June 8, 2023 • 44 mins
It finally, really happened. You maniacs! You forced Apple to make an insane ski goggle VR thing that I guess is the future now? Even though it seems depressing and isolating and kind of dorky but not in a cool brooding outsider way? Because Mark Gurman is the god emperor of scoops and literally knew everything about the Apple Vision before it was announced, we had to have him back on the show to do a big post-mortem. Discussed: memes, money, motion sickness.
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Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
Hey, and welcome to what Future.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
I am your host, Josh Witzapolski, and I gotta say,
I gotta tell you, folks, it's the beginning of the end,
or where is the end of the beginning? I think
we're all grappling with the new reality that we're in,
the reality of Apple's VR headset, the Vision Pro, a
(00:40):
thirty five dollars device that looks like a pair of
ski goggles and also like every other VR headset that
is going to change the world or absolutely not change
the world, as you may know. As you probably know,
last week, we had on Mark German from Bloomberg whotually
(01:00):
perfectly got pretty much all of these announcements reported out
ahead of Apple's actual event, and we talked a lot
about this thing, and I though, to be honest, I
was a little bit in disbelief when we discussed it.
My feeling was, this thing seemed everything I was hearing
seemed so unlike the company and the way that they
(01:21):
release things and the types of things they released, that
it all just sounded like weird sort of fantasy. And yet,
as we discovered on Monday, it's not fantasy. They've created
this fucking face computer that I guess their idea is
it's going to kind of do a little bit of everything.
You can play games in it.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
You can.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
Sorry, I'm scrolling as i'm talking. I'm scrolling the website
for this, and there's a picture of a woman sitting
on a sofa who presumably appears to be talking to
a man. I'm gonna say it might be her boyfriend
or husband. It kind of looks like they're pretty cozy here.
She's wearing this headset, she's smiling at him, She's wearing
these crazy goggles, and there's the outside of the headset
(02:04):
has a screen that shows like what appears to be
your eyes inside the headset, but they're not your eyes.
They're a video of your eyes that's being shot from
inside of the headset. Anyhow, They're sitting on the sofa
in this kind of like cozy environment, and it is
like the most ridiculous, one of the stupidest looking things
I've ever seen in my entire life. And I just
(02:25):
want to say, I'm not trying to be I'm not
trying to nag, you know, Apple, I'm not trying to say, like,
you know, they stink and they can't do anything right,
and this thing is going to be a failure. But
it is such a weird and jarring concept, such a
jarring vision again no pun intended for the future, that
I have a lot of trouble kind of taking it seriously.
(02:49):
So yeah, I mean, look, and I've said this before
and I will say it again. Early on, I was
a huge, huge fan of where virtual reality can go
and what it could be. And I have no doubt
that Apple is going to move the ball forward with
this thing. But the thing that they introduced feels so
not right for this moment. It just sort of like
(03:12):
baffles me. It's a baffling I feel, a totally baffling device.
Speaker 1 (03:16):
Anyhow.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
So I've been thinking about it a lot, obviously, because
it's I mean, certainly, at the very least, it's the
most interesting thing Apple has done in a pretty long time,
good or bad. It's definitely not not ambitious, it's definitely
not not fucking weird, you know, and I gotta do
you gotta throw them a bone for that. I do,
(03:37):
got a hand it to them. They have certainly released
a product that you know, swinging for the fences, as
they say in some in some way. But anyhow, before
they release it. We you know, we had on Mark German.
He talked about what was going to happen and it
all came true, and I thought we have to have
(03:58):
him come back on and just do a little like
post game breakdown. And so Mark is here with us,
and I just want to get into hearing his thoughts
on this very strange.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
New reality that we're living in.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
All right, Look, we had to get you back on, okay,
because I mean we just had this conversation like less
than a week ago, right, I mean.
Speaker 1 (04:35):
You've got to feel pretty good. I guess you know
at this point, but like.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
You, I mean, you literally had this entire story and
end like pretty much everything we talked about on the podcast,
certainly everything you wrote about over a long period of time,
but particularly the last piece you did on this headset.
You got everything pretty much down like exactly as it is.
So first off, congratulations, that's it's a rare feed. I
(04:59):
don't think people know how hard it is to get
that kind of level of scoop out of Apple.
Speaker 3 (05:05):
On Apple specifically, it's challenging. I love to do it.
Speaker 2 (05:09):
Yeah, here's one thing I'm curious, and we can't go
into the full I know you only have a short
period of time, but yeah, you know, I'm sure there
is a part of people at Apple that must be
really mad at you because you like spoil their big surprise, right,
But your writing creates an aura of you know, I'm
not saying that you're doing this on purpose. I know
you're just like writing shit that you get because you
(05:29):
love tracking it down and hunting it down. But it
helps to build the hype level to some degree when
there's all these like exciting rumors about these crazy things
they might do, Like do you have any interaction with
anybody at the company? Like do you talk to the
PR people there? I know it creates a lot of hype.
Speaker 3 (05:44):
At the same time, you know, it's not like they
asked for that hype, right, They have their preferences about
how you know, things would roll. Yeah, they are professionals.
You know, you would expect nothing less from a company
like Apple. Yeah, they have some of the best people
there on the PR side and the marketing side, and
(06:06):
they're all pros pros.
Speaker 1 (06:08):
So yeah, I'll leave it at that.
Speaker 4 (06:10):
No.
Speaker 2 (06:10):
I mean it's interesting because in my era of being
very interactive and covering Apple, I mean there's Steve Jobs
era into the early days of Tim and there was
a very different set of PR people. It is a
very different place in time, but I had I would
describe them as like screaming matches with or just being
screamed at by the PR people at Apple, where they
(06:34):
were like freaking out, like because we published shots that
somebody sent us off like a beta, like a Beta
iOS or whatever. After they released the Death Beta, somebody
sent us some shots and we published them and they
were like losing their shit. But a different era. I
think it's definitely a much more mature company, a completely
different company. Yeah, and I know Tim Cook actually kind
of did a whole house cleaning on the PR side
(06:54):
of it. Like I think there's a whole new group
of people there at this point over the last few years.
But that's the least interest thing. So they've introduced this thing.
It's fucking insane looking. Can we can we just talk
for a second about they released the headsets Vision Pro.
Speaker 1 (07:07):
Is that what it's called, or just Apple Vision? What
is it called? It's the Apple Vision Pro. Were you
surprised about the name?
Speaker 3 (07:13):
The name thing was interesting, So I had heard back
in early twenty twenty two that they were thinking of
calling it the Apple Vision. So I wrote at the
beginning in twenty twenty two that my best guess would
be that it's called the Apple Vision, right, And then
you were like, you just want to be sure to
say you got this originally you had this, yes, And
then in August of last year they trademarked Reality Pro right,
(07:37):
and so that became the working title to me, right,
and then internally they changed the name of the OS
from Reality OS to XROS, and then they end up
announcing it as the Vision Pro with visions right. And
they didn't tell anyone working on the product that it
(07:58):
was called Vision OS. Interesting, they had kept telling everyone
working the product that it was called XROS.
Speaker 1 (08:04):
Right.
Speaker 3 (08:04):
So if you watch any of the developer sessions over
the course of this week related to the headset, all
of the sessions are called XROS. Really, yes, all the
references or XROS, all the Apple engineers call it XROS.
Speaker 1 (08:19):
But XROS is not a thing.
Speaker 3 (08:21):
Yeah, they're eliminating that, right. But Apple Marketing didn't tell
Apple Engineering that they had shifted from XROS to Vision OS, right. Well,
the fact that they're marking it as the pro makes
it pretty clear that there's the non pro coming to
which is coming about two years from now, half years.
Speaker 1 (08:36):
Two years until now. This doesn't give me available until
early twenty twenty four, they said, Right, they're not even
selling it right anytime soon?
Speaker 2 (08:43):
No?
Speaker 3 (08:43):
And then I don't know if you saw my tweet
from earlier today, but were you covering Apple and fourteen still?
Speaker 1 (08:48):
Definitely when they announced the Apple Watch.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
Yeah, Actually that was one of the one of the
last ones where I did the event and review and stuff.
Speaker 1 (08:56):
I did it for Bloomberg.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
Actually I was at Bloomberg at the time, so I
actually went out there from Bloomberg. But yeah, I was
there in twenty fourteen. What's the deal with that?
Speaker 3 (09:03):
Well, when they announced the watch in twenty fourteen, that
was September, they said would be launching an early twenty fifteen, right,
It didn't go on sale until the end of April.
And even then, ye could get one anywhere.
Speaker 1 (09:14):
That's it, right, I remember I.
Speaker 3 (09:16):
Didn't get mine until mid May, end of May, right, yep.
And so they're saying early twenty twenty four. Notice they're
saying early next year versus early twenty twenty four by
the way.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
Right, stee, They they didn't say twenty twenty four early
next year?
Speaker 3 (09:29):
Okay, interesting because early twenty twenty four sounds farther away
than early next year, right.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
Sure, Also next year is more vague than twenty twenty four.
Twenty twenty four sounds very concrete. Sure, not that there's
any wiggle room there really, but yeah, I see what
you're saying. So you tweeted something the day of the
event that I thought was interesting, and I have been
pondering it quite a bit. You tweeted, have they shown
any pictures of anybody in the headset? They had a
picture of Tim Cook standing next to the headset.
Speaker 3 (09:55):
Which is weird, right, if it's your big thing to
set the standard for your career, I mean, legacy builder,
you want a one wearing.
Speaker 1 (10:02):
They're all wearing Apple watches, right.
Speaker 3 (10:04):
Yeah, they'll hold the iPhone.
Speaker 2 (10:06):
Right, I think, And a lot of people and You're
in the replies pointed out what I think is probably
part of it. People were like, Oh, it's because they
don't want memes to be made of them wearing the headset.
But that in and of itself, and that's why I
think it's interesting. The fact that they know that a
picture of them in the headset will become some kind
of joke on the internet, right to me, suggests like,
(10:27):
and that was my point, right, Here's here's what I
was most surprised about with this thing, because frankly, I
wasn't ready to be surprised at all, given the fact
that you had gotten the entire thing. But it looks
so much like a fucking quest or, like you know
what I mean, it looks like a VR headset. It
doesn't look like when in my mind's eye, when I
think of what Apple can do, like from a hardware perspective,
(10:50):
I'm like, this is going to just totally upend my
idea of what these things look like. But it really
kind of looks like a nice a really nice quest. Well,
let me tell you what surprising to me. The back portion,
like the padding in the back of your head. Yeah,
that looked way bigger than I expected. Yeah, and that
things mass. It's clunky. It's a clunky device. I mean,
(11:10):
I tweeted a picture of they have this woman sitting
alone on a sofa with it on, and it's like
a massive apparatus. Joanna Stern from The Wall Street Journal
used that she wrote about it. She said it was
like heavy, it was like hurt her nose. What's your
impression of the reaction from people on this, like you,
what have you seen out there?
Speaker 3 (11:27):
I don't need too much mind to a thirty minute demo.
And what that means for the product long term, My
personal opinion is that it's going to be incredibly slow
for the first year, even the first three to five years.
This is the most controlled Apple launch you'll ever see.
It's available only in the US and only from direct
Apple sales channels right right, And so that's a rarity.
(11:49):
Both of those things are.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
That means stores though, right, just from stores.
Speaker 3 (11:52):
Yeah, what I mean is you're not going to be
able to buy it a Best Buyer, Target or Walmart
or whatever. It's going to be Apple only right in
only the US, which is a rarety for them.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
There used to be periods where it was very hard
to get Apple, certain Apple products like weren't readily available everywhere,
Like this is going to be one of those products.
