00:00:20 ◼ ► So it's about how we make the show, all the organizational techniques we use to prepare very well in advance for making our show.
00:00:28 ◼ ► Except for when the new special episode drops an hour before we're recording, and I was in the shower.
00:00:37 ◼ ► All right, let's do some follow-up. We had a lot of feedback about laundry, mostly, "Oh my God, I can't believe that I listened to laundry stuff and had opinions."
00:00:46 ◼ ► But nevertheless, I think our favorite piece of laundry follow-up and feedback was from Thomas Alvarez, who writes,
00:00:53 ◼ ► "I told my wife, 'These guys are talking about washing shirts with the printing right side out,' to which she said, 'They want to sell you more ATP shirts by telling you to ruin the printing faster.'"
00:01:01 ◼ ► I love this. I wish I could tell you it was some big conspiracy that we had plotted, but no, that had nothing to do with it, but this is hilarious to me. So this is very well done.
00:01:09 ◼ ► Yeah, this is the theory that with the printing facing out, it will rub against other clothes more than it would with the printing facing in.
00:01:14 ◼ ► I'm not even sure that theory holds out because, you know, though the clothes are all smushing around there, if you have it inside out, the printing is still touching another piece of fabric.
00:01:23 ◼ ► It just happens to be the other side of its own shirt. It doesn't know that it's its own shirt versus another shirt, but who knows? People have ideas about laundry.
00:01:31 ◼ ► But yeah, it was not a conspiracy to get you to buy more shirts. The printing is going to come off those shirts eventually, no matter what, if you keep washing them.
00:01:37 ◼ ► Of course, Jon had feedback about a joke, but here we are. Christian Kent, speaking of jokes, has a correction. And according to someone who put this in the show notes, who I'm sure his name is Jon Sertisa, Christian Kent apparently had the best joke about Jon's app.
00:01:53 ◼ ► So the correction is this. When I was talking about names for the app, which we'll get to in a second, I was mentioning Space Doubler or something like that because there was a series of utilities for the classic Mac OS called Ram Doubler or Disc Doubler.
00:02:09 ◼ ► Well, Disc Doubler is what Space Doubler was called, that's the correction, sorry. But it was Ram Doubler and Speed Doubler. Believe it or not, they sold a software product called Speed Doubler.
00:02:17 ◼ ► It did make your computer faster, perceptively faster in a few interesting ways. But anyway, the space saving one was not Space Doubler, it was Disc Doubler.
00:02:24 ◼ ► And Christian made an image of like the old, I presume this is the old Disc Doubler floppy disk that it came on with like the little styled label or whatever.
00:02:32 ◼ ► But he changed the word Disc and Disc Doubler to be a potentially appropriate name for the app that I'm working on, which is Risk Doubler.
00:02:43 ◼ ► A little bit pessimistic, but you know, I laughed, I thought it was funny, Risk Doubler, Disc Doubler there, it's right there in front of you. Good job, Christian. I like that one.
00:02:56 ◼ ► Oh, we have so many names were suggested for Jon's app. I made myself kind of a top list. Have you made one or do you want to hear mine?
00:03:10 ◼ ► Oh, okay. Well, now let me, so I have a list here in front of me. Now, I want to say that this list is not exhaustive. There were just so many suggestions, I could not click them all.
00:03:19 ◼ ► So I'm sorry if you don't hear your suggestion on this list. This list is not ordered in any way.
00:03:29 ◼ ► I'll get to that in a little bit. I mean, there are favorites mixed in, but it's not, it's mostly kind of like the order that I got to putting them into this document together.
00:03:41 ◼ ► So as I, as I go down this list, though, what it will actually be is an exercise in me trying to pronounce people's names.
00:03:48 ◼ ► It's not about, I just realized this has nothing to do with the name of my app. It has entirely to do with the fact that I decided to put the people's name who suggested it in here.
00:03:56 ◼ ► And now you're going to hear, this is like payback for Casey. Now you're going to hear me try to read 50 people's names.
00:04:02 ◼ ► Anyway, I'll try to do this quickly. Here we go. Ben McCarthy suggested deduplicity. Todd Hoff suggested free disk space because it has a double meaning.
00:04:11 ◼ ► It's like you're freeing it as a verb and you're also talking about it as a noun. Alexander Morris Terry said spacey list. I like that one.
00:04:19 ◼ ► Ben O'Matic said Final Frontier. Mark Edwards said double down and clone cut. Gabrielle or Gabriel said deduplo. F10 said dup-de-dupe, which I thought was fun.
00:04:29 ◼ ► Ivan Cavero-Balunde said dup-nukem, which is good. I mean a little bit of a copyright trade address, whatever.
00:04:39 ◼ ► Graham Kay said stor-a-cusa. Al Neal said ding. John Muir said safe space and bigger mac. I'm sure the McDonald's would love bigger mac.
00:04:51 ◼ ► Thomas Hall said saving spaces, bit-biter, and byte-im-potent. That's a little too obscure. Jack Wellborn said fire marshal.
00:05:03 ◼ ► File marshal. It said let me show you something. File minion, copy optimizer and copy miser. Michael Honore said space cowboy, which I like because it's a cowboy bebop reference.
00:05:18 ◼ ► Ted Duffield said obiterate. Timo Gruen said duper blooper, duper trooper, and mirror space. Dan Angler said archvides in honor of history's great minds famous for messing with volumes.
00:05:33 ◼ ► Because he was figuring out how to tell the volume of spheres or something. I remember. And he lived in the city of Syracuse. Cliff Connell said duplerace or duperace.
00:05:43 ◼ ► Matt Johnson said clone war. Obviously there's lots of clone things that are going to run afoul of Star Wars here. Kelly said clone zone. Mustafa Hamumi said conjure, as in creating something out of nothing, like free storage.
00:05:55 ◼ ► Steven Bernard said disk get, like disk get with a G. Jack Uyane said dupli-killer. These are getting kind of violent here.
00:06:03 ◼ ► Squozin said optimus. Marina Appleman said space forager. Claude Zine said repeat defender or repeat offender. Dupli-cut, double down, duper scooper.
00:06:13 ◼ ► Renee Bana said storage sweep. Jonathan Agusto said storage consolidator, disk consolidator, consolidat-saurus. Sounds like a dinosaur.
00:06:23 ◼ ► Storage liberator, disk liberator, byte liberator, freedom biter. Shum straw said space rescue and space machine. Nathan Galt said cow candidate because cow stands for copy on write, which is how the cloning stuff works under the covers.
00:06:36 ◼ ► Mike Kuryliko said doppelganger. And Jose Vasqued said space scout, one file, stack file, bed bunk, and mac half empty. Those are all the ones that I have in my document. That is not all the ones that I suggested.
00:06:48 ◼ ► But that gives you a feel of what the names are going. Now, Marco, you have a favorite list.
00:06:53 ◼ ► I do. From least favorite to most, but I think these are all excellent. That's why they made the list. Jonathan Lacour, copyright. Like two words, copy and then like right as in the opposite of left. Copy, right.
00:07:18 ◼ ► Yeah, but that's a reference. It's a great name. Tom English suggested Space Finder, which I think is pretty, pretty great. I did like Graham Kay's store, KUSA. That's excellent.
00:07:28 ◼ ► Jack Wellborn's file marshal is also excellent. I also wrote down Ivan Kavera-Belgunde's dupe nukem. But my favorite, which I don't think you said, was via email by Sean Flynn. Forage space.
00:07:41 ◼ ► Yeah, there was lots of foragers. I didn't have all the forage ones on because so many will be like space forager. Lots of foraging.
00:07:47 ◼ ► Yeah, space forager I thought was decent, but I think forage space is even better. I think that what is that? What's the pun there? Like storage space?
00:07:53 ◼ ► Like storage space. Forage space. Come on. That's a great name. If you're not going to go with store KUSA, I think. Or dupe nukem.
00:08:07 ◼ ► All the ones that you can't possibly use because like McDonald's and Apple and whatever, those are funny jokes.
00:08:11 ◼ ► Yeah, of course. You can't use most of those, but you can use store KUSA or forage space.
00:08:26 ◼ ► I think dupe nukem was my favorite, which obviously has problems. I think you could get away with it, but it definitely has problems.
00:08:32 ◼ ► I don't know. Other than that, there were a bunch of really good ones. Nothing specific is leaping out at me as the rightest answer.
00:08:40 ◼ ► Come on. Forage space. And again, I apologize if I didn't read yours. There were just so many of these and I'm sure that lots of fell through the cracks.
00:08:45 ◼ ► Actually, that's true. Forage space is excellent. That's probably of the ones that you can actually use. That's probably my favorite.
00:08:52 ◼ ► So the reason I'm not giving you topless here is because I have indeed chosen a name for my app since last we recorded.
00:08:59 ◼ ► Oh, no. And I'm not going to reveal what it is and I'm not even going to tell you whether it was one of the ones on this list or not.
00:09:04 ◼ ► Okay. Will you tell us privately at another time? No. No, that has to be an on show reveal.
00:09:10 ◼ ► Here's the thing about the name and maybe Casey, you can relate. It's a name. I chose this name and I just know that everyone else is not going to like it.
00:09:19 ◼ ► Oh, been there. Been there. Casey lives there. Only I have to like it and that's all that matters.
00:09:26 ◼ ► So, yeah, eventually I will reveal the name. I'll probably reveal the name once I have like an icon, which I'm nowhere near having or whatever.
00:09:32 ◼ ► You know, anyway. And on that front, I'll just give a brief update on my progress on the app.
00:09:36 ◼ ► Like when we recorded last week's episode, I had created the Xcode project like a couple of days before that.
00:09:43 ◼ ► So if you're expecting that app to be released. Yeah. Last one we recorded, I had a working app and it would do what it's supposed to do when you click the button.
00:09:50 ◼ ► But it takes longer than a week to make an app just FYI. And it takes me personally way longer because I am so slow as a Mac developer because there's just so much I don't know.
00:10:01 ◼ ► You know, like I can. Yeah, it's frustrating when you're a fast developer in other contexts and other languages.
00:10:11 ◼ ► And there's only one way to do a lot of things because you've got to use the API to do them.
00:10:15 ◼ ► And anyway, you know, it's going to be a little while. This app will not be out in 2024 for sure.
00:10:28 ◼ ► It takes a surprising amount of time. I got to do all the store in that purchase stuff.
00:10:32 ◼ ► It takes a surprising amount of time for someone who has never done it before. I'll complain about Apple's documentation maybe next episode.
