581: A Different Way to Be Evil
05 Apr 2024Apple Podcasts transcription, how Microsoft and Apple handle antitrust, speculating on M3 Ultra and beyond, and the Vision Pro’s recent updates and struggles.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: John’s two-year anniversary
- Follow-up:
- WWDC lottery results
- John’s Affinity Designer struggles
- Marco’s convert stroke → shape suggestion from the bootleg
- Offset path using Contour Tool (via Vitor)
Create Compound(via Julian Kissman)- Inconsistencies noted by Christian Meyer
- Sam Abuelsamid on real-time OSes in cars
ERR_NETWORK_CHANGED
fix
is in Chrome 124 beta- Has Casey considered running any of his monitors in portrait? (via Bilal Khan)
- Apple IDs & real-world verification (via Simone Rizzo)
- Non-email Apple IDs do still exist (via Erik)
- Apple podcast transcripts & ☁️ computing (via Ben)
- Microsoft is learning from Apple’s mistakes and is pre-emptively splitting Teams off from Office
- No UltraFusion interconnect on M3 Max?
- Apple Vision Pro Spatial Personas
- Apple’s MLS Playoffs immersive video
- Post-show: New theme song! Thank you, Jonathan Mann!!
- Members-only ATP Overtime:
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- Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code ATP.
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Chapters
- John’s quitaversary
- WWDC invitations
- John’s stroked shapes
- RTOS in cars
- ERR_NETWORK_CHANGED fix
- Sponsor: Squarespace
- Vertical monitors
- Apple ID by government ID
- Apple Podcasts transcription
- M3 Ultra and beyond
- Teams and antitrust
- ATP Membership
- Vision Pro updates & struggles
- Ending theme
- “New” theme song
John’s quitaversary
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, it’s time for everyone’s favorite corner. It is time for random
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anniversary corner. Are you excited?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, no. What’s what’s worse? This or list puns?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey those puns are worse. Oh, come on. That’s that’s heartless. John.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco You see how that works? You see it now? All
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey right, concentrate people. So on ATP, episode 476, dated the 30th of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey March 2022. Two years ago now, John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey absolutely blindsided us by announcing he had gone independent. So John,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how have the last two years been?
⏹️ ▶️ John Really? Is that, was that a date?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. That’s what I wrote down anyway, so I sure hope I’m right. John,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco haven’t you learned by now, trust Casey with any kind of anniversary.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Chances are he knows it better than
⏹️ ▶️ John do. Yeah, no. Trust but verify. Let me check. Maybe that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John when I talked about it on the show. Is it March 30th? 30th, you’re right, because I did the blog post the same day. How’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John last two years been? Yeah, you can tell I’m not very into anniversaries, because if you had asked me how long
⏹️ ▶️ John it had been, I’d be like, it’s got to be over a year now, right? But apparently—
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Maybe, right? I
⏹️ ▶️ John have no idea how the passage of time. I guess it’s going okay. Like, the only thing I have to think
⏹️ ▶️ John about is like, okay, there was the tax year where I had jobby job income plus self-employment
⏹️ ▶️ John income, and then there was a tax year where I just had self-employment income. I remember
⏹️ ▶️ John those two things as being different, because taxes
⏹️ ▶️ John annoying. But yeah, otherwise, I don’t know, like we’re hanging in there, surviving,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey doing the thing. Wow. And
⏹️ ▶️ John paying big college bills, thinking about the second kid entering college at the same time the first one is still
⏹️ ▶️ John in college, is slightly terrifying. So yeah, that’s happening.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey http.fm. Flashpoint. And you’re enjoying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey life. I mean, I’m not actually here to interrogate your finances, despite what it sounds like. You’re enjoying life. you’re still happy,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John taking your afternoon
⏹️ ▶️ Casey siestas every day.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, not exactly. I mean, the level of stress is still higher
⏹️ ▶️ John than I would like. But you know, I feel like there’s an acclimation period to being self-employed.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’m still, let’s say I’m still going through that period. That’s what’s that mean.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you know, you get like, you get used to, uh, I don’t know. I guess there was an acclimation period for me
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially having a regular job and self-employment income, which is very hectic. but then eventually it was just too much.
⏹️ ▶️ John And there’s, you know, getting used to the idea that the only income you have is your self-employment
⏹️ ▶️ John income is I think difficult, like balancing how
⏹️ ▶️ John much, how frantically you are trying to work to make that happen and looking for
⏹️ ▶️ John other things or whatever at the same time is, I don’t know, like this, I would imagine
⏹️ ▶️ John that I would have less stress than I am currently experiencing, but it’s still less than when I was doing two things
⏹️ ▶️ John at once. So it’s a bit of net positive.
WWDC invitations
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s do some follow-up. We have breaking news. We have WWDC lottery
⏹️ ▶️ Casey results and I am overjoyed to tell you that for me, it’s the same as it ever was. No invite for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I also don’t have an invitation.
⏹️ ▶️ John was also not invited. Three for three.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like the lottery, it’s, how many people did they say it was? It was like maybe 2,000, 2,500-ish, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like half the number, less than half the number that used to be like when they had WWDC, not at Apple Park.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s very few tickets for a very large number of applicants. So it is to be expected. So, oh, well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And, you know, I’m really I can’t complain because I have gone to so many WBCs. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still absolutely love whenever we get a press invitation that that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wonderful. I kind of feel bad taking one of the developer tickets, you know, because there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are so many people who like I think deserve it more than I do. I’ve been to so many. So I’m glad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and on a level that I didn’t get the developer ticket because I’d rather that go to someone who it’s like their their first time or whatever else.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hope to get press access because that doesn’t take developer ticket.
John’s stroked shapes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, all right, John, you have some feedback with regard to Affinity Designer. What’s going on there?
⏹️ ▶️ John We talked about this in the after show, last episode of my struggles with this vector drawing app and how it didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John seem like a bunch of the operations that it had, like they conflicted with each other. You could do one thing and not the other.
⏹️ ▶️ John You could do them separately, but when you combine them, one cancels out the other. And it was about stroking a path on the outside
⏹️ ▶️ John of a shape, but then once it stops being a shape, the stroke moves to be centered on the path instead of on the outside.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I was finding that frustrating. A couple of people wrote in with possible solutions.
⏹️ ▶️ John And like I said, it was too late for the actual shirt designs because they had long since been completed and submitted.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re still working on that, so stay tuned. But anyway, I was curious to know how to do it. So Marco’s suggestion,
⏹️ ▶️ John he used the terminology from PaintCode, I believe. That will work, it was
⏹️ ▶️ John just different vocabulary because every app calls it something different. One thing that was tripping me up in Affinity
⏹️ ▶️ John Designer is there is a thing called convert to curves that will take a shape and convert it to a bunch of line segments.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I was hoping that would do it for me, but it didn’t. But the thing I needed to use was called
⏹️ ▶️ John Expand Stroke in Affinity Designer. And it’s not like I don’t know about that feature. I had to use
⏹️ ▶️ John that feature when I made the ATP Pixels shirt, like we sold in our last sale. Expand Stroke was the key for me for
⏹️ ▶️ John getting that to work. But since making that shirt, and now apparently Casey-like, I totally forgot about Expand Stroke
⏹️ ▶️ John and just kept being obsessed with convert to curves. And convert to curves wasn’t doing it. So yeah, what Expand
⏹️ ▶️ John Stroke does is it takes whatever your stroke is. So you got your shape and you’re stroking on the outside of the line.
⏹️ ▶️ John And when you say expand stroke, it takes that stroke and turns it into
⏹️ ▶️ John a funny shaped closed polygon, right? So basically it draws an outline around the stroke. So if you
⏹️ ▶️ John draw a stroke that was just a line, it would just like a single line segment and there would be a fat stroke
⏹️ ▶️ John on it that has some, you know, centered on the line. But when you turn it to expand stroke, that turns into a rectangle. So
⏹️ ▶️ John the line that was through the middle is gone and all you have is the rectangle that outlines the stroke. So expand stroke will do
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Of course, once you do that, you lose the ability to edit the stroke as a stroke. So lots of people suggested that when
⏹️ ▶️ John they do it, they always save the stroke in a layer below it. So if you ever wanna go back to the stroke, you can, but you just hide that layer. There’s all
⏹️ ▶️ John sorts of things like that. So that’s one, expand stroke. Vitar wrote in
⏹️ ▶️ John with a solution using an Affinity Designer feature that’s also in Illustrator by another name
⏹️ ▶️ John called Offset Path using the contour tool. This is important if you want
⏹️ ▶️ John to, say you make a path and you want to draw a path around that and you don’t just want to like
⏹️ ▶️ John stroke the outside of the line you can actually move that path inside the shape or outside the shape by an arbitrary amount.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you can do that to sort of simulate the outside stroke thing because now you control how far from the original path the line
⏹️ ▶️ John is. And so when it recenters itself, if you move it out half a distance, it’ll recenter and still be on
⏹️ ▶️ John the outside. That was interesting. I’m not sure I would use that because it might be a little fidgety, but it’s good to know because
⏹️ ▶️ John the solution that I thought that was the most interesting and maybe Affinity Designer only was from Julian Kissman,
⏹️ ▶️ John who suggested using create compound, which is a feature in Affinity Designer
⏹️ ▶️ John where you take a bunch of shapes and instead of like using the Boolean operation on shapes
⏹️ ▶️ John where you take like a circle and you overlay it with a rectangle and you do a subtraction and then the rectangle takes a chunk
⏹️ ▶️ John out of the circle, those features all exist in Affinity Designer, but they’re destructive. You can apparently put them in
⏹️ ▶️ John a nested layer And essentially do non-destructive Boolean operations, say like this layer group,
⏹️ ▶️ John all these layers apply with these Boolean operations, giving you a resulting object
⏹️ ▶️ John that retains all of its flexibility. So it is like it’s, you know, one object cutting on another
⏹️ ▶️ John object, cutting on another object, but all the objects, it’s non-destructive. All the objects are still in their whole
⏹️ ▶️ John editable form and you’re just sort of seeing the union of them. And that I thought was really cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John And yeah, like I said, I didn’t actually try any of these on the projects I had already messed up all of my paths and
⏹️ ▶️ John Mutilated them until they work the way they but I will try to remember all this For the future
⏹️ ▶️ John and by the way create compound is also a place where offset pack path comes in handy because if you have an irregular shape
⏹️ ▶️ John Like the example I was sawing one of the demo videos is a good one like a snowman shape like three balls on top of each other
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re all stuck together like a snowman and if you were to try to
⏹️ ▶️ John Draw a big snowman and then a little snowman inside the big snowman such that when you put the little snowman
⏹️ ▶️ John inside the big snowman you get like a stroke along the outside you very quickly find that the only
⏹️ ▶️ John shape that works with is a circle and any shape that is not a circle if you simply scale the shape
⏹️ ▶️ John and put it inside itself you won’t get an even stroke all around because that’s not the way geometry
⏹️ ▶️ John works you instead have to have a specific tool that lets you offset the path and so if you use offset path
⏹️ ▶️ John to make your smaller snowman shape that will work and finally Christian Meyer said
⏹️ ▶️ John I can confirm that Adobe illustrator has also treated open shape and closed shape strokes differently for the last 20
⏹️ ▶️ John years. The last 20 plus years, sorry. So apparently this is a
⏹️ ▶️ John cultural tradition maybe in vector drawing programs but
⏹️ ▶️ John if you don’t know it like I didn’t it is quite surprising and annoying.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sounds fun I am glad that you are doing that so I don’t have to.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m just looking for another shirt roll I’ll get to use my new compound create compound and
⏹️ ▶️ John expand stroke skills.
⏹️ ▶️ John forget them all between now and the next shirt.
RTOS in cars
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, we got some feedback about real-time OSes in cars. I think this was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey toward the end of the main show last week. We were discussing what’s real-time OS, what’s not,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and where does CarPlay sit? Where would this new CarPlay version 2, or whatever they’re calling it, where would that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sit? And a friend of the show, Samuel Belsamid from Wheel Bearings, wrote in to say, the typical
⏹️ ▶️ Casey architecture is that Android Automotive runs in a container. And the real-time OS, usually something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like QNX, Wind River, or Green Hill Software, runs in another container with an underlying Linux
⏹️ ▶️ Casey distro, and all of it is running on a Qualcomm Snapdragon cockpit 8155. The Realtime
⏹️ ▶️ Casey OS controls the instrument cluster display, and in many cases, Android Automotive will project data to parts of the cluster,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey such as showing Google Maps on the Volvo. The hypervisor makes sure that the Realtime OS gets priority, which is required
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to meet Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards requirements for displaying driving info like speed and warning, quote
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unquote, lamps, which themselves are now usually virtual. We also got some anecdota from a handful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey handful of people who said, hey, you know, when my infotainment crashes, which seems to be a common thing on cars other than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tesla’s, turns out, that oftentimes their, you know, gauge cluster will show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a speedometer or sometimes even will continue to do, if I remember this anecdote right,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will continue to do like, quote unquote, autopilot or, you know, assisted steering or what have you,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even when the infotainment has crashed, which on the surface, I mean, that makes sense, right? They should be totally, totally different
⏹️ ▶️ Casey systems, but yet they feel so intertwined when they’re all sucked into that same main display.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the people saying that when one thing crashes, the other thing stays up, that doesn’t mean either one of them is real time. That just
⏹️ ▶️ John means they’re two separate systems. And it’s interesting that the real-time OS is controlling the cluster, but allowing
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff from non-real-time OSes to display itself into it. The example they gave here is Maps. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I do wonder how much of the stuff displayed in the instrument cluster is coming
⏹️ ▶️ John from a non-real-time OS. And when that OS crashes, like some people said, like, oh, well, the instrument cluster
⏹️ ▶️ John then displays some stuff on its own, right? I’m also kind of interested in, like, I didn’t quite
⏹️ ▶️ John understand this arrangement of real-time OS and hypervisor or whatever that is like, I kind of get it, like it’s running two
⏹️ ▶️ John containers. One is running Android Automotive, which is not real-time, and the other is running, like, say, QNX, which is real-time,
⏹️ ▶️ John and the hypervisor makes sure that the real-time one gets the, you know, a reserve slice of those resources,
⏹️ ▶️ John so the real-time OS is still real-time, and the other thing isn’t, but boy, it’s getting complicated in there, isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John it? And that also like that throws the Apple’s iPhone thing. Another thing into the mix is
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not sure what the status of any kind of real-time subsystem is in iOS.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is not particularly forthcoming with technical details like that. But it seems to me that what would
⏹️ ▶️ John be happening there is that the iPhone would be projecting whatever it’s drawing
⏹️ ▶️ John onto the instrument cluster which may be run by a real-time OS. But if Apple is covering the whole thing with
⏹️ ▶️ John like if every pixel the instrument cluster is produced by the phone, then is the real-time OS simply acting
⏹️ ▶️ John as a video ferrying device until and unless the phone like crashes or disconnects, at which point
⏹️ ▶️ John it takes over and shows like a cruddy speedometer? I don’t know, it’s still kind of mysterious. And finally,
⏹️ ▶️ John I did try to look up in the federal, the United States Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards to see if I could read
⏹️ ▶️ John the text of these standards to see like, what does it say about, you know, the speedometer and warning lamps
⏹️ ▶️ John and everything that would either necessitate a real-time operating system or
⏹️ ▶️ John be well suited to real-time operating system. I confess I drowned in the
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s a lot of words in there and weird language and there is all sorts of stuff about lamps and stuff like, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I couldn’t find anything that was like, oh, I can see to comply with this standard of real-time OS is either
⏹️ ▶️ John necessary or would be the easiest way to do it. But I’m sure I gave up before I
⏹️ ▶️ John found whatever regulation is the appropriate one. I did find a lot of regulations
⏹️ ▶️ John related to it, but maybe not all of them. So yeah, I’m glad I’m not making a car and probably so
⏹️ ▶️ John is Apple. Wow. Uh, cool.
