(Preview) Apple And Its Lack of Vision, The Transformation of United Airlines, Q&A on Grok, Meta, and Streaming Economics

A call for Apple to finally be confident in its Vision Pro hardware, a brief history of broadcasting sports on TV, and yet another reminder that immersive live experiences should be the killer use case that brings users to the Vision Pro platform. Then: Q&A on the AVP, a question on the Siri and Gemini partnership, and thoughts Ben’s interview with United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby and on how tech spearheaded the company’s revival. At the end: Questions on Meta Compute and the end of Aggregation Theory, Grok and its offensive bikini problems, and follow-ups on Baumol’s Cost Disease, humans wanting humans, streaming economics, and venting about the Green Bay Packers.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Andrew Sharp?

  Hello and welcome to a free preview of Sharp Tech.

• 0:08Andrew Sharp?

  Hello and welcome back to another episode of Sharp Tech. I'm Andrew Sharp and on the other line, Ben Thompson. Ben, how you doing?

• 0:19Ben Thompson?

  I'm doing pretty well, Andrew. I don't know, I'm thinking, do you think that, um, I've been playing around with my headphones. I have regular headphones on now. I did get a haircut over the break. I thought the regular headphones were making me look very bald. It was unfortunate, but I didn't put the in-ear ones. But then I look at you, you're wearing, you're wearing your stupid ear pods.

• 0:37Andrew Sharp?

  That's right.

• 0:37Ben Thompson?

  And I can't decide if this is the least professional looking setup ever, or if you've gone full circle and it's actually the most professional.

• 0:44Andrew Sharp?

  Do we need to have a more unified look? Should you be wearing ear pods or should I switch to the over ear dorky look that you're wearing?

• 0:53Ben Thompson?

  No, I have the, those in-ear monitor things, but the problem is they always fall in my ear. I need to fix them. I need to get new ones.

• 0:58Andrew Sharp?

  Well, what you need is ear pods, you know what I mean? But I will continue wearing these purely out of spite until the end of time.

• 1:06Ben Thompson?

  It does irritate me that during COVID, everyone started doing these like, uh, like you watch like ESPN, like the reporters are doing these hits from home and they all look terrible. Like why, why, why is it's, we have much better video equipment and we're not even publishing video. It's, it drives me up the wall.

• 1:23Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah. Get your shit together, legacy media. For now, Sharp Tech will hold people down as far as aesthetics are concerned. Headphones notwithstanding, but in any event, it's great to be back. And Ben, we've got a lot to work through today, a robust mullet section, but we will begin with Apple and the Vision Pro.

• 1:44Ben Thompson?

  Oh, literally the front of the head. Nice.

• 1:46Andrew Sharp?

  Indeed. Here we are. Passed through Vision all the way. Todd says, I mean, this came in 10 days ago and he wrote in and said, after Ben saw the Apple immersive video sizzle reel in June of 2023, Ben wrote, "The company was fairly mum about how it planned to make those cameras and its format more widely available." But I am completely serious when I say that I would pay the NBA thousands of dollars to get a season pass to watch games captured in this way. Yes, that's a crazy statement to make, but courtside seats cost that much or more, and that 10-second clip was shockingly close to the real thing.

• 2:29Ben Thompson?

  It was more like three seconds, by the way, I think. Now that I think back to it.

• 2:34Andrew Sharp?

  And that's all a reference to immersive video in the Apple Vision Pro from your original Apple Vision Pro article in June of 2023. And so, fast forward 30 months, Todd says, and it's finally happening. And here, he links to a press release from Apple that was headlined "Los Angeles Lakers games on Spectrum Front Row in Apple Immersive tip-off January 9th." So Ben, it finally happened, but did it really happen? You have now soapbox about this feature on a bunch of different platforms. Great to see you on TBPN this week, and you also lit into Apple on Dithering. Do you have a Cliff Notes version

• 3:17Andrew Sharp?

  of your complaint about the Vision Pro NBA broadcast for the audience here on Sharp Tech?

• 3:23Ben Thompson?

  Wait, I thought this was my long-form opportunity. You're telling me to cut it down.

• 3:27Andrew Sharp?

  Feel free to go long-form. You did go long-form with an article, an open letter to Apple on Monday this week.

• 3:33Ben Thompson?

