catatp.fm Unofficial Accidental Tech Podcast transcripts (generated by computer, so expect errors).

674: A Reliable, Boring Partner

16 Jan 2026

Apple Creator Studio, the Gemini deal, the NBA on Vision Pro, and how Casey should spoil himself for his 50th birthday.

Episode Description:

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Transcribed using Whisper large_v2 (transcription) + WAV2VEC2_ASR_LARGE_LV60K_960H (alignment) + Pyannote (speaker diaritization).

Chapters

  1. Travel routers and hotspots
  2. John’s TiVo 🪦 🖼️
  3. More on temporal dithering
  4. Sponsor: Guru
  5. Too many screens 🖼️
  6. Wi-Fi
  7. New monitors at CES 🖼️
  8. Sponsor: Gusto
  9. Apple Creator Studio 🖼️
  10. Sponsor: 1Password
  11. Apple to use Gemini
  12. Chase taking over Apple Card
  13. Ending theme
  14. NBA immersive on Vision Pro

Travel routers and hotspots

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Gentlemen, I got to tell you, ubiquity giveth and ubiquity taketh away. Oh no, what happened?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, we’re doing a very abridged birthday trip for Michaela. She turned

⏹️ ▶️ Casey eight on Sunday, which is impossible, but here we are. And we’re going out of town for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a couple of nights over the weekend. And I did the thing that I love to do when we go out of town, which is I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey go to one of the local libraries and I borrow a hotspot. And as I’ve said many times on the show, Our

⏹️ ▶️ Casey actual library offers T-Mobile hotspots that you can borrow and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a neighboring county, which is like a little under half an hour drive from me, offers Verizon

⏹️ ▶️ Casey hotspots in these counties have reciprocity with each other for library cards and things like that. So if I have the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey time and the inclination, I’ll usually go to the further away county to get the Verizon hotspot and I did that.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Erin went with me a couple of days ago. We got her library card at the other library. So now I can

⏹️ ▶️ Casey stage two different hotspots on hold, like ready and waiting to go. I’m very excited about this.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is what makes me happy, right? Especially around football season, because I use these hotspots to get

⏹️ ▶️ Casey internet to the TV and whatnot when we’re tailgating. Well, anyways, I get home

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I have the opportunity, I guess this was yesterday, and I have the opportunity to try

⏹️ ▶️ Casey out the hotspot with my shiny new Ubiquiti travel router that I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m so excited about, right? And this travel router has worked no sweat with

⏹️ ▶️ Casey tethering to my phone. It has worked no sweat tethering to my iPad. All has been good so

⏹️ ▶️ Casey far. And I connect it to the Verizon hotspot

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it says, can you please plug in the internet? I did, I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey did plug in the internet. Now, admittedly, this was while Verizon was dying. So I thought, oh, perhaps

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s the problem. But it turns out, I tried again today after Verizon rose from the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey dead, and it still is asking, please connect the internet. So I was so

⏹️ ▶️ Casey excited to have my sweet new Ubiquiti travel router to bring with me, and I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey still will, and it still works, and it can still rebroadcast the hotspot’s WiFi, but I was connecting it via

⏹️ ▶️ Casey USB-C, which I prefer for a bunch of unimportant reasons, and it didn’t freaking

⏹️ ▶️ Casey work, and I’m having a sad.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Does it have an ethernet jack on the hotspot or no?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Not on the hotspot, unfortunately. There are hotspots where this exists. In fact, you might have or did have one, if I remember.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have one, yeah. Okay, there you go. This is a Verizon Jetpack, I think. I don’t remember the model number,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it’s actually not a bad hotspot, and it has USB-C on it, in contrast to most of the T-Mobile

⏹️ ▶️ Casey ones that I get, which have, what is it, micro USB? The god awful one that won’t go away.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so that’s very annoying. But then I plugged the same hotspot into one of my GL-iNet

⏹️ ▶️ Casey travel router things, and it worked no problem. Oh, no. So I’m sure

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is a software problem with the Ubiquiti travel router. I’m sure it will get resolved at some point, but probably not before my trip

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this weekend. So all is really fine in the grand scheme of things, but it’s the little things,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey gentlemen. It’s the little things. I was so excited for my shiny new white plastic toy and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s not going to work the way I want it to. It’ll still work. Like I said, I can rebroadcast the hotspots wifi, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, that’s not going to be your limiting factor, especially with Verizon being down for a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey day. Exactly.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, that’s, that’s too bad. I have the Netgear, whatever

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the second most recent Netgear AT&T 5G router is.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s fine, it functions as

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a piece of consumer electronics. It’s garbage.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the function of a portable 5G hotspot that creates

⏹️ ▶️ Marco wifi or over ethernet broadcast wherever you are. I have so many uses for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this all the time. And in fact, like since the iPhone 17 Pro has broken iPhone tethering for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco me, which is still not fixed, I’ve been using

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey it more and more. Oh my God. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s working fine for me. I’m not trying to say you’re wrong by any stretch. I’m just saying it’s not everyone apparently, because it works fine for me. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m very annoyed, but I, you know, so in the meantime, I’ve just been carrying this hotspot wherever and whenever I like, you know, go

⏹️ ▶️ Marco anywhere outside of the house and want to use my laptop. And it’s fine. The only thing is like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so the hotspot, it’s kind of like an Apple Watch where like if you need to reboot it, you just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco go do something else for a while. And the thing is, unfortunately, almost any kind

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of configuration change requires a reboot. If you want to like take the battery

⏹️ ▶️ Marco out and switch it to just a hard wire only connection, reboot. If you wanna go the other direction, like, oh, I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on unhard wire this and put the battery back in, reboot. If you wanna convert it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from like bridge mode where it just passes the IP address through the ethernet port to wifi

⏹️ ▶️ Marco broadcasting mode, reboot. And each of those reboots, oh, and just when you’re done using

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it and you turn it off, next time you go to use it, you turn it back on again, that’s a boot. So it takes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a while. And the battery charging, it has USB-C,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco great. Except that it does not support even remotely fast

⏹️ ▶️ Marco charging. So no matter what wattage charger you give it, it’s gonna

⏹️ ▶️ Marco charge at like three watts. And so if the battery’s dead,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can plug it in, like 10 minutes later, it’ll be at 2%. Like it’s, so like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a device, it is not good. But having a hotspot

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you have crappy tethering situations is really nice.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s frustrating. And also, and like the plan is not good either. the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco plan from AT&T for a hotspot is something like $55 a month. And there is a data cap.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not too awful. I think that’s for like 20 or 50 gigs. It’s a good amount of data. But this is kind

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of why I’m concerned. I wonder

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if, we’ve been waiting all these years for Apple to make a cellular MacBook of some

⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind. I’m afraid that the plans might end up sucking for them. Like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they might be really expensive plans. like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey an

⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad plan is what, 20, 25 bucks a month? Uh,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s anywhere like minus 10 because I get like some sort of bundle, but I think typically yeah, they’re like 20

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to 40 generally speaking.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. In that range. Right. Um, but like, uh, a hotspot plan is 50 or 60.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wonder where they would put, like, I know, I guess PC laptops exist. I guess we can just look this up. Um,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I do worry like that, that eventually Apple will give us a cellular Mac book and and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco AT&T will want 60 bucks a month for it. Anyway, yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco mobile hotspots, they’re what amazing capability in such crappy

⏹️ ▶️ Marco electronic devices.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, they usually are straight up trash. That’s why it would be so great to just have this built into

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the device you’re trying to get it into, in which 99% of the time for me is my computer.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Occasionally, like now, it isn’t, you know, when I’m going traveling or whatever, but generally, I would just like to be able

⏹️ ▶️ Casey get on the internet, on my computer, easy peasy. Another thing I’ve been looking at, because I don’t want

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a recurring hotspot bill, because I generally only need it kind of regularly in the fall

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for football. And then outside of that, I don’t really ever need it. And if I do, I can just borrow one from the library. But I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ Casey been looking, I don’t know anything about this, but Solis, S-O-L-I-S, at least here in the state,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually, no, I think it’s worldwide, seems to offer hardware that you have to buy for like a couple

⏹️ ▶️ Casey hundred bucks. But then you can buy data either as like a day pass

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or as like in chunks of 50 gigs or 100 gigs or whatever the case may be.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I haven’t spoken with anyone that has actually used this. So if you have used this and you’re listening, please reach

⏹️ ▶️ Casey out. I think there are hotspots on the states anyway. We’ll kind of go back and forth

⏹️ ▶️ Casey between T-Mobile and AT&T and T-Mobile around where I am is generally trash, but AT&T is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey really good. So I’m very curious if maybe this would be good answer

⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I decide to stop doing the rotating library borrowing dance. If doing this wouldn’t be so bad

⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I don’t mind paying a couple hundred bucks for the hardware, but I don’t want to pay 50, 60 to your brain $70

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or whatever a month every month forever. And I looked briefly, God help me, at,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, could I get like a Starlink mini or something because that would be nice. But not only is it hilariously

⏹️ ▶️ Casey expensive when service is turned on, which I mean to a degree I get, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have you looked recently because

⏹️ ▶️ Casey They turned off the like pause the free pause feature whatever it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco is. Well, they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco did but also I mean I again person who runs it is awful, but Starlink

⏹️ ▶️ Marco dropped their rates considerably last year. So like the monthly rates for Starlink

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are a lot lower than they used to be.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Now, maybe I’ll have to look again.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But a 5G hotspot is still cheaper though.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Well, that’s the thing and I don’t need that kind of bandwidth, right? I don’t need whatever Starlink provides. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyways, I really am interested in the Solus Edge thing or solace service because

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like I said, I think you can get like a day pass, which would be sufficient. Uh, or, you know, I could buy like 50 gigs,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever the case may be. So reach out if you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever used it. Yeah. The other thing that I will, that I will advocate for, for, for 5g hotspots, which

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is way better than tethering, um, is that when you have a hotspot,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like in your backpack and you open up your laptop, it’s ready. Yeah. Because the hotspot is broadcasting

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a wifi network. So it’s like wifi. So when you open up your laptop, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco online. Like just immediately it’s on. It’s really nice. Like that’s,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, the boot up time for the hotspot is not great as I was saying if it isn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on. But if you’re like going in and out of stuff all day and you have one in your bag that’s just sitting there on all day,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like all of your devices are on WiFi all the time. So it also helps, for instance, if you have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco some other device that, you know, that needs WiFi. Like if you have a Kindle, if you have a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco remarkable tablet, you know, any other kind of device, device, if you have one of these stupid new AI

⏹️ ▶️ Marco gadgets, if you have anything like that, if you have a hotspot on your person

⏹️ ▶️ Marco somewhere, those things are just online, always, so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it actually is, it scales well in terms of if you have multiple devices, or if you’re,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, traveling with family, like you were saying, traveling with family, everybody has their own devices, they don’t probably all have cellular plans,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like your kids’ iPads and everything, that’s not gonna have cellular plans, but if you just have a thing where everyone

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is just always online on some road trip you’re on, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco really nice. And so I would say, Casey, given

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the things that you do and what you value, I think you would

⏹️ ▶️ Marco really enjoy owning a hotspot with a stupid $55 a month data plan.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m way too cheap for that. I don’t think you will ever do it, and I don’t think there is any number

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of ATP members that I could sign up to make you do it. Because it isn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you can’t find $55, it’s the principle of the matter, and I get that, because it is kind of a stupid amount

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of money for the utility that most people would get out of it. But I think if you ever wanted

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to really treat yourself one year, be like, you know what, maybe when you turn 50, I don’t know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m gonna celebrate Casey this year, it’s gonna be all me all the time, because I’m a great person, I’m a great dad,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m a successful podcaster. I’m going to treat myself. I’m going to get myself a $55

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a month tethering or hot spot plan.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey At

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that point, it’ll be a hundred bucks a month. It’ll be too much. Uh, no, I, I hear you. And I mean, the thing of it is, is that generally

⏹️ ▶️ Casey speaking, I don’t really need it. Like I said, I, I travel maybe at

⏹️ ▶️ Casey most once a quarter. And I would say that’s even aggressive, you know, generally speaking, I really, truly don’t need it, which is why

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I balk so much at the monthly fee. The only time I kind of sort of needed a lot is between, I don’t know, the at very

⏹️ ▶️ Casey end of August and late November when we’re going to UVA football games every couple

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of weekends. Right. But outside of that, it’s kind of a waste 99% of the time. So you’re not wrong.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’m sure I would put it to use if it was here, you know, if I was already committed, I would show I would use it more often, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s certainly, well, I mean, it’s never really a need. I shouldn’t say need it, but you know what I’m saying? And so,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey um, it’s only a want, you know, a couple of times between January and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey August and then semi-frequently between August and November. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco certainly like some kind of like, you know, day or week pass arrangement makes a lot of sense for a lot of people, probably

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you included. Although there is one other thing. If you have one and you have a ubiquity router,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can make it a backup internet connection. That is true.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Which would be very appealing to me. And now I’m going to totally jinx myself. Watch as I don’t make it through the following recording.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But generally speaking, Fios is freaking bulletproof. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John yes,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I understand that’s Verizon, but this is Verizon Communications, not Verizon Wireless. Which is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey very, very different. So anyways, that went on longer than I intended, and I apologize. But it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey just, it made me sad that my shiny new toy didn’t do what I wanted it to do. yet anyway.

John’s TiVo 🪦

Chapter John’s TiVo 🪦 image.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But we got to do some follow up because even though I’m having a small sad, John,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re having a very big sad.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, we already talked about this, but as the other shoe dropping, I got the email from Verizon

⏹️ ▶️ John Fios telling me that my cable card is, I don’t know, not long

⏹️ ▶️ John for this world. It’s as we saw last time when people sent us images of their emails, I got this basically the same

⏹️ ▶️ John email and it’s, I mean, it’s the end. They’re saying it’s the end, but they leave out one

⏹️ ▶️ John very important piece of information. So here, reading from their email, recent technology advancements

⏹️ ▶️ John now allow us to deliver your Fios TV service using internet protocol, parentheses, IP

⏹️ ▶️ John delivery. Oh, wow, recent technology advancements. I’m excited

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco about this. This sounds so additive.

⏹️ ▶️ John This is exciting as it allows for a more improved viewing experience and increased flexibility.

⏹️ ▶️ John Exciting. Increased flexibility, hmm. What does this mean for you? Your

⏹️ ▶️ John Fios TV digital adapters and or cable cards will no longer work and require an immediate upgrade to avoid

⏹️ ▶️ John a service interruption. Once your new equipment is in place, you can choose what to do with your old equipment. You will not

⏹️ ▶️ John be charged if it’s not returned to Verizon. They don’t even want the cable cards back. They’re like, just, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John recycle it. They’re like, you don’t have to bring it back to us. You don’t have to bring it back to a Verizon store. You don’t have to ship

⏹️ ▶️ John it to us. We don’t want it. We don’t care what you do with it. Just do something responsible with it. Cable cards

⏹️ ▶️ John are garbage. They are dead to us. There is no date or deadline in this email. Googling

⏹️ ▶️ John led me to just a bunch of other Verizon customers saying, I got this email, It doesn’t say what the date is. I mean, I imagine

⏹️ ▶️ John they have to be doing this rollout slowly just because let’s say some large percentage of their

⏹️ ▶️ John customers decide to upgrade. That’s a lot of service calls. So like, it’s not like they’re gonna turn them off tomorrow because

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, people, you know, the customers say, oh, I don’t want to lose my TV. Come to my house and

⏹️ ▶️ John swap my cable cards for your crappy stuff. Some number of their customers are gonna do that. And they have to wait

⏹️ ▶️ John for those people to make an appointment, get the service call, get it all working. And that’s why they’re spreading these emails

⏹️ ▶️ John out. It’s a slow rollout. So I don’t think this is going to happen immediately, but I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John know when it’s gonna happen So now start your timer at some point I’m gonna go pull up my Tevo

⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s gonna say I have no signal and That’s what I know will be over. And at that point I will cancel

⏹️ ▶️ John my Fios TV subscription and Not replace it

⏹️ ▶️ John with anything probably at first if it turns out I have to replace it with something that as I said last time We discussed as I look at YouTube TV or

⏹️ ▶️ John the stuff like that, but that’s my plan. Wait until it stops working at some unknown point in the

⏹️ ▶️ John future, which I will mention on the show, I’m sure. And when that happens, call Verizon and say, please

⏹️ ▶️ John cancel my extremely expensive cable television package. And then I think this is a good

⏹️ ▶️ John time to give a salute to my TiVo Romeo Pro. It’s still working, cable cards are still working,

⏹️ ▶️ John but it has 12 years of service under my main TV. I think it’s probably

⏹️ ▶️ John the best TiVo they ever made before they really started screwing them up hardware-wise. It has more recording

⏹️ ▶️ John capacity than any TiVo device they sold after that, I believe, and it is 12

⏹️ ▶️ John years old and it’s still going strong. So goodbye

⏹️ ▶️ John TiVo, whenever, at some point in the unknown future.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m so sorry, John. I truly am, because I know that as much as I give you a hard time,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and justifiably, for your obsession with TiVo, I know that it is something that’s very important to you,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I know that this is something that you and I have both been dreading. I’ve not yet received this email.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s coming. It’s only a matter of time. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John sometime soon. Again, it’s some kind of gradual rollout. Your time will come.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I’m very sad about this. And this is a good time for me to replug that I was on downstream with our friend Jason

⏹️ ▶️ Casey talking about what to do after this comes for me. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey there were no strong conclusions reached, but he had some really fascinating insights. So if you’re in a similar

⏹️ ▶️ Casey boat, you might wanna check that out. We’ll put a link in the show notes.

