665: My Basement Is Beautiful
14 Nov 2025Apple’s new phone… holder, Steam’s new hardware, and slightly more evidence that CD-Rs are S-tier.
Episode Description:
- Follow-up:
- John has some new Vision Pro treats
- In the defense of the CD-R (via Jonathan Goforth)
- Auto-generated chapters in Apple podcasts
- We’re dummies: ATP has a [chapter-free] bootleg
- Some more technical details (via Stephen Robles)
- New MacBook Pro design is for M6 Pro & Max only?
- Tahoe & Electron app fixes
- Discord is fixed (via Dayton Lowell)
- Microsoft Teams Classic is likely to never get fixed (via Adam Wunn)
- macOS Emoji Picker
- ⌃ ⌘ Space
- Rocket
- Pogo-stick robot
- A butt-dialing theory from Trey Carpenter
- iPhone Pocket
- iPod Socks
- New Steam Hardware
- Post-show: Marco goes to Home Depot
- Members-only ATP Overtime: Affinity graphics apps go free, and some people are upset
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Chapters
- Casey is sorry for being sick
- John’s Vision Pro inserts
- CD-Rs are S-tier
- Touch MBP for iPad apps?
- Synology Drive icon follow-up
- Sponsor: NordLayer (code ACCIDENTALTECH-28)
- Generated chapters in Apple Podcasts
- Sponsor: Grammarly
- Touch MBP only Pro/Max?
- Tahoe & Electron
- Mac emoji picker
- Pogo-stick robot follow-up
- Butt-dial follow-up
- Sponsor: Factor (code atp50off)
- Apple’s phone hammock 🖼️
- Steam Machine & Controller 🖼️
- Steam Frame 🖼️
- Ending theme
- Marco goes to Home Depot 🖼️
Casey is sorry for being sick
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hey, so let me just go on an apology tour right now because we were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey supposed to record yesterday at the normal time and Tuesday I woke up and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I felt like a truck had ran me over Wednesday the truck backed over me and I was like fellas I cannot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do this today. And so I my many thanks to my beloved co-hosts for being flexible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We are recording this on Thursday and we are doing it during the day, which which generally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey speaking we don’t like to do because oftentimes there’s like leaf blowers or in the sometime there’s weed whackers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or whatever in all sorts of background noise. So barking dogs, don’t forget
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re going to hear them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey soon. Yep. Barking dogs. You’ll probably hear penny pawing at the office door trying to get in. So all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this to say, if the audio sounds like garbage, Casey’s fault, not Marco’s fault, Casey’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fault. So that’s my bad. Um, that, that definitely, uh, we, we didn’t want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to record this time, but I I begged my beloved co-hosts to do it earlier in the day to ensure that I stayed awake
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for all of it, which they were gracious and kind enough to do. So if the audio is not exactly up to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey snuff, again, my fault, not Marcos.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, it’ll probably be fine because first of all, Eyes at Hope exists and it’s awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But also, you know, in typical Casey fashion, you are throwing yourself so far under the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bus before there’s even a problem and there probably won’t even be a problem. so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’ll probably be fine.
John’s Vision Pro inserts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do some follow up and a little birdie has told me because John did not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tell me that John has received some new presents.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, yeah, in my continuing saga of Vision Pro stuff arriving at my house.
⏹️ ▶️ John Couple things. I did get my lens inserts. Did I talk about that on last
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco episode? You mentioned you were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to get the lens
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John inserts. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think we know that you did. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, I did. I did get them. They work well. I’m actually kind of surprised that
⏹️ ▶️ John the balance between me trying it with my mismatched contacts versus my correct lens inserts because
⏹️ ▶️ John the mismatch contacts are not quite right. One of my eyes has slightly the wrong prescription, but they
⏹️ ▶️ John have the advantage of not having a second pair of lenses in there. And the second pair of lenses does add more internal
⏹️ ▶️ John reflections and also external reflections for light leaking through, which is another issue we’ll get to in a second.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it actually is interesting. Like I really have no choice. I can’t do the contact thing because I would have to put the contacts in and put the vision
⏹️ ▶️ John pro on, take them off when I take it out because I can’t, because my vision is bad. And my contacts that
⏹️ ▶️ John are calibrated for our distance, I can’t look at the computer or my phone, and that’s not good. I have to get reading glasses.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, so the inserts are way better. Now I can just put the thing on any time I want. It makes all that much better.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, the internal reflections, which is one of the things that bothered me even before I got the inserts, they are actually a little
⏹️ ▶️ John bit worse. And as for, and when I say internal reflections, I mean light from the screens
⏹️ ▶️ John somehow bouncing around inside the lenses and causing little like glowy things inside the lenses. That’s what I mean.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m using the wrong term for that. But what I mean by quote unquote external reflections is when
⏹️ ▶️ John light gets into the Vision Pro from the room and bounces off the lenses and does things. And
⏹️ ▶️ John you can tell when it’s an external one because if you block that gap between the light shield and your face, the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John goes away. When it’s a reflection coming from the screens, even if you’re in a pitch
⏹️ ▶️ John black room, you still see them. There’s no way to stop those. But the external ones, like if only the face shields
⏹️ ▶️ John fit correctly around your face and didn’t have any gaps, then no light could get in there. And the face
⏹️ ▶️ John shield I got, like the process for determining this is when you go buy it at an Apple store, they make you scan your face
⏹️ ▶️ John with your phone and turn your head and do all this stuff. Like they’re trying to get a scan of your face and they say, we think you should get
⏹️ ▶️ John this light shield. And they come with like this number letter combination that’s kind of obscure. By the
⏹️ ▶️ John way, I’ve learned that that kind of obscure number letter combination is kind of obscure for a reason because
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple didn’t want to give people a complex about like, you got a fat face, right? Like they didn’t want to make it like,
⏹️ ▶️ John they didn’t even want to do like small, medium, large or like inch measurements or whatever. So the only part that is distinguishable
⏹️ ▶️ John is the last letter, which is like W or N for wide or narrow, that’s okay. But the other numbers are just like a lookup
⏹️ ▶️ John table as far as I can tell. Like we have a bunch of different variations and lots of things vary on them. And even though it’s represented
⏹️ ▶️ John by one number, that one number is just a lookup, an index and a lookup table as far as I can tell. So that was interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ John And on that front, I mentioned that I had like gaps by my temples for the face shield that I have. When I
⏹️ ▶️ John did it with the app, it said, I forget what it said, like, Casey, you were having me do it. You didn’t actually tell me why. You’re like, do me a favor,
⏹️ ▶️ John go to the, in typical Casey fashion, go to the Apple star app and make like you’re gonna get a Vision
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro and put it into your cart and see what it says and whatever. And I did that and then
⏹️ ▶️ John you asked me like, did you say you have contacts or whatever? Cause it asked you those questions. I’m like, no, I lied. I didn’t think it mattered. I was just doing
⏹️ ▶️ John what you told me to do. So I went back and did it a second time and told the truth and say, yes, I have glasses and this and that and the other
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. And then sent you the screenshot. And then you told me, you know, the whole deal about it. You were gonna send me your
⏹️ ▶️ John Vision Pro and all that stuff. Anyway, I think I got two different answers from those
⏹️ ▶️ John two scans in terms of like, what size should your light shield be? I don’t remember what they were, but I’m pretty sure they were different.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I thought maybe they’re different because the second time I said I was gonna have lens inserts and it wants to accommodate for them or something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Who knows? Fast forward to now me using Eurovision Pro with my
⏹️ ▶️ John own face shield that was 25W, I think, and that had gaps around the temples. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John I had a press briefing from Apple for my old Vision Pro. And one of the things I discussed with them
⏹️ ▶️ John was the fit and the gap and asking them like what their experiences with fit and the sizing and all this other stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they suggested that I do the fit thing again. And I did it like four times.
⏹️ ▶️ John And three of those four times, I got like 23W and one of the four times I got 25W.
⏹️ ▶️ John My face was the same the whole time, I swear to you. But you know, it’s just variability. So it seems like majority rules,
⏹️ ▶️ John it should be 23W. So now I have a 23W face shield. Oh, the other thing I complained about by the way was that a Vision
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro would complain, We’re trying to do the optic ID thing, but your eyes are too far from the screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if I press the thing against my face more, it would make up for it. And I was using the thinner pad to get it closer.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I got a 23W and visually what I can tell is the 23W is not as deep as the 25W.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it does in fact put the things closer to my eyeballs. And that seemed to help. I no longer get
⏹️ ▶️ John the optic ID thing that says, your eyes are too far from the screen. But the gaps around the
⏹️ ▶️ John temples are still there, but it’s still a W. It’s not like the narrow one. And maybe the narrow one would be too narrow. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John the wide one would be too wide. But all this is to say that the advice I got from Apple and that I
⏹️ ▶️ John agree with and would probably do if I was buying one of these is, you can buy one of these in an Apple store. And if you go into
⏹️ ▶️ John an Apple store and you’re going to buy one, you can ask to like try on the different size face shields.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes, of course, the Apple will give you a suggested thing or whatever, but you can also say, can I actually try a
⏹️ ▶️ John 23W with like your Vision Pro as the display one or whatever? Because you’re about to spend 3,500 bucks,
⏹️ ▶️ John probably they’ll, you know, they’ll let you try different sizes on. And that’s what you should do. And if I was going to
⏹️ ▶️ John actually buy my very own Vision Pro, I would do that. I think 23W is better than 25W, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s still not quite right. So sizing is tricky. As for the briefing, nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John too exciting in that. The one thing I did note was, I’m sure they do this in all the Vision Pro demos. I’ve never had one before, but like
⏹️ ▶️ John they show you a 3D model of the Vision Pro itself. Did you, either one of you do this? Yeah. And you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, it’s just a 3D model of the Vision Pro and you can look at it or whatever, but it made me appreciate something
⏹️ ▶️ John I also appreciate when I look at the widgets, like paying virtual pictures on my walls and stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Kind of like in special effects in movies, there are things you can do to make things convincing
⏹️ ▶️ John that pay huge dividends for a small effort. And one of those is
⏹️ ▶️ John correct lighting for 3D objects. Like a lot of the magic of the Vision Pro, like that looks like it’s really in my
⏹️ ▶️ John room. It’s not because the rendering is like amazing with ray tracing and like amazing textures
⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff like that. It’s because they get the lighting right. And they get the lighting right because they know everything that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John going on around you with all those cameras everywhere. And the model of the Vision Pro, yes, it’s a high resolution
⏹️ ▶️ John model with lots of polygons and high resolution textures, and you can zoom it to make it real big and you can get to the limits of
⏹️ ▶️ John the textures or whatever. But the reason it looks so convincing is because they light it with, even it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John simple as like white balancing to the same white balance in the room, that goes so far. Like anytime
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ve ever seen like bad, quote-unquote bad special effects in movies, especially if you’re my age and have seen bad special effects in the age
⏹️ ▶️ John before computers, merely getting the white balance slightly wrong will make two things look like they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not in the same place. That’s it. And getting it right makes even the lowest
⏹️ ▶️ John polygon, lowest resolution textured thing look like it’s really there in the room because
⏹️ ▶️ John apparently in our perception, getting the white balance and obviously the perspective and stuff right and having it be
⏹️ ▶️ John stable and not jump around, which all of which the Vision Pro does, makes it very convincing. So surprisingly looking
⏹️ ▶️ John at the model of the vision pro, which is just, you know, it’s a 3d model of a thing you’ve already got in your face that you can see in real life,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, was a fascinating, interesting, of course, the 3d model. I saw had the dual knit band on it, so they have updated the model a little bit, but
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, that’s about it. It was, uh, it was nice and I continue to enjoy it. I did watch the flight ready, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John short today and I thought it was fun. Although because I watch all those sailing channels on YouTube, I almost kind of wish they concentrated
⏹️ ▶️ John more on the aircraft carrier than the airplanes, but you know, the planes get all the glory.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They sure do. Bye.
CD-Rs are S-tier
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We got an incredible piece of feedback sometime over the last week
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I couldn’t be happier about it, at least as I sit here now. And I’ve gotten
⏹️ ▶️ Casey word that maybe I will change my mind in a minute, but that’s okay. We got this feedback from Jonathan
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Goforth who writes, Forgive me for being late to this particular feedback, but I only recently became a member and started
⏹️ ▶️ Casey listening through the back catalog of member specials. As I recall, one of Syracuse’s primary complaints about CDRs that kept them out of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey S tier was their reliability and their degradation over time. This made me realize that I am actually in a position
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to test this pretty well. For the past 18 years, I’ve been photographing community theater productions. Each
⏹️ ▶️ Casey show would result in hundreds of photos, so in the early years, the best way to distribute those photos to people was to burn them to CDR and hand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them out directly to people. I also keep all the exported files and various hard drive-based storage solutions that have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey been moved around over the years. I pulled hundreds of images off a cheap ordinary CDR that I burned 16 years ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I did a bit compare to files that I’ve kept on spinning hard drives for the same time, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they are absolutely exactly the same. As a passive storage medium, there’s nothing more we can ask
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of it. The existence of a cheap, easy to produce product is what allowed me to run the business that I did for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey years before the internet made it more reasonable for everyone to just download the files. CDR deserves nothing less than S tier.
⏹️ ▶️ John roasted. So I know you’re a sicky Casey, but I’m gonna ask you to maybe try doing
⏹️ ▶️ John the work for me. What am I gonna say about this feedback?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That the bit rot was the same on the spinning hard drives or something like that?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John No, I don’t know. No?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Probably that it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just one data point or anecdotal. Thank you,
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco. Is there a common phrase in the parlance that expresses that
⏹️ ▶️ John idea succinctly? Anecdata?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I believe it’s that you are wrong about CDRs and they’re STL.
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey was closer with anecdata. The plural of anecdote is not data. We’ve had people write in before to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John I know you think CDRs are unreliable, but I got a bunch of CDRs and they’re all fine, you’re wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ John Cool story, bro. I mean, I have a
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco bunch of CDs that are
⏹️ ▶️ John bad, right? If only there were some way to determine the reliability of CDRs
⏹️ ▶️ John rather than our just our individual stories. And sometimes individual stories are compelling. And of course, we believe our own experiences
⏹️ ▶️ John are much more important than anyone else’s experience, because certainly in my experience, I have so many
⏹️ ▶️ John completely unreadable CDRs that yes, that does color my view because it is my personal experience.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s not unfounded my, my opinion of the The reliability of CDRs, and by the way, there are other factors that kept out
⏹️ ▶️ John of this tier as this feedback note, so thank you, Jonathan, is not just
⏹️ ▶️ John based on my personal experiences. It’s founded in the science of how they are made. And we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John discussed ad nauseum all of those factors that go into them being unreliable. So I’m glad
⏹️ ▶️ John Jonathan has some CDRs that he can still read. I’ve got a bunch that I can’t read. None
⏹️ ▶️ John of that changes the overall reliability of CDRs, which is not great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think the problem is that Jonathan was clearly using a PC and you were using Macs and the Macs were just not
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if that’s, I mean, my CDR was like so frigging expensive. It was scuzzy. It was a scuzzy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe that was your problem. Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. No, it wasn’t. Maybe it wasn’t terminated right. And the laser was weak.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. The term, termination was a black art, but I did eventually get it right and that wouldn’t cause a
⏹️ ▶️ John right problems, but yeah, no, I’m sad about my broken CDRs. That’s the last time I checked with so many years ago, I should check again.