00:10:39 ◼ ► And I'm like basically I'm trying to figure out and implement all of the appropriate guardrails to make this not be a risk doubler.
00:10:53 ◼ ► But to make something you're going to give to other people to use, you really have to nail the sucker down.
00:10:57 ◼ ► And that is taking a lot of time because I'm trying to think of what are the best mitigations, which one should I allow to be disabled,
00:11:03 ◼ ► which one should I not allow to be disabled, how locked down should it be because you lock it down too much.
00:11:07 ◼ ► It's not going to find any duplicates because it's not allowed to look anywhere where the duplicates are, you know.
00:11:11 ◼ ► So I'll give updates as I go along here. But like it's going to be a while. So don't hold your breath.
00:11:17 ◼ ► We also got some feedback. Some experts have weighed in. A friend of the show, Dave Nanian, has some thoughts.
00:11:24 ◼ ► Dave writes Super Duper, which is what I use every other day in order to do a full backup of my computer.
00:11:30 ◼ ► Dave writes, the big problem with Space Saver is that, which I guess is the name that he has chosen.
00:11:35 ◼ ► We'll see if that's what John has chosen, is that it's going to be run by people low on space, not just the curious.
00:11:40 ◼ ► And side effects, more data on the drive than capacity, will cause post-run pain for the user.
00:11:50 ◼ ► Even though we know how to do this, obviously it's a brute force thing, we don't on backups for performative,
00:11:56 ◼ ► or excuse me, performance or sense reasons on smart update, which is a feature within Super Duper.
00:12:11 ◼ ► It's not going to be so much your support, which may occur or may not, but downstream support effects that you're not fully or at all anticipating.
00:12:18 ◼ ► At some level, of course, it's not your problem, but it's a significant issue that's certainly prevented me from doing something similar.
00:12:26 ◼ ► Yeah, so this, I mean, obviously, maybe I'm making Dave's life miserable, so even though I'm not calling it Super Duper, he's still going to have problems.
00:12:34 ◼ ► What he's talking about is, if you have lots of clones on your drive, well, clone files on your drive,
00:12:40 ◼ ► and then you try to use Super Duper to clone that drive periodically to another drive that is the same size,
00:12:51 ◼ ► And you're like, "What do you mean not enough disk space? I have one 4 terabyte drive that I'm trying to clone to another 4 terabyte drive.
00:13:01 ◼ ► Well, the drive you're looking at has a whole bunch of clones on it that are only taking up, you know, one amount of the space, even if there's five copies of the file.
00:13:09 ◼ ► But when you copy it to another disk, if you don't faithfully reproduce those clones, you will take five times the space for those five files,
00:13:19 ◼ ► That's what he's talking about, about drives growing or whatever, like migrating to a new Mac, for instance.
00:13:24 ◼ ► If you have tons of clones in your drive and you migrate to a new Mac and it doesn't reproduce the clones, your stuff might not all fit on the thing.
00:13:32 ◼ ► First of all, obviously, Dave's perspective is he is doing support and writing an app that does disk cloning.
00:13:41 ◼ ► But second of all, ever since Apple introduced this feature, the Finder does it every time you copy a file onto the same volume anywhere,
00:13:48 ◼ ► which is why people have clones all over the place. People have no idea how many clones they have.
00:13:52 ◼ ► They're just blindly and instantaneously copying giant files around and putting them into folders and organizing things and not realizing they already had a copy of that somewhere over here or over there.
00:14:01 ◼ ► So I'm not the only thing creating clones. People are doing it themselves every time they duplicate a file in the Finder or copy it somewhere.
00:14:10 ◼ ► Still, I'm obviously making the problem worse, which is kind of a bummer, but this feature exists for a reason, not just to make copies instantaneous, but to save space.
00:14:20 ◼ ► Like I said, I leverage it myself because one of the big things in my home directory is the giant folders full of all my audio recordings.
00:14:26 ◼ ► Every time I record a podcast, it's a couple hundred megabytes and I copy it to a bunch of different places to organize it.
00:14:31 ◼ ► And I don't worry about those copies because they're all clones. They don't take up any more space because I'm copying them in the Finder.
00:14:37 ◼ ► And that's one of the reasons when I duplicate my drive with SuperDuper, sometimes I run out of space.
00:14:41 ◼ ► Now what he was saying is when you do the initial copy with SuperDuper, it faithfully replicates the clones. No problem.
00:14:47 ◼ ► When you do subsequent incremental copies, it does not faithfully reproduce the clones because it would take too long or whatever.
00:14:52 ◼ ► I told him if you added the option for SmartUpdate to reproduce the clones, I would take that option.
00:14:57 ◼ ► Because I want that to be leveraged. It's leverage on the initial copy, but not on follow-up copies.
00:15:03 ◼ ► We'll see how it turns out. It may be disastrous for me, it may be disastrous for Dave, it may be disastrous for users, but right now, I'm still a go.
00:15:19 ◼ ► Unfortunately you can't literally do that. But thanks to Aura, you can effectively do that.
00:15:23 ◼ ► How? Because you give people the ability to get their photos out of their devices, out of their memory banks, if you will, and put them on display in the middle of your home.
00:15:33 ◼ ► Aura was kind enough to send a couple of these photo frames to me, and I kept one and put it on my living room wall.
00:15:38 ◼ ► And I sent one to my mom and dad. I could pre-set it up before it even left the box by scanning a little bespoke QR code.
00:15:45 ◼ ► Give it their house's Wi-Fi password so that when they plug it in, magic happens. It's incredible.
00:15:53 ◼ ► They're just so well designed from top to bottom. There's no chintzy-looking branding on the front or anything like that.
00:16:04 ◼ ► These are so well done. And the thing of it is that every time I walk in my living room, I see a picture of the kids or Aaron or Penny or what have you, and I get to be happy.
00:16:18 ◼ ► And my parents, oh Nelly, they love putting pictures of their grandkids and their kids and their friends and whatever.
00:16:28 ◼ ► It is like the side table that you can see from the front door. That's how important it is to them.
00:16:36 ◼ ► I can upload photos from my phone directly to my parents' frame or my own or both at the same time.
00:16:43 ◼ ► So what can you do? You can save on the perfect gift, be it for now or for later or for yourself, by visiting AuraFrames.com to get $35 off Aura's best-selling Carver band frames by using the promo code ATP at checkout.
00:17:15 ◼ ► Tim Shoof writes, "Do you think that an APFS-style switch from JPEG to JPEG XL in the Apple Photos library is planned, imminent, or for some reason unlikely?
00:17:29 ◼ ► I'd certainly like a 50% smaller photo library. Are there third-party tools to achieve this and would you trust them?"
00:17:34 ◼ ► Ugh. I don't think this is likely anytime soon. Although, to Tim's point, you know, they've shown that they can change the wings while the plane is flying, so anything's possible.
00:17:44 ◼ ► I don't, I don't know. I would, I would want to keep my photos kind of as they are, even though there's really no, like, academic reason why this wouldn't be a good idea. I don't think I would do it though.
00:17:56 ◼ ► If I remember correctly, isn't one of the benefits of JPEG XL that it can actually store existing JPEGs at smaller size and then losslessly go back to them if it needs to?
00:18:08 ◼ ► Yeah, so that's, that's what he's getting at. The idea that the specific feature JPEG XL he's talking about is take an existing JPEG that's not an XL JPEG and make it smaller with no loss in quality.
00:18:18 ◼ ► It's not re-compressing it at all. It's just found a cleverer way to store the exact same JPEG. So it doesn't improve the quality of the photo, but it also doesn't make it any worse.
00:18:26 ◼ ► It is not re-compressing it. JPEG XL has a way to just take your existing JPEGs and make them smaller without changing the quality of the display.
00:18:39 ◼ ► Apple could do that to all of our JPEGs if they wanted to. I think probably the reason it is not imminent is because development in the photos world is slow.
00:18:54 ◼ ► Sometimes for good reasons, because it's a very important thing to get right. How long did it take for us to get iCloud shared photo libraries? Like a decade, right?
00:19:02 ◼ ► But I'd rather have them get it right than, you know, ship it and destroy all my photos. Right?
00:19:06 ◼ ► So I think this is not imminent, but it definitely would be cool. As for, are there third-party tools and would you trust them? I would absolutely not trust them.
00:19:15 ◼ ► Because when you do this thing, you are converting it from a JPEG file to a JPEG XL file. It would have a different file name extension, it would be a different format, apps have to read it.
00:19:26 ◼ ► You can't do that behind the back of the Photos app. Like, Photos app expects JPEGs to be JPEGs, not JPEG XLs.
00:19:32 ◼ ► I would absolutely not trust a third-party tool to do this, because that's not what the photo library is expecting.
00:19:37 ◼ ► Even if you just think of it as simple as like, the metadata in the SQLite database in your photo library will no longer match.
00:19:43 ◼ ► Like, the file on disk will be a different size, right? It will just... No. If you see a third-party tool that says it will do this, don't do it.
00:19:50 ◼ ► Like, I'm talking about changing your photo library in place. Now if you want to like, export originals from your photo library, put them in a third-party tool, change them to JPEG XL and re-import them, by all means.
00:20:02 ◼ ► Anyway, it would be cool if they did it, but as we saw with iOS, they didn't even like, go whole hog on JPEG XL on the phones.
00:20:08 ◼ ► It's just a thing they use for RAWs, but they didn't even switch. The regular voters are still Heek, so... Baby steps in the JPEG XL.
00:20:15 ◼ ► I mean, when you think about it though, like, nobody has a higher incentive to shrink photo JPEGs than Apple.
00:20:22 ◼ ► Because Apple probably stores more photo JPEGs on their own servers than anybody else in the world.
00:20:33 ◼ ► Well, but still, you know, I think they would benefit substantially from the resource savings on their end alone.
00:20:40 ◼ ► And I mean, who knows how many people really pay that much for iCloud, who wouldn't still pay, like...
00:20:46 ◼ ► Yeah, that's the question of like, are people simply not paying, and by making it smaller, making it...
00:20:51 ◼ ► Well, they're never going to fit between the amount... They give you five gigs for free, which doesn't matter how much compression they do.
00:20:56 ◼ ► That's not going to help anybody, right? So... I don't... Yeah, I see what you're saying, but right now, they...
00:21:02 ◼ ► Anybody who does... Anybody who pays for any iCloud storage gives Apple the, you know, market rates for it.
00:21:12 ◼ ► So they're not ridiculous, but it is ridiculous that the amount you get for free is basically useless.
