573: Look at It Harder
08 Feb 2024Our real-world Apple Vision Pro impressions so far.
Episode Description:
- Follow-up:
- YouTube API weirdness (via Christian Selig)
- John’s [latest] Photoshop complaint
- €0.50 is “50 cents”
- Prescription lens pairing
- Wide Lightning™ and Wider Lightning™
- Developer Strap (requires developer account)
- Vision Pro weight discussed in Vanity Fair
- Bluetooth peripherals
- Intel Macs & Mac Virtual Display
- Vision Pro syncs when not in use
- Performance throttling
- Vision Pro for movies & TV
- Color reproduction
- iFixit estimates resolution
- “Ideal” field of view for movies
- Pixels per degree:
- iPad Pro 11” @ 14” / 35cm = 67 ppd
- 65” 4K TV @ 5 feet / 1.5m = 76 ppd
- Pro Display XDR @ 2 feet / 0.6m = 100 ppd
- Real vs. Fake 3D
- iFixit Teardown
- Vision Pro initial thoughts
- Post-show: Casey’s Vision Pro train experience
Sponsored by:
- Trade Coffee: Let’s coffee better. Get a free bag of fresh coffee with any Trade subscription.
- 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
- Follow-up
- YouTube API
- Photoshop zooming
- 0.5 EUR terminology
- Lens pairing
- Developer Strap
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- Weight
- Peripheral compatibility
- Virtual Display compatibility
- Syncing when idle
- Throttling
- Display color, resolution
- iFixit teardowns
- Sponsor: Trade Coffee (code atp10)
- Initial impressions
- Ending theme
- Spatial train computing
Follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have some follow up to do. We have a lot of follow up to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So wait, this show that we have like our first impressions of actually using the Vision Pros, we’re going to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing a lot of follow up first. That’s what we’re saying.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey follow up about Vision Pro. Don’t look at don’t look at me. This is all Jon. I would love to just
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I debated putting all the Vision Pro stuff down in the Vision Pro topic section, but this is just these are just follow ups about Vision
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro before we get to the meat of Vision Pro. It’s all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Vision Pro though. I mean, technically, isn’t everything about Vision Pro follow up because it’s a device that we already talked about before?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, follow-up is a complicated thing that you still don’t understand that I could explain to you at length, but you don’t want to hear it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We should punish John. We should just do the Vision Pro review right now, Marco. We can go rogue, the two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of us. And this will be John’s punishment for putting all this follow-up in the beginning of the show.
⏹️ ▶️ John rewarded because this is high quality vision profile.
YouTube API
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s start with Christian Selig, who we do like. And Christian writes, it was funny hearing John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talk about the, oh yeah, this isn’t Vision Pro at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John We can skip this. I know, but it’s a celebrity. No, we got to do it. He mentions Vision
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro in the middle there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, gosh. I am under protest. I would just like everyone to know. Christian, who is not guilty,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s John who’s the guilty one. Christian writes, it was funny hearing John talk about the YouTube API this week as I was playing around
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with different, a different part of the YouTube API for a Vision Pro app. There you go. remembering that back when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I started Apollo without even having to ask. YouTube’s API limit was 50 million per day.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I assume that’s where that comical 1.8 million per minute other stipulation comes in. After they lowered
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the limit, they started auditing Apollo annually to know how I was using it. And I used it a fair bit. And shortly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey after Apollo shut down, I didn’t do the audit. And I didn’t do the audit. They kept reducing me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from 50 million all the way back to 10,000 per day or 0.02% of what I was allowed at
⏹️ ▶️ John Those were the days. 50 million per day. Hmm. Bye for now.
Photoshop zooming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so explain to me how this next piece of follow-up is related to the vision project
⏹️ ▶️ John because we were talking about Zooming things in on the vision pro and how close you can get to them to pixel
⏹️ ▶️ John peep This is this is weak.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey The next one is
⏹️ ▶️ John weaker, but but still you’re taking longer than the actual item complaining about it Please proceed
⏹️ ▶️ John This was about Photoshop and I was complaining about how it didn’t zoom the way I wanted it to and someone on thread said hey
⏹️ ▶️ John Here’s a video of me doing it and it assumes the way you said you wanted it and then I sent a video and say Hey, here’s a video of me doing the
⏹️ ▶️ John same thing and it behaving differently And so then he sent me a picture of his preferences with the preferences
⏹️ ▶️ John that he thought were related to zooming circled in red And I said I have all those settings set exactly the same way you do
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually I figured it out It was the over scroll setting in the tool section of Photoshop preferences
⏹️ ▶️ John and the over scroll setting when enabled it allows scrolling past The normal bounds of the window So
⏹️ ▶️ John that was the secret if you like me want option scroll wheel to zoom where your cursor is all the time Make
⏹️ ▶️ John sure you have over scroll set and then proton suggested another way to do it if you press and hold in sequence the
⏹️ ▶️ John spacebar then command your mouse cursor will change to a magnifying glass and then while holding these keys down
⏹️ ▶️ John click and hold left mouse button and right drag to zoom in or left drag to zoom out. That doesn’t actually solve the problem
⏹️ ▶️ John entirely if you still have overscroll turned off it still does the bad behavior in some situations but it’s It’s better than nothing.
0.5 EUR terminology
⏹️ ▶️ Casey More, not Vision Pro follow-up. Russ writes, I have a Euro 50 coin and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it quote, 50 euro cent quote is stamped onto the face of the coin. And someone, I’m going to presume Russ,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey provided a convenient little image there. Comically, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey UK is also in this little stamped in the coin here, which I find funny, but nevertheless,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is a 50 euro cent.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s called cents. Yeah, which was a topic of much debate. And also on the previous episode, talking
⏹️ ▶️ John about the core technology fee, which is 50 euro cents. I said about 100 times 50% instead of 50 cents.
⏹️ ▶️ John I apologize. Every time you heard me say 50%, just substitute 50 euro cents or 50 cents. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s what happens when we get older. We’re all losing our marbles, all three of us.
⏹️ ▶️ John I need the one of you. Usually when I do that, like the third or fourth time, one of you corrects me, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I remember you doing it once or twice.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I did it so much. It was so
⏹️ ▶️ John keep saying 50%? 50%! 50 cents, 50 euro cents.
Lens pairing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tell me about Vision Pro prescription lens pairing, please.
⏹️ ▶️ John We were discussing like, why do you have to pair them? Is this a DRM thing? Some people theorize that to
⏹️ ▶️ John get Zeiss to be the supplier of these lenses, they had to provide some kind of sort of DRM so
⏹️ ▶️ John that they would be the exclusive supplier and people couldn’t make knockoff third-party lenses for less money or
⏹️ ▶️ John something like that. But now that we all have, know much more about the Vision Pro, it’s clear
⏹️ ▶️ John that at least one aspect of the Vision Pro lens pairing is because the lenses affect
⏹️ ▶️ John how the device works and yeah, you know, like the eye tracking, for example, and
⏹️ ▶️ John you need to sort of calibrate the device based on the prescription, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John In one instance, somebody had a, like the Vision Pro thought they had a different prescription than they actually had, like there was a pairing problem
⏹️ ▶️ John and the eye tracking was all wonky until they got that straightened out. So it’s not just for DRM, it may be for that purposes
⏹️ ▶️ John additionally, but that whole pairing process is essential for the device to
⏹️ ▶️ John work correctly and track your eyes when you have lenses inserted.
Developer Strap
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, I believe John put in the notes, and I love this, there’s wider lightning and widest
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lightning as it turns out. So over the last couple of days, people have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey figured out how to eject, if you will, or unpair perhaps, the cable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that goes from the Vision Pro battery pack to the Vision Pro itself.
⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, I’m so proud of myself because the second I saw that battery and I saw a little black dot, I’m like, that’s got to be
⏹️ ▶️ John a, you know, stick a paperclip in and eject that connector thing. and behold it was, which is a miracle because
⏹️ ▶️ John if I had talked about it in the show, I would have said, no, Apple would never do that. But it totally looks like one of those holes. Well, guess what? It was.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It turns out, although I think I read somewhere, I don’t know if we have the, I don’t think we have the link handy, but I thought I read somewhere that they specifically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said, do not put a paperclip in there, that you have to use a bespoke tool.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes, of course. It’s a very special tool. We’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey see a picture of it later. Indeed. So anyway, so there’s wide light, wider lightning
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and widest lightning. Wider lightning is the connector between the battery and the Vision Pro. It really legitimately
⏹️ ▶️ Casey does look like a wider lightning point port. Man, I cannot speak tonight. What is there, like 10 or 12
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pins, something like
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think it’s 12 instead of 8.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay. And then apparently it also runs at a higher voltage than standard USB-C, which is different.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then we also got word, I want to say it was Saturday,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or maybe it was late Friday. I forget exactly when it was, but apparently the developer strap
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is available for purchase. I actually have one in the house. I haven’t opened it yet. And I’d actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of like to return it if it turns out I don’t need it, but I wanted to order it immediately just in case there were supply issues.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I figure I’m going to do some development without it, see how miserable I am. And if it’s actually not bad,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then I’ll return it. If it’s like the watch, I will buy six of them just in principle.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But anyways, the straps, so I should back up, I’m sorry. So the developer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey strap is, you replace the right-hand side white piece
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the Vision Pro, the piece that goes from the the goggly part through and including
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the speaker, and then what eventually gets mated to the band that either goes behind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your head, over your head, or both. That means that the developer strap has to include
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the speaker all over again. In the house, I have three speakers for the Vision Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one left-hand speaker and two right-hand speakers. But the piece de resistance of the developer strap is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey behind the speaker, there’s a little dongle that has a USB-C receptacle,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so you can plug your Vision Pro into your computer, and then build and run
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much easier that way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whaaaaa… The whole design of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the developer strap kind of annoys me. So, the Vision Pro, one of the less graceful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things about it is that you have a cord coming out of the left side all the time, running to a battery.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, if you want to connect it to a computer via cable for live debugging,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your other option, if you want to do debugging with Xcode, you want to build and run on the device, you can do debugging, you can do that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wirelessly, just over, it’s regular Wi-Fi debugging, they’ve had that forever on the watch, and they’ve had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it kind of, in recent years, they’ve had it for the phone as well, and the iPad, and it works fine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in recent years, it’s just slower. So, any kind of build and run cycle you do in Xcode,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco send this to the device, go, that process is going to take maybe two or three
⏹️ ▶️ Marco times longer over Wi-Fi than it takes over a cable. So there’s a pretty good reason why developers want to run
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cables to their devices most of the time. And the cables tend to be a little more reliable, but honestly, Wi-Fi debugging
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the last year or so with just iPhone development has been way better than it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used to be. So anyway, with the Vision Pro, brand new platform, designed from scratch, no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cable debugging is supported directly. So we’re going to have this cabled battery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that runs off one side with a 24 pin connector
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a USB-C port on the other end of the battery. You want to wire it to your computer with USB-C?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, you can’t use that. No. You have to instead buy a $300
⏹️ ▶️ Marco accessory to wire this to your computer for development that has to replace the entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other side arm of the thing. of the thing, and then you have two cables,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one on each side, running out from the back of your headset. It is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so cumbersome, and it’s such a weird decision.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Why didn’t they just enable this same data connectivity through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the many-pinned custom connector they made on the battery? That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the mystery of the battery port. Why does it have even more pin contacts
⏹️ ▶️ John than regular lightning when all it is doing so far is providing power.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I’m sure there’s some, like I’m sure there’s a small amount of communication pins, you know, for the battery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to communicate with the Vision Pro. Right, but did you need more pins than lightning? It’s supplying a lot more power than lightning
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever supports, so I’m sure it has to split it up between those pins, but they designed a custom connector
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with obviously, you know, with probably what it seems like the future in mind, like future capabilities
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in mind with this large connector, and then they have a USB-C hole in the battery,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but oh, you wanna connect to your computer USB-C or through USB-C to the headset, oh, you can’t do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You have to have now two cables running out of it.
⏹️ ▶️ John We still haven’t gotten to why this is in this section, which is that the thing that connects that stiff little developer
⏹️ ▶️ John strap to the headset is another one of those things with a tiny hole where you’re not supposed to put a paperclip, but you probably totally can.
⏹️ ▶️ John And what it does is eject the little stiff little things that are on the side of the headset. And so you can put your developer
⏹️ ▶️ John one in. And how does it plug in? It plugs in with an even wider lightning looking thing that
⏹️ ▶️ John is curved. So it’s like curved wider lightning with many, many contacts. And I think it’s asymmetrical.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think there’s more contacts on one side than there is on the other. What like one more, how many different
⏹️ ▶️ John lightning looking connectors can Apple make? This product alone has two brand new ones that we’ve never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They can’t stop it. They stop making the main lightning connector on the new phones and now they’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re itching, we gotta keep using lightning.
⏹️ ▶️ John Somehow we’re hooked. Yeah, they have all those machines that know how to make lightning connector. Well, to be fair, the
⏹️ ▶️ John developer strap one is, I mean, it looks like lightning, but it’s it’s not like a dead ringer for lightning
⏹️ ▶️ John like the battery one is. It is the fact that it’s curved, the the the the size of the contacts,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s different. And anyway, that $300 strap, yeah, it’s expensive, but it does come with a special
⏹️ ▶️ John Vision Pro logo stamped shiny silver ejection tool that’s totally not a paperclip.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s going to be a collector’s item.
Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are brought to you this episode by Squarespace. They are an all in one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco website platform for entrepreneurs to stand out and succeed online. And they are ATP’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco longest running sponsor. They’ve been with us since the very beginning of this podcast. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are fantastic. Whether you are just starting out or managing a growing brand, Squarespace makes it easy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to create a beautiful website or engage with your audience and sell anything from your products
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to your content to your time, all in one place and all on your terms.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Of course, Squarespace makes it easy to make any kind of website, you know, whatever you might need, you know, showing off your galleries
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or your business or whatever else. But they really are doing great things recently in store support, and all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sorts of business support. So here’s what they do. You can sell physical goods, digital goods, you can even sell service
⏹️ ▶️ Marco products, like for instance, maybe you are a trainer and you want to sell time slots, you can do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe you want want to have like a member area and have like a member exclusive content section, you can do that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too. Squarespace has all the tools you need to start selling online and it’s really really easy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My wife runs a Squarespace site for her store and I’ve seen in it, I’ve seen this in action. First of all, she never needs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me for tech support because it’s all very easy and it is very very powerful. All the integrations it has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the features it supports is great for your business. And you know when you have a Squarespace
⏹️ ▶️ Marco site, you can start in trial You can see how it works for you try it out all that all for free,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no credit card required to start that trial. And you can see how it works. And you can also customize it to look like your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco site, you can see how it works for you and make it yours. So it doesn’t just look like some template, it looks like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your site. And then when you’re ready, you can go to squarespace.com slash ATP, and you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. So I strongly recommend start that free
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trial today. you’re ready to launch once again Squarespace.com slash ATP for 10%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off your first purchase of a website or domain. Thank you so much to Squarespace for being with us since the very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco beginning and for for sponsoring our show.
Weight
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. So with regard to Vision Pro Weight, and we’re going to talk about this article in the future as well, I think, but there’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very good, I thought it was a very good Vanity Fair article that came out, I don’t know, sometime over the weekend, I think. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Richard Howarth, the vice president of industrial design, said, quote, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nothing we could have done to make it lighter or smaller. Howarth explained, quote, this is the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey state of the art. I don’t know if that’s true, but I mean, I believe it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s nothing we could have done?
⏹️ ▶️ John Nothing. So here’s like my translation of that is if if we made
⏹️ ▶️ John it out of aluminum, which we’re totally going to do and there’s no way we’re ever going to change that. There’s nothing we could have done to make it lighter
⏹️ ▶️ John or smaller. And that I believe if you look at the teardowns, they did a really good job of this thing. Just lightweight materials. If you
⏹️ ▶️ John say it has to be made of a single piece of aluminum that’s carved out, they did a good job of that.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not so sure it needs to be aluminum. Could it had been a piece of plastic? Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John you couldn’t. Maybe the plastic would melt. Maybe the plastic wouldn’t be stiff enough. I don’t know, but Richard Howarth
⏹️ ▶️ John is unequivocally saying there’s literally nothing they could have done to make it lighter or smaller when the thing is made out of aluminum in glass.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m gonna give that a little side eye.
Peripheral compatibility
⏹️ ▶️ Casey With regard to peripherals, Vision Pro only works with some Bluetooth peripherals as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey per a support document. Apple Vision Pro compatibility with third-party Bluetooth devices and accessories
⏹️ ▶️ Casey isn’t guaranteed. If you have trouble connecting Apple Vision Pro to your third-party device, contact the device’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey manufacturer for help. Good luck with that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and we’ve heard in particular this seems to apply a lot to like mice and trackpads and stuff. Basically, you can use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple stuff and you can try to use anyone else’s stuff, it may or may not work.
⏹️ ▶️ John I heard some people who had some Apple stuff that wasn’t working with it until they did like, you know The firmware update on the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John devices So even within the Apple realm you have to make sure your keyboards firmware is updated
⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, if you’re wondering how to do that, you can google for it But uh, like since I use my apple keyboard plugged
⏹️ ▶️ John in Apparently it will never do a firmware update unless it’s connected through bluetooth So you have
⏹️ ▶️ John to like unplug it connect it through bluetooth And I think like go to the system settings or something and it will update
⏹️ ▶️ John the firmware then you can plug it back in Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey interesting. Yeah, I didn’t know that. That’s fascinating.
Virtual Display compatibility
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Speaking of your piece of garbage computer, John, Apple Vision Pro’s virtual display feature
⏹️ ▶️ Casey works with Intel Macs, but limited to 3K resolution. Womp womp. If you have a Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with Apple silicons, writes Apple, it can appear in Apple Vision Pro at resolutions up to 4K. If your Mac has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an Intel processor, it can appear at resolutions up to 3K. I
⏹️ ▶️ John guess I just don’t have enough GPU power in this machine that has more GPU power than any other Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ John Seems not. And then related to that, some people were asking, because like a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of reviewers seem to be saying this unequivocally and just getting it wrong and saying like that you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John use the Vision Pro to project the screen from your desktop Mac. That is not true. You can’t like
⏹️ ▶️ John every, if you look at all the Apple documentation and literally I know people who have taken their Mac Studio and
⏹️ ▶️ John projected it into their Vision Pro, it doesn’t have to be a laptop. Now, when you have a laptop, I think there
⏹️ ▶️ John are some enhanced features like the little floaty thing over the top of it or whatever that you, you know, click into to
⏹️ ▶️ John do the thing. But even if you have a plain old desktop Mac, you can do the
⏹️ ▶️ John mirroring thing where you see your Mac screen inside Vision Pro. So don’t worry about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. Yeah, anybody who’s using screen mirroring in Vision Pro. So there’s the one way to do it where you look at your laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it sometimes puts up the little connect bubble above it, as John was just saying. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the other way to do it, which is much more reliable and will show your desktop as well, is if you open up the control
⏹️ ▶️ Marco center in the Vision Pro, there’s like one of the buttons in the control
⏹️ ▶️ Marco section of it is screen mirroring for the Mac. And you hit that and it just lists your Mac and you just pick it from a list.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have found so far that is far more reliable than looking at my MacBook Pro waiting for it to say connect.
