Apple's $3500 face computer is here, and after spending far too many hours inside it, Ed Zitron has found Apple's vision of the future to be equal parts exciting and frustrating - and a dark omen for the future of tech. He also sits down with the Wall Street Journal's Joanna Stern to talk about her experience as one of the early reviewers of the Vision Pro.
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Welcome to Better Offline. I'm ed Zetron. This is a weekly tech podcast where I break down the ways in which the tech industry, and in particular big tech, is trying to change the future for better or for worse. And in the case of Apple, a company worth nearly three trillion dollars, it's a little bit of both.
You see.
It took me fifteen minutes and two restarts to try and rename the title of the script. I'm currently reading you the Vision Pro, Apple's latest device and their first real new computer since the iPad, released in early February of this year, and it's a three five hundred special computer which, to quote Apple's marketing literature, you navigate simply with your eyes, hands and voice. This device refused. It's time and time again to let me select the part of the document in Google Dogs that I wanted to look and point and grab. Theoretically, I was meant to look at it with my eyes and then it would go to the place I wanted it to go, and then I'd tap my fingers and then I'd select it and then type things in. That's not what happens. You can probably guess. I assumed at first that this was potentially due to a poor fit. So I pulled the vision Pro off my head, I adjusted the strap, I put it back on, and I saw nothing, only the vision Pro showing me the world around me. No menus, nothing was projected on the one thing this device was meant to do it was not doing. This is a bug that's happened to me at least five different times, and this entire experience is indicative of what the vision Pro is simultaneously the single most interesting and annoying piece of technology ever made. Practically speaking, the vision Pro is a head worn computer that attaches eye with a single band rap called the solo band, which adjusts with a little wheel. It kind of goes around the back of your head and you turn it to tighten it, or the dual loop band, which adjusts with two extremely basic velcro straps. It feels very unapple, but it works. The headset itself features a big sheet of glass and metal with a series of cameras and sensors for measuring the space around you, letting you see the world through pass through technology. This is a fancy way of saying that there are cameras that show your surroundings and it's pretty good perspective wise. It feels realistic. You can grab a drink, you can pet a cat, as I have many times. Inside there's even more cameras and there's two four k O lead screens that's organic LED kind of see it in fancy high end TVs, particularly ones by LG. And these OLED screens are how you see the vision pros operating system, which is projected onto the world in front of you, and the thing that actually blocks out the light around you, that actually puts the vision Pro against your face close enough so it works. It's called a light seal and it clips on with a bit of magnets and it's strange. It's really weird and it kind of works, but not regularly enough for me to recommend. One would think you could just buy this thing, and you'd be incorrect. You can't just order a vision Pro no, no, no no. You have to have an iPhone or an iPad with face ID, which is the scanner that allows you to unlock your phone or your iPad and you scan your face before you can order it so that they can tell you the right size light seal face rest, which is the little cushion that goes inside the light seal and headstrap. Now you're probably hearing this and thinking, man, I hope they don't get that wrong, and you're completely right to worry about that. My first scan gave me a light seal that didn't really seem right, so I scanned it again a day later and got a larger light seal, which costs three hundred dollars. This sucks, and it's the least Apple experience I've ever seen. It's the hallmark of a product rushed out without any real planning or thought. I had to scrape through Reddit to find out what to do with this thing, and apparently there is a way of swapping this. I cannot find anything from Apple themselves about doing so. Nevertheless, you scan, you tell it if you have any vision issues, You tell it if you need optical inserts, and then you provide them with your prescription if you do, and then you order the bloody thing three and a half thousand dollars. And that's just for starters, two hundred and fifty six gigabytes of memory in there, going all the way up to one terror byte, approaching four thousand dollars. When you get the device. It isn't small, but it definitely isn't as bulky or awkward as say Innoculus Quest or an HDC vive or a steam Index, which are all virtual reality headsets. It took about half an hour of messing with it for me to find something comfortable. This thing is not light, though, and you put it on and you can definitely feel it on there. The solo strap, in my opinion, is useless. It's uncomfortable, it does not hold it on right, but the dual strap is actually pretty good. Nevertheless, it took me about half an hour of messing around with it to make it comfortable and make it actually feel right. But when you get there, it kind of just works. It's different from every other VR virtual reality in AR augmented reality experience that I've ever had. You put it on, you turn it on, and it powers on sort of. The initial setup of the Vision Pro requires you to look at your hands, then look at several colored spots hanging in the ether all around your vision, and you tap with your fingers, which you can see with the cameras on the outside of the device. Once that's done, you're presented with a slate of pretty familiar apps, messages, notes, email, and so on and so forth, all things that you would have seen on your iPhone or your Mac or your iPad. When I say you're presented or you