  That is the biggest testament to how strongly I feel about this, because I am aware, no one in the world cares about the Apple Vision Pro, except for maybe me. So I am giving valuable real estate.

• 3:45Andrew Sharp?

  It really cracked me up. Just for the record, you, earlier this week, you described yourself as being on a one-man crusade to resuscitate the Vision Pro. There was overwhelming agreement from the Strategery and Sharp Tech audience with your takes on the Vision Pro, but I really enjoyed one guy who wrote in and said, "Ben, that was quite good writing about a product literally nobody cares about."

• 4:10Ben Thompson?

  Here we are again, talking about a product that no one uses. Well, look, you know, you know, I cared about things before they were cool. And now, you know, I think, thinking back to the App Store, I was focused on those issues a ton before they became mainstream.

• 4:24Ben Thompson?

  Ten years in advance. This is caring about things long after they are cool. So it's, you're gonna get sort of both, both sides of the equation. But I, look, I have to write what I mentioned, number one. And number two, I am more fired up than ever. I'm not just fired up about being right and being irritated that, yes, I wrote this take before. I wrote it when the Vision Pro came out. I wrote it when they released that year in review MLS video, which was atrocious. Like, it was, it was published by Azuber on crack. It was unbelievable, just like 57 gazillion cuts, even on the same play, you didn't even know where you were. It was discombobulating. I wrote it about the Metallica concerts.

• 5:06Ben Thompson?

  Super cool, except that the moments it got really cool, where you felt like they were there, they started cutting to different cameras. The core mistake Apple's making with all these videos, and they're actually intertwined. Mistake number one is there hasn't been enough of them. Now, they went like a year without nothing. It's like, what are you doing? Like, they published these things that was like chapter one or episode one. And then like a year later, you're like, is there an episode two? Like, what's, what's going on here? So number one, they haven't had enough content for the Vision Pro. And number two, the problem with the content on the Vision Pro is it's cut for TV. Right. What is TV?

• 5:47Ben Thompson?

  And, and you, I actually went back and looked at, like, what was the history of sports on TV? And the first ever broadcast was a college baseball game on NBC, uh, at Columbia in New York City. And they had one camera and they had the radio broadcast. And at the time, pretty amazing. You can watch something and not be there. What a concept. It, you know, I'm not being sarcastic. I'm saying like that, that, I'm sure that was absolutely amazing.

• 6:13Ben Thompson?

  I mean, relative to radio, which people have been relying on for decades at that point. Well, so immediately, the next game that NBC did, the second ever sports on TV in the US, was a Major League Baseball game, this time in Brooklyn, the Brooklyn Dodgers versus Cincinnati Reds. And what did they figure out in that intervening three months between broadcast number one and broadcast number two?

• 6:37Andrew Sharp?

  What?

• 6:37Ben Thompson?

  Two cameras. Because like you, you have this ability to give different perspectives. And that's important because you're not there. When you're there, it's a 360 degree, every sense sort of immersive environment. I still love going to baseball games. I go to multiple baseball games a year. What's the whole thing? Part of it is you go in and it's the concourse and in your seat and there's the guy like selling drinks or popcorn or whatever it might be. And it's talking to people next to you. And the last game I went to was the Brewers beating the Cubs in game five. Fantastic experience. All the better. Almost sucked because there was a lot of Cubs fans there. But the Brewers won, so you gotta rub it in their face. And you're like, that's part of the experience is sort of being there.

• 7:22Ben Thompson?

  And even if you go to a game in the middle of summer, it's like you're, it's a beautiful day and you're sitting outside and you can talk and you could be on your phone or you could sort of do whatever you want to do. It's a full immersive.

• 7:34Andrew Sharp?

  Baseball is a vibe. There's no question.

• 7:35Ben Thompson?

  It is a vibe, but even you go to, go to a football game. I went to the Packers versus Steelers in Pittsburgh. So I was the annoying Cubs fan, right? You're there and I, you know, I, Tucker Kraft was amazing that game. I had a Tucker Kraft jersey on and I'm like pointing to it. I'm sitting in the front row of the section and just being a total like annoying person, right?

• 7:54Andrew Sharp?

  And see, this is the stuff that would not, never even be possible, even if the Vision Pro did get it right. But yes, it's all part of the experience.

• 8:01Ben Thompson?