Syncing when idle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving right along the vision Pro syncs data when not in use and I actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have a little bit of experience with this myself So there’s a Mac rumors post that says the battery
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pack for the vision Pro also powers Apple Vision Pro When you’re not wearing it allowing the device to sync your mail
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mail photos and more So last night I was using the vision Pro in the hotel room watching
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little bit of 3d Black Panther Wakanda forever just to kind of try it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out and see what I thought and I left it plugged in overnight and when I had taken the Vision Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey off to go to sleep, I want to say it was that like 80 or 90% battery, something like that. When I woke up,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was at like 30%. It’s like, wow, what the hell happened? And then it occurred to me, oh, I bet it was syncing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stuff, because it seemed like a lot more photos were actually on the device than were previously and so on and so forth.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then I read this in the show notes. So I suspect that this is all one and the same thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and it’s like for something with such short battery life if you’re not plugged in It’s important to actually give it time
⏹️ ▶️ John to like you’re like, why don’t I see all my photos? Well, it has to at some point have time to download those photos And we know
⏹️ ▶️ John that all of Apple’s photos things are afraid to do that unless you’re not using the device. So don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John Reflexively disconnect the power every time you stop using it because then it will never have time to download your photos Because you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John either using it or it’s literally powered off.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is that the vision Pro version of force quitting all your apps? on the iPhone.
⏹️ ▶️ John have a story about that a little bit later too. Oh no. That’s not good.
Throttling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey With regard to performance throttling, Apple is trying to get ahead of the gate, apparently.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple Vision Pro has built-in software and hardware systems that help reduce performance impacts that may be noticed in certain
⏹️ ▶️ Casey conditions, such as a battery with a low state of charge, a high peak power situation, or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a chemically aged battery. The system is automatic, always on, and works to provide the best possible performance.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Power needs are dynamically monitored, and performance is managed to address these needs in real time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey allows Apple Vision Pro to balance and reduce performance impacts as much as possible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The user may or may not notice the effects on device, which may be temporary. Depending on the device battery
⏹️ ▶️ Casey state and the tasks that your Apple Vision Pro is handling, some examples of these effects might include longer app launch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey times, lower frame rates, reduced wireless data throughput, screen dimming, or lower speaker volume.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If your device performance has been impacted by an aged battery and you would like to get help with the replacement, contact Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John support. I feel like they’re really covering their bases here. We’re just like, it could get hot and run low on battery and things are gonna get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’ve been warned. Well, I mean, but to their credit, at least the battery is external. And so it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very, you know, it’s kind of costly to replace, but it’s very easy to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Unlike most of their devices, where if you have an aged battery, you know, it can become very
⏹️ ▶️ John And the people who have taken apart will have links in the show notes to the I fix it teardown. So the people have taken apart the battery pack,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s the rating that’s on the outside of like like the milliamp hours of the watt hours of the battery pack, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But when when they took it apart and looked at the actual like little black, you know, lithium ion
⏹️ ▶️ John battery pouch battery, they’re not pouches, whatever they are like the battery packs that are in there. It seems
⏹️ ▶️ John like based on what’s stamped on that stuff, that the the number that’s on the outside of the
⏹️ ▶️ John battery pack and watt hours is 20% lower than the actual capacity. So they may essentially be giving
⏹️ ▶️ John you 20% more battery, but then lying to you and saying there’s not 20% more battery in here, like essentially forcing
⏹️ ▶️ John that battery to never go above 80% charge. It’s basically like three big iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John batteries inside there. So that’s interesting if they’re doing like the essentially the electric car
⏹️ ▶️ John thing of like, this is how much better you have to use. Yes, there’s more battery
⏹️ ▶️ John in there, but that’s not for you. Kind of like how SSDs are over provisioned or whatever. And I think that’s a really good idea, especially for something
⏹️ ▶️ John with such low battery life as the, you know, two and a half hours for the Vision Pro.
Display color, resolution
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John has been on a tear with regard to vision Pro color reproduction
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I’m not going to handle this John This is all you but I will say
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that When you started down this path, I was like John nobody cares. Nobody
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cares. You’re the only one who cares. Nobody cares and then I was using my vision Pro in my hotel room
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yesterday day before whenever it was and I was doing the Mac virtual display thing where your laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is in the vision vision vision OS world and I looked down at my MagSafe connector
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the laptop was charging at the time. But I tell you what, whatever color that charging
⏹️ ▶️ Casey indicator was, it was not the orange I expected. So even though in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey most cases, I don’t notice this at all, even having watched a modern film on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Vision Pro, there may be something more here than I originally gave you credit for, John.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, so here’s the thing. Like, obviously one of the reasons I’m evaluating the Vision Pro is because I watch a
⏹️ ▶️ John lot of television and movies and this is a great television movie watching device. So how does it measure up? And
⏹️ ▶️ John I started down this journey learning that one of the areas where the Vision Pro is behind, not just
⏹️ ▶️ John like good television sets, but also behind Mac displays, is that the Vision Pro displays for all their amazingness,
⏹️ ▶️ John which we will discuss in a little bit, don’t even do a hundred percent of the P3 color space,
⏹️ ▶️ John which Macs have done for many, many years, right? We’ll put a link to the show, it’s to show you a diagram of how
⏹️ ▶️ John big is the color space for like plain old HDTV or the P3 color space or the more modern Rec. 2021.
⏹️ ▶️ John So good televisions like mine do 100% of P3 and so do pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John much all good Mac monitors, but they also do over 90% of Rec. 2020. The Vision Pro doesn’t even do 100% of P3.
⏹️ ▶️ John So for color reproduction, it is not really
⏹️ ▶️ John up to the task of showing all the colors in that modern Hollywood movie
⏹️ ▶️ John as well as a television set. Probably not a big deal, but worth considering this is a first generation thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I was kind of surprised to see that it didn’t even cross the bar that good Mac monitors have crossed ages ago.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this of course led me down a journey of like display specs, cause now people have these, they’re tearing them down, they’re putting
⏹️ ▶️ John them underneath microscopes. So here’s what iFixit had to say about the Vision Pro resolution,
⏹️ ▶️ John as measured by literally ripping out the Sony displays and looking at them in a microscope and measuring them.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re guesstimate for resolution. And I think there’s been official resolution numbers, but anyway, I’m just telling you iFixit
⏹️ ▶️ John is guesstimate based on measuring, right? Is that each one of the little eye displays is 3,660 by 3,200 pixels.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that is about 11.7 million pixels per display, which is roughly the total of 23 million that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John says it is. And the important thing that they were discussing is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John how good does this display look? I know we always talk about DPI or PPI, pixels per inch,
⏹️ ▶️ John when we talk about Mac monitors and retina resolution. But now once we’re talking across
⏹️ ▶️ John Vision Pro and iPhones and all this other stuff, the equation changes a little bit because you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John those Vision Pro screens are like less than an inch from your eyeball. Like they’re really close to your eyes. So
⏹️ ▶️ John all the stuff of like, oh, a good Mac monitor has to be 200 PPI. Yeah, that’s when you’re looking at
⏹️ ▶️ John the monitor from like a foot and a half, two feet away. What about when it’s one centimeter
⏹️ ▶️ John away from your eyeball? Suddenly what you care about now is not PPI, which the PPI for these screens
⏹️ ▶️ John is insane. I think it’s over like 3000. What you care about is pixels per degree.
⏹️ ▶️ John As in, if you look one degree to the right, how many pixels have you just crossed, right? And there’s 360
⏹️ ▶️ John degrees all around you. So pixels per degree, PPD. And the Vision Pro is 34 PPD, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is apparently pretty good for a headset display. And it’s got roughly 100 degree field of view,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is okay. There are, I think the MetaQuest one is a little bit wider one.
⏹️ ▶️ John According to THX, the movie people, the ideal viewing angle for movies is 40
⏹️ ▶️ John degrees. And the minimum recommended angle is 36 degrees. So you’ve got a hundred degree field of view, and if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John watching a movie the way THX wants you to watch it, and like the Motion Picture Association have similar numbers,
⏹️ ▶️ John the movie screen should be 40 degrees in your field of view. So you shouldn’t really be filling your entire
⏹️ ▶️ John field of view with the movie screen, but you know, you do you, whatever feels comfortable. Some people like to sit in the front row.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, so that led me down the road of doing the PPD calculator for all my other devices. I first compared it to my
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad Pro 11 inch, which I watch a lot of stuff on sitting in bed. That only has 28
⏹️ ▶️ John PPD when viewed from the distance that I view it at like 14 inches. Has 3.9 million pixels,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is fewer pixels than a single one, significantly fewer pixels than a single one of the Vision Pro displays.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it has a lower PPD, a lower pixels per degree and an 86 degree field of view
⏹️ ▶️ John at that distance, right? So Vision Pro wins in terms of resolution,
⏹️ ▶️ John number of pixels, probably everything except for color reproduction, because again, iPad Pros do 100% of P3
⏹️ ▶️ John at the least. A 65 inch 4K TV from five feet away is 76 PPD and 8.3 million pixels.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s fewer pixels by a little bit, but it’s higher PPD.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But isn’t that a bit close to be sitting to a 65 inch TV five feet
⏹️ ▶️ John away? I don’t know, I measured it in my house and my couch is kind of farther away, so I subtracted a foot or two,
⏹️ ▶️ John but like five feet, you know, it depends on if you’re in like a, you know, some people have their TVs surprisingly close where
⏹️ ▶️ John they can actually stick out their feet and almost touch the television, but five feet, I don’t know, you can adjust it.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s still higher PPD. Like maybe it’s not more than double, like 76 to 34, but you know. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll link to the PPD calculator so you can put in the distance because the distance matters, obviously. So you can put in the distance that your TV
⏹️ ▶️ John is. Just get out a tape measure, measure it to your couch, and then put in the distance if you’re curious. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John five feet away from a 65 inch TV is a 51 degree field of view, which is still
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit closer than the THX wants it. And then finally, Pro Display XDR from two feet away,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is about how far I sit from my monitor, that’s 20.3 million pixels, which is close to
⏹️ ▶️ John the amount of one of the Vision Pro displays, and it is 100 PPD at a 60 degree field of view.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the PPD Vision Pro is better than an iPad. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not as good as a TV and definitely not as good as a Pro Display XDR.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and I think, and we’ll get to this later as we talk about our experience with it, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I look forward in general, I look forward to the Vision Pro display as getting much better. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s interesting because like, they are remarkably good in their category right now. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are cutting edge and super high end in their category. But this kind of gives you some idea of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like how far they have to go before they’re really gonna compete on a lot of these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco specs with professional monitors like what we get in almost every other Apple product.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, cause they’re so close to your eyes. Like they’re a feat of engineering. Like they showed in the diagrams and the videos that we’ll link of like
⏹️ ▶️ John how many Vision Pro pixels can fit inside one iPhone retina pixel. It’s like these
⏹️ ▶️ John these pixels are like the size of red blood cells. It’s like they’re so amazing because they’re so close to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I need to just clarify here. That’s not you being hyperbolic. I read somewhere, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have the link handy, no that is legitimately an accurate comparison. They are roughly the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey size of a red blood cell.
⏹️ ▶️ John They are very, very, it’s an amazing, and it’s not just Apple that has these displays.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sony I’m sure will sell them to other people once they fulfill Apple’s demand. And I think the MetaQuest Pro has something close to that as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, moving back from the monitor is a big win. So like Pro Display XDR is, you know, or any
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially any retina monitor, like the studio display, anything, any Mac retina monitor with around 200 PPI
⏹️ ▶️ John viewed from normal monitor distances is better, has finer detail
⏹️ ▶️ John than the displays. But that’s because the displays are just like stuck to your eyeballs, right? So it’s still an amazing technological
⏹️ ▶️ John feat. But yeah, they’ve got a little way to go to catch up to our plain old monitors.
iFixit teardowns
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then we will put a link in the show notes to the iFixit teardowns in video form. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they had at least one news blog post about it. So we’ll put links to all these in the show notes. I haven’t seen the videos
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yet. But I glanced at the text in picture teardown,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it was fascinating. I mean, a lot of it I felt like we had seen in Apple’s marketing materials and whatnot.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But it’s still fascinating.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I strongly suggest that you watch at least the part one video. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the amazing thing about it is what it takes to disassemble it. Because it really, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s been talking about how this is the most complicated consumer electronic device ever made or the most, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever words they’re using. And when you see this video, you’re like, oh wow, that’s correct. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there is so much stuff crammed into the Vision Pro. No
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wonder it’s so expensive. You know, not only are they using very high-end components, but just the assembly alone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on this, it must be absurdly expensive because there are so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many parts, they’re arranged in such crazy custom ways, all in a very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco small space with probably ridiculous tolerances. I can’t even imagine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the logistics of manufacturing this. And so it is worth watching that part one video
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just to see all those different parts that are in there and what it takes to actually disassemble
⏹️ ▶️ John it. It kind of makes me even more annoyed that the XDR doesn’t have a camera in it, or if it did, it would be a cruddy camera.
⏹️ ▶️ John looking how many sensors and cameras and IR sprayers and LiDAR things are jammed into that tiny device.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s only $3,500! It’s a bargain. One more thing about the teardowns. One of the more destructive
⏹️ ▶️ John teardown people who just like damages things as part of his whole shtick. Spent a little bit of time
⏹️ ▶️ John investigating the scratch resistance of the front glass. And here’s the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John about the front glass. The front glass is a quote-unquote glass laminate, but unfortunately
⏹️ ▶️ John slash fortunately Unfortunately the top layer of the laminate is plastic and that’s there I assume so that
⏹️ ▶️ John if it shatters little pieces of glass don’t go flying out into the world Right like kind of safety glass type of thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that top-level plastic Super easy to scratch like in crit
⏹️ ▶️ John like I think it was like Between two and three on the Mohs hardness scale, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John not hard and you may say oh I don’t care if there’s scratches over my fake eyeballs
⏹️ ▶️ John what you care about if there’s a scratch over one of the umpteen cameras that are on that thing so
⏹️ ▶️ John be careful with your vision pros and do not scratch it.
Sponsor: Trade Coffee (code atp10)
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are brought to you this episode by Trade Coffee. Now you know Valentine’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Day is next week so you might want to get a gift for somebody and what better gift is there than great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco coffee? You can show your loved ones how much you love them with the gift of Trade Coffee
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this Valentine’s season. Trade’s gift subscriptions make for an easy personalized gift that they will enjoy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco day after day. I love Trade Coffee. It’s a subscription service that sources
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the best coffee across the country and brings it right to your doorstep. They have relationships with over 55
⏹️ ▶️ Marco local roasters across the US, so you can enjoy their craft from the comfort of your own home.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they have all sorts of preferences and whatever your priorities and needs are,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have something for you. So here’s how this works. You tell them how much coffee you need on what kind of schedule,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how you want a ground or whole bean or whatever else, and they give you personalized recommendations.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you can give them a little bit of feedback of what your tastes are, what your preferences are and then you get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a wonderful variety of curated coffee sent to you to fit those preferences. And if you need you can like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tweak stuff over time. But honestly, I get I got them started and I have never had to give more feedback.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Everything they send me I’ve liked a lot and I love the variety I get from trade. You know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all sorts of stuff from roasters I never even heard of some of which I have heard of but like it’s stuff I would never have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gotten on my own just mailed to me as easily as this. So of course you have options to if you need to like pause or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco suspend or resume your service or delay one bag, get a bag early, you can do all that too. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all very, very easy with Trade. It’s very convenient, very well priced, and just really good coffee
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shipped right to your house. So show your loved ones how much you care with the gift of Trade coffee for Valentine’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Day. Right now through February 14th, Trade is offering $10 off gift subscriptions when you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use code ATP10 at checkout. That’s code ATP10 to receive $10
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off gift subscriptions. Once again, use code ATP10 at checkout. Thank you so much to Trade
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for sponsoring our show.
Initial impressions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you want to start with John and your experience with Vision Pro?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep, mine will be the briefest because I have the least time with this, but it is now a non-zero amount of time. I did
⏹️ ▶️ John the in-store demo thingy that they offer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m very glad you did. Did you do the thing where you just walk in or did you sign up in advance?
⏹️ ▶️ John I signed up for an appointment and the first weekend it was for sale. They wouldn’t let you sign up for an appointment, so I had to sign up for the Monday
⏹️ ▶️ John after the weekend. I don’t know how long they’re going to be doing this in the store, but I would encourage everybody, hey, it’s free. You get to try Vision
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro for free. You can make an appointment, schedule some time to do it, and get while the
⏹️ ▶️ John getting’s good, right? Anyway, I went to do this just to have some experience with it at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John The one thing to note about the experience is when they were setting it up, obviously they’ve only been doing it for like two
⏹️ ▶️ John days, there’s this whole big process that’s not that interesting where they measure your glasses and have you scan your face with your
⏹️ ▶️ John phone and do all this stuff, and then they bring the Vision Pro out with the lenses already in it. It’s all nice and
⏹️ ▶️ John apply. but, and then they have an iPad where the person who’s guiding you through it will be able to see what’s on your screen,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And that whole process of like pairing, it was like an iPad mini, pairing the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John to the Vision Pro so they can see and stuff wasn’t working. And I could clearly see that the person who was doing the demo
⏹️ ▶️ John was like, you know, trying to hit a button, it wasn’t working. And I got to see right off the bat,
⏹️ ▶️ John the, when things aren’t working, what do you need to do? Twist that power connector on the Vision
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro because there’s no on off button, right? You can’t just turn it off and then turn it back on. you got to disconnect the power
⏹️ ▶️ John connector and connect it back in. And the person did this a few times
⏹️ ▶️ John and eventually called over one of the more senior Apple store people to say, hey, I can’t get the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John to pair or whatever. Right. And you know what the solution was, of course.
⏹️ ▶️ John I learned this from messing with my son of stuff. You learn this by doing it. I learned this every time I help my kids with something’s
⏹️ ▶️ John wrong with their computer. What is the first thing you try? They’ll spend an hour banging their head against it. They’ll be super mad. They’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John come to you and say, you need to fix this. and then when I fix it, they’ll say, what did you do? And you know what I did. You
⏹️ ▶️ John unplugged it and plugged it back in. You got it, baby. Person needed to reboot their iPad Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh, okay. Don’t just
⏹️ ▶️ John reboot the headset, reboot both devices. Why do I, reboot the Sonos, reboot the phone. Now it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John working. Always turn it off and then
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, that started working. So putting the thing on my face, I had read so much about
⏹️ ▶️ John the comfort and fit of the thing. I kind of knew what I was going for in terms of like how tight
⏹️ ▶️ John should the strap be? Where should you feel the pressure? I tried to kind of make the pressure even between
⏹️ ▶️ John like my forehead and my cheekbones, right? They did not offer the dual loop,
⏹️ ▶️ John so it’s just the single thing only. So I got that as good as I could get it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I did notice, and I don’t know if this is a prescription lens thing or not, maybe you two can tell me, or at least Marco can
⏹️ ▶️ John tell me, because correct Marco, you don’t have prescription lenses at all in yours?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually got the reader lenses. I’ll get to that later, but I’ve been using them. Okay, well, anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John I have the prescription lens, obviously, and I did notice a,
⏹️ ▶️ John what I thought and I continue to think is some kind of reflection of Apple store beige,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the Apple store beige, like the tables and everything, right? Some kind of reflection of Apple store beige
⏹️ ▶️ John in the lenses inside the headset at certain angles. And there is light,
⏹️ ▶️ John like the light guard thing does let light in. So there are places where the light is coming in. I don’t know if that was
⏹️ ▶️ John light coming from like behind me, like in the gaps between my like temples, you know what I mean?