see these apps, what I actually mean is the Vision Pro projects these onto the world around you. They are it's almost as if they're physically there, but they're not really. It's all computer magic. The screen is sharp, the text is smooth, the icons are rich with color, and they all have a satisfying pop when you look at them, because that's how you really navigate this device. So you look at an icon, you tap your fingers and then that opens it up. You navigate through pages, say, if you're looking at I don't know, a Google doc like the one I'm looking at right now, and you pinch and you hold your fingers and then you move them up and down. It feels kind of cool. And this is all done because the vision Broken see your hands by your side, and they can see where you're looking at. They actually look at your eyes using cameras inside the device. Theoretically speaking, you can just use this device with your hands and eyes. Essentially, the world's your desktop. You open Safari, messages, whatever else. You move those windows around by pinching them, and say you underneath everything you're looking at, say a web browser, there's a little dot and there's a little line. The little dot lets you close it by pinching, and the little line lets you grab it and move it around space. You can have a theoretically infinite desktop space. You can also resize things by looking at the corner of a window and kind of moving your hands up and down. This all sounds quite weird when you're in the experience, it's quite accurate. When it works. It's genuinely magical. It's a functional workspace that turns basically anywhere you are into a huge desktop, resizing windows by grabbing the corners, throwing things around. It feels satisfying, it feels futuristic. Apple has on some level delivered a consumer friendly augmented reality experience that anyone can use. It's really exciting when it works. Sadly, that's a load bearing when now you may be hearing all this and saying, wow, that sounds amazing. Moving things around with my hands and my eyes. How innovative. But what if I need to write an email. The first thing to realize about the vision pro is that has the single worst keyboard I have used on a modern consumer device. And remember, Apple once made a keyboard so bad it ended up on the receiving end of a class action lawsuit, of course, talking about the Butterfly keyboard of the twenty fifteen to twenty twenty era MacBooks that really sucked and cost Apple millions to settle. And that keyboard, well, I mean compared to the Vision Pro, that thing's a bloody masterpiece. The Vision Pro's keyboard is so poorly devised, so horribly executed, and so offensively unfit for the task that I cannot understand how this device was allowed to launch with it. Typing involves either selecting the keys and the keyboard by looking at them and then pitching or physically poking at the air like a confused ape, something that Steve Jobs himself once said he did not like. And that's why MacBooks don't have touch screens. It's ill suited for tasks where you need to precisely select something from a densely packed group of things. It's awkward, it's ugly, it does not work, and it's astonishing that this device launched with this. This is enough of a problem that they should not have put the vision Pro out into the world without a Bluetooth keyboard, which the vision Pro does support. This thing is effectively useless for any kind of written communication, relying entirely on this horrifying airborne poking thing or Siri, a voice based assistant, which, as you know from using literally any voice assistant, is a C plus replacement for the written word. Anyone with a strong accent and mind by comparison, isn't that strong compared to say from Scotland. They're probably going to drop a few letters, few words and just find themselves deeply frustrated by the whole experience. One might think, of course, now that I mentioned bluetooth keyboards like Apple's Magic Keyboard, that this would solve all the problems. You'd plug this thing in and are where you go, you type away, and you'd be like fifty to seventy five percent correct. Look, if I was making this product, if I was Tim Cook and I was putting this bad boy into the world, I probably would have thought, well, my keyboard sucks, so I'm going to make the best Bluetooth experience anyone's ever seen. That's not what Tim Cook did. Look for reasons I cannot ascertain the vision pro treats Bluetooth keyboards unlike any other device, acting with abject surprise in its existence. You'll turn this thing on, connect it, and suddenly blue lines will appear on random things on the bar, on safari, on a textbox in messages, and it isn't obvious what you're meant to do there. You might hit enter and you'd think, Okay, this is going to put me in the textbox. It doesn't. It isn't obvious what it wants to do, and at times it completely freaks out. You'll be typing and then the screen will start freaking out and selecting different parts or unselecting the place where you are currently typing. My theory is that the vision pro is still tracking your hands as I mentioned it does as you are typing. This suggests the hilarious possibility that Apple's engineers did not consider the fact that people use their hands to type on keyboards. Writing in a Google document as I am reading off of now, as billions of people do every day. One of the Web's most common tasks is an exercise in frustration. Sometimes the vision pro will arbitrarily decide that I need to move the entire window, or that I can type, but I cannot navigate through the words with the arrow keys, as one might do on literally any device from the last twenty years. Sometimes it will open the software keyboard while I'm typing on the hardware keyboard, getting in the way, physically blocking my vision with a keyboard that I don't want to use because I'm using a physical one, and then I have to close that or move it because sometimes it will pop back up. Similarly, when you use I message so you're texting features, you have a lot more problems. One might think that