00:21:16 ◼ ► But I could totally see... Because like, keep in mind, like, occasionally what Apple will do is,
00:21:22 ◼ ► in order to justify still selling, like, iPhones and Macs that have much too small of base storage for the era in which they are sold,
00:21:31 ◼ ► they will sometimes, you know, do fancy compression tricks to save space in order to, you know, make them not suck for a little while longer, as much,
00:21:44 ◼ ► You know, we see all the work they did to try to fit, you know, modern LLMs to try to shrink those models to fit onto these small amounts of RAM that are in iPhones.
00:21:54 ◼ ► You know, a lot of that is because it's just more efficient. A lot of it is because the iPhone RAM has been too small for a little while, and so people...
00:22:02 ◼ ► Like, they kind of had to make it work. In this case, maybe, you know, maybe they'll be motivated to do one of these, like, in-place migrations over time for everyone's photo libraries,
00:22:12 ◼ ► you know, as JPEG XL support improves over time. Maybe they'd be motivated to do it simply to, you know, keep selling 256 gig Macs for a little bit longer, you know.
00:22:25 ◼ ► Remember last episode they said we're going to get the one terabit NANs. We're going to be off 256 next year. That person promised.
00:22:32 ◼ ► Yeah, by the way, just to be clear, JPEG XL, like, they should change... To get the benefit of JPEG XL, you should be saving your photos in JPEG XL.
00:22:43 ◼ ► This thing we're talking about where you can take your existing JPEGs and save them without loss of quality and a smaller size, that's like an off-to-the-side nice-to-have.
00:22:50 ◼ ► The advantage of JPEG XL, we talked about before, is like, it will make you better quality pictures in the same size, or, you know, like, it's...
00:22:56 ◼ ► You should just be... The camera should be producing those if you want to get the real benefit from it.
00:23:00 ◼ ► So I would imagine they wouldn't do the recompression until or unless they decided, oh, we're switching from Heek to JPEG XL.
00:23:06 ◼ ► And like, you know, the space savings is just like, well, since we're in there, and since every...
00:23:11 ◼ ► Because if they did this, like, every part of the Apple ecosystem would have to fully support it, which I think it mostly does already.
00:23:17 ◼ ► I think we had a follow-up item about that where most Apple things can currently read JPEG XL, but Apple's cameras don't shoot them, and I'm not sure it's entirely universal.
00:23:35 ◼ ► We... Unrelated to this, we got in a little bit of anonymous Apple Genius feedback with regard to self-service.
00:23:42 ◼ ► So this anonymous Genius writes, "Regarding buying upgrade parts from Apple's self-service store, you can't simply insert the main logic board of one configuration of MacBook Pro into a different configuration of MacBook Pro, nor can you do this for the storage modules in the Mac Studio,
00:23:55 ◼ ► because Apple requires their configuration tests to be run for self-service repair and for Apple Store and mail-in repairs.
00:24:01 ◼ ► This configuration diagnostics will fail unless the specs match what's already assigned and configured to your serial number.
00:24:08 ◼ ► Apple locks storage and memory configuration to your serial number, preventing you from using a different logic board configuration to increase storage and memory, which is why you enter your serial number on the self-repair website."
00:24:20 ◼ ► Alright, Jon, apparently you're still trying to make pinstripes happen. What's going on here?
00:24:25 ◼ ► Not me. I just was using my computer one day and I looked down at the Finder and it was looking a little under the weather.
00:24:36 ◼ ► I guess we'll put a picture in the show notes or maybe it'll be chapter art or something, because it's hard to describe what it is.
00:24:47 ◼ ► It doesn't look like it was done stylistically. It's like the Finder icon in the dock, on the left side of the dock.
00:24:52 ◼ ► And it's got kind of vertical stripes where there's a dim area in the lighter, dim area in the lighter.
00:25:02 ◼ ► But as it gets towards the edge, the stripe breaks up and it's melting the colors behind it and it just looks awful.
00:25:14 ◼ ► And I thought it was just me, who knows, whatever. I have exotic hardware, sometimes weird stuff happens.
00:25:19 ◼ ► But then Jeff Johnson posted that he saw this on Reddit as well. Someone who had the exact same problem.
00:25:27 ◼ ► You can see in my screenshot the Finder is messed up, but Safari right next to it is fine.
00:25:39 ◼ ► So anyway, this is a 15.2 thing as far as I can tell because it started after we all updated to 15.2.
00:25:45 ◼ ► I think this is an Apple bug. Just FYI, if the icons in your dock start to look wonky, it's probably 15.2 and hopefully Apple will fix it.
00:25:53 ◼ ► All right, that was quick and easy. Speaking of quick and easy, I have a question for you.
00:26:04 ◼ ► But it seems like some way, somehow, every time I get in my car, that is the moment that any of my friends decide they would like to talk to me via text message.
00:26:13 ◼ ► And so, because of that, I am often reading, if you will, and responding to text messages via Siri on CarPlay.
00:26:27 ◼ ► So, as an example, when I said something, gosh, I wish I remember what specifically I said.
00:26:33 ◼ ► I wish I remember what specifically it was. But I said something like, I said to the dingus, I'm dictating text messages, right?
00:26:44 ◼ ► And I said to the dingus, "All caps no, all caps freaking, all caps way," which the dingus interprets as, you know, "No freaking way," written all in capital letters, right?
00:26:57 ◼ ► And normally, normally what would happen is it would read it back to me because it's CarPlay and it would say, "Okay, sending to Aaron, no freaking way."
00:27:06 ◼ ► But ever since 18.2, I swear to you, what I get instead is, "Sending to Aaron, no freaking way!"
00:27:16 ◼ ► And so I feel like Siri is actually expressing some amount of inferred, I guess, I think that's what I'm looking for, inferred emotion based on what you're sending.
00:27:27 ◼ ► And that's the most obvious example that I can think of is when I said something like that that was surprising and I feel like, I keep saying the S word, the dingus kept, like, read it to me and read it back to me in a surprising way.
00:27:42 ◼ ► I said something angry, I think similar to what I just described, and it read it back in like an angry way.
00:27:50 ◼ ► You know, maybe it was the same words, maybe it was different, but it was like, "No freaking way!"
00:28:02 ◼ ► I don't remember reading anything about this anywhere, but I swear to you it's happening.
00:28:09 ◼ ► But listeners, reach out on Mastodon or something. You don't need to email us or anything like that.
00:28:13 ◼ ► But reach out to me on Mastodon if you've seen a similar experience, had a similar experience, or if there's been coverage about this that I missed, I would love to get an email about that because I totally missed this if this was stated and I just didn't realize it.
00:28:26 ◼ ► WWDC was so long ago that we've all forgotten about what was advertised for iOS 18 because it's been rolling out over the course of this whole year, but I'm pretty sure this was one of the features that was advertised way back in WWDC that was coming in iOS 18.
00:28:39 ◼ ► And we all forgot about it because at this point I'm not even going to blame Casey because it's just been so long.
00:28:51 ◼ ► Someone in the chat room is saying it's all of 18, not just 18.2, but I'm pretty sure this was in fact an advertised feature of the new Siri.
00:29:05 ◼ ► I wanted it to go back to being on an even keel. I don't need it to play act to the things that I'm saying.
00:29:14 ◼ ► As long as it gets it right, which so far it has, I like it, but I don't feel like I noticed it before 18.2, but it very, very well could be that it was 18.0 and I just didn't notice.
00:29:27 ◼ ► I'm just going by what some people said in the chat room, but it's like which 18 release had which thing in it and which things are still to come on which platforms this year, man.
00:29:36 ◼ ► We didn't put it in the notes here, but there's been some stories about the people at Apple who are supposed to be working on iOS 19 are delayed because so many people are still working on 18 because 18 is not done.
00:29:47 ◼ ► We're getting into this type of thing where it's like they will announce to WWDC basically all the features that they're going to release over the course of the next year.
00:29:56 ◼ ► And only by next WWDC will they all actually be out, which is a strange way to do things because then the next WWDC comes along, do you have another year's worth of features to announce at that point?
00:30:05 ◼ ► Are you just going to start announcing things before anyone has begun working on them and just assume you'll get them done within a year?
00:30:12 ◼ ► Obviously the AI thing sort of catching Apple, not by surprise, but sort of like they had other priorities and they shifted priorities quickly.
00:30:23 ◼ ► Hopefully they'll get back on track, but this definitely has been like the longest release I can remember and for on all their platforms of just like it's not going to be done until certainly not done within the calendar year that WWDC was.
00:30:52 ◼ ► Honestly, I think it's probably for the best that Siri tries to accurately reflect the emotion that like we are choosing or people who send stuff to us are choosing to use capitalization, punctuation, style.
00:31:05 ◼ ► Like we're choosing to use this stuff, you know, maybe now I believe we now have support for some basic, you know, bold italics kind of formatting.
00:31:20 ◼ ► And so, you know, once we get used to it, you know, the shock of it being different will wear away.
00:31:31 ◼ ► Like if I get a message while I'm walking my dog and it comes in through my AirPods and Siri, you know, dictates the message to me over my AirPods.
00:31:39 ◼ ► I'm not sure what part of the computational chain there is choosing how to read those out.
00:31:59 ◼ ► And boy, like when you're like walking your dog and it's cold and it's winter and your hands are all bundled up in your pockets and you have a hat on and all this stuff.
00:32:12 ◼ ► Well, no, there is. There is. If you enable the head shaky stuff, you can shake your head left to right, which is, you know, the standard no head shake in English speaking languages anyway.
00:32:24 ◼ ► Or English speaking cultures. You shake your head laterally left to right and you hear doo doo doo doo doo doo and it'll stop talking.
00:32:38 ◼ ► Yeah, I know. But usually by the time you get that out and by the time it recognizes it, like it's kind of, it's a slow process.
00:32:45 ◼ ► Sometimes it also decides to do, you know, so and so wrote a long message. Do you want me to read it?
00:32:49 ◼ ► Yeah, but so far, like I assume it's waiting for me to do the head tracking. I turned off the head tracking, the yes/no tracking because I thought it would be annoying.
00:32:59 ◼ ► Turn on the head tracking. Like I said, I hear the little rattles a lot, but I've never accidentally triggered it yet.
00:33:04 ◼ ► Alright, yeah, because so far, like just by vocally saying yes or no, I've never had it once do the right thing. Like I've never had it recognize it.
00:33:16 ◼ ► I do, yeah. So this is something that breezed by our friend Charlie Chapman. I saw him buy one and I'm like, "Oh, that looks kind of interesting."
00:33:24 ◼ ► He posted on Maths on it and I immediately ordered my own. This is, it's the terminal with no vowels.
