ ▶️ John for resale. That was the story. I don’t know if there’s any, if the story is true. I don’t remember where I saw it, but I just,
⏹️ ▶️ John just imagine, you know, the motivation to get a bunch of these on day one, so you can resell them kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ John ticket scalpers is motivating somebody to come with a way to quickly and in an automated fashion,
⏹️ ▶️ John go through the face scanning process.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then a couple of videos that are, I genuinely think are worth your time. First of all, there’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple Vision Pro guided tour, which you can find on Apple’s website. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey different segments, but they stitch them together into one cohesive movie. That’s something like 10 minutes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I think it’s a, it’s a pretty good representation of what the vision pro is all about. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they do briefly talk about using your Mac within the context of vision. OS.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wish I had a better, shorter description for that, but anyways, they show that among many other things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, the one funny thing about this though, and I’m not the first to point this out is that they have someone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who they claim had never used a vision pro, which I do take on face value that that’s probably true,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but the, the person, the gentleman that’s using the vision pro, they have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a persona or they have the eyesight turned on and I’m pretty sure.
⏹️ ▶️ John They set it up off camera.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. That exactly. So they must have at least done enough set up to get through the orientation process
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and eyesight scanning process off camera.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That, that was a really weird, like I have a hard time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco believing that those were his first reactions.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Don’t tell anybody.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they were so… The reactions were so well in line with how marketing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wants to describe things,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything was so effusive. They’re reading
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Don’t tell anybody.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There is no way. It’s a commercial.
⏹️ ▶️ John I thought it was tastefully done. I thought it was nice. Yes. We all want to believe that we will be happy
⏹️ ▶️ John in our beautiful clutter-free home, led through a magical experience of this Apple product by attractive, charismatic people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s exactly it. The content of it was good, just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the conceit that, oh, this is allegedly this person’s first time ever. I don’t really
⏹️ ▶️ John I thought it was fine. I mean, the important job, the reason I think that it’s worth looking at is, if you’re wondering, if you just
⏹️ ▶️ John want to see for the umpteenth time or you’ve never seen it before, what are all the things you can do with this? They go through all of them. Here
⏹️ ▶️ John you go, this is what it looks like. You can do this, you can use an app, you can look at a movie, you can do it. they just go through it all very quickly.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s a nice overview. It’s a guided tour. I thought it was a well done video. If someone, if
⏹️ ▶️ John for example, like Casey, if you’re having dinner over something, and they’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John is this thing you’re talking about? I would send them the link to the video and say, if you actually want to see what this thing is that
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re talking about, this video will more or less explain it. You know, as long as you get the idea
⏹️ ▶️ John that what you’re seeing very often is what that person is seeing inside the headset, you’ll be fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. They also have a like minute and a half long making Apple Vision Pro video, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is very much, you know, marketing. It’s almost like, you know, it’s the sort of thing that usually accompanied Johnny
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in his white room, but it was a seriously sweet 90 second video, so it’s worth your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time. It’s bananas, the stuff that they’re going through in order to make these things.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey So it’s really good.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s trying to make you feel better about the price. You’re just like, well, it is really complicated to build, and we have a lot of fancy machines.