Speaker 3 (12:07):
Obviously that's the old Apple, right, and that's you know,
coming back to fruition here, right, They're going to have
to release an iPhone app to consumers or a feature
in the Apple Store app before the headset comes out
that allows you to do the whole face scanning thing
that they were doing, right, because you can't do that
through the web browser right order it, so you'll have
to do the face scanning before you order it online. Wow,
(12:27):
or you'll have to do it in the store. So
that's going to be a really new way to buy
a product. The whole prescription lenses.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
Thing, well, yeah, that was. You were right on that,
one hundred percent right on that.
Speaker 2 (12:36):
It's funny because I was tweeting about it with people
and they're like, that's not confirmed, and I was like, well,
let's just wait a minute to it happens.
Speaker 3 (12:41):
Literally, Like the lens thing, Yeah, okay, how much do
you think the lenses are? Someone who I spoke to
today and this person has no idea, but they just
threw out this random thousand dollars number for the lenses.
Speaker 2 (12:52):
I mean, expensive glasses can be right like in that
range the actual lenses themselves, like from my glasses that
are like good lenses?
Speaker 1 (13:00):
Is you know? I don't.
Speaker 2 (13:01):
I think if you have a strong prescription the price
goes up a bit, but I mean a few hundred
dollars probably minimum, right.
Speaker 3 (13:07):
Two point fifteen insurance? Right, what insurance covers?
Speaker 1 (13:10):
I don't know. I don't know.
Speaker 2 (13:11):
If you go to your insurance you're like, I really
need to use this Apple VR headset for work or whatever.
You know, maybe, but what do you how about this? Okay,
so you're like, it's a long it's a slow climb.
We talked about that a little bit last time. Right, Obviously,
you know people who are have some real inside track
at the company. Have you heard anything from internally about
how the reception has been taken or how the reaction
(13:35):
from from people has been taken. Do you know, have
any sense from inside the building what they what they're feeling.
Speaker 3 (13:42):
Yeah, I don't know, it's still too early at this point.
From people who were there, what they told me the loudest,
the loudest reaction was at the price point, rather than
anything specific to the headset and such.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
Well, the price point's crazy. I mean they had a
lot of crazy price points at the event. And what
it's an M two Mac Pro like desktop grand seven
thousand dollars.
Speaker 3 (14:03):
Either a thousand or two thousand more than the Intel version.
It's really expensive, really expensive. That was crazy pricing.
Speaker 2 (14:10):
And but then thirty five hundred for this headset. Definitely
took it out of the realm of nobody believed that.
I've been telling people for months, this is going to
be more expensive. They're like, no, no, no, no, no, it's just
like the iPad. Ever, you thought it was a grand,
but it was half the price this is going to be.
Speaker 1 (14:21):
It's true.
Speaker 2 (14:22):
I actually I thought the same thing when we were
watching it. I was like, Okay, but they're going to
hit us with like a fifteen hundred dollars price point
or something crazy, and they will sell, and they will
sell like a shitload of them right off the bat.
Speaker 3 (14:31):
But don't forget there's more evidence in context than I
had just from people telling me it's going to be
three grand plus.
Speaker 1 (14:39):
Right.
Speaker 3 (14:39):
I was also told, and I've reported many times, that
they're expecting high one hundred thousands to a million unit sales.
Speaker 1 (14:46):
Right.
Speaker 3 (14:46):
If this thing was priced that two thousand or below,
they would need more than a million units, Josh, because
everyone would buy one.
Speaker 1 (14:53):
Right, Well, I mean a large amount of people would
buy them.
Speaker 3 (14:56):
Right.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
I am still stuck, And obviously we're not going to
resolve this here because I know you have limited time.
But I am totally blown away by the fact that,
no matter what they said and did, I have a
mental block when I look at the device, it is
so similar to the things that have not worked. It
is so similar, even the interface, Like when they showed it,
you've used the quest, right, so you're familiar with the whole,
(15:28):
the whole. They have the whole, this panel interface with
these like icons and stuff. And not to say that
Apple isn't going to completely knock that shit out of
the water, but the consumer side of this still baffles me.
The idea that like your average consumer and I know
right now it's not the average consumer, but I feel
like we're so far away from this becoming a really
(15:48):
viable product, and like, yeah, I don't know. It's interesting
that none of the executives put it on. I mean
I find that to be I find that to be
like a huge kind of tell on their part.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
You know, it's biz all ar.
Speaker 3 (16:02):
You know, for years people have been saying that the
hardware of Apple products is way ahead of the software.
I think this is a unique situation where the user
interface interactions, the user interface design. I would rate the
OS look and feel and what they're showing there as
an a hardware design probably is a b right, And
this is without using it and seeing it in person, it.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
Just feels like a million little compromises you can see.
Speaker 3 (16:25):
Like that's that was the idea from the beginning, because
the non compromised product is not something that's feasible, right,
and had to build this compromised product that they're going
to bring something to market. I for one, think it's
going to be hugely successful long term. You do, I
do the iPhone cannibalized the iPod. Yeah, the iPad had
mac cannibalization potential. I think this has iPhone ipen and
(16:49):
mac cannibalization potential.
Speaker 1 (16:51):
Yeah. I mean that's interesting.
Speaker 2 (16:52):
You say that because John Gruber wrote an essay about humane.
I assume you've read this right. He wrote a piece
about humane and he basically was like, you know, making
a replacement for something that people hate is really pretty easy,
like getting them to convince them that's something you know,
that they can replace the thing they hate with something better.
But getting them to replace something they love is really
(17:15):
a huge climb. And I think, like if you think
about it on those terms, I thought it was a
really interesting passage that is fascinating because, like I think
the Humane device is a similar kind of like it's
like way outside the box, right, I.
Speaker 3 (17:26):
Think the Humane device is way more outside the box
than the Apple device.
Speaker 2 (17:29):
Well, right, but like if you're like, okay, the headset
or an iPhone, Like there's so many trade offs with
the headset, we're so far away from that being the
viable alternative, and like do people are people going to
fall in love with it the way they fell in
love with the iPhone? It's a it's a steep climb, right.
Speaker 3 (17:46):
The iPhone quickly took off, and it was pretty much
you would add that ideal right from the get go,
maybe the second generation, right, the headset's going to take
four or five generations to get to the place where
I'm talking about.
Speaker 2 (17:58):
Well, the funny thing about the iPhone, if you think
about it, is like it was a compromise device when
they released it. There was a ton of compromise, right.
It didn't have Remember it had edge when a lot
of phones had already gone to three G. Its screen
was really small by comparison to to well and really
not other devices, but it was a small, pretty small.
Speaker 3 (18:13):
It became the iPhone screen size became way too small
within three years, right.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
But no, that was like a big screen actually I guess, so, yeah,
that's true. But there was no copy and paste, there
was no apps. There was all this stuff that wasn't
on that was on the cimer room floor. But it
took a thing that was really not great that everybody
was using and made a version of it that was
so much better, such a huge leap that it was like, oh,
I can never look at that other thing again, right,
Like I'm never going to go back to a BlackBerry
(18:39):
after this, right, I don't know they got there with
the with the headset.
Speaker 3 (18:43):
The headset's not really replacing a device that everyone hates, right.
I think the first point that you mentioned is right
where the bar is higher, because you're trying to replace
things that you already love and use every day. Whereas
in terms of the iPhone cannibalizing the iPod, if you
really think about it based on that context, it's even
more what they were able to pull off with the
iPod to the iPhone transition, because they killed something that
(19:03):
everyone loved right hundred.
Speaker 2 (19:05):
Percent, but they killed it with a thing that was
the same thing and had all those features right plus more.
But when you were watching the presentation. Were you there
or were you just watching remotely? Oh?
Speaker 3 (19:15):
I saw it remotely.
Speaker 2 (19:16):
Did not feel to you like pretty just took pretty
black mirror some of the parts of the presentation.
Speaker 3 (19:21):
There were some demos, like the guy playing with his
kids wearing it's a It seems quite ridiculous to me.
And then right, they're gonna also step on their own
toes in three years when they release an iPhone that
can take three D pictures and you have to have
that whole you know, motorcycle helmet on your head to
doom Bault team.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
Is that a plan or they are they doing that?
Speaker 3 (19:41):
No, I'm just I mean, you hit thought to imagine
that's something they're going to try to do if they're
able to integrate a three D camera into a phone.
Speaker 2 (19:49):
Yeah, I mean the thing with the kids was pretty weird,
like the guy sitting on the sofa watching the picture
of his kids or watching the video of his kids playing. Like,
I know we all look at pictures on our phone
or whatever, but there's some something real sci fi, like
not in a fun way about this idea of you,
like being strapped into this device watching a moving image
of your family.
Speaker 3 (20:08):
I will say though, on a high level. They surprised
me with how well they positioned it. I thought they
were going to go in a totally different direction, Like
what direction they did exactly what I thought they should
have done, and market it as the future of the computer.
Speaker 1 (20:22):
Right now. You said that, you said that on the
on the last show, you were like, soid.
Speaker 3 (20:25):
That's what people working on it it should be marketed as,
and what their aim was. But it was very possible
that Apple marketing would take it in a different direction and
make it more of a companion device. But if they
really marketed it correctly, which they did, I think it
has a long term potential.
Speaker 2 (20:38):
I mean the pitch was sort of like, for thirty
five hundred dollars, it replaces your computer.
Speaker 1 (20:42):
Yes, which is a great thing you're I mean it.
Speaker 2 (20:44):
Sort of was like, I mean, it can't replace your
phone because it doesn't have a SIM, right, it's not cellular.
Speaker 3 (20:48):
Well, they'llood cellular, rightly.
Speaker 2 (20:49):
They'll make the dial have a red line on it,
and then you'll know that that's a cellular headset. All right, Mark, listen,
I know you need to go. You're a very busy man.
You probably have thousands of people who have to congratulate you.
Now you have to do a high five session at
Bloomberg HQ.
Speaker 3 (21:03):
One last thing, I'll say.
Speaker 1 (21:04):
Yes, one more, one more thing, if you will actually
two more things.
Speaker 3 (21:07):
Yeah, most absurd thing from the presentation they said two
hours on the battery pack or all day battery life
when you're plugged in, like come.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
On right all day when you're literally plugged into an
outlet right right.
Speaker 3 (21:19):
The other thing I'll say is I still believe that
it's gonna start off very slow. Yeah, but I think
over time, if they can get the price point in
half and they can you know, chop down the design
a little bit, and they can highlight more of the
ar features and they get a really solid developer response,
I think long term it could be it could be
a smash hip. Are you gonna buy one?
Speaker 1 (21:41):
Probably not, I mean honestly, I mean I don't know.
Maybe you know.
Speaker 2 (21:44):
I say, it's like, here's the thing I say no
to shit all the time. I'm like, I'm not getting that,
and then I like go in a store and I
look at it and I'm like, ah, right, fine, thirty
five hundred dollars.
Speaker 1 (21:51):
Is a high bar.
Speaker 2 (21:52):
Even like I'm the like I could certainly I could
afford one, but like I'm like thirty five hundred, what
am I gonna do with this thing? Like again the
other thing that's and this is actually a good point
to we'll close on this, but it kind of speaks
to what you're saying about this long term plan. One
of the things Joanna said in her piece was it
made her nauseous when she used it. I get very
(22:13):
much And you talked about this on the show last
time the same way, and I get very motion sick
using VR stuff. I love it, like I've loved some
of the Quest experiences, but I'm like, damn, I gotta
take this thing off because I literally feel like I'm
going to throw up if they have not come up
with like a real magic bullet for fixing that for
a lot of people, I think that's a huge problem.
Like I know, the like being physically ill is not
(22:34):
like a little thing, right, It's like and I.