00:33:32 ◼ ► T-R-M-N-L. It's basically a little kind of iPad mini sized E Ink screen that you use to just display data. It's like a little E Ink dashboard.
00:33:47 ◼ ► It's a little over a hundred bucks and I got one and when I was buying this, I was like, "Alright."
00:33:53 ◼ ► My family could use some basic ambient display of information in the kitchen. Like on the kitchen counter, next to the HomePod, I want to be able to show the weather and some countdowns to important dates and stuff like that.
00:34:07 ◼ ► And this does that excellently. But I thought for sure, like, "Alright, I'm going to put this up sometime when Tiff is not home and just hope that it can last as long as possible before she sees it because I think it's a huge risk to put this up and have it be approved."
00:34:24 ◼ ► I played a family favorite. I had to do like a three pane layout. One big pane was weather, one small pane was a date countdown to the next important date and the other small pane was a quote from The Office, the TV show The Office.
00:34:37 ◼ ► Because I'm like, "My family loves The Office." So I'm like, "Alright." I'm like, "Playing with the crowd here. Maybe that can win people over."
00:34:44 ◼ ► I put it up there and a day went by and I'm like, "There's no way I got away with this." Because when I change anything in the house, like, you could move an entire room in my house to a different spot and it would take me a week to notice.
00:34:57 ◼ ► But if I change anything in the house, Tiff and Adam both notice immediately. Like, they can sense any disturbance, anything being rearranged, anything missing, anything being new or removed. They know immediately.
00:35:11 ◼ ► They're like dogs. You take your dog for a walk and the neighbor has a new, like, a tiny flag on their lawn and the dog freaks out about it because something has changed in their environment.
00:35:19 ◼ ► Right. Exactly. So anyway, so about a day into this, I'm like, "There is no way I'm getting away with this." And then eventually, you know, somehow a conversation, somebody's asking something and Tiff is like, "Oh, is that what that new thing on the wall is doing?"
00:35:41 ◼ ► Look at that. It's the magic of e-ink because it's not emissive. It's not a quote-unquote stream. I'm assuming it doesn't have, like, any kind of, like, front light like the Kindles?
00:35:53 ◼ ► Yeah, like, so what I like about this thing, so I just love e-ink. I've always loved e-ink. I hardly ever read books and so I don't really have a chance to use e-ink. I also, like, you know, when you look at stuff like the Remarkable tablets, those are great.
00:36:05 ◼ ► I also never take notes, like, with pencils or pens. So I don't have much of a reason to use e-ink in most of my day-to-day life even though I just love it as a display technology.
00:36:15 ◼ ► And it's, I mean, it's very limited. It's very weird. But it's really cool. And so I'm like, "All right, for this kind of purpose of, like, an ambient display, it's actually perfect, I think. Let's try it."
00:36:26 ◼ ► And what I like about the Terminal product is, you know, you've been able for years, you've been able to go buy, like, a basic e-ink screen that's, like, you know, two to eight inches wide for almost no money if you get it in, like, a raw state that you can plug into a Raspberry Pi or something.
00:36:44 ◼ ► Those are great. A lot of people have done some fun stuff with those, but that would never pass muster as a thing that looks nice enough to put in my house.
00:36:52 ◼ ► Like, that would, like, that would be the kind of thing that would be, you know, constrained to my office. And even then, like, I wouldn't even want to look at that in my own office.
00:37:01 ◼ ► But what I like about the Terminal is that they've basically taken that type of hardware, like, inexpensive, mid-sized e-ink screen. It's not super high resolution.
00:37:11 ◼ ► It's, like, I think it's, like, 160 pixels or something like that. So it's not super high res, but for, you know, for viewing it at a distance, which is what you're mostly doing, it's totally fine for that.
00:37:20 ◼ ► And they've put it in a nice-looking, small, minimal white enclosure. They have a battery in it that lasts, like, a couple of months.
00:37:30 ◼ ► So it charges via USB-C, but I just, I took some Velcro command strips and just stuck it on the wall. And I charged it up and stuck it on the wall and, you know, throttled back some other refresh settings so it lasts even longer.
00:37:42 ◼ ► And so, yeah, every three months I'll take it down with those Velcro things and charge it for a few minutes and put it back up.
00:37:48 ◼ ► So far, this is great. I am, and this is not an ad, but I strongly suggest, I think people in our audience would enjoy playing with this thing.
00:37:58 ◼ ► I do have an incentive for everyone in the audience to buy these. The current developer ecosystem of, like, plugins to display things, it's very friendly.
00:38:09 ◼ ► Like, you can very easily make your own plugin, but there just aren't that many yet for different services.
00:38:14 ◼ ► So I would love for more people to buy these so that way maybe more people would develop plugins for more stuff I might be able to do with it.
00:38:21 ◼ ► But I'm very happy with this because it's finally, like, it's taking all of this amazing, like, this amazing cheap tech that we have now.
00:38:29 ◼ ► Like, hardware is so cheap now, especially if you don't need, like, top of the line cutting edge stuff.
00:38:34 ◼ ► And so I'm excited to see products like this, you know, even if this one particular thing isn't, you know, exactly what you need out there.
00:38:42 ◼ ► There's so much amazing cheap hardware now that just makes it so much more accessible. You can use it in so many more places.
00:38:49 ◼ ► More people can buy it, more people can afford it, more people can afford to replace it if it breaks.
00:38:56 ◼ ► I think it's a really cool idea. Their heads are in the right place. It isn't some kind of, like, weird creepy startup trying to, you know, VC you up the rear end or anything.
00:39:09 ◼ ► And so far it passed muster as, like, something that can live in our house, and that's pretty impressive.
00:39:15 ◼ ► So the three things you're showing on it, is that just, like, built in stuff? Like, does it, I forget what you said, weather? Is it, like, a built in weather thing and then countdown?
00:39:24 ◼ ► Yeah, I haven't yet made any custom things. Frankly, I just haven't had time. I do intend to.
00:39:28 ◼ ► Because this, it's so nice and good looking and useful that I think if I were ever to want to make, like, some dashboards for my business metrics, say, this would be great to have, like, you know, two or three of these in my office, you know, just next to my desk or something like that.
00:39:44 ◼ ► But right now I'm just using the, like, there is just in their existing, like, library of plugins that they already have, I'm using, like, yeah, the weather, the date countdown and the office quotes. Those are all built in.
00:39:56 ◼ ► I think I mentioned a while back of the, my brother had the need for the same type of thing to show, like, the family calendar. It wasn't E Ink, but it was, like, I don't know, maybe it was color E Ink or maybe it was just a really bad looking LCD.
00:40:07 ◼ ► But it looked very similar to this. Similar size, similar proportions, even, you know, similar, like, the little bezel was similar as well. Although I do kind of wish this thing didn't have the terminal logo on the front end.
00:40:18 ◼ ► The bezel was equal on all sides, but whatever. It's cheap. But yeah, like, having E Ink, one of the good roles of E Ink is to basically be configurable paper with all the advantages and disadvantages of paper.
00:40:30 ◼ ► You can't see paper if it's dark and you don't have light shining on it, but if there is light shining on it, it looks real good and doesn't take a lot of power and yada yada.
00:40:38 ◼ ► So yeah, I'm not sure if I would use this, but, like, well, another question, does it come with bundled support for, like, Google Calendar or other calendar things if you want to show your calendar and not just a calendar?
00:40:48 ◼ ► It doesn't have any kind of iCloud support yet, so that's kind of what I want people to make. Otherwise I'll be forced to make it for myself and I don't want to. But it does have, I believe it does have the Google Calendar support already.
00:41:00 ◼ ► It does. If you go to /integrations, useterminal.com/integrations, you can see what they're currently advertising, for lack of a better word, and yes, Google Calendar's on there.
00:41:12 ◼ ► But I also am an Apple Calendar person, so yeah, I like the idea of this quite a bit, and on my personal to-do list of projects that I'll never get to and probably talk about a lot, the top of that list is still fiber, but somewhere not too far below that is writing my own dashboard-y thing.
00:41:29 ◼ ► Like Marco said, probably with Raspberry Pi, because hey, what else can I solve with Raspberry Pi?
00:41:35 ◼ ► But I feel like it's a lot of work, especially if I want to make it look good, which is not my strongest suit, and I would have to get a bunch of integrations or find third-party code that does these integrations. It just seems like way too much effort.
00:41:50 ◼ ► I love the idea of this, but the particular integrations I want doesn't seem like they exist. I still use any list, which is, I think it might have been a sponsor years and years and years ago, but I use that for our shopping lists, and I use Apple Calendar, so this does not fit my needs today, but I concur with Marco's implied point that it could fit my needs tomorrow.
00:42:11 ◼ ► And also, if you are so inclined to write your own plugins, you pay an extra $20 for access to the developer keys and everything, and you can do basically whatever you want with it then.
00:42:21 ◼ ► And it seems like it's pretty easy, because it's all just web page rendering, basically. It's like rendering HTML and CSS to an image.
00:42:31 ◼ ► I haven't delved into that yet, but it seems like it's pretty easy to make your own plugins.
00:42:36 ◼ ► I'm still using Panic Status Board, an app that was discontinued many years ago, but somehow still is running on my iPad.
00:42:43 ◼ ► Yeah, that is very limited, but Casey, if you're thinking of doing this, you might want to try doing it on iOS or iPadOS, because there's that cool Swift charting library that exists. It depends on what you want to do with it.
00:42:54 ◼ ► What this thing sounds like it's doing, like rendering HTML to an image, is way more flexible. I kind of wish Status Board did that, but it doesn't. But anyway, yeah, this is cool. I'll definitely keep in mind if I have a need for something.
00:43:06 ◼ ► I already said last time that I didn't think I had any need for a digital picture frame, and apparently I do, so maybe this will find a place as well.
00:43:13 ◼ ► We do use Google Calendar. Maybe having this... Well, the thing is, we have a paper calendar on our fridge, but the reason we do that is just to see the pictures, essentially. We should just take the paper calendar and fold it over so all you see is the picture on the top page and not the calendar.
00:43:28 ◼ ► Actually, I do look at it. Here's when I look at the calendar that's hanging on the fridge. I see the pictures, and I like seeing how I make the calendar out of my own pictures, one picture for each month.
00:43:37 ◼ ► The main time I look at it, and I did it today, was when I'm taking the milk out of the fridge and I see the expiration date, I glance at the calendar that's on the fridge door to see what they say.
00:43:46 ◼ ► Is this expired? How close is this to being expired? So yeah, maybe there's a role for this somewhere. I'll think about it.