this would be a simple case of looking and then maybe tapping and then typing. What actually happens is the vision pro has a minor history onic situation, unable to tell whether you'd want to use the bluetooth keyboard or the on screen keyboard, or even if you want to text. I really cannot make it clearer. It is very difficult to just look at a place and then start typing and then send a message with a Bluetooth keyboard. This is a three and a half thousand dollars item. It should be easy. This is the easy stuff. Look, look, look. While this may seem petty. I just want to be crystal clear. The Apple Vision Pro, Apple's first this new kind of computer in some time, is incapable of simply letting me type words into a document without experiencing some kind of mental breakdown. The user interface issues on this thing are remarkably bad. They suggest this company simply did not test it in real world cases. It feels as if they rushed this out. Apple, a company that redefined the computer several times over and likely will several times more, has managed to launch a three and a half thousand dollars device that its basic level cannot let me type words on a fucking page. And it's astonishing that this company would launch a product so utterly ramshackle in its execution. It isn't clear why, for example, I cannot simply type in this document, check my text, and then immediately return to the same document without the Vision Pro either failing to let me start typing or dropping my cursor into the middle of the page. Look, these are bugs, obvious, ridiculous bugs. An Apple has shown an utter loathing and disrespect for their customers by shipping this device with such obvious flaws, And there are plenty more too. On taking the device off and putting it on again. As I mentioned on the intro, about half the time, it'll simply not load the user interface, forcing me to do a hard restart of the entire device. I've had multiple times where the eye tracking simply didn't work, selecting stuff I was clearly not looking at. Apple has also rushed ahead without a full app ecosystem, relying on compatibility with and I quote millions of iPhone and iPad apps that really aren't that compatible with it at all, including chatap signal, which requires you to take a picture of a QR code to connect to your account. Note that there is no way to take a picture of a QR code that's inside a device that you're looking at with your eyes. It's just sad. It's really sad. You can't launch something with a facsimile of Slack, a workplace piece of software used by millions. But don't worry, Microsoft team fans, You're supported. The basic building blocks of an app ecosystem are not in place here. There's no YouTube app, though YouTubers mentioned that they might build one. Netflix no app. It feels as if Apple just thought we'll just get this shit out there. Who cares and as I've mentioned, well, there's technically Bluetooth keyboard support, Apple has done such a lazy, half fast, than thoughtless job with it that it's barely an improvement over there regular software keyboard unless you can make it work, and that is that's in unless. As I've mentioned, there's technically Bluetooth keyboard support, but Apple has done such an awful, lazy, half fast, and thoughtless job with it that it's only somewhat of an improvement over the software keyboard. This is the easy stuff, as I've mentioned, So while writing this draft, While putting this together, I had quite a few problems with Focus. I would pick the thing up, put it on, it wouldn't look right. I'd readjust and I could kind of get it right, but it just didn't feel consistent. Sometimes I'd look and it wouldn't look at the right place, For example, when you open the device and you have to enter your passcode. Sometimes it just wouldn't accept where my eye was looking. I'd look at the top right corner, it would look in the middle. I called Apple Support, couldn't get through to anyone. I'd book a core, dogged someone for five minutes. They're gone. Hung up on me. This was within a week of the launch of a device that made Apple half a billion dollars. Nevertheless, many of the problems I ran into were a result of poor fit. I want to be clear how inexcusable it is that a major tech product, one that made a company hundreds of millions of dollars in a single day, could be shipped as poorly as Apple has shipped the Vision Pro to try a different sized light seal. An essential part of this device is three hundred dollars, and the cushions that go inside the light seals cost an additional thirty dollars each. I got really lucky. I found someone with exactly the same issue as I had on Reddit, someone with exactly the same sizes. I scanned my face on the day and I got fitted for what Apple caused twenty one W. The person on Reddit also had this problem. They tried to twenty three W. It was better, but a trip to the Apple Store ended up with a twenty three N When I tried it, this was exactly what I needed. The Vision Pro was now very consistent. Every time I put it on it was pretty good. Things mostly worked because that's the Vision Pro experience. Now, these numbers are of course all nonsense and based on some kind of internal calculus that would have made Steve Jobs take a hostage. Had I not spent hours trying to work out these issues and spending ninety bucks on different eye cushions, I would have assumed that the Vision Pro was just kind of awkward if you didn't put it on right. It turns out it's meant to feel a certain way every time, and in many cases I think people would simply return it them correct the homework of a company with two hundred and fifty billion dollars in cash in the bank. I of course was doing this review, so I had to get it right. It's also ridiculous that I had to, and it's ridiculous that Apple does not have a way of checking whether the fit is correct. The way the vision Pro is meant to work is it's meant to go on and feel good immediately. You're not meant to shift the bugger around. That's what I found out only through my own experimentation. Apple has made very little