Speaker 3 (22:36):
Get really ill from it. I am just thinking, you
know about it Yesterday's like I might use this thing
for two weeks and have to return.
Speaker 2 (22:42):
It, right, And I think that's an experience that's It's
not Antennagate. This is way bigger it's like you made
a device that is actually making people. I can see
the stories now.
Speaker 3 (22:51):
Because it's Apple. Yes, those stories will.
Speaker 1 (22:52):
Happen, right, CMBC has the report people throwing up because
of their Apple headsets or whatever.
Speaker 3 (22:58):
The difference between Antennagate and this was intenegate. Apple blamed it,
said it was an industry problem when it wasn't an
industry problem, right nausea.
Speaker 2 (23:06):
Actually, actually they could say it's an industry problem. All
these other headsets have had, you know, the problems with
this people get.
Speaker 3 (23:12):
But this time it would be true, right to tenigate,
it wasn't true what they turned it into an industry
problem when it wasn't right this time, you know, the
nausea thing is an industry thing, and let's see what happens.
But my point being is you can't really know that
from an Apple Store demo before you buy it.
Speaker 2 (23:27):
No, if you use it for long enough, I guess
if they give you a ten minute demo, though they're
not gonna be able to give people ten minute demos, but.
Speaker 1 (23:32):
Like it's just a reality of this.
Speaker 2 (23:34):
If they have not gotten the latency down and the
frame rate and the refresh rate of the screens up
and even then, I think it's still like not a
perfect solution.
Speaker 1 (23:42):
Right, there's still like that.
Speaker 3 (23:43):
Going start growing up upper ten minutes, right, it takes
you a good hour, So you're really going to have
to use this thing and see how it goes.
Speaker 2 (23:49):
I mean, everybody's different, there's different sensitivities. All I'm going
to say is like, there, I have yet to see
another Apple product that induces actual illness when you use it.
Speaker 1 (23:57):
Have you ever heard of an Apple when you see
the right? No, I'm kidding.
Speaker 2 (24:02):
Everybody just started immediately throwing up in the auditorium when
they saw the price.
Speaker 3 (24:06):
I haven't heard of anyone personally who's used the device
who has had that.
Speaker 2 (24:09):
Problem, right, Because there are all people at Apple, aren't
they They're not going to be like, oh yeah, by
the way, it was pukey and when we's jested out.
Speaker 3 (24:15):
I mean, I hadn't seen anyone other than Joanna say it,
which is curious.
Speaker 1 (24:20):
So you're saying Joanna's lying fake news. No, that's not
what I'm saying.
Speaker 3 (24:23):
Wow, that's not what I'm saying.
Speaker 1 (24:24):
White an attack on her credibility, Mark. What I'm saying.
Speaker 3 (24:27):
What I'm saying is is that Joanna cuts through the noise, right,
And I'm saying that it's possible that the demos were
so blow away that it was easy to maybe ignore
for sure that issue. It was a compliment with Joanna.
Speaker 2 (24:43):
They didn't let that many people do hands on with it,
I mean, or an eyes on or whatever the fuck
we're calling it.
Speaker 3 (24:48):
Did demos till ten pm on Reay and really probably
do the same till ten pm today and maybe throughout
the week.
Speaker 2 (24:55):
But I mean comparatively, it's not like people could go
grab it and just try it out.
Speaker 1 (24:58):
It's like they're doing it's all demos.
Speaker 3 (25:01):
Watch the Good Morning America video, the interview with Tim
Cook and the interview that the anchor got. That's the
same demo everyone else is getting.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
Oh did they show it? They have like a they
actually filmed that.
Speaker 3 (25:13):
On the only like Good Morning America film the demo.
You can see the building they built for the demos,
in the room they're in. They put you on a couch.
It's in a controlled environment. Yeah, and so you can
see you know, you sit on a couch for thirty minutes,
you do all the demos they've programmed for you, and
you get to see people are people have been blown
away by this thing, but again a thirty minute demo,
you have to use it for a few weeks.
Speaker 2 (25:30):
I have no doubt it's an incredible They have some
incredible features, and also you got to remember a lot
of those people probably are not I mean there's probably
a handful like the Good Morning America people.
Speaker 1 (25:37):
How much VR do you think they've done?
Speaker 4 (25:39):
Right?
Speaker 3 (25:39):
I want to read the reviews when this thing ships
and they can use it for several days. I want
to read the reviews from the VR websites.
Speaker 2 (25:46):
Right, Well, are they even going to work with those websites?
Do they even care about them? I'm sure they will
really because I feel like historically Apple likes to bypass
the geeky shit and go to like the mainstream for
this device.
Speaker 3 (25:56):
They need that. They were all there at the conference
and I thought it was the right from out certainly
based on Apple's history, could have gone either way, but
I think they made the right decision there. Yeah, you
want that community to really talk this up because that's
the community that's going to buy this thing from the
get go.
Speaker 1 (26:08):
Right? Is this a quest killer?
Speaker 3 (26:10):
Like?
Speaker 2 (26:10):
Is that it?
Speaker 1 (26:11):
Or is it just the price points too high?
Speaker 3 (26:13):
The delta on the price is so large that yeah,
you can't compare the two. What I will say though,
is the Meta is uh one sixth of the price.
I still think it's not as bad as one's sixth
as the Apple thevist.
Speaker 2 (26:29):
I mean, E mean it doesn't it's doesn't. It's not
one sixth as good or it's better.
Speaker 1 (26:33):
It's not as point.
Speaker 3 (26:33):
It's not one. Maybe it's two or three six.
Speaker 1 (26:35):
I mean that's pretty, that's pretty. That's pretty damning, you know.
Speaker 2 (26:39):
But if that's the best that we have to offer
right now, I mean maybe PSVR is. I mean it's
a totally different experience for a totally different purpose. But
I mean Apples certainly will become the best of this category.
Speaker 1 (26:49):
There's no question.
Speaker 3 (26:50):
Yes, I saw someone tweet this morning. Is the last
thing I'll say. I forgot who's who? Please forgive me
for not citing them. And I have the same exact thought.
Meta should license out like their metas.
Speaker 1 (27:00):
Do you like an Android?
Speaker 3 (27:02):
Yeah, they should go the Android model and they'll crush it.
Speaker 2 (27:04):
Yeah. I mean, honestly, what would be really interesting is
to see some hardware creativity here because I think that
like eventually, someone's going to crack that magic place between
like it's not too big, it's not too bulky, it
doesn't look too weird, and it actually is like functions.
Speaker 3 (27:17):
Well and watch it'll be Apple.
Speaker 2 (27:19):
Well it'll be Apple, you know, on a long enough
timeline and they have infinite money. So that's good, like
I assume it will.
Speaker 1 (27:26):
Mark.
Speaker 2 (27:26):
Thank you for coming back and talking about this again,
like ingrats on the scoops. Just super fucking awesome to
see it all like play out the way you wrote it.
Speaker 3 (27:33):
Thank you and thank your team. Thank you so much. Bye,
see you.
Speaker 1 (27:45):
Mark.
Speaker 2 (27:46):
Is he's just great, is I have to say, first off,
and just an incredible ability, Like it's so rare just
to be able to do what he does, which is
to scoop the largest most valuable company in the world
on their own announcements an outrageous thing to do, and
to do it consistently and to get it like almost
perfectly right is fairly unusual.
Speaker 1 (28:06):
So we'll have him back.
Speaker 2 (28:08):
We're gonna have him share some more Apple secrets with
us next time he gets a nasty ass scoop.
Speaker 1 (28:14):
Uh.
Speaker 2 (28:15):
But but you know, I do have some more thoughts
about what this headset really means.
Speaker 4 (28:21):
I did want to bring up that picture that you
posted on Twitter of like you wearing some sort of
like glasses from.
Speaker 1 (28:27):
Like oh yeah, Google Google, that's Google Glass.
Speaker 4 (28:29):
Yeah. I loved that.
Speaker 1 (28:30):
Oh.
Speaker 2 (28:31):
By the way, for the record, I just was writing,
you know, I was writing a piece for the for
the fucking Verge. It wasn't like I was like, I
bought these glasses and I'm wearing them.
Speaker 1 (28:39):
Here. I'll put it in the link.
Speaker 4 (28:40):
That's what it looks like.
Speaker 1 (28:41):
No, I know, but I know it's funny.
Speaker 2 (28:43):
But like, you know, that's what happens when you like
review a product, is like you put them on and
then somebody takes a picture of you and then you
got to live with that for the rest of your life.
Speaker 1 (28:50):
I look fucking so stupid this picture.
Speaker 2 (28:53):
I look like a Jewish terminator is how I describe
my vibe right here. But this is actually way less
dumb than the Apple thing. Like this is super dumb
and embarrassing and like silly, but comparatively comparatively, think about
this versus what Apple is suggesting. Okay, the Apple thing
(29:15):
is like ten times as clunky and gigantic as this.
It's not cooler. I'm not saying this is cool, although
it's closer to like something you'd want, like an unobtrusive
small thing that's like a part of your glasses or something.
Speaker 1 (29:29):
Right.
Speaker 2 (29:30):
I think there's a famous picture of Mark Zuckerberg walking
down the aisle of one of his events where they
gave everybody an Oculus headset a quest or whatever, and
it looks like the most it's one of the most
dystopian photos of all time. And I think, when when
I look at this, and when I see like the
pictures on Apple's website of this woman I don't know,
(29:51):
hanging out on her sofa with her boyfriend or whatever,
and she's got these massive goggles on her face, it
doesn't feel like.
Speaker 1 (29:59):
It doesn't spark excitement or joy for me, you know,
it just is like, what are we doing here, folks?
What are we doing? What's happening?
Speaker 2 (30:09):
I think the thing that's most interesting about it, to
be honest, is how much I feel like the Apple's
just this whole thing just misjudges the moment of life
that we're in. Just I said this on the last podcast,
but it just feels like, Man, I want to breathe
fucking air. I want to be I want to I
want to touch grass. I want to be out on
an adventure somewhere and with like people I know and love,
(30:30):
Like I don't want to put something on my face
and be transported to like a virtual fucking office, which
is a lot of a lot of the a lot
of the stuff they showed was actually like you can
be at the office with this on and like we
do some work and it's like, yeah, that doesn't seem.
Speaker 1 (30:49):
That great to me, you know.
Speaker 2 (30:51):
Or you can watch your kids, you know, playing while
you're wearing this fucking thing on your face, like well,
you can't even actually interact with them properly like a
normal person. Not to say that holding a phone up
is any better. Maybe it's not. You know, maybe this
is better than holding it. It's not better than holding
a phone up.
Speaker 1 (31:09):
It's not.
Speaker 2 (31:10):
People have been holding cameras up forever. It's very similar
when you hold your phone up. But this is like
cutting literally cutting how off you're the main one of
the main ways you communicate with other people in the world.
Speaker 1 (31:22):
I understand.
Speaker 2 (31:23):
They have a digital projection of your eyes and when
you do a FaceTime shat, it creates a virtual three
D avatar of your face. I mean, the whole thing
just is like, is this just an elaborate setup for
the new season of Black Mirror? And by the way,
I hate the Black Mirror shit. Like I'm not a
big fan of Black Mirror because it's always like whoa
(31:43):
technology is fucked up? Man or whatever. That's the whole
premise of the show is like technology right. But I
gotta say I maybe they were onto something. Maybe they're
onto something. Maybe they we should heed the warnings of
a British TV show, although that doesn't say on right
to me at all. And maybe I just need to
just jack into the matrix and call it a day.
(32:06):
Maybe I just need to jack into the matrix and
be done with it. Maybe I'm overthinking it. Maybe I'm
being a negative person. Maybe I'm being a suppressive person,
as they say in scientology. Maybe I'm being Maybe I'm
not an ot anything, I'm an OT zero, you know.