More on temporal dithering

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Alright, temporal dithering. Kyle Foreman writes, while John’s description of how temporal dithering

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is implemented was pretty spot on, how we perceive the colors is actually even more analog and cooler, in

⏹️ ▶️ Casey my opinion. The visual cortex does all sorts of cool processing to fill in gaps when you blink, for example, or

⏹️ ▶️ Casey during eye saccades, saccades? I’m not sure how to pronounce that. Saccades, yeah. Thank you, should have looked it up. Anyway, super

⏹️ ▶️ Casey quick movements that you don’t even notice. But for temporal dithering, a lot of it happens all the way down at the photoreceptor

⏹️ ▶️ Casey level. You have three different types of cones that react differently to wavelengths of light. However, the cones

⏹️ ▶️ Casey aren’t instantaneous detectors, but rather slowly responding gauges that are laggy because they’re opening

⏹️ ▶️ Casey ion channels to create an electrical potential that gets read downstream as inputs to the color system.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Whoa. So the cells in your eyes themselves are basically implementing a low pass filter on the colors you see

⏹️ ▶️ Casey long before your brain smushes anything together. Pretty cool.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. I just, for people that don’t know what a low pass filter is, uh, well, you’re lucky you didn’t have to take signals

⏹️ ▶️ John and systems in college.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Um,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and don’t write a podcast app.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. It’s a filter that allows, doesn’t allow low frequencies to go by.

⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn’t allow high frequencies to go by, it allows low frequencies. It’s like near-sighted and far-sighted, it always gets

⏹️ ▶️ John confused. Anyway, so what this is saying is, let’s say there’s a high frequency signal, like a light

⏹️ ▶️ John that turns on and off and on and off real, real fast, that’s high frequency, okay? Because each time

⏹️ ▶️ John the light hitting your cones changes, it takes them a while, it’s like a laggy gauge, it’s like, oh,

⏹️ ▶️ John different level of light, okay, I’m opening up an ion channel, going or whatever. As it’s going through that process, up

⏹️ ▶️ John now the light is changed again. So high frequency signals like something that goes on and off real fast

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t actually even get through to your brain because the cones take too long to respond to changes.

⏹️ ▶️ John If it’s a low frequency thing like light goes on for three seconds and then off for three seconds, that’s plenty of time for your cones to react.

⏹️ ▶️ John Light goes on, it’s on for three seconds. Your cone’s like, oh, light’s changed. Let me open my ion channels.

⏹️ ▶️ John And that happens and it’s like, hey, light’s still on, light’s still on, light’s still on, and then it goes off. That’s low frequency. And that

⏹️ ▶️ John low low frequency signals are allowed to pass. That’s why things like CRTs, plasma televisions,

⏹️ ▶️ John movies, stuff like that, it’s why they work for us because you can flash an image on the screen real fast

⏹️ ▶️ John and as long as it’s like bright in there for a second, you can have blackness for a while

⏹️ ▶️ John and it doesn’t matter because your eyes are still reacting to the stimulus that they got as long as by the time they’re, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John as long as you don’t allow them to linger too long, the next flash of light, they don’t care that nothing

⏹️ ▶️ John happened in between. and same thing like plasma where plasma TVs would like, some of the old ones would

⏹️ ▶️ John show just like the red and the green and then some blue. Like I don’t even actually even know what system they were using, but if you took a slow-mo

⏹️ ▶️ John video of a plasma TV, you’d see that it doesn’t even flash the whole image, it flashes pieces of the image individually, like

⏹️ ▶️ John a dot of these colors and a dot of like at the same spot, but that would just be combined. And it’s not combined by our brain,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s because our eyeballs themselves are slow to react, the cones in our eyeballs, which is the thing that I didn’t know. So

⏹️ ▶️ John thank you, Kyle, for writing in with that information. And I forget what this is in the context of, I think it was like, um,

⏹️ ▶️ John was it monitor technology? Oh, no, it was temporal dithering. That’s right. It was the, the, um, people complaining about screen

⏹️ ▶️ John flickering or whatever. That’s why most monitors can get away with temporal dithering because they

⏹️ ▶️ John are, you know, flipping a light on and off, uh, fast enough at a high enough frequency that

⏹️ ▶️ John the low pass filters that are the cones in our eyes, um, only allow a lower frequency changes

⏹️ ▶️ John to go through to our brain. And that high frequency one just smushes into like a, a medium before it even gets to our

⏹️ ▶️ John brain.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this episode by Guru. When you’re working with AI,

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⏹️ ▶️ Marco generating more information, it’s trusting it. You got documents over here, tickets over there, conversations

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⏹️ ▶️ Marco Guru. Guru is your AI source of truth. It connects all the things your

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⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to Guru for sponsoring our show.

Too many screens

Chapter Too many screens image.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, John, you were

⏹️ ▶️ Casey shaking your fist and shouting at clouds with regard to too many screens and things. So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey we have a lot of this from a CES. Do you want to tell me about it?

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. I mean, this is just a coincidence. I was complaining. I was mostly complaining about that tiny little anchor charging

⏹️ ▶️ John brick with one USB-C port on it and they put a screen on it. I’m like, no, too far. It’s too much.

⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, this is tangentially related at CES. they’re putting screens on too many

⏹️ ▶️ John things. Two examples. One, this is an MSI computer.

⏹️ ▶️ John Obviously gaming PCs, they’re all fancy and RGB lights and they have clear sides and water cooling or whatever. And

⏹️ ▶️ John they’ve had screens on them for a while, but now there’s a little bit of an arms race. This MSI

⏹️ ▶️ John MEG Vision X tower computer essentially has a screen on the entire

⏹️ ▶️ John front of the tower of the computer. An LCD screen, like full height on the front of the computer.

⏹️ ▶️ John It kind of reminds me of those, you know, like, I guess a nano Raptor type, you know, fake drawings

⏹️ ▶️ John of like take a tower computer and say it’s an all-in-one because you put a screen on the front. The screen is not for you to

⏹️ ▶️ John run windows or whatever. What’s on the screen is some gamery looking thing that lets you

⏹️ ▶️ John look at settings inside your PC or whatever. It is literally a screen for your PC,

⏹️ ▶️ John which I think is dumb, but fine, whatever. Let’s go up one more level. Also from

⏹️ ▶️ John MSI, there’s a lot of MSI content in this episode. The MSI Lightning

⏹️ ▶️ John RTX 5090 is an extremely expensive, no price announced, video card.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the NVIDIA 5090 with like a 17 pound copper heat sink and liquid cooling

⏹️ ▶️ John going through tubes to a giant fan assembly. It’s gonna be really expensive. It’s super duper overclocked. And guess

⏹️ ▶️ John what? This video card has a screen on it. No,

⏹️ ▶️ John no, it’s inside your computer. I know the cases are clear, but like it’s literally

⏹️ ▶️ John inside your computer. What’s next, CPUs with screens on them? What, RAM with screens

⏹️ ▶️ John on it? Screens are on too many things. No, they even mentioned in the video I watched

⏹️ ▶️ John about this that like, in case you’re wondering why it’s not an OLED screen, it’s merely an LCD screen on your

⏹️ ▶️ John horrendously expensive video card, it’s because the OLED screen gave off too much heat.

⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe don’t put a screen on your video card. Yeah, imagine that. So stupid. Anyway, screens

⏹️ ▶️ John are on too many things. Gamers have bad taste. You

⏹️ ▶️ Casey tell me about it.

Wi-Fi

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, last episode we were talking because Abraham Vague wrote to tell

⏹️ ▶️ Casey us that the channel selection and channel size are the most important part of setting up a good Wi-Fi network. And John,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you have thoughts.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I meant to talk about this when I was talking about my new Eero setup in both the

⏹️ ▶️ John Pro and the Con. That’s exactly why I put Abraham’s thing in there about

⏹️ ▶️ John selecting channel size and also location, but all the other stuff. In theory,

⏹️ ▶️ John one of the benefits of Eero is that if you don’t know how to do that, you don’t know

⏹️ ▶️ John how to select the right channel and how big it should be, you don’t know how or when to tweak that or tell whether you’ve

⏹️ ▶️ John done a good job, Eero does that for you. It figures out what channels are free, what channels have the least

⏹️ ▶️ John congestion, and amongst all the little mesh nodes, it sets everything automatically for you.

⏹️ ▶️ John Now if you Google about, alright, so how well does that work? You’ll find some people saying, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John great, I never have to worry about this stuff, it It just does it automatically and it’s great. And then you find other people saying, I wanna manually

⏹️ ▶️ John select the channel on the sides and Eero will let me do it, because it’s all automatic. I wish I had quote

⏹️ ▶️ John unquote real networking hardware that would let me select this stuff myself. I fall down on the side of,

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t ever wanna know or care about this stuff and I just want Eero to do something smart. As far as I’m aware,

⏹️ ▶️ John Eero is doing something smart. My only evidence is that I have solid wifi connection everywhere and that every time

⏹️ ▶️ John I upgrade to fancier Eero gear, my signal and my speeds get better. But if you

⏹️ ▶️ John are a network expert, This is another trade-off with Eero. If you want manual control over channel

⏹️ ▶️ John size and selection, I don’t think Eero gives you that option in any way. But if you don’t know what

⏹️ ▶️ John channel size or selection are, maybe Eero is the right product for you.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, and then continuing with Wi-Fi, let’s talk about Wi-Fi 7, I’m sorry, Wi-Fi 8, because

⏹️ ▶️ Casey apparently it’s happening. So Steve Bonnefield at The Verge writes, “‘The first

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wi-Fi 8 routers and chips made a surprise appearance at CES 2026 and could launch this year,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey only a couple of years ahead, or excuse me, after Wi-Fi 7 debuted. Rather than focusing on

⏹️ ▶️ Casey speed upgrades, Wi-Fi 8 promises improved stability. It offers the high speeds and bandwidth of Wi-Fi 7, but with improved power

⏹️ ▶️ Casey efficiency, higher throughput, and better peer-to-peer communication between devices. Wi-Fi 8 is also

⏹️ ▶️ Casey better at maintaining fast, stable connections when the users are moving devices around or moving them further away

⏹️ ▶️ Casey from their router. As a result, Wi-Fi 8 users will experience less dropping out or freezing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and better streaming and gaming performance.

⏹️ ▶️ John See our past discussion about how long it actually takes for a wifi standard to trickle out through the hardware

⏹️ ▶️ John and get the good version of the standard with all the features. So it’ll be a while, but it is funny that we chose this time to start

⏹️ ▶️ John talking about wifi seven and wifi eight. Is already here, where here is in scare quotes,

⏹️ ▶️ John CES style.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so since we’re already talking about CES, we are now done with followup because John has some new news

⏹️ ▶️ Casey he would like to share with us. And John, it appears that you have virtually strolled the CES floor

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and have some discoveries you’d like to share with the class.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, there’ll probably be more from CES in future episodes, but I just wanted to give a few items that kind of ties into

⏹️ ▶️ John earlier discussions about Apple monitors and stuff. My usual disclaimer is about CES Apply.

⏹️ ▶️ John At CES, they show things, some of which may never even ship, hopefully like that video card

⏹️ ▶️ John with the screen on it. One of the things they almost, almost never do at CES is

⏹️ ▶️ John announce prices. Like they’ll show you the products and they’ll say, yeah, it’ll probably be around this price, nudge, nudge, wink,

⏹️ ▶️ John wink, but nothing official, blah, blah, blah. Sometimes it’s just no price at all. But I did manage to find some items

⏹️ ▶️ John that look like they’re real and are going to ship and actually have announced prices. And

⏹️ ▶️ John the reason I wanna highlight these is to continue to show just how far behind Apple is in the monitor race.

⏹️ ▶️ John Sick burn. Yeah, well, I mean, you’ll see what… So the only place Apple’s ahead is in monitor

⏹️ ▶️ John naming. Oh, truth. I think I’ve made fun of this before, like in the monitors unboxed guy, I forget what his

⏹️ ▶️ John name is, but he is an expert at rattling off the alphabet soup that

⏹️ ▶️ John are these monitor names. He just, he’s really good at it. He says them over and over. I don’t know if he practices or something, but

⏹️ ▶️ John he commented in his YouTube video on this particular monitor that some of the letters in the middle of this jumbled

⏹️ ▶️ John product name actually spell out a word, and he just pronounced it as a word. And he’s like, I wonder if they’re doing that to try to

⏹️ ▶️ John make the names easier to pronounce. No, I think it’s just random. Anyway, this is the MSI MPG271KRAW16.

⏹️ ▶️ John six.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Cool.

⏹️ ▶️ John Or the two seven one K raw 16. I don’t think that’s an improvement. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a 27 inch 5k monitor is exact same resolution as the Apple studio display. It’s a mini led

⏹️ ▶️ John IPS LCD, which means that as a backlight with a bunch of little IDs that you can turn on and off, it’s glossy. It’s got an adjustable stand, 165

⏹️ ▶️ John Hertz or 330 Hertz in 1440 mode, which is a gamer thing where they double the refresh

⏹️ ▶️ John rate by having the resolution or whatever, or quartering it,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever. Can I pull on that thread just for a moment, please? You play first person shooters

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you play games that I believe are the sorts of games that a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey gamer would want, like no latency, you know, instant refreshing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on their monitors. Does that actually freaking matter?

⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, it totally does. Um, the problem is I’m playing on PlayStation five, which mostly maxes out at 60 Hertz.

⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, I can play destiny at one 20, but only on my big TV, because my monitor is so

⏹️ ▶️ John old, it only does 60 Hertz.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But you but it makes a difference in your abilities to like play the game. Well the difference between 60 and 120 Hertz it does

⏹️ ▶️ John Because like the input lag is lower and the motion is smoother and maybe in a future episode I’ll talk about Nvidia’s

⏹️ ▶️ John new backlight strobing thing, which is another Big update this year in terms of motion clarity,

⏹️ ▶️ John but yes, it does make a difference.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco No, I mean there’s diminishing returns, obviously But anyway, sure

⏹️ ▶️ John So this one like I said, it’s 165 Hertz and it does have a doubling mode where you can do 3 3 to 3 30 Hertz It’s at 1440p mode. The mini LED backlight

⏹️ ▶️ John has 2,304 local dimming zones. The Pro Display

⏹️ ▶️ John XDR for seven grand or whatever has 576 dimming zones, which is way less on a way bigger

⏹️ ▶️ John area. The 16-inch MacBook Pro has 2,554 dimming zones,

⏹️ ▶️ John supposedly, that’s the best number I could come up with searching Apple doesn’t give it, doesn’t give that number, I believe.

⏹️ ▶️ John The studio display has one zone and no dimming at all.

⏹️ ▶️ John This this MPG 5K monitor is 1400 nits on an 8% window. The XDR and the MacBook Pro are 1600 nits.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what window size. The studio display is 600 nits.