ERR_NETWORK_CHANGED fix
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Good news. This is our Dacia Sendero segment. And that’s a reference for some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John of you. Nice. Error
⏹️ ▶️ Casey network changed. The fix is in the Chrome 124 beta. John,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are we pulling our party poppers? Are we excited? What’s going on here?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you see the scare quotes around the word fix. Document here. So if
⏹️ ▶️ John you get Chrome beta, which I did, it’s the Chrome version 124
⏹️ ▶️ John beta. That includes this change. And what I did
⏹️ ▶️ John was I pulled up Gmail, which is constantly sending requests in the background. So it’s a good test case. And then I pulled up the dev tools, and I
⏹️ ▶️ John filtered the output to see only errors. And I waited to see if I saw any error network changed.
⏹️ ▶️ John I also like repaired my iPhone with Xcode and did all the things to try to induce the error. And I ran it
⏹️ ▶️ John for a day and a half with that dev tool window open the entire time. And I never
⏹️ ▶️ John saw error network change. I’m like, Hmm, I think they did it. But keep in mind, when we talked about the fix, we looked at like
⏹️ ▶️ John the diff and how they’re doing it, they’re looking for a specific interface that’s like, okay, if an
⏹️ ▶️ John interface appears and it’s one of these and it’s an IPv6 and it’s a local thing and it’s this and
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s that and it’s that, then don’t freak out. Otherwise, freak out. So
⏹️ ▶️ John it didn’t happen to me in 24 hours of trying. But since this fix went out in the Chrome
⏹️ ▶️ John beta, somebody in the bug tracker comment said, hey, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John using the beta and it did happen to me. And then the person asked, can you tell me a bunch of information on your system or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think it’s because their supposed fix is just sort of putting an include list of like, look,
⏹️ ▶️ John if this very specific thing happens, ignore it. Otherwise do what you normally do. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the wrong way to fix this problem. Like, cause you’re just gonna be chasing these forever. It’s like, oh, this person had their, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, HomeKit thing come online and this person had something else happen. Like who knows
⏹️ ▶️ John what will happen on these people’s systems based on network stuff that’s happening. You’ll be chasing these forever.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s better to, I would think, It’s better to figure out, look, what kind of changes to the network does Chrome
⏹️ ▶️ John actually care about? And only flip out when you see one of those and ignore everything
⏹️ ▶️ John else. So I hope this is an evolving system. Anyway, I’m continuing to run the beta because, hey, I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John see it in 24 hours. And I did an A-B test. I had the beta and the non-beta running at the same time, both open to Gmail,
⏹️ ▶️ John and boy, it’s still there in the non-beta. It’s just filled with error network change. Like after a few hours
⏹️ ▶️ John of running, the screen was just filled with error network change errors, you know, from top to bottom, whereas the
⏹️ ▶️ John other window didn’t have in 24 hours. So I think they’re making good progress. I’m not sure if this fix is
⏹️ ▶️ John the right fix, but if this is happening to you, try the Chrome 124 beta.
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Vertical monitors
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Bilal Khan writes, regarding the conversation about multiple monitors, has Casey tried turning the two side monitors to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey portrait orientation? I find this incredibly useful to have Safari windows open as reference and not need to scroll them, especially
⏹️ ▶️ Casey useful for dev documentation. Having them in portrait orientation also reduces the impact of head turning significantly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I use better touch tool keyboard shortcuts to move a window to a specific monitor, which makes window management much simpler.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So this is one of those things that on paper, 100% could not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey agree more. I absolutely agree that it makes sense for one, if not all three of my monitors
⏹️ ▶️ Casey should be portrait. I would make a strong argument that the Xcode designated monitor, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the one directly in front of me, that should probably be portrait, except then my main monitor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is portrait and that feels super icky and weird. And I have briefly tried to do this in the past
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I just, I just can’t. It just feels so wrong. And I wonder if maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I like forced myself to stick with it for more than half an hour, if maybe it would get good to me and maybe I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would enjoy it. So maybe I should give it another shot at some point. But it just, it’s one of those things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where it almost gives me the heebie-jeebies. It just looks so incredibly incorrect,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even though, again, for all the reasons that Bilal cited, makes perfect sense. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. We’ll see. Maybe if I’m having a quieter day, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ll mess with myself and turn one of my monitors vertical and see what happens.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. I feel like our field of vision, like our two eyes have a place where they overlap
⏹️ ▶️ John but then there’s sort of a place that’s exclusive to the left eye, exclusive to the right eye because our eyes are side by side on
⏹️ ▶️ John our head, not top and bottom. So I feel like our field of vision better matches a landscape display.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I also feel like it’s maybe slightly more comfortable to move your eyes side to side than up and down. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John And like even for things like Xcode, like there’s only so much code you can take in at a glance, right? It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John good that you don’t have to scroll and I guess it’s good that like the console on the bottom can take up room and stuff like that. But I still feel
⏹️ ▶️ John like I’d rather arrange things side by side than top to bottom, unless there’s a case where I really do need to see
⏹️ ▶️ John like if I need to see two stat vertically stacked pages and something that’s going to be printed like in a print layout or something
⏹️ ▶️ John like that. But again, that’s kind of the origin of like a back in the old days, the Mac had like a portrait monitor
⏹️ ▶️ John that you could put one eight and a half by 11 page on like wussy weird resolution. Uh, and then
⏹️ ▶️ John they had a two page monitor, which could fit two pages side by side. But I don’t think anyone ever
⏹️ ▶️ John wanted a monitor that could fit two pages top and bottom. Although I’ve seen, you’ve seen the, we talked about
⏹️ ▶️ John this in the show once, like a square monitor, literal square aspect ratio monitor. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John super weird. Is that a thing?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, yeah, there’s, I don’t think I’ll be able to find one to put, find the link to put in the show notes, but somebody in the last
⏹️ ▶️ Casey year come out with, like John was saying, I believe it was a square aspect ratio, but it was designed to be effectively two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey landscape monitors. And I think, did it, did it have a hinge in the middle or something like that? I forget exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what the situation
⏹️ ▶️ John No, the one I’m thinking of was actually kind of small. It was like a weird, small square monitor. No,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nevermind then. But anyways, it’s weird that way.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, no, I don’t object to the portrait monitors, but I think it is definitely getting used to it at a certain point that
⏹️ ▶️ John become like really, so like, you know, I think we talked about this when we first got our XDRs, but
⏹️ ▶️ John the Pro Display XDR can go into portrait mode, and I turned it in that direction when I first got it, and it’s hilarious.
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just, it feels like I need to get a step ladder to reach the Apple menu. Goodness gracious.
Apple ID by government ID
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Simone Rizzo writes, regarding your idea for an Apple ID verification via
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a quote unquote real ID, passport, et cetera, my guess is that Apple may not want to have this option for privacy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reasons. If the quote unquote backdoor of moving ownership of an Apple ID is technically possible,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it might be used by governments by law or judicial order to transfer ownership and obtain private info.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s a good point.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So this is, when we talked about last time, we were saying like, well, an ultimate safeguard If someone
⏹️ ▶️ John steals your Apple ID or whatever, if you had previously verified with your government ID that this belongs to you, you could
⏹️ ▶️ John get it back. And the technically minded were thinking, well, wait a second, how would Apple give it back to you?
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple doesn’t have any power over your Apple ID. They don’t have a secret backdoor that they used. And it seems like
⏹️ ▶️ John making the system would have to give Apple a secret backdoor. Well, yes and no. There’s a way you can do this
⏹️ ▶️ John that is more secure and less secure. The less secure way is, hey, Apple has a master key to everyone’s Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John ID who does this. That’s not great. We don’t want that because then Apple could get a subpoena and get access to your stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John without you even knowing it, the government could force them to do it and Apple would have the power to do it. And Apple could say, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, if that user signed up for this system of verification and showed us their passport, then
⏹️ ▶️ John we do have a key to their stuff. But if they didn’t, then we don’t. But the slightly more
⏹️ ▶️ John secure way to do this, and I say slightly, is to instead, when you do the ID
⏹️ ▶️ John verification, like you go to the thing and you show them all your IDs and you prove that it’s you or whatever, What happens
⏹️ ▶️ John is that they would put essentially an unlock key in like the secure enclave on your
⏹️ ▶️ John devices like iCloud synced, you know, end-to-end encrypted iCloud synced so that all of your devices in the secure
⏹️ ▶️ John enclave, there was a key that Apple could get but only if it had access to your
⏹️ ▶️ John device, right? So if the government came to Apple and say, we need to unlock this person’s thing, here’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a subpoena, and they’d be like, Apple can truthfully say, we can’t do that. The only place our Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John key exists is on their device and we can’t reach out and get it off of the device, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s locked inside their device or whatever. Maybe we’d have to be locked in a device with a backup code or whatever. Anyway, I
⏹️ ▶️ John say it’s slightly better because at least Apple couldn’t do things behind your back, but only slightly because
⏹️ ▶️ John the government can just come to your house and take your phone. And force it to open with Face ID and do
⏹️ ▶️ John all this. I read a story recently where the FBI raided some person’s house, and the person answered the door
⏹️ ▶️ John with their phone in their hand, and their phone was unlocked at the time they answered the door, the FBI yanked it out
⏹️ ▶️ John of their hand. So now
⏹️ ▶️ John the person’s unlocked phone. Oh my God. So many loopholes with like, yoink. No, we didn’t force
⏹️ ▶️ John you to unlock it, but we got it and now it’s unlocked. So yeah, so having the keys only
⏹️ ▶️ John on your individual devices in a secure enclave in a place that Apple can’t get it at it remotely means that Apple doesn’t have a master
⏹️ ▶️ John key back at headquarters, but it doesn’t actually protect you that much more. But yeah, this is the trade-off between convenience and
⏹️ ▶️ John security. And I think it’s a trade-off that I personally would make. And as long as it’s opt-in and only the people who
⏹️ ▶️ John care about this have to do it, I would give Apple the ability to unlock my Apple ID
⏹️ ▶️ John for me. I would give them the key. They can keep it in their headquarters and you know, that just to save my
⏹️ ▶️ John butt in the future, if I prove that I’m me, right, because I trust Apple to do that. Uh, and
⏹️ ▶️ John I, I would prefer that to like totally losing access to everything associated with my Apple ID in an unrecoverable
⏹️ ▶️ John way, but lots of other people wouldn’t prefer that. So there’ll be, you know, that’s that choice is up to them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. And with regard to Apple IDs, Eric writes, Apple IDs are not required to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey email addresses. I still use an Apple ID like quote unquote, J. Smith, and I hope I don’t have to change it to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an email address if the rumor about Apple accounts turns out to be true. I thought this was still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey legacy accounts. I thought that they were still allowed to do this. It’s just that Apple really,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really encourages you not to, but yeah, we’ll see what happens in the future.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the reason we all forgot about this is because developers were literally forced
⏹️ ▶️ John to not do this. So everybody that we know, everybody that we know had to change all our old like non email address
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple IDs. If we wanted to continue to be Apple developers, like you could not log into any of Apple developer stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John which you needed to do to do stuff like release apps on the App Store, right. So I avoided it for a real
⏹️ ▶️ John long time. But there was just no way eventually, this was years ago, there was no way around it. But I forgotten
⏹️ ▶️ John about Hey, if you’re not an Apple developer, and I guess if you never touch anything that
⏹️ ▶️ John makes you change it, you just continue to just use your phone or whatever, You could have an Apple ID like J. Smith
⏹️ ▶️ John and still exist? Wow, that blows my mind, but I guess they’re still out there.
Apple Podcasts transcription
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then finally for follow-up, Ben writes, is iOS podcast transcription Apple’s first
⏹️ ▶️ Casey real attempt at heavy cloud computing? iMessage, Apple Music Mail, et cetera, are all massive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but not compute intensive. All the other cool stuff like photos, metadata, spotlight, news aggregation seem to happen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on device. If I’m not missing anything, this seems to be a good low stakes test for cooler AI stuff to come.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s a really good point, I didn’t think about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like the more we’ve learned about the podcast transcription that they’re doing, that like this is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just them running a whisper model and calling it a day. Because even that is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that would be substantial for the amount of data that they are processing, believe me, I know from experience.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because of course, immediately upon launching this, I thought, oh boy, I have to do this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now. I have to match this feature and overcast. And so I’ve looked into what would it take to match this feature and overcast?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I already have the knowledge of which podcasts are subscribed to,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know when new episodes come out for each one, so I could theoretically do something like this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they’re not just running Whisper. They, from what I gather, they seem to have bought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a company that was working on podcast transcription a few years ago. This is like a few years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long effort, it seems. And they’re doing a lot of very specialized
⏹️ ▶️ Marco processing. It isn’t just a basic transcription model that’s like off the shelf. They’ve customized
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it like crazy. And they seem to be running a whole lot of this stuff all on their server. So first of all,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good on them. that’s a great feature for accessibility and navigation and everything else.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And for me to congratulate Apple Podcasts on a new innovative feature does not happen that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco often because they are a direct competitor. And the whole reason I made Overcast is because I didn’t like Apple Podcasts very much.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So they did a really good job on this. Like there’s no ifs, ands, or buts about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I cannot fault them for anything they’ve done here. It’s really impressive. And for the time being,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can’t match it. And I don’t know when I’ll be able to if ever, but like this is gonna be just,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple Podcast is going to win with this feature compared to Overcast for the foreseeable future. And so to answer the question,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, this actually is a surprisingly big deal for Apple to be doing this much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco server-side advanced AI type processing. I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if there’s really any other efforts they’ve undertaken that at least have such visible results.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So yeah, this is new. And it is, I think, you know, because because this is very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco specialized to podcasts keep in mind the scale we’re dealing with here we are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not dealing with content is being created by every iPhone so you know any if you think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about like oh would they ever run like you know photo recognition server side no because think about the data
⏹️ ▶️ Marco volume of that even if you can get around the the whole privacy and encryption angles which you can’t but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even if you could like the data volume of every photo ever take on every iPhone in the world
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is way bigger than podcast episodes that get released. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is a big step, but I wouldn’t necessarily extrapolate it to much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else that Apple could be doing server-side in the near future for their other products, because most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of their other products, the area of use of this kind of computation would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be so massive that we’d be talking about a whole different ballgame.
⏹️ ▶️ John We talked about this when we were talking about Apple potentially licensing Google Gemini or a chat GPT from an open AI.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s like, there is sort of a difference in
⏹️ ▶️ John difficulty. So Apple has many things that are iPhone scale. iMessage is the example I gave last time.
⏹️ ▶️ John iMessage is iPhone scale. A lot of iPhone users use iMessage, surely billions, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And there’s a lot of traffic on that, but computationally, ferrying the messages around, even though they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John like end-to-end encrypted, most of that is done on the end devices anyway, and dealing with the key management, It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John that big a deal. It’s shuffling bits around, some small, fast computation on optimized hardware,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s it. Something like transcription is not like that, which is part of the reason it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John untenable for Marco at this point. It’s not like, oh, I’ll just run a one or two second little job every time an episode comes out. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna take you longer than that. It’s gonna take a lot of CPU time to do, you know, for a unit of
⏹️ ▶️ John podcast listening time. And the AI stuff, we were talking last
⏹️ ▶️ John time about it, how much, how does inference, which is like when you ask an AI model a question, how
⏹️ ▶️ John expensive is that compared to training? And training is obviously more expensive, but how much more expensive is it?
