Pod Insights The Vergecast Apple’s Vision Pro: the headset of the future? About this episode On Apple's campus, The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, Alex Cranz, and Dan Seifert discuss the long-rumored Apple Vision Pro that was announced this week at WWDC.
Later, Marques Brownlee, Andrew Manganelli, and David Imel of the Waveform podcast join the show for a lightning round of everyone's favorite WWDC announcements.
Coming soon: the Vergecast and Waveform team challenge each other to trivia!
Further reading:
Apple WWDC 10 biggest announcements: Vision Pro, MacBook Air, iOS 17, and more
Apple Vision Pro is Apple’s new $3,499 AR headset
Apple announces visionOS, the operating system for its Vision Pro headset
Apple Vision Pro first look: the mixed reality future is (almost) here
I wore the Apple Vision Pro. It’s the best headset demo ever.
Optic ID will unlock Apple’s new Vision Pro headset
Apple’s Vision Pro headset will turn you into a digital avatar when FaceTiming
Everywhere Apple imagines you’ll use its $3,500 Vision Pro headset
Apple’s new VR headset will feature over 100 Apple Arcade games at launch
Disney Plus and VR sports games are coming to Apple Vision Pro
Microsoft Word, Excel, and Teams are all coming to Apple’s new Vision Pro headset
What’s so ‘pro’ about Apple’s Vision Pro headset?
The Vision Pro headset is really Apple’s first TV
Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you.
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Transcript 15,577 words · 13 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:20 Nilay Patel? Hello and welcome to the Rich Cast, the flagship podcast of the most complicated consumer electronics product in history, both technically and emotionally, I would say.
1:29 David Pierce? Yeah, there's been a lot of feelings the last 36 hours.
1:33 Nilay Patel? And I process those feelings in near real time.
1:35 David Pierce? You've been through the five stages.
1:36 Nilay Patel? I have been through the five stages. I am your friend, Eli. David Pierce is here. Hello. Dan Seifert is here. Hello. Kranz on the Zoom.
1:43 Alex Cranz? I'm here in spirit and totally sober.
1:46 Nilay Patel? Very good. So Kranz on East Coast time. We are here on the West Coast doing this Rich Cast live from Apple Park in a podcast studio that Apple has set up for folks to use. Disclosure, we're in Apple's building.
2:00 Nilay Patel? We're gonna say some stuff. Tim Cook might have us arrested.
2:04 David Pierce? Yeah, if we never make it out.
2:06 Nilay Patel? If you hear the slight catch of hesitation in my voice throughout this episode, it's because a number of Apple employees are staring at me. But I think we're gonna be fine.
2:14 Alex Cranz? I am so happy I'm at home.
2:16 Nilay Patel? It is a big episode where at WWDC, Apple announced a bunch of stuff, including the new Vision Pro headset, which we're gonna talk about a lot in this episode. 400 operating systems got updates. You can now use your phone to find the Siri remote for the Apple TV, which is another full hour of the Vergecast coming your way. And then, to end the episode, we're gonna have our friends Marques Brownlee and the Waveform Crew on for a little lightning round. And then also in the feed, a little bit later, we're gonna have a collab episode with Waveform. Dave, what's going on there?
2:42 David Pierce? Yeah, so we love the Waveform Crew. It's a great podcast. And we went to them and we're like, let's do something fun together at WWDC. And they were like, we do trivia. Let's do trivia.
2:50 Nilay Patel? That's awesome.
2:50 David Pierce? So we're gonna do trivia. I honestly don't know what it's about. We have not done it yet, and I already think they've cheated. I can't prove this, but I'm confident that they've cheated. If we lose, it's because they cheated.
2:59 Nilay Patel? When I walked in here, someone said, "We have the audio for the soundboard you requested." And I thought to myself, finally, someone's given me a soundboard. And it was their soundboard, so...
3:07 David Pierce? This episode is gonna be trouble.
3:08 Nilay Patel? One, I'm very disappointed that other podcasts get soundboards. Andrew. And two, I think they've already cheated.
3:15 David Pierce? Yeah, I think so.
3:16 Nilay Patel? But that's in the feed later, that's a different episode. We gotta talk about the Vision Pro. So there's a lot going on at WWDC. We're gonna talk through all the news, just get through it. This episode is gonna be all Vision Pro. And then on Friday, we'll do the Macs and operating systems. But let's talk about everything that happened, because it was pretty relentless yesterday. Dan, do you wanna start us off? Tell us the hardware. Go through all the hardware.
3:38 Speaker 05 So non-Vision Pro hardware. We got three new Macs. There's a 15-inch MacBook Air, which has been kind of long-waiting. It starts at $1,299. Really aggressive price. 3.3 pounds. It's got an M2, six speakers, 15.3-inch screen. It's basically the same design and features as the 13-inch M2 model. It's gonna be available next week. Probably gonna be really
3:58 Alex Cranz? But it's big.
3:59 Speaker 05 It's a bigger 13 inch MacBook Air.
4:01 David Pierce? And the price is good. Very exciting.
4:02 Speaker 05 The price is good. The size is good. I think it's gonna be really popular. Then we got the new Mac Studio, which is exactly the same as the old Mac Studio, except it's got an M2 Max or an M2 Ultra in it, and they upgraded the HDMI port to 2.1, most important part.
4:15 Nilay Patel? I'm sorry, technically what they kept saying was it includes the feature set of HDMI 2.1.
4:20 Speaker 05 Yes, because HDMI 2.1 is an evolving spec. Let's not forget. So that starts at the same price, $19.99 for the M2 Max, $39.99 for the M2 Ultra chip, that's also available starting next week. And then they pulled this one out, a new Mac Pro, which is basically a Mac Studio with PCI slots. It's got the same design and chassis as the old Intel Mac Pro that came out in 2019, but instead of an Intel chip, it's got an M2 Ultra chip in it. You can get up to 192 gigs of RAM. There's no external GPU support. There's no ability to add RAM after the fact, but you do have six slots to plug in PCI cards, and it starts at $69.99.
4:58 Alex Cranz? They're boasting all the afterburner cards you could put in it, right?
5:01 Speaker 05 Yeah, like accelerator cards, SDI cards, a bunch of acronyms that I'm really not familiar with for I am not a professional. But people who use those in professional studios and things like that, James Cameron's gonna love it.
5:13 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
5:13 Speaker 05 Because he can route so many streams of audio.
5:15 Nilay Patel? Wait, Alex, specifically what they're saying with afterburner cards is you don't need them anymore because the M2 Ultra is as fast as seven afterburner cards.
5:21 Speaker 05 It already burns the afterburners.
5:23 Nilay Patel? You don't need them anymore.
5:24 Alex Cranz? So why do you need PCI?
5:25 Nilay Patel? We gotta move through this. I'm gonna do a whole hour on the USB 3 port, the old style USB A connector for dongles inside the Mac Pro. That's a full hour coming on Friday.
5:33 David Pierce? Wait, I just wanna say one more thing about the Macs, though. When we were live blogging WWDC, the keynote, and this was all happening really fast, and so Neelai is like typing furiously, trying to figure out what's going on, and he leans over to me and he goes, "What was the price they said? $69.99?" And I was like, "Yeah, that sounds right." And Neelai types $69,999 as the price for the Mac Pro. Doesn't blink an eye and just presses enter to publish it. He's like, "Yeah, it costs $70,000. Totally fine."
5:56 Nilay Patel? Well, it's $20,000 for the PCI slot. That's how much PCI slots cost.
6:00 David Pierce? The wheels are 10 grand. And here we go.
6:02 Nilay Patel? Any other hardware? On the Macs, that's all of it. All right, so that's a lot. Again, all on Friday. David, talk us through the, as fast as you can, the software announcements at Dub Dub.
6:12 David Pierce? OK, so this was the first half of WWDC, and they did like 800,000 software announcements in 40 minutes, and I'm going to do all of them in the next 90 seconds.
6:21 Nilay Patel? I'm very excited for you.
6:22 David Pierce? So we got iOS 17, which included a bunch of features for phone calls, including contact posters that you can send when you call somebody. There's a new live voicemail thing that actually auto-transcribes your voicemail, and you can pick it up. There's a new thing called standby for your iPhone, where if you dock it on a MagSafe thing and turn it sideways, it'll be sort of a nightstand and show widgets and the time. There's no more "hey" in "hey Siri." There's a new journal app. They improved airdrops, so that if you and I are close and we start an airdrop thing, and then we walk away, it'll actually continue and finish over the Internet. There's new PDF annotation. There's a new improved autocorrect, especially for swearing, which means I don't have to type ducking anymore. There's a thing called Name Drop, where we can bump phones together to share contact information with each other. You can do voice and video messages in FaceTime. There's a bunch of privacy features to protect you from nudes, which are really great. Then there's macOS Sonoma.
7:04 Nilay Patel? Again, that's a full hour. What you just said is a full hour of the Vergecast.
7:08 David Pierce? And literally, Apple introduced all of this stuff in about this much time. Then there's also iPadOS 17, which has a lot of that same stuff. It also got the personalized lock screen that everybody got on the iPhone with iOS 16. There's some big Stage Manager changes that I'm potentially very excited about, even though I hate Stage Manager with all of my heart. There's a new Health app. There's new interactive widgets, which also is coming to iOS 17, so you can do things like tap buttons or check off tasks or whatever actually on the widget instead of having to open the app. It also got lots of other iOS 17 features. There's macOS Sonoma, which basically got nothing except desktop widgets that you can pull from your iPhone. Cool, great.
7:41 Alex Cranz? It got a name.
7:42 David Pierce? Great job, everybody.
7:42 Nilay Patel? Again, a full hour. You're glazing over desktop widgets. I'm like, this is my dream.
7:49 David Pierce? Oh, no.
7:49 Nilay Patel? One full hour of desktop widgets, please.
7:51 David Pierce? You've never seen a story from me as long as the one I'm gonna write about desktop widgets. Fair enough. There's also WatchOS 10, which has a new smart stack of widgets, which shows contextual information that is supposed to be personalized and based on what you're doing. Cycling workouts, new features for hikers. There's some new mental and vision health stuff. And there's a bunch of new watch faces, including Snoopy, which Apple always gets really excited about, and I absolutely don't care at all.
8:11 Nilay Patel? They really made a big deal about Snoopy.
8:13 David Pierce? It was like Snoopy and Live stickers were the things they spent the two longest amounts of time on. I'm like, I think you missed what people actually care about here.
8:21 Nilay Patel? Snoopy's a legend, alright.
8:22 David Pierce? TVOS 17 got one new feature.
8:24 Nilay Patel? My dude was a fighter pilot. He's in the greatest generation.