⏹️ ▶️ John This monitor is G-Sync compatible. If you care, it’s got HDMI 2.1, DisplayPort 2.1,

⏹️ ▶️ John two USB-C with 98 watts power delivery, two USB-A at five gigabits, two USB,

⏹️ ▶️ John one USB-B at five gigabits and one headphone port. All right. This monitor is essentially

⏹️ ▶️ John a 5K monitor like the Apple Studio Display, but it is brighter. It is 165 Hertz. It has 2,300 local

⏹️ ▶️ John dimming zones, and it is $900.

⏹️ ▶️ John Great. It’s mind-blowing. So

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey like

⏹️ ▶️ John this, I’m just reading, just as we’re recording this show, there’s like another rumor leak of like, oh, FCC things

⏹️ ▶️ John for like the Studio Display successor and the XDR successor, where, you know, those things aren’t

⏹️ ▶️ John out yet and don’t exist yet, but like, oh, maybe the Studio, Maybe the XDR will have, the studio display will have local dimming now

⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. This is what they’re competing against. 165 Hertz, 27 inch, 5K,

⏹️ ▶️ John 2000 local dimming zones, $900.

⏹️ ▶️ John Adjustable stand included.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, next monitor. Before you move on though, I have to say, stats wise, this is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey incredible. And we were just talking about how I’m cheap. I mean, frugal. I mean, I spend money wisely.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And- No, you don’t. 100, no, I don’t know. For $900. You have a Vision Pro. All right,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, fair enough. Occasionally frugal and occasionally cheap.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Selectively frugal. For $900, this is an incredible deal.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is incredible except.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John It

⏹️ ▶️ John is better than the studio display in every possible spec that you could care about.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Except.

⏹️ ▶️ John Except, go ahead.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You have to look at it. And it is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John not pretty.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not that bad. I mean, the stand is, like if you look at it from the side, it’s pretty tasteful. That little chin

⏹️ ▶️ John on the front, I think, they put motion detectors there sometimes and the OLEDs to make them turn off when you’re not sitting

⏹️ ▶️ John in front of them, which is cool. It could be worse. Look, this is a gaming monitor.

⏹️ ▶️ John It could be worse. Oh, it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey could be way worse. And actually, I think if you VESA mount this, it wouldn’t be too bad to your point.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But yeah, I mean, you still gotta look at it. And I would suffer through. I mean, I’m looking at two LG 5Ks,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which are not exactly pretty either. And so I would be able to suffer through, but- This

⏹️ ▶️ John is better

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey than

⏹️ ▶️ John those. It’s like a mini XDR. It’s because the dynamic backlight makes a huge difference. You

⏹️ ▶️ John can have true blacks on it. and it has way more zones than the XDR. So this is a good display. All right,

⏹️ ▶️ John so what’s the next one? Next one is the MSI MAG271KPD7. Cool.

⏹️ ▶️ John Rolls off the tongue. Are these Sony headphone names? Right? This is now the worst, the monitors are worse than Sony

⏹️ ▶️ John headphone names, believe it or not. Cause there’s so frigging many of them. This is another 27 inch 5K display. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John these are Mac relevant things. IPS LCD, matte finish, adjustable stand, 75 Hertz, not 60, 75 Hertz,

⏹️ ▶️ John or up to 300 Hertz in 1440p mode. This is the guy’s name, Tim Scheisser?

⏹️ ▶️ John Scheisser?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey What do we think about that? Scheisser.

⏹️ ▶️ John All right. Tim Scheisser from Monitors Unboxed. Here’s a quote from his video. He’s looking at this monitor and here’s what

⏹️ ▶️ John he said in the video, talking about the 75 Hertz refresh rate. That’s a little unusual.

⏹️ ▶️ John 75 Hertz is quite a low refresh rate for a modern display. I tend to think of 120 Hertz as

⏹️ ▶️ John being the minimum these days. So I thought, why are they making this monitor? He’s questioning the existence of this monitor because it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John only 75 Hertz. All of Apple’s monitors are 60. It’s sad.

⏹️ ▶️ John G-Sync compatible, display HDR 400, which is only 400 nits in the studio display, 600 nits, which isn’t great,

⏹️ ▶️ John but whatever. HDMI 2.1, DisplayPort 1, 4 and 4A, USB-C with 15 watts delivery, two

⏹️ ▶️ John USB-A with five gigabits, one USB-B with five gigabits, headphone out, $500.

⏹️ ▶️ John This is a studio display equivalent with only, the only thing it gives up over the studio display is 200 nits versus, yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s 400 versus 600 nits. $500. The studio display

⏹️ ▶️ John nanotexture upgrade is $300. The studio display adjustable stand upgrade is $400.

⏹️ ▶️ John Just upgrading from the, taking away a non-adjustable stand and replacing with an adjustable one is $400.

⏹️ ▶️ John This entire monitor with an adjustable stand is $500. Say you wanted to have

⏹️ ▶️ John two 5K displays, $500 each. You could have this thing. And it’s on 75 Hertz, which

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco is still better than studio display.

⏹️ ▶️ John So, and the other thing is, I think it

⏹️ ▶️ John might’ve been MSI or maybe another brand, had a monitor aimed at Mac users, but they obviously have no

⏹️ ▶️ John idea what Mac users want because I believe it was 4K 27 inch. It’s like, oh no. Nope. Nope. Nope.

⏹️ ▶️ John You missed. But the whole point, it looked like Mac, a white and kind of Mac-y, had a special mode

⏹️ ▶️ John where it’s like exactly calibrated to how the Apple Studio display is, so it’ll match like the laptop monitors or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, all I’m saying is, if you want a cheaper 5K display, the gaming

⏹️ ▶️ John world, where apparently all the action is and external monitors has finally come around to 5K 27 inch displays. And

⏹️ ▶️ John now you have your choice. What do you want? What kind of features do you want? And they’re all so

⏹️ ▶️ John much cheaper than the studio display. So it is a great time to be looking at 5K displays. It’s just about time

⏹️ ▶️ John if these FCC rumors that maybe we’ll talk about next week are real for Apple to finally update its monitors. Will it update

⏹️ ▶️ John them to still be worse than the monitors I described here?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Probably. Stay tuned to find

⏹️ ▶️ Marco out. They will certainly be more expensive. You can be

⏹️ ▶️ John guaranteed that.

New monitors at CES

Chapter New monitors at CES image.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and then one more quick one is LG. So it’s not as gamery

⏹️ ▶️ John 27 inch 4k RGB stripe tandem OLED panel

⏹️ ▶️ John This is a lot of words RGB stripe means the sub pixels are Red green and blue stripes will put

⏹️ ▶️ John a link in the show notes to an image I finally found that shows the sub pixels not like a drawing of it But literally

⏹️ ▶️ John a photo of the sub pixels you see this in document when

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you scroll down Yeah

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So like normally OLEDs for like ever since they’ve been out have had what I believe used to be called the pen tile

⏹️ ▶️ Marco arrangement of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John pixels Our

⏹️ ▶️ John arrangement is on phones where neighboring pixels share like the green sub pixel

⏹️ ▶️ John But on big displays, they haven’t used that but if you look at the picture you can see like this shows

⏹️ ▶️ John a Couple generations of QD OLEDs and then LCD but look at the cute. Look at all the QD OLEDs

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like there’s a red and a green of blue for every pixel, but they’re kind of in like a triangle or

⏹️ ▶️ John a diamond, right? which is fine, it’s perfect for a TV I

⏹️ ▶️ John think, because you want it to be kind of dithered and fuzzy on a TV. But especially if you’re using Windows with sub-pixel

⏹️ ▶️ John anti-aliasing, this totally screws it up. But now they have RGB stripe displays

⏹️ ▶️ John of various kinds, including OLEDs. So LG has a 27

⏹️ ▶️ John inch 4K RGB stripe, tandem OLED, tandem OLED is the thing that

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple puts in its iPads, where it’s like got another light emitting layer, which makes the screen

⏹️ ▶️ John brighter, with lower power, blah, blah, blah. This is the ASUS ROG Swift OLED PG27UCWM,

⏹️ ▶️ John not to be confused with the PG27UCDM, which is, believe it or not, an alphabet soup that I’ve memorized,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco because it’s a very popular monitor.

⏹️ ▶️ John No white sub-pixel. So this is the first time, this generation is the first time

⏹️ ▶️ John that there has been a non-QD OLED without a white sub-pixel. So that is exciting.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if the iPad has a white sub-pixel or not, I’ve never looked into that, but anyway, This is a monitor. I’m looking at this as

⏹️ ▶️ John a gaming monitor. Why do I care about 27 inch 4K? Not for my Mac, but my gaming monitor. I currently use on my

⏹️ ▶️ John PlayStation a 4K 27 inch monitor. That’s the size and resolution I want. For PlayStation games,

⏹️ ▶️ John this is a tandem OLED. It’s basically like take my iPad that I love and make it 27 inch

⏹️ ▶️ John and make the sub pixels be a vertical stripe. Glossy finish, 240 Hertz, a thousand

⏹️ ▶️ John nits max brightness, which isn’t that much, but it’s way higher than my current one, which probably is like 300 nits.

⏹️ ▶️ John Adjustable stand of course, DisplayPort 2.1a, HDMI 2.1, USB-C with 90 watts power

⏹️ ▶️ John delivery, headphone out, no price announced.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco That’s good

⏹️ ▶️ Marco specs though.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John and the stand is disgusting and I hate it, but. Yes. To Casey’s point, like

⏹️ ▶️ John you can do something about the stand. Anyway, all I’m saying is that the time for me getting a new gaming monitor,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s getting closer, it’s looking closer. I love these specs, I’m sure the price will be great And this would be a huge

⏹️ ▶️ John upgrade over my current monitor.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Well, I mean, we’ll see what happens and whether any of this ships, but it’s definitely

⏹️ ▶️ Casey looking promising. I’m really pleased that the PC industry has finally embraced 5k monitors

⏹️ ▶️ Casey because you’ll basically up until now there was apples and then there’ve

⏹️ ▶️ Casey been other options, but they’re few and far between there’s the LG, uh, ultra fine Dell for like 10 seconds had

⏹️ ▶️ Casey one years and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John years ago. I

⏹️ ▶️ John think they still do. There’s a couple, we’ve talked about a whole bunch of them, but like They’re they’re kind of aimed at

⏹️ ▶️ John like creative professional type things. So they’re priced a little bit higher and they have different

⏹️ ▶️ John have different things that they’re shooting for. But this year at CES, not only I just listed some five

⏹️ ▶️ John K and four K things. There are six K gaming monitors. And I think part of the reason is the DLSS and other sort of frame

⏹️ ▶️ John generation stuff that we’ve talked about on Pat shows is really, really sort of coming into its own. And people are gamers

⏹️ ▶️ John are really accepting it essentially like run the game at a, you know, it would normally

⏹️ ▶️ John run at an unacceptably low frame rate, but don’t worry, the video card will add frames in between the real frames.

⏹️ ▶️ John And so now you can potentially game at five K. Maybe you can’t game at six K, but like

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s it is. These monitors are suddenly somewhat relevant to gaming.

⏹️ ▶️ John Not super relevant. Everyone’s like, can you run any real games at a good frame rate at five K? And people like, oh, I need 500

⏹️ ▶️ John frames per second. Nothing can run. And, you know, even that liquid cool video

⏹️ ▶️ John card with the screen on, it can’t run 5k at 500 frames per second, but it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John happening. The gaming world is discovering retina resolution and monitors

⏹️ ▶️ John are being made and that benefits Mac users as long as you you can stand the cases.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this episode by Gusto. If you run a small

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⏹️ ▶️ Marco our show.

Apple Creator Studio

Chapter Apple Creator Studio image.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so let’s talk some directly Apple stuff. And within the last 24 or 48

⏹️ ▶️ Casey hours as we record this, Apple has announced Creator Studio. And so what is this?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Pixelmator Pro, Motion, Compressor, and Mainstage, plus new AI

⏹️ ▶️ Casey features and premium content in keynote pages and numbers come together in a single subscription.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple Creator Studio will be available on the App Store beginning Wednesday, January 28 for $12.99 a month or 130 bucks per year with a one month free trial, which

⏹️ ▶️ Casey includes access to Final Cut Pro, Logic

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro and Pixelmator Pro on Mac and iPad, motion compressor and main stage on Mac

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and AI features and premium content for keynote pages, numbers, and later free form for iPhone,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPad, and Mac. If you’re a college student or an educator, you can do it for three bucks a month or 30

⏹️ ▶️ Casey bucks a year. Up to six family members can share all the apps and content included in the Apple creator studio

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with family sharing, unless you got it through the student discount, which case tough nuts.

⏹️ ▶️ John You can’t. Yeah, that was my plan. I was like, this is great. I have two college student children. They’ll just get it for $30

⏹️ ▶️ John a year and they’ll share it with their six family members, you know, and it’ll be great.

⏹️ ▶️ John No, no, I’ll do that. Blah, blah.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Alternatively, users can also choose to purchase the Mac versions of Final Cut Pro, Pixelmator Pro, Logic

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro, Motion Compressor, MainStage, individually as a one-time purchase on the Mac App Store. John has been kind enough

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to put notes in the show notes for me to read to you. Final Cut Pro is 300 bucks. Logic Pro, 200 bucks. Pixelmator Pro, 50 bucks, Motion, 50 bucks,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Compressor, 50 bucks, Mainstage, 30 bucks. Mainstage turns the Mac into

⏹️ ▶️ Casey an instrument, voice processor, or guitar rig. I’d

⏹️ ▶️ John never even heard of that app, had you?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, nor had I heard of Motion or Compressor, to be honest with

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John you.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey No, I’ve heard of Motion

⏹️ ▶️ John and

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Compressor, it’s been around for a while. I have Compressor.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, Mainstage is just, maybe it’s a new app or maybe it’s just a blind spot because I’m not

⏹️ ▶️ John a musician using my Mac. But so, two things before we continue with the story. One, I’m kind

⏹️ ▶️ John of surprised that they continue to have the one-time purchase things. And two, it kind

⏹️ ▶️ John of reminds me of those infomercials from our youth where it’s like, you know, you’re getting all

⏹️ ▶️ John this, look at the value. Because when you add up the individual price of like, okay, well, it’s,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, $130 a year. But if I actually wanted to buy all those apps individually and I add 300 plus 200

⏹️ ▶️ John plus 50 plus 50 plus 50 plus 30, it adds up so fast.

⏹️ ▶️ John What a deal it is to get it for $130 a year. Anyway, we’ll talk about pricing a little bit more, but like

⏹️ ▶️ John it does surprise me they did that, but they did do it. So if you hate subscriptions, you can still for now

⏹️ ▶️ John buy these apps standalone.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, which, and these, I believe those were all the prices they already were.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I don’t think they changed it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so with that in mind, Apple says you can use either version of the apps. You can have both

⏹️ ▶️ Casey versions of these apps installed on your Mac. To make it easier to distinguish versions, the apps in

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple Creator Studio have unique icons.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, we can talk about the icons now. So what they’re saying is, if you buy or have purchased

⏹️ ▶️ John in the past, say, the standalone version of Final Cut Pro, but then you get Creator Studio, no problem. You

⏹️ ▶️ John can have them both installed. Every one of these apps that’s available as part of the Creator Studio and available standalone,

⏹️ ▶️ John you can have both. And they distinguish them because the old apps have the

⏹️ ▶️ John icons that they have now, and the new apps all have a set of icons that

⏹️ ▶️ John kind of make a family, kind of like how all All the Adobe apps, or I figure what they’re looking at now, it’s like a, they’re just round

⏹️ ▶️ John racks with letters in them or something. Or the Office, Microsoft Office apps always have like a family resemblance where they

⏹️ ▶️ John pick a theme and they make Word and Excel and PowerPoint or whatever look, you know, fit in the theme.

