Thoughts on Apple Vision Pro and WWDC 2023!
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What is up, people of the internet? Welcome back to another episode of the Way4Podcast. We're back in the studio, and we're your hosts. I'm Marques. I'm Andrew. And I'm David. So last episode, pretty chaotic. I know. It was insane. We had a pretty crazy travel schedule, and we did want to have a little fun while we were out there, but now we're back, and we do want to get into the weeds on all things WWDC. It was kind of the news of the week, and it was one of the more...

packed WWDCs ever. It was lit. I mean, I haven't seen every WDC ever, but that was pretty action-packed. It was busy. So we're going to go through all this stuff. And there's a lot more coming, and of course coverage on the other channels, but we should just dive right into it. Hardware stuff, software stuff, headset, new product category, first-gen stuff. Let's just start with the basics. Yeah. MacBook Air. MacBook Air got a 15-inch version. Yeah.

It's bigger. We were hoping they would do this eventually. Yeah, the details are it's bigger. So you had the M2 MacBook Air. It was 13 inches. Now we have the M2 15-inch MacBook Air. It has a 15.3-inch display of the same quality and brightness. It also means you get a bigger battery to match the battery life of the 13-inch Air. And it also means... Two more speakers. Yeah, two more speakers. So two extra force-canceling woofers. Maybe it's got a little extra bass depth. We'll see. That's it.

Same laptop. Oh, there's one more color because there's four colors now. There used to be four colors. Was it always four? Mm-hmm. Oh, okay. Same four colors. But not black now. They don't come in black. Black is not one of them. It's a gone black. It's not one of them. I'm sorry. Space gray, I guess, is what it's called. Listen to the trivia episode if you want to get that joke. Yeah. Then there's silver, midnight, and starlight. It's $12.99. Mm-hmm.

They have the 13-inch M2 still, of course, for $1099. Yeah, it dropped. And they still have the old design 13-inch Air M1 for $999. Do not buy that. It's interesting. I don't hate recommending it to people who don't need M2. It's just you also get an old design. The screen on the new one is so much better.

I think the screen's worth $100. Yeah, I think so too. That's fair. So it exists. It's the thinnest, lightest 15-inch laptop I think I've ever seen. It's 3.3 pounds, and it only has two ports. Yep, two USB-C and one audio jack. Yeah, still in MacBook Air.

Yeah, I do think if they were going to make it that much bigger, they should have added one more USB-C port. I would have liked that. But hey, I mean, yeah, I think that the versatility of the 13-inch is amazing for a lot of people, but having that option to have the 15-inch is pretty epic. Yeah, I think there's some people who don't need everything in a MacBook Pro but would still like the bigger screen. And I think this is exactly where they're for. That's exactly why it exists. You'd be surprised at how many corporations will issue MacBook Airs now, or...

Like a friend of mine works at this company and they issued everyone 14-inch MacBook Pros. But honestly, they probably could have just done 15-inch MacBook Airs and they would have saved some money. Yeah. There are an ungodly amount of people that walk into a store and just say, what's the cheapest 15-inch laptop that you have?

And Apple would have to go, oh, we have a 16-inch MacBook Pro. And then they go, oh, never mind. And to me, so this is sort of my analogy in the video that I'm going to eventually talk about this laptop. It feels like it's the Tesla Model Y of their lineup or the 13-inch is the Model 3. That's an amazing analogy. Yeah. When Model 3 came out, it was like, oh, yes, finally, an inexpensive version of the car. And it's great. Yeah.

But guess what most of the population is actually looking for? Something a little bigger, a little higher off the ground. So when they made a little bigger, a little higher off the ground version of it, it became the best-selling car. And the 13-inch MacBook Air is the Model 3. It was like, you have an entry-level laptop. It's the one most people are going to get. But guess what? Most people want a little bit of a bigger screen. 15-inch laptops are the most common form factor. So guess what? They made the 15-inch version, and I predict it will be their best-selling computer. Just like the Y was the best-selling car. So there you have it.

Then they did Mac Studio and M2 Refresh across the board. Yes. So we have M1 Pro and M1 Max and M1 Ultra stuff in Mac Studio. Or no, not even M1 Pro. M2. Now it's M2. Now it's M2 Pro, M2 Max, M2 Ultra. That's the new chip. The big bad M2 Ultra. They also got HDMI 2.1, which is great to see. And then they also went, wait a second.

We didn't finish...

The Pro lineup. The Mac lineup. We have one more Mac to add Apple Silicon to. And the Mac Pro got Apple Silicon. It was about the most boring version of the Mac Pro getting Apple Silicon you could possibly imagine. It was basically the exact same Mac Pro cheese grater that we know from the Intel days. But instead of GPUs that you can take out and put back in, and instead of RAM that you can take out and put back in,

It's just the M2 Ultra, same one from the Mac Studio, and a bunch of PCI slots. That's basically it. And that's it. That's it. And it's so big. It's gigantic. And there is no discernible thermal difference between the two. Like, there is plenty of space in the Mac Studio, so they'll perform the same. It's just, if you need PCI...

This is a computer for you. Yeah. And there was like a, there was one of the towers in there with the, the lid off or whatever you want to call it. So you could see inside and there's just like, there was nothing in the PCIe slots. And then there's just the chip. It looked like when like a bachelor gets their apartment and they just have like a lawn chair and a TV.

like in the middle of this, like the room. There's just absolutely nothing in it. It was cool to see the M2 Ultra die in there, though. That looked pretty cool. It's big, yeah. It's very big. It's bigger than I expected. Yeah. I do want to talk about M2 Ultra a little bit in detail because it's actually a way bigger update than you'd probably expect, especially considering M1 Ultra, right, was not a huge lift. You know, it was too...

M1 Max's that were fused together and that's obviously huge performance gains but then when the M2 Max came out it was like it was so close in performance to the M2 Ultra and we actually had a nice briefing about the new Max the new M2 Ultra and the reason it's such a big difference especially for us is that the original M1 Ultra was

Because it was too fused together. It kind of just had twice the performance but in parallel It wasn't exporting our videos twice as fast because they didn't have a hardware way for them to do that They're just like oh

If you need to like export twice as many tasks, you can do them all at like their linear speed, but in parallel. They didn't work together as much as they worked at the same time. At the same time. So if you had twice as many things to do at the same time, you would see a benefit. But if you wanted to do one single thing twice as fast, you didn't see that as often. Which-

Seems like the obvious thing, but I guess with super pro workflows, maybe you're doing a bunch of things. They actually told us, they were like, yeah, but you could export a 480p version of this and a 720p and a 1080p and a 4K and an 8K at the same time. We're like, okay. YouTube does that for me. It's literally...

I would, I guess it's good to do that because we can upload it for subtitling and stuff. Yeah, it's funny, going out of compressor and making nine versions of video at once, I'm sure somebody does that, but for ours, it's like, I usually do a couple back-to-back exports. I do the 4K one that goes to YouTube, and then we do subtitle captions, and I don't need to upload a 4K version of the video to them to do captions, so I just export the smallest possible version, like a 480p version, so that I can upload the 100 megabyte file. Yeah.

So I do two exports, and then maybe I do audio and SFX tracks for when we do our dubbing. So it's like there's a bunch of stuff happening, but I always do them like one after another. I never even thought about the fact that we could do them in parallel. So we should probably set up a workflow for that. Well, it takes like 10 seconds after. I know. How long does it take to export a 480 already rendered timeline? But setting up a macro where you can just do everything at once is cool. That would be fire. Until you accidentally only upload the 480p version. I would never. Yeah.

But yeah, for M2 Ultra, the thing that's amazing about it, they changed the hardware a little bit and changed the software a little bit, the firmware. And now it's 1.8x faster than the M2 Max because it can now put all those resources into one task, which is amazing. So I think that we're going to see a huge gain on M2 Ultra over M1 Ultra, which is very exciting. They showed us a lot of pretty crazy demos with it. Wow.

Where they were just like playing back 12 streams of 8K video in real time. Yeah. You know, but you can get up to 192 gigabytes of RAM in the M2 Ultra, which is pretty insane. 30% faster GPU, 40% faster neural engine.

Yeah, up to six Pro Display XDRs. We're never going to utilize that. That's fine. Don't tempt me with a good time. You get a bunch more I.O. also in the M2 Ultra just because you have more space than an M2 Studio that's going to come out, right? I think the I.O. on the Mac Studio is the same. I thought it had like...

The Mac Pro. The studio is the same. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. The Mac Pro, though, is like where you're getting a bunch of extra IO over the studio. Yeah, okay. So to be fair, yeah. They took away the SD card slot. Yeah, wow. All right, let's go through all the new Mac Pro stuff. Mac Pro, same exact chassis.

- But no SD card slot. - Yeah. - What? - I don't know. - What? That was useful. So that's number one. - Pros don't use SD. They use CFast. - They just put it back on the Mac. - They just put it back in the laptop. It's right here in the MacBook Pro. But it does gain six or eight on the back. I think it's eight. Yeah, eight Thunderbolt ports on the back and the top PCI slot. - Which is a lot. - And then two HDMI 2.1 and two USB-A.

And then six open PCIe Gen 4 slots. The bottom one is a compatibility slot. That's great. The Mac Studio has all the same ports and HDMI 2.1 instead of 2.0 as the last Mac Studio. But obviously the old Mac Pro, you could stuff a terabyte and a half of RAM in there. You can't do that anymore because the RAM is built into M.2. So you can do 192 gigs, which is a lot, but it's not what you could do before. So that's interesting. And then no GPUs at all.

Yeah. Just M2's GPU. Yeah. And you could do obviously other cards and things. Like if you want to put in a card with a bunch of CUDA cores to help render things, you can do that, but that won't be your video card. That would just be like a rendering card. You can do audio cards. You can do storage cards, which is what I'm probably going to end up doing. Yeah. But that's the difference. That is what makes this product very strange is that the old cheese grater was just like

It's upgradable so that over time you can just keep swapping stuff out and you keep the chassis. And this one is just like,

A lot of the chassis, everything's built in. It's on the main board. It's fused to the main board. And all you can really do is PCI expansion, which for the people that use PCI expansion for like audio stuff, useful. But it's a very large chassis for one small subtask. And I imagine this is a much smaller audience than even the old Mac Pro was. I have a theory. Go for it.

Most of my theories about Apple are based on things that they've already done because they are so lockstep predictable as a company. They do things over and over again. I think they're going to redesign the Mac Pro for the next gen. And here's why. This is the ultimate, laziest, we went from Intel to Apple Silicon but didn't change the chassis. What did they do in the first MacBook Air? The same exact thing. They had the Intel MacBook Air and then they just took the exact same Intel MacBook Air, swapped it out with Apple Silicon, and they were like, ha-ha, performance.

And sure enough, we got the M2 with the redesign that was built around the chip. MacBook, or now Mac Pro happens. What happens with the Mac Pro? They went straight from Intel to Apple Silicon, and you go, wow, look at all that performance.

But it's not built for this chip. I think the next-gen Mac Pro can be smaller thermally. It can have a nicer design. It could be on your desk even. It could have four PCI slots instead of six. And you can shrink that thing down and make it nice. And I think that's the next Mac Pro. The hardest thing about that, though, is just the sizing of the...

the cards you're putting in the expansion slots. It's got to be big enough for the cards. Yeah, that's the weird thing. Because ultimately, like you said, you can't replace RAM and all that because it's all on the chip. So we all kind of saw that coming and thought it'd be smaller. But when you think of all the expansion slots, they can only make it so small if you want to put six slots there. So what do you...

Are you imagining a smaller cheese grater? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe not a cheese grater. That would actually be kind of sick. It's got to be a smaller case. It's got to be. Maybe it's still a cheese grater because Airflow and Iconic Design, whatever. But yeah. It's like the die-cast cheese grater model. Can you take bets now when this is going to happen? Oh, when it happens? I like that we're already on to the next macro. You just got what you wanted. This was the Shet Marquez up. Is this what you wanted? I know. Yeah, it kind of was. Is this what you wanted? Yeah. I know. No.