⏹️ ▶️ John Occasionally I did see that, I assume a more controlled lighting environment or a better fit would solve that problem, but I
⏹️ ▶️ John just thought it was worth noting. It would not.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I’ve seen a fair bit of something that’s either a smudge,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I don’t think it is, or reflective inside the Vision Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And this has happened to me fairly regularly, so maybe my fit is totally jacked, I don’t know, but I don’t have any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lenses in mind, because remember my eyes are trash, but the only way I can fix my eyes are with hard contacts. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t put any lenses in mine. I don’t have any in the house. You know, mine is a vanilla Vision
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for whatever it’s worth, so a bunch of reviewers did mention glare issues and you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some, you know, whether it’s glare or flares or both on lenses, that is definitely an issue with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even the stock, you know, no additional lenses configuration, but also for whatever it’s worth,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m in kind of a maybe unusual position here that I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some need for reading glasses at certain distances, but not a strong need. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually can use the Vision Pro just fine with or without these. So I’ve actually spent a decent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amount of time with both trying to figure out like what is best and sharpest and most comfortable for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I can tell you for sure, there is some flare with the stock lenses, no matter what.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then also when I add the rear lens inserts to it, there is noticeably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more. Like if you just like look up and down, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco move your head up and down, you will see reflections on the lenses with almost any content
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re looking at, in almost any room you’re looking at.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you think it’s a reflection, like an internal reflection of the screen image or do you think it’s light from outside?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s internal reflection, but I could be wrong. I mean, and maybe I’ll get to all this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll do some of this stuff early. I’m glad I went to the store because I got to try on a few different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco face shields and pads because however I was wearing it, there was always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a decent amount of light leaking around my nose. And apparently what we’re hearing from people is that that’s actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of to be expected and there isn’t really a perfect nose seal for many people. I guess
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have an insufficiently sized nose. I’m not sure. I mean, my
⏹️ ▶️ John nose is plenty big and I still had that gap.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just the nature of the beast, I feel like. Some people even arguing like that if you did maybe get
⏹️ ▶️ John an aftermarket thing to seal off that part, that it would just make the environment even less kind of breathable. I know the
⏹️ ▶️ John fabric is breathable and everything, but like maybe that air gap actually serves a function. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, yeah, regardless. So, so there are, there are noticeable, there’s noticeable like glare and reflections
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the lenses, whether you use lens inserts or not, but there, there are more of them if you use the lens
⏹️ ▶️ John So the, uh, the first thing you see, obviously after the calibration thing where the little motors
⏹️ ▶️ John move the stuff to line themselves up, is pass-through, where you see the world around you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey McLaughlin Oh, slow down, slow down. We should be a little more specific because remember not everyone has tried this. So the first thing that happens
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when you put on the Vision Pro, if it’s not yours and you haven’t or if you haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey set this up for yourself yet, is you see an image that’s kind of a representation of the Vision Pro and it says, all right, mash
⏹️ ▶️ Casey down on the digital crown. And what it does is it moves the eyepieces laterally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey inside the Vision Pro in and out in order to fit your pupillary distance? I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I both said that right and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John The distance between each of your pupils, the center point of your eyeballs. That’s what it’s trying to line up the things because it
⏹️ ▶️ John really, and when it’s not lined up, you see like a double image. And when it is lined up, you don’t. I mean, you might’ve, again, you might’ve seen
⏹️ ▶️ John this with the eye doctor when they’re adjusting the little thing that you’re gonna look through and you see a double vision until it like comes together.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, that’s that. And yeah, then it turns on the pass-through. The pass-through, I’ve seen a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of videos of people using the pass-through and obviously now I’m using the pass-through. The pass-through is
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of like you’re looking through sunglasses indoors, in that it’s dimmer. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ John that is a software choice that they’re making the real world
⏹️ ▶️ John dimmer. And the reason I think it’s a software choice is that when the UI starts coming in, the UI is not dim.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plenty bright. That is customizable in software. And they kind of raise
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and lower the light level in different conditions intentionally in software. So sometimes it is like just pure,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, brightness, transparent, et cetera. But like if, if for instance, you go to watch a video content, usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it will dim the surroundings there. There’s also some of the environments that you can set are just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lighting modifications to your transparent environment. So, you know, some of them, some of the environments you can set are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, I’m going to be on top of a mountain, but some of them are just like make my room have fall light
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something like that. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of tints the lighting color of the room or makes it. So anyway, so that, that is, that is variable.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you try one of these on you’re like, oh the vision pro display suck. This is so damn It’s not the displays believe me. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the Brightness is not their their weak point So that was interesting to know and oh by
⏹️ ▶️ John the way I had some friends who also did the in-store demo one of my friends Said he did
⏹️ ▶️ John this before me. He did like I think the walk-in thing aren’t actually I think he yeah It must have been the day
⏹️ ▶️ John before me. Anyway, he said hey, I tried it and At one point they had me going through
⏹️ ▶️ John panoramas which we’ll get to in a little bit. And I got motion sick and I had to bail on the demo. And I was like, oh no.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco With just panoramas.
⏹️ ▶️ John My friend is not known for being particularly motion sick and he was getting
⏹️ ▶️ John motion sick and in the 30 minute in-store demo of Vision Pro, I hadn’t even thought about this
⏹️ ▶️ John in ages. Like VR, basically the reason I had thought about it is we’ve seen tons of reviews,
⏹️ ▶️ John all the people who use the WWDC, all the press that went to review it then, the reviews that are on YouTube. pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John much nobody is mentioning motion sickness. And then I hear like a day or two before I’m gonna do my demo, that my friend got
⏹️ ▶️ John so motion sick, he had to bail out of the demo. And I’m like, this does not bode well for me, right? So I was
⏹️ ▶️ John so afraid, I even told the person, I’m like, just to let you know, I get motion sick. So if there’s anything
⏹️ ▶️ John you can do to like help me prevent that from happening, and I was already gonna try to like not wave my head around
⏹️ ▶️ John like a madman or whatever. But anyway, that’s my mindset going into this. So
⏹️ ▶️ John the UI comes up, I’m struck by the stability of the UI. Again, I’m pretty sure this is the very
⏹️ ▶️ John first VR headset I’ve ever used, but what I have seen of course is tons of video of other people
⏹️ ▶️ John using VR headsets like the, you know, they’ll post a YouTube video or whatever. And I’ve also seen tons of video of people
⏹️ ▶️ John using Vision Pro when they post their videos. And this is one of the weaknesses of Vision Pro for marketing.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you’ve seen a video of like, this is what the person inside the headset is seeing and everything’s shaking all over the place and it looks janky,
⏹️ ▶️ John rest assured it does not look like that when you’re in the headset, right? your eyes and brain
⏹️ ▶️ John perform a stability function. And what that means is that like
⏹️ ▶️ John when those icons of the home screen are floating over the table, what everybody says about them is true. I am amazed at
⏹️ ▶️ John how non jittery crap is inside here, whatever windows, icons,
⏹️ ▶️ John things. And what I mean by that is like you’re seeing pastor, you see the Apple Store table, you see the whole Apple Store,
⏹️ ▶️ John when those icons plop themselves in front of you, they’re like a foot in front of you or whatever, over a certain position in the table,
⏹️ ▶️ John they do not move from that position in the table. Now again, I wasn’t shaking my head around like a madman. I’m sure I could jank it up a little bit.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m intentionally trying to go, you know, but, but they don’t jitter. They don’t jump. They don’t move around.
⏹️ ▶️ John They are so incredibly stable. And I’m like, okay, they did a good job with this. Again, I have nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John to compare it to. I’m just saying that, like, objectively, with no other comparison, other than what is a real
⏹️ ▶️ John circle hanging in front of me look like, they looked very, very stable. And it was very impressive.
⏹️ ▶️ John On the flip side of that is the part where you take your hands and put them in front of anything that is displaying a
⏹️ ▶️ John window, a background, a panorama, their ability to mask out your limbs. Not
⏹️ ▶️ John hot. It is probably the most janky thing that
⏹️ ▶️ John have experienced inside the Vision Pro is how it masks out your limbs. Granted, it’s a hard problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if you want to see something that looks all flickery and cyberpunk, put your hand in front of something.
⏹️ ▶️ John what it is. It’s not a big deal because it really doesn’t affect your using things. and believe me, you’re not going to have your arm
⏹️ ▶️ John out in front of you when you’re doing stuff right? I’m sure the Apple Store people would have told me not to do that if I had done it, but of course I already
⏹️ ▶️ John knew not to. Eye tracking. This is one of my experiences when I was doing stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was trying to sandbag a little bit, but obviously I already know how everything works, right? So they’re like, do this and look at that and do
⏹️ ▶️ John this thing or whatever. And one of the things I experienced, they’d be like, okay, just go, you know, see that X
⏹️ ▶️ John over there, look at that and close the window and whatever. And I would look at it and the X wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John highlight. And then I’d look at it harder. I don’t know what I was trying to do
⏹️ ▶️ John in my brain. What does that mean? Like once I’m looking at it, I’m already looking at it and
⏹️ ▶️ John they’d be like, yeah, just look at the X and close it. And I’m like, believe you me, I am looking at that X.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so sometimes it wouldn’t highlight. And so what I would do in those scenarios is I was, I would look at it and then
⏹️ ▶️ John I would look at it harder, which does nothing and means nothing. But like mentally in my brain, I’m like, maybe I need to look at it harder.
⏹️ ▶️ John But then I would just tap, click, which is, you know, the pinching gesture with your hand. Then I would just tap and it would close the window. But
⏹️ ▶️ John the X was never highlighted. So I’m like, so that’s how it’s gonna be. Basically like, look,
⏹️ ▶️ John even if it doesn’t highlight, I don’t know if it’s like the iPhone keyboard where it’s like, you didn’t hit the key
⏹️ ▶️ John you want, but I know you were probably going for that X. So there you have it. So maybe the calibration was off or something, but
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s that. Second thing is at one point I was watching video, which I’ll get to in a little bit. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I wanted to resize the window to make it super big and everything. and moved around and stuff. But the windows controls weren’t there. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John normally when you look down below a window, you see the little control up here and you can look at it and move the window and you can look at the lower right
⏹️ ▶️ John corner and see the resize thing. And I was looking in those places and the controls weren’t appearing. So again,
⏹️ ▶️ John I would look at them harder and nothing would happen because that doesn’t mean anything or doing it. It’s like, I’m trying to conjure
⏹️ ▶️ John an orb and run around the line parlance. Like I’m thinking in my head, like look harder. But
⏹️ ▶️ John no, they would never appear. And the demo person was stumped as well until we eventually figured out.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s kind of like a Mac UI where you have to click before it will show the controls.
⏹️ ▶️ John I did the pinch gesture once, and then now when I look, and in hindsight it makes perfect sense, because
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re watching a video, you don’t want every time your eyes wander to the bottom of the screen, like say it has subtitles, you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John want the frigging resize controls to constantly fade in and out as you read the subtitles, right? And so this prevents
⏹️ ▶️ John that. So just FYI, a little UI tip there. And then finally, they were having me launch a bunch of apps
⏹️ ▶️ John and one of them was like, go to the compatible app section. They had me launch an iPad app. I think they have everybody launch the same iPad app, which is some like
⏹️ ▶️ John a yumly like DoorDash type service, right? So it’s an iPad app, it’s running in a window. When
⏹️ ▶️ John I, you know, it had like a tab bar at the bottom of the iPad app. And when I looked at like the home icon and the star icon or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John they would not highlight because it’s an iPad app and whatever control they were using had no facility for
⏹️ ▶️ John an idea of anything hovering over it, right? Because, you know, an iPad app might have something hovering because it has cursor support,
⏹️ ▶️ John but whatever control they were using didn’t know about hover. So, but I could still use them. So if I looked at the
⏹️ ▶️ John star, nothing would happen. wouldn’t highlight but if I did the tap gesture it would click the star
⏹️ ▶️ John but there were other elements in that UI that did highlight when I looked at them because they had kind of a sheen on it so that’s an interesting
⏹️ ▶️ John you know side effect using iPad apps I’m sure you’ll both have much more to say about that when you talk about using Mac apps which is something I did not get
⏹️ ▶️ John to do despite asking one final thing on basic interactions
⏹️ ▶️ John and I wrote a whole blog post about this will link it in the show notes it’s about spatial computing but from
⏹️ ▶️ John my perspective, indirect interaction. The Vision Pro does not ask you
⏹️ ▶️ John to go out and grab things for the most part. There are some things that do that. You can put your finger out and a butterfly goes on it. And
⏹️ ▶️ John in those 3D scenes that we were talking about, you can manipulate things with your weird blinky hands that aren’t masked out well or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John But in generally, you’re looking at things and then you’re essentially clicking on them by making
⏹️ ▶️ John a gesture with your hands. And it doesn’t really matter where your hands are, which is an incredible benefit because you do not want to hold your hands up. You want
⏹️ ▶️ John them to just be sitting in your lap. It’s way more comfortable. But because we are human beings and we’re used to reaching
⏹️ ▶️ John out and grabbing things, I found myself, even though I knew about this, even though I wrote a blog post about it, I
⏹️ ▶️ John found myself unconsciously, essentially reaching for the lower right corner of windows to resize
⏹️ ▶️ John them. And that does not work. Like, you know what I mean? I’d be looking, I’d be looking at video and I’d be like, now I just
⏹️ ▶️ John want to make this bigger. And we do it on the Macs all the time. Like you’re looking at video and you just grab the lower right corner and you resize it
⏹️ ▶️ John while you’re still looking at the video. I found myself reaching my hand out to the very real
⏹️ ▶️ John looking lower right corner of the video player and trying to pinch it with my hand and drag it out
⏹️ ▶️ John to make it bigger. And I did this more than once. And both times I’m like, why isn’t this working? And I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ John of course it’s not gonna work. That’s not how this UI works. So that was a, I kind of wish it
⏹️ ▶️ John did work that way, because that would be super awesome. But this is another thing that everyone is saying, which is like, you have to get used to the idea
⏹️ ▶️ John that you literally have to look at everything you manipulate, which is not how we work in the real world. I mean, I hardly ever look at my mouse.
⏹️ ▶️ John And even when I’m using my mouse, sometimes I’m not looking at the cursor, because I know where the cursor is, and I’m using it to resize while I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John looking somewhere else. So that was interesting and embarrassing. And we were kind of like when I finished
⏹️ ▶️ John the scroll a paper magazine
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco pinched his paper magazine and it does not
⏹️ ▶️ John work. Panoramas was the next thing. That’s just the panoramas that you take with your iPhone,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And they look cool because they wrap around you. Panoramas. What will what they
⏹️ ▶️ John show you is something that I found was one of the defining characteristics of this device. This device will show
⏹️ ▶️ John you the limits of the source material. Panoramas do not have enough resolution. And
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco this is like the
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple demo panorama. So whatever this panorama was taken on, it’s the best panoramas provided. This is not mine, these are
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s. It does not have enough resolution to look really cool. But that’s not the worst
⏹️ ▶️ John thing about it. Because the next thing we did was environments where you turn the little dial and you can be,
⏹️ ▶️ John wherever that place is with the lake and the mountains, or you could be on the moon, or you can be stuff like that. And
⏹️ ▶️ John for someone who has never been in VR before, this, and this was towards the end of the demo,
⏹️ ▶️ John This is where we start what I would call the convincing phase of the demo, because all the rest of the stars
⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, you’ve got windows and looks real cool. But if you don’t know about the technology involved, it’s not that impressive. Once you turn
⏹️ ▶️ John that dial, you might be thinking if you’ve never used a VR headset or if you’ve never used Vision Pro, you’re going to turn that dial and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John going to show a big wraparound picture of a mountain. That is not what’s going to happen.
⏹️ ▶️ John What it’s going to show is what looks to you for all the world like a real mountain
⏹️ ▶️ John and a lake. And it’s just 3D like we’ve all I went to
⏹️ ▶️ John Captain EO when I was a kid at Epcot. I’ve seen 3D movies. It’s just showing a different picture to each
⏹️ ▶️ John eye. They had like those what are they called things in like the 1900s that you’d hold up
⏹️ ▶️ John to your face. There’s stereoscopes. Yeah, there’s some some other word for them, right? Showing a different picture to
⏹️ ▶️ John each of your eyes is not a new human technology. What is new, I think, is
⏹️ ▶️ John showing each eye 11 million pixels the size of red blood cells in front of your eyes. And that does
⏹️ ▶️ John actually make a difference. The difference between looking at a panorama in this thing and
⏹️ ▶️ John turning on one of those environments is huge. And now it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s probably going to be like, I don’t know, think of anything that happened in my lifetime, a color television,
⏹️ ▶️ John high definition television. I remember when I first saw a high definition television that I was super impressed
⏹️ ▶️ John by it, but the impression being impressed fades and it just becomes, you know, a thing you’re used to. that
⏹️ ▶️ John will happen with this as well. But right now, we’re in the impress phase. And, and
⏹️ ▶️ John it was something that I had never seen before, like literally never seen before, because when have
⏹️ ▶️ John I ever had that many pixels in front of my eyes, without some weird dimming or polarized lenses or like
⏹️ ▶️ John flickering thing or whatever. There is no comparison in any experience that I have ever had of
⏹️ ▶️ John seeing something with that high fidelity in stereo. it really
⏹️ ▶️ John did feel very different than looking at a big wraparound picture. And there’s just no way
⏹️ ▶️ John to express that in an ad or a YouTube video or anything like that. You have to see it yourself. And then they
⏹️ ▶️ John really cranked it up and they were showing like the spatial video from the iPhone 15 Pro and spatial video from the Vision
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro. I think in that order because the 15 Pro wasn’t as good because the cameras aren’t that far apart and the resolution
⏹️ ▶️ John is low and the frame rate is low. The spatial video from Vision Pro does better. And then to top it
⏹️ ▶️ John all off, they do what I think was described that the people at the App Store like a script that they’re essentially reading from the iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they actually described it as 8k. I don’t know what that means in this context but the 8k 360
⏹️ ▶️ John degree spatial video of like Alicia Keys singing to you or a shark swimming
⏹️ ▶️ John up to you or a rhino and again there is no
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s nothing like that that I’ve ever experienced in my entire life. It’s just two really high resolution
⏹️ ▶️ John HDR images being shown to each eyeball but if you’ve never experienced it you
⏹️ ▶️ John should and eventually you will don’t worry we all will and it will become boring and our grandchildren will
⏹️ ▶️ John think it’s dumb that we’re even talking about it because that’s just how the world works but right now is not that time
⏹️ ▶️ John I urge you to go and try this if you’ve never tried all the big janky headset the
⏹️ ▶️ John heavy thing on your face the windows you don’t care about any of that just go to see
⏹️ ▶️ John a shark swim up to you in this headset when you see a YouTube video of it you’ll be like so what is a stupid video
⏹️ ▶️ John of a shark, how many videos of a shark that I’ve seen when you’re in the headset, it does not look like a video of a shark.
