February 21, 2024 • 49 mins
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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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
All Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
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.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
You see.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
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
(00:55):
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
(01:15):
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,
(01:36):
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
(01:58):
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
(02:19):
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
(02:41):
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
(03:04):
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,
(03:24):
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,
(03:45):
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
(04:08):
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
(04:31):
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
(04:52):
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
(05:14):
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,
(05:38):
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
(06:00):
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,
(06:22):
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
(06:44):
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
(07:05):
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.
(07:26):
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
(07:46):
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
(08:08):
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
(08:30):
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
(08:52):
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
(09:13):
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
(09:35):
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
(09:56):
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
(10:18):
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
(10:39):
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
(11:00):
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
(11:21):
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
(11:44):
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
(12:04):
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
(12:25):
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
(12:49):
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
(13:10):
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
(13:33):
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,
(13:56):
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
(14:18):
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,
(14:39):
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
(15:00):
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
(15:22):
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,
(15:46):
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,
(16:08):
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,
(16:29):
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
(16:51):
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
(17:12):
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
(17:34):
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
(17:55):
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
(18:17):
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.
(18:40):
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
(19:01):
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
(19:23):
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
(19:46):
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.
(20:07):
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,
(20:28):
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
(20:51):
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,
(21:13):
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
(21:34):
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.
Speaker 3 (21:51):
Anytime where else would I be?
Speaker 2 (21:53):
Well, maybe that's a good question. Do you plan to
use your vision Pro past the review period?
Speaker 3 (22:01):
I do?
Speaker 1 (22:02):
I think, I you know, I think I've had it
now what okay, two weeks with days today, I'm.
Speaker 2 (22:10):
Very prepared for your podcast Wednesday the seventh.
Speaker 1 (22:13):
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
(22:34):
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
(22:54):
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.
Speaker 3 (23:12):
I have a very good setup.
Speaker 1 (23:14):
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?
Speaker 2 (23:28):
I've not.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
Now, Yeah, it's pretty it's a crazy show. It's on Netflix,
and I watched the last two episodes in there.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
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?
Speaker 1 (23:45):
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.
(24:07):
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
(24:29):
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.
Speaker 3 (24:47):
And I don't have that. I just don't have that.
Speaker 1 (24:49):
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.
Speaker 2 (25:06):
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
(25:27):
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
(25:48):
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.
Speaker 1 (25:58):
Or is it that they got the sizing wrong when
you first did it?
Speaker 2 (26:01):
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?
Speaker 3 (26:16):
I haven't. I haven't. I mean that's good.
Speaker 1 (26:18):
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.
Speaker 2 (26:25):
The light seal and the light seal cushion cushion.
Speaker 1 (26:27):
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.
Speaker 3 (26:40):
Prescription lenses. I don't know if I have those.
Speaker 2 (26:42):
I don't. I also only got one one cushion with
mine when I bought it.
Speaker 3 (26:47):
Mm hmm.
Speaker 1 (26:48):
Yeah, I actually think that I had the extra cushion
because I had the lenses too, right, which is a
little comfier.
Speaker 2 (26:56):
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.
Speaker 1 (27:17):
I mean, I assume it's a place that they're definitely looking.
How do we make a typing experience better there?
Speaker 2 (27:24):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (27:25):
I think that, like, you know, could they with swiping,
you know, sort of the swipe inputs.
Speaker 2 (27:31):
Like gesturing in the air almost exactly?
Speaker 3 (27:33):
Would that be better? Probably?
Speaker 2 (27:36):
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.
Speaker 1 (27:56):
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.
Speaker 3 (28:14):
But it's it's all of this. It's just not natural.
Speaker 1 (28:17):
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.
Speaker 2 (28:27):
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.
Speaker 3 (28:40):
In my opinion, yeah, I agree, I agree.
Speaker 1 (28:42):
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.
Speaker 3 (28:56):
Doing a lot.
Speaker 1 (28:57):
I've actually been writing like a ton of stuff. I've
been riting in there.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
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.
Speaker 1 (29:18):
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.
Speaker 2 (29:41):
Well to that point, do you think that this or
a device like this is the future.
Speaker 1 (29:47):
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?
Speaker 3 (30:05):
And it just.
Speaker 1 (30:06):
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
(30:28):
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.
Speaker 3 (30:40):
Vision right now is to make that easier, working easier.
Speaker 1 (30:43):
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.
Speaker 2 (30:57):
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?
Speaker 1 (31:08):
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?
Speaker 3 (31:17):
And did you not know?
Speaker 1 (31:18):
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?
Speaker 2 (31:28):
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
(31:48):
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,
(32:11):
this is shutting people off from the world.
Speaker 1 (32:13):
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
(32:34):
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.
Speaker 3 (32:42):
And I felt.