⏹️ ▶️ John But like setting all that aside, comparing the cheapest thing in this sort of large language model world, which is,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, inference, comparing that to shuttling an iMessage from one user to another,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the, doing the LLM thing has gotta be so much more expensive in terms of how many
⏹️ ▶️ John CPU cycles do you need. So the question, you know, bring this up with the transcriptions, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John has Apple ever attempted anything at iPhone scale that is computationally difficult,
⏹️ ▶️ John that is not just moving bits around, sending small packets of data from place to place. Even
⏹️ ▶️ John things like, you know, iPhoto, you know, what
⏹️ ▶️ John it, iCloud photo library and stuff. You take a picture, a bunch of computation happens on your phone, but then when the picture’s done, it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John a bucket of bits that they shove up into like S3 or whatever they’re using on the backend, right? Computationally, not
⏹️ ▶️ John expensive. But all this large language model stuff, the stuff that can’t run on the phone that uses
⏹️ ▶️ John really large, large language models that has to run on a server or podcast transcription.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not sure Apple is equipped or prepared, uh, or has invested enough
⏹️ ▶️ John to do that type of computation at iPhone scale. So podcast scale is less than iPhone scale as Marco just pointed
⏹️ ▶️ John out. So this is a kind of a good start for them. Uh, and maybe, maybe I’m forgetting something. Maybe there is something that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John has been doing that is both computationally expensive and also at iPhone scale, but nothing is occurring to me right now. So this
⏹️ ▶️ John is a good point by Ben.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Alright, moving on.
M3 Ultra and beyond
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t, John, do you really need me for this one? Cause this is basically Mac Pro Corner, isn’t it?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, it’s Mac Studio Corner.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so there’s been some theorizing going around that there is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no Ultra Fusion interconnect on the M3 Max, or at least none that we can tell. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, can you remind us what this Ultra Fusion interconnect is in the first place and why it’s relevant?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so when we were looking at the M3 and the M3 Max came out and we were looking at
⏹️ ▶️ John die shots, pictures of the silicon die of the M3 Max. And those are
⏹️ ▶️ John those rainbowy looking pictures with lots of little tiny features, looks like a city from a view from above, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John We were looking at the layout of the chip. And what I said at the time was, well, if you look at the M3 Max and you
⏹️ ▶️ John look at the M2 Max and the M1 Max, the layouts are pretty similar in terms of where the big
⏹️ ▶️ John rectangular blobs are, where the major structures are. The structures themselves are different. There’s different cores,
⏹️ ▶️ John different amounts of stuff, different GPU cores. Like the things are different, but they’re laid out very similar.
⏹️ ▶️ John And both the M1 and the M2 Max were constructed so that you
⏹️ ▶️ John could take two of them, stick them end to end, and make an either an M1 or an M2 Ultra.
⏹️ ▶️ John So when the M3 Max came out, we said, well, this M3 Max looks like just like the M1 and M2 Max. So
⏹️ ▶️ John probably they’re gonna take two of these M3 Maxes, stick them end to end,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you’ll get the M3 Ultra. And the thing, when you stick them end to end, the thing that connects them
⏹️ ▶️ John is that Apple’s branded Ultra Fusion Interconnect. It’s a silicon interposer that lets them
⏹️ ▶️ John weave together these two chips into a single Ultra chip. So
⏹️ ▶️ John my expectation for the M3 was it’ll be the same thing as the M1 and M2. And what that also
⏹️ ▶️ John meant is probably there won’t be any kind of M3 Extreme that’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John four of them connected or whatever, it just looks like, just like the M1 and M2, you’ll be able to stick two of these in.
⏹️ ▶️ John So somebody posted on Twitter in Chinese, which is a barrier for me to understanding this,
⏹️ ▶️ John a picture of the M3 Max die, and if you compare it to the
⏹️ ▶️ John M1 and M2 Max, and if you compare them, on the M1 and M2 Max pictures, at the bottom of the die, you see
⏹️ ▶️ John this like long strip that is that ultra fusion silicon interposer thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John It looks kind of like the pinout, very tiny pinouts, and like a little thing that you slide into a slot, but it’s just, anyway, it’s just a bunch of little,
⏹️ ▶️ John a strip of little connectors, or a strip of little contacts. Those are all the wrong words, because this is microscopic stuff. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a strip on the bottom where you connect them end to end. Except the M3 die shot
⏹️ ▶️ John does not have that strip at the bottom. Now, did someone just crop it out of the M3
⏹️ ▶️ John Max picture? I don’t know. You can’t tell. And the Chinese text translated
⏹️ ▶️ John by competing translation things, Google Translate and like the Twitter Translate thing were like,
⏹️ ▶️ John there is a wiring layer, and then in parentheses, although wiring layer peeling is not listed on
⏹️ ▶️ John X. And the other translation is with wiring layer, although wiring layer peeling is not included
⏹️ ▶️ John in X. I don’t know what that means, but some people like MacRumors
⏹️ ▶️ John and a bunch of other like MaxTech or whatever took this ball and ran with it and said, M3 Max has no silicon interposer,
⏹️ ▶️ John M3 Max doesn’t have ultra fusion. And they spun that out to mean that the two M3 Maxes
⏹️ ▶️ John will not be stuck together to make the M3 Ultra. And in fact, what will happen instead is there will be
⏹️ ▶️ John a new chip called the M3 Ultra that is not the Max at all, but a new chip
⏹️ ▶️ John entirely. And what they were saying about this new chip based on some other vague rumors was that
⏹️ ▶️ John the M3 Ultra will just be one big standalone chip, not two of anything stuck together. And that
⏹️ ▶️ John one big standalone chip will not have any efficiency cores because it doesn’t need them, it’s a desktop only chip.
⏹️ ▶️ John No efficiency cores, only power cores and a bunch of them. So if you can imagine the M3
⏹️ ▶️ John Ultra being like a bigger chip than the M3 Max with all the efficiency cores removed in that
⏹️ ▶️ John new space taken up by just having the power cores. And then if you take two
⏹️ ▶️ John of those ultras and stick them together, you would get the M3 Extreme, which would then go in the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro. I wanna believe this rumor, but basing it on
⏹️ ▶️ John an image posted in a language I can’t understand on Twitter, where someone might’ve just cropped
⏹️ ▶️ John out the interposer, is not reassuring to me. I just wanted to talk about it now
⏹️ ▶️ John to say, hey, hope springs eternal. And despite the rumor we had a while ago that nothing good
⏹️ ▶️ John will ever happen to the Mac Pro until after the M7, which I keep reminding myself,
⏹️ ▶️ John who knows, maybe there’s a possible, a WWDC, presumably, the new Mac Studio and maybe new Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro will be announced. I would love to see an M3 Ultra chip that is not two of anything stuck
⏹️ ▶️ John together, that had no efficiency cores, that had only power cores, and I would love two of them to be stuck together to make
⏹️ ▶️ John an Ultra and the Mac Pro. That would be super cool. So fingers crossed for the WWDC that
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m currently not going to be able to attend in person.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is the kind of thing I would love for this to be true, but I just, I can’t imagine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they’re doing enough sales volume of these very, very large chips to make it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worth custom engineering to make a custom chip. I hope that’s wrong. I would love to be proven wrong on that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But so far, like the amount of effort they have shown so far for these very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco high-end chips is not large, let’s say.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I just have doubts. But that being said, if you look at the M3 series,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the M3, keep in mind, this is the first time that the M3 Pro and Max are actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fairly different chips. That, you know, for the M1 and M2 Pro and Max, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro was basically a chopped off version of the Max that chopped off some of its GPU cores
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and maybe had some disabled CPU cores, you know, for bidding reasons. But the M3
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro is a totally different and custom design compared to the M3 Max
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the regular M3. Like it’s kind of, it’s closer to the regular M3, but it’s still a very custom design. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not just one of those with something chopped off or disabled. So they are, with the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M3 line, expanding it to more unique designs. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe this has some merit and some promise, but I bet they sell a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot more pros than extremes or ultras or whatever. So I don’t wanna get my hopes up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too much in this because it seems unlikely to be leading to anything that we actually want.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, some of the other vague things that are making people hope about this is that in addition to the M3
⏹️ ▶️ John Max being separate from the Pro, the M3 Max is also substantially beefier than the
⏹️ ▶️ John M2 Max was, you know what I mean? In terms of like, if you look at the scale, like you have a small, medium, large, whatever you
⏹️ ▶️ John like, The M3 Max has lots of stuff in it, and it’s more powerful, like comparatively.
⏹️ ▶️ John And like, for example, the M3 Max is contending with the M2 Ultra in many benchmarks,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Just one Max compared to the M2 Ultra, which is not the thing that you saw with the M1 versus the
⏹️ ▶️ John M2, with the M2 versus the M3, a single Max competing with the M1 Ultra
⏹️ ▶️ John or M2 Ultra. So, not in GPU benchmarks, I guess, but the M3 Max does
⏹️ ▶️ John look beefier. And I believe the whole like no efficiency cores rumor was based on some kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of source code leak thing somewhere. Maybe again, can’t lend too much credence to these things,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that makes sense to me, both for the Mac Studio and
⏹️ ▶️ John for the Mac Pro. Those computers are never going to run on battery, you hope, if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John running off of your UPS. So efficiency cores may not, especially a huge number
⏹️ ▶️ John of efficiency cores, it’s just wasted, it’s wasted silicon, right? Not that the efficiency cores are bad or anything,
⏹️ ▶️ John but if you wanna make a powerful machine, like the Mac Pro, that case is huge. Efficiency cores are probably
⏹️ ▶️ John not a worthwhile use, especially if you have like six or 12 of them, a worthwhile
⏹️ ▶️ John use of your silicon space, right? That said, I kind of feel like no efficiency
⏹️ ▶️ John cores is too few. 12 may be too many, but zero may be too few. But then
⏹️ ▶️ John I kept thinking, like, okay, but what would be the point of them? I guess for heat maybe, or I don’t even know.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like you don’t really care about the power, like, cause it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like you don’t care about the electricity your Mac Pro takes, but one efficiency core,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, ticking away doing some trivial job versus one power core ticking away in the grand scheme of
⏹️ ▶️ John the power envelope of a Mac Pro, you’re not gonna notice that, right? So I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m intrigued by this rumor and I’m anxiously anticipating a new hardware WWDC.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So with that in mind, if you’ll permit a slight tangent, What is your vibe check on replacing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your Mac Pro? I mean, last I remember you saying anything about it, which as we’ve already covered, my memory is garbage.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But last I remember is you were gonna keep on keeping on until you don’t get Mac OS updates anymore and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then you’ll start thinking about it. But what’s your current thinking?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I’m still probably gonna keep holding out until I don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John OS support anymore, or I can smell not having it. I’ll know that I don’t have OS support before that OS is
⏹️ ▶️ John released, right? and then I’ll make a decision. I suppose something could
⏹️ ▶️ John be released to WWDC that’s so compelling that would just make me wanna get it. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it might even be just like, you know, an M3 Ultra Mac Studio or something,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Because maybe I still wouldn’t bother with the extreme because there’s still the whole question of like
⏹️ ▶️ John the gaming situation and what good is a giant GPU like that. But, you know, never say never, but right now I’m still
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna keep holding out at this Mac Pro for as long as I can.
Teams and antitrust
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. All right. It seems like everyone’s getting a little bit of antitrust pressure because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apparently Microsoft has decided to do what they’ve already done in the EU and split teams
⏹️ ▶️ Casey off from office. So reading from the verge, Microsoft possibly hoping to deflect the blow
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of an ongoing antitrust investigation in the EU is spinning teams off from Office 365 to sell
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as its own separate app globally. A company spokesperson told Reuters it was making the change
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to its business chat and conferencing app quote to ensure clarity for our customers quote, after
⏹️ ▶️ Casey already doing so in the EU last year.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the background for this, for people who weren’t working in jobby jobs in the past five to 10
⏹️ ▶️ John years is that Slack came out and Slack was one of those sort of backdoor
⏹️ ▶️ John work items, kind of like the iPhone was and Macs in some cases where employees start
⏹️ ▶️ John using it without the blessing or knowledge of management just to help them do their work. Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John Slack was free. People could download it onto their computers if they were lucky enough to be able to install software on their work computers,
⏹️ ▶️ John which many people are, especially developers. Um, and so they just started using Slack and then
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually enough people used it that look, our employees love Slack and it’s helping them get their work done and
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re more productive. We should get a license for Slack and they would go to Slack and they would buy
⏹️ ▶️ John a license and however many seats they have to pay for for their company. And yay, the company
⏹️ ▶️ John is now using Slack and employees are enjoying it and they’re using a little emoticons
⏹️ ▶️ John underneath there. not emoticons, emoji reaction things and making custom
⏹️ ▶️ John animated rainbow dancing parrots they can put under messages and they’re making all sorts of channels about the
⏹️ ▶️ John Frisbee club at work and everyone’s loving it. Slack is great. Having lots of fun. I
⏹️ ▶️ John live this. It was a real thing. It was like IRC, but for people who couldn’t use IRC
⏹️ ▶️ John and it was fun and everyone was using Slack. Then what happened was Microsoft said
⏹️ ▶️ John we don’t like it when other people pay somebody other than us for their office software.