⏹️ ▶️ John They probably, the rest of them are probably all gone bad. It’s grim.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, were you keeping them in like a humidor? Like what was the storage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John situation? I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, look, I was thinking about this the other day. Like, am I the type of person who abuses the things that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco own, especially the
⏹️ ▶️ John computer stuff? Like these things were handled like they were like in a clean room and like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fab. Hold on. Are they in the attic? Because the attic is not HVAC controlled, is
⏹️ ▶️ John it? The attic is somewhat temperature
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Wait, are they in the attic?
⏹️ ▶️ John Most of them are in the basement and sleeves filed away.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So they’re in the extraordinarily moist basement? It’s not moist. How
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey dare you? How
⏹️ ▶️ John dare you? My basement is well dehumidified with
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco humidity detection in the, forget it, no. I mean, my basement
⏹️ ▶️ John is, it is, my basement is beautiful. My basement is better dehumidified than the rest of the house because the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco giant dehumidifier
⏹️ ▶️ John we have is only in the basement. And sometimes I say, you know, we should get a dehumidifier for the upstairs. But anyway, my
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco basement is not
⏹️ ▶️ John humid. And they’re inside beautiful case-lodged cases. And I like, towards the end of when
⏹️ ▶️ John I was making CDRs, when I had already had some go bad, like over the lifetime of the existence of CDRs and I was getting super
⏹️ ▶️ John paranoid about it. I mean, I was already buying like the best ones I could get, make sure there’s the name, brand, whatever, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing is about, you know, the best ones you can get. No, of course, never writing on them because
⏹️ ▶️ John you would never write on a CDR because the back surface is where the stuff is and any kind of damage to that back
⏹️ ▶️ John surface is actually worse than damage to the front surface, right? No stickers, can’t do that because that could
⏹️ ▶️ John damage them as well. Oh God, I put stickers on all my CDRs. That’s not recommended if you want them to last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, they’d spin off balance and they would shatter at 52x. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John So what I was doing was writing only on the clear part in the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco wow. So I was very John.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s how much care I was taking of these things. And still, so many of them are dead. Last time I checked, which must be like five years
⏹️ ▶️ John from now. So, yeah, I don’t have great luck. I’m glad Jonathan does.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s just because you’re using a Mac. Us PC folks, we were we knew what was we knew what was up. We had the good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, get the Taiyoudans, later the Ritex, when those got too expensive.
Touch MBP for iPad apps?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tell me about touchscreen Mac Pros, MacBook Pros, excuse
⏹️ ▶️ John me. This didn’t come up when we were talking about the M6 MacBook Pros. The German rumors that they’re going to have touchscreens. That’s very exciting.
⏹️ ▶️ John We talked about it on an earlier episode, but never once did we mention how great this is going to be
⏹️ ▶️ John for iPad apps on your Mac. You can already run iPad apps on your Mac, but sometimes it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John little bit weird when you’re using a mouse cursor with an iPad Mac. Guess what? If it’s got a touchscreen,
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad apps become much more natural. Now I’m not saying you’re going to be able to draw on the screen with the Apple pencil and make your laptop tip
⏹️ ▶️ John over or whatever. What I am saying is that whether or not Mac OS is updated and to what
⏹️ ▶️ John degree it might be updated to accommodate touch, iPad apps are already made for touch and it’s gonna be great to see them
⏹️ ▶️ John on the Mac with a touchscreen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think all of the weird ergonomics of touching your Mac screen precisely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and frequently, I think will make that no good, but I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know. I mean, you don’t have to, you still can use them the way you’re using them now, but there are certain interfaces and iPad apps
⏹️ ▶️ John that are just more natural with touch like pinch to zoom or something like that. And I think this will lend itself. I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ John saying something you’re not going to use the mouse cursor with your iPad apps on your Mac. I’m saying that there are instances where
⏹️ ▶️ John it would be more natural to use touch and now you can.
Synology Drive icon follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, I lamented last episode that the Synology Drive icon that I put in my sidebar
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was full color and did not fit well with the rest of my sidebar, and I was casting about for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a solution, and Charlie Ellman writes, Symbolic links might help you solve the finder sidebar problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I hate how Microsoft OneDrive is shown as OneDrive, long company name. So I made a symbolic link to the OneDrive cloud storage folder
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and called it whatever I wanted. Then I dragged that symlink into the finder sidebar. The sidebar item opens OneDrive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like normal when clicked, keeps my new name, and only shows a boring folder icon, not the OneDrive icon. Did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this work perfectly? Thank you, Charlie.
⏹️ ▶️ John Ta-da! Unix to the rescue! See, to me,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, I… Sim links and stuff, I always am afraid, like, this is gonna cause
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some weird bug. Because so often, software is written in such a way where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it works if you follow the happy path and what you assume people will do. But if you do something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit off the beaten path, like use a sim link for its files, I always worry something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is going to go wrong there. Yeah, that fear
⏹️ ▶️ John is founded, because there are ways that it can screw things up. But the beauty about this is that he’s not actually,
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey’s not changing Synology Drive. The Synology Drive software is still running on the same thing it used to run. This symlink
⏹️ ▶️ John is a thing totally off the side that Synology Drive has no idea even exists. It doesn’t need to know or care about.
⏹️ ▶️ John Its only function is to get him the correct icon on the sidebar and to open the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John when it’s clicked in the finder. Synology Drive doesn’t have to know that thing exists at all, doesn’t know that thing exists at all. That’s the beauty of this
⏹️ ▶️ John solution. If it ever breaks, what’s gonna happen is Casey’s gonna click on it on the sidebar. It’s not gonna work, oh well.
⏹️ ▶️ John But Synology Drive never knew that seminal existed.
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Generated chapters in Apple Podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s talk auto-generated chapters in Apple Podcasts. Matt Dickoff writes, in the last episode,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you mentioned that Apple’s new auto-generated chapter markers won’t have much impact on ATP, but you do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey release a podcast without chapter markers, the bootleg. It’d be great to get those for the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey auto-generated chapters. For that feed, for those of us that listen to the bootleg before
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the edited feed is released.
⏹️ ▶️ John And what he meant by means by that is that when we released the bootleg, which is shortly after we finished recording,
⏹️ ▶️ John there are no, there is no chapters in the bootleg, obviously, because it’s just a straight from a recording dumped out there.
⏹️ ▶️ John But also the bootleg will eventually share the show notes with the edited episode.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if the edited episode has not been edited and has not been published, there are no show notes. So there is this gap of time where
⏹️ ▶️ John you have the bootleg, you can listen to it, but there’s no notes whatsoever because you’re listening before
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco has even gotten to the edited episode. Apple’s auto-generated chapters.
⏹️ ▶️ John Good luck with the bootleg, but yeah, they can auto-generate chapters for you, presuming it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John able to do so on a private feed, which I’m not sure how that works.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so, so far, when Apple has done things like transcription, which I assume
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the auto-generated chapter feature is being done in the same process, and is most likely using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the transcript as input to, like, I’m sure it’s probably feeding the transcript to an LLM and saying,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, summarize this and tell me where the breaks are,
⏹️ ▶️ John that Merlin has been doing manually for rectifs for a long time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is great. And that’s a great idea. And in fact, I’m frustrated because they beat me to it because that’s totally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my idea and I’ve had it and I’ve been working on it for months.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Anyway. Maybe you
⏹️ ▶️ John should be a multi-billion dollar corporation. Ever think of that, Marco?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, someday I might ship a feature like this. In the meantime,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so what Apple Podcast has done to date with their transcript feature is it only applies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to public feeds. So this most likely would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not apply to your private member bootleg feed. It would probably only apply to Apple public feeds. And Apple Podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has never wanted to involve themselves in the dealings of private feeds. They just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of pass it through to the app and don’t touch it server side or anything like that. And so also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you would do private feed transcription and stuff, you would have so many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more. Because you think about it, you know, ATP has one public feed. we have many members
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and each one of those members has their own feed. So there could be orders of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco magnitude more feeds with different episodes to transcribe.
⏹️ ▶️ John Especially for like popular shows with like millions of listeners and you know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about like the New York Times just moved all of their podcasts, including
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like The Daily, Ezra Klein, like you know, big shows. These are like some of the top shows in Overcast.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the New York Times just moved all of them to the model where like you get the first few episodes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for free, but otherwise you gotta be a subscriber and they have private feeds. So think about like the number of feeds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you know, Slate Plus has been doing this forever. Patreon, any podcast that’s on Patreon,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have per person feeds. I can tell you from running over guys database, this is a huge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco number of feeds. Apple so far has not transcribed those for lots of reasons,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mainly I would assume just the sheer numbers of them. it could be like 10 times
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as many feeds as what they’re doing for the public. And you figure like their value of like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco processing power they would spend server side to transcribe something for one person
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a lot less valuable to them in, you know, in an environment where you don’t have infinite resources, although
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple kind of does. But anyway, it’s a lot more valuable to them to transcribe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco public feeds because many more people will benefit from that. So I wouldn’t expect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this feature to work on private fees in Apple podcasts, at least for a while, maybe down the road, they’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco start doing it for all podcasts, or they can start doing it device side, but even then, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing it device side, that’s, again, you might think, great, do it locally on the phone with the local LLM, local transcription API.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can do that, but it’s not fast. And you can’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do a lot of it in the background either, because background time limitations and background processing limitations.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so it’s not the kind of thing that can be gracefully done locally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on device on iOS with the current limitations. So maybe down the road, this might be a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing. Currently, I wouldn’t expect it to be, but we’ll see. This feature is still very much in beta, hasn’t launched yet,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so we’ll see how it goes.
⏹️ ▶️ John And yes, Apple could, if they wanted, allow you to submit a private feed and then have it indexed. And like it should,
⏹️ ▶️ John like ideally would recognize that the audio file is the same because we don’t do dynamic ad insertion. So the audio files
⏹️ ▶️ John literally would be the same for all our members. Only transcribe at once and share the transcription and yada yada These are all things
⏹️ ▶️ John that could happen, but I’m guessing that they are not currently happening with the system as exists
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but I bet down the road. I bet they eventually get there because Transcripts for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco podcasts are a major feature. They have huge accessibility value plus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco once people get accustomed to Navigating within a podcast app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by the transcript or being able to jump over to it It’s weird when, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you subscribe to the paid version of something, it’s weird that like, oh, I just can’t do that with this show. Like it’s a negative
⏹️ ▶️ Marco experience. So once people get accustomed to transcripts being very popular, which is already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happening thanks to Apple Podcasts, like we’re already on that path. I think there’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be a lot more of a push to get it working on all podcasts. And that will probably require, you know, local device
⏹️ ▶️ Marco processing and we’ll see how that goes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Additionally, Stephen Robles writes, Apple will pull chapters from ID3 tags and JSON just like before,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but also plain text timestamps in an episode description, kind of like YouTube. Creators can also opt
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out of auto-generated chapters completely. I’m curious how shows with dynamic ads will deal with chapters, if at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Lastly, continues Stephen, subscriber audio chapters are a mess. I crash out about it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’ll put a link to their podcast.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John their podcast. What he’s
⏹️ ▶️ John referring to is Apple’s thing where you pay Apple using iTunes, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John You pay using your Apple account, just like you pay for in-app purchases. You can pay to get access to a
⏹️ ▶️ John private podcast, and of course, Apple takes a cut. We don’t use that system, to be clear, because Apple takes a cut.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that system does exist, and that’s what he’s referring to.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. And so on primary technology with Jason Aitken, Stephen kind of summarizes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple has historically stripped the embedded chapter info from MP3s uploaded as subscriber-only
⏹️ ▶️ Casey audio files. Apple’s still stripping them out of subscriber MP3 files, but there’s now the option to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey add chapters to subscriber audio as plain text timestamps in the episode description. Sounds good, right? But the episode
⏹️ ▶️ Casey description is shared with the free version of the episode, and the timestamps are probably different in the ad-free subscriber
⏹️ ▶️ Casey version. Womp womp.
⏹️ ▶️ John But boggles my mind, because I bet they’re stripping it because they’re like, oh, well, this is a subscriber one and the chapters
⏹️ ▶️ John might not be the same, but that doesn’t make make any sense because they’re embedded in the file. But like, there’s a lot of wrong headed stuff going on
⏹️ ▶️ John with chapters. Like Stephen is trying to do the right thing. He’s trying to provide the best possible product and
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is literally undoing his work when he uploads the member audio. Reason number million why we roll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, also like, keep in mind like, you know, the world of big podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that uses dynamic ad insertion and everything, which is at this point, almost all big podcasts, they’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never supported chapters because the DAI platforms don’t support the insertion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of chapters because they would have to custom code that. Now there’s nothing stopping them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from, like the DAI servers that will say like, all right, I have markers for this episode, we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco allowed to insert ads here, here, and here. And I’m gonna put in 30 seconds here, 60 seconds here, 90 seconds here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that way timestamps from this range of the episode, timestamps should be adjusted 30 seconds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forward and so on.
⏹️ ▶️ John No one can do that math, Marco, it’s too hard.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, exactly, it’s super simple. addition and subtraction. Right. But because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so rare that any of those big podcasts have ever even considered the idea of chapters, because of that, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been no pressure on the DAI software serving side to support
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that very basic math. And there’s no reason why they can’t do it. They already are editing the file for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco each configuration of the download. They already have to modify the tags at the beginning of the file
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to properly account for the length, which they used to not do. And it caused a lot of problems. But they’re doing it now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So they already have all the software in place to do this. They just don’t care
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because no one in the world of big podcasts has ever heard of chapters. And every time a German
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tech fan tells them, it just falls on the floor and they ignore it. You wouldn’t believe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how many times over the years people have proposed, quote, new standards,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or have pitched me on ideas for some kind of new standard they’re gonna do that puts markers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in podcast files at certain times to do something maybe show some kind of metadata
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at certain times in a file. I’ve had so many people have had this idea
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over and over again over the years because they don’t know about chapters and no one knows about chapters
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so it is kind of fun that Apple is finally and granted Spotify did this first and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think YouTube is even doing stuff like this now but Apple finally is like okay look, no one’s doing chapters. We’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just do it client side for you. Like that’s it. Because chapters are very useful for the audience and they love
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them and you know, so we’re just gonna do it and you’re gonna basically suck
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it up. Like you didn’t do it for all these years, we’re gonna do it for you. So overall,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is a great way to go and I think it will dramatically improve the podcast listening
⏹️ ▶️ Marco experience. There are gonna be some problems with ads,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but we’ll see how that plays out. It’s gonna not be super smooth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for ads, but we’ll see. It will turn out pretty well for podcast listeners.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and by the way, the timestamp thing Stephen was talking about, I was quoting from his YouTube video, we’ll link,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can watch the video, which is also a podcast. He has a YouTube version of his podcast. So do we, except
⏹️ ▶️ John his YouTube version is video because he’s a YouTuber, and our YouTube version is just audio because we’re a podcast only. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John we do publish ATP on YouTube for people who wanna listen there. And
⏹️ ▶️ John we do translate the chapter markers into the format that YouTube wants, which is they just want in the
⏹️ ▶️ John description of your video, they just want timestamp word, timestamp. So if you look at
⏹️ ▶️ John the description of all of our videos, what you will see is the description is, go here for the show notes, and then timestamp
⏹️ ▶️ John chapter name, timestamp chapter name, and YouTube parses that and implements chapters. So the YouTube version
⏹️ ▶️ John of ATP does in fact have chapters, but of course it’s only the public version because there’s no way to do a member-only
⏹️ ▶️ John one without, I believe, paying Google account.