⏹️ ▶️ John So these icons are Tahoe style icons. They have black backgrounds and they’re little

⏹️ ▶️ John round racks on the Mac. And then they have kind of liquid, glassy, frosty, glassy

⏹️ ▶️ John elements. I don’t even know if the, I don’t think they actually are the, you know, like the icon

⏹️ ▶️ John composer frosty things. I think they’re like bitmaps or something because I don’t think you

⏹️ ▶️ John can do those effects with icon composer, but who knows? Maybe they’re using a new version of icon composer that we don’t have.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco But

⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, they’re kind of modern Microsoft

⏹️ ▶️ John Office style, abstract blobs on a black background. Lots of people are giving these icons

⏹️ ▶️ John crap. And I have to say, I think as a family, they don’t look terrible. They’re Tahoe

⏹️ ▶️ John icons, they’re boring, they all kind of look the same. they’re very abstract or whatever, but I think

⏹️ ▶️ John this family is actually reasonably well executed. If every other icon on the Mac didn’t look like

⏹️ ▶️ John butt and we just saw these, we’d be like, oh,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco what a refreshing change.

⏹️ ▶️ John But as it stands, they’re kind of part of a larger movement that I hate. But individually, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John hate this, you know, collectively, I don’t hate this family. Individually, some of the icons are a significant

⏹️ ▶️ John downgrade from the icons that came before them, and some of them are kind of nonsensical. Like the main stage one

⏹️ ▶️ John is supposed to look like a slider or something, but it is a little bit off. Final

⏹️ ▶️ John Cut Pro is always a really cool icon and now it’s boring, but you know, the pages one, I kind of like the little gradient pencil.

⏹️ ▶️ John Pixelmator, I don’t know what it’s going

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey for, but it’s kind of cool.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t like Pixelmator Pros at all. It’s like a round rect that’s just an

⏹️ ▶️ Casey outline over a round rect that’s filled in. I guess it’s supposed to show layers with like three

⏹️ ▶️ Casey dots beneath it connected

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John with lines.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the little grab handles on like a Bezier curve.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I guess, I don’t like that one at

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco all.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey some of them are

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco better than

⏹️ ▶️ Casey others. I like Final Cut Pro, I like Logic Pro. Do you like the McDonald’s icon? Eh, Motion is basically

⏹️ ▶️ Casey two thirds of a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John McDonald’s icon.

⏹️ ▶️ John Motion is the McDonald’s or follow the bouncing ball. Freeform was already like this. So Freeform is like, yeah, that looks like the

⏹️ ▶️ John Freeform. And Numbers was already the middle finger, like bar charts. Yeah. Remember when Keynote

⏹️ ▶️ John was like a cool, like wooden pillar stand, and then, you know, like now it’s just kind of, you know. This is basically

⏹️ ▶️ John like, imagine abstract shapes drawn with a strip of frosted

⏹️ ▶️ John glass. Like even the keynote one, it’s supposed to look like one continuous strip. So it goes down and then to the left and then wraps to the back.

⏹️ ▶️ John Do you see that at the bottom?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey It looks like a line. Oh

⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, yeah, yeah. I don’t mind them that much, but lots of people are giving them hate. But anyway, I think when I see

⏹️ ▶️ John them, I say, yeah, this is an application suite. This is a family and that’s what they’re going for.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, the one thing that I will say that really made me laugh is that somebody put together, and I don’t think I’ll be able to find it for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the show notes, but somebody put together-

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I have

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it for you. You know where I’m going with this, a tweet or whatever, where they showed the evolution

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of icon design, but from current to original. And the comment, the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey caption, whatever, was something along the lines of, looking at these icons in reverse is like watching an

⏹️ ▶️ Casey icon designer get incredibly good at their job, or something like that, which was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John very funny.

⏹️ ▶️ John Basically, and it was showing the Pages icon, because Pages is this super

⏹️ ▶️ John abstract pencil, and as you go backwards in time, it gets more and more detailed and beautiful looking. All

⏹️ ▶️ John the way down to one of everyone’s favorite icons It’s like the pages icon that was like a really cool

⏹️ ▶️ John semi-photo real illustration of an inkwell with like a fountain pen next to it.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, it’s just a

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco very funny tweet.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco These icons, like some of them are not that different from what we had, so you know, like numbers, freeform. Like those are not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that different. Even the pages were like not that different. I think the, I mean, some of them are bad.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think Pixelmator is a terrible representation of anything.

⏹️ ▶️ John Logic is really a real downgrade from the cool Platinum record.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Logic Pro I think looks like a robot breast from an Elon Musk movie. And as a user of Logic, I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not looking forward to when this is pushed on me. But I think the entire idea

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of distilling the icon style down to an essence and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco having it be simpler, more abstract shapes, and then layering on top of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, we want these to all look like a family. So we’re gonna have them all look somewhat

⏹️ ▶️ Marco similarly styled and they’re all gonna have these same like simple flat

⏹️ ▶️ Marco backgrounds, basically single color neon glass looking shape

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on top. What that does by that uniformity and having them

⏹️ ▶️ Marco look like a part of a family, that serves the corporation and their branding

⏹️ ▶️ Marco guidelines. But that doesn’t really serve users because what that does when you have them all

⏹️ ▶️ Marco follow a very simple kind of template style, it makes them

⏹️ ▶️ Marco less distinguishable from one another at a quick glance. And the entire purpose, like when you’re using

⏹️ ▶️ Marco an app icon, either in some kind of launcher capacity, like a phone home screen, or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the Mac in the case of looking at things in the dock, what you want, what you need, is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for those icons to be very different from each other so that you can quickly and easily

⏹️ ▶️ Marco visually locate the app you are looking for and distinguish it from other similar apps. Now,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when companies do this thing where all of our things need to look similar. All the big tech companies do this. Google

⏹️ ▶️ Marco does this with all their rainbow icons that all look exactly the same. Adobe has all their weird letter

⏹️ ▶️ Marco icons for the Creative Suite apps, which this is obviously trying to rip off. The big companies all do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this. They make all their apps look the same, and they are serving their own goal of uniformity. And that, again,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think users are asking for that, first of all, or really benefit much

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from that. It’s in the same way that Apple has always, in the Allen

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Dive modern era, Apple has talked to, and Johnny Ive too, had talked about unifying

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the platform so that you have a consistent user interface across the Mac and the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhone and the iPad. And that often does not serve those platforms or their users.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s one of those things that to a designer or to a company’s marketing and branding teams,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco those sound really good. It sounds good to have a unified, consistent style.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But in most cases, the results of that suck in some unnecessary

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ways. And I wish they would eventually maybe realize that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And there’s a time and a place for consistent branding, but I think all of your icons and all of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco your UIs are not necessarily that place. Because what it actually does is make

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the icons work worse at one of their most important jobs.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll say, I’m with you on the Google one, because they basically use the rainbow kind of gradient in a couple

⏹️ ▶️ John of different shapes. But I think Apple has made some smart choices here and Adobe kind of too,

⏹️ ▶️ John because, so first of all, Apple due to its own stupidity has forced every icon on the Mac to be

⏹️ ▶️ John the same shape with the round rack, which immediately cuts off one form

⏹️ ▶️ John of identification, which is different icon shapes, okay? To get around that kind

⏹️ ▶️ John of, this Creator Studio suite of icons all use a black background,

⏹️ ▶️ John which, and they even put it on a black background on the webpage. Like the round rag is black and yeah, it’s got the stupid highlights

⏹️ ▶️ John on the edges, whatever. And then they put it on a black webpage. And all of that is to say,

⏹️ ▶️ John let’s try to make the background of our icons fade away. Instead of making the backgrounds white or a lighter color, let’s

⏹️ ▶️ John make them black. I guess it only works if you have a darker desktop pattern

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No wait, is this Liquid Glass icons where like if you have a light mode home screen, they will have light backgrounds? I

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know because I haven’t, like it’s not out yet. So I haven’t run them. I don’t actually know how opaque they are, but in

⏹️ ▶️ John the media literature they’ve

⏹️ ▶️ Marco provided. I think Steve Trout and Smith dug up some screenshots from some videos where like somebody had a light mode dock and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they were showing like they do have. So I think for now, let’s assume that they actually might color shift

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with different themes.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but either way, like it’s trying to be uniform and then there’s bold colors on top of it. And the bold colors

⏹️ ▶️ John are trying to provide a shape. Logic Pro is round, Pages is pointy into the right, Keynote is the little podium,

⏹️ ▶️ John Final Cut is, you know, a rectangle with an antenna coming out of it, whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John And then finally, unlike Google, they didn’t make every single one the same color. So Pixelmator

⏹️ ▶️ John Pro is the red icon, Final Cut Pro is the purple one, Keynote is blue, they kind of run out of colors because Freeform, Keynote,

⏹️ ▶️ John and Logic, they’re all kind of shades of blue, but Pages is clearly orange, Numbers is green, Motion is

⏹️ ▶️ John pink, Compressor is yellow. I think they’re trying to avoid what you just said, but just

⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh no, they made all the icons look the same. Now granted, they’re working within a system the demands they use the same art style

⏹️ ▶️ John for all of them, which isn’t that bad. We used to use the same art style when they were all photorealistic too. But anyway, there’s a little

⏹️ ▶️ John bit more sameness in an abstract design system than there is in a photo real one, because photo real objects look different

⏹️ ▶️ John in real life so they can be distinguished in that way. Whereas no matter what you draw with this liquid glass frost, it looks like liquid grass

⏹️ ▶️ John for frost. But I think they did as good a job as they could do while still

⏹️ ▶️ John using the abstract liquid glass thing by distinguishing them in

⏹️ ▶️ John silhouette shape and major primary color. I still like the old icon style better,

⏹️ ▶️ John but I do give them some credit. And Adobe, the same thing. Like their stupid icons are like letters, like what, PS

⏹️ ▶️ John for Photoshop and LR for Lightroom and blah, blah, blah. You can’t, you’re not gonna read the letters or whatever, but

⏹️ ▶️ John they do make their stupid round-rick icons all different colors. Now, are the colors

⏹️ ▶️ John different enough when you have a certain number of apps in your icon suite and you run out of primary and secondary colors, then you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John into like tertiary colors and it’s like, eh. But they’re trying. trying to distinguish the icons.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s going to be a change for some people, but I have a feeling if you’re a video editor, you’ll be reaching for that purple rectangle

⏹️ ▶️ John pretty quickly and it won’t be as terrible as you made it out to be. So again, this is, this is a challenge

⏹️ ▶️ John of Apple’s own making. And I think whoever would design these icons tried their best to surpass it and was

⏹️ ▶️ John only somewhat successful.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Where did we leave off? Uh,

⏹️ ▶️ John let’s see. Uh, the, uh, the AI features. I like, we’re not going to list every single one here, but

⏹️ ▶️ John like you mentioned before like that, uh, if you get the subscription, you get a bunch of intelligent features

⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever in keynote pages and numbers or whatever. And it’s like, well, what are the, what are they adding? And I just pulled out two examples

⏹️ ▶️ John of like features that didn’t exist before. In these apps that are

⏹️ ▶️ John AI powered or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So with transcript search on Mac and iPad users can now easily find the perfect soundbite

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in hours of footage simply by typing phrases into the search bar to, to see exact or related results

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is legitimately super cool.

⏹️ ▶️ John I really did that. Yeah, that was like an AI transcription with full text search. That’s a good feature to add to your apps.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Looking for a specific video clip also gets an intelligent assist with a visual search. Now

⏹️ ▶️ Casey users can quickly pinpoint exact moments across all footage by searching for an object or action. And I forget what

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the marketing image had for this, but it was something like they searched for going upstairs or something along those lines. And you see a bunch of clips

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of a person walking in front of steps.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it was like a pop-up menu that says, are you looking for a thing or something that happens? If you’re looking for action,

⏹️ ▶️ John you say, you know, person falls down, car races by, or whatever. You’re looking for an object, you say tree, or house,

⏹️ ▶️ John or rug, or whatever. Again, a way to find stuff using, you know, image

⏹️ ▶️ John recognition in your video clips.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Advanced image creation and editing tools let users create high quality images from text or transform existing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey images using generative models from OpenAI.

⏹️ ▶️ John Hey, OpenAI, still working with Apple.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey The content hub is a new space where users can find curated high quality photos, graphics, and illustrations.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey A subscription also unlocks new premium templates and themes in keynote pages and numbers.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s kind of an Adobe type move of like, well, we have some stock art for you and we have some new

⏹️ ▶️ John templates and new themes and premium stuff that you get if you sign up for our subscription

⏹️ ▶️ John that is essentially content for our apps. The content hub is interesting. I wonder how much they’ll expand that or is it just gonna be

⏹️ ▶️ John the same set of 100 pictures three years from now? But we’ll see. It’s a very familiar strategy from

⏹️ ▶️ John the Adobe side of things.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pixelmator Pro for iPad is compatible with iPad models with the A16, A17 Pro or M1 chip or

⏹️ ▶️ Casey later, running iPadOS 26 or later. Apple Creator Studio version of Pixelmator Pro requires

⏹️ ▶️ Casey macOS 26. The one-time purchase version of Pixelmator Pro requires macOS 12 or later. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ John a big difference there. Like so Pixelmator Pro, again, there’s a subscription one and there’s the one-time purchase one and the

⏹️ ▶️ John OS difference is macOS 12 versus macOS 26. And I know that that’s not, you know, they skipped numbers

⏹️ ▶️ John there, but macOS 12 is pretty darn old. So like that’s essentially like the Pixel Meter that Apple bought. It works

⏹️ ▶️ John all the way back to Mac OS 12. The Creator Studio subscription one, nope, 26 or nothing. So that’s another thing,

⏹️ ▶️ John potentially keeping people on the standalone versions is if you don’t want to upgrade to 26.

⏹️ ▶️ John Or if you do really want the new version of these apps, you have to upgrade to 26.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then Keynote pages, numbers, and free form will remain free for all users to create, edit, and collaborate with others, including Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Creator Studio subscribers. These apps will continue receiving updates with the latest versions, adopting the beautiful new visual design

⏹️ ▶️ Casey language with liquid glass on all platforms and supporting the new windowing and menu bar improvements in iPadOS 26.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey However, Pixelmator Classic for iOS, released in 2014 as a companion app to the now discontinued

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pixelmator Classic for Mac, provides basic image editing features such as cropping, color adjustments, and effects. It remains

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a functional app, but is no longer being updated.

⏹️ ▶️ John Another one bites the dust.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then Chris Welch pointed out, Photomator is not included in Creator Studio, but will remain available

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for eight bucks a month or 30 bucks a year. It’s anyone’s guess how much development attention the app will receive

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as a standalone item outside the new bundle. If you’re unfamiliar, Pixelmator Pro is the company’s answer to Photoshop

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Photomator was more Lightroom-ish.

⏹️ ▶️ John So that one’s still around and it’s still a subscription. So I feel like it’ll be getting some kind of work on

⏹️ ▶️ John it because otherwise they would have like made it free or said it was going to be discontinued because now’s the time to discontinue everything. But anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John looking at this whole suite of apps, my first impression upon looking at this and seeing

⏹️ ▶️ John like availability pricing, what’s included is, This is a really, really good deal.

⏹️ ▶️ John Subsidized by out of whole rest of Apple’s business, but still, it’s a really good deal, especially

⏹️ ▶️ John if you just need to use like Final Cut for one project that takes you like a month. That

⏹️ ▶️ John previously you didn’t have an option like this. You could either buy Final Cut or whatever. And buying it for 300 bucks,

⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, do I really wanna buy it? Should I just try to use iMovie or do I use another app? This is now like a no brainer.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like $13 for a one month long Final Cut Pro product. And by the way, you don’t just get

⏹️ ▶️ John Final Cut Pro for $13. You get Logic Pro, Pixelmatrix Pro, Keynote, Pages,

⏹️ ▶️ John Numbers, Freeform, Motion Compressor, and Mainstage, all for that 13 bucks.

⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s all through Apple subscription system and it’s very flexible. $130 a year is also really reasonable. They’re super duper undercutting

⏹️ ▶️ John Adobe. Again, because Apple doesn’t just sell a suite of applications. Now Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John could have made all these free, because again, they have a large other business that makes tons and tons of

⏹️ ▶️ John money. But I think they did a pretty good job of finding

⏹️ ▶️ John the right way to position this in the market. Because if it was free, it would be like, great, Apple is

⏹️ ▶️ John destroying all possible third-party applications. Who wants to compete with a free version of Final Cut, a free version of Logic,

⏹️ ▶️ John a free version of Pixelmator Pro? Like, who wants to compete with that? Free is no good. Plus, free also makes

⏹️ ▶️ John us think they’re never gonna update it. Like photos for the Mac, for example. Or music for the Mac. Or

⏹️ ▶️ John any of the other apps that are free on the Mac. Apparently, Apple has lost interest in updating its free applications, unless it

⏹️ ▶️ John is to make them work like contacts on Tahoe. Make them worse rather like contacts on Tahoe.