Maybe I just need to hop into this head first.
I'm not really sure.
Speaker 4 (32:27):
Can I ask you a question?
Speaker 3 (32:28):
I have a question.
Speaker 1 (32:29):
You can ask me anything you want. I would love
to hear. I would love a question.
Speaker 4 (32:32):
Okay, So I remember when like the I pod came
out and the iPhone came out, these are all things
that are so cool because I like enhanced your living experience.
Right now, our options are you put on a headset
and you go into a different experience where you create
an avatar and go into like assumes like experience, right,
so the right futures so there, Yeah, they are out
(32:53):
of our current realities. So that to me feels like
we're just out of creativity, right.
Speaker 2 (32:59):
I hear you're saying, we certainly are running out of ideas.
Like this is a great indicator that we're at a point,
we were at a value. I've actually I've talked about
this many times in the past. You know, there are
there are there are peaks and valleys to all of this.
You know, there there there is the build up and
the breakdown. And I think like if if the peak
is you know, the iPhone, because it really is from
(33:21):
a technology perspective, the peak of modern sort of technological
innovations is really the iPhone and the era that it begat,
which is this era of always on connectivity and social
sort of inter you know, always on digital social connectivity
and interaction with a device that kind of is to
(33:43):
do everything device that's the highest pinnacle of sort of
technological sort of upset that has happened in probably in
my lifetime. You could say the Internet, right, but actually
in some way the Internet's full the power in the
power in the terror of the Internet wasn't actually fully
encapsulated or realized until the Internet was like in our
(34:06):
hands all the time and in art like was where
our photos went and where we communicated, And that didn't
happen until the iPhone, it really did, and everything else
was like you had to sit down somewhere basically to
go and off to this other place.
Speaker 1 (34:18):
So if that's the peak, and.
Speaker 2 (34:20):
All of the things that begat are the kind of
like in the wake of the peak of this technological innovation,
then there has to be there will be naturally be
a value.
Speaker 1 (34:28):
You can't have. It can't.
Speaker 2 (34:30):
You can't keep hitting peaks over and over again with
this stuff. It's just not possible. Like, you can't. You're
not going to invent things that are that explosive on
such a regular cadence.
Speaker 1 (34:39):
And if you look at the time of.
Speaker 2 (34:40):
Technology that's been built post iPhone, there's been this you
know a huge amount of things that happened. Even like
if you look at like a tesla, a huge amount
of Like why Tesla was successful is because it borrowed
a lot of innovations from an iPhone. Like many many
things about the Tesla are a kind of reference to
or a nod to how the iPhone fund Even this
(35:01):
concept for us conceptually of like electric cars being like
a big phone you charge or whatever, has been made
more accessible by the existence of the iPhone. But in
the grand scheme of things, the Tesla is like a
car with a different engine. Right, It's not a total
reinvention of travel as we know it. So there hasn't
been an explose I'm just used as an example, but
(35:21):
there has not been an explosive next moment. And again,
all of the recent moments of innovation are a byproduct
in some way of the iPhone. You could make an
argument about sort of machine learning and AI stuff like chat,
GBT and mid journey. I think it's an explosive potential.
There's no iPhone of it. Yet, there isn't the iPhone thing,
(35:44):
the killer app that makes it the kind of the
delineating point between the thing before and the thing that
comes after. The VR headset, the vision pro And I'm
not saying this to be to downplay it or to
be negative, but it is a slight tweak on what
an iPhone is. The screen is in a different place,
(36:07):
the content is in a different place. Yes, certainly, VR
and AR there are different things that they allow. Yet
first person games that you play on your computer they
have a lot in common with what a VR game does.
It's just a little bit more of like you're immersed
fully visually in it versus you're only seventy percent immersed
in it or whatever AR. We do on our phones
(36:28):
all the time, so that that application of the digital
overlaid on the virtual. These are fairly familiar things, right.
Every time you use your camera to snap a QR
code and then take you to a website, you're using
AR in some way.
Speaker 1 (36:42):
Right.
Speaker 2 (36:42):
If you use your one of those measurement things to
measure on your phone, like, that's AR.
Speaker 1 (36:46):
Right.
Speaker 2 (36:46):
If you look at like some weird three D object
in your room, that's an AR. So all of this stuff,
like the sensor is, the cameras, the motion tracking, the
connectivity to your apps, all the surface that you see
when you work in it. It is not an explosive
new idea like it's always been this way and now
we've upended it. It's just like a continuation of, almost
(37:08):
an addendum to what the iPhone created. And so for me,
when I look at it, it's not that I don't
think it can be cool or exciting or interesting, and
I'm sure there will be implications with this, but the
idea that it's like the next peak technologically speaking, feels
like really like a vacant thought. It feels like a fake,
(37:29):
a phony, a put on about what real peaks look like.
And I don't think we have the moment, like this
is not the moment for this, Like I don't think
this is the where everybody was gravitating towards it and
then something just broke through that's so special and so
important that we are all going to like move inside
of it. So on your point about creativity, so long
(37:52):
winded sort of explanation or exploration of the idea, I mean,
I think that we seeing there's an explosion of creativity
because of devices like the iPhone and the iPad. I
assume things like mid Journey and some of the AI
stuff's happening continue some expansion in some ways of some
(38:13):
of that entire industry has been built around what modern
technology allows us to do right. Like the podcast industry,
for instance, like would not exist quite the way it
does if it hadn't become so wildly accessible for someone
to like create, to record, and to edit and to
put a thing on the internet and then to share
it with other people.
Speaker 1 (38:32):
There may be some new innovations to be had.
Speaker 2 (38:34):
There may be, you know, variations on themes like the
next time a game like The Last of Us is
really impactful, it might be because you're playing it in
a headset like this, But I don't think it fundamentally
changes where we are at creatively. But I also don't
think this is like an inflection point. They make some
a lot of these. It is yet to be demonstrated
(38:57):
how this creates the inflection point that takes us somewhere
really dramatically different. And until I see that, until I
can really palpably see that, I'm sort of not I'm
not sold. I'm sold only on the continuation of a
fairly interesting peak into a fairly middling or uninteresting valley,
which is where we currently sit.
Speaker 4 (39:17):
So Apple lost it like luster a little bit?
Speaker 1 (39:20):
No?
Speaker 2 (39:21):
No, yes, yes, but Apple's loss is luster since I
mean there's no iPhone post iPhone. There's only improvements on
the iPhone conceptually that and it gets better and better,
and then it kind of levels off, and it's sort
of like, yeah, it's pretty good, and it will be
everything sort of like incremental, like better cameras, better, more storage,
better battery life, like more things you can do in
(39:43):
the software. Though the software itself is like largely unchanged
in about like twelve years of its existence. You have
to remember, it's only twelve years or something like that,
two thousand and seven, right, So it's however, many years
not that many. You know, Apples had plenty of failures.
Apples had plenty of products that fail, and they've had
a lot in the past a few years that are
just fine, that are fine whatever. It's good, you know,
(40:05):
like the iPad's cool, like does some really interesting things.
The watch is cool, doesn't really interesting things. Certainly helped
to define a market and made Apple a lot of money. Again,
they are just extensions of the phone. They are just
simply an augmentation and a variation of the exact same thing.
The surfaces are changing slightly, but the actual functionality is
(40:26):
is just a kind of a little bit of a
satellite of the of the phone. The next phone is
the thing?
Speaker 1 (40:32):
What is that.
Speaker 2 (40:33):
I don't think Apple has that. I don't think Apple's
done that. I think everything's very incremental right now. And
so have they lost their luster? I mean, Apples had
hits and they've had misses for their entire career. Steve Jobs.
People talk about Steve Jobs like he was like could
do no wrong. But there are plenty of things that
Apple has released that Steve Jobs really loved. That was
like a total whiff, you know. I mean, they collaborated
(40:53):
with like Motorola on like an iTunes phone. It was
like completely stupid, and nobody liked it and nobody cared
about and it wasn't a success, But people don't remember
it because it was a kind of an afterthought. Once
you do an iPhone doesn't kind of matter if you've
had a couple of misses before that. So you know,
this could be the lead up to the next, to
the to the right one, per what we've heard, per
(41:13):
what Mark talked about. But you know, I mean it's
just we're in a valley. We're in a technological valley.
We're still figuring out what it is that we're supposed
to be doing. With all this technology and it's put
us in this like, you know, it can't be extended.
It can't be boom times all the time. It can't
be extended innovation, endless innovation, endless change. There has to
(41:34):
be some period of settling, and I just think we're
still in a period of settling. We're not going to
be able to envision the next thing right now. And
if we could do that, then we'd be you and
I would be extremely rich and famous, and we're only
a little bit rich and famous. So you know, you
know how that goes.
Speaker 4 (41:50):
So you're not going to buy one this run, but
would you buy like a future.
Speaker 1 (41:53):
No, I mean I'll probably buy one. I mean I'll
probably buy.
Speaker 2 (41:55):
One, Okay, I mean, to be honest with you, like
at some point, I'll probably just fuck it. I'm gonna
buy one, you know, even just to play around with it,
even just so I know. I mean, I'm kind of
this is kind of a problem for me though, Like
I've got one of everything.
Speaker 1 (42:08):
Yeah, I will say this.
Speaker 2 (42:09):
I think if I spend thirty five hundred dollars on
it and I take it home and I use it
for twenty minutes and I get nauseous. I will definitely
return it, like because like, I have a bunch of
VR headsets and I don't use any of them, and
I've played them. I've played with them and been like, Wow,
this is fucking awesome. But after an extended session, I
mean like fifteen or twenty minutes, I feel physically ill
(42:31):
and I can't keep using it because I'm going to,
like I feel like I'll throw up. That's like a
pretty huge barrier to using any of this stuff. So
take all of the whatever's going on aside. If this
makes you physically ill, it doesn't matter how cool it is.
It just doesn't if you just take drama mean to
use it. I don't think that's a slam dunk as
a product.
Speaker 4 (42:48):
I wonder if there's like the ratio that like women
would put up with that moore than men, just because
like pregnant people are so often nachous that live through that.
Speaker 1 (42:58):
I mean, I ah, look, I will. I would argue that.
Speaker 2 (43:03):
Women have a higher tolerance for discomfort and suffering if
this world has showed us shown us anything, so I
wouldn't be surprised if that were the case. But nobody
wants to feel nauseous. I mean if you had, if
you had a choice between feeling nauseous and not, you
wouldn't like willingly make yourself nauseous.
Speaker 4 (43:17):
Right now, I'm just giving Apple the marketing tools.
Speaker 1 (43:20):
That's good. It's like pregnant women, you'll understand. Yeah, ladies, ladies,
it's better than being pregnant. Is that the pitch?
Speaker 4 (43:29):
Yeah, because it only makes you nauseous for a short
time period that's supposed to extend it.
Speaker 1 (43:33):
Yeah, it's interesting.
Speaker 2 (43:34):
I think we got to workshop that a little bit
before we take it to Tim and Co. But I
like where you're headed with it. It's interesting. Here's what
I've come to from a conclusion standpoint. Either I'm finally
so old and out of touch that I just don't
get it man, or Apple is it can only be
(43:55):
one of those things. It can only be one. It
can only be that I don't get it. My you know,
ability to gauge what is and is not cool or
good is somehow gone now. Or this is a bad,
bad dumb idea and Apple's blowing it. I think it's
the latter. I feel pretty strongly it is. That doesn't
mean it can't be successful. Lots of stupid things are
(44:17):
very successful, like Avatar for instance, but it does feel
a little bit like, yeah, I don't see it. I'm
going trouble seeing it. For the succession fans out here,
the presentation felt a lot like a living plus kind
of vibe. I'm not loving it, as they say, well,
(44:39):
I think I can safely say that as our show
for this week. We will be back next week with
more what Future, and as always, I wish you and
your family the very best.