effort to make sure you are using their device properly. This is not aid to quote Steve Jobs, You're holding it wrong. Issue. This is a you have deployed your launch wrong, mister Cook issue. It's a complete disgrace that a company as large as Apple could ship a product I add that costs several times more than most people pay for rent, requiring such a precise fit, and then trusts these measures to a phone's face scanner. The difference between a correct fit on a vision pro is the difference between the clarity of a seven to twenty piece screen, so the kind that you would have seen from televisions fifteen or twenty years ago, and a four CR screen like you'd see on most televisions today. And there's very little out there to tell you what right feels like. If Apple was a responsible company, they'd demand customers come in to pick up their vision pros and get fitted by an Apple genius when they did so. Instead of doing the expensive, important hard work of building, say satellite fitting appointments, or perhaps a thorough remote fitting appointment, Apple would rather burden an indeterminate amount of customers with an inferior experience. Imagine if you got your laptop and you opened it up and sometimes the resolution was wrong, or maybe your eye phone came and just the quarter of the screen didn't work, and these were all basic settings that had never been put in. This is the level of fuck up that Apple has made with the Vision Pro, and I think it's important that consumers are aware of this look. I don't have any data on this subject, but based on even in a cursory glance of social media, there are so many people who do not know if they're getting the intended experience with Apple's Vision Pro. I spent days with this device, feeling uncomfortable and trying to make it work in a predictable, reliable manner, without success. I did try and schedule a call with Apple support, but when I did so, I spent five minutes giving them the most basic information about my device, like my serial number and all sorts and things I'd already tried. At that point, the specialist drop my call, dump me back on hold with a chirpy voice telling me that a specialist would be right with me in a few minutes. After ten minutes, I hung up. To be abundantly clear, this was a call I sched with Apple several hours beforehand. It's also important to add that Apple does allegedly have pop ups that are meant to warn you of a poor fit of the vision Pro or issues with eye tracking. They never appeared once, and I simply assumed that Apple had really not quite worked out how to make augmented reality work yet. And what's really frustrating about this whole thing is that Apple was really really close to doing something quite marvelous. I wanted to give you listeners a little more perspective on the vision Pro, so I reached out to one of the leading tech reviewers in the country. Joanna Stern is the Emmy Award winning personal tech columnist at The Wall Street Journal and was one of the founding reporters at The Verge, another major consumer electronics website. She reviewed the vision Pro for the Journal, and I thought it'd be great to get her views. Joanna, thank you for joining me.
Anytime where else would I be?
Well, maybe that's a good question. Do you plan to use your vision Pro past the review period?
I do?
I think, I you know, I think I've had it now what okay, two weeks with days today, I'm.
Very prepared for your podcast Wednesday the seventh.
Okay, so I've actually had it for two weeks. Today at five o'clock PM, in one hour from now, I will celebrate my two week anniversary with my vision Pro review you and we will be together and well, well, I won't go there in the augmented world, in the augmented world, and so I will say I finished the review about a week ago, and I have used it for two things since. I will also just caveat saying I have been sick and I've been very nauseous without the headset on. It's just the sickness that I seem to have come down with. So for the last two days I've just been like, I do not want to go near that thing. But when I recover, I plan to put it back on. But the two things i've used it for. One is working, so I don't have the best monitor at my Wall Street Journal office. I know, shocking Leading it was such a glowing intro you did for me, but Leading Technology Columnists has crappy monitor, as really the headline here, and so I've been using the headset to just work.
I have a very good setup.
In there with my three different monitors or virtual monitors, and I've kind of arranged it the way I like it, and I think I'm actually quite productive in there. And the second is I've been watching in it. I've been watching Beef. Have you watched Beef?
I've not.
Now, Yeah, it's pretty it's a crazy show. It's on Netflix, and I watched the last two episodes in there.
So what was the fitting experience? So you, I assume got it straight from Apple. Did they do any kind of fitting experience with you?
They did, but it was very similar to the fitting experience that anyone else goes through, which was on the app. Really that was the you know, I enrolled my face. I did this sort of weird head turns looking at the phone. It then gives you prediction of what size you're going to be, and that was all I really did. But no special, no special. I think mine fits pretty well. I mean it's really interesting because now, so the first week I had it, I really couldn't show it to anyone that was part of the agreement with Apple, and couldn't really let other people wear it. And then after the bargo broke and we were able to start sharing this, I had a lot of colleagues want to test it out. By the way, I'm convinced that's how I actually got sick, because they were all breathing in my face computer and when you put it on them, like you can definitely see this thing does not fit them right. It's mostly men, and they have big heads and you know literally and figuratively, and they and they come out of like the demo that I've done with them with like a giant red stripe on their head, like it looks like they've gone scuba diving.