When is this going to happen? It's the lowest priority thing. It's the Tesla roadster of their lineup. Four years. Before a redesign? I think two years. I think they should have offered two Mac Pros this year if they were going to do this. They should have offered that mini ITX version where it has four PCI expansion slots and it's smaller. And cheaper? And cheaper. Yeah. Yeah, this Mac Pro starts at $7,000. That's crazy. It's expensive, but it has respectable baseline specs.

Yeah, you only get M1 Ultra. Yeah. Or the last baseline Mac Pro was like kind of a slap in the face where you were getting the base one. I think absolutely spec'd out this thing's like 20 grand, which is significant. It's 12. 12? If you see that screenshot, it's because people love to just add like Final Cut and Logic and all the stupid like add-ons down the list. And that's like the absolute highest you can get. Yeah. Okay. The maximum you can spend on the computer itself is just over $12,000. How would I know that?

I wonder. Oh, no. Yeah. I didn't think that's what happened. So, yeah. So, that's the Mac Pro and the Mac Studio. That's the Macs. Mac OS also changed. Oh, right. Because.

We got a new Mac OS. Yeah. I guess that kind of brings us to the software section. Yeah. Because that's most of what WWDC is. Typically, we talk software, OS updates, and Apple's got a bunch of OSs. We don't usually get this much hardware. So it was like, we left there and I was like, if we didn't get hardware, sure, this would be still interesting, but there would be not nearly that much to talk about.

Mac Pro was at like minute 15 out of two hours. They slammed that. They were cruising. When we sat down and they first started going and I couldn't get the Wi-Fi working so I was starting to do things on my phone. My phone was like heating up by how fast I was typing. Like I couldn't keep up and it was like

By the time we got to Mac Pro, I was like, finally, they finally got to it. That was 15 minutes into a two-hour keynote. Adam and I were looking at it to find the clip of them reacting. And I'm like, Adam, you have to go earlier. He's at minute 40. I was like, earlier. He's like 30, earlier. And then he got to 20, and it was still after.

Oh my gosh. It was like 12 to 15 minutes in. That's wild. They were flying. Like, Ellis and I were taking notes, and at the beginning, we're talking, cracking jokes, and then we just get real quiet because we're just trying to keep up. Yeah. It was a lot. Let's talk software. So, macOS Sonoma is what's showing up on every Mac now. You predicted the name. I didn't actually predict the name. Oh, okay. We were kind of joking on Twitter. What happened was...

I think we were joking about like, it was the trivia question. It was the trivia question where Ellis said like, what was the name of Silicon Valley? And then I thought that it was the wine, the like wine country area. What are the multiple choice ones? Yeah. Yeah. The, the, my prediction was Alcatraz. It wasn't actually. Yeah. Anyway. Yeah. You were talking about the trivia, but it's more fun to just ignore the facts and lean into the meme. I,

meme. I agree. The screenshot of you going Sonoma and that's like the caption. It's fake news but I'll take it. Yeah. No context at all. No it's a pretty small update but there are some interesting things. Some highlights. Number one

I don't know why, but you can take widgets out of the sidebar now and just throw them out anywhere on your home screen. Does anybody, do you guys use widgets at all? I don't really even, I have like two in my sidebar. Weather, because we have a terrible air quality alert out here, and then screen on time. But you can, now you can use the TickTick widget on your desktop. Well, okay. So the big widget update is that in iPadOS and macOS, you can interact with widgets in

inside of the widget without opening the app. Believe it or not, you couldn't do this in any widget on the iPad ever. I hear the rant coming, do we want to focus on macOS first before we go straight into it? I just know where this is going and I think we should focus on... Okay, so yeah, you could put your widgets anywhere on the Mac. Widgets are, I don't use widgets, but I think my screen's a mess all the time with just different sized windows and that to me feels like my clicking through widgets. But for people who do use it,

I could see them being kind of cool. It is nice how they like deactivate sort of behind when you have another window active and it like fades nicely into the background. But I don't know. A lot of people using computers with one screen like that

I just use my window full screen all the time, so I never use a widget. I always look at the demos, and they did the demo of that, and I was like, you know how I know I'm never going to use this? Because the demo is just a small window in the middle of the screen and then a bunch of widgets around it. I never use a small window in the middle of my laptop. I think this is part of their merger of the...

iOS, iPad OS, Mac OS thing. They're slowly trying to get everything to look more and more similar. And if you can just like throw widgets, like you see this screenshot, right?

This just has widgets all over the display, which in my opinion makes it look really messy. But people think it looks like an iPad? Do you know what it reminds me of? Well, it looks more like an iPad now. Yeah, that's true. This reminds me of Windows Vista when they were trying to say how Vista was going to be the new sick operating system because it had all these widgets on the screen that no one ever touched because your window is full screen all the time. Hey, I was a widget boy in Vista days. I had XP. A Wii widget lad.

I had XP for like months when Vista was out and I was like, oh my god, I want this Aero Glass so bad. And I installed a theme on Windows XP that gave me the transparent glass and the widgets. And I was like, hell yeah, I kind of have Windows Vista. And it's stable. Yeah. And then I actually got Vista and I was like, oh, this is, this is, I guess. You load it up, you're like, I can see the weather. And you're like, I don't care anymore. Yeah, I didn't need to see the weather. I'm just going to put all the widgets on a separate desktop.

That's actually not a bad idea. As someone who has two monitors, that did cross my mind. It's like, what if I just put them all on the corner of one of the monitors? Or if you're like, oh wait, that's what we already have. Because macOS lets you swipe between virtual desktops. I think you could have a virtual desktop that's all widgets. So you just use the three-fingered gesture. What did we have before? Wasn't it called when you pinched at? That's control center.

That used to be a widget panel. That's this. I don't know. Apple brands all the gestures. I don't know what they're called anymore. There used to be a widget panel where you literally, it was like a search box and a bunch of widgets in Mac OS. This is like the virtual home screens. I think they just change where they put widgets every update and just see what catches on. Yeah. That's basically it. So Sonoma. Yeah, Sonoma has widgets now. There's not a ton of updates in Sonoma. It's probably the smallest OS update out of any of the...

The products that Apple has you also have enhanced screen sharing which is fairly cool. It's like when it's the sickest feature Yeah, it's like a and it works in pretty much any video conferencing application but it can separate you from the screen that you're sharing and sort of like overlay a small version of you because it's doing semantic segmentation cutting you out and

And it can do a bunch of different things. It can put you in a little circle. It can put you just with your body right in front of it. I think that's really cool because it's good to have that interaction with the person and also see their screen. It's like foreground, background, like give you, yeah. I really like that. The like cut out on the iPhone of like holding down and bring a subject out of a photo. You're basically doing that. It's that for video in real time in whatever app you want.

It's pretty useful. If you think about it, Zoom kind of does the, or I forget if it's Zoom or something, but they'll blur the background for you. They all do. So pretty much what it's doing is just eliminating that.

Behind you. Yeah, but it looked really good. It looks really good. They have a bunch of really funny, really dumb things where you can like hold both hands and there's some fireworks. There's a bunch of like effects. I who wants this stuff? Like the demos they were doing of it felt like delayed. It was like thumbs up and it was like for four seconds and then fireworks. Like, yeah, I think every video conferencing app has these like really gimmicky, really

kid like childlike things that like nobody really likes and cares about you know there's like a button to raise your hand in google meet i just picture you going like this and then like 90 hands come up from behind you like i'm raising my hand that would be useful that would do that that would actually be useful yeah um we also got uh

Safari got a little bit of an update. There is more privacy features in it, and they also have profiles now, which is something that Chrome has had for a very long time. So that's cool. I immediately thought...

It kind of looks like Arc now. With the profile switcher. The profile switcher kind of looks like Arc. You can also now create a web app from any app and put the icon on your desktop. Which you could also always do with Chrome. Yeah, or in Windows for like 10 years. Yeah, before Facebook Messenger, back when I used to use Facebook Messenger, before they had an actual web app, that was what I would do. You could just remove the URL bar and it would just be an app that you could launch. It was a Chrome window.

Sick. They have a game mode now. Game mode, which is huge because everyone uses Macs for games. I'm really pumped that they used like a

a really hard game to prove. They used Death Stranding, which is a very hard game to run, and that's how they showed it. I thought there was supposed to be a... There is a translator now. A translator? So did you catch this? They have an API, or they have a thing now where you can basically move, like developers can take their game and translate it to Metal. Oh. Or use the Metal API and easily move it over to Mac, and...

And a lot of people, apparently people can just do this without being the developer, but a lot of people were just taking existing games that they own and moving them over and then trying them on Mac. So people were playing like Cyberpunk on their MacBooks and getting pretty good frame rates. Interesting. That is actually an interesting development. Yeah. Yeah. Seems pretty big for gaming. Okay. Yeah.

Well, game mode, if anyone's wondering, is basically just like a priority of the game on your CPU, GPU. And it also doubles the samples rate of Bluetooth. So if you're using an external controller, it'll be more responsive. It also with AirPods as well, just like less latency between them, which is actually really awesome. Yeah. And I think they assume that your computer is going to be plugged in while you're playing a video game anyway. So if that uses more battery, you probably don't care.

And last but not least, probably the most important possible thing. You want to take it away, Marques? Oh, yeah. I love these things. No, I actually unironically really love these. So there's now this, you know, the screensavers from Apple TV that were like these crazy HDR helicopter flyovers of like major cities or super cool things.

They are bringing them to Mac OS now and they shot a bunch of new ones. And I was talking to the guy, Phil, who shot these because, because believe it or not, really hard to shoot some of these. And if you look at them for like, if you have an Apple TV that goes to screensaver mode and you watch one of the screensavers for like five, six seconds in a row, you're like, oh, this is kind of a cool shot. And then it keeps going for another like minute. And you're like, this is a really long shot. And it keeps going for another two minutes. And you're like,

How did they make this? Yeah. And the answer is 8K slow-mo from some incredible aerial camera setup. And...

And really impressive stuff. It's also really cool that when you then log in after the screensaver is on, it like nestles into your background and then becomes like a free. Like that's just such a nice touch of just like, hey, we have a 8K video like screensaver and then just like turns into your desktop though. I know it seems so little, but that's the kind of stuff that Apple does that makes it feel more. I have to find the moving point.

I will not. It's really hard. Until I find a loop. It's really hard. They're good. It's forever. Samsung also used to do this. I don't know if you remember this on like the Galaxy S9. They would have like these wallpapers or yeah, these wallpapers when you unlocked your phone before you like, well, before you unlocked it, when you turned it on, it had like a wallpaper and then you would unlock it and it would sort of like nestle into the background. Yeah. But they got rid of those. But now they're bringing them to the desktop here. I like it. Very cool.

We should take a break. Yeah. We got a lot more to talk about. There's a bunch more software. There's iPhone stuff, AirPlay stuff, AirPod stuff, iPad stuff, widget rant, and maybe even a Vision Pro thing or two. Maybe we'll talk about it if we get to it. Yeah, we'll maybe get to it this time. Also, all trivia this week is in our collab episode, so we've got way too much to talk about to do trivia today. So sorry for you trivia lovers. Be right back.

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- All right, welcome back. Let's get into the new iPhone software, iOS 17. See what I did there? Yeah, see, now you clicked. No, okay, so there's a lot of good stuff in iOS 17. - Already watching. - It's funny because there's so much other stuff that it kinda went under the radar, but if you just look at this list, there's a bunch of really smart stuff in here. - Yeah. - Two main things that I noticed as an overarching theme to pay attention to for this. One,

Apple doesn't love saying the same words on stage as other companies. And specifically,

If you went back to Google I.O. and you saw what they said on stage, it was mostly AI, AI, AI, AI. And they would say AI any chance they got about any feature that used any sort of machine learning or anything. Pump the stock. I don't even know if Apple said AI once on stage. Did they? Maybe once or twice? They said Transformers twice. They said Transformers. They said ML. They said machine learning. Machine learning. But they don't think they said AI once. And I don't think they ever will. They avoided saying AI at all.

But there are still features that would qualify as AI in iOS in the software we're talking about. So that's one.

And the other is ecosystem takes the lead here. They did a lot of ecosystem tie-in features. And they're useful features, but they're like really useful if you have friends with iPhones or if you have more than one Apple device. Those are the two like themes out of everything I noticed. So, okay, first let's get into the phone app is better. New contact cards. Actually, they're called posters. The phone app, just like making calls. Yeah.