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Touch MBP only Pro/Max?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We got some interesting news from Tim Hardwick at MacRumors. This is kind of regurgitating
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what Mark Gurman said. Apple is working on a revamped M6 Pro and M6 Max MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro with an OLED display, thinner chassis and touch support. But it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was curious that Gurman didn’t say anything about the MacBook Pro with just the vanilla
⏹️ ▶️ John I wonder if that’s an omission, but it’s worth, I’ve just put this here now because I feel like Tim at Mac Rumors
⏹️ ▶️ John is maybe reading a bit much into it, but it’s worth considering It’s true that when German talked about this is he only talked
⏹️ ▶️ John about the pro and the max models and did not talk about the Plain no suffix m6 getting
⏹️ ▶️ John a new thinner chassis and an OLED screen or whatever would Apple bifurcate the MacBook Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John line into the two good ones with the pro and the max and No, let’s green and a touchscreen and a thin chassis
⏹️ ▶️ John and then the no suffix one doesn’t get an OLED screen doesn’t get a thinner chassis, doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John get touch. That would be really weird, but if it’s right, we’ll give credit to Tim.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s also extremely, is precedent a word? Do we know? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, it is. I’m very heartened to hear that. It’s very precedented because there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been lots of times over the years when the least expensive computer named
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MacBook Pro in the lineup was pretty different from the others. You know, obviously, currently,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not that different. It is a little different, but it’s not that different currently.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Even before the M4 generation, there were more limitations on ports and monitors and stuff, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or was it the M3 that had that?
⏹️ ▶️ John Usually the unsuffixed M chip isn’t as capable as the suffixed one. So yes, there were differences
⏹️ ▶️ John in external monitor support and bandwidth. And obviously the unsuffixed one usually had one fan instead
⏹️ ▶️ John of two. So that was an internal difference.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, the entire internals are laid out differently usually. And so yeah, there’s all those differences. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before this entire body style of the MacBook Pro, you had the MacBook Escape, the one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that didn’t have the touch bar. And then before that whole era of like those unibody body
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones, you had the MD101, the one that had like the optical drive forever,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and like long after optical drives were gone from the lineup. Was it, didn’t the MD101 have that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Was that, or was it the one before that even? But anyway, like you’ve had frequently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in Apple’s lineup of MacBook Pros. You have like the one that’s like 12 to $1,400
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is stripped down or is an older generation,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but businesses and schools and stuff keep buying a whole bunch of them. So Apple keeps selling them and they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make a bunch of money from that, just getting older, but still being sold. So I can totally see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a plausible path here where if they’re about to, you know, do some pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big component updates and maybe a design update to the MacBook Pro higher-end models.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can totally see modern Apple saying, all right, we’re gonna keep the cheapest model, we’re gonna keep that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the old design, and maybe for possibly years to come. And we’re gonna have the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco higher-end models, which we make more money on, we can help pay for that OLED screen and help justify the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco case redesign with those higher margins. So this is extremely plausible. Now, we don’t actually know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that there’s, I actually wanna do this, it could just be that like, German only heard about the Pro and Max,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the absence of German mentioning something doesn’t really mean that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is also absent in the reality of the thing. So we’ll see how this goes, but that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is extremely plausible because Apple’s done it a lot in the past.
Tahoe & Electron
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s talk Tahoe and Electron apps. Dayton Lowell writes, apparently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Discord is using a custom forked version of Electron and they cherry-picked the fix. It’s in the shipping version right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now. Also, Discord has since updated the app such that the Electron version detector no longer
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s nice, yeah. I’d forgotten about that. The cherry-picking the fix is a Git parlance or maybe a pre-day
⏹️ ▶️ John skip, but it’s basically like they have, you know, they have their own custom version of Electron that has
⏹️ ▶️ John some changes to it. And rather than updating Electron to the new version that has the fix that we’re talking about that doesn’t slow down in Tahoe,
⏹️ ▶️ John they just take the code that implements the thing that avoids that bug and stick it into their custom version.
⏹️ ▶️ John So there’s a GitHub issue where they did that. But anyway, since then, they seem to have actually fully upgraded
⏹️ ▶️ John to a newer version of Electron. And so now the Tahoe detector app does no
⏹️ ▶️ John longer flags Discord as being a problem, but it wasn’t actually a problem before. That’s the limitation of this
⏹️ ▶️ John AppleScript thing that checks whether you have Electron apps that might have this bug. All they can go on is, does this app have Electron
⏹️ ▶️ John and what version number is it? But they can’t tell, like it’s not going to rummage through the binary to see if it has the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then Adam1 adds, the reason Microsoft Teams Classic has that crappy older Electron version is that development has ended for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the classic version of Teams. So that software will never be updated and is wasting space on your SSD. Time to delete that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey less than wonderful software. I won’t be shedding any tears.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yep, I deleted
Mac emoji picker
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know why this… Often, when we record the show,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we get feedback about something that I either knew or intended to say, and then the conversation moves on, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it would be weird to bring it back around. This is a Casey problem, this is not a listener problem, this is a me problem. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I full well knew that the following was the thing, and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John don’t know why I didn’t bring it up. I do. I use it all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, exactly. I don’t know why neither of us brought it up. But
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, maybe it didn’t seem that relevant, but the reason I put it in follow-up is because if you are not like me and
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey and are fully aware of this, it’s good information to know. No, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey why I agree.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Matt Rigby writes with regard to emoji picking in Mac OS, you can summon the buggy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mac OS emoji picker by hitting control and command and space, and it will automatically suggest emoji
⏹️ ▶️ Casey based on the last word you typed similar to LaunchBar.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is Marco saying that he uses LaunchBar to quickly look up and put in an emoji. I didn’t mention to Marco because obviously he likes
⏹️ ▶️ John the way LaunchBar does that he’s not looking for an alternate solution or something. But just FYI, the built-in picker
⏹️ ▶️ John has and the built-in picker also has two modes, has two modes, which is like the small palette that has just like recent stuff or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then the expanded one. And I think it remembers that state. So sometimes you might do the expanded thing, and then it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John small anymore, but you can switch it back. But anyway, Control Command Space, try it in a decent Mac app
⏹️ ▶️ John that uses like native text controls, and you’ll get a nice emoji picker. You can also go to the menus and select
⏹️ ▶️ John Insert special character or whatever. I think it’s a standard menu in most Mac apps.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and I was glad to hear that. I actually did not know about this. So it was news to me. So thank you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco However, I find it really clunky and it’s it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is both slower and it takes more keystrokes and and just is generally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit more friction.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it brings up a UI that you then have to interact with versus like a launch bar type thing, which is like I just get to keep my fingers on my keyboard,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, exactly. Like I can you know, I can type command space gr. I am there we go. It’s already good grimacing face Enter,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco done. And otherwise, Control Command Space, G-R-I,
⏹️ ▶️ John And you gotta figure out what do I do to select the one that I found? Do I click on it? Do I double click on it? Yeah, it’s- Just
⏹️ ▶️ John double clicking on it, insert it, but not make the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco palette go away. Exactly, it’s more work, it’s more friction. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if LaunchBar stopped working and no other such app could possibly provide something like this, sure, okay, I’d
⏹️ ▶️ Marco start using the system one. But as long as this better version exists, I’m gonna keep using it. And that’s, look, that’s what LaunchBar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is. Like, that’s what all these apps are. Like, the system offers search via spotlight. You can type
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in something and type in an app name and hit enter and launch the app. The system now offers clipboard history if you upgrade
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to Tahoe and you can, or to 26, whatever, yeah, Tahoe. I always lose
⏹️ ▶️ Marco track. Even this soon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John after. It’s the current
⏹️ ▶️ Marco OS. I know. Like, you know, so the OS has offered a, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco standard or basic version of these app launchers functionality for a while. but we use these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app launchers because we think they’re better or they’re faster or they have more capabilities or they kind of just fit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our mental model or they fit our muscle memory better. So yeah, I’m gonna keep using LaunchBar,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but if I ever can’t, I’ll look at my options then.
⏹️ ▶️ John Wasn’t there an app that you used to use, Casey, called like Rocket or something?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey That’s right, yeah. Do you not use it anymore?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, no, no, I do. Basically, I think by default, you type colon,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have switched it to semicolon. I don’t remember why I did this, but I did this years ago. And so you type
⏹️ ▶️ Casey semicolon in basically any text entry field anywhere on the Mac and start typing the name of the emoji like grimacing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a great example. So semicolon, or I should say colon actually by default. So colon G-R-I-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then it’ll filter down to grimace, you know, or grimacing emoji, whatever it’s called. And I really like Rocket.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s not perfect, but it’s very, very affordable. I don’t remember how much I paid for it. And I paid for it like 85 years ago and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s fast and it works. So I really recommend it. We’ll put a link in the show notes.
Pogo-stick robot follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s talk PogoStick robots. So this was from overtime
⏹️ ▶️ Casey last week, and we were talking about the Neo household, quote unquote, robot. And John, you had brought
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up that there was some PogoStick robot sort of situation, and you couldn’t let
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it lie, so you did a little research. What did you find?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I was trying to remember, trying to find, actually. I did, after we had finished, so I tried to actually find this
⏹️ ▶️ John episode of the PBS series Nova that was about robotic stuff in the 80s or 90s, and
⏹️ ▶️ John it showed this pogo stick robot. I was describing how like that’s, that was so clearly a breakthrough to my, when I
⏹️ ▶️ John saw that I’m like, they’re on the right track with how to make things that move around. Like it has
⏹️ ▶️ John to be able to be like off balance and self-correcting, you know? And I’ve talked about these scary Boston
⏹️ ▶️ John Dynamics robot dogs that we’ve seen in the modern era and everything. I couldn’t find the Nova episode, but I did
⏹️ ▶️ John find a YouTube video. I think it’s like a, some kind of British thing. I think the narrator is British,
⏹️ ▶️ John showing the pogo robot. So we’ll put a link in the show notes to a YouTube video. You want to see the pogo robot I was thinking of?
⏹️ ▶️ John This will show it even though it’s not the Nova episode and apparently that robot was from something called the MIT leg
⏹️ ▶️ John lab Founded by Mark Raybert in the 1980s and they created that pogo robot and
⏹️ ▶️ John Mark Raybert would go on to found Boston Dynamics So
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of makes sense that I saw that pogo robot I’m like they’re on the right track and then now we have Boston Dynamics. This is literally
⏹️ ▶️ John the same guy So check it out if you want to see what pogo stick robots were like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It all comes full circle.
Butt-dial follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then finally, we have Trey Carpenter writes, my mother-in-law butt dials me all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What we figured out is that she makes a call from favorites. The other person hangs up first. My name is where the hangup button is in her favorites.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Happens two times a week.
⏹️ ▶️ John I tested this. Many, many people sent this in. This was not just Trey writing in that this is definitely,
⏹️ ▶️ John like this can happen. I tried it myself. If this is what my parents are doing, it would make sense. But
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of people’s parents and siblings and friends are
⏹️ ▶️ John doing this. Because if you miss if you lose the hang-up race, would you like oh, where is that red X button?
⏹️ ▶️ John And you know you go to press it This is another thing like the coyote time stuff we talked about like lots of people suggested this
⏹️ ▶️ John in fact I think this is this exact issue was suggested at that time of like game programming techniques for
⏹️ ▶️ John user interfaces to make them feel better or be less error prone and one of the ideas is When you
⏹️ ▶️ John just transition a screen like there used to be a full screen overlay showing like the call and like the red X button and everything like
⏹️ ▶️ John that. But the other person hangs up and suddenly that overlay goes away revealing the phone app beneath it
⏹️ ▶️ John with maybe your list of favorites or whatever. Ignore all taps for the next 300 milliseconds
⏹️ ▶️ John or something to make it so that if you see, because it takes a while for your brain to go, I’m going to hit the red button.
⏹️ ▶️ John Then it sends nerve impulses down your arm and to your hand, and then your finger has to start moving and
⏹️ ▶️ John then it has to move and move and move and hit that. Like that is a large amount of time to the computer. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it would be great if there could be some, a little bit of forgiveness for when the screen transitions and just ignore any taps
⏹️ ▶️ John after that. On the other hand, if you have lightning fast reflexes and the second the screen changes, you hit the button and it doesn’t register,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re like, this phone feels broken. But I do feel like in this case, butt dialing mitigation
⏹️ ▶️ John is worthwhile for that extra delay. I mean, they already do delay stuff like that with the,
⏹️ ▶️ John it has to tell whether you’ve double tapped the side button. So the first tap of the side button doesn’t count until it has waited X number of
⏹️ ▶️ John milliseconds to see if there’s another tap coming.
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Apple’s phone hammock
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay. So I, like I said, at the top of the show, I was really sick the last couple of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey days and is this foot causing the illness? Well, maybe, I don’t know. It was a CDRs. Yeah, it was CDRs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, no, I woke up, what was this yesterday? I believe as we record this and there was like some sort of weird, like sock looking purse thing that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey announced and they dropped this, I think first thing in the morning and I was like, Oh, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to be sick. I’m going to be morning,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I genuinely thought that this was a gag. Me too. That this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was not real, and that I just wasn’t understanding.
⏹️ ▶️ John Kind of like another announcement Apple made long ago that people thought was a gag.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Perhaps, yes. We will talk about that. No.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m 100% with you. When I first breezed by this, it was, I think it was like early in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco morning or something, or like I had just woken up from a nap or something. I was like a little bit tired, and I hadn’t been near the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computer for a while, and I was kind of catching up on whatever had happened, and I scrolled past that, And I got the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instinctual feeling in my mind as I do on April 1st. And I’m scrolling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through the news and I see some weird thing. And I just instantly classified it as, that’s a parody, that’s a parody, that’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco joke. I just kept going. And I saw the same thing like three times from different people as I’m scrolling up. And I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wait a minute. And then I saw one of the link previews and it said apple.com and I’m like, oh no.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yep. Is this real? Sure enough.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sure enough. So Issey Miyake and Apple today unveiled iPhone Pocket,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey inspired by the concept of a piece of cloth. Let me read that one more time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because this is verbatim. Inspired by the concept of a piece of cloth.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s singular 3D knitted construction is designed to fit any iPhone as well as all pocketable items. Beginning
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Friday, November 14th, it will be available at select Apple locations and on apple.com. iPhone Pocket
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the short strap design. in the short strap design retails at $150 American dollars
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the long strap design at $230 American dollars for
⏹️ ▶️ John well, to describe what this looks like, it’s like a long sort of pleated, like the pleated part of the sock
⏹️ ▶️ John when you pull up your socks. It’s a long version of that with like a slit in it and you can put the phone into that. It’s closed at
⏹️ ▶️ John the bottom. It’s not bent like a sock. It’s just like a big rectangle with a slit in it that you can shove a phone into
⏹️ ▶️ John And everyone immediately, especially older people, said, that reminds me of iPod socks. Well, one person, Paul
⏹️ ▶️ John Kifasa, said it reminded him of a mankini. And he did a blog post with who is that Borat?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yep. The Borat swimsuit. Oh, my God.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What a perfect analogy that was.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think you could actually wear this like that. I think it might actually work. As Paul says, someone can feel
⏹️ ▶️ John take? It’s not going to happen, although the level of body
⏹️ ▶️ John hair might be similar.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I’ll tell you one thing. I couldn’t pull that off, but I bet you could. I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John anybody can pull that off. That’s the thing with the Mancini. Anyway, iPod socks were
⏹️ ▶️ John a thing that was released in 2004. I think I didn’t get the YouTube link here. There was a good YouTube link to
⏹️ ▶️ John Jobs introducing the iPod socks. When they were introduced, even the people who were in the room with Steve Jobs
⏹️ ▶️ John thought it was a joke because he very often has a slide in a presentation and it would be like, oh, we did this, and it shows like an
⏹️ ▶️ John iPod with a rotary dial on it for the iPhone. We all know that’s a joke. When he did the iPod socks, you can hear the room
⏹️ ▶️ John like laughing and tittering and not being like, this is a joke, right? And then eventually realizing as he goes on to the
⏹️ ▶️ John next slide that it’s not a joke, they released socks, again, not like foot shaped socks,
⏹️ ▶️ John but just basically like a tube, the tube part of a sock that’s closed on one end for you to put your iPod in.