⏹️ ▶️ John So I think what they’ve done is we’re gonna charge you money and we’re gonna charge enough

⏹️ ▶️ John money that third-party apps in theory could potentially still

⏹️ ▶️ John exist. It was gonna be hard for them. It’s gonna be hard for them to exist, but they could

⏹️ ▶️ John maybe, because again, Apple is still selling standalone ones. So if you wanna sell a $50 image editing

⏹️ ▶️ John application, you probably still could because you’re competing with an app that’s $13 a month or $130 a year. Now granted, it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ John just that app. Again, you get a whole suite, but if someone just wants an image editor, maybe your $50 image editor looks attractive

⏹️ ▶️ John compared to $13 a month or $130 a year.

⏹️ ▶️ John Charging some amount of money also makes me think maybe they’ll possibly be able to fund the teams to provide

⏹️ ▶️ John updates to these applications and make them better. On the other hand, $13 a month or $130 a year is not enough money to actually

⏹️ ▶️ John fully fund the teams work on these applications is not even enough to fund the team that works on pixelmator, let alone final cut and all

⏹️ ▶️ John those other apps. So it’s not, they’re not pricing it to

⏹️ ▶️ John cover their costs, but I, you know, as a customer, I

⏹️ ▶️ John suddenly have access to better apps for less money than I did before. And as someone who cares about the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John ecosystem, Apple is not 100% decimating the third party market for applications.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. I mean, this doesn’t do that much for me. Uh, In part because

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the one thing in this bundle, or the two things I guess in this bundle that I think I’d be interested in, are Pixelmator

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro for doing like touch up on photos and stuff, which actually you can do in the Photos app now, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pixelmator Pro has always been really good at that. And Final Cut Pro, because occasionally I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey will do some manipulation to videos, and I’m sure I could use a different app for it, but thanks to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey my brief stint as a very unsuccessful YouTuber, I’ve gotten fairly familiar with Final Cut

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Pro. all been there.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, right. It’s a rite of passage, I tell you. So anyways,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really dig that the point that you made earlier, John, about you could do this, like dip in for a month and then cancel.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because I remember when I wanted to do this YouTube thing, just being

⏹️ ▶️ Casey really, really concerned that spending the 300 bucks, whatever it was for Final Cut Pro,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is this worth it? Is this a good way to spend my money? Is this going to be something that I use for more than 10

⏹️ ▶️ Casey 10 minutes. And as it turns out, I’m glad I did buy it because even today, like I was saying, I’ll occasionally do some video manipulations

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and use Final Cut Pro,

⏹️ ▶️ John but- I’m on topic by the way, Steven Robles was saying, I think that when he wanted to get

⏹️ ▶️ John Final Cut to be a YouTuber and wasn’t sure it was worth it, whatever, it was 1300 bucks

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey and he couldn’t afford it. So he got Final

⏹️ ▶️ John Cut Express. Remember that? Remember Final Cut Express?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I do not actually.

⏹️ ▶️ John It was like the cheaper version of Final Cut Pro. I would say a really good investment for Steven, but just-

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco for real. It worked out well there. That’s the thing

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that a lot

⏹️ ▶️ John of people feel. And I do think that it’s kind of weird, Speaking of Final Cut, it is kind of weird that like, Final

⏹️ ▶️ John Cut, due to various reasons, like the big Final Cut Pro 10 kerfuffle about them dropping features and doing stuff

⏹️ ▶️ John and other industry forces that have essentially made Final Cut less popular

⏹️ ▶️ John in the world of professional audio production for television and movies. Video, video production. Yeah, right,

⏹️ ▶️ John video production. But for whatever reason, again, maybe because of the influence

⏹️ ▶️ John of the iPhone and Apple’s brand, my impression is that Final Cut Pro is much more popular with YouTubers

⏹️ ▶️ John than it is with people who make television and movies.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have no earthly idea. I can’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John speak to

⏹️ ▶️ John that. I mean, I don’t, that may not be true. It may just be the YouTubers that I watch, but because they’re like Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John and Apple people or whatever. But I feel like if you want, like it’s a shame that Apple seems to

⏹️ ▶️ John have lost so much ground in the, you know, old school TV movie video

⏹️ ▶️ John editing market to Avid and Premiere and stuff like that. But if you’re looking for a market

⏹️ ▶️ John that is like the future of video editing, know, YouTube is not bad.

⏹️ ▶️ John I guess maybe like Tik Toks are even better and there’s dedicated apps for them that Apple does not make, you know, setting aside clips

⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever that I think was canceled. I forgot.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I believe that’s right.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like I, I, I guess I think, I think Final Cut Pro is not necessarily doomed.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey No, certainly not.

⏹️ ▶️ John Ring endorsement.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, but yeah, I mean, this is interesting. I’m glad that you can still buy stuff outright, at least for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey now, because again, I don’t think I would ever buy Logic Pro unless suddenly Marco decided he didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey want to edit the show, in which case I guess I would, but that’s only going to happen when the show ends

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or Marco dies.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John So, you know, and Logic Pro is not

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey a,

⏹️ ▶️ John as, as you can see from every new version of Logic Pro they put out, it’s not a podcast editor.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It’s for music.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s so for music. They’re like, look at all these great features we have for beat matching and chord identification. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John like, no, it doesn’t help at all. probably hurts because everything about a UI is like you’re making a

⏹️ ▶️ John song.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mm-hmm. It’s really not made for this and it never lets us forget it.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And as each new version comes out, it just keeps going farther from being made for podcasts.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But all in all, I mean, I think this is a pretty good idea. I like that they’re charging money for it. I like that they’re doing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a subscription.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I like that they updated

⏹️ ▶️ John their apps.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey That’s great. Yeah. They don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey do

⏹️ ▶️ John that with most of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey their

⏹️ ▶️ John apps.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right? True. So all in all, I think this is good. I don’t know, Marco, I feel like you’ve been a little quieter Any thoughts on this?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s, I mean, it mostly doesn’t affect me because it’s, I mean, it’s a bunch of apps that I mostly don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco use. But I think anything that makes these apps more accessible

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to people with small budgets is better. And this does that. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, before, you know, you had situations like, you know, oh, you’d have to buy Final

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cut Express, you’d have to buy the small version, or use some free tools, or use some tools that are not like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what the pros are using, or back in our day, just pirate all the big tools. But I think that’s harder

⏹️ ▶️ Marco now. And so I don’t, but at the end of the day,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco these tools, if you’re gonna buy these in the previous arrangements, they were way more

⏹️ ▶️ Marco money, at least upfront. And if you were just thinking like, oh, let me try to learn, say,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Final Cut or Logic or whatever, there really wasn’t a good path for you to go from, I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco think I wanna try learning this, to go between that and I’m going to spend hundreds of dollars

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on this. Now there’s a path for that. That’s great. I think that is wonderful.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Um, there are a lot of details about this that I think don’t make a lot of sense. I don’t think keynote

⏹️ ▶️ Marco pages and numbers and free forms should be included. Like those aren’t, those are what I think used to be free.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I work apps and now it’s like, are they, are

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John they free? I mean, there’s

⏹️ ▶️ John still free. Like that’s one of the things that people are complaining about it and link to it. But Jason just posted a thing to six colors saying,

⏹️ ▶️ John all right, so keynote pages and numbers are are still free, but they’re freemium, because

⏹️ ▶️ John if you pay for the subscription version of them, it’s the same app, but also now you get

⏹️ ▶️ John certain special AI features or access to the content, whatever, that content

⏹️ ▶️ John hub thing, stuff like that. And so it’s kind of, people are worried it’s a slippery slope that like, oh, you just have the free

⏹️ ▶️ John version of Keynote, but you don’t have the cool thing where you can find a slide by describing it or something like that.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I agree that that’s not great, but I also kind of think that like, You know, Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John providing like a mail client, a notes app, all right, like, there’s some amount of platform, like

⏹️ ▶️ John basics that Apple has to provide. And they should provide them in a high quality way about while also leaving room

⏹️ ▶️ John for third parties. But when they get into office suites, like what used to be called I work where it’s like, this is kind of like

⏹️ ▶️ John Microsoft Office type stuff. Should Apple provide all those for free to does it want to foreclose the entire market

⏹️ ▶️ John for office style applications? And at one point, it would have said yes, because Apple will do them better. But now we’ve learned

⏹️ ▶️ John that a Apple won’t do them better and be Apple will never freaking and update

⏹️ ▶️ Marco them. And see their competition is free, it’s Google apps. Like that’s the real, like.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, someone pointed

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that out in the chat

⏹️ ▶️ John room too. The DaVinci Resolve is the free competition for Final Cut Pro and

⏹️ ▶️ John Avid and Adobe Premiere and all that stuff. So it’s a changing landscape and I think it is a little bit confused

⏹️ ▶️ John that those apps are in this bundle, but they’re also still outside it for free. So

⏹️ ▶️ John it seems Apple is trying to like hedge all of its bets.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but so I think, you know, There’s a lot of ways this can go in the future

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I think could be relatively negative or mediocre.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No one’s happy to see Apple push more into services revenue. That’s not healthy

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John for them. I don’t know

⏹️ ▶️ John if I would call this services revenue. This is just a subscription model for an app, which is different than services.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is, but you can ask, well, why are they doing this? And there’s some good reasons

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there’s some cynical reasons. we’ll see how it goes over time. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco far, Apple’s track record for keeping these apps updated

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and keeping them competitive has been kind of spotty. Some of them do well,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco some of them are laughing stocks. Some of them are ignored, some of them get frequent updates.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re kind of all over the place. If this is something that they’re kind of trying to plant a flag in the ground

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and say, like, we’re gonna start doing this better or being more consistent about it, or these apps are gonna

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be updated more frequently, and they’re gonna compete better with their competition, that’s a good thing.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think we have that here. I think this is a rebranding with a new subscription model, and that’s fine.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, there’s again, pluses and minuses to that. And most importantly, I’m happy

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I don’t need to subscribe to the apps in this bundle that I’ve already bought. That

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can continue using them as a customer. And that being said also,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Once Apple switched to the Mac App Store and put all these apps in it,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have, I think, never charged an upgrade fee.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I bought Logic for, I think, $200,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco 10 years ago, and I’ve never paid for another copy of Logic.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John bought Final Cut. I had it with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Final Cut Pro. Yeah, Final Cut, I think, was $300. I bought that years ago, never paid for an upgrade.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, fortunately, I never used it because I also failed at YouTube pretty hard. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, they’ve never charged an upgrade fee in large part because the Mac App Store can’t.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do kind of, on one hand, I’m like, wow, I’ve gotten some good value out of this and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m glad to have bought these tools a thousand years ago on the other hand, as both somebody who sells

⏹️ ▶️ Marco software through a subscription and also, you know, somebody

⏹️ ▶️ Marco who recognizes business realities here, Like I think the days of my

⏹️ ▶️ Marco perpetual one-time purchase license being, you know, even working and getting the new version,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco let alone being available to new purchasers, those days might be numbered. But we’ll see,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, as it is right now, today, this looks purely additive

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in terms of we get more options, there’s some new updates, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the icons all got weird and a little bit worse. But, you know, net,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s pretty good. We’ll see.

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Apple to use Gemini

⏹️ ▶️ Marco All

⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, Apple and Google are sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G. They

⏹️ ▶️ Casey have decided that Google Gemini will be the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey backing technology behind Siri in the future. So let me read Google’s entire press release.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Buckle up. Apple and Google have entered into a multi-year collaboration under which the next generation of Apple Foundation

⏹️ ▶️ Casey models will be based on Google Gemini models and cloud technology. These models will help power

⏹️ ▶️ Casey future Apple Intelligence features, including a more personalized Siri coming this year. After careful evaluation, Apple determined

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that Google’s AI technology provides the most capable foundation for Apple Foundation models and is excited about the innovative

⏹️ ▶️ Casey new experiences it will unlock for Apple users. Apple Intelligence will continue to run on Apple devices

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and private cloud compute while maintaining Apple’s industry-leading privacy standards. That is it. That is the entire thing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that Google submitted.

⏹️ ▶️ John And it is supposedly a joint statement, but I believe it is only on Google’s website.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and they gave it to Jim Cramer.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so a couple of interesting things here. So first bit that

⏹️ ▶️ John I highlighted in the notes, Apple Foundation models will be based on Google’s Gemini models and

⏹️ ▶️ John cloud technology. I don’t know what the and cloud technology means. Their foundation models

⏹️ ▶️ John will be based on Gemini. Yeah, that’s the rumor, you know, this is the headline and then this is Apple and Google make it official. The

⏹️ ▶️ John rumor has been that Apple is, you know, that Gemini is providing models to Apple, that Apple likes them, that they’re

⏹️ ▶️ John the front runner. Official announcement, they got it, they won. Gemini won the bake-off. they are gonna be the helper

⏹️ ▶️ John because Apple can’t do its own models.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Although that being said, I don’t believe the rumors were indicating that it would also include on-device

⏹️ ▶️ Marco models. I think that’s new

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John here.

⏹️ ▶️ John No, that’s not new. They had that as well. Part of it was getting Gemini down to that size. There was a rumor about

⏹️ ▶️ John making smaller ones that could fit on-device. There was two bits of that.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Well, isn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Google already doing that for Android phones?

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s not unreasonable. Google makes a whole bunch of Gemini models of various shapes

⏹️ ▶️ John and sizes, so it wasn’t unreasonable. In fact, most of these stories are talking about the extra work that Google had to do to get

⏹️ ▶️ John their stuff to run on private cloud compute, not to get it to run on the phone. But I’m sure they’re tweaking it for both of them.

⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, they’re gonna be the, what is it? The

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple Foundation models will be based on Google Gemini models and cloud technology? What is the cloud

⏹️ ▶️ John technology? Now, there’s a couple of ways this could happen. I mean, they emphasize

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple stuff, it’s gonna run either on your device or on private cloud compute, which is a special secure privacy preserving

⏹️ ▶️ John way, you know, we’ve talked about in the past, right? That’s where it’s gonna run. But private cloud compute is

⏹️ ▶️ John a, it’s a combination of Apple hardware and supposedly their M5 based server chips are coming sometime soon,

⏹️ ▶️ John but they got the M2 ultras that they’ve been using. Anyway, it’s a special hardware and software thing

⏹️ ▶️ John and that live in a data center somewhere. I assume Apple has its own data centers where it houses

⏹️ ▶️ John this stuff. I guess they could host this hardware in a Google data center and then they’d

⏹️ ▶️ John be using cloud. Like, what is the cloud technology? I may be missing it. This is something Matt and Reese brought up in a Slack that

⏹️ ▶️ John ran, and I was like, I don’t know. I don’t know what the answer, maybe it’s just a badly written press release, and I don’t know what the cloud technology

⏹️ ▶️ John is, but yeah. Anyway, there’s that. And then the second bit, after careful

⏹️ ▶️ John evaluation, Apple determined that Google’s AI technology provides the most capable foundation. Well,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, in these competitions, capability is not the only factor in

⏹️ ▶️ John who wins the competition. Uh, the rumored price for this from German

⏹️ ▶️ John was that it’s a billion dollars a year, which is not, which is peanuts for Apple and is a good

⏹️ ▶️ John deal. That’s a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco steal like that for app for what Apple is getting and, and for how badly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple needed it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John That’s a

⏹️ ▶️ John steal, right? And, and, and, and supposedly the rumor is that Anthropic wanted more. So

⏹️ ▶️ John price apparently was a factor. Another thing that might be a factor, a rumor that was out today, also late breaking, I

⏹️ ▶️ John have a link, sorry, but it was that some source familiar with blah, blah, blah, and open AI

⏹️ ▶️ John says, open AI essentially opted out and said, Yeah, we’re not interested in being

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s model provider in this way. So was

⏹️ ▶️ John Google the most capable? Or was it just the best choice because the price was right,

⏹️ ▶️ John the technology was good enough. Maybe

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco a when I had better

⏹️ ▶️ John tech, maybe even Anthropic had better tech, but openly I didn’t want to do it. And then want too much money and Google,

⏹️ ▶️ John as we’ve talked about in the past, is a reliable, boring partner that Apple has worked with before.