  It's part of the experience. Again, the funny thing is, is going to a football game is actually, well, football's kind of interesting because you do see more because you see the whole field. You see stuff develop in certain ways. You also don't see like good closeups of things, uh, like sort of what's happening, all these crazy cameras that they, they got. But it, it's an experience of being there that, that TV can't capture. TV is a 2D flat panel in front of you. And what they've done brilliantly is.

• 8:30Ben Thompson?

  Create an entirely new way to experience a sporting event or any sort of event that takes that that sort of accepts this isn't real life. But because it's not real life, there's lots of things we can do. So like for the Super Bowl, I talked about they have like 130 cameras or some crazy amount, right? And you get the great like football again is so well suited to TV. You can show the play and then they always show a replay like of the play like right away and it's queued up. And it all seems so seamless and they show like the, the, the, the 20, all 22 viewer. They show a close up and they're see did the guy actually catch the ball or not? And then we can have a debate, was that a catch? Was that not a whatever it might be, uh, or, or baseball, you see the replay or you, or like,

• 9:11Ben Thompson?

  I love those videos of the massive like, uh, uh, in the playoffs when there's like a game winning home run. And everyone's going crazy and sometimes they'll show it on Twitter, like the product, the producer truck view of that. It's like, cut to camera three, camera five. It is like, but it feels totally seamless as a viewer. That's our expectations and it's part of what makes it great is we get to see the, or, or a college football right now. College football playoffs going on. No one knows because they put too many teams in the playoffs and completely killed the product, but whatever.

• 9:40Andrew Sharp?

  Two week gap between the semifinals and the finals. So optimal as far as momentum's concerned.

• 9:46Ben Thompson?

  What is the classic college football shot?

• 9:49Andrew Sharp?

  Hmm.

• 9:50Ben Thompson?

  The crying coed in the stands. That's right. Like, and like, you know, that, that's just, that's part of the college football TV experience, right? And all this is taking advantage. It, it's actually a really brilliant example of accepting this is an inferior product. If measured on the basis of being there in person.

• 10:14Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah.

• 10:15Ben Thompson?

  But let's lean into what is possible, given technology and what we could do. And so you end up with.

• 10:22Andrew Sharp?

  Move around the stadium, up and down the field in ways that fans sitting there in a seat cannot. And so, yeah, there's obviously some advantages.

• 10:30Ben Thompson?

  And something so something like football, I would argue by and large football's better on TV. Right? With a big group of people like now that varies with your basketball, I basketball. Ball, I think is probably the best one in person, especially if you're courtside. But like just you, there's so much like of the physicality and power and like the incredible grace of these like giants like strutting the court. That's just like impossible to really get when you're sort of watching, watching on TV. And, but it varies by sport for sure, but you, you have, they're, they're totally different experiences. What makes the Vision Pro amazing is it actually gives you a legitimate facsimile to being there in person.

• 11:14Ben Thompson?

  You get that feeling when you're, you got this in the Bucks Lakers game. You could be sitting there and Giannis has the ball, Giannis taking the ball down the court on a transition or situation opportunity. Is one of the most incredible basketball experiences you will ever have, particularly if you're close to the court. It's impossible that someone this large, this powerful moves the way that he moves. It's breathtaking. LeBron James, very, very similar sort of like experience. It just, and a thing you get when you're at a game that's hard to get on TV. Is the degree to which certain players control the game. Like the all time great example was, I never felt this more tangibly.

• 11:58Ben Thompson?

  I think it was the 2015 finals, game one, where the Warriors, this huge breakthrough, no one expected them. Suddenly they're in the finals, they're playing the Cavs, seemed to overmatch. And LeBron's control of that game was so, like I was there in the stadium. It was so tangible, the way he, every single second of that game had his fingerprints on that. And it's something that was, that I met, you can get that through TV a bit, but in person, it's, it's like you can sort of feel that.

• 12:30Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah.

• 12:33Ben Thompson?

  I will lean on basketball. It's the sport I know the best. It's the one I've had the most sort of like I have had courtside experiences and being there and knowing what it's like.

• 12:42Andrew Sharp?

  Also the sport that Apple was trying to broadcast with this product here unsuccessfully.

• 12:48Ben Thompson?