⏹️ ▶️ John This was in 2004 and you could get six of these. They came in a package of
⏹️ ▶️ John six in different colors for 30 bucks they’re currently selling for 40 to 80 bucks on eBay,
⏹️ ▶️ John by the way, that may go up with this thing. So the Issey Miyake thing, obviously that’s a designer thing. Gruber had a post
⏹️ ▶️ John about this. Issey Miyake is the person who designed the black turtleneck, the signature black turtleneck that Steve Jobs
⏹️ ▶️ John used to wear that everybody parodies. The actual guy, Issey Miyake, died a while ago, but the company lives on.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the thing is, it’s high fashion. In the world of high fashion, like we complain about Apple’s RAM prices, but in the world of high
⏹️ ▶️ John fashion, everything costs a huge amount of money because there is really no connection between the cost
⏹️ ▶️ John of manufacturing your materials and the price. The price is the price, and it has to do with brand and image and
⏹️ ▶️ John fashion and absolutely nothing to do with what the things are made of or how they’re made or anything like that. So this is just a piece of
⏹️ ▶️ John cloth. Why is it $150? Two words, Issey Miyake. Like it’s just like Calvin Klein or Louis Vuitton
⏹️ ▶️ John or like, it’s just, it’s fashion. So I have no, the Hermes, Hermes, sorry, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Those bands, you’re not paying that much because they’re made of special leather at the cost of $1,000,000 because they’re a fancy brand.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is the same thing. Why does this seem to exist? Why is Apple going to make it? Obviously they have a, probably have some relationship
⏹️ ▶️ John with Issey Miyake, Whatever, I don’t care. Some fashion people want to spend 250 bucks on a sock for their phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John Go for it, I don’t care. I will say that it’s easier to get your phone in and out of this than it is for the crossbody strap that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John made for less money. And so it has that going for it. But yeah, iPod socks definitely seemed a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John more cozy. You got six of them for 30 bucks. It was one of the rare, amazing deals in Apple land. And you know
⏹️ ▶️ John why? Because Apple in 2004 was not Issey Miyake or MS or any of these other companies.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple was just Apple and they made the iPod and the iPhone didn’t exist yet. and they weren’t yet the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John of today. So they could sell you socks for 30 bucks and it seemed kind of expensive, like 30 bucks for the top portion
⏹️ ▶️ John of six socks. But I can tell you as someone who’s bought socks recently in 2025, regular men’s socks,
⏹️ ▶️ John 30 bucks for six of them is actually a pretty good deal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, the original iPod socks were like, of course we all made fun of them at the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time. They were also delightful. They were great. And in fact, we actually, we own a set.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco At some point Tiff got an iPod. I got her an iPod mini as an early gift in our relationship.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In fact, it was the first iPod I ever bought, was one for Tiff. And I got her,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at some point later that year, I got her the box of iPod socks, and she kept it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the, I think it was the teal one that she used, she kept it in the iPod sock for most of the time she
⏹️ ▶️ Marco owned it. It was delightful. And we still have the rest of them like in a box somewhere in my closet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Delightful. This thing, like, look, this is harmless. Apple did a fashion collab with a fashion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco house that, you know, they’re going to sell a couple hundred of these things. Maybe like they’re not going to sell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a ton of them. It’s fine. However, I will say if any of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our listeners buy one of these, I would love to see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it worn like Borat because John won’t do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Wow. You’re going to you’re going to really going to stretch it out too much. No, you’re right. I won’t do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Someone someone’s I mean some YouTube will probably do it, but like someone’s got to spend the 200 bucks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get that for that picture. Gosh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but look, it’s fine. Like, there’s all sorts of, so, and what we’ve been told, apparently, like I saw a few people, a few things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco breeze by on Mastodon and stuff, that like apparently similar types of things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have been, you know, getting some traction in different markets, usually not in the US, which is why a lot of us like haven’t heard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about it, but similar types of things have gotten traction, similar to like the crossbody strap. When that came out,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, a few months ago with the phone, everyone’s like, yeah, okay, good job, Apple. taking you know you’re kind of entering
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a market that was already proven in certain market in certain other markets like okay fine I’m sure this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing will be fine it’ll go in like you know the dustbin of Apple history
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with like weird things they’ve made in small volumes for a lot of money like gold Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watches and the made an Apple book the Johnny Ive the design of Apple in California book like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff like that like they occasionally make weird stuff in small batches
⏹️ ▶️ Casey okay whatever. Yeah. I mean, it’s silly and I don’t really understand it, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t understand fashion. So.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, if we can get. A picture of somebody wearing one of these Borat style while
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also wearing a gold Apple watch. Wow. And maybe, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean, maybe AI can help us with this and then also like carrying a Mac book
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in that, in that $300 MacBook leather sleeve they made about. That $300 leather
⏹️ ▶️ John sleeve sounds like a bargain now with $250 piece of cotton cotton sock or whatever this
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco thing is. At least that thing’s leather,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? In front of them, a coffee table with made it with designed by Apple in California.
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t make fun of that book. I’ve got one of those, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh yeah, large version is too big to fit on shelves. One cute thing from the iPod sock announcement with Steve Jobs
⏹️ ▶️ John is a sign of the times, different times technology wise was that he
⏹️ ▶️ John mentioned, and it will also keep your iPod warm. The idea of putting your phone in something to keep it warm
⏹️ ▶️ John is not common. Now I know phones don’t like to be super cold and people who live in very, very cold climates say, well, actually
⏹️ ▶️ John I do have to keep my phone warm. But the thing is iPods did not really produce that much heat,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially in 2004. And many of them, including the one in the picture, had mechanical
⏹️ ▶️ John hard drives in them. And so keeping them warm, even in mildly chilly winter temperatures
⏹️ ▶️ John was probably a good idea. So the Sock was actually performing a function to keep things warm, but I don’t see them selling, for example,
⏹️ ▶️ John a MacBook Pro case that’s designed to keep your MacBook Pro warm. Unless again, you’re using it outdoors on a film
⏹️ ▶️ John shoot or something, But you know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, in all fairness, I think most MacBook Pro cases do keep it warm. It’s probably not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something you want, but it is something that
⏹️ ▶️ John happens. It depends. You know, if someone’s gonna write and say, we are shooting these videos in Alaska
⏹️ ▶️ John we need to keep our MacBook Pros warm.
Steam Machine & Controller
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so John did me personally a great favor by adding a whole bunch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of information about some new gaming hardware releases that I have no opinions on. So I’m just gonna check out for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the next half hour and you got this, John.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you’re recovering from illness anyway, but still I think you might have some interest in some of this
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey stuff. So this was a
⏹️ ▶️ John big, this came and swept away all of our other topics. At first I was gonna save it till next week, but I think it’s just, it’s of the moment. It was announced
⏹️ ▶️ John yesterday, I believe. Valve announced the company behind the Steam
⏹️ ▶️ John store. We used to say Valve, the company behind Half-Life and Portal or whatever, but now we just say
⏹️ ▶️ John Valve, the company behind Steam, which is where people buy PC games. They have
⏹️ ▶️ John a existing hardware product called the Steam Deck and they have a VR headset called,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Index or something?
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, they made an, and they have had some other hardware over time. They made a big announcement
⏹️ ▶️ John where they’re releasing a bunch of new hardware products and they’re very interesting. But before I
⏹️ ▶️ John get into the products, I wanna just give a brief aside about
⏹️ ▶️ John Valve doing this and how it’s different. Yeah, it’s another one of, how are things different than when
⏹️ ▶️ John you were young, John? Well, here we go.
⏹️ ▶️ John To be clear, what Valve’s hardware does, like the Steam Deck, for instance. The Steam Deck is a handheld gaming
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, and it plays quote-unquote PC games that are sold through Steam. And by PC games, we
⏹️ ▶️ John mean games that run on Windows PCs running on x86 processors.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s, and the Steam Deck runs them, but it doesn’t run Windows. And it doesn’t have an
⏹️ ▶️ John x86 processor. Actually, no, it does have an x86 processor. Sorry, I’m getting confused with another product. Anyway, it doesn’t run
⏹️ ▶️ John Windows. It runs, I believe it’s, even on the Steam Deck, it’s called SteamOS. It’s just a Linux
⏹️ ▶️ John variant. It’s like, how are they running Windows games? Windows, quote unquote, PC games on Linux. And as we’ve discussed
⏹️ ▶️ John in the past when talking about Apple similar technology, they have a thing that I think they call it Proton. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like a translation layer that understands the like direct X API calls or whatever inside of Windows
⏹️ ▶️ John X86 binary and translates them to calls into their own Linux native library for doing
⏹️ ▶️ John 3D stuff. And that way they are able to sell a platform that
⏹️ ▶️ John plays games made to run on Windows, but they don’t license Windows and they don’t have to,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, be involved with Microsoft in any way. And this has been going on for years. And
⏹️ ▶️ John obviously also there’s the Steam store, which is an online store where you can buy games. You can even buy games for the Mac there.
⏹️ ▶️ John some games for the Mac, that has become incredibly dominant and the way that a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ John people buy games, it was one of the very early app stores, even before the iPhone, I believe. You can
⏹️ ▶️ John check my math on that. Because it makes it real easy to install games. You go to like an
⏹️ ▶️ John app store like Experience, so you run the Steam app, there’s a bunch of games, you can buy them, you put a credit card in,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like the app store, but before the app store and for PC games. The PC games used to be a pain in the butt to install, and they would fight
⏹️ ▶️ John with each other, and Steam like made it so, don’t worry about it, If it’s in the App Store, it’s in the Steam Store,
⏹️ ▶️ John you just click install, give us your money, and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it’ll install it and it’ll be great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly, what got me sold on Steam back then was the lack of all the stupid copy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco protection crap that the real games would install. Yeah, yeah, like the App Store, you don’t have to deal with that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it was great, you could just download the game, first of all, you don’t have to go to a store and buy a disc, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you wouldn’t have the disc constantly checking it for self, for disc protection, and all that crap, and then if you went
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somewhere else, like your friend’s house, you could log in and just download the game there, and as long as you weren’t playing it at the same time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as you were in your home computer, you could play your games there. It was incredible.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like the app store. When you get a new phone, you sign into the app store, you can download all your apps. You don’t have to enter serial
⏹️ ▶️ John numbers for all your apps. You don’t have to log in.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, all the activation crap. Because copy protection was getting so advanced
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and therefore also burdensome and invasive back then. Because basically CDRs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did a number on game sales because again, STR, coming
⏹️ ▶️ John back to the CDR. Yeah, good thing all those CD-Rs are now bad so you can’t play those copies anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but there were so many, because look, I used to pirate games a lot. Of course, I was a teenager back then. And there were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so many weird tricks they would do. Like, all right, we’re gonna store this protection data
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in this weird sub-channel of the CD. They did that on floppy disks too, by the way. Of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah. And of course, then you’d have apps that would be able to rip that sub-channel data, and then burners that would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be able to burn it. And you’d have to, okay, you had to get this version of Nero burning ROM to rip the disk and then burn it with this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one Plex tour CD writer. Like it was this whole thing. And then as a result of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that cat and mouse game, the copy protection got so invasive. It started basically being like a root kit on your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computer. And there were all these different schemes that different companies would use. And it was a nightmare
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to both try to be a pirate during that time and also to be a regular customer during that
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, because you had to deal with all the stuff that was meant to make pirates lives more miserable, but it made your life more miserable too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it was awful. And then Steam comes in and is like, all that’s gone. We’re gonna do online activation based
⏹️ ▶️ Marco DRM, but which worked just fine, but it was way less invasive. There was no more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like physical component.
⏹️ ▶️ John were ahead of their time with the, you only sell them digitally, you can’t get a disc and you have to be online,
⏹️ ▶️ John have to be online. I’m never gonna use a service that makes you have to be online. That’s what people would say. That was controversial at the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco say that. Because it was a long time ago. It’s so
⏹️ ▶️ John now. Right, and so, but the thing that strikes me and has always struck me about Steam and doing all this is that
⏹️ ▶️ John the Microsoft of my youth would never have allowed this. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John the Microsoft of my youth, the Microsoft before it lost an antitrust case against the US and had
⏹️ ▶️ John all the baggage, when it was the dominant company and the dominant thing, which was
⏹️ ▶️ John personal computers, all before mobile, before all of that, that Microsoft would
⏹️ ▶️ John never have allowed another company to make and sell a platform where you could
⏹️ ▶️ John run Windows games that didn’t give Microsoft any money, that didn’t run Windows,
⏹️ ▶️ John that didn’t need Microsoft’s permission, and you know how they would solve this problem? How
⏹️ ▶️ John would they not allow it? They would constantly be modifying their APIs in
⏹️ ▶️ John such a way that it would break the proton layer. And I’m not saying they haven’t done that. I bet they probably have.
⏹️ ▶️ John But they would leverage their strength by saying, if company, we will
⏹️ ▶️ John only license Windows to you if you promise to never do business with Valve in any way. And
⏹️ ▶️ John like, we will only let you ship your game on Windows if you promise you will put in this code that will
⏹️ ▶️ John cause it to not function on Steam. Because Valve is selling
⏹️ ▶️ John hardware and selling games through their own app store that
⏹️ ▶️ John runs apps not made for their operating system. They’re selling hardware with Linux on it. These games
⏹️ ▶️ John are not Linux games. They’re Windows games. Developers are making Windows games and
⏹️ ▶️ John Valve is like, we’re just gonna make them work. We’re gonna make a compatibility layer. We’re gonna certify
⏹️ ▶️ John that they work. If they don’t work, we’re gonna tweak our compatibility layer so that they do work. And it’s like, that’s not gonna work. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not tenable. And they hit, the valve is shown. It is tenable. They can do it. And Microsoft,
⏹️ ▶️ John probably because they’ve been chastened by their antitrust case, probably because the PC is not
⏹️ ▶️ John that important of a platform, so they just ignore it, has allowed them to exist and expand.
⏹️ ▶️ John So much so that Microsoft is currently, over the past several years, deciding whether or not they still
⏹️ ▶️ John wanna do that whole Xbox thing? And the answer, by the way, seems to be no, they don’t really.
⏹️ ▶️ John They entered the console space, they did amazingly well for years and years, but they’re not the top
⏹️ ▶️ John of the console space. The highest they probably got was a 360 and they’ve had a bunch of poor choices since
⏹️ ▶️ John then. They seem to be getting out of that, but they’re still make PC games.