00:43:54 ◼ ► Interesting. I'm looking at the API documentation, which we'll also link in the show notes, and they have a "bring your own device" section.
00:44:01 ◼ ► And they say, "Look, the components are probably going to cost more than what we have put together. We share this not to dissuade or pitch you, but rather as a friendly FYI.
00:44:11 ◼ ► Making your own terminal from scratch is not an economically rational decision, but a labor of love."
00:44:15 ◼ ► I mean, John, you could make a custom plugin that would, you know, you enter, every time you buy new milk, you enter expiration dates in your API somewhere.
00:44:24 ◼ ► And then it just counts down the days on the terminal on the fridge to, you know, the milk has three days left.
00:44:30 ◼ ► There's more than one thing of milk on the fridge, but it's just easier to pull it out and glance at the calendar as you close the door. The system works fine.
00:44:37 ◼ ► But that's when I use it. That's when I actually look at the calendar portion. The rest of the time I'm just looking at the image part.
00:44:45 ◼ ► And it's honestly, it's the first one that doesn't look like somebody's DIY project. Like, it's actually like a legitimate product.
00:44:56 ◼ ► It's not like, and it isn't like, you know, held together by like tapes and screws. Like, it's actually just like a nice feeling and looking product.
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00:45:57 ◼ ► This is a time you have both the holidays with gifting season and you have the new year.
00:46:02 ◼ ► And this is a great time to kind of take some, evaluate what you want to be doing with your life.
00:46:07 ◼ ► And say, "Maybe I do want to get better at this hobby I've always wanted to do but never quite felt right."
00:46:41 ◼ ► Last week there was, I think it was last week, there is a new episode of Apple's immersive video wildlife show.
00:47:04 ◼ ► And you should check it out if you're one of the dummies like me that bought a Vision Pro.
00:47:11 ◼ ► I just wanted to call it to people's attention because I feel like because not that many people seem to have Vision Pros,
00:47:16 ◼ ► when new things like this drop, I often am unaware until I put my face computer on my face again
00:47:24 ◼ ► So this is the service I provide to you listeners for all six of you that have one of these. You're welcome.
00:47:57 ◼ ► It still feels like these are little snacks and little previews of what could be done if somebody gave us full length content.
00:48:25 ◼ ► And so that being said, there was also news, I think yesterday, there was that Blackmagic Camera announced. Do you see that?
00:48:38 ◼ ► So basically Blackmagic released a, or announced rather, a camera that's shipping in I think a couple of months.
00:48:45 ◼ ► It's a dedicated hardware camera specifically for recording Apple immersive video video.
00:48:52 ◼ ► It looks basically like two giant lenses, like two eyes on the front of what otherwise looks like a fairly common Blackmagic camera back.
00:49:00 ◼ ► It's two 180 degree kind of fisheye style lenses, each one having an 8K image sensor behind it.
00:49:09 ◼ ► So it records 8K per eye at I think 90 frames a second up to, and then of course all the different video specs of color depth and everything else.
00:49:20 ◼ ► Before this, I'm not sure what people have been using to record the immersive video to date.
00:49:30 ◼ ► Canon released like a dual fisheye lens that you could attach to some of their more recent cameras.
00:49:37 ◼ ► If you look at the reviews of people who actually try to use it, first of all, it is not as good as the Blackmagic thing in specs.
00:49:44 ◼ ► The Canon lens is using two eyepiece lenses to project an image onto one single 8K sensor, kind of just divides the sensor in half.
00:49:56 ◼ ► It projects the left eye onto half the sensor, right onto the other half of the sensor.
00:50:26 ◼ ► But again, if you look at the Canon reviews, people trying to use the Canon double lens to do this,
00:50:31 ◼ ► the main challenges seem to be on the software end, whatever data format the camera is generating,
00:50:38 ◼ ► it's like a special format that you need their special software to transform into anything else.
00:50:45 ◼ ► but apparently it also is not easily compatible with Apple Vision Pro or Apple immersive video,
00:50:51 ◼ ► and is also not as good of quality because it's not having 8K per eye, or more than 60 frames per second.
00:51:02 ◼ ► And I wonder, I don't think we know what Apple has used to shoot the existing Apple immersive video.
00:51:18 ◼ ► and part of that process was they were able to use pre-production versions to shoot all this other content.
00:51:36 ◼ ► Not only is that obviously $30,000, but also it's like a Blackmagic professional camera.
00:51:46 ◼ ► and then whatever data format it makes, to take that onto whatever computer, however it's edited, I have no clue.
00:51:57 ◼ ► No, well the Canon one you do actually. But no, the Blackmagic one I think goes into DaVinci Resolve.
00:52:03 ◼ ► But I've heard of that as a name. I don't know what that means. I've never seen the app.
00:52:11 ◼ ► So the point is, right now, whatever this camera is going to be when it comes out in a couple of months,
00:52:15 ◼ ► it's going to be 30 grand. It's going to require who knows what else in the ecosystem around it
00:52:41 ◼ ► But what's exciting about this is that the existence of this camera being publicly released,
00:52:49 ◼ ► because the Canon solution was just kind of bolting on an existing lens onto cameras that weren't designed for this.
00:52:53 ◼ ► This is designed from the start for this. I'm not going to buy a $30,000 camera to do all my video projects that I do.
00:53:03 ◼ ► Video production companies will be able to buy or rent these and shoot a concert, shoot a play, a nature documentary, whatever it is.
00:53:12 ◼ ► Getting these cameras out there will be a huge boost to getting more immersive video content made.
00:53:20 ◼ ► Whether it's the high profile content snacks that Apple keeps giving us, or I think more interestingly,
00:53:32 ◼ ► Because again, they'll be able to rent these. So if you're doing a shoot, I'm sure you can rent one for a few thousand bucks or something like that.
00:53:41 ◼ ► So this I think is an important milestone. I think this is more important than just breezing through the news for an hour.
00:54:00 ◼ ► And that's giving much of the functionality of this. Granted, the reviews say it's not very good in different ways.
00:54:11 ◼ ► It's only a matter of time. Maybe it'll be two to four years when there will be maybe one or two other options that are substantially in the ballpark of that Blackmagic camera capability,
00:54:28 ◼ ► Maybe in four or five years, maybe we'll be able to get something like that for two or three thousand dollars in the prosumer market.
00:54:37 ◼ ► And that becomes something that maybe nerdy people like us start to buy and experiment with.
00:54:55 ◼ ► When my kid has a band concert, I mean obviously that would be a little disruptive to the audience members behind me, so maybe I work with the school on that one.
00:55:03 ◼ ► Or a family event, Christmas Day. When Apple immersive video capture becomes accessible to prosumers and consumers,
00:55:19 ◼ ► Because I hope it does. Because, yeah, it's great to be able to have a shark video here and there,
00:55:25 ◼ ► but what I want is to capture the people I love and the moments in my life in that format.
00:55:34 ◼ ► And that's so much better than the little post-extamp dream blobs you get from the iPhone immersive video.
00:55:40 ◼ ► And I'm glad to have those dream blobs. It's better than not having anything at all that's spatial.
00:55:52 ◼ ► It's an order of magnitude different in so many ways. In quality, obviously, in frame rate, in just how much of the scene you're capturing,
00:56:05 ◼ ► That's a very different thing. And so when that becomes accessible to regular people in some way,
00:56:11 ◼ ► even if it's in a few thousand dollar camera, photo enthusiasts have been buying few thousand dollar cameras for many years.
00:56:20 ◼ ► That isn't something that everyone will be able to afford, but it is something that gets it into the prosumer market in a much better way than a thirty thousand dollar, custom, pro, everything camera.
00:56:30 ◼ ► So this, I think, is a very important step. This camera being released that shoots directly to immersive video, apparently, or at least can be easily processed into it,
00:56:44 ◼ ► And that maybe in a few more years, and that now, production companies now will be able to rent that and shoot a concert or whatever, and that's going to be huge.
00:56:58 ◼ ► Yeah, and I just want to reiterate, I know you just went over this, but I harp on this regularly because it's very hard, it seems like a distinction without a difference,
00:57:07 ◼ ► the different kind of modes that you can get in in the Vision Pro for video, and I just want to reiterate, there's 3D movies where you have a rectangle, but a rectangle that has depth to it, right?
00:57:19 ◼ ► So it's just a rectangle, but you can see into the rectangle, it's just like a 3D movie.
00:57:24 ◼ ► Then there's these dream blobs, I think you called it a minute ago, which is a very accurate description, which is where you have a very small, often square if not rectangle,
00:57:34 ◼ ► the way they represent it and render it, the edges are a little wispy, if you will, and kind of fade out, sort of, kind of.
00:57:43 ◼ ► And that is when you've recorded something on one of your devices, like an iPhone or whatever, and it also has depth.
00:57:49 ◼ ► But unlike a 3D movie, where the canvas, if you will, is multiple feet wide, multiple feet tall by default,
00:57:57 ◼ ► the canvas, or the viewport, for lack of a better way of describing it, is very, very small by comparison.
00:58:03 ◼ ► And with both of these, with 3D movies and with spatial video, you don't get to control where the camera's pointing.
00:58:16 ◼ ► And what we're talking about, and the key that makes this so impressive, is that immersive video, and I'll continue to harp on this for a long time now,
00:58:23 ◼ ► immersive video, as you move your head and as you look around, you're changing the perspective of the camera.
00:58:45 ◼ ► And even if you can reason through what that difference would feel like, I assure you, actually living it is very different than what you think.
00:58:53 ◼ ► And in the end of the day, I couldn't agree with you more, Marco, that being able to capture full-on immersive video would be such a game changer.
00:59:02 ◼ ► And I'm not going to spend $30,000 to do it. I don't think I'm even going to spend $1,000 to do it.
00:59:07 ◼ ► Like Underscore had tooted, I'll probably forget to put the link in the show notes, but he had tooted,
00:59:11 ◼ ► "Hey, I can imagine being able to rent this for $1,000 and just goof off and try some things."
00:59:16 ◼ ► And I agree with Underscore. For me, $1,000 is still a bit rich for my blood, but the point is still fair.
00:59:22 ◼ ► And I absolutely concur with you, Marco, that how cool would it be if you could set this up,
00:59:29 ◼ ► and I don't know what the mechanics of this would look like, but set this up when everyone's opening Christmas presents or a Christmas dinner or something like that.
00:59:37 ◼ ► Or your wedding, God, yes. And you can look around and you can see, let's take your wedding as an example.
00:59:49 ◼ ► but you can also turn your head and you can look and see how your parents are reacting.