And I don't have that. I just don't have that.
I mean, in the initial hands on I did with Apple in June at WWDC, I actually did have that. I had that like red mark across my forehead and you know, thinking back on it, it was probably because they hadn't figured out the fitting situation.
So when I got mine, I had a horrible experience my foot four or five days with it. I scanned with the app of five in the morning and the day you order it and scam my face and it gave me twenty one W. I then immediately was checking like Reddit and people were saying, oh, I got that. I don't know if this is right. And then when it came out I put it on, I'm like, this is not this does not feel right. So I got a twenty three W based on a reddit post, and I just every so often I'd put it on and it wouldn't feel right. It wasn't be in focused, the eye tracking wasn't working. I just assumed it sucked. And then scraping through reddit more, I found someone else with the same size situation. They said, oh, by the N cushion size, and it was night and day. And it just feels to me like this is a massive supply chain issue that Apple is not considering.
Or is it that they got the sizing wrong when you first did it?
But that's what I mean. Though, it's the supply chain of the actual scan. It almost feels like they should not be relying on it. I don't know if you've heard of anyone else. I'm not even trying to load a question here. Have you heard of anyone else having this problem?
I haven't. I haven't. I mean that's good.
I mean, so, you know, and they have the two and so it was the it's the light seals what you're saying, the difference.
The light seal and the light seal cushion cushion.
Yeah, yeah, so, and I have two cushions because or maybe everyone gets two cushions, but they say you should use the bigger light seal cushion if you plan to use the lenses, the.
Prescription lenses. I don't know if I have those.
I don't. I also only got one one cushion with mine when I bought it.
Mm hmm.
Yeah, I actually think that I had the extra cushion because I had the lenses too, right, which is a little comfier.
But and the thing is, when it's working now, it's great, But I feel like the real elephant in the room is the keyboard. The keyboard is just astonishingly bad. Yeah, yeah, I Steve Jobs. I'm surprised he didn't come out of the grave like an angry zombie over this one. It's awful.
I mean, I assume it's a place that they're definitely looking. How do we make a typing experience better there?
Yeah?
I think that, like, you know, could they with swiping, you know, sort of the swipe inputs.
Like gesturing in the air almost exactly?
Would that be better? Probably?
Right, It's just so weird because the experience feels cool. But then you get to the common way of entering text into stuff, which is very common and that you should be able to do on anything, and it's just it almost doesn't feel like an Apple product.
I know, and you like, I don't know if you've had this too, where it's like you can't touch type on that right, so you want to like looked out. You have to look at this virtual keyboard, but then you're looking up to see where your text is going in and is it going right. And they have like a little thing above the keyboard where you can see the text as it's typing out.
But it's it's all of this. It's just not natural.
And I even showed in my videos like thank god for a real keyboard, and you compare it with Bluetooth, so it's like the killer accessory for this is actually a you know, ninety nine dollars keyboard that I was going to sell you.
One thing I loved in your review is when you said you can have all of this for lo lolo price of what five thousand dollars and yet the MacBook throw the keyboard, this and that is it just feels like the experience is not complete without that keyboard.
In my opinion, yeah, I agree, I agree.
I mean, I think it's fine if you're like going to just type in one show, right and you're like, Okay, let me go to Netflix and type in beef. That's fine, or you can use voice to do that. But when you are really trying to do something in there, like you're trying to type an email or you're I've been.
Doing a lot.
I've actually been writing like a ton of stuff. I've been riting in there.
I wrote the four thousand words script for the full episode on the Vision Pro. I can't write on a laptop sitting down. I have to be at to desk otherwise my rat brain doesn't focus properly. But I was able to sit on the couch and right this just sitting there, and that's remarkable. I find the focus parts remarkable.
I think that's and some people have been remarking about this on social media and various thing pieces. But the irony of this being the killer computing platform for just two D basically notes or documents, right like, yeah, that's what we have gotten. The future is actually just big floating documents in our sky.
Well to that point, do you think that this or a device like this is the future.
So, I mean, look, that's where I kind of took my review, and now I've had some distance from it. And been able to reflect and again also just thinking about where is this going to fit into our lives? That that was the number one thing I wanted to answer in this review is, Okay, they've made this crazy piece of technology. How are we going to use it in our daily lives?
And it just.
Seems natural, especially when we have these new pieces of tech, you know, whether it was the iPhone or smartphones or tablets, et cetera, Like we're going to try to do the things that we did on other devices first, right, that makes sense, Right, We're going to try to work on it, We're going to try to watch TV and videos on it, like we've been trying to do that with all of our personal tech. And so when it comes to like changing those things, sure, but like the future for me and those things, like we are still going to have a good future writing documents on our computers, right, Like the whole entire AI.