⏹️ ▶️ John It looks like you’re in the water with a damn shark.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And I know that sounds dumb.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know that sounds simple. But take this moment to if you’ve never experienced this
⏹️ ▶️ John too. And if you have like meta quest program, you experience this, you’re already there. You were ahead of us. You’re an early adopter.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I have never done this before. And like I went into this thing, I’ll try to whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John just so I have something to talk about on the show. I did not come close to buying one of these things, but I am
⏹️ ▶️ John way closer than I was before I entered that store. This, experiencing this
⏹️ ▶️ John device in real life is very persuasive,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Like very persuasive. And what it makes me look, I
⏹️ ▶️ John was like, look, this stuff that I’m seeing, it’s a bunch of demo stuff. There’s nothing you can get like this. It’s not a big deal.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, but you immediately see like, in the future, there will be content for this
⏹️ ▶️ John and the thing will be better and it will be lighter and the price will be lower. Like seeing sports
⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff, it’s like just, it is extremely compelling. And also the final thing that I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John say is some of the things they were showing where you’re in a room with people, you see people playing sports or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John it occurred to me also that media produced like this, like a television drama or a movie
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, will be upsetting or compelling,
⏹️ ▶️ John compelling slash upsetting in a way that existing media is not. Probably the same way people felt
⏹️ ▶️ John when seeing something like, seeing violence in a movie
⏹️ ▶️ John in color, right, is more upsetting maybe than reading about it in a book because you viscerally feel more
⏹️ ▶️ John like you’re there, like a war scene with bullets flying over and the audio and surround sound, like the
⏹️ ▶️ John fidelity of the experience can affect your emotions. Well, I can tell you that the fidelity
⏹️ ▶️ John of the experience of now seeing that in non-janky 3D, where it literally feels like you’re there
⏹️ ▶️ John and you can look around, is it feels so much more like you are in the room, like
⏹️ ▶️ John in an upsetting way. And so if there ever is like dramatic fictional content, which
⏹️ ▶️ John I imagine there will be someday in this format, for old people like us who did not
⏹️ ▶️ John grow up experiencing this, it is going to be upsetting. Like maybe in good ways, maybe in
⏹️ ▶️ John bad ways, but like viscerally, like imagine if there’s like a play that you’re watching, but you’re on
⏹️ ▶️ John the stage during the play, right? And forget about stuff that’s not fiction. Like if you’re watching, if someone does like
⏹️ ▶️ John news footage from a war zone in this format, like there should be content warnings
⏹️ ▶️ John because it is so much more like you were actually there than looking at it on a screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John There are limitations, you can’t really move the camera around that much. All sorts of stuff that would probably would have made me motion sick, but Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John was real smart in its demos where the camera was either locked off and did not move at all, which thumbs up for
⏹️ ▶️ John me, or it moves super duper slowly. And by the way, once the camera did move, like they had one where it’s like the
⏹️ ▶️ John camera was moving like the Apple TV screensavers where, you know, like whatever they’re flying is going super slow towards
⏹️ ▶️ John an island in Hawaii or something. The camera was moving it like really slow. If you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John seen that screensaver, like not fast at all. It moved three inches and I felt like I was like,
⏹️ ▶️ John had been dropped out of a helicopter. Like that stinking stomach feeling, or like if you’ve ever done the Soarin’ Ride
⏹️ ▶️ John at Epcot or whatever, multiply that by like 100 and it was moving like a half a mile an hour. I can only imagine
⏹️ ▶️ John looking at like going on a rollercoaster in this thing or flying in a plane or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was something else. And I know this is all a tad for everybody who tried this W2WC. Everyone’s had it for a week. I used to think for 30
⏹️ ▶️ John minutes, who cares? But all I’m going to tell you is that if you have not ever experienced HDR,
⏹️ ▶️ John high res stereo video of literally anything, a stupid bird, someone walking
⏹️ ▶️ John back and forth in front of you, you must do this because eventually your grandchildren
⏹️ ▶️ John will be bored of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. You know, just to jump in very quickly, I think it’s important to reiterate or perhaps further
⏹️ ▶️ Casey explain that there’s several different things that were kind of intermingling here. You can watch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a 3D movie and I haven’t watched Avatar yet. Maybe Avatar is different, but with regard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to like, um, Wakanda Forever, which is what I chose to watch, it’s still a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rectangle that does not take up that much of the available viewport, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s a depth to the image you’re seeing there that’s fairly similar to how spatial video works. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey less rigid on the edges, but there is a viewport to what you’re seeing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s depth within the viewport, but there’s still a viewport.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I have to add, because they did, that was part of the demo they forgot to mention. They had me watching the Mario movie, which is a computer, it’s a CG
⏹️ ▶️ John movie, so it’s all 3D. Um… I felt the same way watching the Mario movie as I did
⏹️ ▶️ John watching like Avatar in the theater in 3D only. It wasn’t as bright. Uh, I don’t think the
⏹️ ▶️ John 3D in movies is designed with headsets in mind. In other words, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John there is less depth. Like, I know you’re talking about the viewport, but forget about the viewport. Pretend there was no viewport. viewport.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just the depth data is not realistic depth data.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is more like I don’t know if it’s compressed. There’s something about it that and there’s no reason
⏹️ ▶️ John on a CG thing for it not to have 100% depth data because it’s literally a computer. They know the depth of every single pixel in that scene. So
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not like they have to like pick regions like oh this was the live action and this is a CG. The whole thing is CG. So there’s no
⏹️ ▶️ John reason for it to be like this. But it was it looked flat and it wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John just the rectangle. The rectangle didn’t help, but it wasn’t just the rectangle. So if you’re going in this thinking you’re going to
⏹️ ▶️ John and again, I didn’t see our target there, but if you’re going in this thinking 3d movies are going to look radically different, they won’t they’ll look like
⏹️ ▶️ John they do in the theater, but much brighter. But that is night and day
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and that’s and that’s the other kind of thing that happens. So there’s a different mode for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lack of a better way of describing it, which is immersive is I think the key word that they use here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And what that is, is you no longer have a viewport or not in the same way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was referring to it earlier. As you move your head, you are looking around within
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the scene in which you’re watching. So in the case of Alicia keys, you know, I was talking to Mike over the weekend and he
⏹️ ▶️ Casey described it, I think very aptly as Alicia Kings singing at you. Uh, but that being said, it is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey incredible to watch and what you’re, you, you are in a studio, I think in LA or something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like that, and as you pan and tilt and move your head around, the image that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you see is moving along with it. It is a fully immersive image and it’s as far as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the eye can see. Now there is eventually an edge to it, but it’s as far as the eye can see,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, when you first start it and then as you look around, you can eventually get to the edge, but it’s all around
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you. And in the Alicia Keys thing, I watched a bit of that more than the demo. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I watched like maybe a third of it or something like that. And as you’re watching it, you can see that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s these white pieces of furniture, they’re almost like obelisks. And there’s five of them or something like that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stationed throughout the studio. And come to realize those are the 360 cameras, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over time, and they don’t show this in the demo, they switch between these different points of view.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And in every one of them, you can turn your head left and right. And the sound which you haven’t mentioned yet, john, but the sound coming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from these earpods, it is not as good as AirPods
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro, at least, but it is astonishingly good. And also the the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey surround the foe surround is astonishingly good given that you’ve got these two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ear pods that are solid, you know, a couple of centimeters away from your ears. It is very, very good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But anyway, so yeah, there’s these immersive experiences. I watched the Alicia Keys one I watched the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it’s called Highline or something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John It’s about walking one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, the tightrope walking one. And then there’s a dinosaur one. And I think that might have been all I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey saw. But they’re incredible. They’re just mind shatteringly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good, because it’s like you are in that scene, you are there in a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very different way for me, anyhow, in a very different way than spatial video, like spatial video, you can say,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, yeah, that’s about what it looked like, isn’t it? It’s that’s kind of similar to what it was like, whereas with immersive,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re friggin there. It’s absolutely unreal.
⏹️ ▶️ John Spatial video is another example of showing limitations of the source material is definitely on the iPhone where it’s like, I think it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John 1080p, 30 frames per second or something. It’s not high resolution.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, it’s not that much better from the Vision Pro. I think it’s actually roughly the same specs. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has better spacing. Right, but the Vision Pro has
⏹️ ▶️ John the cameras farther apart. Like the cameras are eye width apart and I feel like that does make a difference. Or it could have
⏹️ ▶️ John also, I mean, Apple is providing this media, so I didn’t, you know, whatever, maybe they just had better lighting conditions for the,
⏹️ ▶️ John like the one I saw was the birthday one where they put the cake real close to you. Those were not nearly the
⏹️ ▶️ John experience of seeing the shark swim towards you in the water or whatever. But I saw that and I said,
⏹️ ▶️ John we need to start shooting janky iPhone 15 Pro video of my kids right now,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Even though it’s gonna be janky, it’s not gonna look as good as the cool stuff, but like, look, it’s literally
⏹️ ▶️ John better than nothing. We have an iPhone 15 Pro, the cameras are too close together, the frame rate is too low,
⏹️ ▶️ John and still we should shoot some of it. Not all of it, we should still take regular video at 4K and everything, but I want
⏹️ ▶️ John to have some of this. So that was convincing enough to let me know, it’s gonna be like, unlike live photos in portrait
⏹️ ▶️ John mode and other stuff that Apple introduced that I have no interest in, I’m going to do this. If
⏹️ ▶️ John my kids will let me, I won’t tell them I’m doing it. Even though I know this is the worst version of this this is ever gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ John because it is more emotionally connecting than seeing a flat photo in
⏹️ ▶️ John some cases, right? And so I wanna have both. I wanna have high quality flat photos. I wanna have good high resolution video
⏹️ ▶️ John and audio. And I wanna have some of this spatial 3D stuff. That’s why I think when I look at
⏹️ ▶️ John this, like my mind just shot forward and I’m like, This is gonna be so boring to my grandkids, right? This
⏹️ ▶️ John be something that’s in the world. Just like high definition television is not something my children think about
⏹️ ▶️ John at all, but I was so impressed when I saw the first high definition CRT television, like, wow, it looks like it’s real.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s this moment for me. And like the sports stuff, right? Like it’s not gonna replace
⏹️ ▶️ John everything in the whole world, but it’s compelling enough that as soon as
⏹️ ▶️ John people see this, they’re going to say, I will make a place for this in my life. just like we’ve all made a place for television
⏹️ ▶️ John and the internet and computers and all the other things that we have that we don’t use 24 hours a day and
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t consume our entire lives, but we make a place for them because they do something that
⏹️ ▶️ John nothing has done in the same way before or don’t do it as well, right? So this, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John showing a high resolution picture to each eye, I feel like is the obvious next
⏹️ ▶️ John step in visual stuff and we’ve been trying to do it for ages and this is not the first VR headset and I’m sorry if this
⏹️ ▶️ John sounds stupid for people who’ve been using their MetaQuest for years and years and already know all this, but this is my
⏹️ ▶️ John first experience with it. And just so happened my first experience was with these insanely high resolution screens
⏹️ ▶️ John and a really solid, like coherent experience.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey With regard to the demo or well, pickup experience, I had an 8.30 appointment at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the local Apple store and our Apple store is tiny. All the people that work there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are extremely nice and I really enjoy them in the rare occasions I go in and chit-chat with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them. But they refer to themselves as like, you know, the Wild West, because this is not the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fifth Avenue store, which I was in yesterday. This is not the Soho store, which I walked by yesterday. You know, this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is not the Grand Central store, which you and I were in a couple of months ago. Like, this is a very tiny store. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought, well, I’ll just show up early, because, you know, they never turn me away for iPhone stuff. They’re not going to turn me away now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I walk in, I say, hey, you know, I’m early, but I have an 830 appointment. They said, wonderful. We’ll see you at 830. Oh, OK. Really? Yes.
⏹️ ▶️ John never tell them the time of your appointment just say you have an appointment.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For whatever it’s worth like I also went to a very small like a Long Island store to pick mine up my appointment
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was at 2 p.m. I showed up at about 8 30 because I like I had something to do later
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the day and so I show up I’m like I’m like I hope they’ll take me like
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think they even know what time your appointment is for I think they just know your day so you just give them your name and never tell them the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well cuz I mean because I showed up and you know because my store was also kind of the Wild West because Long Island
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the south of the north, it was empty. Like there was, not only was there no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco line, there was almost no one in the store. And this was only 30 minutes after they had opened on launch day.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So the funniest thing about the store was as I’m walking up to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, and like you said, Marco, it was mostly empty. I mean, it was busy for 8.30 in the morning since it doesn’t typically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey open until 10, but given that it was the launch of a brand new Apple product, it was effectively
⏹️ ▶️ Casey empty. And as I’m walking in and I see off to the side, oh, that’s funny.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They had all the bollards or whatever you call it, you know, the like line management stuff. It’s the crowd control
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. It was all still on the cart they used to bring it in and out, but it was clear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they were prepared for a line that never showed up.
⏹️ ▶️ John When I was talking with the Apple Store person who gave my demo, they offered the same exact thing as I was commenting on how many people
⏹️ ▶️ John in the store. And they said, yeah, on launch weekend, we had the line thingies set up
⏹️ ▶️ John And we just ended up taking them down because we didn’t need them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because for all, you know, because we were like you’re saying, like we were planning on this to be like an iPhone launch in our minds.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But you know, you don’t realize the scale of iPhone launches. And then, you know, when they’re now launching this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco brand new thing, that’s just a totally different scale product. You
⏹️ ▶️ John the people, people don’t even know that they want it. And also, they do know it’s $3,500. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly. So I go in, they tell me and they’re very kind about it. But they basically say, look, you’re gonna have to wait. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey chit-chatting with another person that was waiting for an 8.30 appointment. I’m chit-chatting with some of the Apple people, whatever, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, at 8.30, they say, okay, you know, it’s demo time. And I’m like, okay. And I didn’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I kind of wanted to get a marketing demo, but it seemed odd to me. Like I’ve already bought the frigging thing. Like, why am I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doing a demo? And I think the reality of the situation, which I figured out after the fact,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey based on talking with a couple of other people that went to other stores and my own store in, in just piecing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everything together, I think they wanted to do the demo in in part to show you how all this works,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but also to do a fit check. But apparently you could have opted out of the demo if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really forceful about it, but they would all but force you to do a fit check, to go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey off to the side, try on an example of a Vision Pro with the light shield and whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that your app says you need. And they would take a look at it. And then if you pass the fit check, then they’ll give
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you your device and off you go.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that makes perfect sense. They’ve got you there in person anyway, and they don’t know how well this whole face scanning
⏹️ ▶️ John thing working for people who are doing it at home. So yeah, it makes sense.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, for whatever it’s worth, I actually did exactly that. I opted out of the full demo because, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I knew I, you know, I’d already had some time with it with the lab. I attended a lab. And then I also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco knew that, like, you know, I was going to get at home and just play with it all the time anyway. So I’m like, you know, I and I knew I kind of knew like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco OK, they’re gonna go through the press demo. I’ve heard this press demo a thousand times. I’ve seen the video of the of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the actor going through it. They posted a few days earlier, They were like, I don’t need to go through this again. But the staff at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my store was extremely nice and extremely accommodating. And again, there was not a lot of other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people there, so they had a lot of time to deal with me being weird. And so I did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just the fit check. I didn’t have the full walkthrough demo. I just did the fit check. And you go through,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you do the eye setup, and you kind of just see how it feels and see how it sits on your face and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I actually had them bring out a couple of different cushions, as I mentioned earlier. So I went through a process of trying a couple of different combinations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of things, but they were delightful and I was out of there probably in 20 minutes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Speaking of fit though, there’s one thing I forgot to mention. When I took the thing off at the end of the demo, there was sweat
⏹️ ▶️ John all around that thing. Like the little, when they did give you the in-store demos, they put kind of like a, I don’t know, some kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of like one of those tissue thin things like that you would put on a public toilet seat or whatever around the,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a tasteful Apple one, don’t worry about it. But anyway, they put some removable stuff around the squishy face
⏹️ ▶️ John cushion thing. And I for sure sweated straight through that. I didn’t think I was sweating that much.
⏹️ ▶️ John When I was in it, it didn’t feel like I was sweating. And I can’t judge comfort in a half an
⏹️ ▶️ John hour, though I will say that I did not really like, as someone who doesn’t like AirPod Pros
⏹️ ▶️ John as they go in my ears, I’m not a big fan of having that thing strapped to my face. Not because it’s heavy, but because it presses against my face.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not a fan. But I also sweat way into those little thingies. I never
⏹️ ▶️ John did get motion sick. I didn’t have any problem with that. But I was in an indoor controlled environment.
⏹️ ▶️ John I wasn’t overdressed, and I didn’t even realize I was sweating until I took it off. I’m like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s some moisture evaporating on a big ring around.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I felt like I should apologize to them
⏹️ ▶️ John for sweating through the thing, but I guess they’ll just take it in the back, peel the thing off and you know, if you’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John do one of these demos, maybe go now. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I asked them about like, you know, like the logistics of, you know, how are they, how are they like doing stuff between people and everything? And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they basically just said like, they just have this whole process to go through in the back of sanitizing everything between each person,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because you know, it would be, it would be a little cumbersome and wasteful to have every single person get a whole new eye cushion just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just for sizing. Yeah, no, they’re thirty bucks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, exactly. So they do have like a set of ones that they reuse and they just clean them somehow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and for the implication was it was fairly involved.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. It’s like at the bowling alley where they spray in the shoes. Same thing. Wow.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then what’s interesting is like the one they bring out for you to test the fit with. That’s not the one that you walk out of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco store with. They have the set of them that they test the fits with and then they make sure your box
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has the right stuff in it and send you home with that box.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, which is actually the perfect segue because when it eventually becomes my turn at 830
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or 835 or whatever, I go and I sit and there’s somebody there with I think it was an iPad mini, which is what John was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talking about, which is going to mirror what’s going on on the Vision Pro that I’m using. And I explained to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them, oh, look, I’ve done the lab experience and I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tell you anything about it, but I can tell you enough that I can do the eye tracking. You don’t need to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tell me about all that. I just do like the video related portions of the demo. You know, the get me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey through, I don’t need the window management stuff, just get me the good stuff. And the dude was totally chill. I was like, yeah, absolutely, no worries.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It took something like half an hour for me to get my Bespoke Vision
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro to try. This isn’t the one I bought, to try. And it does come on a delightful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey little platter, which is very, very cool and looks neat. But they bring it out. It took forever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for them to get me mine. And I think reading between the lines based on what I overheard and what I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey able to glean from the Apple employee, it seemed like our particular store only had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a couple, I’m filling in some blanks here, but only had a couple of light seals in each size or in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the light seal and the cushion or whatever in each size. And it seems like every damn person that was doing a demo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at 8.30 or 8.30-ish at the store I was in all wanted the same one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John And so- Size 11
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly. And so what ended up happening was there was effectively queue just to get a light
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shield, light shield, or whatever the heck it’s called. I always get it wrong. But to get the the the shield or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in cushion that I needed, because everyone else was using it at the same time, they were starting to get not with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me at all, they were super chill with me, but they were starting to get pretty frustrated about the fact that it was taking so long. And it did. And it was, it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not a delightful experience, like the store people made it as great as they could, but it was not great. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyway, so I do my demo. And then I, you know, go and I asked for, you know, I’d say, Okay, I’m I’m ready to pick up my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey device. And then it took like a solid 20, 30 minutes for that to get put together. And I didn’t realize
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at the time, and Marco, I think you said so just a moment ago, but what they’re doing is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re filling this gigantic box with the particular components that you need, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re sealing it in the back of the store. So the good news is, you know, they’re not making you like unbox it and do a fit check with the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one that you bought. You know, they’re doing this all with fresh stuff in the back, like you had said, Marco, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it took for freaking ever. I walked into that Apple store at eight, I think it walked out at 10 or something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was bananas how long it took.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And keep in mind too, like, you know, this was day one,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey the morning, immediately at the beginning. And,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and, and like the, the retail logistics of this are so complicated.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And again, like you mentioned, like the people are the retail staff largely at Apple stores is delightful. Like they’re, they,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they, they hire very well, they train very well. It really shows like the people in Apple stores are always the nicest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people. And you could tell like they are that that first day you could tell they were like a little bit running
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around with their heads cut off because it was just there was so much you know new logistical stuff to deal with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey i couldn’t agree more
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah and they were you know i noticed when they were going through a thing i was on the third day and they were still like going through the script you know
⏹️ ▶️ John learning the parts of like they hadn’t done this a lot um and i was shocked when i went there i went there at 10 30
⏹️ ▶️ John on a monday i think it was um and i’m like what are all these people doing the
⏹️ ▶️ John apple store don’t these people have jobs Because I thought I’d be the only one in the store who the heck is going to the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John store at 1030 on a weekday, right? But they were doing like six vision pro demos
⏹️ ▶️ John at the same time. So they may not have got the couches, but they apparently got enough vision pros to run a lot. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John all there was in the store was just like one sad person who had a broken computer, and then phone
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. And then just vision pro demo demos as far as I could see. And speaking of the little tray, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the little, you know, there’s a special tray, of course, there has to be that exactly fits the vision pro that they bring it out to you on or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m told, but I think someone said this on Mastodon, that if you are at one of the fancy stores that has the new like colorful
⏹️ ▶️ John benches that you sit on for Vision Pro, that there’s like a little, like a nightstand
⏹️ ▶️ John or a little like a desk arm thing, like a place where they put the tray when they bring it out to you because you’re not at a table, you’re sitting on
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of a bench. There’s a place where they put the Vision Pro on the tray, and according to this person, the tray
⏹️ ▶️ John has magnets in it, and there are magnets in the place where you put it, so it will always be exactly correctly
⏹️ ▶️ John centered and aligned on the thing that they put the tray down on. It’s really important that you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John during your day. I mean, I the only I can think of is maybe they don’t want you accidentally knocking the tray off or something, but
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, they’re thinking everything over there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do you think Apple might be the world’s leading consumer of magnets?