8:27 David Pierce? Eli, I have things to do here. Not enough time for Snoopy right now. TVOS 17 got exactly one new feature that matters. FaceTime through Continuity Camera on the Apple TV, which means you can do FaceTime calls and Zoom calls and all kinds of stuff using the camera on your iPad or iPhone, which I think is very cool. There's a bunch of other little stuff like AirPods improvements, including a tap to mute thing on the mic on the AirPods that I'm very excited about. All of that is in beta this summer. It's all shipping this fall. That's the new software.
8:54 Nilay Patel? It's a lot. And like I said, on Friday, we'll go through all that news in great detail. If you were just listening to that.
9:00 David Pierce? Especially widgets.
9:01 Nilay Patel? You know, there's a lot of Verchests in there.
9:02 David Pierce? Yes.
9:03 Nilay Patel? Confabulator stands right up. There's a lot of 2008.
9:06 David Pierce? Yeah.
9:07 Nilay Patel? It doesn't have to be.
9:07 David Pierce? The old internet is back.
9:08 Nilay Patel? And this old man is extremely ready to talk about it on Friday. But we gotta spend this hour talking about the Vision Pro.
9:16 David Pierce? Yeah, I think that's right.
9:17 Nilay Patel? Because I think it is deserving of a full hour. So where to begin? Apple has been spent six years pointing iPads at things and showing us augmented reality demos.
9:27 David Pierce? People walking around on stage, holding up iPads, showing couches.
9:31 Nilay Patel? And I looked, AR kit was announced at Dubbedad almost six years ago.
9:34 David Pierce? Wow.
9:34 Nilay Patel? So six years of, hey, look at this chessboard on a table. My god, an IKEA couch. Have you ever seen one before? And this is their moment to actually ship a true AR consumer product. That is the Vision Pro. It's very clear that this is the first thing they're shipping that is an AR consumer product. There's a number of catches to that statement. I said it very clearly in that sentence, and then if you unpack sort of all of what that means, you end up with, well, you can't actually build one of those yet. It's almost impossible to build an AR product at Apple quality. So they made a series of what I would call enormous compromises to build the Vision Pro.
10:20 Nilay Patel? Which lets you experience what they would like to build, but is not yet that thing.
10:25 David Pierce? Right. Well, it's a funny thing because on the one hand, the whole pitch was to not make sacrifices. Like, as we've seen from the hardware, they did the best thing you can possibly do, and it costs $3,500. Because that's what it costs to do this stuff now. But on the other hand, it involves tons of sacrifices. It doesn't look the way they want it to. It has, it's missing a lot of the features that they're going to want it to have over time. Like, the long-term vision for this is very clear, and this is not that.
10:51 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
10:52 Alex Cranz? It doesn't look the way they want it to, like?
10:54 David Pierce? No, I mean-
10:54 Alex Cranz? I thought they always wanted it to look like ski goggles.
10:57 Nilay Patel? Well, so, okay, so to be clear, we've all seen it in person.
11:00 Alex Cranz? You guys have seen it.
11:01 Nilay Patel? Dave and I actually got to wear it for a while. Alex Heath got to wear it for a while. I would say that I spent a long time waiting for my demo, just sort of menacingly hovering around the ones that were in the lobby, just like taking in the hardware. So it's like a beautiful piece of hardware. It's a beautiful set of ski goggles. Just sort of taking in the shape of the glass on the front, and the amount of Apple engineering it takes to produce that piece of glass at scale, and ship it with Apple tolerant, like, someone worked very hard on this thing. For a long time. For a long time. Like, they're just getting around it, like, the sort of technical execution of this thing. There is but one company that can do it at consumer scale, and it's Apple.
11:45 David Pierce? It was very funny, there were a ton of people on Twitter the last two days, like, changing their bios to say that they worked on Division Pro, and tweeting, like, "Oh my god, after eight years of working on this, I finally get to talk about this thing that I've been building." It's very, this was like, this was a moment-
12:00 Nilay Patel? There's 4,000 people that worked on just the curve of the glass, right? Like, it's like, I'm just guessing. But what they want to build is glasses. They want to build see-through, and we know this because Tim Cook has said it over and over and over again. He said it to Walt Mossberg once. It's gotta be this, and he pointed at his glasses. And so the set of ski goggles that are much more like a VR headset than a pair of glasses is a compromise, a stopgap on the way to the end of the vision. So when I say it's like the most complicated consumer product in history, well, I really do mean that literally. Like, the product itself, enormously complicated, and we could just spend hours talking about specs and like how it works. And then there's the like emotional component of, this isn't what anybody wants. Right? Whatever he wants is a pair of glasses, and this is the thing you build to let developers
12:45 Nilay Patel? start building apps, so that as you continue coming down the hardware cost curve and the hardware capability curve, you're ready for that moment when you can just put on a pair of glasses.
12:54 Alex Cranz? I kind of want to ask you about that, because over here on the East Coast, where none of us have seen it in person, we've not experienced it, we've all just seen like the pitch. And most people I know weren't sold on the pitch. No one's been sold on the pitch. Very few people are like, wow, yes, I gotta go get this. But increasingly, everybody I've seen who's actually seen it and touched it and used it is like, I get the pitch. Do you guys get the pitch? Like, does the pitch make sense for you? Are you, are you on board?
13:19 David Pierce? I mean, that's kind of the question, right? Like, this is, this is what I feel like we've spent the last 24 hours talking about is, I think the thing that I have come to believe is that Apple, at this moment in time, really wants you to think of this as like a gadget and, and to care about the display specs and the processor speeds and the way that it works and like evaluate it like you would a smartphone in 2009, right? Like, we're, we're way back in the early computer days where Walt Mossberg was like telling you about processor speeds. And that's of mattered, right?
13:46 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
13:46 David Pierce? And we're still in this phase where it's like, we made a screen that is better to look at, is like a truly real and relevant thing in this world. But then there is the very separate question of like, is this a thing anybody wants and what is it for? And I think it's very easy to do this demo and think like, oh my God, this thing works so well and not get to the second part of the question. But I think, I think what you're talking about and where this gets really emotional is the second part of that question.
14:11 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
14:11 David Pierce? Do I want this in my life? Is a very different question than like, is this any good?
14:15 Nilay Patel? Right. But the extremely clear answer to your question is, no one knows.
14:20 David Pierce? Yeah, that's fair.
14:20 Nilay Patel? Like, I wore it, I pushed, it's me. So they're like, you have 30 minutes. And I was like, we're going to 37, right? That's like how it goes.
14:26 David Pierce? And I'm gonna push all the buttons.
14:27 Nilay Patel? Yeah. I got in trouble, like wandering around the room. But like, we, we basically got around 30 minutes on rails, like a very tightly controlled demo, and the people giving us the demo had iPads, so they could like watch what we were doing in the headset. Right? And they were telling us what to do. That demo worked really well. The experiences inside that demo were great. They were showing us what they wanted it to show us. Great. You take that thing out of that room, which was perfectly lit for the capabilities of the device, perfectly staged for that demo, and you take it into a crappier, darker room, and I'm just gonna go out on a limb here and say most people's homes are full of crappier, darker rooms. It's in the one that Apple built the demo that had that. I don't know the answer to that question.
15:09 Nilay Patel? You get closer to a wall. Like, Apple kept talking about how you're gonna use it at work. If you look at all of the demos, the people are standing up at desks with nothing in front of them.
15:18 Speaker 05 They look like the design studio.
15:19 Nilay Patel? They're very rarely sitting down. So there's like a million questions, like, how is it gonna actually work in practice? Right? I don't know the answer to that question. So it's like, can I, can I tell you that I buy the pitch? No, I can tell you that I put the headset on. And we, Alex, you and I have talked about the Quest a lot on the show. Like, I'm a Quest 2 owner. I have a preunit of a Quest Pro that every now and again I just frown at in disappointment. I have a PSVR 2. I love my PSVR 2. I think that's, it's a great headset because the GPU is sitting on the floor connected by a cable. This thing is, is like blows most of them away. Right. Right? And I'll just hedge on the PSVR 2 because it's just a very different product. But this thing is great. Like, the, the display is so high resolution. The video pass-through is incredible. The latency is so low.
16:01 Nilay Patel? The demos they gave us were just really great. Yeah. And it's, it's just hard because it's not the thing anybody wants. What they want to show you is augmented reality. And the, the, the truth of the product is you put on a headset, you're looking at two displays, and then through those displays is pumped feed from 12 cameras and a depth sensor and all this stuff with very low latency to make it appear as though you're looking through the thing. That's what Tim Cook said. Yep. So first Apple product you look through and not at. Which is a good line, by the way. Great line. You are super looking at this product.
16:34 Nilay Patel? Like, the reality of this is you are looking at screens, right? And I don't have to tell, like, you can evaluate a screen. You can evaluate the quality of a camera that is projecting an image to you. I can tell you with dead certainty that these cameras, because of the amount of processing and the almost no latency that they're allowed to have, there's some compression going on here, especially in low light. So, you know, the people in the room, sometimes they would be in shadows or like they would have less light projected on their faces just as they moved around. And I could see the details go away. Okay, like, is that the end of the world? Like, how do I evaluate that in 30 minutes and tell you if I buy the pitch to wear a headset on a computer instead of having a television? I just don't know the answer to that question.
17:13 Alex Cranz? But you're still like, you're hyped still for this product. Like, I think what I saw after this event was everybody was like, this is a $3,500 VR headset. Why am I gonna ever want that? But it seems like people who are actually experiencing are like, no, it almost makes, like, we only saw it for 30 minutes, but it almost makes sense.
17:32 Nilay Patel? I know exactly why it's a $3,500 VR headset.
17:35 Alex Cranz? Because it's really good displays, right?
17:37 David Pierce? It's just the displays.
17:38 Nilay Patel? Yeah, yeah.
17:39 David Pierce? That alone is more expensive than basically...
17:41 Nilay Patel? No, no, it's not just the displays. It's the displays, which we should talk, we should talk about the specs a little bit. It's the displays.
17:45 Alex Cranz? We should, yeah.
17:46 Nilay Patel? It is the incredible video pass-through. It is the mixed-reality tricks they are able to pull off. And it is the fact that it has an M2 and an R1 chip in there. And like, I don't know, I opened Safari, I said, I'm gonna go to The Verge. They said, that's gonna take a long time. And then I looked at every individual letter on a keyboard and tapped my fingers together. And we went to theverge.com and I read the website. And it was Safari, right? Like, it's a, like, the Quest 2, this is the joke we keep making, it's an Android, it's a mid-range Android smartphone on your face. This is a MacBook on your face. They're radically different in terms of their capabilities.
18:20 Alex Cranz? Oh, wow.
