Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…
What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!
Wow. Did I miss Mikah on this broadcast!!! I used to really enjoy Mikah and Leo’s comments during Apple Keynotes, but the group that was adding commentary (Leo was the exception) didn’t add anything to the broadcast and were down right annoying. I’ll just watch the Apple airings if Mikah isn’t on the stream with Leo.
As I posted on TWiT.social:
At $3500US in the US only and #NotBefore2024 , #Apple announced their new #AR / #VR slow motion flop. It’s gonna make #Meta squirm, but in the end these two companies are spending $B’s to learn/teach that no one wants to wear a face computer (especially with less than 2h of battery life.) Oh, and Apple’s vision of a face computer includes a fan, so get ready for a new way to hot box LOL
The further thing that Apple never mentioned, is what level of eco-system lock in is required for this. People complained bitterly about Meta requiring a Meta account to use their hardware… I feel certain this device will require an Apple account, and probably an iPhone or iPad to set it up, and a Mac to transcode your content to it (or definitely to develop for it)… I can’t imagine any non-Apple user will want to be locked into the eco-system without spending a further $2-5K to buy the other walled garden toys.
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@PHolder from that description it looks like @Leo called it - it should be renames the TCVP (Tim Cook Vanity Project) Sure sounds like WallE was the inspiration.
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The M2 Ultra looks amazing and the expansion in the Mac Pro looks very good, but I’ll wait to see what Alex says, I’m guessing he is impressed, but also tinged with disappointment, because Apple won’t work with nVidia to get their CUDA cards working with macOS.
I have a Mac mini M1 at home and a MacBook Air M1 at work (as well as a ThinkPad T480), the MBA is as fast running Windows as the T480 and 99% of what I need runs native in macOS on ARM, so, although the Max and Ultra are amazing, I just don’t need that power - oh, I want that power, but I just can’t justify the price.
@TidBit Mikah got a late invite and was sitting with Jason Snell in the stands on the Apple Campus.
The transcription of the audio notes in iMessage sounds good, 90% of the time I get one, I have to wait a few hours, before I can listen to it. That said, I don’t know anyone who uses iMessage, they all use Signal.
I just hope Autocorrect stops correcting words I’ve already written! I hate it, when I have checked a word is correct, then 2-3 words later, AC goes back and changes the correct word for something totally different. It is infuriating, especially on services where you can’t go back and edit posts after posting. Sometimes I catch it changing the word and can go back and put the correct word back in, other times, I don’t notice and I then post the gobbledygook that AC has made out of my text.
As we say in German: Der Erfinder von Autokorrekt ist ein Erdloch und sollte sich ins Knie fügen.
@Leo I was sceptical about AirPods Pro, I thought a lot of it was just gimmicky, but, after the Samsung Galaxy Buds+ and my Sony over-ears (which were more expensive than the AirPods Pro), I was stunned by the audio quality. The moving sound stage is more gimicks, but also amazing, when you hear it.
Watching with Apple TV+, when my daughter was working on the other side of the room, it was strange that the sound stage was in front of me, “in” the TV screen. Likewise, I heard a song on Apple Music and rotating in my desk chair, with my iPhone sitting on my desk, the sound stage stayed stable and eminated from around the iPhone, so moved around my head as I rotated, amazing, but more of a gimmick than something I’d want every day.
My bike already has its own app for connecting to my iPhone and Watch - it shows a HUD and navigation screen, similar to what Apple showed off (I have a Bosch Kiox 300 system) and it uses my Apple Watch to show my heart rate, it also automatically makes a training session in Fitness on the iPhone, but doesn’t record calories used - Health records it accurately, but is currently not shown in the training session. I hope the new version of WatchOS fixes this problem, otherwise it is just natively doing what my current Watch does.
They kept the headset specs well under wraps, it is a lot more than I was expecting. Still way too expensive for me to consider, but I’d love to try it. Like HoloLens, it is one of the few AR/VR devices that has had me excited, since I tried my first VR headset in the early 1990s.
I can see why it is so expensive, the amount of power needed and the quality of the displays, and see-through displays with darkening. Fascinating. But just way outside my budget. 
I think putting the battery in a pocket or belt is a good idea. Remember Darknet (Freedom tm in English?) from Daniel Suarez, the sports glasses they all wore were linked to a computer and battery in a belt, refined later. I should think this makes a huge difference to the wearability of the goggles, moving a lot of the weight away from your bonce and lower down the body, meaning you are more stable and the weight is distributed to areas more used to carrying that sort of weight.
I’ve wanted something like this for a long time, sitting at a desk and moving my head to see more information, instead of having multiple screens around me, just anchor them where I need them and turn my head to see them when I need them.
It is very similar to a system I described in the mid 1990s, when the first major wave of VR arrived. Walking around source code, a debugger that was animated, you could see blocks of different colour, depending on how much they were being used, you could focus in on areas of high activity and explore why they were being so heavily used, then zoom back out again. Virtual meeting rooms, where you could do the same with other programmers. You could pull up a virtual keyboard and an editor window and start working on the code etc. Obviously, voice recognition wasn’t as far advanced as it is today.
I had a lot of ideas, but VR wasn’t advanced enough back then. It looks like we are slowly moving into this realm. I’ll be interested to see, how the display compares to that of the HoloLens, I see the HL as the only real competitor device at the moment, this is a long way removed from pure VR headsets. As far as I’ve seen, the others, at best, simulate the outside world by filming it and projecting it behind the virtual world. I find the HL and Apple solution much better, at least in theory.
(I’m only at about 1:40:00 at the moment, I had to ride to work, I’ll see if I can pick up the rest of the keynote later.)
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While I love your optimism, the price of this kit from laptops to desktop and now the headset is beyond mist normal people.