⏹️ ▶️ John Are they recycled magnets? I don’t know. Oh, I mean, probably. They’re just iron. They’re not just iron.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John right. All the rare. They’re all the rare earth magnets. Yeah, now they’re, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Magnets. What’s interesting too, like speaking of magnets, before I forget this one little nitpick,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Vision Pro hardware design has the light shield
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then the pad on the front of the light shield, both attaching to each other and then the headset via
⏹️ ▶️ Marco magnets. The way you would naturally pick up this device, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think in many cases, you would pick it up by the light seal. Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco clearly knows this because they tell you so many times the correct
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way to pick it up with like two fingers. You basically pick it up by like the nose bridge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the top center of the actual, you know. You pick it up by the aluminum part. Yes, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can tell, because like one time I did accidentally pick it up a little bit by the light seal and it just popped right off. I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they calibrated it to the magnets to be weaker so that you don’t, that you literally
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t pick it up by the light, because if they’re like, oh, they should just make the magnets tighter, that’s just asking for an accident. I think they made
⏹️ ▶️ John them as light as they could. No,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the problem is you can pick it up by the light seal and then it will fall down. Really?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes. The thing was so loose that I felt like you couldn’t even lift it up from it. Those magnets are not strong. Maybe they need to make
⏹️ ▶️ John them even looser because it’s not like, it’s under compression when it’s on your face. So it’s not like it
⏹️ ▶️ John really needs much to just be positively aligned, but yeah, they need to make it so loose that it is literally impossible
⏹️ ▶️ John for you to pick it up by that piece. It is going to come off.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I think they need to have it just attached via latches. Like there has to, you know, have a release button somewhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like have it be mechanically attached. have both pieces not magnetic because the number
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of people who are going to drop and break their vision pros because of that, I think is going to be substantial.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s a that’s that’s just a bad design like that that should really be more physically secure.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe we’ll pick it up by the strap and you can pick it up by the strap, I guess.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but trust me, there’s a lot of there’s gonna be a lot of broken vision pros because people pick it up by the light
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by the light seal. I guarantee it. All
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, so that was my in-store experience. It was not stupendous, but like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco had said, it’s the beginning, it was the early in the day. I was set up for failure,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey head to toe, top to bottom, but that’s okay. I did get to use it a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bit over the weekend. I did some demos for friends and that mostly went okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but most of my exposure to the Vision Pro, because I’ve had such a busy weekend and then a few days when I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was in New York, A lot of my exposure was over the last couple of evenings before bed and on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey train, but I’d like to save that until after, Marco. You’ve mostly covered your pickup experience,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but what have you been doing over the last few days with this thing?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I want to start just with the eye setup. How does it look?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What’s the physical reality of this? So again, with the disclaimer that I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do have prescribed need for reading glasses for things that I hold
⏹️ ▶️ Marco close to my face. You know, maybe a distance of, you know, it’s less than my arm distance, but it’s not that much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco less than my arm distance. And it’s a very, it’s a minor, it’s like a.75 reader prescription
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for that distance. So it’s a fairly minor and light reading prescription. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that being said, the Vision Pro, I cannot really get it to look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very sharp most of the time. And I’ve heard a couple of other people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say this or say similar things. So I think it’s not just me. Somewhat it might just be like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the limits of the displays.
⏹️ ▶️ John Which parts, when you say not sharp, like give me an example, I see that and it doesn’t look sharp to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Where I notice it most is actually in the immersive video content. And so I’m not sure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it’s the limitation of the resolution of the content or if it’s the device, but also,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I’ve seen, I’ve had similar issues with the Quest headsets when I’ve tried them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The main issue is like stuff in the center of the screen is fairly sharp.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco As I look at things more towards the edges of my field of view, it’s less sharp and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s also a lot more like color fringing that I see along the periphery of the view.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And again, so I don’t know how much of that is the optics that everyone sees or how much that is just my eyes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is this with or without the lenses in it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’ve tried it both ways. So I got the Zeiss reader inserts that are for that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco range, 0.75 to 1.25 I think. So I got those and I’ve used it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about half the time with those and about half the time without those. And every time I swap them I go and recalibrate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything and go through all that just to make sure I’m giving it the best possible chance. I’ve tried both straps, different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tightness levels, both the regular cushion and in the box
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they gave you a regular depth cushion and like an extra deep, it’s like the W plus or the the N plus cushion.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the Vision Pro once yelled at me that my eyes were too close. Once I inserted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the reader lenses, it said my eyes are not too close. I think my glorious eyelashes might’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hitting the glass.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John You don’t want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. And so it says you should really use the W plus cushion. So I switched to that. So I’ve tried a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of different combinations. And again, I’ve done as much like recalibration and adjustment and everything as I possibly can.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s hard for me to get everything to look sharp, but it’s close enough now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that like, like the native UI elements, the windows, the text, like that kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of stuff looks sharp enough. Like that it looks pretty sharp. Where I have issues is again, the periphery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the view and a lot of the like immersive video content. That’s a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ John Speaking of sharpness and the video content, one of the things that I did when they were showing one of the first
⏹️ ▶️ John quote unquote 8K, whatever immersive videos is I looked all the way to my left to see essentially where the horseshoe
⏹️ ▶️ John of the viewport ends. Like if you can imagine like a billboard in front of you wrapped around you in
⏹️ ▶️ John a U shape, you can, if you look all the way to the left, find where the edge of that billboard is. Like, and same
⏹️ ▶️ John thing if you look down in front of you, you can see where it essentially intersects with the desk that’s in front of you or whatever. Anyway, I made
⏹️ ▶️ John it a point of looking at those intersections and I think two things were working for me here. One,
⏹️ ▶️ John the pass-through is another example of this device being limited by the source material because the pass-through cameras
⏹️ ▶️ John are not up to the resolution on these displays. Like they, it looks kind of potatoey.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s just because the cameras aren’t good enough, right? So whatever, fine. It’s more
⏹️ ▶️ John important for it to be in sync as it is. But then when I looked at the edge, the edge of the big wraparound billboard,
⏹️ ▶️ John the edge of that billboard of whatever, Alicia Keys room or whatever the thing was in, was so razor
⏹️ ▶️ John sharp, I must’ve stared at it for amount of time that the demo person must’ve been like, why is this person looking at, don’t they
⏹️ ▶️ John realize the action is happening in front of them? I looked at the rounded corner and razor sharp edge
⏹️ ▶️ John of this giant billboard that was wrapping around me. I’m like, how can that be so sharp? And I’m looking for chromatic
⏹️ ▶️ John aberration, right? I’m looking for the things you’re talking about. It was so razor sharp. And it may just be because the
⏹️ ▶️ John background was, the pass-through was potatoey and dim, whereas Alicia Keys was being fed from a
⏹️ ▶️ John file that’s on the device and did not have to deal with it, go through the camera. But it looked
⏹️ ▶️ John so sharp. So, like I cut myself on it. I was like, I cannot believe the resolution
⏹️ ▶️ John of this thing. On the other hand, when I was scrolling Safari, I’m like, ah, this text is, you know, this text could be better.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like my XDR looks, Safari looks better on my XDR. But whatever the hell they’re doing with that HDR video
⏹️ ▶️ John and the edge treatment of that thing, thumbs up. So I guess whatever sharpness problems you were having, because
⏹️ ▶️ John if you think about periphery, I’m turning my head, but I’m also turning my eyes, mostly because I was kind of embarrassed
⏹️ ▶️ John to be looking literally to my left when Alicia Keys is in front of me or whatever. I think I was looking at the
⏹️ ▶️ John edge of the tiny screen while also looking at the edge of that thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And sharpness absolutely did not suffer. And also I never noticed, the foveated rendering I also
⏹️ ▶️ John never noticed, which obviously was happening every time I look anywhere, but I was never able to catch it. Some people have said
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ve been able to catch it, but maybe I was just too wowed, but I never caught it like following my focus and rendering,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean? I mean, so on some level, I am kind of relieved to hear that it’s not a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem inherent to the hardware. On another level, this sucks because I can’t get it to look as good as your is it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, people have said that they’ve seen chromatic aberration and people who have like analyzed it like by machine and not vision.
⏹️ ▶️ John It could just be my vision is too crappy to notice it, but I stared at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it for a while. You couldn’t not notice the level that I’m seeing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe it’s because my regular vision is not as sharp as yours. Right. And it’s just it’s it it passes
⏹️ ▶️ John the bar for me or whatever. But people have like there’s a tremendous amount of processing going on with
⏹️ ▶️ John that image that these people who are like analyzing it, but like shoving like a camera up to the thing and fooling it
⏹️ ▶️ John into running. you can see all the tricks that it’s doing. But whatever tricks it was doing, those tricks worked on me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I’m glad. I hope at some point there’s a version of this that I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can see very sharply, as sharply as you seem to be seeing it, because again, the rest of my eyesight is, as far
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as I know, perfect. I’m 20-20 for everything else, just like I’m 41, I need reading glasses for things I’m close now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s it. So I don’t know what it is, but again, I’ve had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same problem with the Quest headsets I’ve tried. Oh well, we’ll move on because this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sounds like it’s just a me problem, which again is frustrating.
⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn’t get worse over time? No. Like if you’re in it for an hour?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, it stays exactly the same the whole time, from beginning to end. Anyway, so otherwise, comfort
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and fit wise, otherwise I have not any real problems with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I haven’t used it for a whole movie yet. I haven’t had time to watch an entire movie from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco beginning to end. So maybe after a long time I might start to feel the weight. but so far for me, comfort
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wise, it’s fine. I would love it to be lighter, of course, like everyone else, but I can deal with it. I’ve tried both
⏹️ ▶️ Marco straps, the little two strap version and the big fancy singular solar strap.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re both totally fine for me in different ways. Neither one of them seems to have any major problems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on me, so that’s good. I mean, it’s probably, you know, I have neither hair nor makeup, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John helps, I think,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with all the strap issues. But otherwise, like, that’s been fine. Moving on to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the TV and movies a little bit, you know, I was just saying, it was actually fairly difficult for me to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watch the, what you’re describing, like the 3D immersive videos,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the, have like the 180 degree field of view, because, two reasons I think I’ve had trouble
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with them. So I watched Alicia Keys, I watched The High Line, I think there’s one more that I watched.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, the dinosaur one, with like those weird like bird dinosaur things in the sand. The problem,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have two issues with these. Number one is that what they’re shooting looks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a 3D scene that you are freely in and can look around because it’s the 180 degree
⏹️ ▶️ Marco field of view, but it was still shot with cinematic cameras in a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cinematic style. And what that means is there is shallow depth of field very frequently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because that’s how things are shot on video. And that’s partly optics, that’s partly a creative choice,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but there are certain things in the video that the filmmaker chose to make in focus in each scene
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and certain things that they didn’t. But if you’re looking at a scene that takes up your entire field of view and that you feel immersed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in, I kind of feel like I should be able to look around the scene and look at anything and what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m looking at should be naturally in focus the way it would be if I was there looking at it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I meant to mention that a lot. The most convincing 3D ones I’ve seen, and I also think their environments benefit
⏹️ ▶️ John from essentially having a really narrow aperture in camera thing where the depth of field is
⏹️ ▶️ John huge. What that means is that things are in focus one foot from you, two feet, five
⏹️ ▶️ John feet, ten feet, all in focus because the aperture on the camera is very narrow and the only light
⏹️ ▶️ John rays of light that go in it are the ones that are sort of called linear. But anyway, like that works best for exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John that reason because unless it’s not clear where it tracks where you look. But the
⏹️ ▶️ John as we’ve discussed at length in the past, the focal distance is always the same. And yeah, it knows where you’re looking,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it does not currently change the focus. Like you could have like a light field video or something that could change
⏹️ ▶️ John the focus, but that’s not how this works, right? So when you’re looking at the video, you look at that blurry part, it is never going to not be blurry.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is, it’s blurry in the video. It’s a H.265 compressed file. It’s playing for each of your eyes
⏹️ ▶️ John and that video you’re looking at, you can look at it all you want. It’s going to be exactly as blurry as it is in that encoded video
⏹️ ▶️ John file. And the environments, like by the lakeside type thing, I think part of the reason it looks so amazing is they’ve somehow
⏹️ ▶️ John taken it so that like everything is in focus. The dirt on your feet is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in focus? Well, those environments are rendered. They’re not video. Yeah, there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you go. That’s why. Our friend Steve Trout and Smith found, they’re all like, I think they’re like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reality 3D, whatever, scenes. So, the reason the environments look so good,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because if you think about it for a second, it makes sense. In those environments, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can shift your head around a little bit. You can shift your head left, right, in, out, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the view the environment you can see you can like kind of look around the edge of the rock that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re that you’re next to or whatever so which you can’t do and recorded 2d video right so it kind of has to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a 3d rendered environment or have other some other kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John ridiculous or
⏹️ ▶️ John some other kind of composite I don’t actually know how they’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah but whatever it is like the the the environments that you can like you know set
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as your background those seem to be just 3d renders of very high quality you know so maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they capture it with some really good cameras and then modeled it after who knows. But those are renders, not videos.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When I’m actually watching videos, I do. I find that I had this problem a lot where like what I’m focusing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on is not what they focused on, and it kind of breaks the illusion for me and makes me feel like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I almost like feel like I’m getting eye strain trying to trying to watch it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s also one of the problems with like the Mario movie, but it’s a similar type of thing. There’s like shallow depth of field in a particular
⏹️ ▶️ John shot or whatever, and it looks three dish, but it’s the same thing. You know, if you watch any three D movie in the theater. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly the same problem. If you decide that what you’re interested in is something that is not in focus, it will never be in focus
⏹️ ▶️ John because it is just one flat video and there are technologies that allow
⏹️ ▶️ John you to focus on different parts like the light field camera things that have like a million lenses and you take one photograph but then you can
⏹️ ▶️ John put different areas in focus. And this is not portrait mode where it just blurs crap. It’s different than that. It gathers
⏹️ ▶️ John the light information for all those different depths of field. And if you combine that technology with a technology
⏹️ ▶️ John that is not in the Vision pro but that Facebook has done a lot of research into, which is, hey, when we know where
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re looking, change the focal distance, you could achieve what we’re, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John what you get what maybe our great grandchildren will get, which is wherever I look, when I refocus my
⏹️ ▶️ John eyeballs, I can see the blurry things like that. That is technologically within our reach, but it would cost you know, $20,000
⏹️ ▶️ John and still kind of be janky. So Apple kind of hit the sweet spot here, which is like fixed focal distance.
⏹️ ▶️ John The stuff that looks best is the stuff that’s in focus and every everywhere. And if you look at something that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not like that, it’ll be like watching, you know, Avatar in the movie theater where yeah, some things are going
⏹️ ▶️ John to be out of focus. Don’t spend time staring at them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And so for whatever it’s worth, so like a 3D movie like Avatar, like that kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before I had watched it in the Vision Pro, I had never seen a 3D movie ever anywhere, not in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the not in the theater, not on some weird TV from CES to 15 years ago, like never. So I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looking through like you know what’s available and it turns out the the three most recent Star
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wars trilogy movies episode 7 8 & 9 those are all available in 3d I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John know I like them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hey it’s just I don’t want to hear it I like them I and you know what I like all three of them
⏹️ ▶️ John same for that so that for the no that’s not what I’m grunting about I love okay
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the third one is bad
⏹️ ▶️ John but anyway I like it it’s because it’s the 3d right so here’s the thing CG movies like I said could
⏹️ ▶️ John in theory have perfect 3d because it’s literally a 3D scene in a computer and it knows the depth of every single pixel.
⏹️ ▶️ John But for live action movies that are, quote unquote, shot in 3D, especially older ones,
⏹️ ▶️ John they would not cheat. But like, yeah, they use a stereoscopic camera for this, but the background plate
⏹️ ▶️ John is flat and they could end up having that kind of like effect that you get in like what is it called? The
⏹️ ▶️ John Disney animation thing where you have multiple multi plane stuff. Parallax. Yeah, parallax. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so it can sometimes look like you’re looking at a diorama, like some 3D things on top of a 2D plane
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s behind a 2D plane. I again, the Mario movie, I don’t know why it looked like that. That must have been
⏹️ ▶️ John a choice they made to sort of flatten out the 3D and to make it look more like, you know, a bunch of parallax
⏹️ ▶️ John 2D animation. But older, especially older 3D movies. I don’t know if it’s a Star Wars movie in particular, but I haven’t seen them in
⏹️ ▶️ John 3D, but especially older 3D movies that are from sort of the dawn of 3D that are not Avatar
⏹️ ▶️ John caliber and not all CG can look a little bit like you’re looking at a toy box with a bunch of paper
⏹️ ▶️ John cutouts that are stacked in front of each other, which is cool, but it is not the full 3D experience. But
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, you think the full didn’t the Star Wars movies didn’t look like that to you?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I only watched like, you know, a few minutes of Force Awakens. I don’t have time to watch the whole thing, but I was pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco impressed by how it looked like because I had heard that complaint about 3D movies in general.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t know if it has that problem. It wasn’t enough for me to notice it. But again, this was only over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a few minutes, but I will say my experience of watching the 3D Star Wars movie in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco regular like, you know, movie rectangle that’s floating in a fixed space. Optically speaking,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was way better for me than the fully immersive 180 degree video views. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t have the sharpness problems that I have with the 180 degree videos. I didn’t have as much like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, weird issues with me focusing on things that were actually soft in the video. Like, I didn’t have any of those issues
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I was watching 3D Star Wars. So I think for me personally, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a much more compelling device for movies, like for regular movies or 3D regular movies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rather than the filmed immersive video. But that being said,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I like better than both of those is the rendered environments that you can sit in and have your podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco playing in or put in your notes document or whatever. I love those environments and I really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hope Apple continues to add more of those on a regular basis. I would absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco love more of those.
⏹️ ▶️ John Same. When I came out of that store, I said, National Geographic should be selling packs of these for $25,
⏹️ ▶️ John they will make a bazillion dollars. Like just
⏹️ ▶️ John environments. Because this is a consumable, this is that you’re wondering what the beer drinking app is
⏹️ ▶️ John for the Vision Pro, it’s this. Those environments, and again, if you’re thinking like, what is it, it’s just like you’re looking at a big
⏹️ ▶️ John picture of mountains around you, no, that is not what it’s like. I cannot tell you how much that is not what it’s like. And
⏹️ ▶️ John if they sold packs of those, I would be throwing, $5 for one, $10 for one, and what is the cost of this?