⏹️ ▶️ John Although I always wonder with these things, like how do you square the beauty of these videos and the machines
⏹️ ▶️ John making it with what must surely be the much more cluttered and
⏹️ ▶️ John sad looking factories where things are put together with workers being oppressed by, you know, like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just, there’s the marketing video of the factory and there’s what a real factory looks like and how the people
⏹️ ▶️ John who work in that factory feel about working there. I think there’s still some distance between those.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco By the way, some quick real-time follow-up. I also just now checked the Vision Pro ordering to see like how back-ordered is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it now. And so now we are almost a week from ordering being opened
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up. I’m able to get all three capacities at,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not at any store I want, but at a store that’s within a decent drive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for day two or three delivery. Like February 4th, February 5th, February 4th. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all really right there. So maybe there’s some, and they’re all back ordered
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for mail order out to February 28th, but that’s a little, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very surprising to me. Like, I think maybe, obviously, you know, they’re going to probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reserve a lot for retail, but maybe these are not actually selling out
⏹️ ▶️ John think. Well, again, we don’t know how many they made. If they already made as many as they can make, like if they made all of them
⏹️ ▶️ John now and they’re just sitting there waiting, then yeah, you’re not going to sell through a year’s supply in the first week.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if they made, you know, 20,000 of them, they still have some left. That’s much more concerning, but only
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I also wonder if they favored, and I think, Marco, you were just alluding to this, if they favored the retail experience.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I wonder if they have, you know, like regional caches of Vision Pros or something like that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which they can easily get to a retail store, but maybe is a little bit harder to get into the shipping ecosystem
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for whatever reason. I know nothing about logistics. Maybe that’s an extremely, well, it is an extremely ignorant
⏹️ ▶️ John site. Some people were speculating that Apple might be making decisions about what other countries to open
⏹️ ▶️ John up based on how much stuff they have lying around, like for Canada or whatever, you know, so we’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Speaking of other countries, that was a perfect segue. Thank you, John. Uh, Apple vision pro app store, Apple music
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and TV app require us Apple IDs. So this was stated on Apple’s website,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, in the pre-order section. But Mac rumors has a pretty good summary, uh, for international customers who are thinking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of purchasing Apple vision pro in the United States and using it in their own country, Apple has cautioned that they will be faced with several limitations
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when attempting to use the device. According to an FAQ on Apple vision, Apple’s vision
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pro pre-order page. Uh, first of all, the Apple vision Pro only supports English US for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey language and typing and English for Syrian dictation. Number two, Apple Store,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey excuse me, the App Store requires an Apple ID with region set to the US. Number three, purchases on Apple Music
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the TV app require an Apple ID with region set to the US. Number four, for customers with vision correction needs,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ZEISS will only accept vision prescriptions written by US eye care professionals and will only ship to US locations. Number
⏹️ ▶️ Casey five, customers may not be able to access certain apps, features, or content due to licensing or other restrictions in those
⏹️ ▶️ Casey countries or regions. Finally, number six, Apple support is only available
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the U.S. This is fascinating. This is particularly fascinating for a lot of our mutual friends. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recall where I heard the story, probably on Connected or maybe AppStories, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the length to which Federico and Mike have gone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to procure these devices is astonishing, and it is worth listening to their
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stories. Again, I would look at Connected. I probably won’t put a link in the show notes because I’m not sure where I heard this for sure.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But anyways, it is worth investigating this because it is both funny and amazing what they’ve done in order to make this work.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But yeah, it is kind of crummy for those not in America. And I get, especially if they’re inventory constrained,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why they would start here. But I do feel for our European and UK friends.
⏹️ ▶️ John Also, I’d be terrified to change the region on anything happening
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey because of all
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco horror stories I’ve heard about it. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, you don’t want to
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re basically just going to end up using a test Apple ID, which is great because again, if you used your own Apple ID and you sync your
⏹️ ▶️ John messages, it would just fill the SSD. I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco don’t know that that’s true,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I’m just bashing on Apple’s poor control of storage on the iPhone when it comes to messages.
ATP Membership
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hello, listeners. We are brought to you this episode by ATP membership,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you can join today and become a member yourself. Here’s what this gets you. First of all,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the big one, an ad-free version of each episode. You have your own private RSS feed to add to whatever
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco has some extra bonus stuff kind of mixed in here and there. You get to hear Casey swear. It’s totally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unedited and it comes out right after we finish recording. So it comes out usually about a half a day to a day
⏹️ ▶️ Marco earlier than the regular show. And then also you get bonus episodes exclusively
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for members. We’ve done a lot of really fun bonus episodes recently. Everyone’s raving about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the connectors tier list. We’ve also done on some movie episodes, some different tech stuff, non-tech
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff, food stuff, it’s a lot of fun. So all of that with ATP membership
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at atp.fm slash join. It’s about $8 a month or whatever your local currency might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be. We have annual discounts, we have gift memberships now, so much stuff in our membership program. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco consider becoming a member today. It is the best and most direct way to support the show and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we give you all this cool stuff and we think it’s pretty fun and our members seem like they want to, seem like they enjoy it. They keep telling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us how much they’re enjoying all the extra stuff, the bonus episodes, the bootleg stuff like that. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco check it out, atp.fm slash join. Thank you so much for considering it. And now,
#askatp: Why no Vision Pro diopter?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s do some Ask ATP. I think we’ve actually slacked on this accidentally for the last couple of weeks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So one way or another, we’re getting back to it, baby. Nigel Warren writes, listening to the quote,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Vision Pro tidbits segment of episode 570, I was struck by how the lens inserts complicate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things in a variety of ways. Do you know why the Vision Pro doesn’t have some kind of focal adjustment diopter like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a camera viewfinder would use? seems like it would make the buying, using, sharing of the device easier.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Are there specific requirements or constraints that make it not practical for a headset? Do other headsets use lens inserts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or have some kind of built-in adjustment system? I thought a lot of other headsets, or at least the MetaQuest, I thought
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they do take inserts, but I am talking way outside my comfort zone. Do one of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you actually have facts to share about this?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, I think this ties into everything we just discussed. All right. So what I was speculating about
⏹️ ▶️ John is there something about prescription lenses
⏹️ ▶️ John that make that requires that justifies us having to have a prescription in this country to get them unlike
⏹️ ▶️ John readers, right? In other words, some some kind of health damage or thing that could be done that will be bad for your
⏹️ ▶️ John eyes if you’re just allowed to do it willy nilly, you really need someone to give you a prescription.