00:59:54 ◼ ► And you're not losing anything because it's not the camera, it's not the recording that has moved,
01:00:00 ◼ ► it's your viewport into the recording. So you could turn your head right back and look at your partner,
01:00:10 ◼ ► And so it is so incredibly powerful, and I cannot wait until that is in the hands of someone like a prosumer, like you've been saying.
01:00:18 ◼ ► But it's important to understand, if you've seen a 3D movie and you think, "Oh, that's it? This is not that great."
01:00:28 ◼ ► Yeah, more than any other format, this makes you feel like you are there. You are in that room with the people.
01:00:36 ◼ ► So if, you know, I can just imagine, I think back to videos I've taken of relatives who have since passed away.
01:00:52 ◼ ► So imagine the emotional weight of, you know, if I had the video of my grandma with my kid, if I had that video in this format,
01:01:02 ◼ ► I mean, obviously I probably would not have hauled a $30,000 giant camera into the assisted living facility for that video.
01:01:09 ◼ ► But like, you know, so it's obviously very important for the phones to keep getting better at capturing that stuff because they're always with you.
01:01:14 ◼ ► But we don't know what media will be important to either us in the future or our future generations.
01:01:21 ◼ ► You know, like when we look back at our own childhood, you know, there's almost no videos of us generally.
01:01:31 ◼ ► And then when you go to like our parents or our grandparents, there are usually like, there's maybe one picture of them when they're young.
01:01:40 ◼ ► Like, you know, like as we move forward, you know, it becomes more commonplace to have more media captured of people and in more rich formats.
01:01:49 ◼ ► Whether, you know, moving first from photos into like color photos and then better photos and then more photos and then videos and more videos.
01:01:57 ◼ ► I think it will be, I think we will, if you start capturing this kind of video somehow when it becomes available to you,
01:02:05 ◼ ► capture important moments here and there, you know, while it's still expensive and hard to do.
01:02:12 ◼ ► But like over time that will become more common and you'll be so happy you have those videos.
01:02:17 ◼ ► And so I'm looking forward to that because like I thought back before the Vision Pro was out,
01:02:23 ◼ ► I thought that the version of immersive video that the phones were shooting now and the Vision Pro itself as a capture,
01:02:30 ◼ ► as a vision pro itself can capture video, like the spatial video, but the quality is not great and the immersion therefore is somewhat limited.
01:02:40 ◼ ► You know, as Kees said, you're only capturing like a rectangle in front of you and the resolution and frame rates are pretty rough.
01:03:06 ◼ ► I think the realities of dealing with dual 8K video streams with 100 degree fields of view,
01:03:25 ◼ ► But $30,000, it sounds ridiculous now, but trust me, to a production house, that's not that ridiculous.
01:03:47 ◼ ► I mean, obviously I think it'll be a while before they're even available for rental, like from the rental sites.
01:04:16 ◼ ► I know $30,000 sounds like a lot, but like just the regular digital cameras they shoot movies with get into those prices and they have multiple ones of those cameras.
01:04:22 ◼ ► So this is not this is in line with prices of fancy cameras that professionals use to shoot movies, although professionals use iPhones to shoot movies, too.
01:04:34 ◼ ► It's a pro device. Just go look at how much the equipment costs to shoot your average like Marvel movie or whatever.
01:04:39 ◼ ► They're expensive. Another thing is, you know, so as you said, like there's the professional cameras.
01:04:46 ◼ ► And obviously it's not great because the cameras are dinky and small, low resolution and they're like five millimeters from each other.
01:04:52 ◼ ► But I am looking at the picture of this camera and I'm looking at my phone and I am wondering that if the iPhone 20 had cameras on the far ends of the phone and you were to line those cameras up with like basically the interpupillary distance of this camera, would it match?
01:05:07 ◼ ► Because I think those camera things, they look kind of like they're about the same distance as your eyeballs.
01:05:11 ◼ ► Like that's what they're going for. Right. Big lenses. But like the centers of them are like human eye distance from each other.
01:05:18 ◼ ► Well, an iPhone held sideways. The corners of that are also within human eye interpupillary distance from each other.
01:05:27 ◼ ► And if you put a 180 degree fisheye camera on either end of your iPhone and if they were 8K on the iPhone 25 or something, obviously it's not going to be as good as a thirty thousand dollar camera.
01:05:37 ◼ ► But you're getting closer to what we're looking for, which is instead of the little tiny rectangle field of view that is, you know, the blob or the postage stamp that you turn your head and what you see is not the thing you recorded because it's not there.
01:05:50 ◼ ► Because the field of view is so narrow. Right. And the field of view being narrow is mostly due to the lenses.
01:06:01 ◼ ► If you look at these lenses, you'll see they look like spheres poking out of it. Like your iPhone can't capture that. The light coming from the side just hits the side of the camera lens. Like they're they're flat.
01:06:09 ◼ ► It's not going to work. Right. And the the depth perception being slightly off on your phone is because the cameras are just so darn close.
01:06:16 ◼ ► The left or right image aren't that different from each other. We want the when we're looking through our eyeballs, the left or right image to be different from each other based on how far our eyeballs are apart.
01:06:26 ◼ ► Everyone's eyeballs are a little bit different distance, but that's basically what we want out of it. And this camera achieves that.
01:06:31 ◼ ► And another thing that I have a question about, I don't maybe someone who knows about these cameras can write in. So I'm thinking of looking at this camera and I'm thinking about like, you know, professional movie cameras that you see of the Aria Alexa or the red cameras, all of all the modern all the companies that like did well in the modern digital camera space.
01:06:49 ◼ ► And they sell, you know, they sell the camera bodies, which cost as much as a car, and they're just like a cube with and then you buy their incredibly expensive twenty thousand dollar lenses that you stick onto that cube and you buy their fifty thousand dollar SD card that is really just a 10 cent thing from a drugstore.
01:07:04 ◼ ► But it's hard to charge you a thousand dollars for. Although did you did you see what they charge for an eight terabyte SSD? No. Is it less than Apple or more? It's like half what Apple charges.
01:07:14 ◼ ► Oh, lovely. I think the red cameras had back in the early days, the red cameras had flash storage that was more expensive than Apple's. Like, again, it's the same storage, but it's like, well, this is the special red stuff and we guarantee it and it's it's quite a racket.
01:07:28 ◼ ► I mean, they're they're you know, they're selling these Hollywood studios with multimillion dollar budgets. So it is what it is. Right. But my question about these cameras with like the regular ones, like I said, you buy the body, but then you buy the lenses and the lenses tend to cost as much or more than the body because you can buy 17 different lenses depending on what you need.
01:07:43 ◼ ► For your shot, are lenses a thing on this camera or can you not use lenses at all? Because like, what's the point? Like you need to get you need to get 180 degree field of view. That's like so if you put two lenses on there and they also got 180 degree field of view, like is being like I don't understand how lenses work with that wide of a field.
01:08:04 ◼ ► Maybe just works the same. Maybe it's like you're looking through binoculars and it's like you're sitting and you know, if you put this at a concert and you have like a lens that was magnified, it would be like you were sitting five rows up for the cameras place because it's magnified.
01:08:16 ◼ ► But you'd still get a 180. That can't possibly be true. Right. Because the things from the side like you can never with a regular lens with a narrow field of view, you can essentially zoom in and it seems like you're closer to the concert.
01:08:28 ◼ ► But with a 180 degree field of view, the thing that would be directly to your left if you were in the front row is never going to be directly to your left if you're in the back row.
01:08:38 ◼ ► Like you'll never have you'll never be able to see that person's ear dead on because they're in the front row and you're in the back row. You know what I mean? So I think like I'm looking at this camera and I'm like, there doesn't look like there's any place where you could put a lens on this thing.
01:08:49 ◼ ► I mean, maybe? I don't know enough about this to know, but I'm pretty sure like if you're shooting this 180 degree field of view, I think it kind of has to be a certain focal length.
01:09:03 ◼ ► Like it has to be like whatever that focal length is, like that ultra wide focal length to capture 180 degrees. I think it just has to be that because what you're trying to do ultimately is you're trying to match the visual perspective of what our eyes see.
01:09:18 ◼ ► Well, our eyes don't see 180. Our peripheral vision is garbage, but you're trying to make it so that when Casey turns his head, there's something there that he can see.
01:09:24 ◼ ► Yeah. And I mean, by the way, the resolution on the edges of immersive video is also garbage. Like we say we can turn our heads around to look at the sides and we can, but it's very blurry and low res when you get to the edges.
01:09:40 ◼ ► Yes, but for the most part, you're going to, you want to focus straight ahead, but what you get in the field of view is useful for like just additional immersion and context.
01:09:52 ◼ ► So yes, you can look over to the sides and the top and the bottom and everything, but you generally don't spend much time doing that. Also, they're out of focus.
01:09:59 ◼ ► I mean, you don't have to look 90 degrees. You can just look off center a little bit, but like, I mean, they obviously have the 360 cameras as well.
01:10:04 ◼ ► 360 cameras that like erase the tripod that they're on, which is just, you know, the sort of the end game of this, like I capture video in every direction and like, you know, cleverly remove the monopod that my camera is sitting on there.
01:10:16 ◼ ► You know, the resolution is lower on those. They're even more limited. But I think with things like this, like I don't think it seems to me that lenses, different lenses for this camera are not useful or a thing, both based on my reasoning about it.
01:10:29 ◼ ► And also by looking at the physical item, I don't see how lenses would attach to it. Like the two lenses that are there are too close together. So that's an interesting, if that's true, someone write in and tell me, am I, do they have lenses for them?
01:10:39 ◼ ► Do they not? Would lenses just massively narrow the field of view? And maybe that's a useful thing to do or not, but I don't even think it can physically attach.
01:10:46 ◼ ► But anyway, someone who knows, write in and tell me, but either way, that's like, if it's the case that you, that lenses are not as important on this, that's quite a change from decades and decades of, you know, movie camera.
01:10:58 ◼ ► Where it was all about, which lens do you choose for this scene and how do you do this? And then it was just like, we reached the end game of like 360 degree camera in all directions.
01:11:09 ◼ ► There is, there's no more like lenses are not a thing. It's just like light. We put the camera in a position and light comes from everywhere towards it. Right.
01:11:17 ◼ ► I mean, yeah, maybe it's not really the end game because Casey's saying like, you know, you can turn your head and stuff like that. But one thing you can't do, unfortunately, with these cameras and any of the immersive video we've seen here, with the exception of, I think the immersive environments that Apple puts you in is if you stand up in your concert seat, your perspective on the people on stage does not change.