There are live transcribed voicemails now, which is literally if you miss a call or send someone to voicemail, just like on the Pixel when you screen a call, you'll get the voicemail transcription happening live on your screen and you can choose to pick it up in the middle. That's really interesting, I just want to say, because I thought that carriers, like as they're leaving a voicemail,

you can read the transcription and decide to pick it up while they're leaving a voicemail, which I didn't know was possible. I thought that carriers decided on whether you could do that or not. It is funny. I think Nilay mentioned this when we joined their podcast on how it's an old answering machine. That's what you used to do on an answering machine at your house. Be like, I don't feel like answering this. And be like, oh,

oh, that was my mom and she's actually calling about something important and just pick them up in the middle of their leaving the voicemail. That's actually a great point. I never thought about that. It's literally just that. Some people listening to this have never had an answering machine. I do vaguely remember those. It didn't live transcribe. You just heard it and then it recorded it and you played it later. But anyways, I do think that's really cool because a lot of people are going to say like, oh, androids have had live transcription voicemails for a while, but like real time being able to interrupt it, I think it's really cool.

- So you can on the Pixel, it's just not called a voicemail. - But can you pick up while they're leaving a voicemail? - And it's real time transcribing it? - Yes. - Why am I missing that? - On call screen on the Pixel, when you hit screen call, it does give a little like, this person is using a Google whatever, and then they can start talking and I get a transcription as they're talking of what they're saying and I can pick up. - I don't consider that the same thing. I think that's different. I feel like there's a difference between you just made it to voicemail and I got sent a robot to answer this call and now

I mean, if you take away the intro with Google talking, it's the same thing. But do you think that Google is like shoving a robot in between the call and the actual voicemail part? And so it's just doing its own. Yes. So what Google does is it introduces itself as a robot and then it

you start talking and there's a couple of buttons you can press on the screen to ask for more. So if you want to go like, who is this? Or why are you calling? You hit the button and then the robot asks them and then you continue to get a transcription of what they say. And if you want to pick up at any time, you hit the green button and pick up. This one is just like, they're not picking up your call. Feel free to start talking now. It's a voicemail. And then you can pick up in the middle. I would argue that's better.

I feel like if I'm the one leaving the voicemail or I think people leaving me a voicemail will feel much more free-flowing and personal if they're just leaving a voicemail and I pick up versus like... Yeah, no one wants to talk to a robot. Yeah, the robot just changes the vibe completely. What is even the point? It's kind of just like Google just added a bunch of features to screen calls. And it's like if I get a spam thing and a spammer starts talking, I just hit the red button and it's gone.

Yeah, but the thing is, if you were able to screen calls already, like if Apple can just be like, OK, we're interrupting the voicemail feature and we're allowing you to pick up during that call. Why does Google even have to do the thing where it's like, I'm a robot, please talk? I always think it's to introduce the rest of the prompts later. I also always felt like that made it feel like a personal assistant kind of thing. It almost feels way more businessy than like personal, which is like.

cool for businesses like if i'm yeah you know really busy during my work day and it's i'm screening voice calls it's cool it feels like i have a personal assistant i can just do that while i'm still working but when it's like my mom calling me like i don't want to send her a robot to be like yeah i think it was also like overly cautious with these kind of things where anytime they're doing anything with a robot they're like let's make sure that people know it's a robot yeah this feels like a simpler version a simpler more

like personal. - It's easier. - Yeah. - Everyday kind of thing. - Same thing with FaceTime. - Yes. - You can leave a FaceTime video voicemail. - I love this. - Which is like if you FaceTime someone and they miss it, you've already got your camera open and you were gonna do a video call in some way, you just leave a video message.

I think the point of FaceTiming someone usually is, especially if you're FaceTiming them when they don't know you're about to FaceTime them, is that you want to demonstrate something. So being able to have a video call, demonstrate something, and it's just like a voicemail, I think is a really cool feature. Unless you're calling from a Vision Pro headset. But we'll get to that. We'll get to that. That is a cool thing. Like, like,

I want to FaceTime someone because my kid just took their first steps or something. And then you can be like, look what's happening right now. Like, you missed this, but look, you can still see it. Yeah, I love that. I think that's really cool, yeah. I love that. They also have personalized contact posters, which is, again, a very ecosystem. Your friends have an iPhone thing. This is so ecosystem. Yeah. They changed the way that the contact. Yeah. It's cool. They changed the way contacts look. It's way prettier now. Mm-hmm.

and it basically does the cutout of your body and then you can use your own photos. - It's the iOS 16 lock screen for a poster card. - Absolutely. - Which is awesome, the iOS 16 lock screen was sick. - And now you can AirDrop it to someone by putting your phone right next to theirs. Just your iPhones though. - So this is probably one of the coolest features in iOS 17 if your friends have iPhones. They added a bunch of functions to tapping your phones together.

which I think is a very futuristic very like we always assumed you could just kind of like bing that's how it works so this one's called name drop which I think is a great great name they name everything don't they yeah you just bring your iPhones together and all of a sudden I don't know if the animation is actually the way it looked on in the video but it's like this rippling thing where all of a sudden your contact posters just like ripple into each other's phones

I think that's really cool. - I think the neat touch is you get to choose exactly which contact information you share with each person. So if I'm seeing you and I'm like, oh, do you have my phone number? No, and I do that, I can go, yeah, phone number, just share the phone number. And we beam phones and then you get my phone number. Or if I'm at a conference and I'm like, hmm, work email, I'll adjust the work email when we beam phones.

harassment, fake number. I'll give you a fake number and be like, here's my number and it's fake and you just walk away. You can make a bunch of different contact posters and you can just make one that has fake information so if you don't actually want that person to contact you, you just give them fake information. And you're like, I beamed you. I beamed you. You got it. All right, see you later. Bye. Yeah. So that's very ecosystem. Oh, you have an Android? Sorry, I guess I'll give you my phone number. It's like David pops up popping out of the screen on his iPhone and then I call and it's just like a green AM on the screen. Just

I have like a hole punch in a card. If you just dial that number, that'll be it. No, yeah. Airdrop for names. Name drop. Speaking of airdrop, there are a lot of airdrop updates that I think are cool. I never thought of airdrop as something that needed to be updated besides stability. But now, if you're airdropping something to someone but you really have to go, when you get out of range, it'll continue airdropping over the internet.

Super useful. Which is interesting. They showed using Apple Photos, like airdropping photos. And I do wonder if for that feature to work, you have to already have what you're airdropping them like in the cloud. Because then it just kind of like...

handshake shares it over your accounts and continues to download it. I'm not sure if that's the case. We're going to have to test that. When we looked at the images and stuff, it had the little Apple Photos logo, remember? We were trying to figure this out. So not over mobile data. It's because it's already in the cloud on the internet.

We'll be over mobile data. It will be cellular. You wouldn't be cellular to their other phone. It would be cellular to pull it from some cloud source instead of straight from their phone. Oh, I was assuming it's like sending something to the cloud source and then the cloud source is sending it back to you. I think it's like you're sending it locally

over the Wi-Fi Direct handshake that you have with AirDrop. But then if you get out of range, because that file is theoretically also in the cloud, it can finish downloading it. It already knows what bytes it's downloaded, so it downloads the rest.

I don't know if that's how it works definitively, but that's how I would understand it. Disclaimer, that's an assumption. Yeah. We're going to test that. Also, AirDrop now works with Apple Watch. I'm going to beam you so many videos on Apple Watch. Yeah, you can do the NameDrop thing with Apple Watch too, which is very cool. You can bring your watch to someone's phone and it'll beam their information. Can you go watch to watch? I don't know. That would be kind of sick. Someone's going to do it. Yeah, someone's going to do it.

You now know who I am. Cool. Yeah. You can also start share plays now by bringing your devices together, just like Name Drop. Very cool. Start shared activities. Yeah. And then messages. Messages has a ton of things in there. Lots of updates to messages. Yeah. Which I don't use messages, so I'm just kind of watching. The sticker thing, I think, was probably the biggest thing they showed. Yeah.

I think the search features. Well, the search feature is really cool. So search feature with filters, right? And then so you can basically search one thing and then after you've searched that, then you can also keep searching further and further. There's that. There's also the benefit that before you would have to search messages wide for a word. You couldn't search within somebody's message, which was stupid.

If I wanted to search for a very specific thing that I talked to Adam about, I would just have to search in messages and everybody else that said that word would also pop up. So you have to search their name. Wait, really? Yes. There's no individual search thread. Sometimes I'm just really surprised. Yeah. It's one of those things where there's a lot of things they add which you're like, you couldn't do that before? But yeah, this is the iMessage experience. And I always breeze through these and every time I say them, there's a bunch of people going, fuck.

Finally! And you're like, oh yeah, people use iMessage a lot. So search filters is one. Transcribed inline audio messages is another. So if I sent someone an audio message, they would just have a little play button and it would be a waveform that they played and it would disappear. And if you don't have time for that waveform, you can see the transcription now. This is on Slack for videos and I think it's the best thing ever.

So having that in there is actually really cool. Google Messages has it. Telegram has it. I think pretty much every single messaging app has been adding it in the last year and a half. Something about live captions recently has just made me very happy. Me too. I think it's really awesome. And I used to complain about people sending me voice notes all the time because it's like, bro, I'm on the subway. I have to put my headphones on just to listen to your voice note and then take them off. So that's really nice to see. The sticker experience you were talking about? Yeah, it's like...

Rather than reactions, you can just straight up put stickers onto messages now. And my main question there is like, it kind of looks like they could put them wherever, but they always put them on the right side of the screen. But like, if you're a bad faith sticker actor, like, are you going to just start like putting stickers all over your messages so you can't read things anymore? Oh my gosh. Like...

Probably. And then your Android friend just gets like, Andrew, moved sticker to 300,458. Like, what is happening? And the cool... Yeah. Maybe, did they only do this because RCS made reactions a little nicer for... Honestly, it feels like it. And they want to screw over and they want to make our lives miserable again? I think that there is probably going to be like no way for an SMS message to interpolate this. We need to test this. Yeah, it's a really funny point.

This was 100% like Apple watching the Google presentation being like, oh, you want us to support RCS? We'll show you. And then Hiroshi was watching this presentation like, come on, RCS, RCS. And they were like, you can put stickers everywhere.

anywhere. Enjoy hell, Android. And they're like, how are we going to fix this? There's no way you have an Android person in the group chat if you're trying to do sticker chaos. I have a feeling that this is just not going to work at all. Because previous-- For Android, right? Yeah, if you add an Android person to the group chat, this feature will stop working. Correct. And previously, if you had a single Android user in the group chat, you couldn't use any iMessage features except for the reactions and stuff. And then it would do that weird interpolation stuff.

One of the good updates, well, it's actually, you can interpret this in various ways. You could say it's a good update or a worse update. But now, if you have an Android user in the group chat, you can still use a lot of iMessage functions. And I'm assuming that they're doing some weird in-between hacky thing because it's still... Same way Google did, I guess. Well, that was with stickers and...

Not stickers. They would catch an SMS from a reaction and turn it into a reaction inline in Google's app. Yeah. But like you're still able to do... Now you're still able to do iMessage features with other iPhone users in the group chat even if there's an Android user where previously you couldn't besides reactions. So...

They're adding specific ones. It's not like every iMessage feature. I think this helps in a lot of ways because it makes it so having one Android user in the group chat will not make everyone bully the Android user to get out of the group chat, which you can't even do, by the way, because it's an SMS chat. You can't leave and enter. You have to start a new one. It's a whole mess. I think that that's good, but we'll see how that plays out. One other thing. I just realized we missed it, but I did think it was kind of cool. Oh, yeah.