⏹️ ▶️ John So Microsoft created Teams, which is a terrible, terrible Slack clone that everybody hates,
⏹️ ▶️ John as well they should. It is a very bad program. And what they said is, hey, company
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s currently paying for Slack, you’re already paying us for exchange and office
⏹️ ▶️ John everybody is, right? So why are you bothering
⏹️ ▶️ John paying Slack? Because Slack is kind of expensive. Why don’t you just use Teams? You
⏹️ ▶️ John get it for free with the thing you’re already paying for. You’re already paying for Exchange. You’re already paying for
⏹️ ▶️ John Office. Guess what? Now you get Teams. No additional cost to you. It just comes free as part
⏹️ ▶️ John of the thing you’re already paying for. And that caused pretty much every company
⏹️ ▶️ John that has anybody who’s in charge of finances to stop paying for Slack
⏹️ ▶️ John and force everyone to change to Teams.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Because they’d
⏹️ ▶️ John say, how much are we paying for Slack per year? How many millions of dollars are we paying for slack every year,
⏹️ ▶️ John I can just cross that line item off the budget. And I just saved this company $1.5 million per year. You
⏹️ ▶️ John know, and all I have to do is tell everybody, hey, you are using slack now using teams. And this happened
⏹️ ▶️ John to me personally. And when it was happening to me, I complained to it, but my friends and they all said, Yeah, this is happening to me too.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so everybody said, all the employees were like, but we don’t want to leave slack. We
⏹️ ▶️ John love slack. How what about all our chats? What about this? What about that all sorts of employee feedback sessions,
⏹️ ▶️ John but in the end, the CFO would just point to $1.5 million per year versus zero.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that was an unstoppable force that met the very movable object of employee
⏹️ ▶️ John dissatisfaction. And so Slack was phased out, Teams was phased in,
⏹️ ▶️ John and the wailing of the masses who are forced to use Teams, which was and is incredibly buggy and was and
⏹️ ▶️ John is a pale shadow of Slack, happened across the entire universe. And apparently, and
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t even know about this because I’m not paying too much attention and after I left my jobby job, in the EU, they said, that
⏹️ ▶️ John seems like anti-competitive behavior, where you’re using market power in one realm, like
⏹️ ▶️ John your office applications or Exchange server, or whatever, to force, to
⏹️ ▶️ John gain leverage over another market, which is the market for these communication apps. Which, by the way, it totally
⏹️ ▶️ John is. Well, so I talked about it on Macedon a little bit, and
⏹️ ▶️ John a couple of people asked questions. I said, well, wait a second. How is Slack or
⏹️ ▶️ John Teams separate from quote unquote office? Because
⏹️ ▶️ John office includes like Excel, Word, Outlook, PowerPoint, SharePoint,
⏹️ ▶️ John Exchange Server. Trigger warning. Yeah, but you’re saying
⏹️ ▶️ John so quote unquote office software is one market, but things like Teams and Slack
⏹️ ▶️ John are a different market? And what I said to the person I was talking to, Like Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ John would love for you to believe that all of these things are just quote unquote office applications, because
⏹️ ▶️ John office application is a flexible enough term to encompass anything anybody makes that is remotely useful to someone
⏹️ ▶️ John who works in an office. And the fact is historically, we have allowed this to go on to the
⏹️ ▶️ John point where Microsoft Office and the Office suite of applications or the 365, whatever they call
⏹️ ▶️ John it now, encompasses way more than it already should. But that’s not a reason to
⏹️ ▶️ John say, okay, but they’re allowed to do this to literally any other thing that, you know. So Slack had a product that people
⏹️ ▶️ John were using because they liked it, and they charged people money for it. And Microsoft came in and said,
⏹️ ▶️ John we will leverage our existing market power to essentially push you out of the market with a free application, internet
⏹️ ▶️ John explorer style, because free is better than paying. And while I do see why that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John bad, and it happened to me and it didn’t feel good, and it does feel anti-competitive, if you look at it from a logical
⏹️ ▶️ John perspective, what you say is, okay, but also I see other things that happened in the past that Microsoft did, they were
⏹️ ▶️ John also bad, and I agree with that. Like, how did we let them draw a line around everything that
⏹️ ▶️ John is currently in Office 365 or whatever and say that is one market? I think that is the result
⏹️ ▶️ John of doing this same thing multiple times in the past and getting away with it. That’s not a reason to let
⏹️ ▶️ John them get away with it again, but it is kind of perverse. So the reason I put this line item in here
⏹️ ▶️ John is like, okay, EU did this thing and Microsoft is saying, we’re going to do this for
⏹️ ▶️ John the whole world. EU made us split it out and charge money for it separately. Right? And now
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re gonna do it for the whole world. And this, this of course made me think of Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John in a couple of different ways. One, self-regulation. We’ve talked about this about Apple many times.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple, the regulators are coming for it. People are upset. Governments are upset. How about you voluntarily do something
⏹️ ▶️ John to head them off of the pass? And Apple was like, nah. I’d rather not.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re basically like, make me, make me do it. well, you know, pass the law, win the lawsuit, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, come and make me do, I’m not gonna preemptively do something in the hopes that we’ll keep you away.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this looks like Microsoft saying, oh, the EU made us do it, maybe the US is gonna make us do it, why don’t we just
⏹️ ▶️ John preemptively say, look, we already did it in the EU, why don’t we do it everywhere? It’s kind of like if Apple said, you know what, side loading
⏹️ ▶️ John everywhere, EU is making us do it, so we’re just gonna make it global. Apple has not done that,
⏹️ ▶️ John and arguably Apple’s also not done that in the EU either, but we’ll see how that turns out, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So there’s that one thing, But the second thing is I look at this and I say, Microsoft doing this now
⏹️ ▶️ John is like, okay, we use this strategy to
⏹️ ▶️ John push out Slack for years and we got away with it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now that we’ve essentially won and Slack has been pushed out, yeah, sure, fine, we’ll make it separate.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, if you let Microsoft do this for, I don’t know, five to 10 years and they push
⏹️ ▶️ John out the competitor and hurt that company so badly that they essentially,
⏹️ ▶️ John all the companies that were going to use Teams simply because it’s free, by now they have.
⏹️ ▶️ John The only ones still holding onto Slack are the few companies that can bear to see that line item, or maybe they don’t pay
⏹️ ▶️ John for Microsoft Office or whatever. Closing the barn door after the horse has already left.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so this is, when I look at this, I’m like, do you see Apple as a different way to be evil?
⏹️ ▶️ John If you do the anti-competitive thing and get away with it for long enough,
⏹️ ▶️ John then you can quote unquote self-regulate. The first time you’re forced to do this in any
⏹️ ▶️ John jurisdiction, oh, the EU forces to do it. Now we’ll self-regulate and do it globally. Aren’t we a good company?
⏹️ ▶️ John That is so much of a better, more shrewd strategy than what Apple is doing from my perspective because you get
⏹️ ▶️ John to have your cake and eat it too. They got to crush Slack, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John They got to replace it in all these places. And now they also, presumably, will
⏹️ ▶️ John head off antitrust about this specific issue in any other country because, you know what, the EU made us do it and we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John voluntarily doing it every place else. That is just genius. Evil genius, but genius.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, Microsoft’s really good at that. Like, and, you know, Microsoft has also seen what the DOJ can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do. They have been directly affected by it. And, you know, we can quibble
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about whether the big DOJ-Microsoft case in the late 90s, like what that actually did or accomplished.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the reality is Microsoft had to deal with it for a long time and it was a huge pain in their rear end.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So they know what the DOJ can do. The difference here is that I think Microsoft,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when they’re doing things that are blatantly anti-competitive, they know it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whereas Apple, I get the feeling still that Apple’s upper leadership, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco honestly, many people in the company, but certainly the upper leadership, they are so convinced that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are completely entitled do what they’re doing, I don’t think they even see the possibility
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yet that they could be wrong and that they could be forced to do other things. Even now that the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco EU has just forced them to do other things, you know, I still think, you know, Apple is still going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to fight it tooth and nail. They’re still going to never change their minds about what they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are entitled to do. And I think it will take, you know, similar to what Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has now, I think it will take a new generation of Apple leadership before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we start to see them play better ball with regulators. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t see that happening with the current leadership. And not only just like Tim Cook, in particular,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the current generation of leadership, like everyone at the Apple SVP level
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who was over, say, age 60, which is I think most of them, or at least like 55,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, like there’s like a one generation of Apple power that’s like really in right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think they will all have to go and be replaced before there’s even a chance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the current entitlement culture, you know, being a little bit more pragmatic with the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco environment they’re in now.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, that happened to Microsoft, too. Yes. In the Balmer era, it was just a continuation of the Gates era, essentially.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it took Satya Nadella to come in, among many other things. But he did many smart
⏹️ ▶️ John things to turn the company around. But that was the dividing line between an old Microsoft new Microsoft because Balmer was just
⏹️ ▶️ John a Gates extension. And Nadella was like, I have a new idea about how Microsoft can be.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I feel like Nadella has also has a new idea of how to deal with regulation
⏹️ ▶️ John with this, you know, self-regulation after already getting most of the benefits of being monopoly. And by the way, I think don’t quote me on this. You
⏹️ ▶️ John can read the article in the notes to find out the details. But I believe part of the thing of breaking
⏹️ ▶️ John it out separately, it was like all the companies that are currently getting it as part of their contract for office. Their
⏹️ ▶️ John price doesn’t change. So it’s only like for new customers going forward, like not only did
⏹️ ▶️ John we get all those wins and push Slack out, we’re going to consolidate them by not, because if they went to all those customers
⏹️ ▶️ John and say, oh, and by the way, now teams cost an additional 1.5 million per year, the employees would say, Hey, wait a second.
⏹️ ▶️ John That was $0 on the budget just went to 1.5 million. Can we just give that to Slack instead? And there’ll be much rejoicing. But
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not what they did. I think.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. I don’t know. I just, as Marco said, you know, both of you, really, I really wish that Apple had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey taken the initiative to self-regulate because I because I genuinely think if they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey showed even an ounce of, I don’t know if contrition is really the word I’m looking for, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if they showed an ounce of responsibility and conceded
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even the littlest bit that, hey, maybe we should pull back a little on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey our entitlement, which I know we’ve covered it a million times, but I’ll say it again, I couldn’t agree with Marco more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that they feel entitled. And so if they had shown even just the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey teeniest bit of willingness to give on this, I genuinely think that there would be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey considerably less antitrust pressure globally, but because they’re being
⏹️ ▶️ Casey such petulant children about it, here we are. And so, you know, you F around and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now they’re finding out. So this is what happens.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and again, I think it will take a generation of their leadership to turn over before we see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Satya Nadella of Apple, like the newer generation, the more pragmatic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the current conditions kind of leader. Like you look at Apple now, and all those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people who were in leadership positions at Apple now in that upper leadership, they were there when Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was the underdog. And so they still have so much of that underdog mindset. It’s gonna take
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the rising through the ranks and the time for a new generation of Apple leadership who came
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up while Apple was already the big dominant, honestly bully
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash monopolist, however you want to define it, like it’s going to take that generation of leadership
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the company to inherit power before we see meaningful change in this area
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because the current generation just will never ever see it that way. I mean, you know, you made the comparison to Balmer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and look, I know Tim Cook did a better job by most measures
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than Steve Balmer, but make no mistake, Tim Cook is a Steve Balmer type. Doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a Steve Balmer role, he’s just doing it better. But it’s exactly the same kind of transition.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And Tim Cook is exactly the same kind of leader in a lot of ways. He just does a better job of it
⏹️ ▶️ John And he has better values, I would say. Like, Ballmer did not have a big environmental push.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, but Cook still has many of the same strengths and weaknesses.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it is definitely an extension of it because he came up with jobs. And hopefully, Apple won’t have to experience
⏹️ ▶️ John a Microsoft-like transition because part of Adele’s transition was that Microsoft was essentially a fading
⏹️ ▶️ John star, like the dominance of the place where it was dominant, like, you know, office and PCs and stuff like that
⏹️ ▶️ John became less important. And all of Balmer’s attempts to bring Microsoft into the future
⏹️ ▶️ John did not pan out. There was a lot of big acquisitions. You know, all the attempts at mobile failed.
⏹️ ▶️ John Buying Nokia wasn’t a great idea. The Skype purchase didn’t, you know, it was like other people were doing
⏹️ ▶️ John things and Microsoft was trying to do things the old way, Windows and Office, but also new stuff. And it just, you know, Windows everywhere
⏹️ ▶️ John and just wasn’t working. I mean, Ben Thompson’s written a lot about this, right? So the Nadella’s takeover was
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of like, you should make me the new CEO because Microsoft, despite
⏹️ ▶️ John the stock price and the numbers that Balmer will point to to say, I’ve been a great CEO. Look at these
⏹️ ▶️ John numbers. And Tim Cook has even bigger numbers to point to. Despite all of that, the board could see
⏹️ ▶️ John that, look, Microsoft is not ascendant, right? Yes, they’re making a lot of of money,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they’re making a lot of money. It’s like a, it’s like a, uh, a trailing indicator. Like they,
⏹️ ▶️ John they have a lot of existing businesses that have incredible amount of inertia and Balmer was good at continuing to
⏹️ ▶️ John milk them and make tons of money and grow that business. But what does the future look like? And, and
⏹️ ▶️ John Microsoft had faded to the point where they wanted a, a new
⏹️ ▶️ John leader who could put the shine back on Microsoft. And I would hope that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t have to get to that position where either the place where Apple was dominant becomes less important, which I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John is any fear of happening anytime soon, or that Apple is not seen
⏹️ ▶️ John as having a future beyond the stuff that it has done. I don’t think that has happened yet either.
⏹️ ▶️ John The generational thing was like, oh, Tim Cook will retire and all those people will retire. But I think for
⏹️ ▶️ John the, I mean, that’s the good thing about Apple, because if they don’t screw things up, and they certainly haven’t, again, Tim
⏹️ ▶️ John Cook has done amazing things with every metric you could possibly measure at Apple. If
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t screw things up, maybe you just do need a generational turnover to say, we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John going to continue to do all the things that Apple used to do, but we don’t be jerks about certain stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John not a big change, but it is type of like, you need a new sheriff in town, right? Or you need a big change of heart
⏹️ ▶️ John from Tim Cook, which doesn’t seem to be forthcoming, right? So I really hope it’s not like Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John the fading star, never got into holo headbands, like their Vision Pro was a flop, but the holo headband
⏹️ ▶️ John from some company we’ve never heard of is taking the world by storm. And yeah, Apple still has the phone market, but phones are less important now that we have hollow headbands.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you know what I mean? Like that’s where Microsoft was, when Adela took over and said, it’s not gonna be the Windows company anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re gonna ship Linux. We’re gonna put our software in every platform. Like, you know, that strategy,
⏹️ ▶️ John Balmore would never have done that. Gates would never have done that. And there’s all sorts of things that Tim Cook would never have done.
⏹️ ▶️ John But honestly, I don’t think Apple needs that kind of turnaround. They just need leadership that takes a different view
⏹️ ▶️ John of their place in the ecosystem that they’ve created.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a course correction, not a revamp. Because if Apple gets to the point where it needs
⏹️ ▶️ John a revamp, that means things have gone really badly. I mean, that’s where the,
⏹️ ▶️ John if they’re 90 days from bankruptcy, like they were in 97 or whatever, yeah, new leadership has a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of leeway to do all sorts of great things, but I hope they don’t get to that point.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I mean, so two clarifications on that. I mean, first of all, I think we, This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco story has yet to be finished, but we haven’t seen how Apple’s handling AI stuff yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I think that is one area where it could reveal problems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they really drop the ball on it. Now, we’ll see what happens. Again, we have lots of strong rumors of big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff coming in just a few short months. So we’ll see. We don’t know how that story ends
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yet, but that is one area where it is possible that Apple could still drop the ball
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and have a lot of the tech industry disrupt Apple’s businesses by using that. So we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John there. But the reason I was thinking that wouldn’t be as bad was because the thing that really
⏹️ ▶️ John hurt Microsoft was the rise of mobile. Yes. And mobile is the thing right now.
⏹️ ▶️ John So even if the current large language models are a big thing and Apple falls really behind them,
⏹️ ▶️ John the phone is still the thing. And yes, the phone is less valuable. It doesn’t have a good LLM. You know what I mean? Like I can see how they could,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, they can fall behind in this area, But as long as they continue their
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone dominance at the same level or close to it, that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John like, that’s why I gave the Holo headband fictional example. There’s not some new realm of the tech sector, some new
⏹️ ▶️ John platform that is now the show. The phone will still be the show. Even with AI,
⏹️ ▶️ John it is a possibility that if they do such a bad job on AI,
⏹️ ▶️ John that that will ding the iPhone or whatever. But there’s so much else to recommend the iPhone that I don’t think it would hurt them
⏹️ ▶️ John that much. But maybe this is just me being in the large language model pessimism. They’re very useful, and Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John should use that technology. But I don’t think it’s so revolutionary that if Apple does a poor
⏹️ ▶️ John job of it, it’s going to hurt the iPhone in the same way that mobile hurt the PC.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, we’ll see. I think you’re probably right. I mean, I always say, don’t bet against the smartphone. I think you’re probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right. But this generation of modern AI techniques
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the types of models that are being created and deployed now in really compelling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ways in a lot of cases, I think this is the most credible attack yet on the smartphone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because in many cases, we talked about, in ATV Overtime a couple weeks ago, the Rabbit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco R1 and its idea of the large action model. And yeah, there’s a lot of reasons right now where we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looking at version one of this and saying, well, that has all these shortcomings, it probably won’t be very good, here’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why you might not wanna use it or where it might fail. But this is version one. the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things we’re seeing, look at the humane AI pin, like that is something that I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think has much of a use right now in what we see now, but that is also a direct attack
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the smartphone. At some point, one of these attacks might actually succeed,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and because we’re seeing really only the very early versions of it. But if one of those does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco eventually take off and start really undermining the smartphone in some way, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better be there, you know. And so I think that that kind of bomber moment could happen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to Apple. We can see it. We can see how it could happen. If it happens, if it comes from an area where Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not strong, and I think, you know, we’ll see how that goes.