01:11:36 ◼ ► Because guess what? The camera didn't stand up. The camera was the same height the whole time. So if you wanted to see the top of that person's head to see if there was a piece of confetti that landed on their head and you can't see it when you're sitting and you stand up, you still can't see it.
01:11:46 ◼ ► Because you're not, you can't change your perspective in that way. All you can do is look at different parts of the frame that was captured right with the Apple immersive environments where the I don't know what they do with like 3d modeling part or whatever you basically need to be like essentially in a game engine where, oh, if you're in a game engine, when you stand up, you can look on top of the dresser that previously you couldn't see the top of because it's all 3d rendered in real time and it's changed is literally changing your essentially the camera's position in space.
01:12:12 ◼ ► So the immersive video to work well and it does work well, you stay in the same position, you stay seated, you can look up, look down, look left, look right, but what you can't do is stand up or step 10 feet to the left because that will not change your perspective on the video.
01:12:27 ◼ ► Yeah, but you know, I think like the question about like whether we need lenses on this or whether you can I think that's immersive video like immersive 180 degree stereo video, I would I would almost treat it as a different medium than cinema or cinematic video.
01:12:45 ◼ ► What's important is your perspective, but most more more importantly, what what your environment has in it like you're not do it like there is there's less camera work that can be done because it first of all if you if you move the camera too much, it makes people motion sick.
01:13:01 ◼ ► And that's still a problem that I had a little bit with some of the shark video, but it's less so I think they're getting better at that the more they make. It's almost like you know asking like what kind of lens do you use for concert goers to see a concert.
01:13:16 ◼ ► That's that's missing what this medium is people who stage a theater play don't need to care what kind of lens people might be using in the audience like it's it's not about that this medium. There's actually, you know, less camera trickery potential to do because what you're mostly doing is just capturing a scene in a way that that the viewer is in more control over it than you are.
01:13:40 ◼ ► So what you want to do is like, you know, capture as much as you can because you're gonna get the hundred degree field of view no matter what so capture, you know, whatever you can capture it and, you know, give people give people the freedom to look at whatever they want in the frame and, you know, guide them by putting the important stuff in the middle, but for the most part, you know, they're going to be looking around a little bit more than you might expect.
01:13:58 ◼ ► And I think it's just going to take a little while before people, you know, really get that who are producing it but this is this is getting better. I just like, you know, all these these Apple videos as I kind of said earlier that they're like snacks of content or previews of content.
01:14:10 ◼ ► I kept wanting to just like sit on a shot for a while. Like the shark video is in the Bahamas, and there's one shot where they're doing like a quick helicopter flyover of the of like one of the islands in the Bahamas.
01:14:22 ◼ ► I've never been to the Bahamas. I was looking around like, oh, is this what the Bahamas look like? And I'm like looking around and before I know it, it's gone to another shot because it's like, oh, there's well, there's three seconds of what it's like to be in the Bahamas.
01:14:32 ◼ ► Like, I want more they would be they would have like, you know, they're they're feeding some sharks under some water and you can look up and you can see the boat in the like above you on the surface of the water.
01:14:42 ◼ ► Then it explodes. Yeah, and I'm like, I'm looking up at the boat and it's gone because this the shot changes like I want longer shots. I want more. I basically want more immersive content in the sense that I want to just know what certain environments are like just to sit in like let me let me just sit in one of these for you know, give me give me a 10 minute long fixed shot of something that's not that interesting, but just like an environment to be in give me 10 minutes of sitting on a beach in the Bahamas.
01:15:09 ◼ ► Give me 10 minutes of like, you know, a boat ride or something like, you know, like that kind of thing for a nature documentary. How about just stick a camera in a nature preserver this from animals off in the distance and just give me a 10 minute shot of that so I can just sit there and like look at the animals and just enjoy it.
01:15:24 ◼ ► That's why they got to do a full 3d engine of it. So you can actually get up and walk around. And that's what the environments are if they can feel you if they can fool you into thinking it is although of course you could also do the I don't know if you remember this back from the the weird old days. This is before your time in the Apple world, but one of the things they would do it. Do you remember QuickTime VR? Of course you don't that was way before your time. But um, I remember it being a thing. I don't remember using it. I remember that I have used it I should say I don't remember what the actual use of it felt like for lack of a better way of describing it.
01:15:52 ◼ ► Was that where you could like drag your like point and click and hold and drag the viewport around basically with your mouse is that right? It was just like it was a 360 degree field of view extremely low resolution photograph right. And so once you have a 360 degree photograph minus the tripod which they didn't really know how to erase so it was kind of down there right then you could look all around the photograph at your different places and one of the things people did with QuickTime VR is you know, they did it for real estate, but they did it for other things too.
01:16:20 ◼ ► They would take the QuickTime VR camera 360 360 camera and put it in 17 different spots within an area and then allow you to move between individual essentially individual spheres of 2D imagery with like faded cross fading between how my Google Maps when you know when you click forward like on Google Maps and you go to the next part in the street right was exactly like that.
01:16:38 ◼ ► Do you never look at houses on Zillow just for grins and giggles? But this is like QuickTime VR is like it was like the 90s like it was so long ago. But I was thinking it from the from Marcos Bahamas thing. If you had 360 degree 8k 2i video, you could shoot it forward backward up down left right and then move two feet forward backward up that like the data would be massive.
01:17:04 ◼ ► It would be better just doing a 3D engine but like you could brute force this into providing some semblance of essential like 3D Google Maps Street View where you could move around in the space and within each space you could look anywhere.
01:17:18 ◼ ► You could even do the thing where when you stand up on the couch your perspective does change because they should also shot from a foot higher and they could fade between them.
01:17:25 ◼ ► It's probably just easier to do it in 3D but I was just thinking about the QuickTime VR thing or like you said the current real current real estate things are essentially that QuickTime VR thing but like it's so cheap to do now you buy a 10 cent 360 camera on Amazon and you just stick it in a bunch of rooms and you you jump between the spots by QuickTime.
01:17:41 ◼ ► I don't think that's the case like Matterport I think is the company that does this and I I think it's more involved than you're giving it credit for you could do the fancy version to but like the tech is cheap enough now that you can do the janky version really easy fair but yeah.
01:17:55 ◼ ► I mean it is good for real estate like it is does give you a perspective things but like that's as close as we can get to having like okay but what if I wanted to have a different perspective.
01:18:03 ◼ ► Well we had six spots in this room so you can jump between those six spots and look from those six spots.
01:18:07 ◼ ► Yeah but I mean it is like it is very important though like that's that's getting almost ubiquitous now in new real estate listings I've even seen it like on certain like hotel room bookings like here's what this type of room looks like like that kind of stuff is actually very useful and I'm looking forward to seeing more of that.
01:18:22 ◼ ► Yeah it is but it's not it's not video and it only has six spots in the room so for your Bahamas thing if you wanted to like be in the Bahamas with enough room to maybe walk around in a 10 foot circle or something as opposed to being confined and not be able to change it.
01:18:34 ◼ ► But like the apples immersive environments which I'm assuming like they use 3D plus photo stuff or whatever and you can actually move around a little tiny bit and moving around I believe even if you move a little tiny bit does actually change your perspective on the things that are in there.
01:18:48 ◼ ► Yeah because those are those are just rendered 3D environments like those are not videos.
01:18:52 ◼ ► Yeah I think there's probably some photographic things used for textures and backgrounds and those as well but like yeah that's kind of like what you're going for is like the stuff in the what is it called the island thing where they did the Mandalorian the big LCD screens.
01:19:09 ◼ ► Yeah if you can think about that all happening inside because the way that works is they have cameras shooting actors and on a stage in front of a screen and the things and the screen is just a wraparound screen but the things that are projected on that screen only looks same from the perspective of the camera.
01:19:25 ◼ ► If you're just on the side of the camera looking at what's on the screens it just looks like garbage because they're what they're doing is as the camera moves all the imagery moves behind the camera to you know a 3D engine like Unreal I don't think these on real anymore but whatever 3D engine they're using it's basically a game engine.
01:19:38 ◼ ► With the camera being a real physical camera in the real world and real like actors and sets in front of it it's very clever the way they do it.
01:19:46 ◼ ► You can imagine doing that in VR only in VR you are the physical your head is the physical camera that's in that thing what is it called the someone in the chat room tell me it's really annoying me now it's not the sphere because that's the Las Vegas thing.
01:20:08 ◼ ► I mean that's and that's what I want like you know part of part of what I have been kind of begging Apple for since this came out is like more environments please because the environments that are 3D you know game engine rendered kind of things but no but like with this with this black magic camera and like with you know more immersive video cameras hopefully down down the road that are more available to people.
01:20:28 ◼ ► Like it we look at what kind of videos people watch on YouTube say it's everything it's every part stuff you would never even think people watch that.
01:20:41 ◼ ► That's the thing like you can think like oh yeah you can make like a nature documentaries on YouTube you can but it's also people who just like stick a camera on something as here's here is eight hours straight of this thing that people find relaxing.
01:20:52 ◼ ► That's what I want more of like I want I want to get these cameras into the hands of everybody possible who might make video because the reason they were able to make videos like that on YouTube is because video cameras got cheap and widely available so that everybody could you know take out the phone they already had and stick it in front of a fire for eight hours and record that video and put it on YouTube for free and somebody would find that and be like oh this actually is what I'm looking for right now.
01:21:18 ◼ ► Thank you the more we can get immersive video cameras out there into the world the closer we will get to the world in which it is worth somebody's time to stick one in a vacation destination or a relaxing mountaintop or whatever and give us those you know eight hour YouTube videos of just that.
01:21:41 ◼ ► Basically I mean I'm not a very smart person so I can't say for sure but like I think that's what I want.
01:21:49 ◼ ► Yeah but like and again it's all like this is all super easy stuff to to capture all at once when you have the right equipment which they do because like what's interesting is like this does not require them to set up a whole studio or a whole set or have a bunch of actors or staff.
01:22:05 ◼ ► Somebody could take one of these cameras and literally just like bring it to an attractive environment in nature and just capture a day there and you know figure out what to do with it afterwards like I mean well they'd probably fill up all those eight terabytes storage modules pretty fast because this video is huge but.
01:22:20 ◼ ► Yeah let us stream it live your grandchildren there the cheap bird feeder camera that they buy online will have this in it.
01:22:26 ◼ ► Yeah right but and you know there are challenges too again with with just the size of this video right now that's very challenging but you know when 4K came out hell when HD came out.