No stickers. Was there anything else on stickers? Well, you can make animated stickers. Animated ones were kind of... Because you can do the tap and hold thing where you cut out a person from a photo and you can use that as a sticker system-wide on any app. You can also do it with videos now. I think it was live photos. Oh, live photos. Yeah, yeah. So I think it would pick out live photos it felt could...

do it correctly or look good. And then in the live photos, it would do exactly that. And you can apparently use those stickers in like a lot of apps, which is very cool. Yeah. It just adds to your like emoji section as your own stickers, which is, I think, really cool. Anyway, what were you going to say? The check in feature I thought was actually kind of cool. I'm just like

You know, we all, you tell a loved one like, oh, I'm about, like yesterday told Claire, oh, I'm getting on the plane now. And she'll be like, oh, let me know when you land. Or like if you're saying, I'm going to drive back an hour, let me know when you get there. It can tell you said that in the messages and then a little thing will pop up that says like,

you made it there and tell them you're safe. Or just like, if you start going off track and don't quite make it there, it sends an alert to the person you're talking about. I'm worried about, well, I don't use this, but if I had this, I'd be worried then Claire knows I spent an extra 30 minutes going to Taco Bell on my way home or whatever and like gonna get narced out on that. Turn this one off. Otherwise, I think it's actually kind of a cool thing, especially I'm sure for parents that have kids. I think it's a great idea for women too. For sure. It's a huge safety feature. When she used to go on like first dates, she would share her location

her location with me for the night. And it's like, this is basically. I think it's a really good low-key safety feature. Yeah. It's one of the things where Apple looks at the way people use the phone and they were like, we can make that better. And they just did it. Yeah. Yeah. Very cool.

Autocorrect. Transformer based autocorrect. Thank God. You can now it'll basically learn how you text. So if multiple times you you say like a word that is like slang or something. The worst part of the iPhone. Yeah. Hot take. The keyboard is the worst part of the iPhone. By far. Like every time I type a word and I'm like oh that's not the word. Delete it. Type it again. It fixes it. I

I delete it. You should know that when I deleted it twice, I didn't want to say it. And then I type it again and it just keeps going. And I'm like, this is the worst keyboard ever. Ducking sucks. Yeah. I did like they made that reference. I like that they made that reference. They did make that reference. Because that's the most classic one. Like you type it, it fixes it, you delete it.

You type it again, it fixes it again. You're like, in what world would I ever say ducking? I've never said that word before. So now, number one, it will learn from words that you actually use. Thank God. And it will actually autocorrect and help you pick your next word based on the way you usually say strings of words. There's inline typing predictions, kind of like you have in Google Docs, where if you're typing something, it'll predict the next word and you can just hit space and it fills it in. Finally. Yeah.

Yeah. There's sentence level auto-correction, which is really useful, and that's something that you need transformers for. These are all things Google Keyboard has been doing for a while. Yes, indeed. We should make a short of this. Have you ever seen the people who...

They sing songs based on the Google keyboard next prediction, so they just keep pressing. No, no, they just keep pressing the next word, and then they have to sing this. But then it usually just gets in a loop. It eventually gets in a loop. We should do Apple keyboard song versus Google keyboard song. Yeah, after you use it for a month and it really knows you very well, just see what it says. See what it thinks you would say. Yeah. Yeah.

So yeah, the autocorrect and the updates to the keyboard, really, really useful. I'm very excited about that. So anyone can get, in case you guys didn't know, anyone can get the developer beta now. It used to be that you had to pay $99, sign up specifically as a developer. I'm not actually sure if I checked a checkbox that said, I understand and I agree and I'm a developer now. I never read that. I just got the credit card charge for $99 to renew my developer account, but I don't need it to have...

I don't need to pay the $100 to have the iOS beta. But yeah, if you want to try it. It's super not stable. I actually don't recommend it yet. I know. I don't recommend it either. It's a developer beta for a reason. Maybe the public betas, maybe hop on those. But that's where we're at.

Can I talk about standby mode really quick? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course. Okay, and last thing in iOS, which is, I don't know why I'm excited about these things and I don't even use an iPhone, but it's not even called standby mode. I think it's just called standby. Oh, yeah, standby. It's called standby. I think this is pretty sick. I thought it was really cool. Pretty much, and the reason I think this is cool is just because of compatibility with MagSafe on all these things where just like you have a MagSafe stand or I think,

Does it have to be on a MagSafe stand? It can be kind of whenever. I think it does have to be on a MagSafe stand because there's a microprocessor handshake. I think it's better with a MagSafe stand. It will automatically do it on a MagSafe stand. It pushes it into standby mode. But I think on stage they said as long as your phone is charging and horizontal.

which would sort of require a magnet to do that. Sort of. I actually do have a horizontal wireless charger at home. It just has a little lip on the bottom. So I think, yeah, the Cybertruck one, it would be... Yeah, yeah. But anyways, the MagSafe stands are cool because you can put them kind of wherever, and essentially what it is is a mode that just allows like

a bunch of different widgets or just like your alarm clock and stuff like that. And it's, yeah, it's just like, it's basically a smart home display. Yeah. But I think the coolest thing about it is depending on where in your house you are and you put it on those mag safes, it'll like change whatever, uh,

like you want those widgets to be there. So like at your bed, it'll be an alarm clock. If you do it in the kitchen, maybe it's a timer widget or a to-do, like a grocery list widget or maybe sports scores in your like living room. I don't know. It looked really nice. And even when you turn the lights off, like in your bedroom, it'll like,

change the colors of everything to like glow down. It's like the Apple Watch Ultra like diving mode red where it's like it's super low light doesn't affect your eyes as much. It feels like the HomePod team was like can we make one with a screen? Apple was like no. And they were like but we made all this cool software and all these tricks. And they were like do we have any other screens we can use? And we were like there's a lot of people with iPhones so we built this for the iPhone. I want them to add MagSafe to the iPod.

iPad mini and then also allow you to do this like in your kitchen because that's basically a home display someone's gonna build a stand to hold the iPad mini sideways and charge it and then Apple why that's probably it needs I feel like it needs the official bag safe yet to do that though so then it does that like handshake and then maybe yeah just like at home Wi-Fi iPad mini that can do that on all those stands epic you can also say hey

You don't have to say hey anymore. But you don't have to say hey anymore. Oh, yeah. So you can just yell her name from across the room. You can also interrupt her in the middle of her speaking now. And like a new command? Or just say stop? You can just say stop while she's talking. Stop.

I'm saying it. Eddie Hayes. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. We got to bleep that out. No, don't bleep it. This is a family. We can't use profanity on this podcast. That groan happened at the event when Craig just yelled it out loud. Everyone was like, oh, oh.

No, my pocket. Everyone was ready for their notes to get all messed up or whatever. Google does it at their presentations too. They'd say it like three or four times on stage. I wonder if they have some sort of localized way of turning it off. I was going to say it's like a geogate to turn off Siri. It triggered a lot of things. It did? Okay, that's funny. Yeah, I think the standby mode is really cool. There's like a bunch of rumors that they're going to have a home...

What is it? What is their smart display? A HomePod? Yeah, a HomePod with a display at some point. It would be nice. How about a HomePod with a little cutout where you magnetize your iPhone?

- Good work. - Like the Pixel tablet has a stand. - Yes. - You just pop your iPhone into the HomePod. - Or your iPad. - And then your music connects to the HomePod. This is a free product idea, I just realized. Whoops. But then you magnetize it in. - They're probably already working on it. - And then it's got this smart display with the smart home controls and everything, but it's also a better speaker and a long-form mic. - They call it iHome, and they have...

They have the little 32-pin, you know? The little dock. I think that's a great idea. MagSafe is the new 30-pin. Yeah. Dang. Also, randomly, there's a journal app now, but it's not out yet. Oh. Yeah. Also, only on iOS. Yeah, it's not on iPad yet. Not on iPad. Which seems weird because if you're journaling, a lot of people would want to use the pencil.

One more thing the phone does that's not on the tablet. Yeah, they kind of always do that. And then they wait like four years and they're like, ha-ha, we brought this to the iPad now. We know you've been waiting for this. Except the calculator. We're never doing that. Yeah. But no, we did get iPadOS 17. My favorite feature specifically is that widgets are now interactable, meaning that if you have, let's say you have a to-do list app with a checkbox,

You can check the box without opening the app. I know this is mind-blowing information. I know this is something that a lot of Android users thought you could always do on the giant iPad. I cannot believe that that was not something you could do. You can never do it. How is that a widget? I don't know. It's just a shortcut to open the app. It's got glanceable information, which is cool. So if you have like a weather app, you can't scroll, but at least you can look at the weather. That's so stupid.

But like there's so many instances where I want to interact with it and you can't. It just opens the app. 50% of the engagement in this video, this episode is going to be like, I've had this on Android for 10 years. There's a lot of things we've had. So my number one question, which I don't think we've seen an answer to yet is, but wait, can you scroll?

and I don't think you can scroll. There were no examples on stage of scrolling, which sounds silly, but imagine a four-day weather forecast and you scroll over to the next four days. Imagine a to-do list app with more than five items and you need to scroll down to find the thing you just did. Imagine a calendar widget with more than five days and you want to scroll to the next five days.

Imagine a contacts list where you want to contact the sixth person, but you only have the first five showing, so you scroll to the next five. Imagine... Aren't there photo widgets also? Can you not scroll through that? Imagine all the people living for today. There's a lot of versions of wanting to scroll in a widget. So hey, Apple, as long as I'm on the free suggestions bandwagon...

Scrolling widgets. Remember when I cut Marques off about widgets before? This is why. This is just like brewing. No, no, you go now. You're in the zone now, dude. It's cool that I can check the box. Apple, I appreciate that. And you can also add those widgets to the side of your lock screen so you can sort of redesign your lock screen now with some widgets over to the side. Cool. Check those boxes and the widgets. Nice.

Just let me scroll. Go off, King. Yeah, I want to scroll. Oh, you mentioned the weather app really quickly. This is very dumb and very stupid. I just want to note that now on the weather app, they didn't ask us on stage, but it's just an update. You can now look at yesterday's weather, which you couldn't do before.

Anyway, we can move on. Talk about PDFs, Andrew. PDFs, you can do them. Cool, next. There's autofill stuff and replacing your signature. I do think the one cool thing was you could real-time

chat with someone else working on the same PDF and add notes that wouldn't it's in the notes app so you can bring PDFs into the notes app and it has a bunch of different features that PDFs can do now like if you can scan a PDF with your phone document and turns into a PDF it automatically knows where the like fields are that you want to write on and it makes those typable fields and can auto fill them and can auto fill them and

Uh, and then you can like draw on top of it and then, uh,

If you're sharing your note with another person, they can see those changes in real time and also draw on top of it. Yeah, and I think you can even add something to it, like a photo, and then still draw on top of that. I know it's just a bunch of layers, and all these things sound kind of dumb, but PDFs are kind of a pain in the neck sometimes. I do actually think it's useful. It's just not very sexy. It's like one of the oldest file formats. I know, but that everyone requires all the time. All the time. And maybe PR people will stop sending me docx.

when they require a PDF version of it. They always require signatures and they always send me DocX and then I have to convert them to PDF, sign it, and then send it back. Yeah, this is such an in-the-weeds thing, but if you're a PR manager sending out DocXs for signatures, just take the extra minute, make it a PDF,

And then send it to us. Yeah. Like, please. That's an evergreen PR statement. It's like, PR guys, just take an extra minute. We'll all appreciate it way more. Think about what we're doing. I know nobody watching this understands what we're talking about right now, but we have to sign a lot of NDAs and documents and it's always a doc X and nobody wants to print it out. Anyway.

I want to talk about AirPods. Adaptive audio is a new mode. Very cool. And I thought this was interesting. So there's transparency mode, which is now adaptive transparency. It's pretty cool. It's mostly transparent unless a loud sound comes through, then it protects your hearing. Then there's noise cancellation, which is just reduce everything and listen to your music. But now the new default is called adaptive audio.

And I have to get some clarification on this, but it's basically a constantly adapting level of noise cancellation based on your environment. Which is cool. And it will be transparent when it detects you start talking because you're now in conversation mode. That was cool.

So if you are walking down the street and a car passes by, it'll turn that up so you don't hear the car passing. Or maybe there's a siren and you do need to hear it. I don't know. I don't know exactly how this works and I need to test it, but it seems like it's supposed to be smart about this stuff. You're ordering a coffee and you don't want to have to turn it to transparency mode. I think they just want to make it so you have to touch the stems as little as possible. Yeah.