18:21 David Pierce? That's a good way of putting it, actually. And I think, Alex, I think the thing that you're sensing is that there's this overwhelming feeling that a lot of people are having that, like, oh, it's actually possible to do this stuff well. Like, we've not seen anyone do pass-through like this. We have not seen anyone do latency like this. Like, yes, it's very expensive. Yes, it was an incredibly controlled demo, but it's like, we have proven the point that at some... Level and in some constraints, it is possible to do this very, very, very well. And I think a lot of people had never seen it done well before. And we're sort of blown away just by that fact. And again, that's the very beginning of a very long. Story about whether the Vision Pro is a good product or a good idea. But that is. That is the thing that I think a lot of people have reacted to is like, oh, my God. The pass through isn't bad. It's actually good.
19:07 Nilay Patel? Yeah, talk about the specs, go through the specs real quick and we can talk about why the pasture is good.
19:10 David Pierce? Sure. Okay, so it's a it's a pair of ski goggles. It's just just straight up. Absolutely like Joanna Stern, our friend at the Wall Street Journal did a video ahead of this where she actually. Talked about it using a pair of ski goggles. And it is, I mean, shockingly close to what this thing actually looks like. Like she nailed it. She just bought ski goggles. It's just those. But anyway, so it's about, what is it a little less than a pound?
19:31 Nilay Patel? Yeah, so I mean, the most important fact is the battery is not connected.
19:35 David Pierce? We're gonna get to that.
19:36 Nilay Patel? We're gonna get to the headset itself, a little less than a pound.
19:38 David Pierce? Yeah, so the headset itself weighs a little less than a pound and it's basically in three parts. So you get the the actual headset itself, which is. Metallic and relatively thin and small and curved. And then there's the thing that they call. Was it the light seal? That is this sort of customized thing that goes around it and around your eyes. And then there's the strap, which they call the headband. Sure. Uh, and there's one that goes behind and there's one that goes over. And that's essentially the thing that you wear. It's plushy and relatively comfortable. It was kind of heavy on my face. You had an okay time.
20:05 Nilay Patel? I think I strapped it down harder than everybody else.
20:07 David Pierce? You just just really yanked this.
20:09 Nilay Patel? I mean, it's a thing you have to wear on your your head.
20:11 Alex Cranz? Ruined your hair.
20:12 Nilay Patel? They took fit mints when he walked into the demo area. So you you they I all none of this is final. They got months to go. But they were like, here's an iPhone. You look at an iPhone, you did something like Face ID where you turned your head in a circle. That figured out what light seal you'd use. And then you turned your ears to it. Yes. Which works great for me. Did not work for David, apparently.
20:31 David Pierce? It just like didn't understand that my right ear was an ear for a while.
20:34 Nilay Patel? Your right ear, I've been meaning to tell you.
20:37 David Pierce? Yeah, I had no idea. Today was the day I discovered that I don't need glasses, which is very exciting to discover. Uh, and my right ear is just.
20:44 Nilay Patel? It's never been great.
20:46 Alex Cranz? We'll talk about it behind your back. Sorry, David.
20:49 Nilay Patel? So scan your ears and that adjusts the spatial audio for you. So you go, but that's a very quick fitment process. If you had glasses, they have a partner in Zeiss and Zeiss will put prescription lenses in.
20:59 Alex Cranz? And it only works for myopia. It doesn't work for, like, I have astigmatism. It wouldn't work for me unless I'm wearing contacts.
21:06 Nilay Patel? Interesting. So I have contacts and I did not get to the astigmatism question. What do we do? We're just like sent in there. But I think like these fitment issues, just given the circumstances of the demo, that's like a real wait and see.
21:17 David Pierce? Yeah, for sure. Along with oh, so many other things. But okay, so anyway, so then inside the thing, it's powered by some combination of the M2 and the R1 chip. The R1 chip is new. There are 12 cameras in the headset. There are five other sensors, LiDAR pointing down.
21:33 Nilay Patel? No, LiDAR points out.
21:34 David Pierce? LiDAR points out, IR pointing down to find your hands, other things. There's a 4K display in each eye. And that is essentially, you know, that's what you look through the whole time. There's no controllers. You do all the controlling with your fingers.
21:48 Speaker 05 And your eyes, because there's, there's sensors and cameras looking at your eyes.
21:52 David Pierce? Right, yeah, it's, it's eye tracking and hand control are like the two things that are happening here. And that part is fascinating and we should talk about it. I don't think there are any other super meaningful specs. Like it's, it's bonkers how much stuff is in this headset.
22:03 Alex Cranz? Hot, right? Like I was reading, I was reading that because it's got the M2 in it, it actually gets kind of warm and it like vents the air basically over your eyeballs.
22:11 Nilay Patel? Everyone thinks it's venting down at your nose, which I don't know why everyone thinks that.
22:14 David Pierce? Well, it's because there's the little cheese grater design on the bottom that makes you think that's where the air would go out. But that's where the air goes in.
22:19 Alex Cranz? But it's sucking the air up around your nose and then shooting out your forehead.
22:24 Nilay Patel? I don't know. I mean, everyone had like slightly different demo experiences. We have all compared notes. I've just read all the coverage. I took it off and I was like, oh, the top of this is hot. Other people like Joanna and Lauren, I think, were like, the thing got hot. Like they could feel it. So people just had different experiences inside of these demo units. But yeah, the heat goes out the top.
22:42 Speaker 05 And it has a fan that drives that air.
22:44 Nilay Patel? And we just, no one had enough time to sit around thinking about the fan.
22:48 Speaker 05 Yeah.
22:48 Nilay Patel? I was like, this dinosaur.
22:52 Speaker 05 Tell me about the fan. Like, what are the fan curves? Can I adjust the curve of the fan?
22:57 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
22:58 Alex Cranz? But that means that the fans aren't like noticeable enough that you're like, oh, man, that fan's really...
23:02 Nilay Patel? Certainly not.
23:02 David Pierce? No, yeah, it certainly wasn't a problem. I did skip one spec, though, which is the battery. There's no battery inside the headset at all. There is a thing that attaches to basically your right temple with a long cable that goes down to a battery pack that felt to me like about the size and weight of an iPhone, maybe a little heavier.
23:21 Nilay Patel? It was like the anchor battery packs they use.
23:24 David Pierce? Yeah.
23:24 Nilay Patel? Like the 10,000 milliamp.
23:25 David Pierce? And that thing gives you two hours of battery. You can also plug the battery pack into the wall. So you don't plug the headset directly into the wall. You plug the headset into the battery pack, which plugs into the wall, and then you just have power forever because you're plugged into the wall.
23:39 Alex Cranz? Okay, here is the most crucial question that came up at the Verge offices when we were all watching this. What do you do if you don't have pockets? Like, is there like a clip?
23:49 David Pierce? Get some pockets.
23:50 Nilay Patel? Yeah, that's your answer.
23:51 David Pierce? No, there is no place to put it at this moment in time. Whether there will be like an accessory ecosystem where you can stick it to the back of your head or something.
23:59 Alex Cranz? $50 for a clip.
24:00 David Pierce? Or like, maybe there's gonna be a lanyard. You can just like hold the battery around your neck.
24:05 Nilay Patel? Yeah, it just doesn't seem like anyone is anticipating that you're gonna be far from a chair. This is a very stationary device.
24:12 David Pierce? Yeah.
24:13 Nilay Patel? It's two hours on battery.
24:16 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
24:17 David Pierce? And if you have to walk somewhere with it, you like walk, holding the battery in one hand.
24:20 Speaker 05 I can see people doing their laundry while wearing this.
24:23 Nilay Patel? That's true. Wait, I wanna come to that, because that's like the other part of this, right? That's like the emotional, we're gonna show you the dream that we think we're enabling.
24:29 David Pierce? Yeah.
24:30 Nilay Patel? But we're still just on like the thing. Right? And like, I think the thing itself is just like fascinating for what it is.
24:37 Speaker 05 It's a very cool gadget. And I think that's kind of like, to your point, Alex, about like the people that are seeing it in person and getting to touch it and stuff like that, they are kind of like wowed by the gadgety factor of it. And it's a very nice, polished, cool-looking sci-fi VR goggles headset. And if you look at the VR goggles that we've seen beforehand, and you look at this one, it's very clear that this is like a level above in terms of fit, finish, polish, and design.
25:04 Nilay Patel? And price.
25:05 Speaker 05 And price. And I think that is part of what is driving a lot of like the kind of like the ooh, wow kind of reactions on the ground that don't translate necessarily in pictures over the internet.
25:15 Nilay Patel? I'll give you two examples that like blew me away. One... Like an idiot, I just like tried to pick up my phone and use it while I was wearing it. Right?
25:24 Alex Cranz? Cause you had the pass through.
25:25 Nilay Patel? I'm looking at them, looking at the pass through. It's like I'm in the room with people. And I just like reached down, saw my phone, picked it up and started using it. And like, there is not another pass through headset experience where you can just do that.
25:38 Alex Cranz? Right.
25:38 Nilay Patel? And I was just using it. I was like unlocked it. It, um, again, you're looking at a camera feed on a screen. So I could see the IR illuminator or the Face ID blinking at me.
25:46 Alex Cranz? Oh, that's cool.
25:47 Nilay Patel? Cause the cameras pick up IR. So it's weird, right? It's like, so I couldn't do faces because I was wearing C goggles, but unlocked my watch. Because I'm safely in the walls of iCloud.
25:57 David Pierce? Okay. Here's a real question that I actually mean seriously. So one of the features that the Vision Pro has is that it'll show your eyes on an external screen. So someone can see that you're paying attention to them. Do you think Face ID will unlock?
26:08 Nilay Patel? No.
26:08 David Pierce? On your face?
26:09 Nilay Patel? Zero percent. You gotta have a watch or the, the headset's gonna be, it's got retina scanners.
26:13 Alex Cranz? It's gonna do the depth sensing.
26:15 David Pierce? Maybe it's like- No, but I'm saying, can you unlock your phone with your headset on?
26:18 Speaker 05 Right. Like, like the reverse of the watch unlocking the Mac. This is the Mac on your face unlocking your phone.
26:23 Nilay Patel? That's totally because it'll, it'll off you. But by the time, we're ages away. But I just started using my phone in full color, open like navigating my phone, open notes app, started taking notes. They looked terrified because I was taking notes. And like, as I went through the demos, I just kept looking down and taking notes. This like just straight up incredible, like from a pure technology standpoint.
26:44 David Pierce? That's also a big like user experience deal. The question is always like, what do I do when I need to pick up my cup of coffee, right? And that's, that's, that passes the coffee test.
26:52 Nilay Patel? But the coffee test, you can like get you like meant like, uh, neurologically, you can get used to like a slight delay between your brain and your hands. Like it's weird. So like coffees, like you pick it up and you're used to it. This is like, the phone is reacting in real time to my fingers and I'm navigating the phone. It's like all working and I perceived nothing.