Hey, and welcome to what Future.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
I am your host, Josh Witzapolski, and I gotta say,
I gotta tell you, folks, it's the beginning of the end,
or where is the end of the beginning? I think
we're all grappling with the new reality that we're in,
the reality of Apple's VR headset, the Vision Pro, a
(00:40):
thirty five dollars device that looks like a pair of
ski goggles and also like every other VR headset that
is going to change the world or absolutely not change
the world, as you may know. As you probably know,
last week, we had on Mark German from Bloomberg whotually
(01:00):
perfectly got pretty much all of these announcements reported out
ahead of Apple's actual event, and we talked a lot
about this thing, and I though, to be honest, I
was a little bit in disbelief when we discussed it.
My feeling was, this thing seemed everything I was hearing
seemed so unlike the company and the way that they
(01:21):
release things and the types of things they released, that
it all just sounded like weird sort of fantasy. And yet,
as we discovered on Monday, it's not fantasy. They've created
this fucking face computer that I guess their idea is
it's going to kind of do a little bit of everything.
You can play games in it.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
You can.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
Sorry, I'm scrolling as i'm talking. I'm scrolling the website
for this, and there's a picture of a woman sitting
on a sofa who presumably appears to be talking to
a man. I'm gonna say it might be her boyfriend
or husband. It kind of looks like they're pretty cozy here.
She's wearing this headset, she's smiling at him, She's wearing
these crazy goggles, and there's the outside of the headset
(02:04):
has a screen that shows like what appears to be
your eyes inside the headset, but they're not your eyes.
They're a video of your eyes that's being shot from
inside of the headset. Anyhow, They're sitting on the sofa
in this kind of like cozy environment, and it is
like the most ridiculous, one of the stupidest looking things
I've ever seen in my entire life. And I just
(02:25):
want to say, I'm not trying to be I'm not
trying to nag, you know, Apple, I'm not trying to say, like,
you know, they stink and they can't do anything right,
and this thing is going to be a failure. But
it is such a weird and jarring concept, such a
jarring vision again no pun intended for the future, that
I have a lot of trouble kind of taking it seriously.
(02:49):
So yeah, I mean, look, and I've said this before
and I will say it again. Early on, I was
a huge, huge fan of where virtual reality can go
and what it could be. And I have no doubt
that Apple is going to move the ball forward with
this thing. But the thing that they introduced feels so
not right for this moment. It just sort of like
(03:12):
baffles me. It's a baffling I feel, a totally baffling device.
Speaker 1 (03:16):
Anyhow.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
So I've been thinking about it a lot, obviously, because
it's I mean, certainly, at the very least, it's the
most interesting thing Apple has done in a pretty long time,
good or bad. It's definitely not not ambitious, it's definitely
not not fucking weird, you know, and I gotta do
you gotta throw them a bone for that. I do,
(03:37):
got a hand it to them. They have certainly released
a product that you know, swinging for the fences, as
they say in some in some way. But anyhow, before
they release it. We you know, we had on Mark German.
He talked about what was going to happen and it
all came true, and I thought we have to have
(03:58):
him come back on and just do a little like
post game breakdown. And so Mark is here with us,
and I just want to get into hearing his thoughts
on this very strange.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
New reality that we're living in.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
All right, Look, we had to get you back on, okay,
because I mean we just had this conversation like less
than a week ago, right, I mean.
Speaker 1 (04:35):
You've got to feel pretty good. I guess you know
at this point, but like.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
You, I mean, you literally had this entire story and
end like pretty much everything we talked about on the podcast,
certainly everything you wrote about over a long period of time,
but particularly the last piece you did on this headset.
You got everything pretty much down like exactly as it is.
So first off, congratulations, that's it's a rare feed. I
(04:59):
don't think people know how hard it is to get
that kind of level of scoop out of Apple.
Speaker 3 (05:05):
On Apple specifically, it's challenging. I love to do it.
Speaker 2 (05:09):
Yeah, here's one thing I'm curious, and we can't go
into the full I know you only have a short
period of time, but yeah, you know, I'm sure there
is a part of people at Apple that must be
really mad at you because you like spoil their big surprise, right,
But your writing creates an aura of you know, I'm
not saying that you're doing this on purpose. I know
you're just like writing shit that you get because you
(05:29):
love tracking it down and hunting it down. But it
helps to build the hype level to some degree when
there's all these like exciting rumors about these crazy things
they might do, Like do you have any interaction with
anybody at the company? Like do you talk to the
PR people there? I know it creates a lot of hype.
Speaker 3 (05:44):
At the same time, you know, it's not like they
asked for that hype, right, They have their preferences about
how you know, things would roll. Yeah, they are professionals.
You know, you would expect nothing less from a company
like Apple. Yeah, they have some of the best people
there on the PR side and the marketing side, and
(06:06):
they're all pros pros.
Speaker 1 (06:08):
So yeah, I'll leave it at that.
Speaker 4 (06:10):
No.
Speaker 2 (06:10):
I mean it's interesting because in my era of being
very interactive and covering Apple, I mean there's Steve Jobs
era into the early days of Tim and there was
a very different set of PR people. It is a
very different place in time, but I had I would
describe them as like screaming matches with or just being
screamed at by the PR people at Apple, where they
(06:34):
were like freaking out, like because we published shots that
somebody sent us off like a beta, like a Beta
iOS or whatever. After they released the Death Beta, somebody
sent us some shots and we published them and they
were like losing their shit. But a different era. I
think it's definitely a much more mature company, a completely
different company. Yeah, and I know Tim Cook actually kind
of did a whole house cleaning on the PR side
(06:54):
of it. Like I think there's a whole new group
of people there at this point over the last few years.
But that's the least interest thing. So they've introduced this thing.
It's fucking insane looking. Can we can we just talk
for a second about they released the headsets Vision Pro.
Speaker 1 (07:07):
Is that what it's called, or just Apple Vision? What
is it called? It's the Apple Vision Pro. Were you
surprised about the name?
Speaker 3 (07:13):
The name thing was interesting, So I had heard back
in early twenty twenty two that they were thinking of
calling it the Apple Vision. So I wrote at the
beginning in twenty twenty two that my best guess would
be that it's called the Apple Vision, right, And then
you were like, you just want to be sure to
say you got this originally you had this, yes, And
then in August of last year they trademarked Reality Pro right,
(07:37):
and so that became the working title to me, right,
and then internally they changed the name of the OS
from Reality OS to XROS, and then they end up
announcing it as the Vision Pro with visions right. And
they didn't tell anyone working on the product that it
(07:58):
was called Vision OS. Interesting, they had kept telling everyone
working the product that it was called XROS.
Speaker 1 (08:04):
Right.
Speaker 3 (08:04):
So if you watch any of the developer sessions over
the course of this week related to the headset, all
of the sessions are called XROS. Really, yes, all the
references or XROS, all the Apple engineers call it XROS.
Speaker 1 (08:19):
But XROS is not a thing.
Speaker 3 (08:21):
Yeah, they're eliminating that, right. But Apple Marketing didn't tell
Apple Engineering that they had shifted from XROS to Vision OS, right. Well,
the fact that they're marking it as the pro makes
it pretty clear that there's the non pro coming to
which is coming about two years from now, half years.
Speaker 1 (08:36):
Two years until now. This doesn't give me available until
early twenty twenty four, they said, Right, they're not even
selling it right anytime soon?
Speaker 2 (08:43):
No?
Speaker 3 (08:43):
And then I don't know if you saw my tweet
from earlier today, but were you covering Apple and fourteen still?
Speaker 1 (08:48):
Definitely when they announced the Apple Watch.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
Yeah, Actually that was one of the one of the
last ones where I did the event and review and stuff.
Speaker 1 (08:56):
I did it for Bloomberg.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
Actually I was at Bloomberg at the time, so I
actually went out there from Bloomberg. But yeah, I was
there in twenty fourteen. What's the deal with that?
Speaker 3 (09:03):
Well, when they announced the watch in twenty fourteen, that
was September, they said would be launching an early twenty fifteen, right,
It didn't go on sale until the end of April.
And even then, ye could get one anywhere.
Speaker 1 (09:14):
That's it, right, I remember I.
Speaker 3 (09:16):
Didn't get mine until mid May, end of May, right, yep.
And so they're saying early twenty twenty four. Notice they're
saying early next year versus early twenty twenty four by
the way.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
Right, stee, They they didn't say twenty twenty four early
next year?
Speaker 3 (09:29):
Okay, interesting because early twenty twenty four sounds farther away
than early next year, right.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
Sure, Also next year is more vague than twenty twenty four.
Twenty twenty four sounds very concrete. Sure, not that there's
any wiggle room there really, but yeah, I see what
you're saying. So you tweeted something the day of the
event that I thought was interesting, and I have been
pondering it quite a bit. You tweeted, have they shown
any pictures of anybody in the headset? They had a
picture of Tim Cook standing next to the headset.
Speaker 3 (09:55):
Which is weird, right, if it's your big thing to
set the standard for your career, I mean, legacy builder,
you want a one wearing.
Speaker 1 (10:02):
They're all wearing Apple watches, right.
Speaker 3 (10:04):
Yeah, they'll hold the iPhone.
Speaker 2 (10:06):
Right, I think, And a lot of people and You're
in the replies pointed out what I think is probably
part of it. People were like, Oh, it's because they
don't want memes to be made of them wearing the headset.
But that in and of itself, and that's why I
think it's interesting. The fact that they know that a
picture of them in the headset will become some kind
of joke on the internet, right to me, suggests like,
(10:27):
and that was my point, right, Here's here's what I
was most surprised about with this thing, because frankly, I
wasn't ready to be surprised at all, given the fact
that you had gotten the entire thing. But it looks
so much like a fucking quest or, like you know
what I mean, it looks like a VR headset. It
doesn't look like when in my mind's eye, when I
think of what Apple can do, like from a hardware perspective,
(10:50):
I'm like, this is going to just totally upend my
idea of what these things look like. But it really
kind of looks like a nice a really nice quest. Well,
let me tell you what surprising to me. The back portion,
like the padding in the back of your head. Yeah,
that looked way bigger than I expected. Yeah, and that
things mass. It's clunky. It's a clunky device. I mean,
(11:10):
I tweeted a picture of they have this woman sitting
alone on a sofa with it on, and it's like
a massive apparatus. Joanna Stern from The Wall Street Journal
used that she wrote about it. She said it was
like heavy, it was like hurt her nose. What's your
impression of the reaction from people on this, like you,
what have you seen out there?
Speaker 3 (11:27):
I don't need too much mind to a thirty minute demo.
And what that means for the product long term, My
personal opinion is that it's going to be incredibly slow
for the first year, even the first three to five years.
This is the most controlled Apple launch you'll ever see.
It's available only in the US and only from direct
Apple sales channels right right, And so that's a rarity.
(11:49):
Both of those things are.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
That means stores though, right, just from stores.
Speaker 3 (11:52):
Yeah, what I mean is you're not going to be
able to buy it a Best Buyer, Target or Walmart
or whatever. It's going to be Apple only right in
only the US, which is a rarety for them.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
There used to be periods where it was very hard
to get Apple, certain Apple products like weren't readily available everywhere,
Like this is going to be one of those products.