⏹️ ▶️ John If that’s true, then maybe they don’t want to provide the type of adjustment. But Setting all of that aside, the
⏹️ ▶️ John much easier explanation is any kind of adjustability for lens
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff, uh, it adds space and complexity. Maybe not a lot, but it is additional
⏹️ ▶️ John space and additional complexity versus snap and inserts. And I can imagine the snap and inserts can be
⏹️ ▶️ John higher quality because it is just one lens element that doesn’t move, that’s exactly the right position, that is exactly your
⏹️ ▶️ John prescription. And then finally, there’s more to your prescription than can be adjusted
⏹️ ▶️ John easily. Now, obviously you can adjust it. When you go to the eye doctor, you know that big thing you sit in front of and they go one or two, three or
⏹️ ▶️ John four, and it’s got a million different lenses that go in front of your eyes? That can adjust for everything. That’s the doctor’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s their device for figuring out what your prescription is. But there’s more than just that, you know, the sphere number
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. You can have the stigmatism. They make you look at the lines, tell you which one is thicker. Like, it is possible
⏹️ ▶️ John to do all those things. But when I look at the size of the thing at the eye doctor, I think to do that well
⏹️ ▶️ John probably requires space They don’t want to spend on the inside of this device space weight complexity
⏹️ ▶️ John cost all that that those I think are the main reasons that this doesn’t exist
⏹️ ▶️ John in the Apple vision Pro because It’s it makes for a smaller lighter
⏹️ ▶️ John simpler headset not to do that and especially if you wanted to do it Well, you know I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John the details of What’s going on inside that big thing the doctor’s office aside from things tumbling in front of my eyes and things looking
⏹️ ▶️ John different But I know it’s not as simple especially again if you have a stigmatism of just having a lens
⏹️ ▶️ John that you move farther And you know closer and farther away from your eye if you have bad enough eyes There’s all sorts of
⏹️ ▶️ John things that can be wrong with them that are not solved by taking a single lens element and moving it farther or closer to your eye.
#askatp: Email backups
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Lawrence Koteff writes, do you have an email backup regime outside of Time Machine or local computer backups?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Recently, a family member accidentally deleted all of their iCloud and email in the Mac Mail app, not realizing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that they had all the folders selected when they hit the delete button. And being a very fastidious email
⏹️ ▶️ Casey user, they immediately emptied the trash folder without noticing. Apple does not provide any way to restore trashed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey emails, so we were left with restoring the mail database from a back-placed backup. This got most of them back, but apparently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple Mail does not always download store the contents of emails and attachments. So many of them are blank and lost.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I haven’t found an obvious solution for automatically backing up an email account. And I wanted to know if this is something you’ve considered before.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey For me, it is not. I don’t have a good answer. It’s just I,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not terribly worried that I will put myself in that position, I say, as I knock on wood. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t I don’t have any good answer for this. Marco, do you do anything about this?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not besides just local file backups. I mean, I first of all, I am not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an aggressive trash emptier. Like that’s, I mean, like the purpose
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the trash is to be like a buffer so that you’re not constantly, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if every single time you delete anything you immediately empty its trash, you know, whether
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s in your mail app or the, you know, trash on your Mac, you’re kind of,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, ruining the point of the trash.