⏹️ ▶️ John But Valve was coming and say, oh, hey, Microsoft, you’re getting out of the Xbox space and you’re just gonna do PC games. Well, guess
⏹️ ▶️ John what? We essentially own the PC gaming space. We don’t run Windows. We don’t care what you do.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s weird that people are still writing games for x86 Windows, but we can run them
⏹️ ▶️ John on our links platform and gamers seem to like it fine. And they buy them through our store and our store is
⏹️ ▶️ John the only gaming store that matters even though you have your own store. So sorry about that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And now with these announcements, you’ll see they’re basically looking to fill the gap
⏹️ ▶️ John that will eventually be left by Microsoft either radically
⏹️ ▶️ John changing and deemphasizing the Xbox or abandoning it entirely. Sorry for this big, long preamble, but here’s what they announced.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the first is this thing called the Steam Controller. They’ve made a controller before. Do you remember the one with the big touchpads on it,
⏹️ ▶️ John like the round touchpads? I think it was also called the Steam Controller. I used it and didn’t like it, but anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a handheld controller. It just looks like an Xbox or PlayStation controller, but it’s got two big
⏹️ ▶️ John square touchpads on it. Most of the things that they do, like their Steam Controllers, are made
⏹️ ▶️ John for quote-unquote PC games, which means they expect you to have a mouse. So the controller has to have some equivalent way to use a mouse.
⏹️ ▶️ John Same thing with the steam deck. Steam deck also has two big square touch pads on either side of it because
⏹️ ▶️ John these games are made to use the mouse cursor, their PC games. And so you need a touch pad to basically be, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John to be the mouse cursor on a system that doesn’t have a mouse cursor. Um, this controller works with any
⏹️ ▶️ John PC or device running steam. So that includes a Mac running steam, a PC running steam, any
⏹️ ▶️ John of the hardware that we’re gonna talk about or the steam link app, this includes Mac windows, Linux PCs, as well as tablets
⏹️ ▶️ John and smartphones. So this is just like a controller or with anything It’s got infrared LEDs
⏹️ ▶️ John that will make it trackable by the VR thing that we’re gonna talk about in a second It’s got magnetic sticks.
⏹️ ▶️ John So we’ve I think we talked about this on a past episode The technologies for how little joysticks and controllers work
⏹️ ▶️ John Even today like the PlayStation. I think also the the plain Xbox one
⏹️ ▶️ John the controllers use Sticks that have things
⏹️ ▶️ John rubbing up against each other inside them and And anything that rubs up against each other, if you use it long enough, the rubbing
⏹️ ▶️ John will cause, you know, friction and damage And it will stop working. And so you get things like stick drift in the
⏹️ ▶️ John Nintendo Switch because things wear out over time There are technologies that allow joysticks to work
⏹️ ▶️ John without things that touch each other. One of them are the Hall Effect sensors Which use, I don’t know, we’ll put a
⏹️ ▶️ John link to the difference between the Hall Effect and the thing we’re about to talk about But they, things don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John actually touch. They just pass by each other and through magnetic fields or whatever determines where the stick’s pointing
⏹️ ▶️ John The steam controller uses TMR, which is tunnel magneto resistance, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John slightly more accurate than Hall effect and a little bit better. Again, they’ll be linking to show us about these details, but the point is
⏹️ ▶️ John steam controller, they’re using the very best kind of like joystick thumbstick technology
⏹️ ▶️ John that is available today that will last the longest. The steam controller, like everything else we’re going to talk about,
⏹️ ▶️ John no pricing released, but pricing probably won’t be too bad. 30 to 40 hour battery
⏹️ ▶️ John life and magnetically attaching combo charger and wireless dongle, so There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a little magnetic thing It’s really neat like if you just sort of like slide the controller How to describe this if you leave
⏹️ ▶️ John the little magnetic charging thing flat on your desk And you put the controller flat on your desk
⏹️ ▶️ John And then you just push slide the controller along the desk Towards the magnetic thing that magnetic thing will leap from the desk
⏹️ ▶️ John surface and stick to the underscout of the controller. It’s very neat And that magnetic thing that charges
⏹️ ▶️ John it is also the wireless dongle that you has a cord that plugs into the back of your thing For the
⏹️ ▶️ John like low latency wireless signal, so that’s the steam controller neat And I think it looks kind of uncomfortable to
⏹️ ▶️ John use but you got to have some compromises for To be able to use PC games on it
⏹️ ▶️ John Second thing they’re releasing. It’s called the steam machine Which is a six inch
⏹️ ▶️ John black cube That is oh, I should have got these images six inch black cube.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a gaming PC It’s a small form-factor gaming PC and a six inch black cube And I had some pictures
⏹️ ▶️ John of what is on the inside of this thing that I will try to find But it’s pretty nice looking inside like it’s a small
⏹️ ▶️ John form-factor PC, but not one that you made yourself it is It looks
⏹️ ▶️ John almost kind of like something Apple would make when you open it up. There is just a massive
⏹️ ▶️ John single fan that’s like probably six inches in diameter, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John one fan pulling through and the whole rest of the thing is filled with like heat sink that the fan is pulling air through.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s pretty neat. It looks like a little black cube. People were making parodies of it by putting a NeXT logo on it, even though it doesn’t really look
⏹️ ▶️ John like the NeXT cube. But it is a small form factor PC.
⏹️ ▶️ John It has an internal power supply. It has an LED strip on the front that’s like customizable. And the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John they described was like, say you want to download a game on Steam, but it’s taken a while to download, which
⏹️ ▶️ John probably won’t take too long because they use peer-to-peer downloading and it’s really fast. But anyway, if you have this Steam
⏹️ ▶️ John machine hooked up to your TV, you can go just go watch a TV show or something and you’ll be able to see on the LED strip
⏹️ ▶️ John like a progress bar, like whether your download is done or not without having to take over the screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey That is super
⏹️ ▶️ John cool. And you can, it’s all customizable. This is again, it’s a PC. They emphasize that it’s a PC. It
⏹️ ▶️ John runs SteamOS 3, which is an Arc-based Linux, ARCH-based Linux with KDE Plasma as their desktop environment.
⏹️ ▶️ John Here’s a quote from their market material. “‘Steam Machine’ is optimized for gaming, but it’s still your PC.
⏹️ ▶️ John Install your own apps or even another operating system. Who are we to tell you how to use your computer?”
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love this line so much. When I saw it. Very unhelpful.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, they’ve always been like this, because they’re a PC company. And they’re like, look, this is just a PC.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, we’re not going to say, like, it looks like a little console. What I’m getting is like, this looks like an Xbox.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is a little cube. It plays quote unquote PC games, But
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not sold as a personal computer, but it is. And they’re like, look, it’s a computer. Like you can, like, you
⏹️ ▶️ John want to install Windows on it? Go ahead, that’ll work fine. Do whatever you want with it. It is a cute, small, four-factor
⏹️ ▶️ John PC. Another bit from the marketing. Steam Machine keeps cool and runs whisper
⏹️ ▶️ John quiet, even when running the most demanding games. And the measurement I saw in some YouTube videos was 28 to 30 decibels. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John awesome. A cute little, small, four-factor
⏹️ ▶️ John gaming dedicated PC. The performance they describe as quote, 4K gaming at 60 frames
⏹️ ▶️ John per second with FSR, which is one of those technologies that does like upscaling or whatever. So it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not gonna do native 4K 60 frames per second, but you won’t notice the difference. The specs,
⏹️ ▶️ John it has a, what they describe as a semi-custom AMD Zen 4 processor with a
⏹️ ▶️ John six, they say 6C12T, six core, 12 thread, I guess, up to 4.8 gigahertz, 30
⏹️ ▶️ John watts TDP. They describe it as having more than six times the performance of the Steam
⏹️ ▶️ John Deck. So I’m assuming this AMD Zen processor thing, I’m assuming it’s like one
⏹️ ▶️ John of those AMD CPU, GPU combos, kind of like what the PlayStation has. But it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John an x86 CPU and a GPU, comes with 16 gigs of RAM. Your choices for storage are 512 or two
⏹️ ▶️ John terabytes. It has a micro SD card slot, a Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3,
⏹️ ▶️ John a dedicated antenna for the Steam controllers built into the Steam Cube.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you don’t need that, the dongle thing. Display port is 4K at up to 240
⏹️ ▶️ John Hertz or 8K at 60 Hertz. Supports HDR FreeSync and Daisy chaining. HDMI 2.0 port at
⏹️ ▶️ John 4K at 120 Hertz. Supports HDR FreeSync and CEC. Everyone loves CEC.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s got two USB-A 3.2 ports, one USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 port, and
⏹️ ▶️ John two USB-A 2.0 ports and gigabit ethernet. Again, no pricing.
⏹️ ▶️ John But this, you’re like, so is this an Xbox? Is this a game console? It is
⏹️ ▶️ John a, the Steam Deck is a quote unquote handheld PC. You can run quote unquote
⏹️ ▶️ John PC games on the Steam Deck. You download them from Steam, they’re games designed to run on Windows
⏹️ ▶️ John and they run on Linux on this handheld thing. This is the non-handheld version of the Steam Deck. And of course
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s more powerful. It’s a tiny little PC. It’s a cute little box. You can connect it to your TV just like you would connect an
⏹️ ▶️ John Xbox to your TV, just like you connect a PlayStation to your TV, but it’s a PC.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s kind of like a Steam console. Like is a valve is going
⏹️ ▶️ John to replace X-Box as the third company, or are they just going to become to dominate the PC gaming
⏹️ ▶️ John space? Because most people don’t want to build a gaming PC. I know I don’t like,
⏹️ ▶️ John they just want to play PC games because PC games are good. They’re the, that’s where, you know, PC games are made, are
⏹️ ▶️ John more complicated, have more features require a mouse and a keyboard often. And here’s valve out here with the
⏹️ ▶️ John dominant PC gaming store selling a handheld PC that you can play games on. And now
⏹️ ▶️ John a non handheld PC you can play games on that looks a lot like a game console and they also will sell their Own controller.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m fascinated by this again. No pricing The guess for people looking
⏹️ ▶️ John at this is that it’s not going to be super expensive because it is not a super powerful game We see against a six inch cube.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s it’s gonna be like game console caliber power But I think
⏹️ ▶️ John it will also be game console caliber ease of use which
⏹️ ▶️ John is really important. Like Marco, you just talked about all the things that you liked about Steam and how annoying PC gaming
⏹️ ▶️ John was. The Steam Deck has the same advantage. It’s a dedicated piece of hardware. You don’t need anything but
⏹️ ▶️ John the Steam Deck. You sign into your Steam account, you download your games, you buy new games. You know they’re gonna play on it because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John made by the same company. Like it’s pretty compelling. And in the same way, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, should I build a PC? Should I build a little PC and hook it up to my TV? Should I go to PC parts picker and start
⏹️ ▶️ John designing my small form factor PC and make sure that it doesn’t overheat has the right blah blah blah, or should I just buy a
⏹️ ▶️ John Steam machine? Steam machine, something like this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to considering having
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco gaming PC in my
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not even out yet, by the way, but I’m looking at this and going, you know, this would solve a lot of problems I have.
⏹️ ▶️ John In particular, I have no place for a gaming PC, but this thing is a freaking six inch cube and I could put it right
⏹️ ▶️ John next to my PlayStation and connect it to the same monitor and use the same controller. So I have some interest
⏹️ ▶️ John in this. Do either Do you have any interest in this cute little cube?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So by coincidence, I have one right here. No, just kidding.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But close. A few months ago, I bought a small form factor gaming PC
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for our house here because Tiff and Adam were basically like, everybody wanted one more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco PC in the house. And at this point, almost all of our Razer laptops are dead except for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mine, the one that I repaired, put in all the new stuff in. The others are all dead. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tiff wanted her own gaming PC for here. And so there was this company that I found on Amazon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that basically sells almost like shoebox sized little, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, it’s basically, it can fit a full-size graphics card and then everything else is kind of tiny around it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it looks almost like a PCIE enclosure, but it’s the full computer in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there. Anyway, so we bought one of those and it is currently connected to the TV
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with wires running across the living room for the keyboard and there’s like a game pad style controller
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on it. And Tiff uses it to play some old games. And it’s totally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine. But if the Valve thing was out, I would have definitely bought that instead because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is way smaller and it will have, it will have like, you know, the SteamOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of, you know, like the shell and the software environment
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John that is made- It’s meant
⏹️ ▶️ John to be used on a TV, like a console. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it’s not, you’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna see like the Windows Explorer, like it’s running Linux. Like it’s its own operating system made. So you hook
⏹️ ▶️ John this thing up to your TV, sit on the couch with a controller and you launch Steam and launch your games.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, so there’s no question in my mind that if that was available at that time, we would have bought that
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll just put a link in the document. We’ll try to put in the notes to the Verge article that has an image carousel showing
⏹️ ▶️ John the internals. It’s a huge heat sink, a huge fan and everything else. It looks very
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple-like on the inside. Maybe not quite as neat and beautiful as the Apple stuff, but it is extremely well-designed
⏹️ ▶️ John little PC. I forgot to mention in addition to the customizable LED strip in the front It also has very
⏹️ ▶️ John much like various Xboxes have a replaceable magnetically attaching faceplate So you can
⏹️ ▶️ John have different faceplates and brand them and put stickers on them and have color ones or whatever The default
⏹️ ▶️ John one is a cute little you know black cube, but you can that front part can be replaced with Third party
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff or anything you want so that’s pretty neat as well. I’m very interested in this machine
⏹️ ▶️ John Although basically my p my ps5 looks like my PS5 is
⏹️ ▶️ John an AMD combo CPU GPU with an SSD and RAM and connected
⏹️ ▶️ John to with a Linux based operating system connected to a store where I download games. Like that’s what my
⏹️ ▶️ John PlayStation is. The difference is my PlayStation plays PlayStation games and this thing plays quote unquote
⏹️ ▶️ John PC games, which how long before they’re called Steam games or Valve games or something?
⏹️ ▶️ John like, I guess they’re still PC games. Like they’re emphasizing like, look, gamers can build their own monster gaming PC
⏹️ ▶️ John and that will run all these games too. But it’s just weird to me that developers are making games, presumably
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re developing on Windows machines, they’re testing on Windows, and then how many of their users
⏹️ ▶️ John are running their games not on Windows? It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey fascinating. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is not something I have a need for today, but it’s only a matter of time before Declan discovers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey PC gaming. Yeah, Declan may have a need for this. Right, I don’t plan to bring this into our world, But, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he will find out and he will want it. And if we do go down this path, this seems like a great answer,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John pricing that it’s better than
⏹️ ▶️ John building your own gaming PC for sure. Like if your kid wants to just play PC games and you don’t have to think about it,
⏹️ ▶️ John you just buy this thing, plug it in. Like, even if you just hook it up to like a monitor in his room or hook it up to your TV or something, like you can treat
⏹️ ▶️ John it like a console and that’s yeah. And you know, who knows price performance wise, people go, Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John I could build a small form factor PC. That’s 10 times as fast. You probably could.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco You always could. Doesn’t matter.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Like that’s, yes, of course you can. This is for, this is like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for Apple buyers. This is for people who don’t want to do that and who don’t want, who either
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t have the time or don’t have the skill or want the more integrated experience that this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will offer. And that’s a good size
⏹️ ▶️ John market. And the beauty is, as I’m sure Valve would tell you, is say you build your small form factor
⏹️ ▶️ John PC or say you build your monster PC. You don’t need to install on it, SteamOS, which is free.