That and also just like safety-ness. So you can still walk down the street while being able to like really hear your music, but like if that siren happens or if that like really important safety issue is like making noise that can alert you. This seems like basically it's for the wear AirPods everywhere people. Yeah, are we at that? Maybe you guys know because you're maybe wearing AirPods more. Are we at that stage of society where that happens? Where we like

I don't know, even transparency mode on like my link buds. If someone talks to me, I just take both of them out because I feel rude.

There is a generation of people. We're getting there, right? No, there's a generation of people who just wears them all the time. They wear pods for sure. Actually, Miles wore them nonstop for like the first couple weeks he worked here. That's because he's 22. Yeah, I'm a boom. I'm old, man. Oh my God, I'm old. You take them out of your ears when you talk to me, Sonny. No, that's a great point, actually. I always take my earbuds out when someone stops me on the street, but I would bet you that there are a lot of younger people that just like... And they're not wrong. They just understand it and...

I think there's so many people when I'm talking to them, I don't know that they understand that I can hear them. And it just feels weird. The gray area for me is on a flight because I have the AirPods on and a lot of other people do, but I still take an ear cup off to talk to the flight attendant. But also flight attendants see this all the time. They must know that we can hear them through the headphones. So maybe I don't have to do that. I don't know. I don't know. Note, this feature is not coming to AirPods Max.

It's only coming to AirPods Pro 2. Not even AirPods Pro, just AirPods Pro 2. Okay. So it's truly for the wear them everywhere people. Yeah. I'm actually not a huge fan of this feature, like the more I thought about it, because the Sonys have a very similar thing, the over-ear WH-1000XM3s, I think? Slash 4s, whatever it is. Slash 3 or 5s, yeah. Where if you start talking, it'll like pause the music or enter transparency mode or something, which sounds great in theory. I hate it.

Yeah, but if you're home, it was happy to be singing it just like I Always turn that feature off when I say it wants you to know that you're singing I think the m4 is added the automatic feature on the m3s You would hold the ear cup and it would turn on transparency But I have to always download the app turn that feature off and then use the head you don't like the Sony app Next topic it's a bad app

I feel like by the time we get to the point where we're all comfortable wearing earphones to talk to people all the time, people will start having things on your face. And then we're going to get into the weird stage of, do I take my goggles off? Are you saying Dyson's ahead of their time?

Quick things, tvOS now supports FaceTime so you can put your screen up. - Who is going to do this? - Well, see this is the thing. This is the third theme is like Apple looks at what people are mostly doing with their phones and they're going, oh, that's a lot of people doing that. We can make that better. There's a lot of people who are on FaceTime who want to put it on the TV. And I've witnessed this with families. They're like, oh, there's nine people in the room. We all wanna see grandma and they put it on the TV.

But then the phone, the camera's here, so now they have a dock, they put it up next to the TV so everyone can see everyone. - You need a dock in front of your TV and nobody has a dock for their TV. - It's a small niche thing that some families do that it'll be better for them. - Also how am I gonna text when my family's boring? - That's fair, yeah. - It's at the TV now, I can't text. - Yeah, but they already narc you out because if you're on FaceTime and you multitask while you're on a FaceTime, it makes your camera black.

No, not with the newest FaceTime. Wait, really? Yeah, the newest, I think iOS 16, it continues your camera feed. Oh, really? Yeah. Okay, good. So you can multitask and it doesn't smoke you out. In the past, it was like, yeah, it'd be like, this person's not making it. Like, this person's peacing out, bro. It's not listening at all. But yeah, I just feel like if you need to buy an additional hardware dock,

for this one niche circumstance that you don't use that often. I don't know if you need a dock. I just know that you can- Well, you need something to hold your phone. Exactly, yeah. I was gonna say rest on the TV, but a lot of people mount TVs. I don't know. I don't know. Anyway. It's a thing. Yeah. Is that the only thing for TVOs? Well, and then there's the TV share play in hotels, right? Or sharing in-

Is that TV? Yeah, it's tvOS. Or AirPlay. AirPlay, yeah. I don't know when they'll add that. It'll take a while. One thing that they're adding is you can use your own photos for your Apple TV wallpaper now, and it's basically Chromecast from literally 15 years ago. The original Chromecast that just would use your Google Photos albums and kind of rotate through. You can now do that. So Apple's looking at what their own users are doing, and they're looking at what everyone else's users are doing. Yeah.

doing yeah we could do that too yeah uh okay watch os 10 10 they had a sick as crap is can i say crap you can say duck yeah they had a sick as duck animation for watch os that was that one right the intro video i think david and i looked at each other and were like that was pretty sick i feel like they ditched a lot of just the drone shots for this um and they did all these animations in between everything they're really good i do miss the drone stuff but the animation for this was

It was pretty epic. It was really good, yeah. Yeah. I don't like the logo for WatchOS 10. I think it's kind of boring. I think all of their logos are boring. Yeah. Yeah. Wait, I just remembered something. Sorry, that also is WatchOS 10, but we'll talk about that in a second. I thought some of these were pretty cool, but I'm the only one who doesn't use an Apple Watch, and everyone else around me says this looks nice. I don't use an Apple Watch either. Tell us what I'm going to enjoy. I did...

Is the SmartStack widgets not a pretty cool idea? I thought that seemed really neat to just be able to be like, okay, I have a bunch of widgets that's basically taking account for what I'm doing in a day. And then when I scroll up, it's going to show me the widget that's most likely to be the next thing that I have to do. Yeah. It didn't have to be a whole new OS version, but yeah, it's a cool feature. Well, they were always going to push a new OS version. Yeah, of course. I mean, it's definitely not the...

big redesign that we thought that was rumored to happen. Yeah. There's some cool things like they make things. There's more stuff that happens in the corners of different apps and the health. I did like the full screen health app. I don't know. That's mixed because so now you used to be able to see your steps, your move time and your stand time all in like one screen and now they're full screen. Is that still not there? And now just when you go into each individual one, it's like

a more detailed version it might be behind a click i think you have to go to look at them on each individual page and it does give it does give you more information about that metric but you have to like scroll to a new page every time i mean i guess ultimately the rings are that information yeah and you see them all together and then you go into more individual definitely okay that's true that's a good point yeah um there's also snoopy face

You guys aren't pumped about that? I actually thought that was cool. It looks nice. It's a watch face that has Snoopy and the bird. They sit on your clock and they play things and they do shit. And like... Anyway, when it...

It adapts to the weather. So when it's raining, he has a little umbrella. That is true. Is this the new watch face or is this the new OS version? What are we doing? There's an entire new operating system? Yeah. I guess. For Snoopy, baby. There's a couple cool activity changes.

One that I really, really like. There's a bunch of cycling stuff, but I don't understand anything about cycling. So if you like cycling, it was probably pretty cool. And they're like your max power level. I think you can connect it to a stationary bike and actually get like cadence and stuff out of it. Or connect it to a monitor on a bike where if you're actually cycling, it'll show the information that that monitor is knowing on your Apple Watch. I think it also goes vice versa where it's geeky.

gauging how like your potential power output is based on your watch and the metrics from your heart rate and everything and then it displays it on a phone that's mounted on your bike or

Yeah, so a lot of people bike with like a separate meter that shows them things like power and cadence. And that stuff will pair to your watch and show it in line with your heart rate and everything else, which is pretty cool. I was just completely confused about that. But yeah, cool. I liked the hiking updates. And mostly one specific one that was essentially it will auto-generate a waypoint in the hiking app that shows the last place that you had reception or the last place that you also just had an...

somewhat of reception that you can send SOS signals. So basically when you're hiking, if you're losing reception and know you need to call somebody or are in a dangerous position where you need to send an SOS, you can know the last place where that is available. And it'll track you back to it. I think that's stupidly cool. I think that's so handy. And like a great safety feature. So handy. The other thing I just remembered though, wasn't there something with...

golf swings where like it can tell the angle of your wrist call me a skeptic call me a skeptic so i think we need to test this because my golf swing i have enough power to drive the ball but i shank is that going you you probably are slicing the ball slicing where it starts off straight and turns to the right

For me as a righty. Yes. Yes. I do that. So let's see if it can fix that. So they showed a demo where like you swing and then because it's on your wrist, it shows it knows your angle of impact at the ball. I mean, I guess they're pretty precise sensors. I just...

Man, golf swings are complicated and that I am very skeptical about. So we'll see. I would like to test it because I think I have enough power to where it would be noticeably different. Because when I do actually hit the ball correctly, I feel like I have a decent, it's a decent hit. But 99% of the time, I'm just hitting the right net at top golf. It's like,

swaying it into there. They showed like at impact your hands were open and that's like on its face is really cool but like people have weak or strong grips so they won't be open at impact even though the club face is open so do they line up their hand with the club face or not? You don't know. You just have it on the wrist. You don't know a lot of things about the golf swing so we'll see. I can't wait to see someone. So this is what people feel like when I start talking about basketball? Yeah.

Yes. I mean, I don't know much. Will this help my mini golf game? That's my question. Honestly, yes. This is better for mini golf because it can tell easily, like when you're putting and you just do the simple backswing and forward swing, like, oh, okay, I know if I went open or closed because it's a very obvious movement. But the golf swing, all kinds of other movements happen. I'm just imagining the driving range of people like,

Fix my swing! Just screaming at the watch. It can only tell you what's wrong with your swing. It can't fix you. It can just tell you what you did wrong. No one can fix you. Not how to fix it, just yet. Just go to therapy, people. Men will literally analyze their golf swing before going to therapy. Factual. On that note, we'll probably take a quick break. Wait, wait, wait. There's more. There's more what? There's the hiking stuff. Oh, yeah. We said that. Well, the topographic map. There is a topographic map. Cool.

Cool. Seems cool. All right. Now we'll go to break. Now we'll go to break. We got a lot of headsets to talk about because Apple didn't make a new first gen product. There's one more thing. What's the one more thing? Okay. Okay. There is actually one more thing. There is now a mindfulness app.

where you can like log your mood. You can describe how you're feeling, which I think like journaling your mood is probably a good thing. This feels more like the journaling app than the journaling app. It does. But the thing that was kind of weird to me is that you can also, they can pull up a test where you can like take this test and depending on what you say, it'll like suggest you go talk to someone. And that's, I think that's good in general. It just, it's very interesting to see how people

into the health stuff apple is willing to push right because amazon you know recently bought a medical company and i could foresee apple also becoming like we have more health data on you than like almost any other company so okay spoiler alert this is a sort of a preview into a really interesting conversation we're going to have on the podcast soon with a doctor because there is a

ton of Apple Watch versus health questions and then the mindfulness and then how do you diagnose versus use what the watch tells you so that's gonna be a whole episode so stay tuned for that subscribe if you haven't already to see that but I think the funny ironic part to end on is there is a data point which tells you hey you've been really close to a screen a lot lately maybe back off a little bit and be further from a screen and

And then we immediately got into the next product, which is strapping screen to your face. So on that note, we'll take a break and we'll come back and we'll talk about Vision Pro.

Okay, I have to tell you, I was just looking on eBay where I go for all kinds of things I love, and there it was. That hologram trading card. One of the rarest. The last one I needed for my set. Shiny like the designer handbag of my dreams. One of a kind. eBay had it, and now everyone's asking, ooh, where'd you get your windshield wiper? eBay has all the parts that fit my car. No more annoying, just beautiful.

Whatever you love, find it on eBay. eBay, things people love. Support for the show today comes from NetSuite. Anxious about where the economy is headed? You're not alone. If you ask nine experts, you're likely to get 10 different answers. So unless you're a fortune teller and it's perfectly okay that you're not, nobody can say for certain. So that makes it tricky to future-proof your business in times like these. That's why over 38,000 businesses are already setting their future plans with NetSuite by Oracle.

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and it was the first generation of a new product category. A watch. No, just kidding. It's a headset. It's an AR VR headset, and this, again, completes the theme of Apple not wanting to use words that other companies use. At no point did they want to say this is an AR VR headset. No, they said XR. They didn't say virtual reality very often. They actually called it spatial computing before they said AR VR.