27:08 Alex Cranz? And that's, yeah.
27:09 Nilay Patel? Right. And it had, it had the dynamic range in the camera and in the display to show me my phone display at the proper exposure. While the room was in the proper exposure, which basically no camera can do.
27:22 Alex Cranz? Because usually it would blow out.
27:24 Nilay Patel? Usually your phone blows out.
27:25 Alex Cranz? Yeah, so you could see all the text.
27:28 Speaker 05 I mean, I would be interested in like to mention, you mentioned earlier, what it would work like in a dark room. You were in a well lit demo space. It's bright in there.
27:36 Nilay Patel? For sure. But I'll just figure it out. Like, that's just like straight up incredible. That works. I've never seen that work in any other product. And then the other one that really got me was they put me in a VR theater. They forced me to watch Avatar Way of the Water. Apple has made me watch so much Avatar these past two days. I've seen more of that movie than I ever intend to see. And when I were in the theater and I raised my hands and asked about aspect ratios, like you do. And I can see my hands because it broke through the VR immersion. So I just knew my hands were in the air and it's like, these are your hands. It wasn't cartoon meta quest hands.
28:11 Alex Cranz? It was like your hands.
28:11 Nilay Patel? It was just my hands. And then the person next to me started talking and she just faded into view, breaking the immersion.
28:19 Alex Cranz? That's cool.
28:20 Nilay Patel? And it's like, oh, that's sick. Like, just all of that was like, I can't believe any of that just happened. This, this computer on my face figured all of that out at once. It's playing a 4K movie in what appears to be HDR. It's resized the pixels of that movie to whatever weird aspect ratio cinema situation that I figured out. It's identified my hands. It's broken those through in real time, passed those over the video. It heard another person talking, figured out her outline, mastered and brought her like, and just doing this on my face.
28:53 Nilay Patel? That's crazy. And by the way, we weren't plugged in for any of this, right? There's running out the battery for all of this.
28:58 Alex Cranz? That's, I know, it sounds super impressive. Did, did your eyes appear? Do you know if your eyes appeared when you like, when she talked to you?
29:05 Nilay Patel? None of that works.
29:06 David Pierce? Yeah, I know. The, the eyes didn't appear. We couldn't make our own avatars, which Apple calls personas for the FaceTime stuff, but we could see other people's. There's a lot of this stuff that is clearly not finished. Like, one of the theories I've heard, and this is just a theory, but it makes a lot of sense, is that one of the reasons the Apple executives weren't wearing them is because the eye stuff on the outside is not ready yet. And yeah, a lot of that stuff is not finished. That was one of the things I wanted. To see was like what somebody's eyes look like because I have a lot of questions.
29:33 David Pierce? But yeah, we didn't get to see that stuff.
29:34 Nilay Patel? So that's the hardware and I I don't want to discount like that is a lot of hardware to enable these experiences.
29:40 David Pierce? Yeah.
29:41 Nilay Patel? The big question, I think, Alex, this is the this is the split between the people who just looked at what they saw and the people who experienced it. People experienced are like, wow, that's a lot of hardware. All right, like, that's cool. Like, I love a gadget. Then there's like, do I want any of this? What is it for? So we should take a break and come back and talk about that aspect of it because that's where things start to spiral, I think, in wild and exciting ways. All right, we're gonna take a break.
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31:20 Nilay Patel? Okay, we're back. So we talked about the hardware, we put it on our face, we looked at the stuff. What was your favorite demo?
31:26 David Pierce? I think for me, it was the second sort of movie thing that Apple showed, which is I also saw the Avatar demo. I've actually seen the movie. It's very good. It lasts substantially longer than the Vision Pro's battery, which I think is great, but.
31:41 David Pierce? But then they did a thing where they showed immersive videos is kind of what they call it. And this is the kind of demo you see on every
31:47 Speaker 05 Yes.
31:48 David Pierce? On every headset ever, right? They're like, here's the 360 video. You can turn your head and there's more video. It's one of those things that is like the most standard tech demo of all time for these headsets. So it was like, watch a basketball game from above the backboard, or soccer game from behind the goal. You can see some rhinos, just like being rhinos. And it's all this sort of big, wide panoramic video. And it was the first one of those that I was like, oh, this is not just like a tech demo of how you can move your head. This is like a cool thing that I would actually watch. And that was the moment it really sort of turned for me from like, oh, the fact that this is better changes what it's for, to me, right? Whereas like, I would watch Avatar on that thing in the way that like, there's absolutely no chance in hell, I'm gonna watch a three hour movie on the Meta Quest.
32:33 Speaker 05 Yeah, definitely that.
32:34 David Pierce? But I would watch, I would spend time just sitting on my couch, watching something. Like, what does that mean for me as a person? We should talk about right now. But that was the thing that jumped out to me is like, there's actually something to this kind of filling the world around me with content that I can actually get behind.
32:50 Speaker 05 Yeah.
32:50 Alex Cranz? Yeah, I thought it was, you both wrote, you both wrote these hands ons after seeing this thing. And that was really interesting, because David, you, you talked about how this is just the TV. They, they finally made the TV.
32:59 Nilay Patel? David stole my headline. I'm really upset about it, and I kind of don't want to.
33:03 Speaker 05 Full disclosure, Neelai provided the headline. It was like, this is a really good headline, we should run it. And then he was really mad after we run it that it wasn't his headline.
33:09 David Pierce? Yeah, the story published in Neelai, I was like, damn it, I should have run that headline with my name on it.
33:13 Alex Cranz? Neelai, you, you talked about how like, you, it kind of felt lonely, in a way. And I, and I thought that was a really interesting tension, because like, yeah, as a person who lives alone, sure, this sounds great for me. I don't have to have a TV ever again. I could just have this and wear that. But if you don't live alone, this would probably be a not great experience to watch all your content on.
33:34 Nilay Patel? Yeah, I don't want to get too philosophical.
33:37 Alex Cranz? Right.
33:37 Nilay Patel? In Apple's podcast studio. Weird place to get deep.
33:41 Speaker 07 Tim just kicks the door in.
33:43 Nilay Patel? Yeah, at any moment, Tim Cook is gonna have me arrested. It's weird to not be looking at the same stuff as other people. Right? To be perceiving reality and have it to be objectively different reality that you know is different reality than someone else. To be like, I'm looking at a dinosaur and there's two people in the room who are not having that experience is fucking weird. Right? It's just weird. Like, I'm having all these feelings about what's happening to me and they're like, huh, you know, and like, taking notes about you or whatever they're doing. Like, that's weird. Watching sports, unless it's a playoff game, I like to do with other people. Playoff games are very lonely, very isolated experience. Right? Like, just these, you're supposed to watch, James Cameron does not want you watching Avatar
34:27 Nilay Patel? at home by yourself. He wants you in the theater. Tom Cruise is out there, like, trying to have Christopher Nolan assassinated so he can get the IMAX theaters. Like, there's just something about spending time with other people and literally looking at the same thing at the same time that is like, the human condition. And this thing puts you way away from that, right? Where the answer is, both of you will be wearing the headset, which is super weird. Like, and that's the, that's the only answer that exists right now. And I just think, like, there's a lot, there's another 10 years of Verge coverage in that, like, I know what we're doing for the next 10 years, right? This thing, but right now, it's like, it's meant to be like a MacBook display that you wear on your face. That's David's angle, right? It's a, they made an Apple TV for your face.
35:10 David Pierce? Basically. Yeah. I mean, Dan, I'm curious what your thought was, because there's like, Apple made the case, basically, that it's a, it's a productivity device, so you can, like, array a bunch of screens on your desk. It's a content capture device, which is basically, they have these sort of like 3D volumetric videos and photos you can take, and it's an entertainment device for watching stuff. These are three things I know you care very much about individually and together.
35:31 Nilay Patel? I do, yeah.
35:33 David Pierce? I'm curious what it all kind of made you feel.
35:35 Nilay Patel? I think of those three, the content capture is a nonstarter. Like, I, the demo, taking a picture of my kids wearing goggles, my wife would just literally leave me.
35:45 Speaker 07 You're not gonna do that?
35:46 Nilay Patel? I don't foresee myself doing that. I think that the, the first one, the productivity thing, is kind of interesting if it is done well. I do not think that I could wear that thing for eight to 10 hours a day.
35:56 Speaker 05 And like not just boil my eyes, trying to like blog and read articles and stuff like that. But the idea of having like an infinite canvas in front of me that I can like put as many windows as I want and stuff like that is kind of intriguing. And then I think, you know, like you were saying, you would watch Avatar on it. And I think that like if you are alone, maybe on an airplane, that is like an area where I do not want to be watching the same thing as other people.
36:20 Nilay Patel? So the airplane, okay, first of all, one of the best airplane experiences I've ever had my entire life is when the Baywatch movie went viral on like a long flight, like cross country and like one person started watching Baywatch and then all of the people started watching Baywatch. It was just, I've never seen anything like that in my life.
36:39 Speaker 05 Aside from watching the Baywatch movie with the rest of my 737 flightmates.
36:45 Nilay Patel? The other reason the airplane one is, it's just the Baywatch thing. That's the only thing I care about. The other reason it's fascinating to me is that's the one where you are definitely in VR.
36:53 Speaker 05 Yes, you would be in a full VR environment.
36:55 Nilay Patel? And there's a reason they did not show the airplane demo from the perspective of the wearer. They showed the person sitting on the plane wearing the headset. But that is not a mixed reality or an augmented reality situation.
37:07 Speaker 05 And I don't think that like, even watching it at home, you wouldn't really want a mixed augmented reality situation if you're watching a movie. The whole point is to be immersive, right? Otherwise, just watch the movie on a TV where it's there in front of you and you probably already have it, right?
37:21 Nilay Patel? This is where I think the form factor of the thing, which is a VR headset.
37:25 Speaker 05 Yep.
37:26 Nilay Patel? We can just be honest with each other. Here, they're all looking at me. It's weird, man. But the form factor of the thing leads them into places where the desired product would not take them.
37:37 Speaker 05 Yep.
37:37 Nilay Patel? So the desired product is augmented reality glasses. You can never put a light seal around you and block out the world and say you're on the top of a mountain watching Avatar. But this thing lets you do that. And I think you have to make the case for it. You have to say, well, there's big screens in front of you. And that's weird because if you keep stepping down the curve to where they want to go, eventually they're going to ship you a pair of glasses and they will not be able to do that. And I don't know how that goes, right? Maybe what everyone wants is a bunch of virtual displays to run Safari and a movie and a FaceTime call instead of having physical monitors.
38:13 Alex Cranz? That's my dream.