Speaker 1 (32:43):
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
(33:07):
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
(33:29):
to prove out what those things are going to be.
Speaker 2 (33:32):
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
(33:54):
should be kicked off the app store anyway, But like
Slack isn't there, Signal isn't there, Yep, very funny thing.
Speaker 1 (34:01):
Slack is there, but they're there as an iPad app
and it's horrible.
Speaker 3 (34:05):
The same it's horrible.
Speaker 1 (34:06):
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.
Speaker 3 (34:12):
I mean, this is the issue with putting the iPad
apps in.
Speaker 1 (34:15):
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
(34:37):
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?
Speaker 3 (34:54):
I mean, how do you work without Slack? It's impossible.
I'm just joking.
Speaker 1 (34:58):
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,
(35:18):
what happens after this first wave of real big interest
is do you feel.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
Like something I'd ever use around a person exactly?
Speaker 3 (35:25):
And I live with a person. I don't. I don't
know about you. I love.
Speaker 1 (35:28):
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
(35:49):
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?
Speaker 2 (36:01):
It feels very doesn't feel particularly intimate.
Speaker 3 (36:05):
No.
Speaker 2 (36:05):
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.
Speaker 1 (36:28):
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?
Speaker 2 (36:45):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (36:45):
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?
Speaker 2 (36:53):
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
(37:14):
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.
Speaker 3 (37:22):
Yeah, I think.
Speaker 1 (37:23):
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
(37:44):
mine was worse than others.
Speaker 3 (37:45):
It seems like to be the case.
Speaker 2 (37:47):
Oh, I have no neck in mine. I will refuse
to show it to anyone.
Speaker 1 (37:51):
Yeah, I mean, look, most people look bad. I just
look like I look terrible. I'm another level of bad
in mine.
Speaker 2 (37:58):
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.
Speaker 1 (38:14):
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.
Speaker 3 (38:23):
So they're trying to make us.
Speaker 1 (38:24):
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.
Speaker 3 (38:33):
Done building this thing.
Speaker 1 (38:36):
I get why they couldn't ship without it, Like, how
are you going to ship we've just been I actually.
Speaker 2 (38:41):
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?
Speaker 1 (38:51):
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.
Speaker 3 (38:57):
Like it works.
Speaker 1 (38:58):
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.
Speaker 2 (39:05):
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.
Speaker 1 (39:14):
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.
Speaker 2 (39:27):
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.
Speaker 3 (39:35):
That's true, I don't I don't know why they didn't
do that.
Speaker 2 (39:38):
So I only got two more questions for you. Do
you think that Apple rushed this out? No?
Speaker 1 (39:44):
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.
Speaker 2 (39:57):
Selecting on like even Google Docs is extremely broken. Basic
things like that don't.
Speaker 1 (40:02):
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.
Speaker 3 (40:10):
This is designed?
Speaker 2 (40:11):
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.
Speaker 1 (40:28):
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
(40:49):
making a bet before it's ready. I think also Microsoft
has nothing to lose because they don't have their own
headset coming.
Speaker 3 (40:54):
They've sort of abandoned that.
Speaker 2 (40:56):
Yeah, Holo lens is kind of dead in the war.
Speaker 3 (40:58):
Yeah, but I mean, look I think so.
Speaker 1 (41:00):
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?
Speaker 3 (41:20):
Right?
Speaker 1 (41:21):
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.
Speaker 2 (41:31):
This and that's actually my final question for you. How
do you think Steve Jobs would have done this?
Speaker 3 (41:39):
I was asked this on another podcast. I think.
Speaker 1 (41:42):
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.
Speaker 3 (41:51):
Holding it wrong? Yeah right? And so Steve.
Speaker 2 (41:55):
Jobs hated touch screens on laptops because he didn't like
poking the air.
Speaker 3 (42:00):
Yeah, yes, and here we are.
Speaker 1 (42:04):
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.
Speaker 2 (42:16):
Little bit right, right?
Speaker 1 (42:19):
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.
Speaker 2 (42:32):
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
(42:55):
when something goes wrong in this environment. It's so claustrophobic.
Speaker 1 (42:58):
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
(43:20):
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
(43:40):
ten years.
Speaker 2 (43:41):
I don't know, Joanna, thank you so much for joining
me anytime.
Speaker 3 (43:47):
I'd love to see your persona soon.
Speaker 2 (43:49):
Oh God, I will be hiding that from the world.
All of this comes together to just make it impossible
(44:12):
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
(44:34):
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
(44:54):
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
(45:16):
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
(45:37):
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,
(45:58):
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
(46:23):
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
(46:45):
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
(47:07):
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
(47:30):
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
(47:52):
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,
(48:15):
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.