  You, well, no, you, you get that feeling. And what is was so frustrating about this presentation was the exact same thing that frustrated me about every other Apple immersive video that I've seen. Is that instead of being able to sort of luxuriate in that feeling and to sort of lose the sense, yes, it's a little pixelated. Yes, in your peripheral vision, it's not perfect. Yes, if you move your head really quickly, there might be a little bit of tearing. You could

• 13:17Ben Thompson?

  get the suspension of, of, of belief that you were there. And the moment you would start to feel that boom, it would cut to another camera angle and it would switch to a replay and it would like, like, and it was, it was so frustrating and it was, it was kind of uncomfortable to watch. Like you would be in the middle of, I mean, there's one thing in a fast break where I'm on one camera. And it suddenly switches to another camera and I literally missed the basket because I was discombobulated as to where I was.

• 13:47Andrew Sharp?

  That's the thing. I mean, hearing you and reading you describe your experience, it seems like something that would just drive me completely insane because as immersive as the Vision Pro can feel, it is still disorienting. And so you have to kind of adjust to whatever the view is. And then as you make that adjustment, it switches again. And it apparently was like that the entire game.

• 14:12Ben Thompson?

  The entire game. Well, and so here's the thing.

• 14:13Andrew Sharp?

  It's just like maddening that they would do it that way. And the sizzle reels you were complaining about earlier, like watching that and the jump cuts and everything else. And like even watching it in 2D, I feel like I'm getting vertigo. I don't know who that is supposed to appeal to. And all of it comes back to Apple's penchant to over engineer and overproduce this content, which flies directly in the face of your recommendation, literally 30 months ago to just put. One camera on the baseline or courtside and allow people to experience the game that way.

• 14:50Ben Thompson?

  Well, here's the thing. Here's the thing. It's not just that, it's not just that they're making it worse. They're also exacerbating problem number one, which is not having enough content.

• 15:00Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah.

• 15:01Ben Thompson?

  So you, you, you, so when you start this broadcast, there's a dedicated studio show for the Apple Vision Pro.

• 15:08Andrew Sharp?

  Mm hmm.

• 15:09Ben Thompson?

  Why, why do I want this sort of like B-list studio presenter to be giving me a presentation about the, you know what I like, you know what I like to do when I'm at a game? I like to watch the players warm up. Right? To use another Warriors Cavs example, I was at Warriors Cavs, I think it was game five, the game that Draymond was suspended for.

• 15:28Andrew Sharp?

  Okay.

• 15:29Ben Thompson?

  And in that game, I remember I was with another guy, this is the worst seats I've ever had. We were literally on the second to last row at the top of, at the top of the stadium for, for this game. But, uh, and I know it's second to last row because we got towels for that and we went to the bathroom, whoever's behind us stole our towels. But anyhow, uh, so Kyrie did not miss a shot the entire warmups.

• 15:52Andrew Sharp?

  Unbelievable Kyrie game.

• 15:54Ben Thompson?

  No, but you could, before the game, my buddy's like, this is the most, like, we've seen Steph warm up, whatever. It was nuts. He's like, Kyrie might go off tonight. And he 100% went off tonight, went off that night, like made some crazy shots going on. And you know what? Being in the stadium and seeing that happen, or seeing him warm up and like talking about it, and then him actually doing it was amazing, right? Like, like the whole, it was the totality of the experience. Guess what would have been less amazing? Oh, we're gonna put you in a little room before the games, you can watch some presenter talk about what's going on.

• 16:33Andrew Sharp?

  Broadcasters, yeah.

• 16:34Ben Thompson?

  Yeah, it's, it's nuts.

• 16:36Andrew Sharp?

  It is, it's more overhead for Apple to do it that way, which is what's so insane.

• 16:41Ben Thompson?

  To have multiple cameras, to have a studio show, to have dedicated announcers, all of this makes it worse and also reduces the amount of content available. I don't under, all I want, and I'm, I'm more convinced. It's never that I'm right about this, but even if I'm not right is put a camera at every game. That's it. Just and nothing else. I don't need a play by play announcer. I can listen to the crowd. I can listen to the P A announcer. I don't need a scoreboard. I can look up at the scoreboard, which is by the way, what I did in this game. In this game, they did have a scoreboard bug. It was way at the bottom. You had to like weirdly look down to see it. I just looked up at the scoreboard around the The Jumbotron, is that right? Yeah, well, I looked at the ones around the edge, right? Like where you normally, if you're sitting courtside, that's where you look anyway.