Vision right now is to make that easier, working easier.
So what I was trying to really look at is like, we're going to be the things that are just going to break out of the mold of the current things we do on these devices, and where will it be better? And this is where I kind of got into this cooking situation which has gone viral and you know now.
Oh with and just just for listeners if you haven't seeing Joanna's review, she is able to place with the vision pro, you're able to place timers above things. So while cooking she made it what was a pasta dish?
I believe, yes, yes, And so this has become the running joke like, well, did you not know you could also set multiple timers on your phone?
And did you not know?
And Colbert is you could maybe pipe the audio in here. He's now being making fun of me on his late night show saying, well, what else would you do by two ovens?
I think Colbert needs to not throw so many stones in glasshouses with how deeply unfunny Midnight is. But that's a separate podcast. I think that that whole thing has really annoyed me as well, not because I'm particularly defensive of Apple, but it's like, if you're going to do that kind of thing about a new device, there are so many that you could have sat with the Oculus quest and done the same thing. Oh I get Oh I can work out while wearing a headset. Well, I can also do that without anything, I can just do jumping jacks. You can make that kind of thing. Sure, And actually, here's a good question. Do you think that this is going to make people more antisocial? Because that feels like the weird meme I'm seeing. It's like, oh, this is shutting people off from the world.
Yes, so just let me finish it. Answering the first one because I felt like I didn't do it great. No, it's my fault. I was going on now, But my point in that review, and maybe I haven't articulated this well. I've seen a lot of analysis of the review, which thank you everyone for spending time reviewing the review. But the point was to show things that that aren't the typical things, the things that could bring this into the future and that actually make things better and change the way we use these devices.
And I felt.
That that situation with the cooking really illustrated it. Here is a real life thing you're doing. It's better to actually have this headset on than use your phone because you don't have to hold a phone, and cooking with your holding a phone, or you know, even touching a phone in the kitchen is a pain. Everyone knows that. And on top of that, it was just blend. This idea of blending the virtual with the real really really stuck out to me there, like I have a physical thing. It is this part of pasta. It is boiling, and I see a digital interface over it. And I'm not saying that he needs to be every use case, but that is where I felt like, Okay, I can see the future. So that is how I would try to answer that, Yes, I think this is the future. We still need to have the use cases and the apps to prove out what those things are going to be.
The thing I and you kind of glanced at this in the review, but I understand why this wouldn't have come up, but it's it feels like the apps are not there though, like very basic apps are not there, YouTube being the obvious one. And there is, by the way, a four ninety nine YouTube app that people are hyping as a replacement. It's a goddamn web rapper that developers should be kicked off the app store anyway, But like Slack isn't there, Signal isn't there, Yep, very funny thing.
Slack is there, but they're there as an iPad app and it's horrible.
The same it's horrible.
I mean I didn't even have time in the review, but like there was a couple of places when I was cursing because you cannot select.
I mean, this is the issue with putting the iPad apps in.
They weren't they were created for touching, right, so you actually when you're using the Slack app and the vision pro, you want to bring it closer to you and then actually tap in the air versus using the pincher, you know, using the pinch gesture. But no, absolutely, And I look, we've seen already momentum this week with YouTube saying they're going to create and more apps coming, and chat gybt announced like there's going to be some momentum and we're going to get some of these apps. But what I'm more interested in is like, what are these going to be? These ideas of these apps that we don't have right now that don't run our computers. I agree we have to have those other ones, because hey, how do we work in there if we don't have Slack?
I mean, how do you work without Slack? It's impossible. I'm just joking.
I don't really I'm a major Slack user, but would happily use anything else to work. So I think those are those things will come with time. But on the isolation thing, I think that's so. That is the number one reason I have not picked it up more, and I think might end up being part of you know, what happens after this first wave of real big interest is do you feel.
Like something I'd ever use around a person exactly?
And I live with a person. I don't. I don't know about you. I love.
Yeah, I live with with my wife and I live with two kids, so I live with like a lot of things at a dog and there's a lot of things going on in here. And I had this situation this weekend. I was like, I'd love to watch another episode of The Beef in here, but my wife is sitting right here. I'm going to put this on on the couch and she's going to do what right? And then you start to think like dystopian, like, oh, what if we both had them and we both sat here with these on looking at the wall. Eh, I don't even if that was an amazing experience, is that what I want to do on Saturday night?
It feels very doesn't feel particularly intimate.
No.
No. When mine arrived, I was with my fiance and I played with it, but I put a hard cap on when I stopped because it felt strange using it with another person around it just it felt very much like rejecting anyone around me, like I even with passed through it felt kind of strange.