⏹️ ▶️ John some fancy camera equipment or 3D thing. Making one of these good is probably costly,
⏹️ ▶️ John but a good 3D artist can probably do it. And oh boy, I would spend so much money on those
⏹️ ▶️ John because they are so compelling to just sit there. So what do you do? Like you just turn it on and then you’re there?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, yeah, that’s it. That’s literally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Well, that can be it. You can just sit there or you can open up windows and work there. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then it’s like you’re working on a mountain or whatever. Like that’s, you can totally. And yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am with you. That is possibly my favorite thing to do on Vision Pro is just go to those environments
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and just hang out or do something simple. Like that, that I think is a huge market for Vision
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro is kind of just transport me to a nice place and make it seem as realistic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as possible. I don’t need there to be a story happening around me. Just bring me somewhere nice. Like kind of like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco virtual vacation or virtual tourism or even just again, like almost like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a meditative spaces could also be useful here. There are so many great applications for that, and that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco extremely compelling when you’re in the Vision Pro. That is by far my favorite immersive type of
⏹️ ▶️ John And the little dial that fades it in, they do that in a smart way, so there’s kind of like a
⏹️ ▶️ John semicircular cutout in front of you. So I’ve seen a lot of people online who are basically like, oh, so I pick my favorite
⏹️ ▶️ John immersive environment, right, and I dial the little dial so that I can still see everything on the desk in
⏹️ ▶️ John front of me. So like, there’s a little semicircle in front of them where their desk is visible and pass through they see whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John it is they have in front of them, and then the immersive environment appears and they basically dial it in so they can
⏹️ ▶️ John interact with the stuff that they need to interact with. But everything else is, you know, the moon or like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, whatever that lake is at the side of the mountains. I even saw some person was using it on a rowing machine
⏹️ ▶️ John and they wanted to be able to see like the I don’t know some stats or screen that’s on their fancy rowing machine, but also
⏹️ ▶️ John feel like they’re on like a mountain lake type thing or whatever. Again, I wouldn’t recommend wearing this for exercise. That was the
⏹️ ▶️ John point of this video is like, can you use it for exercise? But the way they’ve implemented immersive environments
⏹️ ▶️ John and the way they allow you to dial it in is not just like, how much do you want? It is literally
⏹️ ▶️ John dial it so that you can do all the things in the real world with your real hands on your real physical surfaces
⏹️ ▶️ John that are in front of you, while also getting to experience the immersive environment. And then, by the way, when you dial
⏹️ ▶️ John it all the way to like 100 percent, you have arms and you have hands, but you
⏹️ ▶️ John do not have a body or feet or legs. so to speak,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco for that when you look straight down,
⏹️ ▶️ John you will see the dirt below you. You will not see anything, but you will see your flickery,
⏹️ ▶️ John poorly masked arms and hands. It’s kind of fun.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Another very useful benefit of that kind of partial environment view, as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you were saying, like the oval in front of you is environment, that’s very useful if, for instance,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re in a place physically where whatever is immediately in front of you might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be distracting or prevent windows from showing up correctly. So if you’re trying to get work done with some windows in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco space and there’s, say an airline seat directly in front of your face or,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or maybe a very distracting or busy background, you will often want to dial that in partially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just to have something that you can like a solid or solid ish background that you can,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can do work against. So that’s, it’s also very useful for that. So anyway, love the environments, please expand
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, speaking of airline seat, remember our question from back then. I was like, well, what are you going to do with an airline seat when the airline and see this two inches
⏹️ ▶️ John from your nose, but you want the movie screen to be 10 feet away from you. The answer in Vision Pro is they just draw 10 feet away from you.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you would think that the sort of disconnect of like, but that’s impossible or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John it does look weird sometimes, but usually because they dim the background so much and because the Vision
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro content is so much more compelling in HDR, like I did it with the semicircular thing. The semicircular
⏹️ ▶️ John thing was three feet past the Apple person who was sitting next to me, but it was drawing over them,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? is like it’s like a Z index problem like in a video game. And it’s like, well, wait
⏹️ ▶️ John a second. If it’s five feet past them, how can it be drawing in front of them? And the answer is your brain
⏹️ ▶️ John just eventually accepts it because you look at the shiny, bright pixels, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John edge, it doesn’t make any sense. But so, you know, the answer to like, if you’re watching a movie on a seat
⏹️ ▶️ John back in front of you and the screen’s gonna be two seats up, it’s just gonna draw over the seats.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it will look like you’re looking through the seats and they’re not even there and here’s your window.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and if you look at the edge, be like this doesn’t make any sense how is it cut off or whatever but like because you know it’s all
⏹️ ▶️ John fake and it’s a screen it mostly works I don’t know what else they could do I didn’t know what they were going to do I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know if they were going to try it like forbid it or try to whatever and the answer is they just draw over it like and it mostly works
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so let’s talk productivity this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not going to be a productivity device for most people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Text input is terrible and it will probably always be terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know if I agree about the productivity in a broad sense, but yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey could not agree more. It is infuriating how bad text entry
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re talking about without a physical keyboard, obviously.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes. And I think that is fair because many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco times, I mean, look, I have a physical keyboard. I have a Bluetooth keyboard I bought just for this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t always have it with me. And there’s lots of times when you will need to enter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco text on the Vision Pro directly for some reason, whether you don’t have the keyboard or it’s not right there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or it’s not working, whatever. Text input is very bad. Now, some of this can be tweaked a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little bit here and there but I think a lot of it is just inherent to the physical realities of what you’re doing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So this is never going to be, I think, as good of a text input platform as,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say, a Mac or even an iPad with a keyboard, because what you don’t realize with text input,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco text input is not just typing. It’s also things like moving the cursor,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco selecting things, moving text, cut, copy, paste, all the different stuff that you do with the text as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re working with it. So, a combination of typing and all of that other stuff. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the Vision environment, it is rough. That even with a keyboard, a keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco makes it a lot better, but it still doesn’t make it good, because still all of that manipulation stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is still all pretty rough. This is going to be a problem for a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of people. And by the way, I mentioned that you have arms and you have hands. One thing you don’t have is
⏹️ ▶️ John a keyboard because it does not even attempt to mask it out. So if you dial that environment in, so it’s taking up where
⏹️ ▶️ John your keyboard would be, you’ll see your hands, you won’t see your keyboard.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. One other kind of inherent problem that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve had so far, And I think some of this will get better over time and some of it won’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is that the eye tracking and gesture based system,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my experience, and a number of viewers have mentioned this, it is not super
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reliable. Like it works well enough in the sense that like most of the taps that you do and most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the places you look with your eyes will be correct. But there’s a very huge difference
⏹️ ▶️ Marco between most and all. And you know, when you are operating precise PC
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Mac input devices, keyboards, mice, trackpads, like, they’re all pretty precise and they’re all extremely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reliable. Butterfly keyboard accepted. But you know, we’re past that era now. Thank God.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So part of the reason why the butterfly keyboard was so infuriating was that even if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would make an error like, you know, 0.1% of the time, it turns out you type keys
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot. And so that would add up and it would actually be very annoying or very destructive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to your workflow if you had even that tiny of an error rate. The Vision Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is trying to read all these kind of real world squishy analog
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inputs that you’re doing with your hands and where you’re looking with your eyes and trying to create
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a very reliable input method from that. And they’ve done a really good job with what they can do,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the physical reality of that is that that’s never going to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as precise and as reliable as the other input devices that we’re accustomed to in the PC world.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I have found personally, some of this I think is habits that I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can improve as I learn to use the device better. For instance, John, you mentioned this earlier, that like when I look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at an eye target in Vision OS, I will look at it and I will begin
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do the tap gesture with my fingers. And as I’m doing that, I am moving my eyes to the next
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing. And then I click the wrong thing. Because by the time my fingers actually reach
⏹️ ▶️ Marco each other, my eyes have actually moved slightly over, you know, on the way to the next thing I’m doing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, I haven’t realized it, because it’s just like subconscious. Like I think, look, click, move, you know. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it takes a while, and you know, everyone’s reporting this, it takes a while for you to realize as a user, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wait, no, my eyes are the pointer, and therefore I have to keep looking at this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing until the tap is registered. Then I can move my eyes. And that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is very different from any other computing device we’ve ever used. So that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both slows me down and combined with the squishy analog factors, it increases
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my error rate. So I’m frequently clicking the wrong thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not just the fact that you have to keep looking at it. Like remember those heat map things where they’re like, let’s see where people looking on
⏹️ ▶️ John this webpage so we can optimize it or whatever. One thing is that you’ll realize that I realized when I was
⏹️ ▶️ John doing like menu selections, it’s not just that I have to remember to keep looking at the thing. one thing that apparently I do and I imagine
⏹️ ▶️ John other people do is, hey, when a menu pops up with a bunch of different choices, uh, even though I know
⏹️ ▶️ John the one I want is whatever I scan them all. And even when I’m about to select the one, like
⏹️ ▶️ John I would see my selection going up, down, up, down, up. And it’s because I’m realized I’m looking at what all the choices are
⏹️ ▶️ John as of what, if I was doing this on the Mac, the menu would come up and what would happen is my cursor would make a
⏹️ ▶️ John beeline for the one that I want to click while my eyes scanned all the other options, especially if it’s an
⏹️ ▶️ John app that I’ve never used, right? And envision pro, that is not helpful, because
⏹️ ▶️ John your selection in the menu of seven items is going top bottom, top bottom, top bottom, and you’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John but no, I just and it’s like, you don’t realize that your eyes essentially scan things to
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, let me especially again, using an app for the first time, what are all the options while I’m going to now go
⏹️ ▶️ John into that menu and select the whatever and I’m going and I’m selecting, but I’m also scanning them all. And it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John conflict because you don’t You don’t, your eyes are for scanning, but now your eyes are also for, are
⏹️ ▶️ John also the pointer, and they can’t be both at once.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Along with a few other, a few other, like, you know, just physical and design considerations, that I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the biggest hindrance to me so far whenever I’ve tried to do productivity work with this, whether
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s just basic email or notes, or even Safari, YouTube, like all this other stuff. There’s so much stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where I’m kind of trying to bounce between different windows or do something in an app, and that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco eye tracking mechanic gets in my way and creates a lot of error. So first of all, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can strongly encourage developers out there, as you design for Vision OS, undo.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Please support undo. It is very important because I think this is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially as people are new to it, I think it’s gonna have pretty high error rates of input.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But more generally with productivity tasks too, so you have pretty rough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco text input, you have kind of coarse grained and kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of not great reliability on pointer input. That hurts it in some areas.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What I think also hurts it is, you know, kind of accounting for that and accounting for the space you’re in.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The controls and the layouts in Vision OS for productivity apps, everything has to be very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chunky and fairly low information density. It feels a lot like I’m using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps on my Apple TV, but with more advanced input and larger screen space.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wouldn’t want to do certain kinds of work this way. What we’re accustomed to in the PC and Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco world is high resolution, highly precise, highly reliable inputs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and outputs. And that’s not what we have here. We have a lot of other advantages here, but those aren’t among them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so the design of the apps that we use has to be totally different on Vision OS.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And there’s different designs that feel and work better or worse than others. and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what we are accustomed to with most productivity apps in the PC platforms is again, like very dense things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco made for very precise mouse pointers and stuff. And that just doesn’t work in Vision OS.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Everything in Vision OS has to be very similar to like a very blown up iPad design.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For instance, one of the questions I had early on with like all of our friends who got pressed on was I asked them all in June,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, hey, how is scrolling, especially vertical scrolling? Because so much of app design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the modern world based on phones is based on lots of vertical scrolling. I had suspected
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it might be clumsy on Vision Pro. And now that I’ve been using Vision Pro, I can tell you for sure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it works, but yeah, it is clumsy. You’re not gonna wanna like be browsing a social feed by vertical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scrolling constantly on a Vision Pro. It’s tedious and it’s not nearly as nice or direct
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or reliable as doing it on a phone screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mentioned that in my blog post, which I wrote the blog post obviously before I’d ever used Vision Pro and also
⏹️ ▶️ John before I’d read any reviews or seen any review videos and stuff. And so I intentionally
⏹️ ▶️ John tempered what I said to not be too sensational or adamant, but in
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco everything that Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John was saying, I’m like, this is totally how it’s gonna be. But I’m like, hey, you haven’t tried it. Don’t come out and
⏹️ ▶️ John say it’s definitely gonna be this way. You don’t know. So if you look at what I wrote, like in the last few paragraphs and the things
⏹️ ▶️ John that I say, I say them in a nice way, but what I’m trying to say is like, this
⏹️ ▶️ John is not going to be like flicking, I think it did, they make the comparison, flicking your thumb
⏹️ ▶️ John on your phone to scroll. And I also gave myself
⏹️ ▶️ John a hedge, but I said, this is also not going to be like 1984 and I grabbed my mouse and I grab a menu, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Because the directness of that connection, even though it’s not direct, you’re on a mouse, the
⏹️ ▶️ John mouse is on a mouse pad and the cursor’s on your screen, it’s sort of mechanically close enough
⏹️ ▶️ John that within five minutes, my eight year old mind, I was grabbing
⏹️ ▶️ John the file menu with my hand, right? And as I try to explain without
⏹️ ▶️ John going on too much in my old man mode, grabbing things with your hand is something we learned to do from
⏹️ ▶️ John birth because it’s important to live our lives and feed ourselves and navigate the world.
⏹️ ▶️ John Seeing something and grabbing it with your hand, we’re all really good at that because we have to
⏹️ ▶️ John be because we have bodies and we live in a world. And to the extent a computer
⏹️ ▶️ John interface can take advantage of that, it’s awesome and it feels efficient. The phone, even better. We literally,
⏹️ ▶️ John we see the thing we want and we touch it with our stupid meat fingers. Flick scrolling with your thumb on the
⏹️ ▶️ John phone, just such a beautiful combination of like a real spatial computing.
⏹️ ▶️ John We already know how to do all that stuff with our hands. They make the images on the screen pretend like they have inertia
⏹️ ▶️ John and it makes sense to our little monkey brains, right? And it is just so satisfying.
⏹️ ▶️ John and pinch scrolling in Vision OS is not that. And
⏹️ ▶️ John same thing with the resizing, that you have to look like that you can’t just grab the window. We’re real good
⏹️ ▶️ John at reaching out and grabbing the corner of the window and yanking it, but that’s not how Vision OS works. It might someday, but today
⏹️ ▶️ John it does not. And so it kind of reminds me of like, very often when I use my phone or my iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ John if I have to do something complicated with my computer, I feel like I’m using my computer with mittens. Like, I just need to get to my Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ John Even if it’s just like to get arrow keys and to be able to, you know, just text manipulation and I gotta have three
⏹️ ▶️ John browser windows and I gotta, I have a file that I wanna save this and I wanna convert it to this and I wanna put it into
⏹️ ▶️ John this document and I wanna put it in this folder on my website and I’m like, it’s just so much easier to do it on the Mac because I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John my hands are in there, in the Mac with like these high fidelity interfaces of the keyboard and
⏹️ ▶️ John the mouse. And you’d be like, that’s not direct manipulation, you’re using a thing down there and your screen’s up there. It
⏹️ ▶️ John is so much more direct than the quote unquote spatial computing of the Vision Pro because
⏹️ ▶️ John the Vision Pro does not ask us to manipulate things with our hands the way we manipulate
⏹️ ▶️ John a keyboard and a mouse. Now, yeah, you can use a keyboard and a mouse with the Vision Pro, and as I said in my article, it could be that the
⏹️ ▶️ John full solution is really, hey, this screen tech combined with plain old boring a keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ John and mouse, but trying to use the Vision Pro without a keyboard, without a mouse, without a pointer,
⏹️ ▶️ John just using your fingers, gesturing in space where they never ask you to grab anything. And by the way, if you were to
⏹️ ▶️ John grab it, it wouldn’t be there because it’s not real, unlike the mouse and keyboard, which you can feel. It is
⏹️ ▶️ John so much less efficient, less direct, and less quote unquote spatial than
⏹️ ▶️ John moving windows around on your Mac with a track pad or a mouse. It doesn’t mean
⏹️ ▶️ John that it’s bad. And the screen, obviously, as I said in the post,
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro can do things that the Mac absolutely cannot. But being really efficient for
⏹️ ▶️ John doing like text editing or moving files around, or even just resizing and moving windows, which you know I love to do.