⏹️ ▶️ John So they win. But the press release doesn’t say that the press release says the most capable foundation.

⏹️ ▶️ John All right. It’s a press release. It’s a joint statement. Sorry. So, you know, that’s fine.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So the information had a post about this and there’s some interesting tidbits in there where

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m going to read some very short passages. Uh, in November, Bloomberg reported that Apple would pay

⏹️ ▶️ Casey about $1 billion annually to Google for the AI to power Siri. Again, incredible

⏹️ ▶️ Casey deal. These servers, according to a person who has been involved

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the project, the Gemini-based AI will run directly on Apple devices or its private cloud system,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is powered by Apple’s own server chips, rather than running on Google’s servers. That’s what we were talking about earlier. This

⏹️ ▶️ Casey one just really made me raise an eyebrow. Another common set of questions that Siri has

⏹️ ▶️ Casey historically struggled with involved emotional support, such as when a customer tells a voice assistant, it’s feeling lonely

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or disheartened. And the Gemini based version Siri will give more thorough conversational responses. The way chat GPT and Gemini

⏹️ ▶️ Casey do, this person said.

⏹️ ▶️ John Danger, danger, warning.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey As

⏹️ ▶️ John terrible as Siri is at trying to do its crappy humor at the worst possible time.

⏹️ ▶️ John We all know the failure your mode of LLM based, uh, agents

⏹️ ▶️ John when discussing things like this. I, you know, this,

⏹️ ▶️ John there’s lots of stories about how Apple will be able to tweak this and guardrails this and safety that or whatever, but

⏹️ ▶️ John this is the tricky bit. We always talked about like, how has Apple before we went back when we had some faith that Apple would actually

⏹️ ▶️ John integrate LLMs into Syria, we were like, how are they going to do it in an Apple way that doesn’t cause harm? And it turns out they’re just not

⏹️ ▶️ John going to do it at all for years. So we didn’t have to worry about it, but

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco everyone else who has done it.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s there’s, you hear all the stories about like, Oh, you know, I was just talking to my phone and all of a sudden it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John telling me to pound nails into my forehead or whatever. So it’s, we’ll see how this goes, but that, that

⏹️ ▶️ John is, it’s true that Siri is bad at that. It’s true that an LLM based a Gemini

⏹️ ▶️ John based one could be better at it, but it also can be much, much worse. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey One set of answers Apple hopes to improve with Gemini is the ones related to so called world knowledge

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or factual questions, such as describing the population of a country or scientific information. The new system will give

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a conversational answer and cite where the answers came from. Similar to the way Google’s Gemini chatbot or open

⏹️ ▶️ Casey AI’s chat GPT answers, certain questions.

⏹️ ▶️ John Devils in the details in this one. So like one of the things that I had liked about the pre LLM days

⏹️ ▶️ John of voice assistants is if you asked any of them something like the population of a country or

⏹️ ▶️ John the age of an actor or something, you knew that the only way they could give you that answer is they probably had some kind

⏹️ ▶️ John of database that they’re looking the stuff up in because they weren’t smart enough to essentially just look

⏹️ ▶️ John at a free text, a body of free texts and derive the answer. Um, and in the case of Siri,

⏹️ ▶️ John they often didn’t have a database and it’d be like, I don’t know, here’s what I found on the web, right? That’s the joke with the Siri thing. But things

⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, the Amazon assistant and stuff, they would have little databases of things that people ask a lot and they were just

⏹️ ▶️ John like, they would find out what people are asking about a lot and they would say, we just need a list of all that stuff. We need

⏹️ ▶️ John a calendar tool that can tell people what day Easter is on and well, no, let’s what day one of those

⏹️ ▶️ John holidays, it doesn’t always fall on a Sunday is on, you know, they would, they would make essentially little tools

⏹️ ▶️ John for these dumber systems to look stuff up. And that was limiting and annoying, but it also meant that

⏹️ ▶️ John when they told you an answer, what’s the population of this country? You’re like, that’s a number they looked up and it may

⏹️ ▶️ John not be exact and it may be a little out of date, but it’s not going to be horrendously wrong with LLMs. As we know,

⏹️ ▶️ John you ask them a facts-based question and they’ll give you an answer that looks plausible. You have no frigging idea where it came from. So you’re like,

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, that could be right. But like the whole reason I asked you is I have no idea. If you have some idea, I’d say, what’s the, what’s the population

⏹️ ▶️ John of Belgium and they said it’s 17 billion. You’re like, that’s probably wrong. Right. But if they say something plausible,

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re like, well, is that the population of Belgium? So now we get, okay, cite your sources.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s an LLM powered thing. It’s going to get the answer. And it’s going to say, here’s where I got it from. I got it from

⏹️ ▶️ John Wikipedia. I got it from this website. I got it according to this New York times article by this person or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John You can do that well by giving these sort of thinking models the tools to essentially do what the old dumb models did,

⏹️ ▶️ John which is, Hey, look this up in a database, but you can also do it poorly, which is,

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, just look at this document on the web and extract the information from it. And LLMs

⏹️ ▶️ John are notoriously bad at that task of like summarize this thing, extract the

⏹️ ▶️ John relevant piece of information from this larger text. People think they’re really good at it because their summaries look plausible

⏹️ ▶️ John that every time they’ve tested this, they’re like, Oh, summarize the scientific paper. And it’s like, no, it, your summary

⏹️ ▶️ John is the wrong conclusion. Like it’s the opposite of what this paper says, or tell me the population of this country

⏹️ ▶️ John based on this Wikipedia page, the numbers right there, we can see it, but they pull out a different number because they get confused.

⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s a plausible number, and is near where it’s supposed to be. And you can see how it got confused, because

⏹️ ▶️ John maybe it’s talking about population migrations and deltas or whatever. But it gives you a number. And it’s like, and I

⏹️ ▶️ John got it from his Wikipedia page, when you’re talking to an agent, and it says the population of of Belgium is 7

⏹️ ▶️ John million. Should you trust it? How many times do you have to verify

⏹️ ▶️ John that information by looking, it says, I got this from Wikipedia. How many times do you have to look at Wikipedia yourself from the Belgium Wikipedia page,

⏹️ ▶️ John look at it before you trust it? Without knowing how it’s getting that number, it’s a little bit tricky. Now maybe it

⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t matter for things like trivia and age of actors and, you know, you should just build an LLM to call sheet,

⏹️ ▶️ John Casey. You know, or build an app intent or whatever. Like maybe it doesn’t matter

⏹️ ▶️ John too much for that stuff, but like we are in this still this in this uncomfortable time where systems like this,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, how many cups in a quart or whatever, all in all, we do a lot of unit conversion over

⏹️ ▶️ John here in our country because things aren’t nice and even. So we have no idea how many teaspoons are in a pint or

⏹️ ▶️ John whatever. And I asked my Google voice assistant that, and I was more confident

⏹️ ▶️ John before I was LLM powered that it was giving me the right answer because I knew it had to be a dumb calculator. Now I worry that

⏹️ ▶️ John it is just like, same way when you ask these like voice assistants to do any kind of math or some things

⏹️ ▶️ John up, or even if you just say, here’s a tab delimited text document with numbers in them, please sum them up,

⏹️ ▶️ John and it doesn’t get the correct sum, it really shakes your faith in computers. You’re

⏹️ ▶️ John like, this is the one thing computers are supposed to be good at. I really want to be certain. And so I’m glad that they’re trying

⏹️ ▶️ John to go in that direction. But I’m still cautious about it, because they don’t tell you

⏹️ ▶️ John the implementation. I’m still cautious about it. Because, and the reason I am is I use these assistants all the time. And they

⏹️ ▶️ John increasingly do the little citation link, like the little gray link icon. I think Java TV and Gemini

⏹️ ▶️ John both do this. And I follow that icon and I look at that web page and so many times I say,

⏹️ ▶️ John that sentence is not from this web page. Like you made that up. Nothing

⏹️ ▶️ John in this web page says anything like that. And then really shakes your faith in their citations.

⏹️ ▶️ John So we’ll see how this goes.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. All right. And then finally, old versus new Siri. While

⏹️ ▶️ Casey certain common Siri tasks, such as setting a timer, reminder, for sending a specific text

⏹️ ▶️ Casey message to a phone contact will continue to be powered by technology stored on Apple devices. The new version of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Siri would also be able to handle instances in which the customer’s question isn’t clearly

⏹️ ▶️ Casey understood. I think they gave an example in the article, if I’m not mistaken, of like, send my mom a text

⏹️ ▶️ Casey telling her I’ll be home in 10 minutes. But you don’t have any clearly defined mom

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in your contact card or whatever the case may be. It will try to figure out via context clues who

⏹️ ▶️ Casey mom is and take a stab at sending her the right

⏹️ ▶️ John message. And I hope it gets it right or you’re going to send some awkward messages. So like the good version of this is making me think, this is exactly

⏹️ ▶️ John what we were asking for. Put an LLM in front of Siri, make Siri figure out what you want and then make the LLM

⏹️ ▶️ John formulate the Siri approved stupid syntax that it can understand to do the task.

⏹️ ▶️ John The bad version of this from the same paragraph is actually what will happen is the bad old

⏹️ ▶️ John Siri will get a first crack at all your commands and be stupid and dumb. But in the case

⏹️ ▶️ John where the bad old Siri 100% throws up his hands and says it has no idea, we will throw the bad old Siri aside

⏹️ ▶️ John and pass it off to the LM and cross our fingers. That’s not the system I want. But you know, this

⏹️ ▶️ John is, again, we’ll have to try the product. The ingredients for

⏹️ ▶️ John an improved meal are there. I think these ingredients can make something better than the current Siri. But

⏹️ ▶️ John if you put them in the wrong order and the wrong proportions or ask them to do the wrong things, it might actually

⏹️ ▶️ John be worse. because I don’t want essentially anything to go directly from me to the old Siri.

⏹️ ▶️ John I always want an LLM between me and like the tools that it’s using on the background

⏹️ ▶️ John because I have faith that the LLM will parse what I’m saying and capture my intent.

⏹️ ▶️ John And then I want a bunch of tools that I can rely on that are used to do the stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ John So a tool that reliably can find the mom contact. I don’t need the LLM to do

⏹️ ▶️ John that. Mine is labeled, right? And a tool that can send the message or a tool that can do unit conversion lookups or

⏹️ ▶️ John a calculator tool that can sum numbers. Like that’s what I want to happen, but they’re not gonna

⏹️ ▶️ John tell me how it’s implemented. So the only thing I’ll have to go by is I will pick up my phone and talk to it and see the results.

Chase taking over Apple Card

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Uh, finally for tonight, uh, chase has been

⏹️ ▶️ Casey officially announced as the new issuer for Apple card, or at least will be in two years

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or something. Anyway, uh, reading from Apple newsroom today, which was January 7th, Apple and chase

⏹️ ▶️ Casey announced that chase will become the new issuer of Apple card with an expected transition in approximately 24 months.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey During this transition, Apple card users can continue to use their card as they normally do. More information, including FAQs is available

⏹️ ▶️ Casey at a link. We’ll put in the show notes. Notes. Additional details will be shared with users as the transaction date approaches.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey MasterCard will remain the payment network for Apple Card. Eric Silva from MacRumors writes,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey reports began circulating over two years ago that Goldman Sachs was looking to end its partnership with Apple as a part of an effort to scale

⏹️ ▶️ Casey back on consumer banking products amid steep losses. According to the Wall Street Journal,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Goldman Sachs is unloading its roughly $20 billion of outstanding Apple Card balances at a discount of more

⏹️ ▶️ Casey than $1 billion. A rare move for co-branded account deals like this, but higher than average delinquency

⏹️ ▶️ Casey rates and high exposure to subprime borrowers made it difficult for Goldman Sachs to find a buyer.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So this has been, we, I pulled up stuff from the show notes from like years ago that we had down there

⏹️ ▶️ John of like, Oh, Apple card. Like the very first story we have is like, Apple card, it’s moving from Goldman Sachs. It’s totally moving.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s yeah, it’s definitely moving. And then like months later, yep. Apple card is moving. It was just eventually like Apple card

⏹️ ▶️ John is probably moving, right? It was just years and years of this. I deleted all of that. It’s like, guess what? It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John moved. Chase has got it. Um, and we’ll put a link in the show. So the wall street journal story that gives

⏹️ ▶️ John more of the saga, but Apple card is essentially like, it’s not a hot potato. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John a rotten Apple. Nobody wants it. It’s a money loser. Goldman Sachs is losing

⏹️ ▶️ John money on credit on a credit card, which is not what you want to happen when you’re running a credit card. You

⏹️ ▶️ John want it to make money. Hey, great. Become a partner. They’ve been trying to get rid of it forever.

⏹️ ▶️ John And Apple has all the demands about who’s going to have it or whatever, but like nobody wants it.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like, because anybody who might be interested, Apple comes and says, but you gotta do this, you gotta do that, you gotta do that. And they’re like, ah, no, I’m not

⏹️ ▶️ John interested. So that’s why it’s taken so long for somebody to take this. Goldman Sachs is so desperate to get rid of

⏹️ ▶️ John it, they’re just gonna take a loss of a billion dollars and say, here, you take it. It’s not a problem anymore. And it’s still

⏹️ ▶️ John gonna take two years to do it. The Wall Street Journal story has more of this saga,

⏹️ ▶️ John but like the few things we’ve heard about on the outside is that one of the things that immediately tripped up Goldman is that Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John decided that everybody’s bills should be due on the first of the month, which is a totally Apple style thing to do. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ John oh, it’s consistent. You never know when, you never wonder when your build date is. It’s the first of the month. And

⏹️ ▶️ John then any credit card issuer could have told them, don’t do that because that means all your customer support will be concentrated

⏹️ ▶️ John around the first of the month instead of being spread evenly over the entire month. And sure enough, it destroyed Goldman’s ability to

⏹️ ▶️ John do customer support. And it’s been an ongoing problem. The other thing is apparently Apple or whoever

⏹️ ▶️ John decides what card, whether you’re not, you get an Apple card has been too permissive. So tons of people have it, who

⏹️ ▶️ John have like really bad credit and don’t pay their bills. So that’s another reason it’s a money

⏹️ ▶️ John loser. So I mean, I’m, I have an Apple card. I basically only use it to buy Apple things

⏹️ ▶️ John to try to get cash back or whatever. But unlike Apple pay, this

⏹️ ▶️ John has been out for a while and has not been a ringing success. And Apple is lucky they found somebody

⏹️ ▶️ John who’s willing to take it off Goldman’s hands. Yep. Very much so.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, so from the wall street journal article, uh, Still, Murray Abrams, one of Capital One’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey most senior executives, met with Goldman around early June. Now, this is relevant for a couple of reasons. First of all, Capital One

⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn’t win the bid. And secondly, Capital One is effectively based here in Richmond. Privately, Capital

⏹️ ▶️ Casey One executives viewed Apple’s outreach as an attempt by the tech giant to try to squeeze more favorable

⏹️ ▶️ Casey terms out of JP Morgan. Classic tactic, but I think it’s quite funny. More than a year ago, Johnson

⏹️ ▶️ Casey told employees that those who stay until last day of the Apple program will be eligible for a lump

⏹️ ▶️ Casey sum payment equal to their 2023 compensation. This is for the Goldman Sachs employees.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey They’re getting an entire year’s pay. If I understand this right to stay until the ship has finally sunk.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is something else.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Cause I mean, obviously all those people are like, oh, fine. Well, we’re losing the card, so I’m going to lose my job. I better start looking for new and like, no, stay,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s going to be to your transition when you just stay, we’ll pay you lots of money. Uh, yeah. That like Apple was talking to

⏹️ ▶️ John everybody and trying to make it seem like everybody’s in the game and, you know, play everybody off against each other. We’re

⏹️ ▶️ John also still being super demanding. And it just seems like not

⏹️ ▶️ John an exciting winner. I don’t even know if Apple is excited about Apple Card anymore, but