Speaker 3 (12:07):
Obviously that's the old Apple, right, and that's you know,
coming back to fruition here, right, They're going to have
to release an iPhone app to consumers or a feature
in the Apple Store app before the headset comes out
that allows you to do the whole face scanning thing
that they were doing, right, because you can't do that
through the web browser right order it, so you'll have
to do the face scanning before you order it online. Wow,
(12:27):
or you'll have to do it in the store. So
that's going to be a really new way to buy
a product. The whole prescription lenses.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
Thing, well, yeah, that was. You were right on that,
one hundred percent right on that.
Speaker 2 (12:36):
It's funny because I was tweeting about it with people
and they're like, that's not confirmed, and I was like, well,
let's just wait a minute to it happens.
Speaker 3 (12:41):
Literally, Like the lens thing, Yeah, okay, how much do
you think the lenses are? Someone who I spoke to
today and this person has no idea, but they just
threw out this random thousand dollars number for the lenses.
Speaker 2 (12:52):
I mean, expensive glasses can be right like in that
range the actual lenses themselves, like from my glasses that
are like good lenses?
Speaker 1 (13:00):
Is you know? I don't.
Speaker 2 (13:01):
I think if you have a strong prescription the price
goes up a bit, but I mean a few hundred
dollars probably minimum, right.
Speaker 3 (13:07):
Two point fifteen insurance? Right, what insurance covers?
Speaker 1 (13:10):
I don't know. I don't know.
Speaker 2 (13:11):
If you go to your insurance you're like, I really
need to use this Apple VR headset for work or whatever.
You know, maybe, but what do you how about this? Okay,
so you're like, it's a long it's a slow climb.
We talked about that a little bit last time. Right, Obviously,
you know people who are have some real inside track
at the company. Have you heard anything from internally about
how the reception has been taken or how the reaction
(13:35):
from from people has been taken. Do you know, have
any sense from inside the building what they what they're feeling.
Speaker 3 (13:42):
Yeah, I don't know, it's still too early at this point.
From people who were there, what they told me the loudest,
the loudest reaction was at the price point, rather than
anything specific to the headset and such.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
Well, the price point's crazy. I mean they had a
lot of crazy price points at the event. And what
it's an M two Mac Pro like desktop grand seven
thousand dollars.
Speaker 3 (14:03):
Either a thousand or two thousand more than the Intel version.
It's really expensive, really expensive. That was crazy pricing.
Speaker 2 (14:10):
And but then thirty five hundred for this headset. Definitely
took it out of the realm of nobody believed that.
I've been telling people for months, this is going to
be more expensive. They're like, no, no, no, no, no, it's just
like the iPad. Ever, you thought it was a grand,
but it was half the price this is going to be.
Speaker 1 (14:21):
It's true.
Speaker 2 (14:22):
I actually I thought the same thing when we were
watching it. I was like, Okay, but they're going to
hit us with like a fifteen hundred dollars price point
or something crazy, and they will sell, and they will
sell like a shitload of them right off the bat.
Speaker 3 (14:31):
But don't forget there's more evidence in context than I
had just from people telling me it's going to be
three grand plus.
Speaker 1 (14:39):
Right.
Speaker 3 (14:39):
I was also told, and I've reported many times, that
they're expecting high one hundred thousands to a million unit sales.
Speaker 1 (14:46):
Right.
Speaker 3 (14:46):
If this thing was priced that two thousand or below,
they would need more than a million units, Josh, because
everyone would buy one.
Speaker 1 (14:53):
Right, Well, I mean a large amount of people would
buy them.
Speaker 3 (14:56):
Right.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
I am still stuck, And obviously we're not going to
resolve this here because I know you have limited time.
But I am totally blown away by the fact that,
no matter what they said and did, I have a
mental block when I look at the device, it is
so similar to the things that have not worked. It
is so similar, even the interface, Like when they showed it,
you've used the quest, right, so you're familiar with the whole,
(15:28):
the whole. They have the whole, this panel interface with
these like icons and stuff. And not to say that
Apple isn't going to completely knock that shit out of
the water, but the consumer side of this still baffles me.
The idea that like your average consumer and I know
right now it's not the average consumer, but I feel
like we're so far away from this becoming a really
(15:48):
viable product, and like, yeah, I don't know. It's interesting
that none of the executives put it on. I mean
I find that to be I find that to be
like a huge kind of tell on their part.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
You know, it's biz all ar.
Speaker 3 (16:02):
You know, for years people have been saying that the
hardware of Apple products is way ahead of the software.
I think this is a unique situation where the user
interface interactions, the user interface design. I would rate the
OS look and feel and what they're showing there as
an a hardware design probably is a b right, And
this is without using it and seeing it in person, it.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
Just feels like a million little compromises you can see.
Speaker 3 (16:25):
Like that's that was the idea from the beginning, because
the non compromised product is not something that's feasible, right,
and had to build this compromised product that they're going
to bring something to market. I for one, think it's
going to be hugely successful long term. You do, I
do the iPhone cannibalized the iPod. Yeah, the iPad had
mac cannibalization potential. I think this has iPhone ipen and
(16:49):
mac cannibalization potential.
Speaker 1 (16:51):
Yeah. I mean that's interesting.
Speaker 2 (16:52):
You say that because John Gruber wrote an essay about humane.
I assume you've read this right. He wrote a piece
about humane and he basically was like, you know, making
a replacement for something that people hate is really pretty easy,
like getting them to convince them that's something you know,
that they can replace the thing they hate with something better.
But getting them to replace something they love is really
(17:15):
a huge climb. And I think, like if you think
about it on those terms, I thought it was a
really interesting passage that is fascinating because, like I think
the Humane device is a similar kind of like it's
like way outside the box, right, I.
Speaker 3 (17:26):
Think the Humane device is way more outside the box
than the Apple device.
Speaker 2 (17:29):
Well, right, but like if you're like, okay, the headset
or an iPhone, Like there's so many trade offs with
the headset, we're so far away from that being the
viable alternative, and like do people are people going to
fall in love with it the way they fell in
love with the iPhone? It's a it's a steep climb, right.
Speaker 3 (17:46):
The iPhone quickly took off, and it was pretty much
you would add that ideal right from the get go,
maybe the second generation, right, the headset's going to take
four or five generations to get to the place where
I'm talking about.
Speaker 2 (17:58):
Well, the funny thing about the iPhone, if you think
about it, is like it was a compromise device when
they released it. There was a ton of compromise, right.
It didn't have Remember it had edge when a lot
of phones had already gone to three G. Its screen
was really small by comparison to to well and really
not other devices, but it was a small, pretty small.
Speaker 3 (18:13):
It became the iPhone screen size became way too small
within three years, right.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
But no, that was like a big screen actually I guess, so, yeah,
that's true. But there was no copy and paste, there
was no apps. There was all this stuff that wasn't
on that was on the cimer room floor. But it
took a thing that was really not great that everybody
was using and made a version of it that was
so much better, such a huge leap that it was like, oh,
I can never look at that other thing again, right,
Like I'm never going to go back to a BlackBerry
(18:39):
after this, right, I don't know they got there with
the with the headset.
Speaker 3 (18:43):
The headset's not really replacing a device that everyone hates, right.
I think the first point that you mentioned is right
where the bar is higher, because you're trying to replace
things that you already love and use every day. Whereas
in terms of the iPhone cannibalizing the iPod, if you
really think about it based on that context, it's even
more what they were able to pull off with the
iPod to the iPhone transition, because they killed something that
(19:03):
everyone loved right hundred.
Speaker 2 (19:05):
Percent, but they killed it with a thing that was
the same thing and had all those features right plus more.
But when you were watching the presentation. Were you there
or were you just watching remotely? Oh?
Speaker 3 (19:15):
I saw it remotely.
Speaker 2 (19:16):
Did not feel to you like pretty just took pretty
black mirror some of the parts of the presentation.
Speaker 3 (19:21):
There were some demos, like the guy playing with his
kids wearing it's a It seems quite ridiculous to me.
And then right, they're gonna also step on their own
toes in three years when they release an iPhone that
can take three D pictures and you have to have
that whole you know, motorcycle helmet on your head to
doom Bault team.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
Is that a plan or they are they doing that?
Speaker 3 (19:41):
No, I'm just I mean, you hit thought to imagine
that's something they're going to try to do if they're
able to integrate a three D camera into a phone.
Speaker 2 (19:49):
Yeah, I mean the thing with the kids was pretty weird,
like the guy sitting on the sofa watching the picture
of his kids or watching the video of his kids playing. Like,
I know we all look at pictures on our phone
or whatever, but there's some something real sci fi, like
not in a fun way about this idea of you,
like being strapped into this device watching a moving image
of your family.
Speaker 3 (20:08):
I will say though, on a high level. They surprised
me with how well they positioned it. I thought they
were going to go in a totally different direction, Like
what direction they did exactly what I thought they should
have done, and market it as the future of the computer.
Speaker 1 (20:22):
Right now. You said that, you said that on the
on the last show, you were like, soid.
Speaker 3 (20:25):
That's what people working on it it should be marketed as,
and what their aim was. But it was very possible
that Apple marketing would take it in a different direction and
make it more of a companion device. But if they
really marketed it correctly, which they did, I think it
has a long term potential.
Speaker 2 (20:38):
I mean the pitch was sort of like, for thirty
five hundred dollars, it replaces your computer.
Speaker 1 (20:42):
Yes, which is a great thing you're I mean it.
Speaker 2 (20:44):
Sort of was like, I mean, it can't replace your
phone because it doesn't have a SIM, right, it's not cellular.
Speaker 3 (20:48):
Well, they'llood cellular, rightly.
Speaker 2 (20:49):
They'll make the dial have a red line on it,
and then you'll know that that's a cellular headset. All right, Mark, listen,
I know you need to go. You're a very busy man.
You probably have thousands of people who have to congratulate you.
Now you have to do a high five session at
Bloomberg HQ.
Speaker 3 (21:03):
One last thing, I'll say.
Speaker 1 (21:04):
Yes, one more, one more thing, if you will actually
two more things.
Speaker 3 (21:07):
Yeah, most absurd thing from the presentation they said two
hours on the battery pack or all day battery life
when you're plugged in, like come.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
On right all day when you're literally plugged into an
outlet right right.
Speaker 3 (21:19):
The other thing I'll say is I still believe that
it's gonna start off very slow. Yeah, but I think
over time, if they can get the price point in
half and they can you know, chop down the design
a little bit, and they can highlight more of the
ar features and they get a really solid developer response,
I think long term it could be it could be
a smash hip. Are you gonna buy one?
Speaker 1 (21:41):
Probably not, I mean honestly, I mean I don't know.
Maybe you know.
Speaker 2 (21:44):
I say, it's like, here's the thing I say no
to shit all the time. I'm like, I'm not getting that,
and then I like go in a store and I
look at it and I'm like, ah, right, fine, thirty
five hundred dollars.
Speaker 1 (21:51):
Is a high bar.
Speaker 2 (21:52):
Even like I'm the like I could certainly I could
afford one, but like I'm like thirty five hundred, what
am I gonna do with this thing? Like again the
other thing that's and this is actually a good point
to we'll close on this, but it kind of speaks
to what you're saying about this long term plan. One
of the things Joanna said in her piece was it
made her nauseous when she used it. I get very
(22:13):
much And you talked about this on the show last
time the same way, and I get very motion sick
using VR stuff. I love it, like I've loved some
of the Quest experiences, but I'm like, damn, I gotta
take this thing off because I literally feel like I'm
going to throw up if they have not come up
with like a real magic bullet for fixing that for
a lot of people, I think that's a huge problem.
Like I know, the like being physically ill is not
(22:34):
like a little thing, right, It's like and I.
Speaker 3 (22:36):
Get really ill from it. I am just thinking, you
know about it Yesterday's like I might use this thing
for two weeks and have to return.
Speaker 2 (22:42):
It, right, And I think that's an experience that's It's
not Antennagate. This is way bigger it's like you made
a device that is actually making people. I can see
the stories now.