⏹️ ▶️ John When we talk about the rabbit R1 and the humane AI pen, though, like that stuff so wants to be on a phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I think the only way that would happen to Apple is it ends up being an Android phones, but not an iPhone stood a stupid like
⏹️ ▶️ John app store policy reasons. And that would hurt Apple. But those things so clearly want to be on a
⏹️ ▶️ John phone. It’s It’s just that the companies putting them out don’t have a phone platform to put them on. So they’re trying to go down their own
⏹️ ▶️ John with pins and the little playdate type thing. But those things just feel so naturally
⏹️ ▶️ John at home on a phone. And it remains to be seen. Like we said, when we talked about the Apple stuff, but most recently
⏹️ ▶️ John is the stuff a commodity or is it a competitive advantage? Because if it’s a commodity, Apple will
⏹️ ▶️ John just license it or make some of its own or whatever. But if it’s a competitive advantage, how big is that advantage?
⏹️ ▶️ John And how much is the way against all the other stuff? That’s why I threw a whole headband out there, because it’s like, Like what if there’s something that replaces
⏹️ ▶️ John the phone? But a lot of that AI stuff is gonna be perfectly, it’s natural home is on the phone. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the computing device that you already have that already has microphones, it already has cameras, it already is connected to the internet,
⏹️ ▶️ John you already pay for that connection, it already has a platform and software and CPUs in it, like that’s all the stuff you need and you just
⏹️ ▶️ John need to connect it to the AI large language model. And yeah, Apple could screw that up by being dumb
⏹️ ▶️ John and everyone else connects to a large language model and no one wants to license it to Apple or Apple has a cruddy one.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I just look at how much the terribleness of Siri hurt the iPhone? And the answer is not that much, despite
⏹️ ▶️ John the fact that the voice systems on every other platform have been better significantly for years,
⏹️ ▶️ John it hasn’t really hurt the iPhone too much. So I still feel like the I keep saying hollow headband and people
⏹️ ▶️ John probably thinking I’m saying Vision Pro, but I’m trying to think of some fantastical future thing that obviates our need to hold rectangles
⏹️ ▶️ John with screens. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so this actually leads me into the second refutation or kind of clarification I want to make on this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whole topic is, you know, the way that I think we’ve all characterized it here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there in this conversation with Apple’s behavior now, we’ve kind of said, like, we wish they would be a little,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, let go a little bit or be a little bit, you know, nicer or more gracious with some of these,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, App Store-related policies. The failure of leadership here is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they are not being nice enough. And for them to ease up their grip a little bit on some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of these areas would not be them being charitable. I think it’s actually strategically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the right move to have done that for lots of reasons that would generally benefit the company
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and its users and developers all because the grip they have held has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been so damaging to the entire ecosystem and to them and their products
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that has invited so much of this regulation and the regulation comes with it the possibility
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to significantly negatively affect them. If for, you know, for instance, if you look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at what the DOJ is asking for in their lawsuit, they’re asking for some pretty significant changes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the way Apple makes integrated products. That is a massive attack
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on Apple’s entire method of making products. It is a huge attack on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco key components of the, you know, their operating system, their hardware, their integrations,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like if the DOJ gets what it wants, even if the DOJ only gets part of what it wants,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it could really negatively impact Apple. And for Apple’s leadership to have basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco driven the ship directly into this and invited these attacks from governments by being so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco incredibly anti-competitive in so many areas for so long, I think that shows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a failure of leadership and a failure of strategy. When I say I wish Apple would have avoided some of this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by loosening the grip a little bit, I’m not saying that they should have been nice, that they should have been charitable,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they should have been generous. No, I’m saying they actually made a strategic error that will cost them more in the longterm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in much larger areas.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, we’ve been saying that for, it feels like for years now, but like the problem is Apple disagrees with us.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey So clearly, so
⏹️ ▶️ John characterizing it the way we do of like that they should loosen their grip or they should be nicer is trying to tell them what behavior they
⏹️ ▶️ John should change. But the argument has always been, Apple, if you do this, it will literally be better for you
⏹️ ▶️ John in the long run, right? Which I’ve always said is supposed to be, Apple’s always going on about how like, we
⏹️ ▶️ John take a long view, we don’t care about the ROI, we do what’s right, you know, and that’s, and they have done, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John has done, it’s not just hype, Apple has done many, many things since the return of C jobs going
⏹️ ▶️ John on for decades, including in the Tim Cook era, decisions that are bad in the short
⏹️ ▶️ John term, but good in the long term. Apple does that all the time, except in this one area. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the reason is because they disagree with us. They don’t think it’s good in the long term. We obviously think it is, but we don’t run Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John So yeah, when we say they should be nicer, it’s not because we’re telling them to be magnanimous or to give up money or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s because we literally think it will make the company more money in the long run. Like so many other
⏹️ ▶️ John things that they have done that were sort of counter to conventional wisdom, counter to what their competitors were doing,
⏹️ ▶️ John that seemed like a bad move, that took years to come to fruition. So many
⏹️ ▶️ John of those are why Apple is where it is today. And we’re trying to say, this is another one Apple, and they’re saying they disagree.
⏹️ ▶️ John And when Marco was saying, if he was ready to make this reference, he could have. The more Apple tightens its grip, the more developers
⏹️ ▶️ John will slip through its fingers.
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Vision Pro updates & struggles
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple Vision Pro personas can now be 3D and float freely across different apps. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reading from the Verge, starting, uh, what was it yesterday, day before, something like that, uh, starting today as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Verge writes, Vision Pro personas will be able to do more than hover like a ghost and FaceTime calls. Now you can use them in SharePoint
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enabled apps to collaborate, play games, or watch media with other people. Apple’s calling this a spatial
⏹️ ▶️ Casey persona. The idea is to make it feel like you’re in the same physical space as another user. It was part of what Apple showed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in developer previews last year, but hasn’t been available in the actual Persona beta until now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will point you to this week’s Connected, where they discussed this and had a really good conversation about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. I do plan on trying this in the next couple of days. In fact, I was trying to get some time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with Mike from Connected in order to try this before we recorded, and it just our schedules
⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn’t work out today. I apologize to all of you for not having been able to make that work, but stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey happens. So yeah, check out Connected if you’re interested in that. Marco, I’m assuming you haven’t tried it, because you never
⏹️ ▶️ Casey asked me to. I’m not sure how many people you know with Vision Pro, so what is your understanding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’re right, I have not tried it. In fact, my Vision Pro is not even in my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco house right now. I actually, I lent it to a friend
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a few days because I hardly ever use it. And I wish,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wish that this was not my answer this question but I don’t think this is going to change
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my usage of the Vision Pro at all because I mean first of all I still can’t get it to look right with my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco eyes that’s a separate I guess that’s a me problem just like how air pods never fit me until the AirPod Pros
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Vision Pro does not work with my eyes and I know it’s not my eyes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fault because when I put on my son’s $500 metaquest 3 everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is tack sharp I can see every single sharp edge of all those blocky pixels on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those low resolution screens with no adjustments all I do like I crank the little head thing back as he’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a kid so he has head smaller than mine so I just cranked a little head thing back to make it bigger stick it on my head no adjustments
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no setup perfectly sharp and I put on the vision pro no matter what I do with the vision
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pro I’ve tried everything believe me everything I’ve tried
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it is a blurry mess and so I I have a very hard time using it for anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Even if I get past that, I think this is, first of all, I have major concerns
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the Vision Pro. I’ll get to those in a little bit when we talk about the soccer video. But I’m not motivated to use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. I’m going weeks at a time without even putting it on because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m just not finding those compelling use cases that fit into my life.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so recently, I don’t know, maybe it was a couple of months back,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I added a shortcut to, and I think we might’ve talked about this on the show, I added a shortcut
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to both my iPad and the kids’ hand-me-down iPad that will send me a push notification when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey either of those iPads falls below 20% battery. And I did that because even though
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the iPad is not an essential device for me, and it’s mostly not an essential device for the kids.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am never happy when it’s completely discharged. And I would notice
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably relatively quickly and probably at an inopportune moment.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have no idea what the battery state of my vision pro is ever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that’s mostly okay because I’m just not using it that much. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it’s a few different reasons. Um, you guys covered this really well
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from a developer in like business perspective on under the radar or the most recent under the radar. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s obviously more to it than just the business perspective, but, um, from a personal and user perspective,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I, I do very much like the product. And I think it is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as everyone has said, a technological Marvel. I don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot of occasions for it in my life. And I think a lot of that is because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s so immensely anti-social. I think Apple did as good a job as they possibly could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with making it social, but inevitably, you have a humongous set of goggles on your face
⏹️ ▶️ Casey between you and your eyes and the other person’s eyes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that’s just never going to work. You’re never going to be able to watch something together because, you know, my limited experience
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with share play is not great. And what are you going to do? You’re going to have one person looking at a TV and the other person looking at the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Vision Pro in the same damn room? Like, that’s, that’s, yeah, Aaron, why don’t you sit next to me with these idiotic goggles
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on, on my face while we watch this movie together? Because the fidelity on the Vision Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you just don’t understand, honey, it’s just that much better. Like, no, that’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Aaron Powell, Ph.D.: We’re going to spend $7,000 on Visions Pro instead of getting just like, instead of just using our TV together. Aaron
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Powell, Ph.D.: Right, right,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John right. Exactly. Aaron
⏹️ ▶️ John Powell, Ph.D.: And as we established, the fidelity actually isn’t better if you have a 4K television, decent 4K television that you’re a reasonable
⏹️ ▶️ John distance from. or a subwoofer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, right, exactly. So anyways, there are occasions when it is freaking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey magical. And I really do mean that I mean, being I will forever and always be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dumbfounded in incredibly impressed by Mac virtual display. And the handful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of times I brought the vision pro to like the library to work, I have used the Mac virtual
⏹️ ▶️ Casey display and it is just chef’s kiss. It is just incredible. I could not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say enough good things about it. The problem though is that you’re that idiot at the library
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wearing the Vision Pro. And so the only times I’ve been able to do it, because I just haven’t had the gumption to do it otherwise,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is when I’m in a private room that granted, you know, has glass walls on the, behind me or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I’m facing an interior wall. And so the only people, the only thing that people can see as they walk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by is the back of my head and I am secluded from the rest of the library. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the other day I went back to Wegmans to work for the first time in a long time. And it’s really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey delightful at Wegmans. You know, there’s really great wifi and no, not say our libraries are bad by any stretch, but anyways,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like this is really nice. It’s got comfortable chairs, really great wifi power all over the place. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, if I’m thirsty or hungry or whatever, I can go and grab a snack. Uh, but I’m not going to use the vision pro there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like, this is just, it’s to look at me, look at me, you know? And, and so I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey haven’t had a lot of places where I think to myself, you know what now is vision
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pro time. And the only times I can really think of other than, you know, when I’m working privately, even in a public spot,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, is when on the rare occasions that Aaron has a social thing in the evening. So she’s out, the kids
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are asleep and then hell yeah, I’ll put that on and watch a movie because I’ll watch something in 3d, you know, or what have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you, or I’ll, I’ll do something along those lines. And that’s pretty cool. And,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and bringing us to the next topic, you know, the immersive stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is just phenomenal even though this new video kind of wasn’t. So what am I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talking about? So when Apple first debuted the Vision Pro, there were several
⏹️ ▶️ Casey immersive experiences. And again, just to set the table or set the conversation,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s 3D where you’re looking at, say, a rectangle and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s depth to the images in that rectangle, but you can’t change your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey perspective at all. You’re still always looking at a fixed, you know, from a fixed camera,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re looking at something that now has depth in a way that my television on my wall does not.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But, but it’s still a rectangle. There’s nothing you can do about that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And when you mean fixed camera, just to be clear, it’s what you basically can’t do is you can’t move the camera forward or backwards,
⏹️ ▶️ John up or down, left or right, but you can rotate because the cameras feel the view is larger than your field of view. So you
⏹️ ▶️ John can turn your head. Imagine your head, the camera is replaced with your head. You can turn your head. You can look up, you can look down, you can
⏹️ ▶️ John look up, you can look right. But you can’t take a step forward.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey But I know what that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s you’re getting ahead of me I’m talking about just vanilla 3d like Marvel movies is what I’m saying
⏹️ ▶️ John Same answer though same answer if you’re sitting close to the screen You can’t ever change your perspective in a
⏹️ ▶️ John 3d movie same way Like even if you’re sitting in the front row, you turn your head to the left You can turn your head to the right you
⏹️ ▶️ John can look up you can look down But you can’t take a step forward and see like more of the back of something
⏹️ ▶️ John like oh I can’t see what’s written on the side of that truck. Let me take two steps forward and now I can see it that’s not how
⏹️ ▶️ John 3D movies work, and that’s not how Vision Pro 3D works for these things that we’re recording.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, but I mean, just to make sure we’re saying the same thing, 3D is when you’re watching a Marvel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey movie or something along those lines, and there’s depth to that movie in the way that there isn’t depth in your TV.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But you have zero control over the perspective of what you’re looking at. You are along for the ride.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey With immersive stuff, and I think this is what you’re describing, John, with immersive stuff, yes, you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey turn your head, You can go up and down left or right and that will actively change what you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looking at you have You are immersed in this environment you have Agency
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over where you’re looking
⏹️ ▶️ John well. It’s basically just because the screen is really wide and really tall
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s it’s basically using like a hundred eighty degree camera. It’s like you’re sitting Extremely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco close to a very large 3d movie
⏹️ ▶️ John so screen that wraps around you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah Yeah, like you still can’t like shift your head left or right and like look around objects like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s not a thing you can do. Like you’re still fixed in what you are seeing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but your field of view is way bigger.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the comparison in the Vision Pro world is the immersive environments that are like 3D modeled, where
⏹️ ▶️ John you can actually take one step forward before you go down, right? Or
⏹️ ▶️ John tilt your head to the side to see around, because those are 3D modeled and you’re essentially changing the position of the camera because the
⏹️ ▶️ John camera is your eyes in those immersive 3D model environments.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, so in any case, what we’re talking about is when the Vision Pro was released,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there were, I think, four, off the top of my head, immersive experiences. So there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was a thing with a woman on a tightrope on a fjord in Norway, I guess. There
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was a completely computer-animated dinosaur experience. This is not the thing that everyone got
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the demo in June. This is like your, it’s a video, effectively, but it’s an immersive video, So you can look around
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and change your perspective. There was a thing about rhinoceroses or something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey along those lines where this was a document or a very brief documentary. And then finally,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there was the something like half an hour, 45 minute Alicia Keys concert where you’re in a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey studio space and the perspective occasionally changes between cameras. But the point is you can look around and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if the bass player is just jamming out and doing something incredibly exciting, you can turn your head and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey watch the bass player, which which is pretty freaking cool. So that was the only four things. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the Rhino one and for the tightrope walking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one, they were listed as episode one back in February two or whatever it was that this came out.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And we still haven’t gotten anything since. But last week, Apple released their
⏹️ ▶️ Casey immersive video sports film on Apple Vision Pro. And this was an immersive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey video featuring highlights from the 2023 Major League Soccer Cup playoffs. So this is the American
⏹️ ▶️ Casey soccer slash football, what the Brits would call football,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey playoffs and finals. And the first time I watched it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was really, really disappointed by it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it’s been talked about a lot. I forget specifically where. Jason Snell
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talked about it at Six Colors a bit, and Ben talked about it on, Ben Thompson talked about it on Stratechery a bit.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And also I think it was covered on Dithering, if I’m not mistaken. But the problem with the immersive video,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the soccer video, is that it was edited like a commercial
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for regular old TV. So it was, Oh, look over here, change, look over here. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey look at this thing. Now look at that thing. Now look at this thing. Now look at that thing, which is fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If you’re watching something where you don’t have any influence on what you’re looking at. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so often I would be put in a situation where I’m, I’m maybe the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey players are walking onto the field on either side of me. You know, you’re at the edge of the field, the perspective of the camera is at the edge
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the field. The players are walking by you on to your left and to your right, going to the center of the field to do like a coin toss or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever. And you’re naturally panning and tilting your head, you know, and trying to see different
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things that are happening in the scene. And by the time you’re just getting a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feel for like, okay, I see the scene, I get what’s going on here and I’m now going to concentrate on wherever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the video appears to want me to concentrate. Well, guess what? Now we’re somewhere else. And what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey made it even worse was a lot of times there would be a soccer ball rolling down the field