But the point is, it's a headset that you put on your face that costs $3,500. Will come out early next year. And, well, they gave a bunch of demos of it. I got to try it. It has a bunch of really interesting tech.

Let's talk about it. Yeah. Yeah. So on the like XR extended reality spatial computing idea front, I actually I was thinking about this all night last night. I was like writing about my feelings about this headset last night just to get my feelings out about it. I actually think that the journal app. No, it's not. I actually think that the extended reality like spatial computing phrasing is really good for this headset because it's

It is not really supposed to be a VR headset. Like it is. So for those listening and also watching, there's like this digital, there's a digital crown on it that you can turn. And as you turn it, it takes you from the real world into a more digital world. And you can just on the fly, whenever you feel like it, put yourself more in a digital world or more in a real world. And I think that that is a really good idea because it's,

Virtual reality headsets, you only are able to be in VR. And for so many people,

That means that the only use case for using a VR headset is basically like playing games or that kind of stuff, right? Whatever is in a virtual world. Yeah. Yeah. But that means that you're going to only be in that virtual world and you have no other options. And most people don't want to be immersed in this virtual world for a long period of time because one, just evolutionarily, people don't like not being able to see or feel what's around them. Like there are predators that could attack you, right? Mm-hmm.

And so I think that Apple wants this to feel just like an extension of what you're already doing, which is what AR was originally sort of intended for. And the reason I think that Google Glass was like one of the best inventions ever, but it just got completely destroyed because of privacy concerns. But I think their point with this is that they want you to mostly just like

be in real life, but then be able to use those experiences when you want to. - Interesting. - Yeah, do you wanna talk more about what the headset is, what it does? - Yeah, so I'll give you the breakdown basically of controls versus other headsets. So if you've ever seen an AR/VR headset, typically a VR headset is this plastic shell you strap to your face and then you get a set of controllers or you can do stuff with your hands.

This is a metal and glass headset that you strap to your face. There are no controllers being made for it. It isn't controlled entirely by your hands.

Your eyes. Your eyes. And your voice. The eyes is the craziest part. This to me is like the big difference really with like an Apple product. Obviously there's a lot more to talk about, but really it feels like the innovation here was UI again. Like it reminds me a lot of the first iPhone where you have this like pinch to zoom moment on stage and everyone goes...

whoa you can just pinch the screen and make it bigger and it seems so obvious now but the same thing happens in that headset where instead of like the normal experience which is i have the controller i point out in space and i hold a trigger and i like drag something and this one i just look at what i want to touch and then i just touch my fingertips together and it clicks it

And your fingertips can be anywhere. They can be in your lap. They can be off to the side. Almost anywhere. Almost anywhere. As long as you're in the front somewhere. But honestly, so I did my demo. I did it by accident on the couch next to me and my fingers connected and I clicked something by accident. I should say you have to try to be out of range. Sure, of course. Yeah, you can't do it like this. Yeah, I heard people talking about how they were testing it and it does get to a point. Or if I guess something is in the way.

of your hands? Right. Yeah. So there are cameras, two on the front, two on the side, two facing down. So generally think about that. That's where it's sensing things. It's a 180 degree field of view basically. Yeah. It's got a super high resolution display for each eye, well over 4K. It's the sharpest VR headset I've ever seen. It has a lot of cameras and the two on the front are for stereoscopic 3D and it does full color pass through. It's the best pass through in any headset I've ever seen. And then the

The eye tracking is borderline telepathic. So what happens is with the headset, you start with a calibration thing. So it shows some dots on the screen, like a dot appears and it shrinks down and you look at it and another dot appears and you look at it. And so it's looking at your irises. There's a bunch of sensors on the inside to see what your eyes are looking at.

And then once it's done with that, it opens up. You get to the home screen and the UI is there. You hit the digital crown. The apps show up and you just look at the icon and it highlights like me. And then others are still. And you look at another icon. It's like, oh, me. And it's this really interesting like telepathic dance where like I look all over the screen. And as soon as my eye stops, it highlights exactly what I'm looking at. There's a home screen bar at the bottom. There is a little icon to like drag to make windows bigger.

God, there's so much to talk about. I know. I look at a window, I select it, and I push it back in space, and with incredible precision and responsiveness, it moves it around the room exactly where I want in any UI direction. There are shadows cast under the windows in the room, so I'm moving a window back, and I see it cast a shadow. I have Safari going. I'm scrolling up and down. You know with the physics of an iPhone scrolling? You can scroll it up and catch it and toss it around. You can do all of that in the air in real time.

responsive yeah more so than any i've ever seen i mean i tried the quest pro and the quest pro is as close as i've seen to that there's a psvr2 um just this one is it's the highest quality ui of any headset i've ever seen with the pass-through and the eye control and the hands and everything um a lot of other interesting features there's the iris scanning unlocking it's called what uh

Iris, no, what is it called? Optic ID. Optic, thank you. Optic ID, yeah. Optic ID, just because your eye is as unique as your fingerprint, so that's cool. Borderline creepy. Borderline creepy, but at least it's just like IR cameras and it's fine. Makes a lot of sense for sure on like how to unlock something like that. And then I think the most iconic piece of this whole thing is this headset appears to be transparent, but it is not.

What you're seeing when you're looking at the headset and there are eyes looking back at you, it's actually just a sort of a, it's an OLED screen flipped around showing what your eyes are computed to look like on the inside. But really, it only shows up when you're in some sort of a pass-through mode and you can see other things in the room. As soon as you're not in a pass-through mode, if you're watching a movie or you can't see anything, it shuts it down, you don't see the eyes, and it's just like an animation.

And this is one of those things that is, it's fascinating. I don't think we're going to see any other headset do this. I think it adds a lot of cost. It adds a lot of weight. And it adds no benefit to the person actually wearing the headset. It's mainly just

so that you can wear it without looking like a meme. - The eye thing? - Yeah. - I think the eye thing makes you look like a meme. - Well, it does, but I think they were specifically thinking about how do we make this acceptable to wear out in public. - But no, don't do it.

Also, I do think they would argue that the part that is benefiting the person wearing it is in that situation, someone comes into your field of view and you're trying to communicate with them is you don't have to take it off now. Or that's what they want you. They don't want you to take it off. And like that taking it on and off is, is benefit...

I'm just you this is their argument not mine it's beneficial to the person wearing it because you're not taking it off I think the weird thing about the eyes is like I think it shows one of the coolest things that I think they did really well and then everyone's only focusing on the eyes which is kind of the weird part it's really cool that you can have windows open and someone comes close enough to you where it assumes you want to like they want to talk to you like

you're not stuck in this VR world. It has a feature for this. That part is really cool where it comes forward and it pushes them through the screen and that's when it activates the eyes because then you're communicating with them. That is really cool. And it's only when you make eye contact with each other. So they can be like in here but only when you like look at them they sort of like fade into your virtual reality.

Yeah. Well, they need to be able to... They fade in if they just get close enough. I don't think so. Well, you can make eye contact with someone if there's a window. Okay, so you can because you can look over it in that direction. It's not eye contact. Yeah, but if they come behind you, if they come from behind a screen, you can't make eye contact with them. They're not always going to make it into those spaces. If they come from behind a screen, it...

it goes like 10% more transparent than usual and you can see that there is a face there. And then if you choose to look at the face, then they sort of like fog away. It still like finds a way to fade someone in when it thinks there's someone in close enough to you rather than just being completely oblivious to the outside world.

Yeah. Which is a feature I have not seen on other headsets yet. It's an incredible feature. Incredible. Like the way that it does it is so amazing. Like just the fluency of them like slowly fading in and then you kind of look at them and they fade in a lot more. And then even if you're in full virtual mode, if you're looking at them, suddenly you've just got this person that's

that's there as well. It's freaking amazing. That sounds kind of creepy, but also is way less creepy than somebody just standing outside and you don't know they're there. So like, I think that is an awesome feature, but then that feature, everyone's just thinking about the stupid eyes that come in front of it, which is like,

It's so cool and so memeable at the same time. The whole crowd was laughing when they kept showing eyes coming through. It was really interesting. So just disclosure, David and I have tried the headset, and we've gotten our demos of it, and there was a 30-minute full demo of a bunch of different features. I want to hit on a couple other features and things we got to try. One is you can do FaceTimes in the headset. It's its own computer with an M2 chip and an R1 chip, which is doing all the real-time processing of the sensors.

and you can jump on a FaceTime, and you don't have to have it paired to an iPhone or anything. It's connected to Wi-Fi. And you pick up the FaceTime, and there's like a window or two windows or however many people are on, and you can see everyone's FaceTimes in their video feeds. But what do they see? Oh, funny you ask. They will see...

a 3d reconstructed version of you that is sort of animated in real time to match the way you look and you actually have to scan yourself in by turning a headset around and scan yourself as a registration process yeah and so then there's this like high-res cartoon version of you and i actually got to chat with one of them which i assume you did too yeah yeah it's kind of like google starline ish a little bit worse quality i would say yeah yeah um

So that was interesting to see. The demos made it look like, and you guys can confirm this, the quality of your face in Starline was better, but the cutout of Starline was really rough, and that looked like the actual image of it was better.

better just like lower quality well so there's no background or anything yeah it's just kind of like a floating but starline had like that weird like squiggly cut yeah because they tried to put you on like a fake background yeah yeah yeah yeah i mean starline was a million times more immersive because it's a 16 inch real screen but this was more just like a little floating window in front of you yeah and uh like a wii sports avatar

Yeah, it was sort of this weird like, you know how Meta announced the really high resolution? Because there's that meme of Zuck standing in front of the Eiffel Tower looking worse than a Wii graphic. And then they're like, no, no, no, this is what it's actually going to look like in the future. And they have this way higher resolution version of him. You're going to be able to scan yourself in, yeah. It basically is like that. And it's this weird like,

You know it's digital because it's got this weird texture to it. Yeah, that's what I was trying to explain. Like, it looks from the things and, like, you looking at it was probably almost looks like... Do you know when they, like, blend a bunch of faces together to show you, like, what the average person would look like? Yes. Or, like, if we were all together. It's got that vibe. It's like an uncanny valley thing. And I don't know if people are going to respond well to this. They might get used to it. But...

It's just strange. Previously, Apple and FaceTime allowed you to be a Memoji. And I think that's so far away from Uncanny Valley that people were just used to that. It's just a funny thing. But this...

feels like what a sci-fi representation of like people are in holograms this one i feel like is why you have to look forward into the future because this is the first gen version of it but let's say theoretically in the future this gets much better much smaller and much higher quality yeah then maybe it's acceptable to like jump on a facetime with a high-res animated version of you and there's hand tracking and face tracking and stuff yeah i guess it's got like it's got good um

mapping of your face though because it's got those downwards facing cameras that are seeing your facial expressions so it's not just guessing what your facial expressions are the one thing that was pulling me out of it was like the movements around your eye right like it knows the direction you're looking because it has the iris scanners and stuff there's a lot more happening there's a lot more happening that you're not even really noticing actively like in your cheekbones and your eyebrows and stuff that those were pretty static and that's why it felt you also have a thing that

pressing up against your face at that point. So those things can't really move in that situation. Exactly. So yeah, that was strange. This feels like a kind of weird, like when you're going to FaceTime your friends or your family and you're the only person with this, are they going to be like, I don't know how I feel about this?

Probably. A bunch of people in 2D and you're just like. Well, it just feels really impersonal. Right. I said this in the video. Like when I'm FaceTiming friends and family, I'm trying to see my friends and family, like actually see them. Right. And at this particular moment, this 2023 version of it, it does not feel like I'm actually seeing the person. Yeah.

maybe in the future it's so high res and accurate and it's a recent scan. Because this is the thing, I could scan myself a month ago and I'm using that old scan. It's like, that's not what I look like right now. But maybe it eventually gets really good and it feels like I'm talking to a person, but right now it feels worse than a FaceTime. This is like a better version of an audio call, but worse than a video call. I was going to say this looks like a better version of the like meta...

like AR VR business stuff. This feels like a business thing, not a personal thing. Like I wouldn't care if I'm just doing a meeting with like you guys, like, and we're doing like, oh, let's go over and edit or doing something in 3D. Like,

I don't care quite as much as like what we feel like we're doing in the moment. But FaceTime feels way more personal and this feels a little weird for that. This to me feels like a perfect feature that will make sense in 10 years. Like the digital crown right now, when you rotate it, it'll go from VR to AR, right? Yeah. The goal is to always have it rotated so that you're just in AR. Is that not the case? Well, in 10 years, they want you to always be in AR.