The headset has too many compromises and while a superfast processor is cool, I’d rather have enough speed and a nice car 
, well at least Liz has a nice new car/!!
It depends on what you want. As I say multiple times, the pricing is way out of my league (the same for Windows workstations with high end processors, I want, but I can’t justify).
That said, what did it for me was the performance per Watt of the Apple Silicon, compared to AMD and Intel. Electricity prices have nearly trippled in the last year, so I am glad I made the switch. I haven’t even turned on my old Ryzen 7 desktop since October.
I’ve used MS-DOS/Windows and Macs since the mid 80s and have switched back and forth over the years, Linux as well. I was a home computer guy, ZX81 Vic=20, Memotech MTX500, Amstrad CPC6128 and a pair of Amigas in the 80s and early 90s, then had to give in and go with Windows, as work had pretty much dropped Macs by that time - UK prices were 4 times higher than US prices at the time. Then XP put me off Windows and I used Linux as my main Desktop between 2002 and 2008, when I got a 24" iMac - with educational discount (I was a running a project seminar at a university in Bavaria), it cost as much as a normal PC + 24" display. When I went to replace it, the cost of displays had come down, but Apple’s prices had increased.
Then, with the M1 mini, the prices made sense again, especially the long term savings in electricity.
I must be weird, but then you all know that, the 15" air can’t be the ultimate 15" laptop - it doesn’t have a touch screen!!!
Also I used to have the ability to leave messages on Skype, 10 years ago.
I think the battle is on for AR vs AI although Apple has a dog in both fights now.
I think either Google or Microsoft will introduce Night Shift, the Copilot for working while you sleep… Will that outperform a system too fast for you to keep up?
I must be weird, but then you all know that, the 15" air can’t be the ultimate 15" laptop - it doesn’t have a touch screen!!!
It is the ultimate 15" laptop from Apple… 
It is marketing speak.
Also I used to have the ability to leave messages on Skype, 10 years ago.
The same with most messaging platforms, including iMessage. New is that if you leave a voice message, it will automatically create a transcript of the voice message. That is a nice improvement, shame I never use iMessage.
The headset is the first one, apart from HoloLens, which has made me go, “aha, they get it!” It might be too expensive for me, but it is a move in the right direction, I think.
I think Apple is doing the right thing with “AI”, they are putting little bits of AI in where it makes sense and where it can really help. Microsoft are similarly doing this, at least in part, with Co-Pilot, but they are also going overboard with the LLM in Bing AI. I’ve been using it for a while now and it provides useful answers about 50% of the time, 30% is just wrong and 20% I have enough knowledge and can find the right answer, to train it with the correct answer.
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Based on Cook’s performance I can see the return of the I am a PC and I am a Mac ads.
I still remember the speed claims about Photoshop where it genuinely was 5x faster with one obscure transform, but everything else Windows roasted it. Marketing is marketing I guess.
I don’t know about power and speed, I want enough speed to do what I want to do, but then a lot of the time I am thinking of my next move and the computer is already ready for me.
At least with a fast car you go to Germany and try the Autobahn 
I like that the headset uses separate lenses for those that need them. I wear varifocals, so a headset that doesn’t support prescription optics or individual dioptrine adjustments is a non-starter.
I think it shows an interesting direction in which Apple are going, but this is out of reach for most people.
While it is technically cool, I cant afford it, certainly wouldn’t even try as that kind of money isn’t a throw away should it go the way of many current and previous headsets. The 3D recording is intriguing, would it be possible for people to virtual tours? Perhaps a guide in say Venice could offer a personal tour or maybe aa group tour if you could multicast the stream.
I don’t know, I think maybe 20% of people could come up with something to do with it but not enough people wanting the same thing to make it worth while for developers.
Just in case - Vision Pro Tourism was mentioned here first…
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Leo graciously invited members of Club TWIT to participate as commentators on the show. Those were people who don’t do this everyday. Maybe extend a bit of grace yourself next time.
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I can think of a lot of use cases, and not having to lug my 44" screen around with me would be a great start! If I can “project” windows “onto” my surroundings, I could have the equivalent of multiple 44" monitors with windows waiting for me to turn and look at them.
I’ve been waiting for something like this in a business or productivity setting, but it certainly isn’t something i’d use with other people in the room or out and about, this is a thing for the office/den, at least for me. The battery life is another problem, unless you can have multiple battery packs or a tethered cable - not a problem if you are sitting at a desk anyway - that is Magsafe, so that if you stand up to use the “facilities”, the MagSafe would pull out and you’d be on battery, until you go back to your desk…
Ultimately my objections to the category boil down to “I don’t want to strap screens to my face” and I don’t think 99% of consumers want to, either. The current version is an expensive gimmick that’s DOA.
When they can make lightweight AR specs I’ll buy them even at that price. But the technologies they’ll need to do that don’t exist yet at any price. I’m pretty sure we’re 15 years out at least and there’s no guarantee Apple has the inside track on developing them.
In other words, Vision Pro is a very expensive high-risk gamble for Apple and a clear DO NOT BUY for me.
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I can agree with this - especially at the price point. It’s a luxury toy that will probably be really nice to use, but that price will keep adoption down. You will see the apps that can be easily ported to it done so (like any movie-viewing app). But you will not see any hit games. If Apple Arcade is the best they can do - and maybe No Mans Sky (if it will run on that hardware), then games as a reason is a non-starter as well.
I think ‘high risk’ is the important point here. Will be interesting to hear from Mikah if he gets a go with it. I need to hear what the Vergecast has to say as well
I could do that with my acer MR headset, didn’t look as cool though 
Does anyone plan on doing any furniture arranging with this device? Alex Lindsay seems to think that’s a viable use case.
For $3499 - I can move my own d**n furniture.
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