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as people are kicking it down the field and you would get this like view from way off in the corner
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you’d be looking, oh, where’s the soccer ball? There it is. All right, I’m gonna focus on the soccer ball, which is approximately, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey down to my left. And then next thing you know, oh, now the soccer ball is over to my right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it was infuriating. The second time I watched it, which was about an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hour ago, knowing what what I was getting into, I liked it a lot more,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it’s still really damn annoying because the whole point of immersive video
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where you can change the perspective by tilting your head all around is that you want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to give that some space and some air to breathe, you know, and you want to be able to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey look where you want to freaking look. And the Alicia Keys thing did this so much better because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they had, and I think we talked about this on the show, like several of these different cameras
⏹️ ▶️ Casey positioned throughout the studio space. And they would cut between them, but they would do it like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey every minute or two. And so you can really settle in to where the camera
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is and look around and take in what you want to take in. And yeah, it occasionally was annoying if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like you were positioned on one extreme end of the studio and that bassist who’s just killing it is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way on the other end of the studio. So you, so they’re far away and you can look over where they are but they’re far
⏹️ ▶️ Casey away and that’s annoying but it’s still nice you have the space
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to settle in and look at what you want to look at and with this it was just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rapid fire in a way that was extremely off-putting. So I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some quotes to read but Marco have you you said you did watch this is that right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey because honestly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like every time I’ve watched video on my vision pro I’ve I’ve gotten
⏹️ ▶️ Marco eye strain and a headache and I have to stop. Because again, I can’t get it to be that sharp.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And again, I’ve tried everything. I have tried the reader lenses, I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tried different settings, I’ve tried the different hacks for the face shields, having no face shield, different gaskets.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have tried everything. It doesn’t look good enough. I would feel a lot better just watching something on a laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That being said, this isn’t particularly for me because I’m not a sports person. I understand what people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are saying what you’ve been what you’re saying about how like it’s it’s edited like a like a you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know traditional video and it’s not really edited for the new format and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I forgive them for that for the very first you know teaser whatever in most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ways I think that the way that I have concerns
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it points to the larger concern I have with the vision pro which is did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did no one at Apple think this was a problem? Like, did they watch it? And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because so far everyone who has watched it who knows sports and who knows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Vision Pro in our like tech press group here, everyone’s had the same feedback
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like, oh yeah, this is not the right style for this. It’s disorienting. It’s not good. Like, did Apple not know that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Did they not put it through like a test audience of any kind? Right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s a big company though. And I think the evidence that Apple institutionally does
⏹️ ▶️ John is all the demos they actually gave and like the Vision Pro thing, all of those had like, not
⏹️ ▶️ John just the Alicia Keys thing, but the Typewriter Walker, all those things had a stationary camera without lots
⏹️ ▶️ John of cuts, right? They all, they must, the people who made those must have understood that because there was
⏹️ ▶️ John such a variety of content in the short little demo. And all of it was like, the
⏹️ ▶️ John one thing that did move was like, like I said, it was like the slow moving drone shot that you see in like the Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ John screensaver. It’s just so slowly, like no fast movement, No fast cuts, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John so somewhere in the organization, probably in the Vision Pro team, are people that know this. Now, who put together
⏹️ ▶️ John this MLS thing? Probably an entirely different set of people. And, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John big companies, like people in one org aren’t communicating with people in the other org, or if they are, they
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t wanna be told what to do. And that’s where I give some forgiveness, because it’s like, look,
⏹️ ▶️ John the people who did this either didn’t know, hadn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John taken on board the institutional knowledge that clearly exists and Apple related to Vision Pro stuff, or
⏹️ ▶️ John they had heard that advice but thought, well, but we’ve been cutting sports together for our entire careers, we know
⏹️ ▶️ John better, so we’re gonna try it like this, right? And there is a little bit of a dance here because
⏹️ ▶️ John the dance is between the person doing the editing and the person doing the watching. Casey was watching in the way
⏹️ ▶️ John that he chose to watch immersive content, which was finding the things that he wanted to look at and looking at them. You could
⏹️ ▶️ John also look at immersive content without moving your head at all and just look at what’s in front of you and enjoy the 3D effect, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John the way some other people may do it. Obviously they haven’t worked out the kinks here, but I
⏹️ ▶️ John think maybe if this knowledge was communicated, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John the sports people said, well, that’s too limiting. Yeah, that works fine for your demo where you have a locked off camera and you change perspective,
⏹️ ▶️ John you change from one camera to another once every 90 seconds, but that’s not gonna work for an exciting
⏹️ ▶️ John sports thing. And by the way, I think the biggest problem with the sports thing was that it was a five minute highlight reel
⏹️ ▶️ John that is not teasing you for any longer content because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know what I mean? It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a five minute highlight reel for games that happened last year.
⏹️ ▶️ John highlight reel. What would be great when you can watch the whole game in immersive video? You can’t. So
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, but yeah, so I hope this is just one of those stunning looks, but I will point out that like,
⏹️ ▶️ John so this, how to handle making things exciting in video while
⏹️ ▶️ John also making it trackable is also a thing in 2D video. And despite the, by this
⏹️ ▶️ John point, hundred plus years of making moving pictures and how to edit them, still people get it wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ John And even like the most recent example, I was thinking about this Casey, when you were saying looking at the base player or looking off to the side of the soccer ball.
⏹️ ▶️ John The most recent example that people know from being on the internet and reading various articles and reviews
⏹️ ▶️ John about it is Mad Max Fury Road. Have either of you saw this movie? Casey must’ve seen it, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve seen, actually just re-watched it maybe a month ago. Marco, have
⏹️ ▶️ John course not. Okay, anyway, when that movie first came out, one of the many genres
⏹️ ▶️ John of like sort of, you know, press surrounding the movie was about the director and specifically
⏹️ ▶️ John about a technique the director used, and I’m sure there’s a YouTube video showing it, where there’s lots
⏹️ ▶️ John of quick cuts and lots of action. It’s an action movie. People are fighting and jumping and crashing cars and shooting and doing
⏹️ ▶️ John all sorts of stuff like that. And it does use a lot of fast cuts. And the technique the director
⏹️ ▶️ John used to make it so that the audience doesn’t get lost is that when they would
⏹️ ▶️ John do cut, cut, cut from one camera to another camera to another camera to another perspective to another perspective,
⏹️ ▶️ John he would doggedly keep the most interesting thing that you needed to look at
⏹️ ▶️ John dead center in the frame, which is not a thing most people do. Most people are like, yo, we’re gonna compose
⏹️ ▶️ John the image on my frame and I’ll use rule of thirds and I’ll try to guide the eye to this thing or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John But George Miller, I think that’s the direction I’m, correctly realized that if I’m gonna do lots of fast cuts in action,
⏹️ ▶️ John I want people to track it. I don’t want them to have to, every time there’s a cut, figure out where the point of interest in this
⏹️ ▶️ John frame is. So we kept it dead center, which artistically seems like, isn’t that so super boring? Like you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John drawing a bullseye and you’re like, look, when we go to this camera, whatever I want them to look at, I want them to see this hand punching
⏹️ ▶️ John this face. I want to see this knife being stabbed in this direction. I want to see this guy. Just put a dead
⏹️ ▶️ John center in the frame so you can put your eyes in the center of the movie screen or your television screen
⏹️ ▶️ John and endure incredibly fast, exciting cuts and never have to move your eyes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because whatever they wanted you to see, most importantly was dead center in the frame. And maybe those frames aren’t as artistically interesting
⏹️ ▶️ John if they had been composed in a more painterly manner or whatever, but it allows very
⏹️ ▶️ John fast action to be more easily tracked by the people watching it. It doesn’t require them to do
⏹️ ▶️ John anything interesting. So I would say that if you go into these immersive
⏹️ ▶️ John things and you never move your head and you keep your eyes dead center, A, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John sacrificing one of the things that’s cool in an immersive video, But B, I bet they would actually
⏹️ ▶️ John work better, right? You don’t get to look at what you want as cool, but at least you’ll survive
⏹️ ▶️ John the cut. So maybe, Casey, I was gonna ask you, the second time you watch it, did you move your head less?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Probably, yeah. I didn’t think about it consciously, but yes, probably.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s too bad too, because I am a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very enthusiastic viewer of concert videos. You know, in Plex, I have probably a couple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hundred different concert videos and only maybe a hundred of them are Dave Matthews concerts. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyway, I really enjoy a concert film. I really truly do. And I would consider,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, Hamilton, for example, I know it’s not a concert, but I don’t think it’s too dissimilar.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I love a concert film. I love watching certain sports.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And one of the most, I don’t think we talked about this on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey show. I don’t recall if we have, but one of the just the most and I hate the way they use this term, but the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey most blow away experiences I’ve had in the pro was when I use the app, which is currently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in beta, I believe it’s called room, I don’t know if I’ll be able to put my hands on a test flight link or not,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because it’s a test flight only at the moment. But what room does is it lets
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you use your f1 TV subscriptions, this is where you pay to get you know, kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the to get the f1 season that you can stream, you know, and watch later or watch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey live or what have you. And F1 being super nerdy is all about data. And so they have immense
⏹️ ▶️ Casey amounts of telemetry that you can get from F1 TV. They have camera feeds and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey audio feeds for every single car on the racetrack. They have obviously the footage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s being broadcast on say ESPN if you’re here in the States. But what Vroom does is it says, all right,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’re gonna take the main feed and put a dead center and a rectangle right in front of your face. But you can optionally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey add several other panels around it. So you can do, I believe,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you could do two panels to the left of the main panel and two panels to the right of the main panel. So you now have six panels. So you have your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey main feed that’s jumping between, you know, all the different racers and whatnot. And then upper left, you have your favorite
⏹️ ▶️ Casey driver, bottom left, you have that driver’s teammate, cause there’s, you know, two drivers per team. And then maybe upper
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, you have your rival, and bottom right, you have their teammate, or, you know, however you want to do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then even cooler is below all this, you can optionally put a 3D rendering of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey racetrack and you can see little dots racing around the racetrack. I cannot overstate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how incredibly f**king cool this was. It is unbelievable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how cool it is. And so, and that’s the thing that you can do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s an app called multi-viewer for the desktop that works okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, but I’ve tried it in the past and I, I have not had a good experience with it. Uh, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can’t do this near as well on a desktop as you can with, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the vision pro and this moment, these moments like, and that’s not immersive at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That there, well, I get it. It’s not really immersive in the, in the way we’re talking about, but a concert,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an immersive concert is amazing. When, when you watch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey immersive sports, granted, I’m getting all these damn cuts all the time, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the brief way, for the three seconds before another cut happens, it’s incredible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And for me, I don’t feel like I’m just up close to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a screen the way that two of you guys have described it to me. I feel like I’m frigging there. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really, really do. And at the end they do, they’re in, you’re in the locker room and the team is celebrating
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I’m glad I actually watched it again because I could swear that all these dudes had like vision pros on, even though they’re spraying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey champagne at each other and I was deeply confused by it. It turns out they just have some sort of goggles on. I don’t know why. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know enough about soccer to know why those goggles were there in the first place. But regardless,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in any case, you feel like you’re there. You feel like you’re in the locker room. You feel like you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about to get sprayed with champagne. It is immersive. That’s why they call it that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it has so much potential. It would be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unreal. And I think Ben in particular has been banging this drum for a while. It would be unreal to have, say, courtside
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seats in an NBA game. Just unreal! Because you can look up at the Jumbotron if you want. You can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey look at where the action is. I don’t know if this could happen live, and certainly, given that it took like three
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or four months for this to get put together after the MLS season ended, I don’t know if it would happen in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a timely fashion, but if it could, holy freaking smokes, it’s amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, let me quickly read a couple of summaries from Ben and Jason, because I think it’s relevant.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jason writes as you might expect from the run from the runtime This video is a highlight package with lots of quick
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cuts videos all about quick cuts, but immersive video doesn’t work with quick cuts I don’t think several times during the MLS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey highlights video My head was turned in one direction taking advantage of the 180 degree immersive space to watch something happening off to my left
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or right Only for the vantage point to change to a different perspective now I was staring at nothing It would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey take a few seconds for me to scan my surroundings reorient oftentimes a delay that led me to miss the highlight I was meant to be viewing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ben writes in short this video was created by a team that had zero understanding of the vision
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro Or why sports fans might be so excited about it? I never got the opportunity to feel like I was at one of these games
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because the moment I started to feel the atmosphere Some amount of immersion there was another cut and frankly the cuts were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so fast I rarely if ever felt anything this edit may have been perfect for traditional 2d video posted to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey YouTube The entire point of immersive video on the vision Pro though Is that it is an entirely new kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey experience that requires an entirely new approach now to jump in for a second And I cannot overstate this enough.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like it is unlike anything I have done with just a 2D rectangle,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no matter how great my 2D rectangle is, which my TV is pretty good. And it certainly was really good back in 2019 when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I got it. This is just a whole different level. So Ben continues.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, just to be clear, it’s because it’s 3D, it’s showing a different picture to your left and your right eye. So that’s the comparison to a movie screen
⏹️ ▶️ John would be if you were seeing Avatar in 3D with the stupid 3D glasses, and you were up close to the screen and you could turn your head
⏹️ ▶️ John left to the right. That would be the closest analogy. But as we said, we talked about the Vision Pro originally, difference is the Vision Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t cut the brightness in half for each of your eyes because of the stupid polarized
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lens. But again, it’s more though. It’s so much more than that though. I really think you’re underselling it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when you say that because with Avatar in 3D, you don’t get to change your perspective. The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey perspective is your perspective.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you just established that you don’t get to change your perspective in the immersive video. You can turn your head only. If Avatar
⏹️ ▶️ John was in 3D and you didn’t have to wear polarized glasses, like if you could see Avatar, it’s basically like Avatar
⏹️ ▶️ John in the Vision Pro, but it wrapped around you, like if it wasn’t a rectangle in front, it’s just essentially a screen wrapped around you
⏹️ ▶️ John spherically different picture for left and right eye, no brightness loss
⏹️ ▶️ John and a high resolution. And that’s not, I mean, I’m not saying just that because that is significant and that’s why it is so
⏹️ ▶️ John profoundly different feeling, but it is essentially just different picture to your left and right eye.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I hear what you’re saying and that may be technically accurate, but the experience of it is vastly different than that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John yeah, because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not flickery, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey dim, It’s not wrapped around you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’re too hung up on the technical aspects.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that is the difference. That is why it feels that, and I felt the difference myself. I’ve watched tons
⏹️ ▶️ John of 3D movies, and like I said, when I talked to the Vision Pro, it feels different. It’s kind of like the touchscreen on the iPhone felt different.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, it’s just a touchscreen, just more responsive. Yeah, but when you cross this threshold, something happens that makes
⏹️ ▶️ John it feel different to your point, and I think that’s the Vision Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, and I think the thing is that if you put me in an IMAX theater
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with let’s suppose I had perfect, no brightness altering
⏹️ ▶️ Casey glasses so that I got a perfect view of this IMAX screen that’s wrapping all around me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I still would be hard pressed to feel like it would hit quite as well as the Vision Pro does.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that technology doesn’t exist. That’s why you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey never felt that there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, even still, even still, like it really is, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John cannot stress enough how much it
⏹️ ▶️ John is. I mean, that technology is just, that’s the headset. That is the, it’s a pair of glasses with no brightness cutoff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey resolution. Right. But all I’m saying is, even if you’re imagining like a 3D movie where it wraps around you, like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I genuinely, to me anyway, feel like it’s more than just that. Well, anyway, to finish up, Ben continues,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey “‘Today is April 1, 2024. “‘The Vision Pro’ was available to customers on February 2. “‘In other words, it has been just short of two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey months “‘and there isn’t an episode two of any of these videos. “‘There is, as noted, only one additional immersive video, “‘that MLS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey highlight reel that I am so disappointed by. “‘This is frankly bizarre, given that immersive video “‘is arguably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the single most important thing in terms of standing up the Vision Pro ecosystem. Maybe this is all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey still going to happen, but it is baffling to me that there’s been such a paucity of new immersive content
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from Apple. But maybe this MLS clip explains why. Apple has what I think is compelling footage,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but they didn’t release it until it had been heavily edited because I guess they thought it looked better that way, even though I think it looks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey worse. This is the antithesis of a highly iterative experimental approach to figure out what works, but perhaps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple isn’t as capable of that as we might’ve hoped.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the explanation of this is, you know, the sort of slow start is mostly explained
⏹️ ▶️ John by the fact that Apple hasn’t sold a lot of these. And so the amount of money I feel
⏹️ ▶️ John like it’s a penny pinching way to do things, but say, look, why are we going to spend millions and millions of dollars doing production
⏹️ ▶️ John on this stuff when we know the total potential audience, the TAM, as they would say in business
⏹️ ▶️ John speak, total addressable market is so incredibly small that it’s a rounding error because we just haven’t sold
⏹️ ▶️ John that many of these stupid headsets. So it’s like, wait, how much are we spending per Vision Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco sports video?