38:13 Nilay Patel? Or maybe what we want is actually augmented reality. And that is like, I just don't, again, half an hour in the device, couldn't tell you the split. But that seems like a very challenging, right? If the goal is augmented reality.
38:25 Speaker 05 Right. The augmented reality would be like you're wearing the glasses, but you are watching your TV. And then what are the glasses doing around your TV?
38:32 Nilay Patel? And what I mean by the plane example specifically to make it clear is if you do the big screens on a, if you're sitting, imagine sitting on a plane and you're like, I'm going to do the big TV in augmented reality. Where's the screen gonna go?
38:45 David Pierce? Right. If you project it on the seat in front of you, you have a hundred inch screen, two inches from your face.
38:51 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
38:51 David Pierce? That's bad. If you put it four rows ahead of you, there's just a bunch of seats between you and your TV. So, so like you're saying, the only correct thing to do there is just occlude everything else.
39:00 Nilay Patel? Yep.
39:00 David Pierce? And sort of disappear into a thing where the, the screen just fills your view. And that just is a VR headset.
39:05 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
39:05 David Pierce? I think it's the right call for that place. Like that is what I would want to do. I don't need to see the other people or the seats.
39:11 Nilay Patel? You cannot do that with a pair of glasses unless you have a bunch of like glasses accessories, right? And that's, so that's just like a fascinating, like form factor, like result.
39:20 Alex Cranz? What if the plan is to, to keep it as goggles though? And the goggles just get smaller and smaller until you're wearing like welder goggles. And then welder goggles are the new hit thing.
39:29 Nilay Patel? Those glasses with the things on the side, like, like Mad Max?
39:32 Alex Cranz? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like everybody just looks like that.
39:34 Nilay Patel? When I think of Tim Cook's greatest ambitions, I think of Mad Max glasses. Tim Cook secretly extraordinarily steampunk.
39:40 David Pierce? Those like wraparound Oakleys would do it too.
39:42 Nilay Patel? Yeah, some blades.
39:43 Alex Cranz? Oh, I can't do those.
39:45 Nilay Patel? I bet Fred Faderigi has some steampunk in him. That's just my, I saw him playing Black Sabbath on a, on a triple headed guitar. I feel it. So that's, but that's weird, right? Like this form, this VR form factor.
39:56 Speaker 05 Well, I, I, I think that like, yes, you are totally right. But if they came out with this and you couldn't, with the form factor that they have today, that they are releasing. And you couldn't do what David just described of going into full VR. People would be like, why can't I just go into full VR? I'm wearing a VR headset. And I can see that like for today, for this product, for what it can do, for the capabilities it has. That is an experience that makes sense. If we get to the point where AR glasses, like you're talking about, that do not have the occlusion and things like that. Maybe that experience just kind of fades away or the track divides and we have goggles for that experience. And we have AR glasses for, I don't know, knowing your name, birthday and.
40:34 Nilay Patel? Oh, so this is the other thing. So I, as Rich Housewives as well now, the killer app for glasses for me is being able to know faces and names. And if I could just remember these people's names, I would be the most powerful politician in America. Vote Patel. I cannot, and thus I will host the show.
40:53 Nilay Patel? Apple doesn't show any of that. There's none of that there. And there's a whole stack of problems to that. Worldwide facial recognition database being the first one. But Apple didn't show any of that. They didn't show hardly any augmented reality. Apart from the very fact of displaying screens in space, which is a challenging augmented reality problem. Right? I don't mean to denigrate that, but the, the things that they've been showing us for years. There's a chess board on this table and you're going to play chess on it. Not there. The only augmented reality demo I think we actually got was the butterfly and the dinosaur experience landed on your finger.
41:28 David Pierce? Right. Yeah. You held out your finger and a butterfly sort of flapped through the room and landed on your finger. And I'm told it didn't land on everybody's finger, but I think that's a lie. I think.
41:36 Speaker 05 They're like, you hold out your finger, it may land on you. And I was like, oh, my special.
41:39 David Pierce? Yeah. But I think, I think.
41:41 Nilay Patel? You are.
41:42 Speaker 05 Yeah, I thought so. I mean, I know so. I was like, this butterfly is coming. Can't resist. Riz God over here.
41:50 David Pierce? We're not even touching that, but I think, I think the, this like impossible place Apple has put itself in with this is it has to make the case for a device that exists right now and costs $3,500. And Apple is not the kind of company to come out and say what like Snap has been saying for years, which is like, this is the very beginning of a very long road.
42:09 Speaker 05 We don't expect anyone to buy this one. We're going to make many more.
42:11 David Pierce? Like, look at this cool vending machine, right? Like, that's, that's not a thing. Apple does. So what they have to do is say, here is the best thing we can do right now. It's very expensive. You should totally buy it. You should totally make apps for it. But also you and we both know that we're on this long road to somewhere that is not only better. It's not like an iPad that gets like faster and bigger and the battery lasts longer. And that like slowly changes things over time. It's going to be fundamentally different in its final form. And so they're trying to sort of explain where we're going, but also convince you that where we are is worthwhile. And that's really hard to do simultaneously. And I think like the thing we talked about in the run up to this was that the whole industry was out there like desperately waiting for Apple to like, explain to the world why you need one of these things.
42:56 David Pierce? And I think of all the things that we saw, that's the thing that fell sort of the most flat for me. Was that just, I didn't come out of this being like, I know exactly what this thing is going to be useful for, for lots of people.
43:08 Nilay Patel? They did make one argument that tracked right into your, your thesis, your, your piece with an excellent headline. A totally original headline.
43:15 David Pierce? Do you want to co byline? I can put this.
43:18 Nilay Patel? Just like every other paragraph.
43:20 David Pierce? Headlined by Neelai Patel.
43:22 Nilay Patel? And this was in a keynote, right? There was Mike Rockwell who said, yes, it's a big number, but imagine you're buying a big screen TV and a soundbar and all this content, all this. Just imagine all the screens you're buying. That would be $3,500.
43:37 David Pierce? Assuming you buy exclusively Apple.
43:38 Speaker 05 Second half of that line is, and it doesn't do nearly as much as.
43:41 Nilay Patel? Right.
43:41 Speaker 05 This.
43:42 Nilay Patel? And so again, the, the point that they're making is like, this is very much a consumption device. We have not yet gotten to, right? You can, you can just run Safari on it. And I did open Safari and like scroll through text and it looked great. Right? Like you can just use this as a monitor. The resolution is high enough. You can mirror your Mac to it and get a Mac display on it. Unclear what the resolution will be because your Mac has to support it and the headset has to like. That's some wonky question.
44:08 Speaker 05 They didn't demo that for us.
44:10 Nilay Patel? We didn't see that stuff. You can make a FaceTime call in it and send a 3D avatar to someone else. Like, you can do a bunch of this stuff, and I think what everyone has caught up in is the form factor of it. Because if they actually produced the glasses and said you could do all this stuff, we'd be like, that's pretty rad. But it's a VR headset. Like, the Quest Pro is not a good product, and you should not buy it.
44:34 Speaker 05 True.
44:34 Nilay Patel? It is exactly, I think it started $1,500, so it's exactly the $1,500 version of this. And now they've dropped the price to $1,000, just like get them off the shelf. Like, you can see exactly the $2,000 difference in quality and ambition between these two products. But in terms of what Meta says about what the Quest Pro should do, it mirrors your laptop with a variety of clunky software dongles. It shows you a bunch of workspaces, right? That was the thing that went viral with the Quest Pro, right? Was, here's four monitors in front of you.
45:03 Speaker 05 Yep.
45:03 Nilay Patel? That's the same thing. Yes, 3D personas in FaceTime, which we should actually talk about a little bit more. They're very neat and worth examining. Mark Zuckerberg's like, you're some cartoon shit. You may have legs, you may not. But it's still just like talking to each other.
45:18 Alex Cranz? You can really see that difference between like a company that's been doing hardware for 30 years, 40 years, and a company that does social media and just pivoted to hardware like four years ago.
45:28 Nilay Patel? Yeah, and look, Meta is, um, there was a disastrous startup called Magic Leap, which we've talked about on the show. They've hired a bunch of those engineers, they've acquired a bunch of those patents. Like, these are ideas that have been around for a long time. Uh, Ronnie Abramovich, the Magic Leap CEO, I think he was tweeting like, "This is the greatest hits reel of every VR demo for the past 10 years." And I think that's, that's right. Like, we've seen a lot of these experiences before. The basketball one is like a perfect example of this. I cannot tell you how many times I've been told that I will put something on my face and sit courtside. Yeah, constantly. Like endlessly, then this ships, like you can watch YouTube Pilots and like spin around with a mouse if you want to. You can do this today. Apple invented a new video format called Apple Immersive Video, which it will not tell you the specs of.
46:13 Nilay Patel? And apparently has a proprietary new camera developed to shoot an Apple Immersive Video, which it will not talk about. I was like, you made a new camera? And they're like, yes.
46:21 Alex Cranz? An NBA is totally gonna buy one.
46:23 Nilay Patel? Tell me anything about it? No. Are you gonna ship it? I don't know. Like, but they concocted these demos at like the highest level of their own ambition to make sure they were great. And so this is the best executed riff. I'm like, all these are very familiar ideas. But the ideas are inherently familiar. And that little like gap between is this what's gonna make me buy it? Is this what's gonna make me spend even more money? I agree. Like, well, that's what, that's why the developers have it now.
46:50 David Pierce? Right. And I think that's the like, we're on this funny spectrum from you have the Meta Quest, where it's like tech demos that are not real things that anyone would do in their life. This demo was like, okay, this, you've made just these basic things so much better that it's not just like you made my computer slightly faster. It's like you've, you've actually changed the set of things I am willing to do on this device by making it this much better. Like, I would watch an NBA game like that. It's kind of a weird camera angle. You can't see very much, but if you, sitting courtside actually kind of sucks. But if it's as good as we saw in the demos, right? Like, every sentence we say on here should be, if it's preceded by, if it's as good as we saw in these incredibly controlled on rails demos. I opened the Notes app and I got yelled at about it. Like, we don't know most things about this.
47:33 David Pierce? But the, the thing after that is still, is this worth the price to you? And I think overwhelmingly the Quest Pro is like, well, it's not very good and it's not very expensive. So no, I don't want it. And this is now we're getting to, it's pretty good and very expensive. Is that something?
47:51 Nilay Patel? If those use cases appeal to you. Because I think one of the other things to Alex's point that a lot of the kind of shruggy reaction I've seen is from a lot of people who are expecting VR experiences and want to use it for VR experiences because it has that.