⏹️ ▶️ John And now you have, now your PC connected to your TV has a nice convenient interface
⏹️ ▶️ John that you can use from a controller from your couch because that’s what they’re offering. Like they are the Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ John of PC gaming, which sounds weird to say, like
⏹️ ▶️ John Microsoft the Microsoft of PC gaming? Like they have an open platform, well, they don’t, Microsoft didn’t give away Windows
⏹️ ▶️ John for free, but like a Linux based operating system designed for what it’s supposed to do. They have their own store. They’re the Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ John and Apple combined of PC gaming. They’re the best of both of them. Like trying to provide a unified experience
⏹️ ▶️ John without giving problems, but also being open like the old Microsoft was and not super duper evil like the old Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ John was intentionally bringing stuff. But still, like these games are still written to DirectX.
⏹️ ▶️ John Valve does not control DirectX. So there’s still this tension. There’s still this like other shoe waiting to drop or Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ John can wake up and go, why are we letting them do this? Why are they allowed to take all
⏹️ ▶️ John the profit and market share by selling a machine that doesn’t run Windows that runs Windows games? Why are we
⏹️ ▶️ John allowing that to happen? But I think Microsoft’s mostly distracted by AI and business customers. So maybe it won’t be a big deal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, does Minecraft still not run on Steam OS? I think it’s, I know it doesn’t run like it’s, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco isn’t like natively in Steam, of course, because Microsoft, but yeah, I remember I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looked into it because Adam got a Steam deck a few couple of years ago. And I looked into like, can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we put Minecraft on it? And the answer at the time was like, you can sort of try, but it’s very hacky.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it would maybe only be the Java version. And like there’ll be like there was, you had to like, you know, leave the walled garden to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. And I was just like, yeah, that doesn’t sound worth it. We’re just not going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John to do that. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I think what I saw from people who had talked to Valve and this product release is that like there is still
⏹️ ▶️ John a way like their games are like this is certified to run on SteamOS and blah, blah, blah. But if you have a Windows game
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not certified to run, you can still just ask it to run like you can you can say, well, give it a try. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John will it work? Well, there might be glitches that might not work right. But like because of the open nature of it, they’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John stopping you from doing it. It’s just like it might not work that well. And I think Minecraft probably falls in that category of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s not Steam certified for whatever, but you can still run it. and if it works, then it works.
Steam Frame
⏹️ ▶️ John Alright, so this next one is where things get really interested in and there’s more of an Apple angle
⏹️ ▶️ John But there’s also even more of the angle. I was talking about like why is my gonna fling him do this? It’s called the steam frame
⏹️ ▶️ John and it is a VR headset There is a much bunch more images of
⏹️ ▶️ John it at upload vr.com. We’ll put that link in the notes Steam frame looks like a vision pro, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John all black It runs steam os 3 just like the other things does it has a 4
⏹️ ▶️ John nanometer snapdragon 8 gen 3 processor I know nothing about the Snapdragon line, but from what I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John gathered This is a basically like a current or previous gen phone processor on really high-end phones
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s an ARM processor and Valve has added a translation
⏹️ ▶️ John layer that translates x86 to ARM Just like Apple has done and just like Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ John has sort of done with Windows ARM Valve says that is there’s a 10 to 20 percent
⏹️ ▶️ John performance hit for code that is being translated but that is only code that is running on
⏹️ ▶️ John the CPU and that is not part of an API that has a native implementation. So for example, all
⏹️ ▶️ John those DirectX calls or whatever, those get sent to native ARM
⏹️ ▶️ John implementations of everything. It’s only like the game code that is just running on the CPU. That has a performance hit, but everything else goes
⏹️ ▶️ John through the native stuff. They describe the Steam Frame as having roughly
⏹️ ▶️ John Steam Deck levels of power. Like if you were to run a game on the Steam Frame, it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, which means it’s six times less powerful than the Steam machine. But you know, it’s a headset,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they don’t have an M5 to stick in it. They’ve got this, which I’m sure the Snapdragon 8
⏹️ ▶️ John Gen 3 is fine, but it’s no M5. According to Dave2D,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll put a link to his review as well on YouTube, Valve has touted its control over the whole
⏹️ ▶️ John stack. They control the hardware, the OS, the drivers, when explaining why they were able to do this better than Microsoft with their
⏹️ ▶️ John ARM on Windows efforts. Like, Microsoft has been trying to do this for a while. ship Windows for
⏹️ ▶️ John ARM, and have all the x86 stuff run well, including games, and it has proven difficult.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe they’re not putting a lot of resources into it, maybe they don’t care as much, but Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John the gold standard for take a binary written for a different CPU and make it run amazingly on the current
⏹️ ▶️ John CPU, has done exactly that with ARM and x86.
⏹️ ▶️ John From the early days, ARM Macs were running x86 binaries faster than many x86 Macs, and now
⏹️ ▶️ John definitely faster than all of them, including games. Apple of course has its own similar based similar
⏹️ ▶️ John technology similar to Proton similar to crossover similar to all these other things where You can run a Windows
⏹️ ▶️ John x86 game on an arm Mac through that type of translation layer and valve when talking
⏹️ ▶️ John about this Sounds like Apple they’re like well when we have a problem if we see a game has a performance problem or a hitch or something
⏹️ ▶️ John We have the all the code for the OS we have all the code for the drivers We control all the hardware we can fix
⏹️ ▶️ John it We can make the game run better because we control the whole stack in theory That’s true of Apple, but Apple doesn’t care about games
⏹️ ▶️ John as much as Valve does. But still, even Apple’s doing a good job with their game porting toolkit. This headset has 16
⏹️ ▶️ John gigs of RAM. Your choice is 256 gig or 1 terabyte of storage. It also has a microSD
⏹️ ▶️ John slot. The reason these things all have microSD slots is Steam Deck’s got a microSD, Steam Machine has it,
⏹️ ▶️ John this thing has it. If you have all your games and you downloaded them, like huge games, you downloaded them,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you want those games to be on your headset, yes, you could download them to your headset again, But you can also just copy them to the
⏹️ ▶️ John SD card take the SD card out stick it in your headset and now the games Are there without having you redownload them because not everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John has gigabit fiber like like we do right because it’s a PC Of course, you can copy stuff onto a removable media
⏹️ ▶️ John and move to something else. They all have a micro SD card So I know that’s not SD Express, which is kind of a shame
⏹️ ▶️ John There is one USB C 2.0 part on the rear for charging and data. It has Wi-Fi 7 Bluetooth 5.3
⏹️ ▶️ John and a dedicated Wi-Fi 6e radio just for the wireless
⏹️ ▶️ John adapter, which we’ll talk more about in a little bit. It has a magnetically attaching front piece. So
⏹️ ▶️ John the Vision Pro has a magnetically attaching back piece, like the ski goggle part, you pull
⏹️ ▶️ John the face shield off of that, it attaches with magnets. This thing is kind of,
⏹️ ▶️ John not the reverse, but slightly different. This thing, when it’s, you know, if you put it on your face, you can pull the
⏹️ ▶️ John front part of it off. And what comes off is like the ski goggle part, basically like the aluminum part. So it’s got the CPU,
⏹️ ▶️ John the lenses, the screens, all the compute, like all that stuff comes off. But the rest
⏹️ ▶️ John of it is like the strap that goes around your head, the equivalent of light shield that is a separate piece.
⏹️ ▶️ John So they’ve broken the thing up in different pieces instead of having like on the Apple thing
⏹️ ▶️ John the ski goggle part and the little temples sticks whatever. That’s all one piece.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then the strap comes out. And this thing, the front goggly part with the CPU
⏹️ ▶️ John comes off magnetically. Supposedly that says if we come out with a better one that it’s higher CPU
⏹️ ▶️ John You can just buy that and snap it on or if you like a different strap or whatever and different speakers
⏹️ ▶️ John because again the speakers Are in that part you can mix and match those things together so interesting different choice
⏹️ ▶️ John there The head strap does include integrated speakers, and they fired backwards like they’re not in the little
⏹️ ▶️ John sticks They’re like in the basically what you would imagine would be the light shield on a vision Pro Their
⏹️ ▶️ John force cancelling kind of like the Sunos subwoofers that you do like Um, which
⏹️ ▶️ John means they have, uh, drivers, uh, opposing each other so that their vibrations cancel out because when they didn’t do this,
⏹️ ▶️ John the vibrations would throw off the display for like tracking and stuff. And that makes me wonder if
⏹️ ▶️ John the reason Apple put the speakers in the vision pro and those little, I don’t know what they’re called the sticks.
⏹️ ▶️ John Did Apple put the speakers in there? Because if they hadn’t, they would have the same problem of vibrations
⏹️ ▶️ John because Apple doesn’t have like, uh, you know, uh, force canceling Speakers as far as I
⏹️ ▶️ John know they just have single ones, but they’re in the sticks if they had put them in the metal part Maybe they would have the same
⏹️ ▶️ John problem So, you know two different possible approaches to the same problem, which is hey Speakers cause vibration
⏹️ ▶️ John vibrations bad for the displays and for tracking and stuff Apple just moved the speakers out of that area
⏹️ ▶️ John valve left them in like the front sort of Light shield part
⏹️ ▶️ John but made them force cancelling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It could also just be like getting getting them closer to the ears the way Apple does is of course gonna be better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for everything about them. But it also probably involves costing a plexi that maybe Valve’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco product couldn’t bear that in its margins.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and it makes it like the one piece, like the non-replaceable piece, it’s more stuff that is connected together.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like Valve’s whole idea is like, maybe we didn’t get this whole strap and speaker part right. Maybe a third party makes
⏹️ ▶️ John a better one. Maybe we make a version two. You can replace all those things, whereas those are, they’re stuck to the
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple headset. The the steam frame has which is what they
⏹️ ▶️ John call this thing has a 21.6 watt hour rechargeable battery The battery is on the rear of the strap.
⏹️ ▶️ John Lots of other headsets have done this instead of being on a cord in your pocket or whatever it’s on the back
⏹️ ▶️ John like on the back of your head and lots of reviewers were sort of Repeating the line
⏹️ ▶️ John that I’m sure valve told them and lots of people have said for other things Oh it balances it because
⏹️ ▶️ John the front thing has a weight on it because that’s where the headset the goggly part is and then the the batteries in the back and it balances it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’m like, look, it only balances it if there is a fulcrum in this seesaw,
⏹️ ▶️ John but there’s not because the
⏹️ ▶️ John frame does not have a top strap. The steam frame has a single strap, like a pair
⏹️ ▶️ John of ski goggles. So I’m like putting weight on the back and on the front, I guess it makes it feel like the front isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John sliding down your face as much, but the only way for you to make that balance is to tighten that strap.
⏹️ ▶️ John So right away I said, you know what you should have done? You should have put a top strap. The valve index has a top
⏹️ ▶️ John strap. Like it’s not like they don’t know top strap technology. So Apple is definitely out ahead
⏹️ ▶️ John on the strap technology, but I feel like this is surmountable for them, especially since that part is replaceable.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, the battery is on the back of the head and it’s smaller than the Vision Pro battery. The Vision Pro battery is a 35.9 watt hours compared
⏹️ ▶️ John to 21.6. Battery life for this thing is quoted as
⏹️ ▶️ John one to four hours. So like one is worst case scenario, four is best case. So probably in the same range
⏹️ ▶️ John as the Vision Pro, maybe a little bit better, maybe a little bit worse. The weight, it’s 440 grams,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is roughly half of what the Vision Pro weighs. It’s not made of aluminum. Doesn’t have a front screen
⏹️ ▶️ John on it. It’s plastic. It’s half the weight of the Vision Pro. And the Vision
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro weight does not include the battery. So keep this in mind. It’s half the weight of the
⏹️ ▶️ John Vision Pro with the battery, which is stuck on the back of your head. For displays,
⏹️ ▶️ John this apparently is very disappointing to a lot of the PC people. We’ll put a link to the Digital Foundry’s review
⏹️ ▶️ John of it. And that guy’s real broken up. I don’t know about the screens, but you know, anyway, the screens are 2160
⏹️ ▶️ John by 2160 per eye, but they are LCD.
⏹️ ▶️ John And LCD does not have per pixel lighting control and LCDs and headsets don’t even have
⏹️ ▶️ John mini LED like, you know, dynamic backlighting or whatever. It’s just one
⏹️ ▶️ John single backlight for the whole thing, which means when you put this thing on and it’s showing a full
⏹️ ▶️ John black screen, what you actually see is a full gray screen. as LCDs cannot block
⏹️ ▶️ John the light from the backlight entirely. So even though it’s supposed to be pitch black in there like it is in the OLED Vision
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro, it’s not, it’s gray. This is very much like the Quest 3 and the other things. Why do
⏹️ ▶️ John they use LCDs instead of OLEDs? One reason is cost, because those OLEDs and Apple’s things are a whole jillion dollars, right? And this is not gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John be as expensive as Vision Pro. But the other reason is a lot of the gaming headsets use,
⏹️ ▶️ John like they describe this as a low persistent LCD screen. And for combating motion
⏹️ ▶️ John sickness and other, you know, motion artifacts and stuff like that. Uh, what was
⏹️ ▶️ John discovered very early on in the VR world was the way to do that with current screen technology. This
⏹️ ▶️ John predates OLED was to pulse the image onto the screen. So just say,
⏹️ ▶️ John boom, here’s the image and then turn off the screens and then wait, wait, wait, and then turn on light up for
⏹️ ▶️ John the next thing and turn off the screens and wait, wait, wait. Um, and the reason
⏹️ ▶️ John they can do that with LCDs is because LCDs can get really, really bright. So
⏹️ ▶️ John rather than them having, like for example, a thousand
⏹️ ▶️ John nit screen, or no, a hundred nit screen, which that’s what the light output of this thing is,
⏹️ ▶️ John a hundred nit screen, they said, how about instead of a hundred nits that we just show each frame at a hundred nits the whole
⏹️ ▶️ John time, how about we show that frame for one tenth of the time at a thousand nits? So 10
⏹️ ▶️ John times the brightness for one tenth of the time. Does that work? The reason they’re doing that
⏹️ ▶️ John is because the way the human visual system works is it’s much better to show an image
⏹️ ▶️ John really, really bright and then show nothing for a long time. And then show the next image really, really bright
⏹️ ▶️ John and then show nothing for another time. It’s just why film projectors work well for us. Because they show the frame
⏹️ ▶️ John of film and then they show nothing. And then they show the frame of the next frame and they show nothing. Because while they’re showing nothing, the
⏹️ ▶️ John next frame of the actual film strip is traveling to get in position to be displayed. So there’s nothing they can show
⏹️ ▶️ John at that point, right? And then they show that frame and then they show nothing, right? That’s what
⏹️ ▶️ John you wanna do to avoid motion smearing. Now the Vision Pro has the OLED problem of like, what
⏹️ ▶️ John are they called, sample and hold. It’s the reason motion looks weird on OLEDs. OLEDs can turn on and off
⏹️ ▶️ John really, really fast, way faster than LCDs, way better than LCDs with less smearing. It’s like, why don’t they
⏹️ ▶️ John just do this on OLEDs? The problem is OLEDs can’t get 10 times as bright. You can’t show an OLED 10 times as bright for 1 1⁄10 of the
⏹️ ▶️ John time because they can’t get 10 times as bright. If they could, they absolutely would, but they can’t currently. So they have
⏹️ ▶️ John to show the frame pretty much the whole time on an OLED. and then OLEDs instantly change
⏹️ ▶️ John to the next frame. So you see one frame in a 24 frame per second thing for 1 24th of a second,
⏹️ ▶️ John and that frame never changes for the whole 1 24th of a second. You’re like, isn’t this how it’s supposed to
⏹️ ▶️ John work? Not in a film projector, it does in a film projector. You see that frame briefly, and then you don’t see anything
⏹️ ▶️ John for a while as the next frame scrolls up into view. Same thing with a low-processing LCD. They’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John show one frame very briefly, way brighter, and then show nothing for a while, and then
⏹️ ▶️ John show the next frame, And that makes for better, clearer motion and less motion sickness
⏹️ ▶️ John and less stuttery things. That’s why if you watch a 24 frame per second movie on OLEDs and don’t have any motion
⏹️ ▶️ John smoothing on, some people perceive a stutteriness because it is literally showing frame one for 1 24th of a second, never
⏹️ ▶️ John changes for that 1 24th. And it is never black or anything. And we’ll show the next one. That’s why lots
⏹️ ▶️ John of TVs have black frame insertion where they will show, OLEDs will show a frame and then insert
⏹️ ▶️ John a black frame and then show another frame. Like they’re trying to make it so the frame isn’t on the screen the whole 1 24th of a second.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, that cuts the brightness down and sometimes looks flickery depending how you do it. So anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John these low persistence LCDs for all their terrible contrast and bad black levels,
⏹️ ▶️ John they do use low persistence strobing. They display each frame for around 300 microseconds,
⏹️ ▶️ John which they describe as a 3.7% illumination cycle, which I think means for the length of each frame,
⏹️ ▶️ John only 3% of the time is the screen lit up and the other 90 whatever percent of the time, the screen is off.