AR. Not necessarily. Transparency mode. They already want you to mostly be in AR. But you can switch it to VR. But you can switch it to VR because sometimes being in... That's only because that's what we're capable of right now.

I don't think like if this was just an AR machine, that would be weird. Like they have to add the VR things. No one's going to wear this for the functionality of what's currently available with AR. It seems like there's a lot of potential use case in each. Yeah. Like with AR, with having like your computer monitors up, but being able to see your coworkers around you, just like that feels like a kind of useful AR thing. But if I'm watching a movie, I don't want to see anything else. Yeah.

So like VR, I want, if I want to watch a sports game or a movie or something, I want full VR. But I feel like they're only adding those features because they have to because the headset is so big.

Adding the VR features? Like if they could have made the glasses yesterday or two days ago whenever they announced this, they would have just done that. And then we wouldn't have any VR features. But then, oh, we're so far away from that. I think that removes the ability to do most of the best stuff in VR, which is like we have cool games. We have cool experiences. I want to like really immerse myself in this virtual world. That was a lot of the interesting stuff too is like they showed a bunch of content that was shot for it.

And it was really, really immersive and good. It was. And I think if you don't have the ability to shut out the outside environment, you don't fully appreciate that. I want to specifically like, first of all, yeah, like the immersive stuff. Watching movies was really interesting. I've watched I've used so many VR headsets for like, you basically have a 200 inch display. And it actually felt like I was in a movie theater. Like they put it far enough back. And there's like this kind of like.

This depth that you get even in full VR that I've never had from a different headset before. But specifically, the like XR mixed reality feature that kind of blew me away the most was how good it is at understanding spatial reasoning. So so first of all, when we were doing the demo, you're sitting in a couch and the display pops up in front of you and you can pin windows and stuff.

When I say pin windows, like with other AR stuff that sort of understands your space, the windows will kind of like glitch around. They'll jiggle because they're trying to understand like, where are you again? But no, it's like you can walk around the room and if this is here, it is there. It is not moving at all. If you put a window on the ceiling, then like spin around and walk around the room and look back up there, it's exactly where you put it. That was one of my questions because Andrew and I didn't get to try it.

So like when you walk in for this demo, is there like furniture in the room? Yeah. Or is it just like a blank? There's furniture. They did a decent job. It was like a normal looking room. There's some photos. If you look at the Good Morning America interview, there's stuff.

Maybe not as cluttered as an average. Yeah, there's a couch. There's a table in front of you. I actually think the more stuff you have, the more tracking points it has to latch onto, which is probably fine. But yeah, it was a pretty normal room was the goal. I think the demo that really showed that off to me the most and that blew me away the most is, first of all, every single VR headset that you will ever use or AR headset has...

T-Rex dinosaur demo for some reason to make it just so you get that like, oh, I'm scared of this large thing. But there was that exact dinosaur demo. I think they showed it in the keynote. But basically this this gate portal thing opens up in the wall and it feels like it's the wall is opening up because the spatial pinning is so good. But the thing that was interesting about this demo is they're like, so

Get up walk over to the wall you know they actually have you walk around and the cool thing is like the Refresh rate or whatever and it's in the cameras are so good that I didn't feel like I needed to like be careful about where I was walking I felt like I could just walk freely through yeah, this is the transparency was good enough like I walked right around the table if I can cut you off really quick I don't think people understand how important that is like we've got every single pass through you can probably think of and if

They're not great. So like this is one thing specifically looking at that that I'm glad you guys got to experience was like pass through is not very easy because there's you have to have different cameras and the 3D space is like not remember that one. I forget what that headset was. But when you went into pass through mode, things further away and things closer to you would start wobbling off axis of each other because like those cameras aren't like.

computing them together well and that just immediately is like I'm in this weird space and I do not feel comfortable moving totally so that's like great that's really really impressive it's hard to tell how impressive it is here's a really niche way of understanding that that only us will understand you know we've tried to play ping pong and other headsets you could do it in this one

Yeah. No, you could legit. You could actually play ping pong with the headset on. No way. Totally. No, it's so good. It's so good. Like I felt no, oh God, I'm going to trip. Oh God, maybe I don't see this thing. Oh God, maybe the refresh rate's not high enough. Especially because depth is usually a problem. Like I feel like if I toss something up in front of me, I would maybe be almost able to catch it, but it would like hit me in the wrist or something. Yeah. I'm throwing a Frisbee at you when we get this. I think we can do it. Yeah. I'm hucking it. I think we can do it. Well, I'm throwing, we're playing guts. Yeah.

I don't know about that, but I do think if I wanted to play ping pong virtually with someone in AR, I could stand in front of a table and play like a real fun game of multiplayer ping pong. The apps are going to be fun. The spatial reasoning thing with this T-Rex demo specifically that was like, oh my god, was they get you to stand up from the couch, you walk over to the wall,

with the gate open and everything. And the T-Rex is like coming out and he like comes out of the wall and it doesn't matter. Like usually with these demos, you have to stand straight in front of the wall. And if you kind of like get off axis a little bit, it kind of messes up kind of like the star line thing. But with this, you can like go over to the other side of the room and kind of look at the wall from over there and

And the space is exactly the T-Rex is exactly rendered perfectly quality and it knows where you are. So it like comes out of the wall a little bit and it kind of gets up to your face and it's snarling. And because this headset also has spatial audio. So.

Not only is there like the spatial rendering of your vision, but there's also the spatial noise and it makes it so immersive because you're like here and the T-Rex is staring directly at you. You feel it right in your ear. If you turn like to your right, you feel it like snarling in your ear.

It's it's it's crazy. It's really hard to explain because I know that a lot of people have tried these kind of demos and it's like like the first time I ever tried VR was trying a Vive in a Microsoft store. And I play this game where you're underwater and there's like a whale that goes over you. I think it's called like the blue. And I felt my heart start racing because I felt the scale of the whale. It was kind of the same thing with this. Yeah, I actually there was also some footage that was like because I think with the T-Rex, I kind of.

could not really fully suspend disbelief because it's a T-Rex. And we like held our hand out and like a butterfly landed on our finger and stuff and that was cool. But there was also footage where like a baby rhino would like walk right up to you. I was like, I now know exactly what it would look like if a baby rhino was right in front of me. Apple's got the money. That could have been real. Ugh.

I didn't smell it, but I saw it. Speaking of that Rhino demo, they had a few of these XR videos, right? And another feature they added to this headset that everyone was memeing, because you should, is that because they have all these cameras on it and they're all at sort of different angles, you can take

3D videos, right? And so they have content that is like spatial video content, which all the demos they had on the headset were really freaking cool for the spatial video content, except they suspect apparently that people are, you can also take your own 3D depth videos, right? And they had this moment in the keynote where there's this like

child's birthday party and it's this little girl with all her friends and there's a cake and she's blowing out the candles and the smoke is like going right into your face and it's kind of like half faded out half faded into reality so it kind of feels like a portal into a memory yeah which is exactly how the idea of a portal into a memory would look in like most sci-fi stuff I thought you dripped water into like a sorry

That's a Harry Potter reference. That's fantasy. Different genre. Oh. And it was fine. It was cool. I think the thing about this is that, first of all, making something 3D does not inherently make it better. We learned this with 3D TVs, with 3D movies. Like, in some cases it- How many times do we have to teach you this lesson, old man? Sometimes it, like, takes you out of the immersion and it was, like, kind of cool. But the thing that makes this truly terrible-

is that if you're the dad at the birthday party... Dad, why do you look like this? You've got this giant headset on your face and you've just got your stick in your head like right into the birthday cake. Let me get the angle. Let me get the angle. Let me get the angle. Imagine the eyes also are like... Oh, the eyes are on? As good as this memory could be and now like you as a parent get to look back at this later, imagine that child's memory of now like...

wanting to blow out their candles but their dad's just like hovering over them with these bulgy eyes come on do it hold on I'm not recording I just feel like with photos and video there is a point of diminishing returns where like adding extra like immersion features to the photos and video really just makes it worse I can see 3D like

photos or like memories like that being something kind of cool in the future but you have to not diminish the experience in the process of capturing it. Correct. This is doing right now. This is another look 10 years into the future type thing where theoretically the tech gets nice and small and it looks like a pair of glasses and it's not too bad and you can record this ultra high resolution memory and relive the memory without looking like an insane person. Yeah.

maybe that's mine. Take away from being 90 and being able to like, Oh, this was my kid when they were 10 blowing out a birthday cake. That, that in general sounds cool. Yeah. But you're messing up that entire experience. You're messing up your child. Just put that technology on a GoPro on a stick. Sometime in the future, they'll figure that out. I don't think this is,

I just want to say how black mirror this is, by the way. It's like your wife dies way too early and then you're just like, you're sitting in your headset just like watching her on the couch doing her like, you know, in every like sad movie. You replay the memory like six times in a row. Like, I wish I was here again. Yeah. It's like, holy crap. Yeah. Yeah, it got dark. Yeah. Because I think a lot of the discourse around this was like,

This feels really dystopian because, and I think a core problem potentially with this headset or with any XR headset is that this is such a you and only you device, right? Every video that they showed

They didn't have multiple people in the room except for that like playing that video of the child's birthday party It was always one person sitting alone in their five million dollar apartment And that was in the workplace They had a bunch of examples of like the workplace and having people handing you things, but I do agree It's never two people using that. It's not social. It's always like one one person in the headset Yeah

I think while we're on the topic, let's go over the couple of negatives, the downsides that I was immediately able to pinpoint just to get them out the way, right? So one of them is it's $3,500, and that's obviously going to limit how many people are going to try it. I think that's intentional, though. Yes, that is definitely intentional, and it's got Pro in the name, and obviously you can see a version in the future with not Pro in the name. Number two, so this is interesting. There's no haptics because there's no controllers, and I think that's fine, but it was interesting that it could sort of take me out of...

The full immersion? You know, you can add gloves in the future? I don't know. You say there's no haptics, but this is something I talked to with Shen before, asking him why all hand gestures in VR seem to be tapping. And he said because that is a haptic. That part is haptic. I guess there's still the flicking thing, which if you flick, I guess there is still some sort of... But he said the reason they do hand gestures like that and not just pointing is because you're making some sort of contact and that represents it better.

Yeah, but all the rest of the stuff like scrolling in Safari and hitting the bottom of the page everything is virtual Yeah, I want something when I wanted to like pet the dinosaur or the or the butterfly Landed on my hand you feel nothing you feel nothing like we did the haptic gloves demo and that's like so far from like solving the problem But that's just something I noticed

It's intentional, obviously. They don't want you to have to have a controller. Number three is it's heavy. It's glass and aluminum. And it's got a separate battery pack to save weight. But even that, it's heavy even without that battery pack. How big is the battery pack? It's hard for me to get scale. It's not huge.

You just don't understand scale, Adam. I don't. It's smaller than a phone, but thicker than a phone. Two phones. It's got a USB-C port on it, so you can plug it into the wall for all-day battery, which is a hilarious spec. Or plug it into another battery pack. I did not like the non-replaceable USB-C battery pack. Just have that. I understand that it needs to have the locking and mechanism and the nice wire. Just put a USB-C cord at the end of it. Think of it as a power brick. Think?

Think of it as a dumb brick. Like a laptop with a power brick. Well, it's a laptop with no battery inside and a power brick where the battery is in the brick. Like a desktop. So like if you ever want to unplug from the wall. How much extra powering stuff is in there? A desktop. Nothing, just the battery. But if I ever want to unplug from a wall, I have two hours to find a plug. Basically, that's how it goes. Two hour battery life. Yeah. I don't know. I think they're reasoning, Andrew, for the reason that it's- It's because it looks nice and it's Apple. Yeah.