Speaker 3 (48:37):
Better Offline is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (48:40):
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Speaker 1 (48:43):
Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
All Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
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.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
You see.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
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
(00:55):
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
(01:15):
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,
(01:36):
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
(01:58):
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
(02:19):
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
(02:41):
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
(03:04):
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,
(03:24):
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,
(03:45):
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
(04:08):
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
(04:31):
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
(04:52):
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
(05:14):
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,
(05:38):
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
(06:00):
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,
(06:22):
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
(06:44):
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
(07:05):
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.
(07:26):
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
(07:46):
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
(08:08):
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
(08:30):
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
(08:52):
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
(09:13):
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
(09:35):
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
(09:56):
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
(10:18):
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
(10:39):
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
(11:00):
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
(11:21):
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
(11:44):
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
(12:04):
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
(12:25):
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
(12:49):
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
(13:10):
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
(13:33):
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,
(13:56):
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
(14:18):
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,
(14:39):
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
(15:00):
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
(15:22):
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,
(15:46):
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,
(16:08):
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,
(16:29):
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
(16:51):
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
(17:12):
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
(17:34):
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
(17:55):
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
(18:17):
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.
(18:40):
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
(19:01):
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
(19:23):
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
(19:46):
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.
(20:07):
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,
(20:28):
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
(20:51):
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,
(21:13):
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
(21:34):
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.
Speaker 3 (21:51):
Anytime where else would I be?
Speaker 2 (21:53):
Well, maybe that's a good question. Do you plan to
use your vision Pro past the review period?
Speaker 3 (22:01):
I do?
Speaker 1 (22:02):
I think, I you know, I think I've had it
now what okay, two weeks with days today, I'm.
Speaker 2 (22:10):
Very prepared for your podcast Wednesday the seventh.
Speaker 1 (22:13):
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
(22:34):
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
(22:54):
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.
Speaker 3 (23:12):
I have a very good setup.
Speaker 1 (23:14):
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?
Speaker 2 (23:28):
I've not.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
Now, Yeah, it's pretty it's a crazy show. It's on Netflix,
and I watched the last two episodes in there.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
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?
Speaker 1 (23:45):
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.
(24:07):
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
(24:29):
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.
Speaker 3 (24:47):
And I don't have that. I just don't have that.
Speaker 1 (24:49):
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.
Speaker 2 (25:06):
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
(25:27):
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
(25:48):
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.
Speaker 1 (25:58):
Or is it that they got the sizing wrong when
you first did it?
Speaker 2 (26:01):
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?
Speaker 3 (26:16):
I haven't. I haven't. I mean that's good.
Speaker 1 (26:18):
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.
Speaker 2 (26:25):
The light seal and the light seal cushion cushion.
Speaker 1 (26:27):
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.
Speaker 3 (26:40):
Prescription lenses. I don't know if I have those.
Speaker 2 (26:42):
I don't. I also only got one one cushion with
mine when I bought it.
Speaker 3 (26:47):
Mm hmm.
Speaker 1 (26:48):
Yeah, I actually think that I had the extra cushion
because I had the lenses too, right, which is a
little comfier.
Speaker 2 (26:56):
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.
Speaker 1 (27:17):
I mean, I assume it's a place that they're definitely looking.
How do we make a typing experience better there?
Speaker 2 (27:24):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (27:25):
I think that, like, you know, could they with swiping,
you know, sort of the swipe inputs.
Speaker 2 (27:31):
Like gesturing in the air almost exactly?
Speaker 3 (27:33):
Would that be better? Probably?
Speaker 2 (27:36):
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.
Speaker 1 (27:56):
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.
Speaker 3 (28:14):
But it's it's all of this. It's just not natural.
Speaker 1 (28:17):
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.
Speaker 2 (28:27):
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.
Speaker 3 (28:40):
In my opinion, yeah, I agree, I agree.
Speaker 1 (28:42):
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.
Speaker 3 (28:56):
Doing a lot.
Speaker 1 (28:57):
I've actually been writing like a ton of stuff. I've
been riting in there.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
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.
Speaker 1 (29:18):
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.
Speaker 2 (29:41):
Well to that point, do you think that this or
a device like this is the future.
Speaker 1 (29:47):
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?
Speaker 3 (30:05):
And it just.
Speaker 1 (30:06):
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
(30:28):
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.
Speaker 3 (30:40):
Vision right now is to make that easier, working easier.
Speaker 1 (30:43):
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.
Speaker 2 (30:57):
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?
Speaker 1 (31:08):
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?
Speaker 3 (31:17):
And did you not know?
Speaker 1 (31:18):
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?
Speaker 2 (31:28):
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
(31:48):
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,
(32:11):
this is shutting people off from the world.
Speaker 1 (32:13):
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
(32:34):
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.
Speaker 3 (32:42):
And I felt.