⏹️ ▶️ John that every time I delete something from my media volume on my Synology because the finder says, just so you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m gonna delete this immediately and not move it to the trash. Is that okay? And the only choice you have is yes, it’s okay
⏹️ ▶️ John or no, don’t bother deleting it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I think getting getting out of the habit of trashing everything or emptying the trash constantly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that is that would be extremely beneficial for you know, to whatever degree you have control over it for, you know, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people you’re talking about here. You know, so I don’t have this problem because I let the trash be the trash.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I let it be a temporary buffer for deleted stuff, in case I need to go get something out of it that I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco accidentally threw away or decided I didn’t want to throw away and I only empty the trash if I’m running low on
⏹️ ▶️ John I find it funny that both of my children and both in real life and on their computers never empty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like unless you are out of space you need the space right now there’s not much reason to empty it right after
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’ve been deleting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John things. Oh there’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a reason the same reason that this person’s relative emptied the trash that reason is very
⏹️ ▶️ John simple a full trash icon bothers people. Oh.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what it is. It’s like notification badges, right? I wish there was a way in the finder to say, don’t show the crumpled up paper, because it makes
⏹️ ▶️ John people want to empty, it makes me want to empty the trash. Yep. That’s a fair point. John, do you have any backup strategies
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for this? What do you think? I’m sure you do. Of course I do. How many is the question? Right. So here’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco with my email. All right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco First strategy, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I use Gmail for everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John I use the Gmail web client. I use it and like it. But I also use Apple Mail for this one purpose. I use it to get my emails to the right person. I use it to get my emails
⏹️ ▶️ John to the right person. I use Gmail for everything. I use the Gmail web client, I use it and like it. But I also use Apple Mail for this one
⏹️ ▶️ John purpose, which is to pop, to use the pop protocol to pull my Gmail
⏹️ ▶️ John using pop down to my Mac. Because that way I know I’ve got a copy. It’s not like IMAP where
⏹️ ▶️ John it might be somewhere else and you know, the problem they were having, it’s like, oh, but Mail didn’t have all the mail locally. Some
⏹️ ▶️ John of it was still on the server. I use pop, which is an older, dumber protocol, which says, just give me
⏹️ ▶️ John a copy of the mail from the server and I use Apple Mail periodically run it, so it will pop
⏹️ ▶️ John all my Gmail down and fill its Apple Mail database. But of course, I don’t trust Apple Mail as far as I can throw it. So that’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John one thing I do. The main thing I do, once per year on a calendar, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John reminder that I think it’s sometime in December, I use the very good Google
⏹️ ▶️ John Takeout feature that allows you to download data, your Google data onto your computer,
⏹️ ▶️ John and Google will make you a tarball, tar.gz file of all your Gmail
⏹️ ▶️ John on demand whenever you want it. And I do that once a year. And that gives me all my, I think it’s in like M-box
⏹️ ▶️ John format or whatever. So worst case, and then of course, once those are files, they’re in my backup vortex and they get backed
⏹️ ▶️ John up or whatever. So worst case scenario, I’m gonna lose on average six months of mail, assuming my Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John Mail thing totally doesn’t work at all, which again, I’m not sure I entirely trust it. So those are my strategies. Pop from
⏹️ ▶️ John Gmail using a mail client that I don’t actually use for mail. And I just launched Apple Mail every once in a while and just let it run in the background
⏹️ ▶️ John and then quit it, right? Because it catches up pretty quickly. And then Google takeout. I suggest everybody who
⏹️ ▶️ John uses Gmail as their main email thing, put a reminder in your calendar once a year, once every
⏹️ ▶️ John six months, whatever you’re comfortable with, to download all your Gmail. You can set the options. It will
⏹️ ▶️ John give you a single file, a single multi-gigabyte file depending on how much mail you have. It compresses
⏹️ ▶️ John really well. So GZIP compression will get it down pretty small because it’s mostly text. And that’s what I
⏹️ ▶️ John suggest. And then yeah, put that file into your own personal backup Vortex and have it go on Time Machine, and your SuperDuper
⏹️ ▶️ John clone, your cloud backup the whole nine yards.