48:05 Speaker 05 Incredible hardware and displays and things like that. And it's not doing gaming and it's not doing flight simulators and it's not doing racing simulators. And all these things that are like really high end VR experiences where there is an audience that will pay $4,000 for a headset to make that better.
48:19 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
48:20 Speaker 05 But like you, this is, this is a self-contained MacBook on your face. It's not probably powerful enough to run Flight Simulator or any of those. And you can't plug in your GPU on the floor. So like.
48:32 Nilay Patel? Also known as a PS5.
48:33 Speaker 05 Also known as a PS5.
48:34 Nilay Patel? My good old 4 GPU.
48:36 David Pierce? Battery in one pocket, GPU in the other pocket. Let's go.
48:40 Speaker 05 Or a PC gaming rig or whatever it is, right? And so like, there's kind of like that audience who has been in this world for a while has been watching the, the development and the tracking and they see this as like, oh, this is the next leap in the technology. But we can't use it for that because Apple's kind of gating it to.
48:55 Nilay Patel? Yeah, but.
48:56 Speaker 05 The use cases that it wants.
48:57 Nilay Patel? I'm one of these people, I got a 4 GPU situation. I'm with you, here are my people.
49:02 Alex Cranz? You've got to be.
49:04 Nilay Patel? Like that is a tiny market that has accomplished very little.
49:08 Speaker 05 How big is the market that'll spend $3,500 on this?
49:10 Nilay Patel? I, I think it's also a teeny tiny market, but I think Apple's ambitions are way bigger than, Apple doesn't need this thing to make money, right?
49:18 David Pierce? For a long time.
49:19 Nilay Patel? If Apple's like, we gotta pay for this whole program. Tim Cook is gonna be like, I don't know, make it 35%. You know, and so it's over.
49:27 Nilay Patel? They could just do it. And like very few other companies in the space, save for Meta, have that ability.
49:33 Speaker 05 Yeah.
49:33 Nilay Patel? And I, I think that's just a part of the dynamic here is like we're thinking through. Because Apple's just gonna stick with it. Even Microsoft, God bless the number of commenters in our hands-on posts who are like, the HoloLens did it. My friends, the HoloLens came out eight years ago, it was a flop and Microsoft axed the entire division. Well, you can keep typing it, it doesn't matter.
49:55 David Pierce? It did it. The kin did it first.
49:59 David Pierce? No, I think the next nine months, I think, are going to be fascinating. And Apple has done this before, like, announce a product way before it launches. And typically, what happens is a lot changes in that time. Because developers start to see it, they start to use it, they start to have ideas, they start to build stuff. Apple changes stuff as they, you know, as things move along and time goes and people start to see it, it's out in the world. And so, like you said, there's a lot of stuff we haven't seen. I absolutely, I would bet my life that Fitness Plus ends up being like a meaningful part of this thing. And we haven't seen any of it.
50:28 Nilay Patel? So this is, they showed us meditation, they did a one-minute meditation. Again, a very odd thing to do with other people in the room, especially when the voice is like, be grateful. And it's like, I don't know, man. I'm pretty grateful, like, generally, maybe not in this situation. But Supernatural exists. Alex and I both use it on the Quest 2. It's a totally fun experience. It sells a bunch of Quest headsets, that's why Facebook bought it. They bought it out notably from under Apple, who also wanted it. And I know for a fact that it is a killer app for that platform, which is why both companies wanted it. And the median Supernatural user is a woman over 40. Right? And that is, that's how you grow a platform.
51:11 David Pierce? Fitness was a very real killer app for the Quest.
51:14 Nilay Patel? And I don't mean like, fitness for women over 40. What I mean specifically is like, you go attract a demographic that is not inclined to be an early adopter of a bleeding-edge gadget. You show utility to a huge thing, and you expand your user base by providing utility to like, average consumers, right? Apple has not shown, and at $3,500, I don't think they need to. But Fitness Plus is the thing that gets them there.
51:36 David Pierce? I think so too, yeah.
51:37 Alex Cranz? So yeah, that was actually Addy's theory too, is that that's going to be the killer app for it, is like, fitness. Because I believe we saw, you guys saw, like, there's stabilization bands, right? To like, there's like a third strap to put on it, so it'll stabilize and stuff. And this is something that like, yeah, you can imagine having somebody running alongside you. You can imagine having yourself jogging alongside you, so you can keep pace with yourself. I would never do that. This was John Porter's suggestion.
52:05 Nilay Patel? This embodied, disembodied ghost of yourself. That's glasses, I'm telling you, this is glasses stuff. This is not ski goggle VR headset stuff.
52:12 Alex Cranz? Right, but I think that idea of like, having a fitness coach, having that fitness like, even more intimate than it already is with Supernatural, than it already is with Fitness Plus in its current, like, incarnation. Would be really, really compelling, particularly for those people who are already spending $2,500 on a Peloton, right?
52:31 Nilay Patel? Yep.
52:31 Alex Cranz? Like, oh, $3,500 and I get a personal coach?
52:34 Nilay Patel? But I think the open question here is going to be, how do you control it? Right? Like, Beat Saber is a fitness application, Supernatural is a fitness application. You're holding controllers to do those things.
52:44 Alex Cranz? Yeah, you will look like a dumbass with this, just doing like...
52:48 Nilay Patel? Just cross chops.
52:49 Speaker 05 Just pinching your fingers.
52:50 Nilay Patel? We'll see. I mean, like, there's a universe of potential third-party accessories and stuff. Like, it's so early.
52:57 David Pierce? And now that this is out, we're going to start to see that stuff trickle in a big way over the next nine months.
53:03 Nilay Patel? Oh, without question.
53:03 David Pierce? Yeah.
53:04 Nilay Patel? All right, we should take a break.
53:05 David Pierce? Yep.
53:06 Nilay Patel? Come back with Marquez. And do what?
53:08 David Pierce? Yeah, it's gonna be great.
53:09 Nilay Patel? We'll be right back.
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54:01 Speaker 08 Trying to locate news sources that reliably separate fact from fiction can seem like looking for a needle in a haystack. That's why The Guardian is launching Stateside with Kai Wright and Carter Sherman, a conversation with experts who slow down the news and wrestle with the questions we all have about what's actually happening in the world. Three times a week, hosts Kai and Carter utilize all the reporting resources The Guardian has to discuss the news, international affairs, climate, culture, sports, lifestyle, fashion, and wellness. And The Guardian is not billionaire-owned, meaning they're free to report the whole picture without interference. Go to theguardian.com/stateside to learn more. And listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube. That's theguardian.com/stateside.
54:55 Nilay Patel? We're back. And boy, do we have some special guests. The waveform crew is here. Welcome.
54:59 David Pierce? Thank you for having us.
55:00 Speaker 09 Thanks for having us.
55:01 Nilay Patel? David, Andrew Marquez, we're here. I still have this David.
55:06 David Pierce? Hi.
55:06 Nilay Patel? D1.
55:07 David Pierce? I feel less good now.
55:07 Speaker 09 D1.
55:08 David Pierce? We've like, we've improved David. You're DA. And now.
55:11 Nilay Patel? D prime?
55:12 Speaker 09 D prime.
55:13 David Pierce? I like that.
55:14 Nilay Patel? Uh, it's good.
55:15 Speaker 09 D max.
55:17 Nilay Patel? We gotta stop it. Dan Seaver's here. Kranz is here. David, D1, has promised me that he can execute a lightning round.
55:27 David Pierce? Look dude, you called me DP2 for a decade.
55:28 Speaker 09 Yeah, the other is DP squared.
55:30 David Pierce? This is better.
55:31 Nilay Patel? Look, David Pogue talked shit about us in a CES keynote one time and he's dead to me. So we're good. All right. David has promised he can run a lightning round.
55:39 David Pierce? Okay, so the way we're gonna do this is we have, we have five categories about things that got announced. We went really fast through all the news. So we're gonna just very quickly go through the stuff that like, we thought was coolest and best and most interesting. And the way this is gonna work is we're just gonna go down the line. So David, you're gonna go first on all of them. Alex, you're gonna go last on all of them.
55:56 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
55:56 David Pierce? And Alex, if you ruin it, I will be furious with you. I just want you to know. You too, David. Don't mess this up.
56:02 Alex Cranz? I promise I will probably not ruin it.
56:05 David Pierce? Okay, good. All right. So the five categories are the just straight up coolest thing announced. Oh, and I should say the one rule is you can't just answer to the Vision Pro for any of them. You have to pick a feature.
56:13 Speaker 09 I put that for everything.
56:14 David Pierce? Or a thing. You can't just, that's like, Apple things. Like, no, you can't do that. Uh, the thing you're most likely to use all the time, big or small, uh, the thing you care about that no one else cares about, which is the one I'm most excited about for everybody. Uh, the tiny, small thing that you are needlessly excited about, and the most, I can't wait for the next version, new feature. Sound good? Everybody good? Ready to go? All right.
56:36 Alex Cranz? Yep.
56:36 David Pierce? David, you go first. The straight up coolest thing that Apple announced.
56:39 Speaker 09 Okay. I really like the name drop feature. Now I can just tap your phone to everybody else and it just kinda sends it across.
56:44 Nilay Patel? This is a startup that Apple killed in 2008 and they finally Sherlocked them.
56:47 Speaker 09 I love it.
56:48 Nilay Patel? Do you know like, delayed Sherlock?
56:50 Speaker 09 Yeah.
56:51 David Pierce? That makes it even worse. All right, I like it.
56:54 Speaker 10 Andrew. I like how if somebody comes into your vision in the VR headset, you kind of like pops into in front of a window. So you can actually tell someone's in the room with you.
57:02 David Pierce? The thing where it just like fades in.
57:03 Speaker 10 Yeah.
57:04 David Pierce? It's nuts.
57:05 Speaker 07 Like a movie.
57:05 David Pierce? Love it.
57:06 Speaker 07 My guess. Huge fan of the 8K aerial video screensavers in macOS.
57:13 Nilay Patel? Very good. And they just pulled those from the Apple TV.
57:15 Speaker 07 Well, they shot new ones.
57:16 Nilay Patel? They got new ones.
57:17 Speaker 07 They shot new ones. That's why it's so cool.
57:19 Nilay Patel? Okay.
57:19 Speaker 07 Yeah.
57:19 David Pierce? Are those going to the Apple TV?
57:21 Speaker 07 I believe, well, they talked about on Sonoma, but I think they'll probably also put those on TV.
57:25 David Pierce? Okay. Because they are, sneakily, the best thing about the Apple TV is the screensavers.
57:28 Speaker 07 Fully agreed.
57:29 Nilay Patel? Apple is actually the master of putting a feature on one platform and then like five years later putting it on another platform.
57:33 Speaker 07 Yeah, that's true.
57:34 Nilay Patel? I mean, like, drive for it. All right, mine, I'm just doing dad stuff.