⏹️ ▶️ John OLEDs can’t get bright enough to do it. The perceived total brightness of really bright frame for a short period for 3.7% of the
⏹️ ▶️ John time, the perceived total brightness is 100 nits, which is way less than the Vision Pro. The contrast is way
⏹️ ▶️ John less than the Vision Pro, but within a dark headset, 100 nits is sufficient to, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John seem bright. They’re using pancake lenses just like the Vision Pro instead of the Fresnel, Fresnel lenses, how
⏹️ ▶️ John do you pronounce that, Fresnel? Something like that. Like the lenses in the Quest that are cheaper to make, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John like, I think they’re plastic, They’re like they have lots of like sort of concentric Rigi rings on them kind of like the the
⏹️ ▶️ John lenses and lighthouses They’re cool and all but they make things a little bit fuzzier, especially around the edges pancake lenses
⏹️ ▶️ John are more expensive and better That’s what the vision Pro has that’s what this has Refresh rate
⏹️ ▶️ John is 72 to 144 Hertz. Although they say 144 Hertz is experimental It’s got a hundred ten degree
⏹️ ▶️ John field of view the vision Pro is around a hundred It’s got pass-through cameras, so you don’t like bump into things
⏹️ ▶️ John and so you can find your mouse on your keyboard But the pass-through is monochrome That’s wild.
⏹️ ▶️ John Saves money! Not only does it save money, but it’s also really good in low light. Because if you don’t have to
⏹️ ▶️ John deal with color, you can gather more light. Instead of trying to worry about the red, green, and blue and stuff. There is
⏹️ ▶️ John a port, a front port on the bridge of the nose, where they say, Oh, well if you want a
⏹️ ▶️ John color pass-through, you could buy some sort of third-party camera module and shove it in
⏹️ ▶️ John there, and now you have a color pass-through. But this is not about AR. It does pass-through
⏹️ ▶️ John so you don’t hurt yourself, and so you can see what you’re doing. so you can see what you’re doing, but there’s no AR. You’re not gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ John floating windows in the middle of your room. It has no idea where your walls are. It doesn’t care about any of that crap. This
⏹️ ▶️ John is a VR headset for playing games. It’s got IR illuminators for tracking pass-through
⏹️ ▶️ John in dark environments. So you can still play like in a really dark room. It’ll still know where your controllers are. It does come with
⏹️ ▶️ John controllers. We’ll get to them a little bit. Streaming, this is one of the things they emphasized about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John It does wireless streaming as in, yes, you can play games on the headset. I just described
⏹️ ▶️ John like the arm CPU and everything, but you can also run games
⏹️ ▶️ John on your PC, on your Mac, on your Steam machine and stream
⏹️ ▶️ John those games to your headset. So then it’s just acting like a monitor. And how does it do that? Not by connecting your headset with
⏹️ ▶️ John a wire like the Valve Index, but instead I think the Valve Index uses wire, but instead by
⏹️ ▶️ John using a wireless protocol with a special USB adapter they have that provides a dedicated low
⏹️ ▶️ John latency wifi connection only for the video. USB-A
⏹️ ▶️ John hilarious. It’s a PC. PCs don’t have USB-C that commonly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, every PC game stuff is all USB-3 over USB-A. Yeah, gracious. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John and so they’ve done this because they need the lowest latency connection possible. Like the Quest 3 can also
⏹️ ▶️ John do this. Quest 3 you can stream from PCs and stuff, but it’s not great because it’s sharing that connection. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not like, again, them controlling the whole stack. This is a dedicated, separate Wi-Fi connection
⏹️ ▶️ John only for visuals. If your game does network stuff, that doesn’t go over this connector. The network stuff goes over the regular
⏹️ ▶️ John wifi that you’re connected with, but this is just for the visual stuff. And it also does
⏹️ ▶️ John foveated streaming, which means when it’s streaming stuff from your Mac, from your PC,
⏹️ ▶️ John from your Steam machine, it knows where you’re looking in the thing that it’s gonna be streaming,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it streams at higher resolution where you’re gonna be looking. Just like foveated rendering works inside the Vision Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is foveated streaming. And unlike foveated rendering, the thing being streamed has
⏹️ ▶️ John no idea that this is happening to it. This is purely done at the level of transporting the image. They basically probably
⏹️ ▶️ John compress the image. They take the image as it arrives at them, because when we’re playing on a PC, it’s not foveated
⏹️ ▶️ John or anything. They render the whole screen, right? They take that whole screen image, but they don’t send every single
⏹️ ▶️ John pixel from that image. They send more pixels where you’re looking and less where you’re not, which makes a streaming
⏹️ ▶️ John lower bandwidth, lower latency. And as everyone who tried this out, this is a lot of a, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John PC gamers first experience with foveated rendering, because not a lot of people have Vision Pros or the other fancier headsets.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re like, I tried to move my eyes and catch it, and I couldn’t do it. Like, Valve did a demo where they were streaming like Half-Life
⏹️ ▶️ John Alyx or one of those other VR games. Instead of foveated streaming, they did streaming where it
⏹️ ▶️ John literally sent blackness everywhere except for where you were looking. Like, so just a little,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, two-inch postage stamp of where you’re looking. Like, when you looked at the mirror display, it’s like you see a black screen
⏹️ ▶️ John with a little section of where it’s rendering. And when you’re in the headset, you can’t tell that it’s doing this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Every time you try to look into the black area,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can’t look at it. Why don’t the OLED models do that to save power?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think with the blackness, I think you can tell like in peripheral vision that it’s not the full image there. Like I think you need to
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco there, but you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John catch it. You can’t ever look at the blackness. I think you can detect that it is black instead of blurry or whatever. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ve all used the Vision Pro. Foveated rendering, like we see it in the UI.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s very difficult to catch. which you can catch it a little occasionally, but it’s very difficult to catch. And the thing about foveated streaming, like I said,
⏹️ ▶️ John foveated rendering like in Vision OS, the OS is doing that, like the window compositor or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John is displaying the UI in the Vision Pro, when it renders that frame,
⏹️ ▶️ John it has to know about where your eyes are and it renders a foveated image, which is why you get a foveated
⏹️ ▶️ John image when you’re mirroring it, because that’s what it’s rendering. But foveated streaming, it’s taking a
⏹️ ▶️ John non-foveated thing and then like, it’s just a transport thing. So it’s very clever, very interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ John It saves bandwidth, makes it higher performance, and it allows you
⏹️ ▶️ John to be better than the Quest 3, essentially. That’s what everyone said. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, I tried the Quest 3 streaming, it wasn’t that good. It’s better on this thing that I tried. They say you can stream
⏹️ ▶️ John from PC, Steam Machine, or quote, any device running Steam. That’s what Digital Foundry said. And again,
⏹️ ▶️ John the Macs can run Steam, so I’m assuming that includes Macs. Media consumption is not really
⏹️ ▶️ John a thing. Valve said, you can use a web browser. So don’t think you’re gonna have cool theater. I mean, third-party
⏹️ ▶️ John opportunity. People can make cool theater apps and stuff like that, but this is not a priority for this product. This
⏹️ ▶️ John is a game thing. And to that extent, it comes with two controllers, two handheld controllers with a full set of buttons
⏹️ ▶️ John and triggers for 2D games, which is not true of all the quests and things like that. A lot of times
⏹️ ▶️ John they have controls for VR games, but they don’t have sufficient controls to play like just a regular PlayStation game, or
⏹️ ▶️ John I know it’s gonna be a PlayStation game, Like a regular game console, like an Xbox game,
⏹️ ▶️ John expects you to have a certain number of triggers and buttons these days or whatever. And a lot of times VR controllers
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have them, but the Steam Frame does. Their controllers, it’s basically like a regular console controller
⏹️ ▶️ John split in half. And it tracks where your hands are, and there’s little LEDs that shine through the plastic. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re VR controllers. The price of all of this, the headset, the controllers,
⏹️ ▶️ John supposed to be less than $1,000. No prices are announced, So people are just like trying to feel out like how expensive is it gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John be or whatever. The point is it’s not Vision Pro prices. Less than a thousand dollars, more than the Quest,
⏹️ ▶️ John sure. Cause it’s better hardware than the Quest, but less than a thousand dollars. And Valve would not be quiet
⏹️ ▶️ John about, so you will say, this thing ships with ARM. You’re playing Windows games for a different
⏹️ ▶️ John operating system on a different architecture. Are you gonna do more of that? They’re like, we can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John wait to make more ARM hardware. They’re like, we’re not announcing anything yet, Steam Deck 2, but we
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t wait to make more ARM hardware so we can run x86 Windows games
⏹️ ▶️ John on non-Windows, on non-x86. Which again, boggles
⏹️ ▶️ John my mind that Microsoft is lying, Microsoft is trying to put Windows on ARM, but game makers are out there, time for
⏹️ ▶️ John me to make my PC game, better compile it for x86, so 50% of my users can eventually run it on
⏹️ ▶️ John ARM on Linux. So weird. Now, having a Vision
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro, I’m in Casey’s Vision Pro now, None of the specs of this headset may be jealous or interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m like, man, the Vision Pro hardware is amazing. But it did make me think, you know, Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John your $3,500 headset would be an amazing streaming VR
⏹️ ▶️ John headset if you could connect it to Steam. And if Apple knew or cared anything about gaming, they would have long since made
⏹️ ▶️ John a deal that said, hey, if you get Steam on your Mac or your PC, you can stream VR games to
⏹️ ▶️ John it using the Vision Pro. Can you imagine how amazing that would be? These screens look so good. maybe the persistence isn’t as good
⏹️ ▶️ John as the low persistence LCD or whatever, but and maybe the field of view is a little bit lower, but and
⏹️ ▶️ John I would I know Apple to its credit just did come out with the ability to buy the PlayStation
⏹️ ▶️ John VR controllers for Vision Pro, but then what what do you get to play
⏹️ ▶️ John on them? Do you get to play all PC games that are available on Steam? No, you do not Do you get to play the VR
⏹️ ▶️ John games available on Steam? No, you don’t you get to play the games that are available on Apple’s App Store which is a much more limited
⏹️ ▶️ John selection. And by the way, the PlayStation controllers probably don’t have all the buttons needed to play PC caliber
⏹️ ▶️ John games. Now, these three products, Steam Controller, Steam Machine,
⏹️ ▶️ John Steam Frame, and their existing handheld Steam Deck, they have
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially a complete suite of console level hardware. They have,
⏹️ ▶️ John they are basically Sony, which has the PSVR and PlayStation 5, Microsoft, which has quote unquote PC
⏹️ ▶️ John gaming, And Nintendo, which has the Switch, combined into a single company on an open platform running
⏹️ ▶️ John Linux with the most popular non-console gaming platform. Steam might actually be bigger than all the
⏹️ ▶️ John consoles, I’m not sure. Playing games for an operating system that they don’t control on an
⏹️ ▶️ John architecture that is different than the one that people are targeting. And I think they’re gonna be successful. It boggles
⏹️ ▶️ John my mind, but like, I think they hit it out of the park with these products. Again, no prices have
⏹️ ▶️ John been announced. These are coming in 2026, I think. But the rumor prices sound right,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they all look really good. And I’m mightily impressed with what Valve has done here.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, it looks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very promising. Like, you know, I mentioned earlier, like the little square gaming PC thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looks great. And the headset, I mean, look, we see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the headset market, we see like Apple’s take on it, which is, you know, in space.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then you have like everyone else here on earth, they’re using, you know, basically you have like the meta
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Quest series. This is obviously meant to directly compete with the Quest and it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seems like it is built like a Quest.