#askatp: Contact Key Verification
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Severin writes, do you use iMessage contact key verification? I just stumbled upon it in settings
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in iOS 17.2.1. I’ve never seen it before. So, in short, this is a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mechanism by which you can verify that the people you are talking to are the people they claim to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be. You can do a manual contact key verification by way of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey getting a key and then over like FaceTime or a phone call, whatever, you read your two keys and verify that they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what you expect. I don’t use this because I don’t I don’t think anyone’s gonna like man in the middle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of me for state secrets. Like I just don’t think I’m important enough. But I don’t know, do you guys use this?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s start with Marco again.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, for the same reasons. I mean, I didn’t know about it until fairly recently, but I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a pretty recent thing. I think it’s iOS 17.2 that added it. But I don’t really have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the need for this level of security like in my iMessage. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, if this becomes easy and I’m by default and everything, then sure, yeah. but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the same reason I don’t use that like ultra lockdown protection mode of iOS. I forget what that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco called. Lockdown mode, is that it? Yep. Yeah, so I don’t use that either for the same reason that like, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really deal with data that sensitive or am that big of a target. But if I were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dealing with very sensitive stuff, if I was like a whistleblower or a journalist or like that would be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different then I would be very happy these features are here. But the way it is now, I don’t need them.
⏹️ ▶️ John John, I do actually wanna try it with somebody because I wanna see how onerous it is. It seems
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of onerous. Like it seems like a burden that you would not wanna deal with unless it was like super important. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John Mark said, like you’re in an actual secure situation where you wanna make sure you’re talking to who you think you’re talking to.
⏹️ ▶️ John I just wanted to see what that burden was. Do I have, do you have to like use some side channel to do something? Is it done
⏹️ ▶️ John all through the phone? I was willing to try it, but I haven’t found anyone to try it with. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I currently do not have this enabled or used at all. And related to that, 17.3 is out now. iOS 17.3 and it has the
⏹️ ▶️ John stolen device protection and I turned it on. I turned it on on my
⏹️ ▶️ John phone and I had my wife update hers and turned it on on her phone and I’m trying to get my kids to turn it on. Have you guys
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I haven’t yet, but I probably should.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have it and I’m doing to his phone probably this weekend with it because that’s one of those things where like, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like she can access our shared bank account and stuff like, I feel like this is like a family IT
⏹️ ▶️ Marco security policy thing that is worth, you know, closing all the doors on.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, they can still get to your bank account, they just can’t take over your Apple ID.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but again, yeah, that’s, it’s a high risk enough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco situation and also her passcode hygiene is not great. Anyway. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John I did it on my wife’s phone is remember the family photo library is on her Apple ID. Now with the great
⏹️ ▶️ John shared library feature, I get access to all of them, but technically it’s her Apple ID. So having her Apple ID
⏹️ ▶️ John get taken over is really the worst case scenario, not mine. Although I have all the purchases, so we do those all in movies, But
⏹️ ▶️ John honestly, I’d much rather lose the movies than the photos. So yeah, I want her to have stolen device protection
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsor this week, Squarespace. And thank you to our members who support us directly. You can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco join us at atp.fm slash join. And we will talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was accidental, oh it was
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Margo and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Casey wouldn’t let him Cause it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ John can find the show notes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at atp.fm And if you’re into Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, N-T
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse It’s accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean to Accidental, accidental, tech podcast,
Post-show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Has Adam or Tiff shown any enthusiasm for the Vision Pro?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Adam because he is so into the quest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he’s so into that he has requested that I please let him try it Tiff doesn’t care at all
⏹️ ▶️ John Does Adam know that there’s no controllers?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, and because he’s a big fan of Because there are so the quest 2
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Some games could use like just hand recognition the quest 3 I based on what he told me it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seemed like that has gotten better but not every game will use it. So he still uses the controllers. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it makes sense, I can understand why, for gaming purposes, controllers are generally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a better option. You know, because you want the higher precision, you want maybe more buttons,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because most of the gesture recognition on these systems, it can do a handful of gestures, no pun intended,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s not doing every single finger individually, you know, stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco latency’s better with controllers, presumably. Yeah, I would assume so. You know, when you look at the Vision Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s very clear that this is a device that’s made for computing first and games
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe second. Or not at all. Right, exactly. Whereas, like, you know, the Quest is a game console.