Well, and the pass through thing, while they've done a lot more than the others right to put some screen on the front, like it's all kind of bullshit, like nobody really knows that you're looking at them. If I had like a dollar for every time I asked, Hey, can you see my eyes in this?
Yeah?
Right, Like that's the same thing, and the answer was always no, right, the answer is always know and you're constantly asking. It's just like, please stop asking me if I can see your eyes?
Like the persona thing is awful? Is I just why bother with that? I don't know what they were thinking, king, I know that it's this to describe for the listeners, it's you scan your face using the vision Pro and it spits out a three D clone of your face that is not flattering, I should add, yeah, and it mimics your facial actions. If someone FaceTime videos you during your use of the vision Pro, I just don't I know why they did it, but they shouldn't have.
Yeah, I think.
Look, I hit on this really hard in my review because I had not laughed so hard. I don't remember the last time I laughed so hard. When I saw my persona, I couldn't. I was like crying of laughter. I think it's the funniest thing I've ever seen. It just doesn't look like me. And then I would call people and they would be laughing, and they would say, never call me again looking like this, like, and maybe mine was worse than others.
It seems like to be the case.
Oh, I have no neck in mine. I will refuse to show it to anyone.
Yeah, I mean, look, most people look bad. I just look like I look terrible. I'm another level of bad in mine.
So it makes me look so I used to be about one hundred pounds heavier than I currently am about buck ninety right now. It makes me look like I weigh three hundred pounds, which is not great for myself esteem, I should add. But it also looks strange. Yeah, it looks very weird.
It looks strange and like and look, there's a lot about they didn't want to go the root of what Meta had done, which make us look like cartoons.
So they're trying to make us.
Look more realistic and maybe eventually they get there. And they clearly they've slapped the beta label on there just to make it clear, like we are not.
Done building this thing.
I get why they couldn't ship without it, Like, how are you going to ship we've just been I actually.
Can answer that memoji. The memoji works fine. No one is going to expect you to do a video call well wearing this buddy thing. So do the memoji make it fun?
I agree, I you know, and that's there for the taking. Like our iPhones already have memojis that are like mapped to our face.
Like it works.
I think they didn't want to go to the root of Meta, like they didn't want to be competing with like Mark Zuckerberg cartoon face, you know.
Like the irony is that they also released an incomplete product that kind of sucks. So who's laughing now, probably Mark Zuckerbuck I don't know.
Right, but I mean, look, on the other hand, we just spent ten minutes talking about working in this thing, so how are you going to release a device for working in this day and age where you should be working at your home office and you can't video call on it, like you have to have to have something.
I I don't know. I find the whole thing quite confusing. I think you could even just have a still image of the person that would do the same job.
That's true, I don't I don't know why they didn't do that.
So I only got two more questions for you. Do you think that Apple rushed this out? No?
And yes, did they rush this particular version out? No? It actually like it works really well, right like, there are some small bugs and I'm sure maybe I don't know.
Selecting on like even Google Docs is extremely broken. Basic things like that don't.
Feel like but that's not so that's where that's a design issue, right like that, that's can you navigate the whole web with this the way.
This is designed?
The only reason I push back on that is you're right, the whole web, but Google Docs what billions of uses? It just feels The reason I ask is because to me, at least, it feels rush because they didn't do their due diligence without the developers keep going sorry.
But then there's the flip side of Hey, these developers need to feel and I believe Google will come along once they see, oh wow, look we're really seeing an x amount of people for x amount of time working here. We should probably do something. Right, Microsoft did it. Microsoft has apps in there, They have all of almost all of Microsoft three sixty five in there, so like they're making a bet before it's ready. I think also Microsoft has nothing to lose because they don't have their own headset coming.
They've sort of abandoned that.
Yeah, Holo lens is kind of dead in the war.
Yeah, but I mean, look I think so.
But this particular version we all know this is you know, this is the first generation. I've actually called it times. Is this negative one generation? Should we should this have sort of been you know as people have called it a dev kid and all of these things. It's certainly not a mainstream product, right. The question, like really is should they have waited five years?
Right?
And would Steve Jobs, as everyone's saying, would he have waited the five years? Would you have said, Okay, we've got this, so we can do this now, but we need to wait five more years until we can slim down this and we can make this and we can do.
This and that's actually my final question for you. How do you think Steve Jobs would have done this?
I was asked this on another podcast. I think.
I keep thinking about It's funny what you said before. You know, you put it on wrong, and or you didn't put it on wrong, but you had some issues with it, right. And there's the famous Steve Jobs quote, you're.
Holding it wrong? Yeah right? And so Steve.
Jobs hated touch screens on laptops because he didn't like poking the air.
Yeah, yes, and here we are.