⏹️ ▶️ John The Vision Pro has a long way to go there. It doesn’t mean that it’s bad
⏹️ ▶️ John or doomed or whatever, but I do kind of feel like, like your impression, Marco, obviously you’ve used it
⏹️ ▶️ John way longer than I have, and I’m glad to hear, like, that’s what I imagined it would be like if I had one of these in my house and had to use it
⏹️ ▶️ John for an hour. I felt like I would feel like what you just described. And I mean, I use it for 30 minutes. Again, I don’t want
⏹️ ▶️ John to come down too strongly on it. I was mostly wowed by the visuals, but like,
⏹️ ▶️ John like if trying to do stuff on my phone my iPad, it’s like wearing mittens, trying to do stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John in Vision Pro is kind of like wearing a straight jacket or with one arm tie behind your back or maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John sending messages to someone and asking them to do it. Wow. Like it’s amazing that it works at all,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I cannot imagine trying to do any of my computer stuff in that environment. That’s before
⏹️ ▶️ John even getting to the stuff that you were talking about with information density, because again, I didn’t have enough experience to know
⏹️ ▶️ John if that’s like just Apple’s apps or if it’s, you know, like it’s whatever, but like even setting that aside,
⏹️ ▶️ John just I don’t feel like my hands are in there doing stuff in the same way that I do
⏹️ ▶️ John on the, and even on like the iPad and the phone, like that’s as direct as you can get. I see stuff, I
⏹️ ▶️ John push my finger on it, I move my finger, like that becomes so second nature and feels so efficient right up
⏹️ ▶️ John until we have to do anything involving text editing, which again is a separate issue. But like the way you mentioned text editing,
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like that on the software keyboards, on the phone and the iPad, and I can actually touch those
⏹️ ▶️ John unlike the one in Vision OS, which you can’t actually touch because it’s not there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And on the spatial design front too, everything optically, as we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco discussed, both earlier this episode and also in previous episodes, it’s all kind of optimized for that like 1.3
⏹️ ▶️ Marco meters away from you focal distance. And the whole system is designed around that, of course, because if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a lot of stuff that’s much closer than that, you do risk getting eye strain from VAC, again, as we’ve discussed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So if you think about it, you’re using all of these apps at, you know, greater
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than arms distance away. And so the design of them is very big and chunky
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also. And you are limited when you’re having things be that far away naturally.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Um, and again, if you put everything closer to you, you’re also not only risking eye strain, but like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the displays aren’t actually high, high resolution enough to make that look very good a lot of times anyway. So you’re going to be operating
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mostly like at that distance, things are going to be placed at that radius around you by default, and you’re going to be operating mostly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that distance. Well, with the information density of the apps, even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you set them to their smallest setting of like, it’s kind of like a display size setting for how big content should
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be. Even at the smallest setting, apps and windows are huge.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So while you have the whole room around you and the whole space in front of you and everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to place them, you can’t actually fit that much on screen, or rather in your viewport.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can’t actually fit that much without having to like turn your whole body around different parts of the room. But like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re just gonna face generally forward and try to fill, you know, whatever like 90-ish degrees that are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ideal for you to be looking at, you’re not gonna be able to fit that much on screen. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you make things smaller, the distance that they are placed away
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from you, it will start to look too small and you’ll start to like, you know, have to squint
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to see things. So this is an environment that is not made for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of information dense and control dense apps. That’s what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco productivity typically requires. So I’m not saying that nobody will be able
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get their work done on this, that’s not true. But I think as a general purpose work device,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is not what most people are going to want. There’s gonna be certain fields, certain types of productivity,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where it’s gonna be amazing, but it’s not gonna be what most people consider
⏹️ ▶️ Marco productivity work on computers. that’s not great on this. Again, and this is not to say that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s no use for this. There’s tons of great uses as we’ve gone over, but I think Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having focused on entertainment for this first generation of this product
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is very wise, because on the entertainment front, it’s excellent. And on the productivity front, it’s really
⏹️ ▶️ John If you want a distraction-free writing environment where you just have one text editing window in front of you, like there’s all those apps
⏹️ ▶️ John that did that on the Mac, like, oh, we’ll fade out all your other windows or we’ll hide them all or whatever. like this,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s perfect because what you can have is one pretty big window directly in front of
⏹️ ▶️ John you. And if you’re just writing text and you want that distraction of your environment and you want to be on the moon and you just have your text
⏹️ ▶️ John editing window and you have a physical keyboard, you’re off to the races. That is your productivity environment. But when Marcus has productivity,
⏹️ ▶️ John he’s like, what if you’re like doing something on the ATP CMS and you’re editing HTML
⏹️ ▶️ John and BB edit and you’ve got a web browser window open to preview and you’re making images in Photoshop and then you’re saving them and then you’re putting them
⏹️ ▶️ John in the folder and then copying them into the Git directory you’re making directories for the file and then
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re going back and reloading and then you’ve got Docker running, right? Like, that’s too much.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not even, it doesn’t even have to be that complicated. Even just like, if you’re gonna have like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco four apps open where you’re like moving data between them, like even if it’s just as simple as like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco notes, email, photos, and a web browser, like that, this is, you know, it doesn’t have to be like a nerdy developer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco workflow to run into problems here. Even regular like office work and email and stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that, you will hit these issues. And again, it’s not that you can’t do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’ll feel less efficient. Yeah, and I think you will very quickly go back to doing it on a PC or even an iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, I think you’ll find that a lot better.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’ll feel less efficient. You’ll be turning your head and or rotating your seat much more than you thought you might. And it
⏹️ ▶️ John will, like, it’s again, it’s why I’ll do a certain amount of things on my iPad and my phone, but at a certain point
⏹️ ▶️ John I get frustrated and I just get up and leave the room, get off my butt, leave the room, and then walk to
⏹️ ▶️ John my Mac. And then it’s like, it’s just, it’s like, ah. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco like flying. And you might
⏹️ ▶️ John be saying, oh, it’s because you’re old and you’re used to the computer or whatever. That’s not it. Like, this is what I tried to get out in the spatial computing post.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, there is the efficiency of humans doing things increases
⏹️ ▶️ John to the degree that we can leverage abilities that we have essentially innately, like the ability
⏹️ ▶️ John to find things with their hands and feel them and move them around. And the farther we get from that, the more
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of like remote we are from that, the more we feel like we’re steering a thing that’s steering a thing that’s moving a thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John the less efficient it feels. Because then some part of our brain is working on that part of
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Whereas when you’re using your phone, which is the newer device, so
⏹️ ▶️ John that it’s not just because I’m old and used to Macs. The phone is the newer device, and yet flick scrolling,
⏹️ ▶️ John how many people have you had to teach to flick scroll? People pick that up faster than they pick up breastfeeding.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just, that was referencing a thing of like intuitive interfaces
⏹️ ▶️ John from like Tognazini interfaces or whatever, like Tognazini, I always get his name wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ John The interface had to be intuitive. And the idea is like, they don’t have to be taught. You just innately know how to do them.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the counter saying to that back in the 80s was the only thing that’s intuitive is the nipple. Like what thing do you not
⏹️ ▶️ John need to be taught? You don’t need to teach a baby to breastfeed, which is not really true if you’ve ever had a baby. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John that was the idea. Nothing can ever be intuitive as in you’re already born knowing it, But
⏹️ ▶️ John our genes are nicely designed to
⏹️ ▶️ John let us learn to manipulate the world around us with our hands eventually when we stop being useless little
⏹️ ▶️ John babies. And that’s because the ones that did that less well didn’t pass on their genes.
⏹️ ▶️ John So we’re all here in the 3D world with our meat bodies. And seeing things with our hands and
⏹️ ▶️ John grabbing them and manipulating them is something that we do not need
⏹️ ▶️ John to spend much mental energy on once we reach a certain age.
⏹️ ▶️ John And almost everything in Vision Pro is not like that. One thing that is like that is looking around in wonder at the
⏹️ ▶️ John amazing things we’re seeing. We’re great at that. But doing the gesture to scroll
⏹️ ▶️ John with the little pinchy thing, so far from Flick scrolling through Twitter with your thumb.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And so, you know, kind of building off the productivity limitations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and trade-offs here with, you know, sizing and density and everything, it leads me into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac screen sharing. This is the feature where you can project a Mac screen into Vision Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco give it a large screen, make it, you know, 10 feet wide or whatever, you know, whatever you want to do with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is, I know this is an area that a lot of people thought and hoped that that would revolutionize their life.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think it’s kind of getting mixed reviews. And I think there’s good reason for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In my experience, I did this for a few hours the other day, trying to just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get some work done on my Mac in this mode, where I’m in the Vision Pro looking at a large screen that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is being projected from my laptop, because I was away from my main office, so I’m like, this is perfect. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco staying at this house for a little while, I’m like, this is great. I can just have my laptop and not bring my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco XDR, because it would be large and cumbersome to do that, and I can just have my laptop and I’ll use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a screen in the Vision Pro, perfect. I’m not gonna be doing this very frequently.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s just too blurry. Everything is blurry, everything. And part of this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think a big part of this is, as we were saying last episode, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re rendering the Mac screen down to a lower resolution to send it over the wire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or over the wireless to be displayed. So you have some loss right there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where, you know, whatever the, you know, the high-res Mac screen that I have on my MacBook Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s being sent at, it’s being rendered at a higher resolution virtually, then shrunk down
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the 4K display stream to be sent, to be displayed inside a virtual
⏹️ ▶️ Marco window on a device that is simulating this window being shown, but showing it to your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco eyeballs with around 4K of pixels each. So there’s a lot of scaling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and reduction of detail going on in this process, in this pipeline. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have found that at the default setting of basically the simulated 5K amount of space,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s really pretty bad. If you push it one resolution step down,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which gives you basically 1080p at 2X, that is better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It just makes everything larger. And that fixes one big problem in the sense that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can then push it further from you virtually. you can push it back to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the ideal distance of 1.3 meters. Because when I did it for a couple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hours the other day, I had the regular default 5K resolution, and I positioned it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco closer to me the way I would position a screen that size. And I got massive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco eye strain from doing that for a couple hours. I felt awful. My eyes were exhausted.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think this was me experiencing VAC. I put it too close that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the focal distance thing, this is VAC. Now I get it. Okay. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I have found is that if I’m going to do the Mac monitor, the right way to do it is to put
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it at or to leave it at that 1.3 meter default distance and to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have it be larger in the Vision Pro. Scale the window up so it’s large
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so that the detail works at that distance and also have it set at the simulated 1920
⏹️ ▶️ Marco resolution which is the one step down from default. And what this results in is a still kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of blurry, fine-performing window that is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that much higher resolution than the screen in my 16-inch MacBook Pro. It’s only like a couple hundred pixels more.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What I ended up creating was a very complicated, limited,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still blurry setup that is only marginally better than my laptop’s built-in display in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen space. And so to me, that is just not worth it. It was, there’s too many downsides, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too many gotchas, there’s too many what-ifs. And also the reality is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having carried both the Vision Pro and my 16-inch laptop in the same backpack, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heavy. Like this, it would have to be really great to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have that be worth it. And for me, this is just, it’s just not worth it. I hope in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco future, if the Vision Pro gets much higher resolution screens down the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco road, which I assume it will eventually, I mean, it might be a while, but if the Vision Pro can like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, get, you know, the 2X version of what it has now, you know, basically 8K screens in each
⏹️ ▶️ Marco eye or whatever that would be, I think there might be enough resolution at that point to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make the Mac pass through like really good for my standards. But the way it is now, it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just a very, very cumbersome way to get a very blurry screen of your MacBook Pro. And it’s just not worth it to me.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s not just the fact that it might be blurry. It’s like the dream of having a big monitor,
⏹️ ▶️ John whether in real life or a virtual one, is that you can see more stuff, like that it is higher resolution. Like the
⏹️ ▶️ John XDR isn’t just the same resolution as a studio display, but bigger. It has more pixels. And that
⏹️ ▶️ John means we can see more stuff, right? And in the Mac retina world, there’s whatever the standard PPI is,
⏹️ ▶️ John 200 and change or whatever. adding more stuff adds more information. But what you’re forced to
⏹️ ▶️ John do is take this virtual 4K window and make it no
⏹️ ▶️ John more information dense, possibly less information dense than your actual laptop screen. And at that point,
⏹️ ▶️ John the size of the window no longer really matters, except for ergonomics and maybe not having your head looking down at a laptop,
⏹️ ▶️ John having a look across. You’re not getting the benefit that we want of like, I can have a really big screen. Because when we
⏹️ ▶️ John say that with a Mac, like I have a really big screen, it’s like now I can have more windows. And you say that because you
⏹️ ▶️ John got more pixels, but you’re not getting more pixels. No matter how big you make that window, it’s 2X a 1080
⏹️ ▶️ John screen, and you’re not getting any more information. So the dream of having a
⏹️ ▶️ John big monitor is not being realized. And at that point, like you said, you could just look at your laptop
⏹️ ▶️ John screen, which is going to be sharper. It’s maybe, again, maybe ergonomically less good, because sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John looking down at your laptop that’s attached to the keyboard is one of the many reasons the laptops are bad.
⏹️ ▶️ John But in Envision Pro, Like, you know, you separate that, the keyboard is down here by your hand and the laptop is ergonomically
⏹️ ▶️ John directly in front of you. And that may be better, but it’s not like, what people want out of the experience
⏹️ ▶️ John is like, I can’t have a big Mac monitor with me all the time, but I can have this and this is a big Mac monitor. And no,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not a big Mac monitor. It’s a Mac monitor, it’s not that big. And, you know, currently
⏹️ ▶️ John those of us outside Apple can only have one of them, supposedly internally, they have a thing that can show two Mac screens,
⏹️ ▶️ John which would, I think, help a little bit because then having two 1080 screens, that’s definitely something you don’t have with a laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t argue with you, but.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly, I don’t know how much that would help, because to avoid what I think is my VAC
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem, I have to make the screen so big, because it’s simulated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco further away. It’s far away, yeah. That I don’t even know if I would necessarily have a lot of comfortable room to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have two of them in my field of view at once. Because the way it feels comfortable to avoid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco VAC, it almost feels like you are using your computer on a large TV. Like if you ever like, you know, wired
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it with HDMI to a big TV, it feels a lot like that. And so I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t know that that would solve my problem. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know how people use dual monitors all the time anyway, is I don’t like the head turning. That’s just why I like the one big monitor, but yeah, I would
⏹️ ▶️ John imagine you’d have to turn your head. And at least, because again, that is another advantage that the Vision Pro has that a laptop doesn’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John or is that you don’t have to take up physical space with it. So if you do have two monitors, you can have one over there and one
⏹️ ▶️ John over here, and you just turn or swivel your seat, and now you’ve got double the information, both equally
⏹️ ▶️ John dense, which is better than just one on. Again, you can’t even do that now, like the rumor is inside Apple, you can do it, but someday
⏹️ ▶️ John we might be able to, but yeah, I think the solution to this is probably eventually going to be resolution,
⏹️ ▶️ John I suppose, so, but we’re not quite there yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so that’s actually a really good time for me to jump in because I have thoughts about Mac virtual display
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and just generally thoughts about the device. I am not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to say that anything you’ve said is wrong or incorrect, particularly for you and you know, the way your eyes work and so on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and so forth. Comma. Comma. I f***ing love Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey virtual display. I have admittedly used it very briefly. I have not had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a two hour session with it. So consider your source here. It has been very brief sessions here
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and there, but it has been incredible. I think some of the difference
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and some of the reason I’m so excited about this is because I willingly chose a 14 inch laptop. I don’t have a 16 inch laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I have considerably, I think it’s considerably less screen real estate than you do. Additionally,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just happened to be traveling, which is not too dissimilar from what you’re working with, with your, you know, temporary
⏹️ ▶️ Casey housing and all that. But I was in a hotel room. You know how often it is? I have a nice 4k display in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a hotel room. Frigging never, literally never. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought it was tremendous. I loved that I could make the screen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hilariously large. Yes, that does mean I need to move my neck and move me or,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, twist my head and move my, and move my head around in order to see everything. Don’t care. It was all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gigantic. So no matter how bad my eyes are, and that’s not, I really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t think that I had problem with crispness in terms of the device. I think it’s just because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I need things to be a little bit bigger because I’m old and because I have terrible eyes. Um, and so anyways,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could have a gigantic, a physically gigantic 4k resolution screen right in front
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of me and then I can put the Vision OS Slack on one side
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of it. This is what my blog post was about, you know, right before it came out. I can put messages on the other side. I can put Safari
⏹️ ▶️ Casey above or, you know, or to the further to the side. I can put a freaking video. I can watch, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, Wakanda Forever. I keep picking on that because that’s when I watch it. I can watch Wakanda Forever off in the corner. Whatever, man.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve got infinite canvas, baby. I can put whatever wherever and it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is great. The other thing is, holy flipping crap,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how does universal control work as well as it does? It is not perfect,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it is astonishing how good a job it does. Because what you’re doing, a universal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey control means you can use your Mac’s keyboard and your Mac’s mouse
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to control things even within Vision OS, just like you can with an iPad, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Doing that with the keyboard is not that remarkable, Like whatever that that stands to reason if you’re looking at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a text field and you start typing, okay Put the word put the letters in there fine however
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Pointer is so good and the thing that’s good about it. Like of course, it’s just a mouse
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pointer Like it looks like an iPad pointer within one window you look at another window. There’s the pointer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sometimes usually you can go between windows. I don’t know. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in 3d space I don’t know how I guess I am looking I guess and maybe that’s what it’s doing and I’m attributing to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey magic what’s really just my own gaze, but it feels like fricking magic. It is so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good. And that’s extremely important because what you were saying a little while ago about needing considerably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey less information density, I think in terms of visual, not acuity,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but in order to see things, for me, I don’t think I necessarily need less information density
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in order to see and read and whatnot. Where the information density becomes a problem is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when you have a lot of controls that are not spaced out very well. The perfect example of this for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me is basically any iPad app that’s running on Vision OS,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in particular things like Slack. So if you think of Slack, and as much as I love to slag
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Slack, I don’t think this is really a Slack being garbage issue. I think it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that it’s a hard problem and Slack has not been designed specifically for Vision OS. But if you’re trying to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey choose between the icon of the Slack you’re on all the way in the upper left or the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey home DMs activity. I’m looking at the Mac version, but I think it’s the same on iOS or Vision OS.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In order to get my eyes to correctly focus the one I want,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I, it’s like John was saying way earlier, I need to like look harder or look past where I think I need to look
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I think it’s because all of these different buttons are just too close together, there’s just not enough space between
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them. And even though the eye tracking is astonishingly good, at least, I mean, I have nothing compared to but it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is astonishingly good. But still, I think there needs to be more or less density,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more space between these different controls. But if you have a mouse, you can mash that bad boy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right on the icon you want, because it’s a little blob hovering right over the icon you care about. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I freaking love it. I was on the train coming back from New York and I had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wakanda forever over to the side. I had my screen, my Mac screen in front of me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was balancing our checkbook because it just so happened that our statement came in. Well, first of all, I’m doing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that in complete and utter privacy because my Mac screen is black. Second of all, I now have considerably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more real estate, so I can put my little—it’s not Quicken, what is it called? Banktivity, who I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think sponsored way back when, but I’d been using the app before that. I have Banktivity on one side of my screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have the PDF of our statement on the other side of the screen, and I don’t need to be showing anyone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how rich or poor we are. looking over my shoulder at my credit card statement or checking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey statement, whatever. I can do all this in a big, huge window that’s kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the seat back in front of me, which is a little weird. I can do that all right there. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have a 4K, an LG UltraFine 4K on the train. That
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is amazing. I cannot wait to be that frigging loser
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s using this at the library or Wegmans or whatever. I don’t know if I have the gumption to do it yet. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was thinking maybe I would like rent a little meeting room and I would be the only or reserve a little meeting room at the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey library and I will be the only one in there and maybe I’ll face the wall so it’s not too obvious. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it would be so amazing to have this at the library. I’m so excited for it. I am
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so pleased with how Mac virtual display and universal control work together. It is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey amazing and it blows my mind. Again, my eyes are different. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey haven’t used it for two plus hours straight. Maybe if I did, I would change my tune. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from what I know today, it’s amazing. And I love it.
⏹️ ▶️ John One thing to note about you saying how you like set up like, oh, here’s my Mac screen in front of me. And then here’s the vision of us version of
⏹️ ▶️ John Slack to my left. And here’s the Wakanda forever movie over here. This is one area where
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll definitely benefit from advancements here. The field of view, like I said before, when I was talking about the specs
⏹️ ▶️ John is only a hundred degrees. And so when you were saying, oh look, I can have all these things. You have this here, this left, this
⏹️ ▶️ John right, or whatever. You have to end up turning your head to see those. Oh yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John On a big Mac monitor, those can all be in front of you. And why is that? Because our eyeballs have better than a
⏹️ ▶️ John hundred degree field of view.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey That’s fair.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like there’s lots of people on YouTube trying to show the reviews, like, oh, it looks like you’re looking through goggles. Like you don’t notice it that much,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the field of view is limited, right? It’s limited because the size of the screens. Like they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not four by three ratio. If you see the screens when they’re yanked out of it and the iFixit, they’re almost kind of square, right? They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not 16 by nine, they’re not wider, you know, they’re a little bit wider than the AeroTol, right? And
⏹️ ▶️ John they combine to give you a field of view that is narrower than you expect. So you will end up having
⏹️ ▶️ John to turn your head more, and it’s, in this case, assuming the information density is all right, it’s not because like,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s not enough, like, it’s because your vision is narrowed. It’s like, you know, pretend there’s nothing in the headset.
⏹️ ▶️ John You rip everything out of the headset, but you still put it on your head. It’s not exactly like that, but it’s pretty close.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like your field of view is narrowed and that makes you have to turn your head and that makes you have to
⏹️ ▶️ John use the ability to put things in space around you. That combined with the resolution things that Mark
⏹️ ▶️ John was complaining about mean that what you could get away with having all on one screen in front of you, even a 4K screen,
⏹️ ▶️ John all in one Mac 4K screen in just native Vision OS apps, you might have to arrange
⏹️ ▶️ John a raid out alongside you and have to end up turning your head because of the field of view. Although that brings up one more point
⏹️ ▶️ John that I’ve already heard people complaining about it. I haven’t heard either one of you mentioned probably because you don’t work like me, but you
⏹️ ▶️ John can layer windows in Vision OS. You can put one in front of another. Oh, you don’t want
⏹️ ▶️ John you probably don’t want to, because as I noted, it does not feel like your hands are in there like
⏹️ ▶️ John they are on the Mac, or at least it feels like that for me. Like on the Mac, to bring a window to the front,
⏹️ ▶️ John there are caveats and asterisks on this, but you can click on places in the window and the window will come to the front.