⏹️ ▶️ John to be fair to Apple, like, you can just use, like, a PlayStation controller with the Vision Pro. Like, that’s their solution, essentially. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John you wanna play a game on the Vision Pro? Just literally use your Xbox or PlayStation controller, right, which is not the same thing as a VR
⏹️ ▶️ John controller, which, like, in the Valve games, like, oh, you have a virtual hand and you’re reaching out to grab
⏹️ ▶️ John the ladder or the gun or the bottle. Like that’s not a thing that Apple is showing
⏹️ ▶️ John or promising at all. It’s more like, oh, you can put something in front of you and here, hold the PlayStation controller. Now you get low latency,
⏹️ ▶️ John fast access to buttons.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, yeah. So, but it seems like, you know, the way Apple has designed the Vision
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro, they want it to be a computer. And that is a very different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco set of priorities and a very different set of choices than game consoles. The Quest series, those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are game consoles that Facebook keeps trying to make computers and they’re not very good. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re game consoles. And all this stuff that the Vision Pro does that’s not games, Adam doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco care. He might someday, but he doesn’t now. It’s not his job. He’s 11. He cares about games.
⏹️ ▶️ John He might like the movie thing or the panorama. Imagine if they had a you’re riding on a roller coaster
⏹️ ▶️ John immersive experience thing. That would be fun to do. But I’m thinking about games and the Vision Pro. All that
⏹️ ▶️ John resolution that’s good for looking at your documents is not good for games. for games. Games don’t want to
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco push that many
⏹️ ▶️ John pixels. They want high frame rates and you can’t get high frame rates in a, you know, a headset type
⏹️ ▶️ John thing with a low power, uh, S.O.C. and GPU on there. And so not having
⏹️ ▶️ John so many pixels to push is an advantage to those less expensive ones. But yeah, the only thing I can think of where
⏹️ ▶️ John it’d be an advantage is, oh, you’re on a roller coaster that you might want to see in like HDR, you know, 4K for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. But like, I feel like I would think that’s amazing. I don’t think Adam would like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco He would just be like, okay, that’s cool. And then he would just go back to his game. Show him the
⏹️ ▶️ John gerbils demo from Quick Draw 3D. Neither one of you knows what that is. Nope. Nope. Do you
⏹️ ▶️ John know what Quick Draw 3D is?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know what Quick, so Quick Draw, that was like the toolbox functions in the original Mac that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco made fast window drawing stuff, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it was the drawing API. It’s like, you know what Core Graphics is now? Yeah. Quick Draw was. So what was Quick Draw
⏹️ ▶️ John 3D? So Quick Draw 3D was at a certain point, And this is the time when
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple did its quote unquote most serious push into gaming. They made libraries for gaming
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff called game sprockets. They had input sprockets and a bunch of other sprockets for like handling joysticks
⏹️ ▶️ John and doing game type stuff. And they had a 3D API, like
⏹️ ▶️ John instead of OpenGL or DirectX or whatever, and they called it QuickDraw 3D.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it was a 3D API, just like all those other ones I described except for much, much worse. and
⏹️ ▶️ John made by Apple and one of the demos they had for it, like in a typical Apple fashion, once they came up with QuickDraw 3D,
⏹️ ▶️ John like it works everywhere. There used to be a desk accessory called the Scrapbook. I don’t know if you guys remember that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Nope. You’d go to the Apple and you’d pick Scrapbook and it was just basically an application with a bunch of,
⏹️ ▶️ John like a horizontal scroll bar and a bunch of different things. And what could you put in the Scrapbook? Anything you wanted. You could paste in text,
⏹️ ▶️ John you could paste in images, you could paste in a movie. And once QuickDraw 3D came out, you could paste in
⏹️ ▶️ John 3D objects. So you’d get a Mac with Quickdraw 3D and you’d open the scrapbook and there
⏹️ ▶️ John would be a 3D model of a palm tree that you could rotate. Anyway, one of the things they had, I believe
⏹️ ▶️ John it was a demo application called Gerbils, I think. And it was a Quickdraw 3D application
⏹️ ▶️ John that modeled, I believe, a bunch of supposedly furry gerbils
⏹️ ▶️ John riding on a rollercoaster in 3D. If you can find a movie of what gerbils
⏹️ ▶️ John look like, it is the most hilariously not impressive of young people think you’ve ever seen in your life and the frame
⏹️ ▶️ John rates were awful. I don’t think there was any 3D hardware acceleration either. So it was all in software.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not an impressive experience, but if someone can port gerbils to
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple Vision Pro, I guarantee a bunch of old people like me actually had a Vision Pro will
⏹️ ▶️ John buy it for 99 cents and try it. I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, so those are like 12 copies.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, yeah, no, it’s a big, big market for gerbils. happen Beep, beep.