No, you can't put that much weight also on the headset. Well... No, no, no. I don't think it should be on the headset. The reason it's not removable... Yeah. Okay, the reason I think it's not removable is because they don't want the USB-C cable to, like, just...

come off and then all of a sudden it just goes to black and dies in the middle of it like Apple is so intentional about we don't want this to feel we want it to feel like such an extension of your reality we don't want you to suddenly be like oh what happened and then you have this like weird shock value they do have this pin hole in the battery that you that I assume is a way to remove the cable if the cable breaks you can replace the cable and not replace the battery itself

The cynic in me says that they'll sell this for $200 in the Apple Store. The battery? Well, it should come with one battery. I think they should sell a bigger battery or additional batteries. Yeah. But yeah. I just think it's weird having to plug two battery packs in at the same time. I agree, for sure. No, you only plug one in. But you can plug that battery. Yeah, but if you want that to have more, then you plug another battery pack into it. And be mobile if you don't want to plug into the wall. But like, come on, this whole thing is not to be connected to the wall. Like, it should not...

really be in that scenario very often it's interesting yeah i kind of wonder i don't know yet but i wonder how much of this will be used plugged in versus not i kind of suspect it'll be plugged in a lot i feel like that takes away from a lot of the things you guys are describing that are really good watching a movie on the couch watching movies sure using it as a computer at your desk it can be plugged in in a lot of these situations yeah but even at your desk then the wire is getting tangled up in the chair because you're like i don't know i don't think that

Yeah. I think a lot of people will be double battery packing. Just make a backpack. Yeah.

Well, you shouldn't double. EcoFlow on your back? Just plug right in? Yeah, so you can disconnect it from the headset. It's like a quarter-turn locking thing, so I assume you can just unplug that and theoretically buy a bigger battery pack or whatever. So you should never have to have two battery packs. From them? No, some third party is going to make a bigger battery. With that connector? I don't know. I hope so. I'm assuming that's a weird connector. They'll have to license it. MFI? MFV?

Made for vision. But the locking mechanism, I would bet you that they patented that and made it proprietary. Just like no one makes MagSafe stuff now. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah, I would bet you that because they probably don't trust third parties to have a battery that actually doesn't take you out of the immersion randomly. I think it's a weird spot. I'm sure I understand that. But also something I didn't hear either of you guys talk about or just really anyone is there's also an...

another strap that you can have that goes over the top of your head. Yeah. Yeah. I had no, they didn't mention that in the keynote or anywhere. I think that's also intentional. It is an optional accessory that's probably in the box that I think everyone should use because it's so heavy that you're going to want to use it. I completely agree. I heard it's so heavy that it sounds like

almost everyone will be using it, but I guess it just doesn't look as nice when you're presenting it. I will say the materials are insanely nice. The strap is really crazy nice. One thing that really kind of blew me away is when you put it on, when you're tightening it, a lot of other headsets, you have to just kind of pull it and tighten it around your head. This one, it's got this kind of crown that you twist, and it's got a clicking mechanism. It's got ratchets, and you hear it and feel it like...

And it just feels so smooth and seamless, but you feel it slowly tightening around your head. Yeah, I think it's really good. Those are for like minute adjustments, right? Like I think there was, they said there was some sort of, or is the strap modeled to your? No, the strap is not modeled to your head. The light seals around it are modeled to your face. They mentioned something in the keynote that was like, it was adjustable and then that was just for like,

minuscule adjustments when like and like on the fly for like, oh, this is not feeling too tight. I'm going to loosen it up. That's true. But you also have to use it to put it on. Like you have to like loosen it to be able to take it off. Mm.

There are other VR headsets that do that. But the quality and the mechanism is so good. The material is pretty great. Again, it's heavy, but it is really high quality. Also, the head strap that you were talking about, the way that you tighten that is also very seamless. And everything about it is modular. So every single part you can take off and almost every single part of it is also machine washable, which I think is awesome. So you can clean it and wash it really easily. And the main actual headset is not...

huge it's just the mechanisms to keep it on your head are add a lot of volume yeah do you have any other like questions about the demo or anything I don't think so yeah I think the main two things like from not just you guys but everyone that I talked to that tried it it was the main things they said was

And that worked way better than I expected because everyone saw no controllers and thought, I've tried every other VR headset and that's not going to work. And they were very surprised by it worked. And then it immediately went to and that was heavy and the battery pack's kind of weird. But then like, I don't care. I loved using it. And that was wild. Oh, and then it's really expensive. Think about it like a first generation of a new iPhone. Yeah.

It almost feels hard to think about as first generation because it sounds like it's working so well. It's just priced like first generation and maybe there's not as many things available for it. It just has so many parallels to me to the first iPhone where number one right now it just has Apple apps. And of course it's going to launch next year and we should have a bunch more apps. But it has Apple apps right now. And those are the ones that sort of demonstrate how you're going to use it and what it does best.

And then the UI and the way you interact with it is the revolutionary part of it. Just like how pinch to zoom was incredibly responsive and worked so well on the first iPhone compared to any other phone. This one, the eye tracking and the hand tracking and the way you move those windows around and interact with things and scroll has the same vibe. It's like, I've never seen a headset do it this well. And if it gets better at all, I'll be very happy. I do think that's something that I asked you guys after, which was like,

This worked so flawlessly and was so amazing is part of the reason we're so impressed by this because of all the ones we've tried before it that I've tried to do similar things and they just are not good. It's the iPhone of headsets. I think that's kind of the crazy part. When you look at $3,500, I still don't know if I was like,

This stuff works. Is that worth that? But it's just like, that stuff didn't work. This does. I still don't know if it's worth it, but it's really cool to see how good it's doing. Yeah. Other versions of it worked pretty well, but it wouldn't have all of those things at once. Like, Sony has good eye tracking, but not the most incredible hand tracking. Yeah. Like, the Oculus Quest Pro, the Meta Quest Pro had...

decent pass through and like is lighter and could do some of these things but you needed controllers for the precise stuff. It wasn't good enough though. It wasn't good across the board. There's a point of no return where like I could not if I used anything worse than this now I would just be like this sucks. If this is 60% as good as you guys are saying it is it blows the MetaQuest out of the water. It does. And I think it's way more than that like I believe everything you guys are saying and this feels like the MetaQuest Pro is

And that's exactly why I don't think this price, you can't really compare the price to anything else because it's like everything else is garbage and then this is really good. The reason you can compare the price is like, am I spending $3,500 to do these things in here? For sure. Like the usability. The usability, absolutely. If we're just comparing like if you 100% want these AR VR goggles, then the price is there. I'm not saying people should buy this necessarily. Exactly. No, no, yeah, yeah.

If you want to reduce it to just a checklist, it looks insane. It's like, can you watch a movie in the regular quest? Yes. Can you watch a movie in this? Yes. Okay. Can you use hand controls in one? Yes. Can you do it in hand controls in this one? Yes. So they both like check most of the boxes. Pass-through? Yeah, pass-through. Tracking? Yeah, tracking. Apps? Yeah, apps. Games? Of course, games.

But the difference is so much more than the checkboxes. I think if you want a headset, I would spend the extra money on this. I just don't know if you're not sure if you want a headset. If you're not sure if you want a headset, don't buy any of the existing headsets, including this one. Also, something that's interesting to me is that when Oculus announced the MetaQuest 3 last week, right?

I watched that intro for that video and they were like, we have 500 apps. And I was like, that is not very many considering like considering how long the meta quest ecosystem has been around, uh,

500 apps is not very much. And also, I would bet you that 75% of those are garbage. Yeah. It's like Android flexing how many apps there are on the App Store. It's like, well, how many good apps are there? Right. Where the interesting thing with the iPhone, for example, and the Android App Store, is that it's a multi-tool that does literally everything. If I never use this one thing, but then at this one moment, I'm like, oh, I really need a light meter.

I can look up light meter and they're just a bunch of light meter apps on the app store. Right. And, and,

I think the interesting thing that the Apple ecosystem has, if Apple is actually able to get so many developers to port their apps to this, to make new apps for it, is that they're just going to blow every other headset out of the water in terms of what can you do with this? That's the Apple superpower. Yeah. I think that's a good place to end it, which is like, it is early. It doesn't come out till next year. We've only got to try it for 30 minutes. There's not a lot we know. Yeah.

But what we do know is this is going to slot into the world of VR headsets, where the advantage to any one headset typically has been quality or features. And the advantage to this Apple one is going to be...

Now there's an entire giant developer community that's like feasting over like, oh, this is it. I'm going to make the best app I can and blow up in VR. And this is their chance to make the best apps possible. And those are all going to really showcase what this thing is capable of. And the technology will back it up and there'll be quality experiences. It will ride or die on if there are good apps for it. So it's kind of like a chicken or the egg thing.

Yeah, and I think they had to make the good hardware to entice those developers, and they did that, and because they've nailed that, I can't wait to see what apps show up, and we just have to wait and see. And we don't even know what they're going to make yet. We'll just wait and see. There could be an incredible calculator app, for all we know. So sick. I have one more point that I want to make, and it's that this is the only product that Apple makes that isn't an accessory for the iPhone.

Right. Like the AirPods are its own entire industry and their accessory for the iPhone. The Apple Watch accessory for the iPhone MacBook. The MacBook came out before the iPhone. But you could argue that so many of the things that make the MacBook useful is that it works with your iPhone. I think that's true about the headset, too. But what do you do besides besides having an Apple ID and like doing FaceTime and stuff?

What necessarily makes this an iPhone accessory? Well, not an iPhone accessory, but it's an ecosystem plug. Where like if I look at a MacBook, my MacBook screen levitates out the top and suddenly I'm doing like final cut editing with a trackpad and all this stuff. If I have messages on it, FaceTime, it's like the ecosystem plug part is real even though it's not an iPhone accessory. But you could just have a MacBook and an Android phone like Alex does.

and use this headset and you don't really need an iPhone. Apple ecosystem in general is that everything works better. Yeah. When you have everything. But some things kind of only work if you have an iPhone like the Apple Watch, you know? Right. Yeah. Yeah. This is its own. I think this is kind of like a Mac in that it's a standalone computer, but it will definitely plug into the ecosystem really well by design. And that's why I think the $3,500 price tag, yes, it's stupidly expensive for sure. But you're also buying basically a whole computer.

It has an M2 in it, whereas like an Oculus Quest, it can play some games, but you can't do what you would do. It's like a Snapdragon something. XR1 or something. Yeah. But you can't do on an Oculus Quest what you can do on a MacBook. I don't think we should, well, Quest Pro is the only thing we should compare to this. An Oculus Quest is just, it's not the same thing. But a Quest Pro doesn't really have like a desktop.

kind of like format, right? You could pair it to a Mac. Yeah, you can pair it. To computers. But you don't have to pair this to anything. No, yeah. It's its own standalone. It has an M2 chip. If you think about it as a computer, $3,500 isn't that expensive. Exactly. But chances are you're not replacing a computer quite yet with this. Totally, for sure. Somebody's got to do a, I can't wait for a benchmark of like...

Can we just run geekbench on all these headsets of like the M2 gets a trillion points and then the Snapdragon XR gets like whatever it gets? It's just absurd. It doesn't actually matter. So before we go, I know we said no trivia, but I do have a fun trivia thing for you guys if you want it. Okay, yeah. When was the last time Apple did the whole one more thing on stage before this headset? A long time ago. Was it the Mac Pro at DubDub? I was going to say Mac Pro. Mac Pro, David. You're saying the...

Oh, no, it was the iPhone 10. iPhone 10? Oh, yeah. Because they released the 8 and 8 Plus. And I was like, wait, okay, one more thing. You guys know it was iPhone 10. 2017 iPhone 10. Dang. Wow.

Okay. Well, that's good to know. We got a lot more upcoming, a lot more coverage. Obviously stay tuned. The studio channel has a video. We got an episode, a bonus episode on the podcast channel. We've got the main hands-on on the MKBHD channel. Autofocus dropped a Prius review. We're popping out all kinds of great videos. So watch those and no trivia. Of course, we'll be right back next week with a bunch of cool stuff. Thanks for watching and listening. We'll catch you guys in the next one. Peace.

Waveformer is produced by Adam Molina and Ellis Roven. We're partnered with the Vox Media Podcast Network and our interruption of music was created by Vane Still.