⏹️ ▶️ John And what I would say to Apple, what Apple would say to itself, and just like, well, it’s chicken egg. Like, you’re never going to get more vision
⏹️ ▶️ John pro users if you don’t make those videos. But I know you don’t want to make those videos at a cost of $1,000 per vision,
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever it is, right? And so yeah, Ben’s point is like, they need
⏹️ ▶️ John to do it, if only to get better at it, or at least to spread the knowledge about how to be good at to spread that
⏹️ ▶️ John around and to work out the things. I still currently, I may be proven wrong, but I still
⏹️ ▶️ John currently believe that Apple does have pipelines of Vision Pro immersive content going. We just
⏹️ ▶️ John haven’t seen any of those pipelines push the first things out the end. This thing seems like
⏹️ ▶️ John a one-off or whatever, but I feel like those pipelines are currently ramping up and running,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I think they will start spewing forth content maybe sometime in the middle of the
⏹️ ▶️ John year or next year. And is that part of Apple’s plan? Did they plan to
⏹️ ▶️ John be have those pipelines coming out sooner if they had gotten NFL Sunday ticket would have changed their plans?
⏹️ ▶️ John Are they waiting until they have a few more vision pros sold? Are they waiting till version two like, there’s all
⏹️ ▶️ John sorts of explanations that you might have for this from the outside. It definitely looks like a mess. And it looks like a mess to people who own
⏹️ ▶️ John vision pros, right? Because they’re like, I bought this thing. It’s sitting in my house. I would like to be able to
⏹️ ▶️ John use it for something. And Apple’s like, Yeah, yeah, we’re getting to it. We’re getting to
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco hopefully they’re saying we’re getting to it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they’re not saying, Oh, we never actually planned to make any immersive content. we assume developers to do it because they love us.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, first of all, I think there probably is some of that for sure.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hope not too. But it’s very difficult to look at the Vision Pro launch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so far, here we are two months out, to look at the Vision Pro launch so far and say, this is going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way it was supposed to. I have a really hard time believing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. This is kind of a weird time in the sense that we haven’t seen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco WWDC yet. However, that being said, given that it seems like Vision
⏹️ ▶️ Marco OS is just barely done now, I honestly don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco expect a lot from what they’re probably going to call Vision OS 2, which will probably launch, you know, probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be debuting at WWDC and then coming out this fall. Like, I wouldn’t expect much from Vision
⏹️ ▶️ John I think Vision OS 2.0 will come with the App Store, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because the thing is, if you look at where it is now, it launched basically halfway
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through this Apple product year, it’s barely at a 1.0 product, and so I don’t see it somehow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco getting massively more mature in the next two months. That just seems too aggressive software-wise.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you look at where it is now product-wise, I wouldn’t expect massive upgrades for 2.0.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, what about apps? Well, you know, as I talked about on Under the Radar, as Casey
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mentioned, um, from a developer’s point of view right now, the installed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco base of Vision Pro owners is just so tiny. And it seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like very few apps really make sense on it right now that it’s very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco difficult as a developer to justify working on it and porting an app or bringing an app or writing a new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app to it. there’s really not much reason for developers to give it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any attention right now. Okay, so that kind of rules out developers. So there’s also not that many apps for it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That kind of harms the computing angle. So then that brings us back to content. Okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where’s the content? That’s still a big question mark. And you know, John, I hope you’re right that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s just a big pipeline and we’re seeing none of it yet, but I keep going back to,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why did they launch it? Most of the content that was there on day one, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost all of the content that is still there now, that was mostly what they had last June
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when they were doing the press demos. It seems like they haven’t really put out much new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco content in not two months, but like seven months. I don’t know what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re waiting for. They have this big splash and they launched this big product
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s been crickets since then. There’s no apps, there’s no content,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s no users. It’s very difficult for me to look at it right now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and to see Apple putting what is necessary
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into this to make it succeed. It seems like they put it out there almost reluctantly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they just kind of hoped things would support it. And that’s not going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happen because of the volumes and everything. So, Apple has to support it. it. And where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that support? I don’t see it. It seems like Apple itself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not giving the Vision Pro what it needs to succeed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, I don’t know what you’re talking about, Marco, because I have almost earned back the cost of my developer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey strap from all of my call suit sales. Almost. $260, baby. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I actually, what, I have another hundred to go, 150 to go, something like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Don’t forget, yeah, don’t forget tax. and yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, also the thing with the Vision Pro is it is a new product and platform.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so, I mean, first I still do think there is a pipeline
⏹️ ▶️ John there and everything and the fact that it’s such an expensive product, the pipeline could have been intentionally set up such
⏹️ ▶️ John that it doesn’t really start pushing the content until they get the cheaper version out or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that just screws everyone who buys it now. Like honestly, like if you ask me, like who should buy the Vision Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right now? My honest answer is nobody. I wouldn’t say that. I would. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco honestly, the more I’ve owned it, the more I’ve shown it to other people, the more we see that there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no content. Who should buy the Vision Pro right now? My answer really is nobody.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I would disagree. I think it’s frequent travelers who do not care about being that person.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it sucks as a travel device. It’s too big and clunky. Like, it’s… I don’t know if I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John agree with that.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s no, nothing equivalent to that except for other similar VR products. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John the VR experience in a plane, you need a VR thing to do. And the Vision Pro is an expensive one, and there
⏹️ ▶️ John are a couple of cheaper ones that are similar, but I can see that. Like it’s an early adopter product
⏹️ ▶️ John at this point. But like the reason I mentioned it being a new product is because one of the things that is often true
⏹️ ▶️ John about new products at regular companies, and this may or may not be true at Apple, I’ve never worked there, so I don’t know, is that
⏹️ ▶️ John new products have plans about their launch with predictions
⏹️ ▶️ John about what will happen. And very often the thing that happens next depends
⏹️ ▶️ John on how closely that product matched the predictions. So unlike something like the iPhone,
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t really have to prove itself in the market because people continue to buy iPhones or whatever. They just really
⏹️ ▶️ John need to not screw up, right? This thing needs to come out and they said, and we think when this thing comes out, we’re going to sell
⏹️ ▶️ John this many this fast. And assuming we do that, then we will, that will trigger this
⏹️ ▶️ John pipeline to start churning on this video or whatever. And it could be that this new product has not
⏹️ ▶️ John met Apple’s internal expectations, which has caused them to slow down on
⏹️ ▶️ John their like, hold your horses on those plan. We Yeah, we were going to invest $200 million into sports content
⏹️ ▶️ John starting on the day of the launch, if the launch went like x, but the launch was 10 times worse than we thought
⏹️ ▶️ John it would be. So maybe we’ll hold back on that maybe we’ll hold now maybe the new plan is we’ll hold back on that until the
⏹️ ▶️ John cheaper one comes or whatever, like, because it’s a new product, I think there may
⏹️ ▶️ John be benchmarks that it had to pass in order to get it that next stuff ASAP.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the reason I think about this is something that came up earlier in the show, podcast transcriptions.
⏹️ ▶️ John Doing that podcast transcription stuff is expensive. It’s as expensive as probably
⏹️ ▶️ John spinning up one small pipeline of Vision Pro stuff, right? And that’s for a free application,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? podcast is not, despite the premium podcast thing they rolled out, I don’t think is a huge
⏹️ ▶️ John moneymaker, right? But because it’s part of the iPhone, and it’s just like, this is just another thing that makes iPhones
⏹️ ▶️ John valuable. The iPhone is established product, the iPhone, they’re going to sell an expected number of them.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so someone had to, to get the budget to say, Hey, we want to do podcast transcriptions, here’s how much it’s going
⏹️ ▶️ John to cost every year, forever and ever, like to transcribe every single podcast, here’s how much
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s costing computing or whatever. And what is that offset by? We think it will make the iPhone more valuable. No, we’re not going
⏹️ ▶️ John to charge for this. It’s going to be free for everybody. The I, you know, the podcast app is going to be free
⏹️ ▶️ John in the App Store, right? We’re just going to do it for free for now anyway, right? That is a
⏹️ ▶️ John big difference. But it does show that Apple, when it has a product that is performing
⏹️ ▶️ John as expected, is willing to put a fairly large amount of money into it, even with no return.