57:37 David Pierce? Love it.
57:38 Nilay Patel? It's the automatic deletion of verification codes for messages. Which is a straight up Android feature.
57:43 Speaker 07 Yeah.
57:43 Nilay Patel? But I'm happy about it.
57:44 David Pierce? And in mail and messages.
57:45 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
57:46 David Pierce? Great news. All right.
57:47 Nilay Patel? Because everybody uses Apple Mail.
57:48 David Pierce? My, Dan texted me right after and he was like, I'm done with My Stream. Back to Apple Mail.
57:54 Speaker 07 No way.
57:54 David Pierce? Mine was the sports example in the Vision Pro that Disney did where you can just like layer a bunch of different games from different channels all in one place. And you can like click through your favorite teams to see what's going on. Love that. Uh, Dan, what do you got?
58:05 Speaker 05 Uh, automatic grocery list sorting and reminders.
58:07 Speaker 07 Hmm, let's go.
58:09 David Pierce? Wow, it's possible I have that for another category. I love it. Uh, that is the single coolest thing that happened.
58:14 Speaker 05 It is. It is the coolest thing that I've ever announced.
58:16 Speaker 10 I got blown away on the dad category here.
58:19 Speaker 05 You know what? They didn't even announce it. I had to read it in the press release in the list of things that we did not get time for.
58:23 David Pierce? Spectacular. Alex, what do you got?
58:25 Alex Cranz? The hotel AirPlay collaboration where you can AirPlay your stuff in a hotel.
58:29 Nilay Patel? Another hot 2008 feature. They announced that like the year after they announced AirPlay and I think hotels are finally like, all right, we're done with USB-A ports.
58:39 David Pierce? We finally got rid of the 30-pin iPod dock.
58:41 Speaker 07 I was gonna say, every hotel, the iPhone, the iHome dock. Yeah.
58:45 Nilay Patel? Do they, they can announce that feature every year for the next 20 years.
58:48 Speaker 07 And it'll never come out.
58:49 Nilay Patel? Have you ever been to a hotel?
58:51 Alex Cranz? It's gonna be great. It's gonna be great. I believe in it.
58:54 David Pierce? All right, that's good. Um, all right, next category, starting with you, David. The thing, big or small, that you are most likely to use all the time.
59:00 Speaker 07 Transformer-based autocorrect.
59:02 David Pierce? Hmm.
59:02 Nilay Patel? Very good.
59:03 Speaker 07 All the time.
59:03 David Pierce? That's, that's the answer for all of us, I think.
59:06 Nilay Patel? That was their big like generative AI mention.
59:08 Speaker 07 They said twice they said anything about AI and it was, they said transformers twice.
59:13 Nilay Patel? Yeah, they were effectively like, yeah, all of you, chat GPT is cute. We own the keyboard.
59:17 Speaker 07 Yeah.
59:19 Speaker 07 Yeah, so much better.
59:20 David Pierce? I love it. Andrew.
59:21 Nilay Patel? Uh, annoyingly, the PDF iPad stuff I'll probably use quite a bit, as boring as that is.
59:27 David Pierce? Unbelievable enthusiasm for PDFs.
59:29 Speaker 07 Cheers, I was gonna say.
59:31 David Pierce? Really good, yeah.
59:32 Speaker 07 Yeah, roar from the crowd. Uh, for me, it's the faster media engine encoding in the M2 Ultra specifically. We, we do back to back exports a lot and then just gonna enjoy that a lot.
59:43 Nilay Patel? You're a deeply on brand.
59:45 Speaker 07 I'm sorry, it's just, it's what I do. I do it a lot. A lot of renders, yeah.
59:50 David Pierce? Eli, what do you got?
59:50 Nilay Patel? Air tag sharing.
59:51 Speaker 07 Hmm.
59:52 Nilay Patel? Not stalking my wife is an important improvement in Iowa 17.
59:57 David Pierce? Together you can stalk someone else.
59:59 Nilay Patel? Yeah, like she has the car keys right now and she's like, how do I turn this off?
1:00:05 Nilay Patel? Cause it's like someone is following you.
1:00:09 David Pierce? Alright, alright, I like it. Uh, mine is the live voicemail answering machine. Again, it's possible I'm never gonna answer another phone call. Like, I'm just gonna, I'm gonna screen every phone call for the rest of my life.
1:00:19 Nilay Patel? This is my answer for another one.
1:00:21 David Pierce? Okay.
1:00:21 Nilay Patel? We'll come back around. Cause that one's hilarious.
1:00:23 David Pierce? Dan, what do you got?
1:00:23 Speaker 05 Uh, so I'm most likely gonna use automatic grocery list sorting and reminders.
1:00:28 Speaker 07 I sense a theme.
1:00:29 Nilay Patel? Did you pick that for everyone?
1:00:31 Speaker 05 I don't know. This is your vision pro.
1:00:32 Speaker 05 I guess we will find out.
1:00:34 Nilay Patel? Oh my god.
1:00:35 David Pierce? I will kick you off this podcast.
1:00:36 Speaker 05 I warned you I was gonna make everyone really mad.
1:00:39 David Pierce? Alex, what do you got?
1:00:40 Alex Cranz? Dan, you're gonna have to redo that because my plan is also to say that it's the hotel airplane.
1:00:48 Alex Cranz? If they do it.
1:00:49 Speaker 05 Can you tell why Alex and I work together so much?
1:00:52 Nilay Patel? Here's my question for you. Okay, what comes out first? The full CarPlay integration? They announced last year, they're not talking about this.
1:00:59 Speaker 07 That's not coming out.
1:01:00 Nilay Patel? Or hotel airplane. Apple makes a car or hotel airplane?
1:01:04 Speaker 07 Neither.
1:01:04 Alex Cranz? Apple makes a car.
1:01:07 David Pierce? I'm gonna bet the feels.
1:01:09 Speaker 09 Cybertruck.
1:01:11 David Pierce? All right, let's keep going. Next category, the thing you care about that nobody else cares about.
1:01:15 Speaker 09 Okay, there's an iMessage update where if you have a group message and there's iPhone users and Android users, you can still use iMessage's features. So if you get... Yes, they didn't talk about this. So if you have one Android user in the chat...
1:01:29 Nilay Patel? Which is always Marquez in your chats, right?
1:01:30 Speaker 07 It's me.
1:01:32 Speaker 09 They're not going to ruin it for everybody else and then they'll crowd up on you and tell you to get an iPhone. Tell your mom to get an iPhone.
1:01:38 Nilay Patel? But it's actually a feature, so at the end it's like, "Get an iPhone."
1:01:42 Speaker 09 It's just a little reminder.
1:01:43 Speaker 07 Pick Marquez's phone every time. I'll have a miserable time, but you'll all be okay.
1:01:47 Speaker 09 Yeah, so the Android users will probably not see anything that you're doing and it'll be very confusing, but for the iPhone users, it will be more enjoyable, I guess.
1:01:55 David Pierce? I mean, anything that gets rid of the so-and-so liked a message thing is a victory.
1:02:00 Nilay Patel? This is the official Dieter Bohn Memorial RCS mention.
1:02:02 David Pierce? Yeah.
1:02:03 Nilay Patel? It's done. All right, moving on.
1:02:04 Speaker 10 Um, standby mode and specifically how it can tell like the MagSafe chargers in different places in your house and how it changes up kind of the views that you have on each of them.
1:02:13 David Pierce? Oh, you can have different standbys for different...
1:02:15 Speaker 10 Yeah, they said like it will know where you're putting it on. So like if by your bed you have like your alarm clock or whatever, and then I believe in like your kitchen, if you have a different view in standby mode.
1:02:24 Nilay Patel? I'm dying to know how it figures this out.
1:02:26 Speaker 10 What? I didn't say I know how to do it. I just said it sounds cool.
1:02:29 Speaker 09 All the MagSafe chargers have a handshake with the iPhone, so it's like device by device.
1:02:33 David Pierce? That's cool. I'm into that. All right, Marquez, what do you got?
1:02:36 Speaker 07 Uh, the ability to interact inside of a widget in iPadOS and just check a box and not have to open the app to check the box.
1:02:42 David Pierce? You're gonna get a tick tick widget and it's gonna change your life forever.
1:02:46 Speaker 07 It's so, it's about...
1:02:47 Nilay Patel? You know, that's really good.
1:02:48 David Pierce? Marquez, Dan and I are like America's three weirdest to-do list app people.
1:02:54 Speaker 07 We're gonna start a podcast later where we just talk about this feature.
1:02:57 David Pierce? It's gonna be 19 hours long.
1:02:58 Speaker 09 Productivity apps.
1:02:59 David Pierce? All right, Neela, what do you got?
1:03:00 Nilay Patel? Uh, mine's super wonky. It's gonna be the Verchastity of all. They announced the ability to pin web apps to the dock.
1:03:07 David Pierce? Shit, that's mine. That's also mine.
1:03:09 Nilay Patel? That is the end of Electron apps on the Mac, as long as those apps support Chrome. This is like an hour of wonky Verchat. There's like 10 people on this thing that like make an hour show about this one feature. "You're my people, I love you," but Apple's coming for Electron. It's good, and battery life will go up in some way and then down as Chrome finds a way to make features exclusive to Chrome.
1:03:30 David Pierce? So that's mine, too.
1:03:31 Nilay Patel? No reaction from the group.
1:03:33 David Pierce? Yeah, no.
1:03:33 Nilay Patel? On this one.
1:03:34 David Pierce? This is good. You've hit the no one cares but me thing.
1:03:36 Speaker 10 It's specifically something no one else cares about.
1:03:38 Speaker 07 That's the whole thing.
1:03:39 David Pierce? Two thirds of the audience just turned off the show. Yeah. No, I said the same thing.
1:03:45 Speaker 05 Man, he got you.
1:03:46 David Pierce? I said the same thing because I think this is Apple's way of trying to get around all of the App Store regulation is to be like, look, you can turn web apps into apps.
1:03:54 Nilay Patel? See, you're like deeply cynical about it. They're like, screw you, Europe. And I'm like, Apple's making the web better.
1:04:00 David Pierce? Yeah, they're like, what is an app if not an icon?
1:04:02 Nilay Patel? All right, we gotta move on from this deadbeat silence.
1:04:04 David Pierce? Dan, what do you got?
1:04:05 Nilay Patel? Opposite of reaction.
1:04:06 Speaker 05 So the thing I care about that no one else cares about is definitely.
1:04:08 Nilay Patel? Don't do it. Oh, my God.
1:04:11 David Pierce? Alex, what do you have? If you say hotel airplane, you're not getting the next one. I'm ruling you out of the round five if you say hotel airplane again. Dan's already out.