• 17:24Ben Thompson?

  It's paying the neck to look up that high, but but like, like the, and so they could solve both problems. They could, I think, have a better product and they could have way more stuff. And this is why, like, I'm super worked up about this. It's not just that I think I'm right and I'm disappointed I'm not getting what I want. To me, this is a reason to buy the Vision Pro. And I would rather have, instead of like 10 things that are way overproduced, even if they were awesome, and they're not awesome. Even if they were awesome, I would rather have 10,000 things that are pretty good. And I can experience all these things that I couldn't otherwise. And and the funny thing is, the whole world is conspiring to make this an opportunity.

• 18:10Ben Thompson?

  Everything digital is commoditized. There's a gazillion things. Like, why was, we talked about this with Taylor Swift and the Eras Tour. Like, there's something about live, having this sort of experience. Now, is the Vision Pro the same as being there with a bunch of crazy teenage girls and getting friendship bracelets? No, but there, there, there is live and something that's happening in the moment is increasingly rare, is increasingly special. And I think Apple has the capabilities. They've built all the pieces. They made these cameras, which by the way, are dramatically smaller. It's actually pretty amazing how small they are compared to the way they used to be. You could see it like dangling from the basket and things on those lines. They've built this pipeline. They've now shown they can do it live.

• 18:52Ben Thompson?

  They have these devices that are these incredible experience. They, they could build a marketplace to sell.

• 19:00Ben Thompson?

  Live tickets to basically everything on earth. Like, and

• 19:05Andrew Sharp?

  And they would also have users for the Vision Pro, which they don't currently have. And then, who knows what flowers from there, from that foundation.

• 19:13Ben Thompson?

  Once you have users, you'll get developers. Like, that's the, there is, it's not a chicken and egg problem. It's a one-way street. You need to get users first, which means you need that core use case. And to me, this, this core use case, it's there. The only thing standing in the way is Apple's refusal to

• 19:29Andrew Sharp?

  Loosen the reins.

• 19:30Ben Thompson?

  Over engineering, to over, so that's why I put it on the front page. I'm like, look, I already wrote this as a daily update. Look, maybe you're not subscribers, whoever's in charge of this, and you didn't read it. Look, I

• 19:38Andrew Sharp?

  Let me address it directly to Apple, directly to Cupertino. Please, for the love of God, save this device. I mean, just for the record, I care about the Vision Pro and will always enjoy talking about it because it was a product that I thought was stupid, reading about it and hearing people

• 19:55Ben Thompson?

  You don't want it to succeed.

• 19:57Andrew Sharp?

  And Gruber rhapsodize about it. I was like, these nerds. But then I tried it and the experience of using that hardware is undeniably really cool. And as a tech podcast

• 20:09Ben Thompson?

  It remains one of the best 30-minute demos of all time. It's like, it's mind-blowing.

• 20:12Andrew Sharp?

  Totally. And like you and I, we're on here talking about software and cost structures and regulation. And like, if I think about the coolest piece of new tech hardware that has been released this decade, it's pretty clearly the Vision Pro in my book. Now, Apple has not given me a reason to spend $4,000 on a headset to date. And you offered to buy one for me and I was like, you know what? I don't want to waste the company's money on something that I'll use once every six months. And so I would be a customer and there's just no content for me to consume. Related to all this, though, I'll read this note from Aaron.

• 20:54Andrew Sharp?

  He says, "Guys, I wholeheartedly agree with Ben's takes on live events and where the Vision Pro has gone wrong. His solution is lower cost, higher volume, and a differentiated viewing experience. It's so baffling a decision that I can't figure out what could possibly be driving it." One of Ben's axioms, paraphrasing here, is, "Don't assume people are stupid, assume they are smart."

• 21:21Andrew Sharp?

  So assuming the Apple execs sort of know what they're doing, what is the possible steel man argument for why they've hitched the Vision Pro to this terrible wagon? Can you make a steel man argument? Do you have theories on why Apple is here? All right, and that is the end of the free preview. If you'd like to hear more from Ben and I, there are links to subscribe in the show notes, or you can also go to SharpTech.fm. Either option will get you access to a personalized feed that has all the shows we do every week, plus lots more great content from Sir Teccary and the Sir Teccary Plus bundle. Check it out, and if you've got feedback, please email us at [email protected].