⏹️ ▶️ John Whereas this is saying, okay, why don’t you just put a large amount of money in because it’s going to make people buy more Vision
⏹️ ▶️ John Pros. And it smells to me like either the pipeline was always super delayed and they were aiming for when they get the cheaper
⏹️ ▶️ John one, or they were going to go like gangbusters until they saw the first month of sales. And they’re like, you didn’t hit expectations
⏹️ ▶️ John Vision Pro, you know, executive. And so you’re we’re switching to the slower
⏹️ ▶️ John plan, the plan that that that spaces out the content production, so
⏹️ ▶️ John that it lands closer to when we have version two or three of this and it’s cheaper or whatever. With Apple secrecy,
⏹️ ▶️ John we don’t know which one of these things is right. But what we do know is out here as people who own
⏹️ ▶️ John vision pros, it doesn’t feel good. It feels like you got a product and you’re not sure what to do with it and it cost you a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of money. And it’s disappointing. And I think that is part of the risk of being
⏹️ ▶️ John an early adopter. It’s a new platform, you don’t know how it’s going to do you took the risk right along with Apple, you paid the money you got
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing. By the time content appears, maybe version two is out and you’re like, Oh, man, I
⏹️ ▶️ John really want version two, but I already spent all this money in version one. You know, it’s, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s tough launching a product. Not every product is guaranteed to be a success, but I think for the most part Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John still has at least as much faith in this as they did in, for example, the Apple Watch, and they’re going to keep churning
⏹️ ▶️ John on it despite the fairly slow launch. Is this launch slower
⏹️ ▶️ John than they expected or is it exactly as slow as they expected? We don’t know because again, they’re not sharing their
⏹️ ▶️ John numbers with us. We did know that there was a ceiling on how much they could make just because of the screens. And it seems like
⏹️ ▶️ John even if that ceiling wasn’t there, they probably wouldn’t have sold anymore. but it’s a $3,500 weird headset that you have to like
⏹️ ▶️ John get special try on stuff and deal with prescription stuff. And like the barriers to purchasing are high. So
⏹️ ▶️ John we are very far from the iPhone six moment. We’re not even at the iPhone OS 2.0 App Store
⏹️ ▶️ John moment. That was a joke about the App Store. Yes, the Vision OS already comes with the App Store, but you might be forgiven for thinking
⏹️ ▶️ John that it doesn’t. And what did iOS firmware 2.0 come with? iOS firmware 2.0 came with not
⏹️ ▶️ John but it did have the App Store and that was a big thing. So I also have very low expectations for Vision OS 2.0
⏹️ ▶️ John at WWDC, but I continue to think that if Apple sticks it out with Vision
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro, the year you should pick your head back up, I tell everyone today should go do the free demo because why wouldn’t you
⏹️ ▶️ John get using expensive product for free and it’s really cool. And to Casey’s point, it does feel like nothing you’ve ever done before
⏹️ ▶️ John unless you’ve used another headset, right? And then wait a year or two
⏹️ ▶️ John and see how this shakes up because version two and three of this are gonna be better, but I honestly don’t even think the one that’s really better
⏹️ ▶️ John than this is gonna be out for several years, because I think first they’ll do the cheaper one that’s about as good,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then you’ll get the more expensive one or the equally expensive one that’s better. And
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s gonna take a while for this ball to get rolling if it starts rolling at all. And then we’ll find out how big this ball is
⏹️ ▶️ John to talk to this analogy. The Apple Watch did take off a lot faster than people expected,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it still seemed like it took years of the Apple Watch kind of wandering the wilderness until people settled on,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s a rich person’s fitness tracker. And that turns out to be a fairly lucrative
⏹️ ▶️ John niche, but it took a while to get there. So as someone who didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John spend $3,500 on this,
⏹️ ▶️ John willing to give it time to grow, and I’m gonna check back in on it each year and see
⏹️ ▶️ John how it’s doing, and I don’t have the bitterness of someone who bought one of these things. especially if you bought it
⏹️ ▶️ John for development purposes and now you sold two copies of your application, but you know, welcome to my world. I,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, for the record, I’m, I’m not currently bitter about it. I mean I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bitter in general that it’s so damn expensive, but I mean, I knew it going in and I’m not currently.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you didn’t, you didn’t even charge extra for your vision pro thing. You’re just leaving literally dozens of dollars on the table.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I mean, yes, that is true. I’m not bitter about it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think the thing, if I’m bitter about anything, it’s that there is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to my eyes, an immense amount of potential here. And I can’t get a good read,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, if you would agree with that or not, I’ll give you a chance in a second. But I think there’s an immense amount
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of potential here and there are moments where it is, I mean, life
⏹️ ▶️ Casey changing is dramatic. I wouldn’t say that, but I cannot, I mean, like that room app, it is unreal. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t particularly particularly want to watch F1 any other way.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I literally will sit in the family room if that’s where everyone happens to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey such that I am available to people and I will put the Vision Pro on to watch F1. Even if F1 is showing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the TV right there, the same thing I was making fun of people, you know, this hypothetical of me saying to Aaron, Oh, I’m going to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my Vision Pro, I literally would do that for room because it is that much better. It is that incredible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anything else I wouldn’t bother. like 3D avatar, eh, I wouldn’t bother, I’d just watch it on the TV.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But nevertheless, there are so many things about this device that are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unreal. Again, Mac virtual display for me and for my eyes in literal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and figurative sense is incredible. The immersive stuff, if we can get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more of it, is incredible. The Vroom app, as silly as it is to keep harping on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this, it is that incredible. So there’s so much potential here and I don’t regret having
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bought it, but knowing what I know now, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, like, I think it was a professional responsibility, especially for the show, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into some degree for CallSheet to buy one. But leaving that aside,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think it would have been a smart purchase, and I don’t think I would have purchased it were it not for my professional
⏹️ ▶️ Casey obligations. But I don’t know, Marco, do you see potential here or do you Do you think it’s just a complete waste?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it is possible for this product to succeed, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco am not yet seeing any evidence that Apple will be able to do what it takes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make it succeed. So what I think it will take is Apple needs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to dramatically over-invest in it in a way that does not make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco financial sense directly in terms of content, apps, games, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what they’ve made here is a really great technology product
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that has absolutely nothing in its ecosystem. There is no content, there are no games,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are no apps, there are no users. How do you solve this? You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seed it somehow. You invest money up front as the maker of the hardware to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fund the creation of content to get users to buy it and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco eventually if you succeed at doing that then you can start relying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more on third-party investment.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like with Apple TV+, another great example. They put so much money up front, millions of dollars to make those TV
⏹️ ▶️ John shows so people would buy their service. And that was a huge upfront investment that only probably now
⏹️ ▶️ John has started to finally pay off in terms of getting subscribers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, but what they have here is a totally clean
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slate that is empty. Like when you turn that dial and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you are put into the Mount Hood environment and you just hear the wind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco blowing by, that’s what the content ecosystem is like. It’s an empty field
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that just wind is blowing by and there’s nothing there. Even the environments, there’s still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the two that are coming soon that aren’t even there yet. Didn’t say what soon meant. No,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I, it seems like nothing is coming. And so hopefully I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wrong. That’s just, I’m just saying that’s how it looks as an outsider and as an owner of this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco device. It seems like nothing’s there and nothing’s coming. And I can tell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you for sure from the developer side, there’s no reason to bring anything there. So Apple needs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to seed that ecosystem themselves. They need to maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pay developers to make apps for it, maybe make more apps themselves. Even Apple’s own apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are barely there. They have many of their own apps that are still in iPad compatibility mode for it or that aren’t there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all. So it seems like even Apple isn’t visibly investing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the content ecosystem. Maybe they are behind the scenes and we haven’t heard about it, but it sure looks like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they don’t have their foot on the gas either. And one thing I have learned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over the years is to not care about any of Apple’s products more than Apple cares about them. That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a recipe for heartache. See also the HomePod. And so whenever Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t care about a product that much, I shouldn’t either. And so far, it seems like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we are just waiting for Apple to start investing in the content ecosystem of this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And until they do, I don’t know why we should. So I’m very pessimistic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on this product right now because I don’t see the evidence that they’re gonna be able to do what it takes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make it succeed. And right now, the way it looks right now today,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would be surprised if they ever launched another Vision Pro product.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, I don’t know about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, hopefully that’s wrong. But that’s just how it looks now two months in. Again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is still early days. But where are the signs that they are investing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in what it will take to make this succeed? Right now, I don’t see those signs. That’s my concern,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that it seems like even Apple is having trouble justifying making software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or content for this. And if they can’t even figure out the reason, then we sure can’t. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything that I’ve said that I want, before this came out I was very excited about it. Everything I’ve said that I want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do with it, all the possible applications for it that I think I will have,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that all depends on software and content coming out for it. That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t happen yet, because it makes no sense to get there until Apple really pushes and seeds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the ecosystem themselves. So everything I hope this device could do, I still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hope it can do it, but today it can’t. Maybe someday it will.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We just have to see what Apple will do to invest in it. And right now we’re not seeing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nearly enough of that. So hopefully I’m wrong or hopefully they’ll turn it around and we’ll be looking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back on this in a year and laughing. As of today, right now, I think this product is a massive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco failure. So I really hope that it has turned around soon.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve always been on the three-year mindset for this product, because I didn’t think like, everyone’s like, oh, next year it’ll be even better. I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ John no, next year. I think even something’s gonna show back when it came out, next year it won’t be that different. And in two years,
⏹️ ▶️ John it probably won’t be that different. So I’m on the three year after launch timeline of saying three years after this goes by,
⏹️ ▶️ John at that point, there should be a new version of this hardware, and the ecosystem should have moved a little bit. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a good check-in point. It doesn’t mean that if three years they haven’t done X, it’s doomed or something, right? But
⏹️ ▶️ John in three years, I mean, the product still exists and hasn’t gone big home potted into the
⏹️ ▶️ John mystery closet before it pops out again. That’ll be a good time to look at progress. Because I think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John unfair to look at this after one year. I think it’s unfair to look at it after two years because it
⏹️ ▶️ John is an unproven product in an unproven market because Apple is not doing what all the other headset makers did and tried to
⏹️ ▶️ John make a video game thing like they’re not doing that they’re doing a new thing right a mass market device
⏹️ ▶️ John that you can use for productivity in addition you know they’re taking a different approach so I’m going to give them three years
⏹️ ▶️ John to figure out what the heck this is and to field new products and to update the OS so we’ll check in again
⏹️ ▶️ John and I guess it’s three years from launch I guess I put that I know to my calendar or something What would that be? 2026, 2027-ish?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the problem is, yeah, sure, three years before it matures, maybe, but- No, no,
⏹️ ▶️ John matures. Not matures. Three years before we figure out if it’s going to work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all. Well, but I think the big challenge is between now and three years from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now, what will make people buy it?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, no, I’m assuming Apple is going to continue to spend money on this for the next three years, if only out of sheer
⏹️ ▶️ John bloody-mindedness, as they say across the pond, because like, this is Tim Cook is all in on this thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is the thing he shipped and not the car. I think despite the pace of investment
⏹️ ▶️ John being unsatisfactory to us on the outside, I believe there are at least three years of continued
⏹️ ▶️ John real investment in this product line from Apple. So that’s why I’m putting a three year timeline on it. If that
⏹️ ▶️ John isn’t true and they don’t, they may stop funding it. Well, I mean, we’ll know, because there’ll never be another one. But I think there’s three years of money
⏹️ ▶️ John backed up behind this sucker, if all goes to plan.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hope you’re right because I think, you know, alternative timeline here, I think in two months
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we start talking about iOS 18 and we never come back to this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, we may not come back to it, but I, you know, I think there’s people at Apple who are doing stuff and I think there’s money being put towards
⏹️ ▶️ John it. We’ll find out, like again, this is about like internal benchmarks. If there was some benchmark that said we have to sell this number of these things
⏹️ ▶️ John this amount of time or others were canceling a project, if that happened, Apple’s not gonna tell us immediately, right? But
⏹️ ▶️ John that happens, companies, there are consequences. There’s like, we’re gonna put this out, here’s what we predict is gonna happen. And
⏹️ ▶️ John if it catastrophically doesn’t, we’re gonna have to have a serious meeting about the future of this product line. But
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re never gonna know about that. Like, I mean, for all we know, that’s what happened with the HomePods. We were all talking about people buying HomePods two
⏹️ ▶️ John years after launch and they were getting a model that was manufactured two years ago, right? So that is a product
⏹️ ▶️ John that disappeared, but it came back, sort of. So, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see. I mean, there is one thing though, like that is I think a red flag in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, did you see the other day that Woot had the Vision Pro on sale. Oh yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s not good. We were speculating for the last six months. We were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco saying the Vision Pro is gonna be backordered throughout this entire year. It’s gonna be supply constrained.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re gonna be selling every single one they can make. That doesn’t seem to be happening. And that doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seem to have been happening since launch day. Like remember we were saying, hmm, there’s really not a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of lines. It’s really surprisingly easy to get them. It seems like they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not selling to what they expected. And they already have discounted and gotten
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rid of a bunch of them through Woot. That’s not good. So I am concerned.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really am concerned for this product. If I had to guess, it seems like it’s selling well below
⏹️ ▶️ Marco expectations, and Apple is not investing in it. And that’s scary for two months out.
⏹️ ▶️ John You might have a collector’s item.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t want that. I want it to succeed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really what’s going to happen is, John, you’re going to have a collector’s item because Marco is going to ship it to you as packing chips
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or packing peanuts in a few years.
⏹️ ▶️ John I never bought a G4 Cube either, but I did a review on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. I want them to get to version 2 so I can maybe have a chance of it being sharp for my eyes. Three
⏹️ ▶️ John Three years. Oh, God.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. Thank you to our sponsor this week, Squarespace, and thank you to our members who support us directly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We have a new member-exclusive content area called Overtime. This is a bonus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco topic, a bonus tech topic, after the show that is member exclusive in each episode.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This week’s overtime, we’re going to be talking about an unpatchable vulnerability in Apple chip
⏹️ ▶️ Marco design and the XZ open source project backdoor that happened this past week.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Two very interesting security topics, I think. So that’ll be an overtime this week. Join atp.fm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash join to hear those overtimes and all the other member perks. Thank you so much and we will talk
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cause it was accidental, oh it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental And you can find the show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, they didn’t
“New” theme song
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just heard a new song.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ah yeah, yeah. So we had asked and been asked, well we’d been asked many many many
⏹️ ▶️ Casey times to have our friend Jonathan Mann do something with the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey theme song that mentions Twitter.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because the three of us haven’t used Twitter in how long?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah. It’s not that, it was not from lack of desire, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey first of all we didn’t really want to put a lot of stuff on Jonathan’s plate And we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey love the original so darn much that we really didn’t want to screw with it too badly. But Jonathan
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reached out to us, I guess, a week or two ago and said, Hey, I’m going to take another stab at it and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey see what I can do to make it sound a little different. And so, yeah, that’s what you just heard, unless
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you are listening to the bootleg, in which case I’m not sure what you’re going to do. But you’re going to have to listen.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just go download the regular version and go to the chapter of the theme song.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. There you go. And literally the only change is we’ve changed the line about Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to now refer to Mastodon. That’s it. Everything else is the same.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, Jonathan did a more different version, but it turns out it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John very difficult to, or at least difficult for us or for Marco, to blend vocals recorded
⏹️ ▶️ John a decade later with vocals recorded a
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey decade earlier.
⏹️ ▶️ John I like your voice sounds different, you know what I mean? And so to try to get them to go together seamlessly,
⏹️ ▶️ John it turned out to be beyond our capabilities So we did the surgical strike. And I have to say, when we talked about this before,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve saved a little link in my notes document that I send to people whenever they ask about the theme song. We did talk about it
⏹️ ▶️ John ages ago. And one of the beautiful things about the original theme song is that, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John A, it’s kind of like a nostalgic historical record, and B, specifically the part about Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ John it had one out from the beginning, which is that if you’re into Twitter, it’s a conditional. So the conditional becomes false.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco whatever. And B, and B, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John After we had talked about that, the guy renamed Twitter.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco So it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John not only is this, have a conditional statement, it’s a conditional statement about a thing that ostensibly doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John exist, but still is because he can’t figure out how to change the domain name because he’s an idiot. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John so I was perfectly fine having the historical theme song be there forever and ever and ever.
⏹️ ▶️ John But now that we have a modified version, you’ll see it’s slightly modified. There are a few other
⏹️ ▶️ John modifications that I think would be useful, but incorporating them is difficult. So we still have the ability to modify
⏹️ ▶️ John it elsewhere. So to give an example, the little verse with the, John didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him is dated from back when they were convincing me to do a tech
⏹️ ▶️ John podcast with them and I was afraid I was gonna burn out because I was doing too many things at once. Obviously that is
⏹️ ▶️ John not the case anymore. I don’t even have my jobby job anymore, but that thing is still in there and the out
⏹️ ▶️ John on that one, it’s all past tense. Wouldn’t let him in the past, you know, didn’t do any
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco research. I love that you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco song. I know, seriously. I’m just saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, and I have a modification of that that makes it even more clear that it was in the past, but it still kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of works. But anyway, we love the theme song. We hope you love the theme song. We hope you love the new theme song. And if we
⏹️ ▶️ John have to change it again in 10 years, I guess eventually we will. Yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco extra, extra thanks to Jonathan Mann for, first of all, working with John,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but also for doing this in the first place, you know, 10 years ago or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whenever that was, and also doing it again now. We are very thankful. Check out his work, jonathanman.net.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We love his stuff. And I love the song for us, and we’ve used it all this time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It really, I think it fits the show very well, and I know a lot of our listeners love it. So yeah, thank you very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much to Jonathan for that, again.
⏹️ ▶️ John For many of our listeners, the theme song is the only thing they like about the show. And I’m speaking of
⏹️ ▶️ John people’s children and spouses that are forced to hear a tech podcast in a car ride, and they hate every
⏹️ ▶️ John second of it, but they like the theme song. or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least it sticks in their head.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah. Right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah. Golly, Jonathan’s been writing a song a day for 15 years,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey since January 1 of 2009. Gracious, that is a long time, a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The funny thing too is like, so he, years ago, like if you notice that the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ATP ad bumper music bits are actually parts of the theme song.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s because years ago, When we first started doing, like, basically audio
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bumpers into ads, I tried a few different, like, sound effects, and, you know, John hated them all,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they were all kind of awkward, and Jonathan Mann emailed me, he’s like, hey, I have, here’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the original, like, logic tracks to the theme song. If you want, you can, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use this to formulate some kind of, you know, ad bumper music. So I did, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s how we got our, like, music theme ad bumpers, and it was great. So, with this, it was great, like, He
⏹️ ▶️ Marco literally just recorded a new song, new vocal tracks, and he just gave me all the tracks again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we were able to just drop in the vocals, and I was able to make some adjustments to make it match, and it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great. But I also wanted to point out, because I have all the original
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tracks to it, I, as a non-musician, had no idea how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many tracks are in a song like that. Like, because first of all,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Jonathan is the only singer. he, but if you listen to the song, there’s backing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco vocals. There’s also not just one backing singer. The backing vocals, there’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco six different backing vocals that are all just hymn overlaid doing like a six-part
⏹️ ▶️ Marco harmony as backing vocals behind the main vocals. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s like 17 different instrument tracks, like so to write a song
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every day, that’s like even just the writing part, like the composition
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the writing the words, that’s its own challenge. That’s, but then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to actually record these like many track compositions and recordings
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every single day is no small feat. Like there is so, there’s so many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco layers, there’s different instruments, like there’s all these like, there’s like seven or eight different vocals. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s really impressive. I don’t know how he does it. And I am like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the more that I dove into this logic file, the more impressed I was.
⏹️ ▶️ John At least you’re using logic for what it’s actually designed for, for once.