⏹️ ▶️ John In Vision OS, as far as I know, I didn’t get to test this, you can’t just look at
⏹️ ▶️ John a part of the window and tap your fingers and it comes to the front. Is that right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know if that’s right, but I, so I have ended up with layered windows here and there, and it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cumbersome at best.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something I recommend. Like think of Vision OS as you’re inside of a sphere
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you can put, you can stick things on wherever you want along the sphere, but you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to ever have things overlap each other. It’s terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s kind of weird though, because like I wrote about this in my thing, like, you know, there’s a,
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac has overlapping windows, right? But, and they have, they have always, since the beginning, had some kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John like little drawn shadow to like make it look like one is in front of the other. But if you were to like,
⏹️ ▶️ John take the world of the Mac and like rotate it sideways and look, what I think the, both the visual and
⏹️ ▶️ John mental model we all have is that those windows are pretty close together. Like the total depth of like having three windows
⏹️ ▶️ John is not one foot between each of the windows. They’re like, they’re within millimeters of each other. They’re stacked on top of
⏹️ ▶️ John each other, more like pieces of paper would be on a desk. Imagine that desktop metaphor, right? So yes,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re magic pieces of paper where if you tap one that’s behind, suddenly that piece of paper jumps in front of the other
⏹️ ▶️ John one, but they could be literally touching despite the huge deep drop shadows that Mac OS draws in them,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Where in Vision OS, you don’t have to imagine, it’s literally a 3D space and you could probably
⏹️ ▶️ John take a ruler in the virtual world and measure the distance between them, but it’s so weird that like, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John some of us, certainly me, are comfortable having tons of overlapping, essentially pieces of paper on our Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John screens. But when you have four of them in Vision OS and one of them is in front of the other ones,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like, oh no, I can’t figure out how to deal with it. And I think part of it is because you don’t feel like you can reach in there and manipulate
⏹️ ▶️ John them. Like you could papers on a desk and like we all do windows on a screen. But I think the other part is that just the window
⏹️ ▶️ John management controls are meant to keep you at a distance, right? You have to look, you have
⏹️ ▶️ John to activate them. That’s the only way for the move things. There’s no real title bars to speak of
⏹️ ▶️ John Or like, you know, window control widgets are differently arranged. Like it’s not it’s not set up like
⏹️ ▶️ John the whole Mac, all the Mac and it raises like, look, the window Chrome, we’ve got window control widgets. We’ve got a title
⏹️ ▶️ John bar. We used to have scroll bars back in the day. That is the window frame. There used to be an actual little window frame
⏹️ ▶️ John before they got rid of that. A Mac OS 10. And then all your content is inside it. And those frames, we have ways
⏹️ ▶️ John to manipulate them. You can grab them. You can move them around. You can use utilities. And like Vision OS is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re not going to be doing a lot of that. You can, you can grab the bar on the bottom and you can move them. You
⏹️ ▶️ John can grab the little thing in the corner and move them around, but it just seems like it’s not made
⏹️ ▶️ John to make it really easy for you to shuffle those papers around.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think also a huge limitation there is just the precision of the eye tracking. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the design of the system apps is pretty good to kind of help conceal how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco coarse grained I think it actually is. You know, you don’t have super fine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pointer accuracy with the eye tracking. a lot of the mechanics of operating,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco overlapping and stacked windows requires you to like, oh, let me get this pointer between
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these two and get, you know, grab this edge of this
⏹️ ▶️ John just snag the corner of a window.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and that’s, I think in Vision OS, things have to be larger and more, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more chunky than that. And so that’s one of the reasons that it doesn’t really work.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s like the iOS keyboard where it’s trying to like average, like, well, where do we think,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, I know where you did
⏹️ ▶️ John right? But where do we think, And if it has to make that choice, and you’re trying to snag the corner of some window that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John poking out from behind another one, the right bet is you were actually trying to look at the upper right corner of the front most
⏹️ ▶️ John window and not, oh, what he was actually trying to do was snag that little piece of the window
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s poking out. I snag pieces of windows that are poking out all the time. That’s how I use my Mac all the time. But like, that’s, if you
⏹️ ▶️ John were to guess, like, if you just had an average probability cloud based on where you’re looking, which I
⏹️ ▶️ John imagine if there was like a debug mode, you could see like the actual like giant point cloud
⏹️ ▶️ John of where your eyeballs are racing all over the place and it has to average them together and kind of guess like the iOS keyboard.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but what did they mean to look at? It’s always gonna guess the top right corner of the front most window.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is never gonna guess the two pixels of the window that’s behind it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, the Mac virtual display stuff was great. I really, really like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the idea of spatial computing. Maybe it’s a gimmick and maybe I’ll get over it quickly, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again, on the train and I think in the post-show, we’re gonna briefly talk about my training experience. because there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a couple of funny things that happened. But, um, but in, on the train at one point I was watching
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the movie and to my right hand side, I put, you know, Apple maps watching
⏹️ ▶️ Casey myself, you know, come down the East coast so I could see where I was off to the left. I had messages just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so I could see, you know, if anyone was trying to send me a text or whatever the case may be. And it was amazing. Yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do have to turn my head a bit. That doesn’t seem to bother me as much as I guess it bothers you, John, but it was amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I was doing this privately. I was doing this in a tube that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was not in the air, but that was hurtling down the eastern seaboard at like, you know, anywhere between 20 and 120 miles an hour. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this technology is amazing, and I can’t believe that I can do this. And broadly, I think we’ve mostly covered
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of the kind of different aspects of the Vision Pro. The spatial
⏹️ ▶️ Casey videos are very cool. I will be taking them more frequently. I don’t think it’s going to be,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like John had said quite a bit earlier, I’m not gonna do every video that way, but having some moments like that are really cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am a sucker for the panoramas. I do not argue that they need a lot more fidelity, but nevertheless,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am a sucker for them. I think they’re really neat. The 3D movies in the sense
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of like Disney Plus 3D movies, I think I said earlier, you get a 3D viewport. That’s neat.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would probably choose a 3D movie for the Vision Pro if I had the choice, but if I didn’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not gonna miss it. I agree with what Marco was saying about the environment.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They are extremely cool. I wish I purposely didn’t use them on the train
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I wanted to see if people were staring at me and we’ll talk about whether or not they were later
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on. But I briefly turned it on toward the end of the journey when I knew I was about to take the whole
⏹️ ▶️ Casey vision pro off and suddenly you are somewhere else. And it is truly incredible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And like John had said earlier, take all my money, national geographic Apple. I don’t care who you are. Take all my money. Give
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me all the environments, take all my money because I don’t need to go I don’t need to go on a great vacation if I can just go to Mount
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hood or, you know, Shenandoah National Park or whatever the case may be. Take all my money, please and thank you. Well, not that you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey haven’t already, but take
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco more of all of my money. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my very good offense. Yeah, they’re very efficient.
⏹️ ▶️ John consumable. We would all pay $5 for one of these, even just like – I don’t even know if this is a little cool. Five
⏹️ ▶️ John bucks, take it. It’s like paying $5 to go to a place and you’re like, well, what if you go there and it’s boring? It was only $5.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, that is a money-making machine if you can produce compelling ones of these, let let alone
⏹️ ▶️ John when eventually someone makes a game of that fidelity that you’re in in the headset that’s more difficult because the beautiful
⏹️ ▶️ John thing about the environments is you’re sitting still which is ideal once things start moving
⏹️ ▶️ John around and you know there’s anyone who’s played uh vr games knows the difficulty
⏹️ ▶️ John of the virtual world coming in conflict with your physical world and you’re walking into walls or hitting your
⏹️ ▶️ John coffee table and stuff like that but sitting still in the middle of one of these places is like the platonic ideal
⏹️ ▶️ John of like look you’re in the sweet spot sell me these things for five dollars make a million bucks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. So all in all, I don’t think it’s for me to make a judgment statement
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about whether or not this thing was worth $3,500. Sitting here now, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ask me again in a month and ask me again again in a year, but sitting here now,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is this a necessary purchase for me, leaving aside that I needed, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feel like I needed one for this very moment of talking about it? Is it a necessary purchase? No.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did I do I really want to spend 35 plus hundred dollars on it? No, not really. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is so cool. And you know, how lucky are we to be alive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right now that this is what’s being released? And we and yeah, everyone keeps saying and I think half jokingly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey half seriously, this is the worst of the vision pro will ever be. And that’s true. But it is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey freaking cool. And it is freaking amazing. And I am so thankful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and lucky that we get to experience this, not, you know, we broadly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we the three of us, I’m so thankful for it and so lucky that this is what’s going on.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I don’t think this is going to become the Accidental Vision Pro podcast, but we’re probably gonna have to seize enough
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of it for the next few weeks. Because, oh my word, there’s so much to say, there’s so much to capture, there’s so much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to process, there’s just so much here and I’m so excited.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You put it very well, because like there’s so much on this platform. Like we still haven’t talked really that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much about pretty large areas of it. Like I still haven’t really tried any games.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s not that many to start with, but I still haven’t tried any games. I still haven’t watched an entire movie.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We didn’t even talk, I didn’t talk too much about like photo and video consumption and stuff like that. Like there’s still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much to talk about here. Personas. Yeah, oh you’re right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Oh gosh, you’re right. Yeah, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco entire thing. So we’re gonna be covering this over a few weeks. We’re obviously running a little long tonight, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is gonna be a process that we cover over a few weeks, or probably months,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more likely. And I don’t wanna have to end on a negative note because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I said the productivity angle wasn’t very good because whenever something new comes out, we try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to wedge it into what we already know. I’ve ranted about this before, but I’m gonna do it again because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s important. When the iPad came out, everyone said, we’re gonna stop buying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computers, this will replace them. For some people it might have, for most people it didn’t. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s fine, now we have another thing. When the watch came out, so many nerds were like, oh my God,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this phone I have right now might be the last phone I ever buy because I’m just gonna do everything on my watch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then it turned out, no, we all still have phones, but we now, some of us also have watches.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s what this is. When this was announced
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but not yet out and we were all trying to make plans of how we’re gonna rationalize purchasing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this device by saying, you know, we’re gonna get all of our work done on this, we’re never gonna have to buy a big Mac again or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that’s wrong, but that doesn’t mean it’s a failure. It just means it’s for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other things mostly. There are some people who do all their work on iPads and don’t buy laptops anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But most people who need laptop style work still buy laptops to do it. There
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are people who are going to be able to do all their productivity work with a Vision Pro. but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think most people with productivity work are gonna choose to do other things instead. But the Vision Pro can do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a whole lot of stuff really, really well in different areas.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That I think is extremely exciting. Again, even if I could just be transported
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to those environments and just sit for a few minutes, that’s amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like the iPad, like we were saying, like the iPad has to be better at some things, and one of the things the iPad is better at, it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, sitting on your couch and casually scrolling the web. You could do that on the laptop, that the iPad does that job in a more
⏹️ ▶️ John pleasing way. The Vision Pro is exactly like that. A lot of things that you can do on a Vision Pro and on a
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac and on an iPad, some of those, the Vision Pro does them the best, right? And I would
⏹️ ▶️ John argue looking at 3D video, clear winner. Like the other ones can’t do it at all, so
⏹️ ▶️ John thumbs up, right? And I had a TV that used to be able to do it and it sucked. So, right? It’s like, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a competition among all the devices in your life of like, yeah, I can do this here. I can do this here or I can
⏹️ ▶️ John do this here, but which one makes me want to do it on it? And you know, the iPad is a perfect example
⏹️ ▶️ John of like, aren’t you doing things that you could also do on your phone and that you could also do on your Mac? Why are you choosing to do them
⏹️ ▶️ John on the iPad? You know, like, well, the iPad screen is bigger than my phone, but it doesn’t have a keyboard attached
⏹️ ▶️ John and I can sit on the couch to do it and it feels more comfortable. And it’s like all these nuanced reasons but that you find yourself,
⏹️ ▶️ John like what do you choose to use your iPad for versus what you use your phone for versus what you use computer for. People
⏹️ ▶️ John will naturally gravitate to wherever they are most comfortable doing that thing. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s just with a bunch of rectangles that are screens that are different sizes. They’re not even that different from each other.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is so different that the things that it does well, and there are things that it does well, it
⏹️ ▶️ John basically has no competition. There is no other thing that you own, unless you own other VR headsets, that can
⏹️ ▶️ John do this stuff at all. So I feel like the place in the ecosystem for devices like this,
⏹️ ▶️ John like it’s well carved out. The fact that the iPad could find a place when there was a rectangle
⏹️ ▶️ John that was slightly smaller that did all the same things, is a testament to how easy it will be for this thing to find a place in people’s
⏹️ ▶️ John lives once it doesn’t cost $3,500 and way a ton. Yeah. All
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right, thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace and Trade Coffee,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atv.fm slash join,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we will talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now the show is over, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to begin Cause it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental And you can find the show notes
⏹️ ▶️ John at atp.fm And if you’re into Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Auntie Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse It’s accidental, they
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t mean to Accidental, tech podcast, so long.
Spatial train computing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I gotta hear a train story. What was it like using this on a train with people who could maybe see you?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So on the way up, I was in business class as we discussed in the bootleg
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and may or may not have discussed in the release version of the show. And there were not a ton
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of people on the train anyway, but there weren’t a ton of people. And my understanding before
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I went on the journey was that it is the travel mode or whatever. I don’t forget exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what it’s officially
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that’s what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s called. Okay, so travel mode is, it wasn’t clearly stated as far as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could tell until in the last couple of days or maybe I just discovered it in the last couple of days,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it is not really travel mode, it’s plane mode. It’s called travel mode to John’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey point, but it’s actually plane mode.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because we already have something called airplane
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mode. Exactly, yeah, yeah, exactly right. And so I talked to a couple of people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the inside who indicated to me, yeah, it might work on the train, but probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not. And so, I tried it initially on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way from Richmond to DC, and that’s relevant because at DC,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you stop for a while, and I’ll explain why in a minute. But I tried on the way to Richmond, from Richmond to DC, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you go into control center and, or maybe it’s the thing, no, it is control center. You go into control center
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because there’s like something before control center, I don’t know what they call that, but then there’s control center off of it. Yeah, anyways, you go into
⏹️ ▶️ Casey control center and I, you know, tapped on on the little airplane because I was turning on airplane mode.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t realize until the return trip that no, you idiots, that’s the turn off
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all the radios mode.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I don’t know what I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was thinking. I don’t know what I was thinking.
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, were you looking for travel mode or was it in your brain, I’m looking for plane mode?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it’s because it was in my brain. I was, I knew that I didn’t want to turn off the radios. I don’t want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the traditional definition of airplane mode, but because I was just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey convinced in tunnel visioning on airplanes, I tapped or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pinched on airplane mode. And I saw the radios turn off, but I still just didn’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey twice about it because I’m a frigging idiot. And so I put the thing on, right. You know, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was able to do that and it was getting kind of upset that I forget exactly what the dialogue says, but like tracking,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tracking failed or something like that and things are not going well. And then I put it, I turn
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the airplane mode, which again, as I later front realized was not what I wanted. But at this point in the story, I don’t realize
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that yet. And sure enough, like windows are bouncing all over the place. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to some degree bouncing all over the place. Like it is, it’s not great. It’s not great at all. I think I had the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing on my face for a minute and a half, two minutes. And I was like, well, that’s that. Well, we get to DC
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the way trains work here is, or down here in Virginia is that in Virginia,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey um, the, the commuter or not computer, the, the, the travel train,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the people train, actually travels on train tracks that are owned by the freight train company.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So not only that, but the freight train company has no need for electric trains
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because, to my limited understanding, I don’t know if they would work as well. If I’m wrong, it doesn’t matter.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey One way or another, there’s a diesel locomotive pulling the Amtrak train south of Washington,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey DC. And then when you’re in DC, you stop for like half an hour. Well, they literally switch locomotives
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from diesel to electric. I knew this going into it. I knew it before my trip to Marco. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all fine. It’s no big deal. Well, once we get to DC, we’re stationary. So I’m like, oh, hell yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m going to turn on a movie, and I’d start Wakanda Forever. And we’re there for 20, 30
⏹️ ▶️ Casey minutes, and we go to take off. And again, I think that I have travel mode on.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t, but I think I do. So we go to take off. And I don’t know if you saw the Casey Neistat video,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was on the New York City subway and he was sitting with his back to the outside of the car.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So the car is moving laterally from his perspective. And when he took off,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the screen just stayed behind, you know, it just went through the center
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the subway car and stayed behind. It’s very funny to see. I don’t know if he had travel mode on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or not. I really don’t. But when we took off, immediately, I went
⏹️ ▶️ Casey through the screen because the screen was in front of me. and the screen stayed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey still as I went through the screen. It was hilarious.
⏹️ ▶️ John And- You could have turned around and looked at the back of it, which would have, I guess, been entirely white because they don’t show the reverse.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would have been entirely white, yeah. But immediately I took the Vision Pro off and I was like, well, that’s that. And I honestly, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was really disappointed because I really wanted to be able to use this thing on the train in no small part because I had six and a half
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hours to do something and it would have been great to watch a movie or do whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And outside of the time that they’re switching locomotives, There’s AC outlets right at the seat. So I mean, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have infinite battery power for all intents and purposes. I was really genuinely kind of bummed about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey On the way back today, I was doing the same thing. And I’m like, you know, let me try it again just to see. And I did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this, I forget when it was. I don’t recall if I did it in DC or some sometime before, but one way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or another. I decided I’m going to try it again. And I look at control center and I’m like, wait, what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the hell is this? like goggles with like other like ray or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like goggle ripples off of it. And I tap that and it says, Oh, travel mode enabled.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Son of a gun. I screwed this up. I didn’t even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So this whole time on the way up, I probably could have been using the vision pro, but I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I thought I couldn’t because it was janky as hell. Well, the reason it was janky as hell is because I’m an idiot. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was not perfect. You know, things were dancing about a bit. Like John, you had said early on in your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey review that the home screen was just locked into place and I completely agree with you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Things were not locked into place as this train was jostling, you know, rumbling down the track.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I don’t think it was bad at all. In fact, it worked better than I thought. But at that point I realized,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, holy smokes, I can use this thing for the remaining, you know, two to three hours of the train ride or whatever the heck it was.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I was very happy about that. But I really was bummed and remain bummed that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I couldn’t use it the rest of the time. But to get back to your question, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think one person walked by and gave me like a double take. But other than that, nobody seemed to give a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey crap. And I was very surprised because I expected everyone who walked by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was going to be like, what is this idiot doing? Look at this guy with his fancy goggles. Wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he cool? Nobody cared. I don’t think a lot of people noticed, but nobody cared.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I was very surprised by that. And it actually made me feel a lot better about the idea of using it anywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Am I going to go to Wegmans where it’s just like a cafeteria area and sit there and use it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe eventually, but not, not today and not tomorrow, but I genuinely think the way I’m going to ease
⏹️ ▶️ Casey myself into this is, you know, renting or, I keep saying renting, um, reserving. Cause it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey free, you know, reserve a room at the library and probably face the wall because I don’t want to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey call that much attention to myself. But that’s a way I can ease into it. And I really think this will be a very powerful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tool for me to use anywhere other than home that I want to get work done. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was a truly hilarious moment watching the screen go through my body as we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey took off from DC northbound. I couldn’t help but laugh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when that happened. It was very, very funny.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Alright, John, how long do you think it takes Casey to use it at Wegmans? I say one week.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, so I’m of two minds. I think he’ll get over the embarrassment quickly, but I’m wondering if
⏹️ ▶️ John he will tire of its utility in the same way that you kind of have for productivity tasks. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s fair. So that’s the conflict, but yeah, I feel like you’ll, not a lot of people are gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John have these for a while, but like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think, I think as you said on the train, fewer people care what you’re doing than you think.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Right, yeah, yeah. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John in general, have nothing to do with Vision Pro, just like whatever.