Speaker 3 (22:51):
Because it's Apple. Yes, those stories will.
Speaker 1 (22:52):
Happen, right, CMBC has the report people throwing up because
of their Apple headsets or whatever.
Speaker 3 (22:58):
The difference between Antennagate and this was intenegate. Apple blamed it,
said it was an industry problem when it wasn't an
industry problem, right nausea.
Speaker 2 (23:06):
Actually, actually they could say it's an industry problem. All
these other headsets have had, you know, the problems with
this people get.
Speaker 3 (23:12):
But this time it would be true, right to tenigate,
it wasn't true what they turned it into an industry
problem when it wasn't right this time, you know, the
nausea thing is an industry thing, and let's see what happens.
But my point being is you can't really know that
from an Apple Store demo before you buy it.
Speaker 2 (23:27):
No, if you use it for long enough, I guess
if they give you a ten minute demo, though they're
not gonna be able to give people ten minute demos, but.
Speaker 1 (23:32):
Like it's just a reality of this.
Speaker 2 (23:34):
If they have not gotten the latency down and the
frame rate and the refresh rate of the screens up
and even then, I think it's still like not a
perfect solution.
Speaker 1 (23:42):
Right, there's still like that.
Speaker 3 (23:43):
Going start growing up upper ten minutes, right, it takes
you a good hour, So you're really going to have
to use this thing and see how it goes.
Speaker 2 (23:49):
I mean, everybody's different, there's different sensitivities. All I'm going
to say is like, there, I have yet to see
another Apple product that induces actual illness when you use it.
Speaker 1 (23:57):
Have you ever heard of an Apple when you see
the right? No, I'm kidding.
Speaker 2 (24:02):
Everybody just started immediately throwing up in the auditorium when
they saw the price.
Speaker 3 (24:06):
I haven't heard of anyone personally who's used the device
who has had that.
Speaker 2 (24:09):
Problem, right, Because there are all people at Apple, aren't
they They're not going to be like, oh yeah, by
the way, it was pukey and when we's jested out.
Speaker 3 (24:15):
I mean, I hadn't seen anyone other than Joanna say it,
which is curious.
Speaker 1 (24:20):
So you're saying Joanna's lying fake news. No, that's not
what I'm saying.
Speaker 3 (24:23):
Wow, that's not what I'm saying.
Speaker 1 (24:24):
White an attack on her credibility, Mark. What I'm saying.
Speaker 3 (24:27):
What I'm saying is is that Joanna cuts through the noise, right,
And I'm saying that it's possible that the demos were
so blow away that it was easy to maybe ignore
for sure that issue. It was a compliment with Joanna.
Speaker 2 (24:43):
They didn't let that many people do hands on with it,
I mean, or an eyes on or whatever the fuck
we're calling it.
Speaker 3 (24:48):
Did demos till ten pm on Reay and really probably
do the same till ten pm today and maybe throughout
the week.
Speaker 2 (24:55):
But I mean comparatively, it's not like people could go
grab it and just try it out.
Speaker 1 (24:58):
It's like they're doing it's all demos.
Speaker 3 (25:01):
Watch the Good Morning America video, the interview with Tim
Cook and the interview that the anchor got. That's the
same demo everyone else is getting.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
Oh did they show it? They have like a they
actually filmed that.
Speaker 3 (25:13):
On the only like Good Morning America film the demo.
You can see the building they built for the demos,
in the room they're in. They put you on a couch.
It's in a controlled environment. Yeah, and so you can
see you know, you sit on a couch for thirty minutes,
you do all the demos they've programmed for you, and
you get to see people are people have been blown
away by this thing, but again a thirty minute demo,
you have to use it for a few weeks.
Speaker 2 (25:30):
I have no doubt it's an incredible They have some
incredible features, and also you got to remember a lot
of those people probably are not I mean there's probably
a handful like the Good Morning America people.
Speaker 1 (25:37):
How much VR do you think they've done?
Speaker 4 (25:39):
Right?
Speaker 3 (25:39):
I want to read the reviews when this thing ships
and they can use it for several days. I want
to read the reviews from the VR websites.
Speaker 2 (25:46):
Right, Well, are they even going to work with those websites?
Do they even care about them? I'm sure they will
really because I feel like historically Apple likes to bypass
the geeky shit and go to like the mainstream for
this device.
Speaker 3 (25:56):
They need that. They were all there at the conference
and I thought it was the right from out certainly
based on Apple's history, could have gone either way, but
I think they made the right decision there. Yeah, you
want that community to really talk this up because that's
the community that's going to buy this thing from the
get go.
Speaker 1 (26:08):
Right? Is this a quest killer?
Speaker 3 (26:10):
Like?
Speaker 2 (26:10):
Is that it?
Speaker 1 (26:11):
Or is it just the price points too high?
Speaker 3 (26:13):
The delta on the price is so large that yeah,
you can't compare the two. What I will say though,
is the Meta is uh one sixth of the price.
I still think it's not as bad as one's sixth
as the Apple thevist.
Speaker 2 (26:29):
I mean, E mean it doesn't it's doesn't. It's not
one sixth as good or it's better.
Speaker 1 (26:33):
It's not as point.
Speaker 3 (26:33):
It's not one. Maybe it's two or three six.
Speaker 1 (26:35):
I mean that's pretty, that's pretty. That's pretty damning, you know.
Speaker 2 (26:39):
But if that's the best that we have to offer
right now, I mean maybe PSVR is. I mean it's
a totally different experience for a totally different purpose. But
I mean Apples certainly will become the best of this category.
Speaker 1 (26:49):
There's no question.
Speaker 3 (26:50):
Yes, I saw someone tweet this morning. Is the last
thing I'll say. I forgot who's who? Please forgive me
for not citing them. And I have the same exact thought.
Meta should license out like their metas.
Speaker 1 (27:00):
Do you like an Android?
Speaker 3 (27:02):
Yeah, they should go the Android model and they'll crush it.
Speaker 2 (27:04):
Yeah. I mean, honestly, what would be really interesting is
to see some hardware creativity here because I think that
like eventually, someone's going to crack that magic place between
like it's not too big, it's not too bulky, it
doesn't look too weird, and it actually is like functions.
Speaker 3 (27:17):
Well and watch it'll be Apple.
Speaker 2 (27:19):
Well it'll be Apple, you know, on a long enough
timeline and they have infinite money. So that's good, like
I assume it will.
Speaker 1 (27:26):
Mark.
Speaker 2 (27:26):
Thank you for coming back and talking about this again,
like ingrats on the scoops. Just super fucking awesome to
see it all like play out the way you wrote it.
Speaker 3 (27:33):
Thank you and thank your team. Thank you so much. Bye,
see you.
Speaker 1 (27:45):
Mark.
Speaker 2 (27:46):
Is he's just great, is I have to say, first off,
and just an incredible ability, Like it's so rare just
to be able to do what he does, which is
to scoop the largest most valuable company in the world
on their own announcements an outrageous thing to do, and
to do it consistently and to get it like almost
perfectly right is fairly unusual.
Speaker 1 (28:06):
So we'll have him back.
Speaker 2 (28:08):
We're gonna have him share some more Apple secrets with
us next time he gets a nasty ass scoop.
Speaker 1 (28:14):
Uh.
Speaker 2 (28:15):
But but you know, I do have some more thoughts
about what this headset really means.
Speaker 4 (28:21):
I did want to bring up that picture that you
posted on Twitter of like you wearing some sort of
like glasses from.
Speaker 1 (28:27):
Like oh yeah, Google Google, that's Google Glass.
Speaker 4 (28:29):
Yeah. I loved that.
Speaker 1 (28:30):
Oh.
Speaker 2 (28:31):
By the way, for the record, I just was writing,
you know, I was writing a piece for the for
the fucking Verge. It wasn't like I was like, I
bought these glasses and I'm wearing them.
Speaker 1 (28:39):
Here. I'll put it in the link.
Speaker 4 (28:40):
That's what it looks like.
Speaker 1 (28:41):
No, I know, but I know it's funny.
Speaker 2 (28:43):
But like, you know, that's what happens when you like
review a product, is like you put them on and
then somebody takes a picture of you and then you
got to live with that for the rest of your life.
Speaker 1 (28:50):
I look fucking so stupid this picture.
Speaker 2 (28:53):
I look like a Jewish terminator is how I describe
my vibe right here. But this is actually way less
dumb than the Apple thing. Like this is super dumb
and embarrassing and like silly, but comparatively comparatively, think about
this versus what Apple is suggesting. Okay, the Apple thing
(29:15):
is like ten times as clunky and gigantic as this.
It's not cooler. I'm not saying this is cool, although
it's closer to like something you'd want, like an unobtrusive
small thing that's like a part of your glasses or something.
Speaker 1 (29:29):
Right.
Speaker 2 (29:30):
I think there's a famous picture of Mark Zuckerberg walking
down the aisle of one of his events where they
gave everybody an Oculus headset a quest or whatever, and
it looks like the most it's one of the most
dystopian photos of all time. And I think, when when
I look at this, and when I see like the
pictures on Apple's website of this woman I don't know,
(29:51):
hanging out on her sofa with her boyfriend or whatever,
and she's got these massive goggles on her face, it
doesn't feel like.
Speaker 1 (29:59):
It doesn't spark excitement or joy for me, you know,
it just is like, what are we doing here, folks?
What are we doing? What's happening?
Speaker 2 (30:09):
I think the thing that's most interesting about it, to
be honest, is how much I feel like the Apple's
just this whole thing just misjudges the moment of life
that we're in. Just I said this on the last podcast,
but it just feels like, Man, I want to breathe
fucking air. I want to be I want to I
want to touch grass. I want to be out on
an adventure somewhere and with like people I know and love,
(30:30):
Like I don't want to put something on my face
and be transported to like a virtual fucking office, which
is a lot of a lot of the a lot
of the stuff they showed was actually like you can
be at the office with this on and like we
do some work and it's like, yeah, that doesn't seem.
Speaker 1 (30:49):
That great to me, you know.
Speaker 2 (30:51):
Or you can watch your kids, you know, playing while
you're wearing this fucking thing on your face, like well,
you can't even actually interact with them properly like a
normal person. Not to say that holding a phone up
is any better. Maybe it's not. You know, maybe this
is better than holding it. It's not better than holding
a phone up.
Speaker 1 (31:09):
It's not.
Speaker 2 (31:10):
People have been holding cameras up forever. It's very similar
when you hold your phone up. But this is like
cutting literally cutting how off you're the main one of
the main ways you communicate with other people in the world.
Speaker 1 (31:22):
I understand.
Speaker 2 (31:23):
They have a digital projection of your eyes and when
you do a FaceTime shat, it creates a virtual three
D avatar of your face. I mean, the whole thing
just is like, is this just an elaborate setup for
the new season of Black Mirror? And by the way,
I hate the Black Mirror shit. Like I'm not a
big fan of Black Mirror because it's always like whoa
(31:43):
technology is fucked up? Man or whatever. That's the whole
premise of the show is like technology right. But I
gotta say I maybe they were onto something. Maybe they're
onto something. Maybe they we should heed the warnings of
a British TV show, although that doesn't say on right
to me at all. And maybe I just need to
just jack into the matrix and call it a day.
(32:06):
Maybe I just need to jack into the matrix and
be done with it. Maybe I'm overthinking it. Maybe I'm
being a negative person. Maybe I'm being a suppressive person,
as they say in scientology. Maybe I'm being Maybe I'm
not an ot anything, I'm an OT zero, you know.
Maybe I just need to hop into this head first.
I'm not really sure.
Speaker 4 (32:27):
Can I ask you a question?