Speaker 1 (32:43):
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
(33:07):
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
(33:29):
to prove out what those things are going to be.
Speaker 2 (33:32):
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
(33:54):
should be kicked off the app store anyway, But like
Slack isn't there, Signal isn't there, Yep, very funny thing.
Speaker 1 (34:01):
Slack is there, but they're there as an iPad app
and it's horrible.
Speaker 3 (34:05):
The same it's horrible.
Speaker 1 (34:06):
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.
Speaker 3 (34:12):
I mean, this is the issue with putting the iPad
apps in.
Speaker 1 (34:15):
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
(34:37):
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?
Speaker 3 (34:54):
I mean, how do you work without Slack? It's impossible.
I'm just joking.
Speaker 1 (34:58):
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,
(35:18):
what happens after this first wave of real big interest
is do you feel.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
Like something I'd ever use around a person exactly?
Speaker 3 (35:25):
And I live with a person. I don't. I don't
know about you. I love.
Speaker 1 (35:28):
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
(35:49):
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?
Speaker 2 (36:01):
It feels very doesn't feel particularly intimate.
Speaker 3 (36:05):
No.
Speaker 2 (36:05):
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.
Speaker 1 (36:28):
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?
Speaker 2 (36:45):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (36:45):
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?
Speaker 2 (36:53):
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
(37:14):
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.
Speaker 3 (37:22):
Yeah, I think.
Speaker 1 (37:23):
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
(37:44):
mine was worse than others.
Speaker 3 (37:45):
It seems like to be the case.
Speaker 2 (37:47):
Oh, I have no neck in mine. I will refuse
to show it to anyone.
Speaker 1 (37:51):
Yeah, I mean, look, most people look bad. I just
look like I look terrible. I'm another level of bad
in mine.
Speaker 2 (37:58):
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.
Speaker 1 (38:14):
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.
Speaker 3 (38:23):
So they're trying to make us.
Speaker 1 (38:24):
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.
Speaker 3 (38:33):
Done building this thing.
Speaker 1 (38:36):
I get why they couldn't ship without it, Like, how
are you going to ship we've just been I actually.
Speaker 2 (38:41):
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?
Speaker 1 (38:51):
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.
Speaker 3 (38:57):
Like it works.
Speaker 1 (38:58):
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.
Speaker 2 (39:05):
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.
Speaker 1 (39:14):
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.
Speaker 2 (39:27):
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.
Speaker 3 (39:35):
That's true, I don't I don't know why they didn't
do that.
Speaker 2 (39:38):
So I only got two more questions for you. Do
you think that Apple rushed this out? No?
Speaker 1 (39:44):
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.
Speaker 2 (39:57):
Selecting on like even Google Docs is extremely broken. Basic
things like that don't.
Speaker 1 (40:02):
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.
Speaker 3 (40:10):
This is designed?
Speaker 2 (40:11):
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.
Speaker 1 (40:28):
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
(40:49):
making a bet before it's ready. I think also Microsoft
has nothing to lose because they don't have their own
headset coming.
Speaker 3 (40:54):
They've sort of abandoned that.
Speaker 2 (40:56):
Yeah, Holo lens is kind of dead in the war.
Speaker 3 (40:58):
Yeah, but I mean, look I think so.
Speaker 1 (41:00):
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?
Speaker 3 (41:20):
Right?
Speaker 1 (41:21):
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.
Speaker 2 (41:31):
This and that's actually my final question for you. How
do you think Steve Jobs would have done this?
Speaker 3 (41:39):
I was asked this on another podcast. I think.
Speaker 1 (41:42):
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.
Speaker 3 (41:51):
Holding it wrong? Yeah right? And so Steve.
Speaker 2 (41:55):
Jobs hated touch screens on laptops because he didn't like
poking the air.
Speaker 3 (42:00):
Yeah, yes, and here we are.
Speaker 1 (42:04):
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.
Speaker 2 (42:16):
Little bit right, right?
Speaker 1 (42:19):
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.
Speaker 2 (42:32):
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
(42:55):
when something goes wrong in this environment. It's so claustrophobic.
Speaker 1 (42:58):
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
(43:20):
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
(43:40):
ten years.
Speaker 2 (43:41):
I don't know, Joanna, thank you so much for joining
me anytime.
Speaker 3 (43:47):
I'd love to see your persona soon.
Speaker 2 (43:49):
Oh God, I will be hiding that from the world.
All of this comes together to just make it impossible
(44:12):
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
(44:34):
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
(44:54):
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
(45:16):
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
(45:37):
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,
(45:58):
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
(46:23):
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
(46:45):
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
(47:07):
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
(47:30):
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
(47:52):
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,
(48:15):
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.
Speaker 3 (48:37):
Better Offline is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (48:40):
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Speaker 1 (48:43):
Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Host
Ed Zitron
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