⏹️ ▶️ John nobody wants to run the card, to do the stuff that Apple doesn’t wanna do. There was also rumors

⏹️ ▶️ John they were gonna move from the MasterCard to the Visa Payment Network, but that also didn’t happen. There’s also some

⏹️ ▶️ John uncertainty about the savings accounts. Apple has a savings account for, I forget what

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like. It was originally like high-interest savings accounts that you can put your Apple cash that you

⏹️ ▶️ John get back on things, you can put it into our high interest savings account. And over the course of the year or so that high interest savings

⏹️ ▶️ John account was out, the interest rate of the high interest has just gone down and down. They just kept

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco announcing, oh,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s gone down another half percent. Now, I mean, it’s not just Apple doing that. Like it’s the whole financial world, but like,

⏹️ ▶️ John it just, aside from having a really cool physical card that no one should ever use, and

⏹️ ▶️ John aside from giving you, I think, 6% back on Apple purchases, is it six? Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John and having a cool icon in the wallet app, It just doesn’t seem like a very successful or exciting product,

⏹️ ▶️ John but it is still a product in their lineup and soon it will be a product in Chase’s lineup.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey As an aside, if you permit me to fuss and whine for a moment, I was trying to put together

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a link to the wall street journal article from Apple news, because if you’re an Apple one subscriber, you get

⏹️ ▶️ Casey some of the wall street journal for free, I think.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think all

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of it. Maybe all of it. I don’t know one way or another. Um, but I went and I tried to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey copy a bit of the text to put here in the show notes for us to talk about.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I did this on my Mac in the Apple news app, right?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It freaking hijacked my, I don’t know, whatever I clipboard hijacked, whatever the term is where

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I copied a little bit from the text, but what ended up on my clipboard was the text. And then,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, first of all, it was the text with quotes, although they were curly quotes, so I guess they got that for going for them.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then after that, excerpt from Behind the Unraveling of Yada Yada Yada by so and so, the Wall Street Journal,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey link, this material may be protected by copyright. All of that landed in my f***ing clipboard. I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey hate that so much. And the reason I use Apple products is so I don’t have to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey deal with this fing bulls. And yet here I am dealing with it. I’m so mad

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it’s so unbecoming of Apple news. Now

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I probably just need to wake up and embrace the fact that Apple It’s not the company that I think it is and want it to be. But why

⏹️ ▶️ Casey are we doing this? I

⏹️ ▶️ John hate it. Are you sure it’s an Apple News thing? Because tons of websites do that. I imagine it’s a Wall Street Journal thing.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, that’s the thing is that I think it’s actually that Apple News is just rendering some, you know, web kit

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John for something or other. Because

⏹️ ▶️ John tons of websites do this.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Like,

⏹️ ▶️ John you can see how it’s sometimes it’s useful. Like, oh, I get the link and the, because I’m probably going to want the link anyway. I get

⏹️ ▶️ John the text and the citation all at the same time. But it’s not what you expect. When you highlight some text

⏹️ ▶️ John and copy and paste it, You expect what you paste to be what you copied and not have extra stuff stuck on the

⏹️ ▶️ John end of it. But yeah, annoying, expensive, newsy website

⏹️ ▶️ John stented to this. I’m currently gonna blame this on the Wall Street Journal and not on Apple News, but Apple News itself is

⏹️ ▶️ John not a nice app. The only reason I ever use Apple News, by the way, is to read the Wall Street Journal, quote unquote for

⏹️ ▶️ John free because I’m an Apple News Plus subscriber because it’s part of my bundle. So I go to the Wall Street Journal article

⏹️ ▶️ John on my Apple web browser, Safari on the phone or whatever, and then I share to

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple News. If you don’t have Apple News in your list of like frequently used sharing platforms, do it. Because if you share to Apple News

⏹️ ▶️ John when you’re on a Wall Street Journal article on their website, it will take you to your ability to see it

⏹️ ▶️ John inside the Apple News app. And the Apple News app is worse than your web browser. And this may be one

⏹️ ▶️ John of the ways that it’s worse, but I bet the website does the same thing.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I think it is ultimately the Wall Street Journal’s fault, but I hate that Apple didn’t put the kibosh

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on this. It’s just, it’s gross.

⏹️ ▶️ John They’re not telling people how to modify their websites. Like I think they learned the lesson of like, don’t try to ask people

⏹️ ▶️ John who are in Apple News to like specially format stuff or make a special Apple News version. They’re like, look, we’ll

⏹️ ▶️ John just show your website. We’ll

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco just let people see your website.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. All right. Thank you to our sponsors this episode. One Password, Guru and Gusto.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at ATP. FM slash join

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the many perks of membership is ATP overtime,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco our weekly bonus topic. Members get a weekly topic every week that is just for them, plus all the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco other stuff, you know, the ad-free feed, the bootleg, the membership discounts on merchandise,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the exclusive content like member specials, but also every single week, extra

⏹️ ▶️ Marco topic called overtime. This week on Overtime we’re going to be talking about the continuing disaster

⏹️ ▶️ Marco over at X and Grok and all that stuff. So stay tuned

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for that fun bit if you remember. If you want to hear it, join atv.fm slash join.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks everybody, and we’ll talk to you next week.

Ending theme

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental John

⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause it was

⏹️ ▶️ John accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco accidental

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you can find the show

⏹️ ▶️ John notes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at

⏹️ ▶️ John atp.fm And if you’re into mastodon,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco 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

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco Armin,

⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, they didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean to Accidental, check podcast

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so long

NBA immersive on Vision Pro

⏹️ ▶️ Casey The NBA immersive experience. So this was announced

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a while ago and then Apple had their first instance of it, I think this past

⏹️ ▶️ Casey weekend. Um, and what this is, is you put your vision pro on your face.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And if you are a, uh, Los Angeles Lakers fan and you pay

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the spectrum, um, like app or whatever, or if you pay for the NBA app,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey then then you can watch, depending on if you’re in the home region, you can either watch this live or

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can watch it like the next day if you’re not from the Los Angeles area.

⏹️ ▶️ John I love how we have all this modern technology in the VR headset and yet we still can’t escape the Byzantine rules

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco of rights

⏹️ ▶️ John ownership of

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco how

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey and

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco where

⏹️ ▶️ John and when I can watch a sports. Yep.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So what this is, is it’s the entire basketball game filmed specifically for the Vision Pro. It

⏹️ ▶️ Casey has a announcing team that’s specifically for the Vision Pro. It had a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the court reporter specifically for the vision pro. This is a very, very bespoke

⏹️ ▶️ Casey experience. And, um, I, I have a lot of thoughts

⏹️ ▶️ Casey about how this is done and what they’re doing and how they’re doing it. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey before I get into the nitty gritty, um, I’d like to kind of give my overall thoughts and I’d like to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of indirectly respond to our good friend, Ben Thompson over at Stratechery and Dithering, who

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is very fired up about this. And Ben’s thesis,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think, in the Stratechery article was actually a freebie for this week, or last week, whatever

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was. If Ben would permit me a summary of his thesis, I think his thesis

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is, never move the camera, is basically what it boils down to.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Which I’ve also said on the show, I want that to be an option. For all of the Vision Pro

⏹️ ▶️ Marco immersive stuff, I am frequently very disoriented by the changing cameras and everything.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I always ask for, like, man, wouldn’t it be great if there was an immersive camera, like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a really good seat equivalent in like a concert or a stage production,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, and in the case of sports, it’s, you know, it’s a little more complicated, but like a similar, I think,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco value of there of like, just make me feel like I am there. And the way I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco think I would want to do that is just give me a fixed camera, like, in or maybe above

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a really good seat. but that being said Apple has not yet delivered that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so we don’t actually know if that’s what we want but it sure be nice to like to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey try well but they sort of have so here’s the thing so the way the broadcast was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was they had you know a big wide shot to start then they had some

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the court reporting and then when the game started they basically had a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey camera at the half court line so on the middle of the court long ways

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and they just sat there. That’s, that’s what you did. You had, and you had almost the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey entire court in your field of view, the very extreme edge, like the, the, the three point

⏹️ ▶️ Casey area right against the out of bounds line, you couldn’t quite see cause field of view wasn’t quite

⏹️ ▶️ Casey enough, but, and that’s on either end, but by and large, you could see the entire court and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey up until, and I actually wrote this down, the first shot that I saw That wasn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the half court live shot was halfway through the first quarter with eight

⏹️ ▶️ Casey minutes and 14 seconds game time remaining. And I loved

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this view that they had where you’re basically sitting court side dead center

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you can twist your head left and right in order to watch the action and you know, the announcers

⏹️ ▶️ Casey will occasionally say, you know, look to your right to see this, look to your left to see that. Um, I don’t want to get into

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the nitty gritty right now, but another thing that was very cool was I didn’t see a score bug. You know, the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing where it shows how, what, who, what the scores are and how much time is left and blah, blah, blah. And it wasn’t until after

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the first couple of minutes that I realized, oh, I need to look down because they don’t have

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to have it in the middle of the action. They can have it below

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the action. And when I would like to see the score, I look down extremely clever. Love it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, after the eight minute and 14 second mark, what they started to do from time to time

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was have a view basically behind the backboard, remember the backboard is glass

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and behind the backboard, uh, and it was looking down the court the long way. And in and of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey itself, this view was incredible. I loved this view because you got a much clearer shot of the action.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey However, they flip-flopped back and forth between the two extreme ends of the court.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And if, if the person with the ball or the thing that you’re looking at really is what it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey boils down to, the thing you’re looking at, is approximately in the center line of the court laterally,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the short way, then it was fine. But if you think about it, if you’re watching the ball

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the person and the player is dribbling, let’s say on the extreme left-hand side of your view,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey when they flip 180 degrees, that person is now on the extreme right-hand

⏹️ ▶️ Casey side of your view and it is off-putting to Ben’s point. Now, with that said, I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t think I would want to watch an entire two and a and a half hour experience,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey just stapled to the, to the, you know, I almost said the 50 yard line to mid court.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think I would want to do that. And that’s what Ben is dying for. I violently disagree

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with him there. I think just being stuck there forever would be awful. Now I will say, however,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I agree with you, Marco, the option to be stuck there forever. I’m good with

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. And in a perfect world, I think some amount of control, and I don’t know how you would do this, but some amount of control of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what view and what camera angle you have would be great. Because then it’s not off-putting because

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re not being whipped through space suddenly, it’s that you’re

⏹️ ▶️ Casey choosing when to get through space. And I was actually talking to my friend John who does channels and he pointed out,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, it’s like when you’re in a car and the driver brakes suddenly, the driver’s head stays still because they know what’s about

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to happen. The passenger’s heads are all whipping forward because they didn’t expect the driver to stand on the brake.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. And it’s kind of, sort of like that. Um, but I thought overall, I only watched the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey first quarter. I watched a bit of halftime, um, and I watched the very end of the game. And I’m going to go through

⏹️ ▶️ Casey some specific thoughts in a moment, but overall, this was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in credible, I have quibbles, but it was incredible. Now I don’t know

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that this would work too well for soccer or football, or maybe even wouldn’t even work too great for hockey

⏹️ ▶️ Casey because these are all bigger, um, fields or, or, you know, courts or what have you. I think hockey is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the best chance it would have, but something like football or it would be that American or

⏹️ ▶️ Casey soccer, you know, no matter how you slice it, I don’t think football slash football would be a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey good fit because you’re going to have to whip around the field. You know, the camera angles will have to change,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but golly, I’m not a particular basketball fan anymore. I used to be years and years ago, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I only want to watch games this way. And goodness knows if my, if my preferred team

⏹️ ▶️ Casey had a hat gave me the ability to do this, especially if I’m out of market, and do this every time,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey take all of my money, take every bit of money I have. I can’t get a hotspot, Marco, because I’m giving all

⏹️ ▶️ Casey my money to this phantom Apple Vision Pro thing that will let me watch my favorite NBA team, you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, courtside. Give me all the money. How much is a courtside seat at the Lakers? Fifty grand? A hundred grand?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, suddenly the Vision Pro seems positively cheap. Before I go through my line-by-line

⏹️ ▶️ Casey things, John, you also tried this. Tell me what you thought.

⏹️ ▶️ John I got a vision pro, so I thought I’d give it a try. Um, I also heard Ben’s big complaint and I think his,

⏹️ ▶️ John his core issue here, which he didn’t really, I mean, he, he said it by, uh, he implied

⏹️ ▶️ John it, but he didn’t explicitly say it. Um, which is that he likes being in

⏹️ ▶️ John person at sporting events, particularly basketball games. He likes that. So obviously

⏹️ ▶️ John if he could reproduce the experience that he likes of, you know, sitting half court at a basketball

⏹️ ▶️ John game, courtside seats, that would be great. And that’s what he wants. And he’s like, why won’t you do it? Why don’t you give me

⏹️ ▶️ John this thing that I like? But here’s the thing. Not everybody. Either

⏹️ ▶️ John likes or if they do like it, even prefers the experience of being at sporting

⏹️ ▶️ John events live. A good example is the Super Bowl, the most popular sporting event in our country.

⏹️ ▶️ John It is an experience to be there in person, I’m sure. But if you are very into the game,

⏹️ ▶️ John you just get a much better view and understanding of the game, not being in person and watching the broadcast

⏹️ ▶️ John because they have 500 cameras and you get to see everything and every replay and every little bit. And

⏹️ ▶️ John and honestly, that’s how most people experience American football is by watching it

⏹️ ▶️ John on TV. And they’ve done a good job of perfecting that art. And when you’re there

⏹️ ▶️ John in person, it’s a different experience. But I bet a lot of people would say, you know what? If I really care about the teams and

⏹️ ▶️ John the minutiae of individual plays or whatever, I kind of would rather see it on a TV.

⏹️ ▶️ John Not everybody feels that way. But I think for lots of sporting events, being there

⏹️ ▶️ John in person, as exciting as it is, it’s exciting as kind of like a change of pace. It’s not like

⏹️ ▶️ John live music versus recorded music where it’s like, you know, they’re

⏹️ ▶️ John they’re close enough to each other. And it’s mostly an auditory experience and it’s only purely additive because televised

⏹️ ▶️ John sports with a bazillion cameras and cutting and a team announcing or whatever

⏹️ ▶️ John is just it’s experienced by millions and millions and millions of people all the time, every single day.

⏹️ ▶️ John Live sports is only experienced by the people who can fit in the freaking stadium. It’s a very small number of people,

⏹️ ▶️ John and a lot of those people have terrible seats and can’t see anything. And even if you have the very best

⏹️ ▶️ John seat, still, if the exciting play happens far away from where you are, it’s not great. So

⏹️ ▶️ John I get where Ben’s coming from, but he should basically say, I want a live sports simulator,

⏹️ ▶️ John which I agree, should be a thing and would cost less money. But I’m not sure I could make the

⏹️ ▶️ John argument to Apple that a live sports simulator is the best use

⏹️ ▶️ John of their budget because I don’t think it’s appeal is as wide as trying to find

⏹️ ▶️ John a good way to give the good parts of being in person at a sporting event

⏹️ ▶️ John while also giving the good parts of being in a virtual reality headset where you can have crap floating around you and

⏹️ ▶️ John do cuts and stuff like that. Because when you’re sitting on the sideline, yeah, you can look up at the stupid

⏹️ ▶️ John fuzzy screen on the top of the stadium and see all the stupid advertisements blaring in your face, but you can have a bunch

⏹️ ▶️ John of like floating views or like in your F1 app of seeing the view from the car and seeing the map. It’s like, you can do

⏹️ ▶️ John that in VR. So I feel like whether or not Apple has been successful with its

⏹️ ▶️ John current product, I don’t agree that they should say our only ambition is to simulate the live experience.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco That should be

⏹️ ▶️ John one of their ambitions. That should be a thing that they offer. But I don’t think that has the widest appeal

⏹️ ▶️ John of all the things they could potentially do for sporting events. And watching, I only watched like the first

⏹️ ▶️ John quarter of this game and then jumped around because I don’t care about the teams. Watching this stuff in

⏹️ ▶️ John the Vision Pro did nothing to dissuade me from that. I didn’t find that the cutting and jumping to be that

⏹️ ▶️ John big. In fact, like you said, Casey, I was kind of surprised they kept the view for as long as they did. Unfortunately for

⏹️ ▶️ John the Vision Pro and basketball, sitting in the center of

⏹️ ▶️ John the half court line on the sideline with the Vision Pro is

⏹️ ▶️ John worse than sitting there in real life in one super duper important way, which is, I mean, you noted that the

⏹️ ▶️ John field of vision doesn’t get you all the way around. But the real problem is the Vision Pro and the Vision Pro cameras

⏹️ ▶️ John have much more resolution and detail in the center. And yes, you can turn your

⏹️ ▶️ John head to look at the basket on one end of the quarter of the other, but the camera doesn’t turn, which means that

⏹️ ▶️ John when you’re watching the part where the action happens towards one side of the quarter of the other where

⏹️ ▶️ John the baskets are, you are looking at the worst possible edges of the

⏹️ ▶️ John film’s footage. The part with the least resolution, the part with the most warping the part that’s the softest.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what you’re looking at all the time. If you want to see the tip off, boy, that’s great. Best resolution is perfect.