Speaker 3 (32:28):
I have a question.
Speaker 1 (32:29):
You can ask me anything you want. I would love
to hear. I would love a question.
Speaker 4 (32:32):
Okay, So I remember when like the I pod came
out and the iPhone came out, these are all things
that are so cool because I like enhanced your living experience.
Right now, our options are you put on a headset
and you go into a different experience where you create
an avatar and go into like assumes like experience, right,
so the right futures so there, Yeah, they are out
(32:53):
of our current realities. So that to me feels like
we're just out of creativity, right.
Speaker 2 (32:59):
I hear you're saying, we certainly are running out of ideas.
Like this is a great indicator that we're at a point,
we were at a value. I've actually I've talked about
this many times in the past. You know, there are
there are there are peaks and valleys to all of this.
You know, there there there is the build up and
the breakdown. And I think like if if the peak
is you know, the iPhone, because it really is from
(33:21):
a technology perspective, the peak of modern sort of technological
innovations is really the iPhone and the era that it begat,
which is this era of always on connectivity and social
sort of inter you know, always on digital social connectivity
and interaction with a device that kind of is to
(33:43):
do everything device that's the highest pinnacle of sort of
technological sort of upset that has happened in probably in
my lifetime. You could say the Internet, right, but actually
in some way the Internet's full the power in the
power in the terror of the Internet wasn't actually fully
encapsulated or realized until the Internet was like in our
(34:06):
hands all the time and in art like was where
our photos went and where we communicated, And that didn't
happen until the iPhone, it really did, and everything else
was like you had to sit down somewhere basically to
go and off to this other place.
Speaker 1 (34:18):
So if that's the peak, and.
Speaker 2 (34:20):
All of the things that begat are the kind of
like in the wake of the peak of this technological innovation,
then there has to be there will be naturally be
a value.
Speaker 1 (34:28):
You can't have. It can't.
Speaker 2 (34:30):
You can't keep hitting peaks over and over again with
this stuff. It's just not possible. Like, you can't. You're
not going to invent things that are that explosive on
such a regular cadence.
Speaker 1 (34:39):
And if you look at the time of.
Speaker 2 (34:40):
Technology that's been built post iPhone, there's been this you
know a huge amount of things that happened. Even like
if you look at like a tesla, a huge amount
of Like why Tesla was successful is because it borrowed
a lot of innovations from an iPhone. Like many many
things about the Tesla are a kind of reference to
or a nod to how the iPhone fund Even this
(35:01):
concept for us conceptually of like electric cars being like
a big phone you charge or whatever, has been made
more accessible by the existence of the iPhone. But in
the grand scheme of things, the Tesla is like a
car with a different engine. Right, It's not a total
reinvention of travel as we know it. So there hasn't
been an explose I'm just used as an example, but
(35:21):
there has not been an explosive next moment. And again,
all of the recent moments of innovation are a byproduct
in some way of the iPhone. You could make an
argument about sort of machine learning and AI stuff like chat,
GBT and mid journey. I think it's an explosive potential.
There's no iPhone of it. Yet, there isn't the iPhone thing,
(35:44):
the killer app that makes it the kind of the
delineating point between the thing before and the thing that
comes after. The VR headset, the vision pro And I'm
not saying this to be to downplay it or to
be negative, but it is a slight tweak on what
an iPhone is. The screen is in a different place,
(36:07):
the content is in a different place. Yes, certainly, VR
and AR there are different things that they allow. Yet
first person games that you play on your computer they
have a lot in common with what a VR game does.
It's just a little bit more of like you're immersed
fully visually in it versus you're only seventy percent immersed
in it or whatever AR. We do on our phones
(36:28):
all the time, so that that application of the digital
overlaid on the virtual. These are fairly familiar things, right.
Every time you use your camera to snap a QR
code and then take you to a website, you're using
AR in some way.
Speaker 1 (36:42):
Right.
Speaker 2 (36:42):
If you use your one of those measurement things to
measure on your phone, like, that's AR.
Speaker 1 (36:46):
Right.
Speaker 2 (36:46):
If you look at like some weird three D object
in your room, that's an AR. So all of this stuff,
like the sensor is, the cameras, the motion tracking, the
connectivity to your apps, all the surface that you see
when you work in it. It is not an explosive
new idea like it's always been this way and now
we've upended it. It's just like a continuation of, almost
(37:08):
an addendum to what the iPhone created. And so for me,
when I look at it, it's not that I don't
think it can be cool or exciting or interesting, and
I'm sure there will be implications with this, but the
idea that it's like the next peak technologically speaking, feels
like really like a vacant thought. It feels like a fake,
(37:29):
a phony, a put on about what real peaks look like.
And I don't think we have the moment, like this
is not the moment for this, Like I don't think
this is the where everybody was gravitating towards it and
then something just broke through that's so special and so
important that we are all going to like move inside
of it. So on your point about creativity, so long
(37:52):
winded sort of explanation or exploration of the idea, I mean,
I think that we seeing there's an explosion of creativity
because of devices like the iPhone and the iPad. I
assume things like mid Journey and some of the AI
stuff's happening continue some expansion in some ways of some
(38:13):
of that entire industry has been built around what modern
technology allows us to do right. Like the podcast industry,
for instance, like would not exist quite the way it
does if it hadn't become so wildly accessible for someone
to like create, to record, and to edit and to
put a thing on the internet and then to share
it with other people.
Speaker 1 (38:32):
There may be some new innovations to be had.
Speaker 2 (38:34):
There may be, you know, variations on themes like the
next time a game like The Last of Us is
really impactful, it might be because you're playing it in
a headset like this, But I don't think it fundamentally
changes where we are at creatively. But I also don't
think this is like an inflection point. They make some
a lot of these. It is yet to be demonstrated
(38:57):
how this creates the inflection point that takes us somewhere
really dramatically different. And until I see that, until I
can really palpably see that, I'm sort of not I'm
not sold. I'm sold only on the continuation of a
fairly interesting peak into a fairly middling or uninteresting valley,
which is where we currently sit.
Speaker 4 (39:17):
So Apple lost it like luster a little bit?
Speaker 1 (39:20):
No?
Speaker 2 (39:21):
No, yes, yes, but Apple's loss is luster since I
mean there's no iPhone post iPhone. There's only improvements on
the iPhone conceptually that and it gets better and better,
and then it kind of levels off, and it's sort
of like, yeah, it's pretty good, and it will be
everything sort of like incremental, like better cameras, better, more storage,
better battery life, like more things you can do in
(39:43):
the software. Though the software itself is like largely unchanged
in about like twelve years of its existence. You have
to remember, it's only twelve years or something like that,
two thousand and seven, right, So it's however, many years
not that many. You know, Apples had plenty of failures.
Apples had plenty of products that fail, and they've had
a lot in the past a few years that are
just fine, that are fine whatever. It's good, you know,
(40:05):
like the iPad's cool, like does some really interesting things.
The watch is cool, doesn't really interesting things. Certainly helped
to define a market and made Apple a lot of money. Again,
they are just extensions of the phone. They are just
simply an augmentation and a variation of the exact same thing.
The surfaces are changing slightly, but the actual functionality is
(40:26):
is just a kind of a little bit of a
satellite of the of the phone. The next phone is
the thing?
Speaker 1 (40:32):
What is that.
Speaker 2 (40:33):
I don't think Apple has that. I don't think Apple's
done that. I think everything's very incremental right now. And
so have they lost their luster? I mean, Apples had
hits and they've had misses for their entire career. Steve Jobs.
People talk about Steve Jobs like he was like could
do no wrong. But there are plenty of things that
Apple has released that Steve Jobs really loved. That was
like a total whiff, you know. I mean, they collaborated
(40:53):
with like Motorola on like an iTunes phone. It was
like completely stupid, and nobody liked it and nobody cared
about and it wasn't a success, But people don't remember
it because it was a kind of an afterthought. Once
you do an iPhone doesn't kind of matter if you've
had a couple of misses before that. So you know,
this could be the lead up to the next, to
the to the right one, per what we've heard, per
(41:13):
what Mark talked about. But you know, I mean it's
just we're in a valley. We're in a technological valley.
We're still figuring out what it is that we're supposed
to be doing. With all this technology and it's put
us in this like, you know, it can't be extended.
It can't be boom times all the time. It can't
be extended innovation, endless innovation, endless change. There has to
(41:34):
be some period of settling, and I just think we're
still in a period of settling. We're not going to
be able to envision the next thing right now. And
if we could do that, then we'd be you and
I would be extremely rich and famous, and we're only
a little bit rich and famous. So you know, you
know how that goes.
Speaker 4 (41:50):
So you're not going to buy one this run, but
would you buy like a future.
Speaker 1 (41:53):
No, I mean I'll probably buy one. I mean I'll
probably buy.
Speaker 2 (41:55):
One, Okay, I mean, to be honest with you, like
at some point, I'll probably just fuck it. I'm gonna
buy one, you know, even just to play around with it,
even just so I know. I mean, I'm kind of
this is kind of a problem for me though, Like
I've got one of everything.
Speaker 1 (42:08):
Yeah, I will say this.
Speaker 2 (42:09):
I think if I spend thirty five hundred dollars on
it and I take it home and I use it
for twenty minutes and I get nauseous. I will definitely
return it, like because like, I have a bunch of
VR headsets and I don't use any of them, and
I've played them. I've played with them and been like, Wow,
this is fucking awesome. But after an extended session, I
mean like fifteen or twenty minutes, I feel physically ill
(42:31):
and I can't keep using it because I'm going to,
like I feel like I'll throw up. That's like a
pretty huge barrier to using any of this stuff. So
take all of the whatever's going on aside. If this
makes you physically ill, it doesn't matter how cool it is.
It just doesn't if you just take drama mean to
use it. I don't think that's a slam dunk as
a product.
Speaker 4 (42:48):
I wonder if there's like the ratio that like women
would put up with that moore than men, just because
like pregnant people are so often nachous that live through that.
Speaker 1 (42:58):
I mean, I ah, look, I will. I would argue that.
Speaker 2 (43:03):
Women have a higher tolerance for discomfort and suffering if
this world has showed us shown us anything, so I
wouldn't be surprised if that were the case. But nobody
wants to feel nauseous. I mean if you had, if
you had a choice between feeling nauseous and not, you
wouldn't like willingly make yourself nauseous.
Speaker 4 (43:17):
Right now, I'm just giving Apple the marketing tools.
Speaker 1 (43:20):
That's good. It's like pregnant women, you'll understand. Yeah, ladies, ladies,
it's better than being pregnant. Is that the pitch?
Speaker 4 (43:29):
Yeah, because it only makes you nauseous for a short
time period that's supposed to extend it.
Speaker 1 (43:33):
Yeah, it's interesting.
Speaker 2 (43:34):
I think we got to workshop that a little bit
before we take it to Tim and Co. But I
like where you're headed with it. It's interesting. Here's what
I've come to from a conclusion standpoint. Either I'm finally
so old and out of touch that I just don't
get it man, or Apple is it can only be
(43:55):
one of those things. It can only be one. It
can only be that I don't get it. My you know,
ability to gauge what is and is not cool or
good is somehow gone now. Or this is a bad,
bad dumb idea and Apple's blowing it. I think it's
the latter. I feel pretty strongly it is. That doesn't
mean it can't be successful. Lots of stupid things are
(44:17):
very successful, like Avatar for instance, but it does feel
a little bit like, yeah, I don't see it. I'm
going trouble seeing it. For the succession fans out here,
the presentation felt a lot like a living plus kind
of vibe. I'm not loving it, as they say, well,
(44:39):
I think I can safely say that as our show
for this week. We will be back next week with
more what Future, and as always, I wish you and
your family the very best.
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