But like what he have said to you, you know, you're you're wearing it wrong again, and to me too, because sometimes I'll put it on and it's like, yeah, you know, it's not aligned exactly to my eyes, and so if I look at something, it's slightly off and then I've got to like change it a.
Little bit right, right?
And what have he have been okay with that? Would he have said, Nope, We've got to wait. We've got to wait a number more years to get this right, to get all of these things right into a thing that people would wear, or what if you looked at it sort of like we've got to get it out there.
I don't know I don't feel like he was a god to get it out that guy. It just feels like a very different Apple experience. It lacks it's almost fun in the way it lacks it. But when it's I feel like, in a like it's kind of funny. I guess it's not really fun, but it feels like. Also, the format of the vision pro really emphasizes the problems when something goes wrong in this environment. It's so claustrophobic.
Mm hmmmmm. Well, and I think also what we know to be true? And I think Neli Petell's review on The Verge did a really good job of this is what we know to be true? Is what Tim Cook sees the vision of this being right. He sees a vision of us really at augmented reality type of glasses where we can see the real world in this digital overlays are there, but to get there they had to make a lot of sacrifices in the here and now. And so now we have a VR headset that's trying to function as an AR mixed reality headset, but it really is a VR headset. And again, would Steve Jobs have said, Nope, We're just going to wait till we get there, we're gonna wait five years, We're gonna wait ten years.
I don't know, Joanna, thank you so much for joining me anytime.
I'd love to see your persona soon.
Oh God, I will be hiding that from the world. All of this comes together to just make it impossible to recommend the Vision pro in its current form. It's too expensive, its experience is too variable, the supply chain and infrastructure to get this thing fitted is too thin, and the developer community is just far too sparse. Without a Bluetooth keyboard, it's claustrophobic, frustrating, and unproductive. With one, it becomes a highly customizable and consistent desktop space that I can pop up wherever I am the past through feature gives me as much awareness as I needed the world around me as i'd like, though not to the extent i'd ever use it in public. I can move around, I can close things and resize things with tiny gestures, and when it works, it looks and feels very cool, and it's far more natural than an iPhone or an iPad or a magbook. I guess when it works, and with the right fit, it's much much more consistent, looking and pitching a menu options feels great, and you can sweep and move through apps and website like a weird little wizard. When it works, I have more space to work with than my regular setup, which is a forty eight inch curve gaming monitor on a massive L shaped desk. But that's when it works. And if you're one of the hundreds of thousands of people who bought this, perhaps you're listening to this and thinking, oh, it's not meant to be this bad, And it isn't. But how the hell are you meant to know that? Because Apple certainly hasn't tried to make that the case. Apple has not put in the time, the energy, and the thought to making this the launch it deserved to be. I truly believe the Vision Pro could be something revolutionary. It needs to be smaller, it needs to be two thousand, if not two five hundred dollars cheaper, It needs to have the apps. But when it works, it really is something new. It is something I will be using a lot. It is something that I think could change how we consider computing, how we consider the spaces we work in and the ways we work in them. And indeed, if Apple actually respected their customers, if Apple had the love for their customers that I believe they used to have, this wouldn't be a problem. None of this would be And I just don't think they care enough. And I can't say it's worth three five hundred dollars despite its warts. I really do plan on keeping my Vision Pro and I'm going to use it a great deal, particularly when I'm traveling. But for the price of a vision Pro, I can get a brand new MacBook Era fifteen inch one, a terror By iPhone and still have hundreds of dollars left to spare. Well. I love the immersive nature of this whole thing. There's nothing it does better, and there's plenty of things it can't do at all. There are few reasons why the Vision Pro should have shipped in such terrible shape, other than the fact that Apple needed to show double digit revenue growth to board investors. Apple has done very little work to confirm that the very basic parts of the Internet work with any reliability. Website that you'd expect to be perfect, like Google Docs, like Google itself, like Twitter, even are just not ready for this, and Apple clearly didn't reach out to any of these providers to make sure they did. The app ecosystem marvels the iPhone app store when it first launched. The problems I've experienced with the Vision Pro are annoying. They're frustrating. They're getting a way of an experience I've really wanted to enjoy and may indeed enjoy in the future, and it's not clear if they're a result of bad quality control or the limitations of hardware and software. It really isn't obvious, but the problem here is pretty simple. The Vision Pro is an intriguing and exciting look into the future, except that future is one where a near three trillion dollar tech firm ships US beta hardware with alpha software and hopes that will thank them for the privilege of helping them fix it. I've been at Zeitron. Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matasowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at Matasowski dot com, M A T T O, S O W s ki dot com. You can go to Better Offline dot com to find more episodes, find my newsletter, Where's your ad app? Or even shoot me an email at easy At Better Offline dot com, you can find this podcast on Iheartradios app, or anywhere else you find podcasts. Thank you for listening.
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