⏹️ ▶️ John But like, but when you’re sitting there in real life, you just turn your head and then you’re getting full resolution when you look at the basket

⏹️ ▶️ John on either

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco side. So

⏹️ ▶️ John not ideal for basketball in that position. The in the under the basket and position

⏹️ ▶️ John thing. That’s cool because you can see the people closer, but it’s also kind of hard to see what the ball is doing. Yeah, the backboard is clear,

⏹️ ▶️ John but like it has a frame and there’s paint on it and there’s a big, you know, the big arm that holds out the

⏹️ ▶️ John backboard. I felt like that was kind of like an obstructed view. I felt like I was kind of like I was sitting behind a beam in like a

⏹️ ▶️ John Fenway Park or something. I don’t know if Fenway had the beams. Some places have them. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John when I was watching this, the only thing I could think of course is a sport that I like better, which is tennis. If

⏹️ ▶️ John you watch a televised tennis match, because the court is small and there’s only two people,

⏹️ ▶️ John most tennis matches, like there’s the master shot of a tennis match, which is essentially like

⏹️ ▶️ John above and behind one of the players. So you see the entire court and you see both players.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not the same as being there live. I’ve been to many tennis matches live. Being there live, you don’t get

⏹️ ▶️ John that sort of bird’s eye view type thing, but you can still pretty much see the entire court and it feels

⏹️ ▶️ John more like you’re on the court with them, kind of like being courtside, you’re on the court with the basketball

⏹️ ▶️ John players. So I feel like tennis, there’s a good chance they should do that. they would, they should

⏹️ ▶️ John never put a camera on the net or even with the net

⏹️ ▶️ John to do VR tennis because that the whole, you know, cliche of watching people in the stands at a tennis match turning their head side

⏹️ ▶️ John to side as the balls go back and forth. That’s not enjoyable. You don’t want those seats. You want to be behind one player

⏹️ ▶️ John or the other. Um, and on that front on the like, what can you bring

⏹️ ▶️ John to vision pro that, that brings like the advantages of being there live. I think the

⏹️ ▶️ John the uh the vision pro lakers game brought a lot of that. Part of

⏹️ ▶️ John it is being kind of like you’re on the same floor. It’s one of the unique things about

⏹️ ▶️ John basketball. You were literally on the same floor as the players. There’s no step down, there’s no wall, there’s

⏹️ ▶️ John no barrier, you’re just on a little folding chair next to spike leaves getting up and getting all excited and

⏹️ ▶️ John there are the players right in front of you. You can hear them trash talking to each other. You know stuff you wouldn’t hear on tv

⏹️ ▶️ John because the microphones are far away and because they mute it, but you can hear and see them all talking and doing stuff, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, to your point, Casey, about looking on the mid court thing, I don’t, is it half court? I don’t think it’s mid court

⏹️ ▶️ John anyway. And on the, on the half court line, looking to the left and the right, the

⏹️ ▶️ John coach

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey of, uh,

⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, was getting in the way, blocking your view. That’s what it would be like

⏹️ ▶️ John if you were in that seat. What are you gonna do? Tell the coach to sit down. That’s part of the experience of being there

⏹️ ▶️ John in person. It’s like he’s out there, he’s going on, I feel like there should be like penalties, isn’t there like penalties

⏹️ ▶️ John in football of like the people can’t, you can’t have like too many players in the field if they like go over the line or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John He was literally on the basketball court. I guess they don’t care, it’s just like they don’t call it traveling anymore. But like he’s blocking your view,

⏹️ ▶️ John he’s getting on the field. And that’s just part of being there. And that’s, it’s annoying because now he’s obscuring

⏹️ ▶️ John your view because he’s a big guy, right? But it is like being there. It is an experience

⏹️ ▶️ John you would never get on TV. So I did, I did appreciate that part of it, but I came away thinking

⏹️ ▶️ John that again, if I really cared about this game, I probably would have preferred to see it on a 2d broadcast,

⏹️ ▶️ John but it was definitely an interesting experience to feel like the people were right there in front of me and

⏹️ ▶️ John to get a little bit of that. And again, going back to tennis, one of the best things about seeing tennis live

⏹️ ▶️ John is the, um, the sort of, uh, visceral and auditory experience

⏹️ ▶️ John that you don’t get on TV because I don’t know if you’ve ever seen like, Oh, I’m sure you have now,

⏹️ ▶️ John unfortunately, like filmed gunshots, like because they’re so loud, they essentially clip on the

⏹️ ▶️ John microphones that are recording them and they sound kind of like these muffled little things. Whereas when you’re there in real life, very close

⏹️ ▶️ John to them, they don’t clip quite as much. When you watch a tennis match in person, it sounds like gunshots

⏹️ ▶️ John are going off. Like you really get the impression of like, oh, these people are hitting tennis ball harder than I’ve hit a tennis

⏹️ ▶️ John ball in my life, and they do it every single time they hit it. And it is shocking

⏹️ ▶️ John to be like, oh, like, you know, you see them on TV and his little ball going back and forth. Yeah, but if you see that

⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re like three feet away from them and you’re seeing their head, it’s like you cannot believe how hard and how accurately

⏹️ ▶️ John these people hit every single ball and it is terrifying and you only get that when you’re there

⏹️ ▶️ John quote unquote in person and I feel like the vision pro could potentially deliver that as well. So

⏹️ ▶️ John I give the broadcast mostly a thumbs up. I don’t agree with Ben that live

⏹️ ▶️ John sports is the one and only and best thing with the broadest appeal, but I do agree with him and

⏹️ ▶️ John both of you that it should be an option.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. So, uh, quickly going through some line items that I took notes on when I was watching, um,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the beginning, particularly, and including during the starting lineup, they were feeding in the stadium

⏹️ ▶️ Casey audio, which was very, very weird instead of getting, you know, audio

⏹️ ▶️ Casey piped, like soundboard, a sound board audio, they basically were taking the ambient audio from the microphones

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the camera, which was barely intelligible for me. I really didn’t understand that choice. Maybe it was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey noops. I don’t know. Uh, in speaking of during the replay, there were times that it was just straight up silent

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a few seconds. Like the video was working, but there was zero audio, not even like ambient, just

⏹️ ▶️ Casey chitter chatter from the stadium. It was literally silent, very, very weird. But at one point

⏹️ ▶️ Casey during the game, I heard a kid shouting over my left shoulder when I was sitting court side, which was pretty cool.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, so I dug that, uh, then for, with regard to the video, um, the,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you already mentioned the doc rivers thing, getting the way, but the thing that was most striking to me, we already talked

⏹️ ▶️ Casey about all the other stuff I had, but the thing that was most striking to me was that when they would show an instant replay,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what would happen is it would, they w there was like a graphic that would swoop in and it would say

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like instant replay with like the NBA logo or whatever. And then instead of any sort of like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey wipe or transition or anything, it was just a hard cut to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the replay. So they had the graphic, which you can see through, like it wasn’t taking up the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey entire view and then back to the replay. And then because there was no swipe or anything to give you a clue

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you’re going back to the actual action as it’s happening, then they had a different, but similar

⏹️ ▶️ Casey transition or not even really transition, but, but thing on the screen adornment that said back

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to live or back to live action or something like that, which I get, you know, intellectually,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it was really freaking weird. Like, I don’t understand why we can’t do some sort of some sort of swipe, maybe there’s a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey perfectly legitimate

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John reason. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t, I think you mean wipe, not swipe, but

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey yeah. Sorry, yes, yes, yes. I

⏹️ ▶️ John think they don’t have, we don’t yet have a vocabulary for building

⏹️ ▶️ John a VR broadcast in this way. We don’t have the vocabulary. We have the vocabulary in like 2D broadcasts of like,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, all the transitions we have, the different camera angles, how we cut between them. It’s kind of like, like crossing the 180

⏹️ ▶️ John degree line or whatever. Like when filming, uh, you know, filming a movie with dialogue, you don’t want to cross over the line

⏹️ ▶️ John because it gets confused about who was on what side and who’s talking where or whatever. And they do that in these sporting events. There’s a

⏹️ ▶️ John different vocabulary for doing sporting events to not get people confused about where the ball is and where the players are.

⏹️ ▶️ John But we have all those rules for 2D television only. In this VR space where

⏹️ ▶️ John suddenly there’s a new degree of freedom where the person can be looking, not where you expect them to be looking, we don’t have vocab

⏹️ ▶️ John for that. And I feel like, maybe I’m wrong about this, but I feel like some of

⏹️ ▶️ John the solution has to kind of be to essentially put virtual 2D

⏹️ ▶️ John screens into the 3D world that the person watching has some control over. Just

⏹️ ▶️ John because, like, it’s like an analog of like,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, oh, it’s like you’re looking at a computer screen inside your VR headset, that’s so dumb. It’s like, but yeah, but these screens

⏹️ ▶️ John I can literally put anywhere. Like, I’m not constrained in the way the physical world is. And then within those

⏹️ ▶️ John screens, all of our 2D vocabulary exists, right? So the instant replay thing, I kind of almost feel

⏹️ ▶️ John like if a thing had to come into my field of view, that is the place where the instant replay would happen.

⏹️ ▶️ John And the instant replay was in 2d, but I can immerse myself in it if I wanted to, you know, I don’t, I don’t know the answer. I’m just,

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m just spitballing here, but I like, it’s so hard to, because I think our vocabulary is so limited.

⏹️ ▶️ John When you say the only thing we can do is throw small things in front of you, like the score bug and stuff

⏹️ ▶️ John like that, or take over your entire field of view with a thing you didn’t choose, which a lot of

⏹️ ▶️ John people feel is jarring, more jarring than 2d cuts in TV. So TBD,

⏹️ ▶️ John we’re still experimenting and trying stuff out. I have to feel like there is a solution here, but we haven’t found it yet.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And I mean, I get it. I get how they landed here and I think you’re right. I think there’s something better

⏹️ ▶️ Casey out there. We just haven’t figured it out. Um, just a couple other quick notes, uh, at the end of the national anthem,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I almost clapped because my

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John brain

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was like, that’s what you do now. You’re there. You should clap. And so that’s, I almost did.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that was a very, very weird feeling to have. Not a bad one, but a very weird one. Uh, additionally,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really do think that if you’re going to cut behind the basket, which I think should happen on occasion, the best possible

⏹️ ▶️ Casey time to do that is during an instant replay, because then you get a closeup of the thing you just watched and that was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey really good and really well done. And plus you’re already getting ripped out of what’s currently happening

⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyway, because you’re going back in time. Why wouldn’t you get the best possible view? And that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what they did a lot of the time. And it was really great.

⏹️ ▶️ John They need those NFL skycams though. Like I was begging for different camera angle. I know it’s I mean, it’s hard.

⏹️ ▶️ John The camera, the VR cameras are even though they’re smaller than they used to be there. It’s a big like

⏹️ ▶️ John but just I was kind of I was wishing for some cameras like that’s the problem

⏹️ ▶️ John with being there in person is sometimes you don’t have a great view. And the problem with cameras that simulate being there in person

⏹️ ▶️ John is sometimes they don’t have a great view. The the cameras for the 2D broadcast get every angle and have amazing zooms

⏹️ ▶️ John on them, which is another thing that you can’t do as easily with these VR cameras, which is like, well, those cameras are all around

⏹️ ▶️ John the stadium and some of them have amazing telephoto lenses. So you get the instant replay from seven different angles. You can see, was

⏹️ ▶️ John this person fouled? You would, you know, were both these feet inbound before we caught the ball? Like, like

⏹️ ▶️ John that stuff you can see because they have so many cameras from so many different angles and the VR one is like, you

⏹️ ▶️ John have like three choices and that’s it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. Well, and they had, basically you had behind the baskets and then the half court. Um, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey occasionally they would put, I guess, uh, one of these immersive doodads on a tripod and bring it on the court. Well, as

⏹️ ▶️ Casey an example, the Laker girls did the halftime show and of course, you know, we had to get a close up view of that and,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, but anyways, I think in the end, this was an incredible experience. I would love

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to experience any sporting or concert event in a similar fashion. Again, I, I get

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ben’s point about, you know, keeping me stationary and never moving me or only moving me under

⏹️ ▶️ Casey my own control. I, I, I genuinely just do not agree. And the whole thing for me is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey look, and John, you were saying this earlier. This could be a courtside seat,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it doesn’t have to be. It can be so much more than that. So make it more.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey If nothing else, do the instant replace from behind the basket. Figure out other ways to get us

⏹️ ▶️ Casey other views or do other things. I feel like I get where Ben’s coming

⏹️ ▶️ Casey from, but I couldn’t disagree more.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and also the announcers, like whether you’re like these announcers or not, again, most people’s experience of sports is with someone

⏹️ ▶️ John essentially guiding them through the event. It helps people who aren’t familiar with the sport get up to speed on it, it helps

⏹️ ▶️ John the announcers tell you things you don’t know, all the baseball or whatever statistics, this player usually does this well against

⏹️ ▶️ John this pitcher, this thing has never happened in 20 years of this franchise, the last time a Super Bowl team

⏹️ ▶️ John was down by this amount of this time was, like the announcers give that info, you don’t get that when you’re there

⏹️ ▶️ John live,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco unless

⏹️ ▶️ John you have a very knowledgeable person sitting next to you, they’re different experiences, and most people watch sports

⏹️ ▶️ John not the live way. They watch it the way with knowledgeable announcers and the team cutting through different angles

⏹️ ▶️ John and instant replay and all that stuff. And I think that’s how, that is the

⏹️ ▶️ John mass market product that they’re trying to imitate here. Despite how much the non-mass market product

⏹️ ▶️ John of $10,000 court side Laker tickets are exciting and exclusive and cool,

⏹️ ▶️ John there’s also another thing that I think they shouldn’t simulate, which is those really expensive boxes that don’t have a view of

⏹️ ▶️ John the game, but you just eat the food and hang out with the

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey rich people. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John they could do that in Apple Vision Pro 2 and it would suck. If you’re interested in the game, you don’t wanna be in one of those rooms. they have a bad

⏹️ ▶️ John view. Like, so, you know, I, I, this is not

⏹️ ▶️ John an either or they, they should offer the option for Ben to make him happy. I agree, but I don’t think that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John going to solve their problem. I think their problem is all this stuff that you were talking about, Casey, but just like this could, this has

⏹️ ▶️ John lots of really cool aspects to it, but it’s still not even as good as the 2d one in terms of competence and confidence

⏹️ ▶️ John and how it works. So it’s like amazing, you know, amazing parts of this experience. And

⏹️ ▶️ John then a bunch of crappier ones that are worse than watching in a 2d. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But for me, two thumbs very high up. It’s not perfect, but it is really

⏹️ ▶️ Casey good and really cool. And I cannot stress enough if the Lakers were my team and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I cared about the NBA and neither of those things is true, I would absolutely be buying

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a vision pro yesterday because it is that freaking cool and that freaking great.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John really great. There’s

⏹️ ▶️ John a sloppy basketball in my game too. I didn’t watch the whole match,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey but

⏹️ ▶️ John some not great plays there. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey know. Yeah. I mean, I haven’t watched the NBA since the Bulls were really good. That’s 30 years ago now, something like that,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it’s been a long time, but no, it was some rough basketball for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey sure.

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