1:04:18 Speaker 09 You can say it.
1:04:19 David Pierce? This is the last time Dan will ever be on the Vergecast.
1:04:20 Alex Cranz? I'm gonna say it because it is.
1:04:22 David Pierce? There it is.
1:04:22 Alex Cranz? Like, if it actually happens, it's incredible.
1:04:25 Nilay Patel? I gotta say, the waveform crew showed up on our show, prepared and ready to go. And the Vergecast crew is like, hotel airplane and grocery lists.
1:04:33 David Pierce? Yep. All right, two more categories. We're gonna do this really fast. The tiny, small thing that you are unnecessarily pumped about.
1:04:38 Speaker 09 Okay, Apple Fitness Plus now has workout schedules. So they can like, get you to do an entire week's work of things so I don't have to keep subscribing to things for one month for free and then canceling them.
1:04:49 David Pierce? That's good. That is tiny and small and good. I like it.
1:04:51 Speaker 09 Yeah.
1:04:51 David Pierce? Andrew, what do you got?
1:04:52 Speaker 10 In the hiking activity on watch, there's an auto waypoint for the last time you had cell reception.
1:04:56 Nilay Patel? That one rules.
1:04:57 Speaker 10 I thought that was really, really cool and useful.
1:04:59 Nilay Patel? So smart. And then they have the SOS one for the last time you had anyone's reception.
1:05:02 Speaker 09 Also good.
1:05:03 Nilay Patel? Even better.
1:05:03 Speaker 10 Yeah, that was awesome.
1:05:04 Speaker 09 Mine is the Mac Pro.
1:05:06 David Pierce? Tiny, small thing.
1:05:07 Speaker 09 Yep.
1:05:07 David Pierce? Okay, cool. I like it.
1:05:08 Nilay Patel? The fifth PCI slot.
1:05:12 Speaker 05 Screw the sixth one. The first four are busters. Number five.
1:05:15 Speaker 09 I need the fifth one.
1:05:16 Nilay Patel? The sixth one is a compatibility slot in case you have even older cards. Like, that's how Apple's thinking about this product. It's very good.
1:05:22 David Pierce? Neil, what do you got?
1:05:22 Nilay Patel? I also picked the voicemail transcription.
1:05:25 David Pierce? Okay.
1:05:25 Nilay Patel? Yeah, but specifically what I'm excited about is how much of a straight up hack it is. It's an answering machine app on your phone. Your phone answers the call for you, listens to the person talking, transcribes it, and saves it. It bypasses the carrier voicemail.
1:05:42 Speaker 10 Is this not what call screening is on a Pixel?
1:05:44 Nilay Patel? It's the same thing, but it's just such a hack. Like, it's so funny that they're like, screw it, answering machine.
1:05:49 Speaker 09 Visual voicemail, no. We're doing that for free.
1:05:51 Nilay Patel? Yeah, it's like, great. Yeah. But yeah, this exactly is call transcript, but it's. They're playing it as voicemail, which makes it much more like an answering machine, which I think is hilarious.
1:06:01 David Pierce? It's very good.
1:06:02 Nilay Patel? They should put up like the tapes. They should go back to skeuomorphic and put up the tapes.
1:06:05 Speaker 07 Animation.
1:06:06 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
1:06:06 David Pierce? I like it. Mine is that now in Spotlight search, if you search like wifi or Bluetooth, it'll pull up a toggle and you can turn it on and off in the Spotlight search.
1:06:14 Speaker 07 I didn't know that.
1:06:15 David Pierce? Very excited about that. Tweaking settings and you can launch shortcuts from Spotlight search now. Big fan. Dan, what do you got? Never mind, you're out. Alex, what do you got?
1:06:22 Speaker 05 I will no longer have to say, "Hey Siri," when I'm adding things to my grocery list reminders.
1:06:26 Alex Cranz? That means I get to do the bit still? Oh, God.
1:06:28 David Pierce? No, moving on, David. Last category. The most, I can't wait for the next version new feature. What do you got?
1:06:34 Speaker 07 They have not added group competitions in the Apple Fitness app forever.
1:06:38 David Pierce? That was mine.
1:06:39 Speaker 07 And I really want them to add it. So I guess it'll come in iOS, whatever the next one is, 17?
1:06:44 David Pierce? 18.
1:06:44 Speaker 07 18? I don't know.
1:06:46 David Pierce? I watch OS.
1:06:47 Speaker 07 Or watch OS 11. Yeah.
1:06:48 David Pierce? Yeah.
1:06:49 Speaker 07 Yeah, hopefully.
1:06:50 David Pierce? Yeah, let's hope. Andrew, what do you got?
1:06:52 Speaker 10 You know, I was gonna say grocery list, but then he stopped the bit, so I couldn't even like combo breaker it, so I don't know what to do anymore. But like, contact cards, like when they do the personalized contact cards in the future, I'm just waiting for like, Mark has to knock on the phone screen as he's like calling me or something.
1:07:08 Speaker 07 Animated.
1:07:09 Speaker 10 Like animated contact.
1:07:10 Speaker 07 Me emoji ones, because they're gonna do that at the same time, for sure.
1:07:13 Nilay Patel? Or different ones for different people.
1:07:14 Speaker 10 Yeah.
1:07:15 Speaker 07 Yeah. They suggested in my briefing, you could give like a fake contact card to people, because you know, you can choose, you can choose like a my cellphone number or my email address, whatever. And then a representative from Apple was like, "Or a fake number?" And I was like, "That's a great idea." I didn't even think about that.
1:07:30 Alex Cranz? I mean, that's the most important one. Like, you get those people who just really want your phone number and you're like, "Leave me alone."
1:07:35 David Pierce? We should hang out sometimes.
1:07:36 Nilay Patel? The Finsta of contact posters.
1:07:38 David Pierce? I just give everybody Alex's number. It's fine.
1:07:40 Alex Cranz? Oh, that explains a lot.
1:07:43 Speaker 07 I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna second David's group competitions. Yes, please.
1:07:46 David Pierce? Yeah, it's good.
1:07:47 Nilay Patel? I think watch OS 11 is a concept.
1:07:49 David Pierce? The whole thing.
1:07:50 Nilay Patel? Assuming that some, some updates will be made.
1:07:52 David Pierce? Okay.
1:07:53 Nilay Patel? Given that no updates were made.
1:07:55 David Pierce? This was the biggest update they've ever made, despite not making very many updates at all.
1:07:58 Nilay Patel? Snoopy.
1:07:59 David Pierce? Yeah, sure.
1:07:59 Speaker 07 Let's go. He sits on the clock, though.
1:08:03 Speaker 05 Greatest generation.
1:08:04 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
1:08:04 Speaker 07 Greatest generation.
1:08:07 Nilay Patel? That's horrible.
1:08:09 David Pierce? Mine is with the new contact posters where something comes up when you call somebody else. I want to have several of those so that I can have one where I'm doing like really rude things for just when I call Neelai and one for other people and that's I want lots of those.
1:08:21 Speaker 09 That's a good idea. I like that.
1:08:23 Speaker 05 So as we all know Siri works wonderfully. So I know that when I don't say, hey Siri and just say Siri now, it's not gonna work.
1:08:30 David Pierce? How do I keep getting played by this Alex? This is you. You get to go last.
1:08:34 Alex Cranz? Okay, it's it's the face scanning for for your your Vision Pro mask. Like the next generation of it presumably I'll be able to wear a mask and scan that and then make it like talk for me. So I never have to show my face in public again. I think that's cool.
1:08:51 Nilay Patel? She's going out with like the full glitter and 95.
1:08:54 Alex Cranz? No, no, I've got like a giant Ewok head.
1:08:57 David Pierce? You have a Daft Punk helmet.
1:08:58 Alex Cranz? And I just want it like it's mouth to move.
1:08:59 David Pierce? Dyson Zone on the bottom. Vision Pro on the top. You're good to go.
1:09:03 Nilay Patel? All right, can I add one? We've got these people here. We have to ask about the Vision Pro.
1:09:08 Speaker 09 Uh oh.
1:09:08 Nilay Patel? Give me give me a five word Vision Pro reaction.
1:09:12 Speaker 09 Touching stuff with your eyes.
1:09:15 David Pierce? Nice.
1:09:16 Speaker 09 Well, that was good. That was cool.
1:09:18 Nilay Patel? That was fast. I really just meant short. I didn't know that you were gonna say it.
1:09:23 Speaker 09 I'm not going to do that.
1:09:24 David Pierce? No, this is the bit now. Five words. You gotta do it.
1:09:26 Speaker 09 Oh, you actually just meant short.
1:09:28 Nilay Patel? Yeah, I just meant short.
1:09:29 Speaker 09 Oh, sorry. I'm good at haikus, I guess.
1:09:31 Nilay Patel? I'm very impressed, my man.
1:09:32 Speaker 09 Thank you.
1:09:34 Speaker 10 I feel like it needs a rechargeable or a swappable battery pack.
1:09:37 Speaker 09 That was like nine words, dude.
1:09:39 David Pierce? Double battery.
1:09:39 Speaker 09 Way too many words.
1:09:40 David Pierce? Give me more battery packs.
1:09:42 Speaker 09 Give me more battery packs.
1:09:44 Nilay Patel? I really did not mean for this to become what it's becoming.
1:09:46 Speaker 09 No, I got five words. Don't worry. Way sharper than I expected.
1:09:50 Nilay Patel? Yeah. I mean, the displays are amazing. That's what I got. We just did an hour on Vision Pro. Do we need to do more words?
1:09:57 David Pierce? This is so many words.
1:09:58 Nilay Patel? No one needs 15 more words from this group of people on the Vision Pro.
1:10:03 Speaker 09 It's just a TV haul.
1:10:04 Nilay Patel? That's it. That's a Verchast. Apple is gonna arrest us at any moment for what we did to their podcast studio today. Thank you, gentlemen, for joining us. We've got a collab episode with the Waveform crew doing trivia. That's also in our feeds. Check that out. Really excited about it. That's it. That's Verchast.
1:10:27 Speaker 07 And that's a wrap for Vergecast this week. We'd love to hear from you. Shoot us an email at [email protected] . The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Moreno. Our editorial director is Brooke Minter. That's it. We'll see you next week.
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1:11:45 Speaker 12 Support for this show comes from CoreWeave. Everywhere you look, AI is expanding what we thought was possible. And at the center of it all is CoreWeave. Medical research and diagnosis, education, complex visual effects for movies, science and technology breakthroughs. CoreWeave powers AI pioneers around the world with purpose-built tech, building what's never been built before. CoreWeave is the essential cloud for AI. Ready for anything, ready for AI. To learn more about how CoreWeave powers the world's best AI, go to coreweave.com/readyforanything.
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