What Future with Joshua TopolskyApple's Vision of the Future (Mark Gurman, Act 2)
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.
Hey, and welcome to what Future.
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 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 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 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.
You can.
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 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 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. 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 baffles me. It's a baffling I feel, a totally baffling device.
Anyhow.
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, 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 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.
New reality that we're living in.
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.
You've got to feel pretty good. I guess you know at this point, but like.
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 don't think people know how hard it is to get that kind of level of scoop out of Apple.
On Apple specifically, it's challenging. I love to do it.
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 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.
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 they're all pros pros.
So yeah, I'll leave it at that.
No.
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 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 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.
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?
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, 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 was called Vision OS. Interesting, they had kept telling everyone working the product that it was called XROS.
Right.
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.
But XROS is not a thing.
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.
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?
No?
And then I don't know if you saw my tweet from earlier today, but were you covering Apple and fourteen still?
Definitely when they announced the Apple Watch.
Yeah, Actually that was one of the one of the last ones where I did the event and review and stuff.
I did it for Bloomberg.
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?
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.
That's it, right, I remember I.
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.
Right, stee, They they didn't say twenty twenty four early next year?
Okay, interesting because early twenty twenty four sounds farther away than early next year, right.
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.
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.
They're all wearing Apple watches, right.
Yeah, they'll hold the iPhone.
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, 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, 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, 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?
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. Both of those things are.
That means stores though, right, just from stores.
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.
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.
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, 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.
Thing, well, yeah, that was. You were right on that, one hundred percent right on that.
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.
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.
I mean, expensive glasses can be right like in that range the actual lenses themselves, like from my glasses that are like good lenses?
Is you know? I don't.
I think if you have a strong prescription the price goes up a bit, but I mean a few hundred dollars probably minimum, right.
Two point fifteen insurance? Right, what insurance covers?
I don't know. I don't know.
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 from from people has been taken. Do you know, have any sense from inside the building what they what they're feeling.
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.
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.
Either a thousand or two thousand more than the Intel version. It's really expensive, really expensive. That was crazy pricing.
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.
It's true.
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.
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.
Right.
I was also told, and I've reported many times, that they're expecting high one hundred thousands to a million unit sales.
Right.
If this thing was priced that two thousand or below, they would need more than a million units, Josh, because everyone would buy one.
Right, Well, I mean a large amount of people would buy them.
Right.
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, 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 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.
You know, it's biz all ar.
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.
Just feels like a million little compromises you can see.
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 mac cannibalization potential.
Yeah. I mean that's interesting.
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 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.
Think the Humane device is way more outside the box than the Apple device.
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.
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.
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.
It became the iPhone screen size became way too small within three years, right.
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 after this, right, I don't know they got there with the with the headset.
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 everyone loved right hundred.
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?
I saw it remotely.
Did not feel to you like pretty just took pretty black mirror some of the parts of the presentation.
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.
Is that a plan or they are they doing that?
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.
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.
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.
Right now. You said that, you said that on the on the last show, you were like, soid.
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.
I mean the pitch was sort of like, for thirty five hundred dollars, it replaces your computer.
Yes, which is a great thing you're I mean it.
Sort of was like, I mean, it can't replace your phone because it doesn't have a SIM, right, it's not cellular.
Well, they'llood cellular, rightly.
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.
One last thing, I'll say.
Yes, one more, one more thing, if you will actually two more things.
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.
On right all day when you're literally plugged into an outlet right right.
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?
Probably not, I mean honestly, I mean I don't know. Maybe you know.
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.
Is a high bar.
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 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 like a little thing, right, It's like and I.
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.
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.
Because it's Apple. Yes, those stories will.
Happen, right, CMBC has the report people throwing up because of their Apple headsets or whatever.
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.
Actually, actually they could say it's an industry problem. All these other headsets have had, you know, the problems with this people get.
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.
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.
Like it's just a reality of this.
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.
Right, there's still like that.
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.
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.
Have you ever heard of an Apple when you see the right? No, I'm kidding.
Everybody just started immediately throwing up in the auditorium when they saw the price.
I haven't heard of anyone personally who's used the device who has had that.
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.
I mean, I hadn't seen anyone other than Joanna say it, which is curious.
So you're saying Joanna's lying fake news. No, that's not what I'm saying.
Wow, that's not what I'm saying.
White an attack on her credibility, Mark. What I'm saying.
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.
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.
Did demos till ten pm on Reay and really probably do the same till ten pm today and maybe throughout the week.
But I mean comparatively, it's not like people could go grab it and just try it out.
It's like they're doing it's all demos.
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.
Oh did they show it? They have like a they actually filmed that.
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.
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.
How much VR do you think they've done?
Right?
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.
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.
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.
Right? Is this a quest killer?
Like?
Is that it?
Or is it just the price points too high?
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.
I mean, E mean it doesn't it's doesn't. It's not one sixth as good or it's better.
It's not as point.
It's not one. Maybe it's two or three six.
I mean that's pretty, that's pretty. That's pretty damning, you know.
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.
There's no question.
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.
Do you like an Android?
Yeah, they should go the Android model and they'll crush it.
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.
Well and watch it'll be Apple.
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.
Mark.
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.
Thank you and thank your team. Thank you so much. Bye, see you.
Mark.
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.
So we'll have him back.
We're gonna have him share some more Apple secrets with us next time he gets a nasty ass scoop.
Uh.
But but you know, I do have some more thoughts about what this headset really means.
I did want to bring up that picture that you posted on Twitter of like you wearing some sort of like glasses from.
Like oh yeah, Google Google, that's Google Glass.
Yeah. I loved that.
Oh.
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.
Here. I'll put it in the link.
That's what it looks like.
No, I know, but I know it's funny.
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.
I look fucking so stupid this picture.
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 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.
Right.
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, 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.
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?
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, 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.
That great to me, you know.
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.
It's not.
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.
I understand.
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 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. 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.
Can I ask you a question?
I have a question.
You can ask me anything you want. I would love to hear. I would love a question.
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 of our current realities. So that to me feels like we're just out of creativity, right.
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 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 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 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.
So if that's the peak, and.
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.
You can't have. It can't.
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.
And if you look at the time of.
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 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 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, 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, 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 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.
Right.
If you use your one of those measurement things to measure on your phone, like, that's AR.
Right.
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 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, 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 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 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.
There may be some new innovations to be had.
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 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.
So Apple lost it like luster a little bit?
No?
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 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, 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 is just a kind of a little bit of a satellite of the of the phone. The next phone is the thing?
What is that.
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 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 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 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.
So you're not going to buy one this run, but would you buy like a future.
No, I mean I'll probably buy one. I mean I'll probably buy.
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.
Yeah, I will say this.
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 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.
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.
I mean, I ah, look, I will. I would argue that.
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.
Right now, I'm just giving Apple the marketing tools.
That's good. It's like pregnant women, you'll understand. Yeah, ladies, ladies, it's better than being pregnant. Is that the pitch?
Yeah, because it only makes you nauseous for a short time period that's supposed to extend it.
Yeah, it's interesting.
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 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 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, 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.