⏹️ ▶️ John But be slightly better and slightly more expensive. Right, which is great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because like the Quest, the Quest is a very successful product line and it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is honestly a good product line. Like for VR gaming,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Quest is great. It is a great
⏹️ ▶️ John product. But it doesn’t run PC games and it doesn’t run Steam games. It runs like, Meta has an app store where
⏹️ ▶️ John they have their games. And yeah, I’m sure there’s more games than on Apple’s platforms, but like Steam is Steam. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John where all quote unquote to the game, when Declan is gonna be interested in playing games, it’s gonna be a quote unquote PC
⏹️ ▶️ John game that’s available on Steam. It’s not gonna be something from the Meta App Store.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Exactly. And so like, I think this is great. And you know, the things about like using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an LCD for the display. Honestly, with today’s technology,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think for most use cases, that might be the right move. because look at what it has enabled them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do. The entire device is way smaller, it’s way lighter,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s gonna be way cheaper than something like the Vision Pro it’s using OLED.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, the size and weight aren’t the thing, it’s the price. Well, the OLEDs and the Vision Pro cost more than
⏹️ ▶️ John all four of these products combined, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, almost certainly. But also like, you know, OLED also has trade-offs. The Vision Pro is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great for color and contrast, it’s not so great for fast motion.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, so that’s the thing about OLEDs, Because like I said, OLEDs are better for motion. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John why gaming, people who buy gaming monitors are getting OLEDs. Because if you try to run an LCD gaming
⏹️ ▶️ John monitor at like 120 Hertz or 240 Hertz, which is what high-end PC gamers wanna do,
⏹️ ▶️ John it becomes a smeary mess because LCDs cannot change from one color to another fast enough to keep
⏹️ ▶️ John up with 240 Hertz. OLEDs can. But,
⏹️ ▶️ John LCDs can get way brighter. And inside a headset, doing that thing where you show something 10 times as bright for 1
⏹️ ▶️ John 10th of the time, that’s what you need for motion in a headset. So while every gamer
⏹️ ▶️ John in the world, including me, probably for my PlayStation 6, is getting OLED monitors, because OLED pixels
⏹️ ▶️ John change instantly from one color to another. They’re perfect for this. They just can’t get bright
⏹️ ▶️ John enough to do the low persistence pulsing thing that you need to do inside a headset. So yeah, LCD was the only
⏹️ ▶️ John choice. Like people are disappointed, but it’s like, I wish it had an OLED, well, if you wish it had an OLED control, it’d be 2000 bucks. Is that what
⏹️ ▶️ John you want? because there’s no, like, the current hardware reality is, if you want Vision Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John style OLED things, it’s gonna be, you know, hugely more expensive, and you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna have the possibility of the sample and hold blur that you get inside the Vision Pro, because
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re not pulsing the thing for 300 microseconds. They think they’re showing it for the whole frame.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think this, this looks like they have made a very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different set of trade-offs than Apple, and a slightly different set of trade-offs than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Meta, but I think it’s gonna be, you know, for its market, which is gaming, the only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco competition for gaming is the Quest, that’s it. Like, there’s no other competition out there in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John this market.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Valve’s previous products, like, this is the thing, this is not Valve’s first headset, this is not Valve’s first,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a Varj article about like the earlier Steam machines they made various kind of Linux PC-looking
⏹️ ▶️ John things or whatever, but they learned from those. They learned why weren’t those successful, why didn’t those take off, what is
⏹️ ▶️ John bad about our current headset, how can we make it cheaper and better for games? Like, they’ve really nailed, like kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John like game consoles do where it’s like, we know what people are gonna do with this. They’re gonna play games. How cheap can we make
⏹️ ▶️ John it and still make it good for games? And that’s what they’ve done with these products.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think it’s probably gonna be a hit.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, these look, I mean, this is not for me today, but these all look really, really impressive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And also I think it’s worth, you know, putting in context what it means to be a hit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s still a VR gaming headset and it’s still VR. And what that means is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gamers like it, not all gamers, not even most gamers, but it’ll do fine. It’s still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna be a pretty small technical market. Like in terms
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like, how big is it compared to computers? Other gaming PCs, how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big is it compared to game consoles? How big is it compared to phones? And like, it’s gonna be tiny
⏹️ ▶️ Marco compared to all those, just like everything in VR to date has been.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I think it will do well within that market.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and speaking of those markets, So you look over there at the Steam machine and you really just have to think,
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of game consoles sell. People buy a lot of PlayStations, millions of PlayStations, millions
⏹️ ▶️ John of Nintendo Switches, which I know is kind of more of a Steam Deck competitor, but Steam Deck was kind of there first,
⏹️ ▶️ John although it doesn’t convert to a TV or anything. A lot of people kind of wanted that, like, why don’t you just make the Steam Deck like the
⏹️ ▶️ John Switch and instead they said, how about we make one six times more powerful that connects to your TV?
⏹️ ▶️ John What does the console market look like with the PlayStation 6, probably still the Nintendo Switch 2.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the Steam Machine with the Xbox essentially either bowing out entirely
⏹️ ▶️ John and then retiring the brand or them simply selling something as an Xbox that is just a gaming PC. I
⏹️ ▶️ John think Steam got there first. Like, we’re gonna sell you a gaming PC. We’re gonna give it a different
⏹️ ▶️ John name, Steam Machine. And for anybody who wants to play PC games who does not wanna deal with a PC,
⏹️ ▶️ John who would previously have bought an Xbox, even though Xbox doesn’t run PC games, runs Xbox games, but they’re really similar.
⏹️ ▶️ John How about we just cut out that all those nuances and say, this just runs games from Steam, the world’s most popular
⏹️ ▶️ John PC gaming store. And you buy it and you plug it in and it works. And I really do
⏹️ ▶️ John think, if depending on how much marketing Valve puts behind this, they could
⏹️ ▶️ John become the replacement for Xbox as the third player in the console market with PlayStation, Nintendo,
⏹️ ▶️ John and no longer Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo, and Steam machine. I think they could do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Will they do that? have an interest to do that or they just want to sell like these small form factor PCs to PC enthusiasts.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ll see. But like to your point about the VR market, the VR market’s small, the gaming
⏹️ ▶️ John PC market is small, the console market is less small. So small than mobile games, but less
⏹️ ▶️ John small. And so if Valve really wants to make money, they would do this. Now, the problem with Valve is
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of like Apple, they’re like, okay, we make all this stuff and it’s great and we’re really good at it. But the real money’s in the
⏹️ ▶️ John store. Just FYI. The reason we have so much money to make this hardware is
⏹️ ▶️ John we get a cut of all those things sold on Steam and that makes us a lot of money. And the margins
⏹️ ▶️ John on that server’s revenue, they’re way better than on these Steam machines and the headsets. We don’t have to build any hardware,
⏹️ ▶️ John we don’t have to ship any boxes, we don’t have to do any warranty repairs, we just run a bunch of servers and we collect the money and that’s been
⏹️ ▶️ John going on for a long time. So maybe they’re not incentivized to
⏹️ ▶️ John become the world conquering third console maker with the Steam machine, but it has
⏹️ ▶️ John the potential to be that because I think they’ve already made a better non
⏹️ ▶️ John Nintendo, non Sony console than the X-Box because unlike the X-Box, this runs quote
⏹️ ▶️ John unquote PC games. So it, it, it ops out of that whole, like getting exclusive
⏹️ ▶️ John games and doing all this stuff. It’s like the whole world of PC games is for you. So it’s like console versus PC
⏹️ ▶️ John or console versus console. That’s a PC. I
⏹️ ▶️ John think it’s amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I love to, I love the idea of like, you know, the Steam Deck has been great for this so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco far, of like creating a market for Windows games to run on a platform
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s not Windows. And as the Steam platform, SteamOS platform, as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it gets more users, it gets more power in the market. It starts to become such
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that game makers will actually make sure their games work on it. They’ll test on it. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if there’s enough demand there, if it’s a big enough user base there, then not only will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco game compatibility be better overall, like it’ll be more ubiquitous and just better in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quality, but also it’ll make it impossible for Microsoft to ever shut it down. And as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somebody who uses Windows only for gaming, like I don’t use a Windows PC
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for any other reason and dealing with anything about the PC that’s not the game
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a huge pain in the butt that just gets in the way. I love the idea of a console
⏹️ ▶️ Marco style experience, but having the high quality Windows games,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s great. And the bigger and more powerful and more popular that platform
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gets, the harder it will be for it to go away or to get shut out. And that’s only good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for gamers because it gives you more choices. It makes more people port their games to it with higher quality,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as I was saying. It’s just better for everyone. And Valve can take their 30%, whatever, it’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John think it’s less
⏹️ ▶️ John than that, but yeah, there is the danger of them becoming the Apple, like in the bad way, the Apple of the PC market.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, so it’s important to distinguish between steam, the store, which is already
⏹️ ▶️ John massively dominant and has been, and these products, which remains to be seen how dominant, well, the steam deck is doing
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty well, but there are other handheld gaming PCs from other companies, right? Um, that’s the beauty of the PC market. Like people,
⏹️ ▶️ John other people can make hardware like it’s the whole idea, right? It’s a competitive market. You can’t just, unlike
⏹️ ▶️ John the switch where that’s the only place we’re on Nintendo games, you can buy a handheld
⏹️ ▶️ John gaming PC from Asus or whatever and they’ll run the same games. But steam, the store
⏹️ ▶️ John has been so dominant for years that when these days when anybody talks about like, how
⏹️ ▶️ John is this game doing? How is this PC game? You’re like, uh, I just did a podcast where I was talking about arc Raiders and marathon
⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff. And they’re like, Oh, you know, all these stories in the, in the PC gaming press, uh, arc Raiders is
⏹️ ▶️ John doing great. And marathon is doing poorly. And destiny is, has few years, you know, checking these
⏹️ ▶️ John live service games to see how they’re doing, like basically the ratings, like how are the games doing? All they talk
⏹️ ▶️ John about, the foundation of all that information are numbers from steam. A, because steam publishes those
⏹️ ▶️ John numbers and B because they use that as a proxy for the entire PC industry. And it’s not,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not the whole PC industry. You can download games directly from a game maker and install them with their
⏹️ ▶️ John own janky ass installer that you hate. Like that still exists because again, it’s the PC world. It’s not like Apple where there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John no quote unquote side loading. Like you can do anything you want, but steam is, has just use is like, we
⏹️ ▶️ John just look at the Steam charts because Steam shows them. And because yes, Steam’s not all the market, but it’s enough
⏹️ ▶️ John of the market that it is the stand in for the entire market. So and every YouTube
⏹️ ▶️ John channel, they’re showing charts from Steam to show how well a game is going. You’d be like, but but that’s not all the users.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s like, it’s enough of them. It’s enough that it’s representative. So this Steam is the entire
⏹️ ▶️ John PC gaming market as far as we’re concerned when we’re seeing how well a game is doing, which is fascinating.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, thanks to our sponsors this week, factor, Grammarly and NordLayer. And thanks to our members
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who support us directly. You can join us at atv.fm slash join. One of the many perks of membership
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. Every single episode has bonus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco content that only members can hear. This week’s Overtime is about, Affinity’s graphics apps are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now going free and people got upset about that. We’re gonna talk about that in Overtime. Join
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and listen at atv.fm slash join. Thank you so much, everybody. And we’ll talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over, they didn’t even mean to begin
⏹️ ▶️ John Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John And you can find the show notes at atp.fm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re into mastodon, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, Auntie
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, they didn’t mean to.
⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental, check podcast so long.
Marco goes to Home Depot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, you noted in our internal show notes that you made a trip to Home Depot, which means I assume you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually made seven trips to Home Depot. That’s the way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Amazon helped a little bit reduce that. No, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I thought you would enjoy this brief story of me learning to do a very basic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing that I should have known a long time ago but did not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a common theme in our after shows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pre-shows. So I’m trying to hang some shelves in my garage. I got the shelves
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a year ago, and the problem is there’s not that many studs in certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spans that the shelves need to go. And I have learned a long time ago, do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not use drywall anchors for anything, ever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Especially not for shelves.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they will always fail you. And so I’ve been delaying installing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these shelves. I installed one set where like one of the two, like I guess
⏹️ ▶️ Marco arms of the shelf was in a stud and the other one had to be anchors. And of course like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anchor got all loose and the shelf bent and yeah, it was like, okay, this, that’s not gonna work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I had an idea. I’m like, all right, I’m gonna install a bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco horizontally installed one by four boards
⏹️ ▶️ John You were deriving from first principles, knowledge that is relevant to the industry that you are not familiar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Exactly. But I’m like, all right. I’ve been having this in my head for months, I’m gonna do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this, but I’m like, well, how am I gonna, like, at some point I’ll ask a friend who has a pickup truck or something,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they can give me a ride to Home Depot or something, or maybe they’ll deliver. I just hadn’t worked out in my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco head, how am I gonna get wood to my house?
⏹️ ▶️ John A pickup truck’s bed is probably smaller than the inside of your SUV, just FYI, because pickup truck beds are now vestigial
⏹️ ▶️ John and don’t actually carry anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, but I assume like there’s no, like, you know, my car is not as big as a full size SUV anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m like, I don’t know. So anyway, eventually I’m like, I’m just gonna do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have some time this week. I’m just finally going to do it. How am I gonna get the wood here?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do they deliver? Like, first of all, does my local hardware store even sell lumber? No, they don’t. So I have to go to Home Depot, like, you know, two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco towns over. And I’m like, I’m gonna ask Chad GPT.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So first I’m like, all right, ChatGPT. I’m like, what, first of all, what are common lengths
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of one by four boards that are sold in hardware stores? And also here’s what I’m trying to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do. Should I even be using one by four? Do I need to use two by fours instead? And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of course, ChatGPT is amazing for questions. Like it was so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John It was like, all right.
⏹️ ▶️ John Especially when you don’t know whether it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco right or not. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like, here is a full report of, okay, here’s why you might wanna use one by fours versus two by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fours and you know, and I described what I was doing, why I was putting wood
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the wall. And it said, okay, you probably want to use two by fours for that. They’re like three times stronger in this way and all these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John like, all right, all right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then I’m like, what kind? It’s okay, well, you’re gonna want this kind of wood, you know, not pressure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco treated because unless it’s gonna be sitting in water, you know, like all these different things. And it told
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me that they come in eight foot segments. I’m like, oh, okay. I went out, I like put the seats
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out of my car with a tape measure. and I measure, like, what’s the longest thing I can fit in my car? And it ends up,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can fit something about nine feet long in my car. I’m like, okay. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco went to Home Depot and I’m like, I almost felt like a kid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a cartoon walking into an adult space and trying to fit in and trying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to play it cool and not be noticed. I’ve never bought wood in my life. I have no idea
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how to buy wood. All I know is that I’ve seen people do it at Home Depot and there seems to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that entire like left side of the store against the wall seems to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all big stacks of wood but chat GPT help me out it’s like you’re gonna want this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of wood this kind of board it comes in a foot segments it should probably cost around this at a standard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hardware store like a Home Depot and even told me what kind of screws to buy because of course I definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would not have thought to buy screws there is no chance I would have come back from that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trip with wood and screws I definitely would have forgotten gotten those. Nice. So it told me what kind of screws
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to buy. It even recommended that I get like a star drive head for this purpose. I’m like, okay, great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I already have one of those fart drills that like hammers it while it screws it in. Like I got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John it in like a multi-pack. That’s what they’re called,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fart drills. Yep, yeah. I never actually had used it before today, but I like at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some, like a year ago I had to buy a drill and there was like a two-pack that had the regular kind and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the fart kind for like $10 more. I’m like, all right, yeah, sure. I’ll use it sometime.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, so all this is to say I, in the most nerdy way possible,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did research to figure out how to buy wood and then I went and just bought it. And it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine. I got one of those U-Boat things at Home Depot, put on 15 2x4s and a box of screws, walked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over, checked out, it was fine. They all fit in my car just fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Everything worked out great. I spent today starting the installation process for some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of them and it was all fine. I even, I have a saw that I’ve used like three times
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that what the kind that like you lift it up and down and it makes chops. And though, I don’t know, I don’t know if it’s a chop saw or not,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I don’t, I don’t know. Miter saw? Maybe the kind that you can turn to different angles.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah. That’s the one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay. Yeah. You use it to cut miters. Oh, well I also used it to cut wood. Um, so.
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of a cut in wood.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, well I made only the most boring straight cuts. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s been fine. I use the fart drill for some especially difficult screws for some of the shelf brackets
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s been great. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I got to say that we were talking before we started recording about you doing some wiring in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the restaurant and you doing these shelves and I feel like Marco, if I were 10 years ago, would have been like, oh, I’ll call
⏹️ ▶️ Casey somebody and this will just be done. I will trade. Oh, but the Margo of today has
⏹️ ▶️ John called a lot of people and he’s learned, he’s learned what that’s like.
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s one thing that Marco is very experienced with. And and I think he now fully understands. What are the downsides
⏹️ ▶️ John of having someone else do something for you?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Also, like this, this is a really small job for like if you’re going to call someone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like putting some two by fours on your garage wall and hang some shelves on them, that’s like like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that even worth anybody’s time? And whatever it would cost, I would be like, I probably should have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just done this myself.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, you’re not wrong. I’m just I’m impressed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because I feel very accomplished. I’m like, I bought wood and I cut some of it and I put it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the wall. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it probably won’t spill everything that’s on the shelves onto the floor. Most likely, unlike the one that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drywall anchors. Yes, that wouldn’t. That was, that was unpleasant. Um, but I still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have more to do, but like I’ve done the hardest ones that were above the garage door where there’s not that many studs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Um, I probably used way too many screws, but I don’t care. Better than too few.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. Exactly. Until you have to unscrew it someday. And you’re like, who put all these screws in here?