01:22:42 ◼ ► Now you can stream 4K live and it's fine like every it just works in so many places now and it's not that big of a deal anymore.
01:22:52 ◼ ► So it's only a matter of time before this you know dual 8K format is a little more wieldy is that is I know unwieldy is wielding a word.
01:23:01 ◼ ► Make enough words yeah like like I always say we are you know we only need probably a few more doublings to do what we've already done with audio which is max out human perception like for this particular format of like can't change your perspective immersive video shot from a single point.
01:23:17 ◼ ► We're not there yet but we're you know one or two or three more doublings away from like there's no point in making this higher resolution because human eyes can't distinguish it just like we were with audio where there's no point in making this higher resolution because humans can't hear a difference right and we got there with audio because it's easier because there's less data.
01:23:33 ◼ ► And even when we get there with still video then it'll be like OK but what about the camera that takes 8000 different perspectives from all over the place and what about the 3D engines yada yada yada.
01:23:41 ◼ ► So there's still a ways to go but you can see it now you can see that like all right if you could give me four times eight times the resolution.
01:23:49 ◼ ► There's no need for more at that point and then it's just about dynamic range and other issues but not resolution which and resolution is mostly what's giving you the data size issues so and even within resolution like poor Casey sports are still in 1080 most of the time which is sad sports.
01:24:05 ◼ ► And yeah in terms of streaming we can mostly do it except the Internet is not made for broadcast the way radio waves and cable television was so when everyone tries to watch Mike Tyson there are problems.
01:24:19 ◼ ► Yeah I mean I know I've said it a hundred times I'll say it again that I think the Holy Grail for this would be live streaming sports it would be just unreal just truly incredible but getting that much data quickly in real time down to a vision pro I imagine is a large engineering hurdle to say the least.
01:24:40 ◼ ► It would be upsetting to be have a 180 degree immersive I know they have those wire cameras flying over the football fields and everything but like a lot of sports especially football you do want to have that narrow field of view perspective so you can see the whole field.
01:24:54 ◼ ► Sometimes and in fact maybe most of the time because the view like from like you know the quarterbacks perspective when the when he's about to get sacked like that's exciting but also kind of upsetting and doesn't really give you a view of the entire game.
01:25:06 ◼ ► It's kind of like your F1 thing you're talking about Casey where it's like it would be it's cool to see the driver's perspective but what's really cool is to see 17 other perspectives not to say oh the whole race is going to be from the perspective of one driver because that would be incredibly fatiguing and you wouldn't have any sense of what's going on and so sports really needs a hybrid approach but again vision pro is there for that because it's oh you want five screens.
01:25:27 ◼ ► I can put them wherever you want. I can put them any size you want. I could put them have whatever we want on them. I can have an immersive screen that when you stare at it and pinch your fingers you jump into that screen and now it's immersive and you're seeing from that driver's perspective like so many things are possible.
01:25:40 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean, again, I've said it before but I'll quickly recap when you're watching F1 race and you have like the main feed directly in front of your face in the equivalent of like a 70 inch TV, but you have two or three accessory feeds on either side of that so you have like the in car feeds from a couple of drivers and then on the bottom you have a 3D representation of what the racetrack looks like and where every driver is on the track.
01:26:05 ◼ ► It is mind-blowingly cool and that is another great way you make a great point that I hadn't considered that's another great way to get quote unquote immersive sports.
01:26:14 ◼ ► All of these are 2D rectangles like the most basic version of video that you can get on a vision pro but because the whole of them end up being immersive and they're in an immersive space.
01:26:25 ◼ ► It's a different way of kind of sort of reaching the same goal. Now you can't turn your head and you know change the way the camera is looking but you can choose which one of your screens you're looking at.
01:26:35 ◼ ► It's like you know the prototypical man cave sports dungeony thing where there's you know 14 TVs in the wall.
01:26:42 ◼ ► We can do that with 14 TVs in front of your face and strapped to your face in a way and that and that's really really cool and I would love it.
01:26:50 ◼ ► I would absolutely love it. I love it when f1 is live and I have the opportunity to use the vision pro to watch it but that is another way of accomplishing the same thing.
01:27:00 ◼ ► I don't know I'm happy that as Marco said that we're moving forward you know the sun is rising progress is being made and that's nothing but a good thing.
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01:29:14 ◼ ► Speaking of VR, Apple is allegedly working with Sony to bring PlayStation VR2 controller support to the Vision Pro.
01:29:24 ◼ ► "Apple is now working on a major effort to support third-party hand controllers in the device's Vision OS software and has teamed up with Sony GroupCorp to make it happen.
01:29:33 ◼ ► Apple approached Sony earlier this year and the duo agreed to work together on launching support for the PlayStation VR2's hand controllers on the Vision Pro.
01:29:40 ◼ ► Inside Sony the work has been a months-long undertaking, I'm told, and Apple has discussed the plan with third-party developers asking them if they'd integrate support into their games.
01:29:48 ◼ ► Apple doesn't have any imminent plans to launch its own controller but the company's design team spent a few years prototyping what is essentially a wand for the Vision Pro.
01:29:56 ◼ ► This would be more of an Apple pencil-like tool for precise control rather than gaming.
01:30:00 ◼ ► As for supporting the PlayStation VR2 controllers, Apple and Sony originally aimed to announce this capability weeks ago, but the rollout has been postponed.
01:30:08 ◼ ► One hiccup is that Sony doesn't currently sell VR hand controllers as a standalone accessory.
01:30:12 ◼ ► The company would need to decouple the equipment from its own headset and kick off operations to produce and ship the accessory on its own.
01:30:18 ◼ ► As part of the arrangement, Sony would sell the controllers at Apple's online retail stores, which already offer PS5 controllers.
01:30:24 ◼ ► The move is meant primarily for games on the Vision Pro, but the company's also created support for navigating the device's operating system.
01:30:31 ◼ ► The controller's thumbstick and directional pad could be used for scrolling while the trigger button could replace a finger pinch when clicking on an item."
01:30:36 ◼ ► So, on the one hand, you can see the arguments surely people are making inside Apple, which is, "Why should we bother trying to make a controller?"
01:30:46 ◼ ► These gaming companies have been making controllers for decades. They're really good at it. They're making them anyway. They're going to make them with or without us.
01:30:53 ◼ ► Why don't we just make sure our Macs, our iPads, our phones are compatible with Xbox controllers, PlayStation controllers, so on.
01:31:01 ◼ ► Hell, we'll sell the PlayStation controllers in the Apple Store. Done and done. What a clever, good business thing we did.
01:31:08 ◼ ► We didn't try to make a controller because we're probably bad at it. They're already making them. We support it.
01:31:13 ◼ ► People already have these controllers because they already own a PlayStation or an Xbox. Problem solved.
01:31:19 ◼ ► This is just one more example of how Apple's approach to gaming is inadequate, let's say. Wrong-headed, misguided.
01:31:31 ◼ ► The reason all those people make controllers is if you want to be remotely serious about gaming, you have to make and ship your own controller.
01:31:42 ◼ ► You can't just say, "Oh, it's a third-party opportunity. Apple just does this forever. Third-party controllers for your phone, for your iPad, for your Mac."
01:31:55 ◼ ► If you bought a console and it didn't come with controllers and they said, "Oh, just buy them from a third party. Other people make them," they'd be like, "What the hell? Is this a gaming console or is this not a gaming console?"
01:32:05 ◼ ► It was a bad enough one. They used to come with one controller, which is criminal, but they still do.
01:32:09 ◼ ► Apple, you need to make controllers. Anyway, Vision Pro, no hand controllers. People are like, "Apple doesn't believe in hand controllers. It's all going to be with your hands. You pinch your fingers together. You do gestures. You don't need controllers. They're cumbersome. It's bad enough that you're putting a thing on your head. You have to be able to use it without them."
01:32:25 ◼ ► I agree with that. But also, from day zero of the Vision Pro, we were like, "Okay, but what kind of games do people like to play in VR already before Apple introduced this product, and how would those games work on the Vision Pro with no hand controllers?"
01:32:40 ◼ ► The answer is poorly. It doesn't mean there can't be good games without hand controllers, but we know that there's a whole bunch of games that people already like that require hand controllers, and Apple's like, "You can find them somewhere."
01:32:52 ◼ ► They're doing the same thing here. "We'll team up with Sony. We'll make support for their controllers. They already did all this work. It's fine." It's so frustrating.
01:33:02 ◼ ► It's like the Alan Kay quote, or whatever. People who are serious about software have to make their own hardware. I may be reversing that. Someone please Google that and get it.
01:33:11 ◼ ► But anyway, it's like, if you're serious about gaming, you have to make your own controllers. And I agree. Apple will be terrible at it. There's a story we'll probably get to in the next episode about Apple working on human input peripherals and how that has not been their strength for a long time.
01:33:24 ◼ ► But you gotta try, Apple. You can't sell the Apple TV with the stupid diving board remote and say, "Here's your game controller." No. That's not a game controller. It's never gonna work. It's just killing me. I can't take it anymore.
01:33:40 ◼ ► They're putting amazing GPUs in. They have the game porting toolkits. They're doing all these things. And they're just like, "But we're not gonna make a controller because..." I don't know. How do you guys feel about this?
01:33:51 ◼ ► Well, I think if you look back at the history of how this has gone, the Apple TV, great example of this. The Apple TV has all of the hardware needed to be a fun game console. But it really hasn't stuck.
01:34:07 ◼ ► Why didn't the Apple TV ever become a fun game console? All the computing hardware, you mean? Yes. And the problem, the reason it never became a game console, there's multiple factors for sure.
01:34:18 ◼ ► But one of the biggest reasons, and there were different changes over time that affected this, but you couldn't require a game controller for a long time by policy.
01:34:28 ◼ ► But how many people who have Apple TVs bought extra game controllers for them? I did because I'm a fool, but no one else did. So if you're making a game for the Apple TV, you cannot assume that almost any of your players will have a controller.
01:34:45 ◼ ► So you have to design for the crap little diving board thing that it came with, which is very limited for what games could do with it. And that's it.
01:34:53 ◼ ► It wasn't enough that it was possible for people to buy controllers. Since every Apple TV didn't come with a controller, effectively zero of Apple TVs market would have one.
01:35:04 ◼ ► That's what's going to happen here. The Vision Pro, I mean look, there's so many ways that it's not a game platform.
01:35:14 ◼ ► Yeah, but like suppose this goes through and all of a sudden you can buy Sony PSVR controllers separately that will work with the Vision Pro.
01:35:24 ◼ ► How many people are going to do that? Like 10? And I'm not exaggerating, like actually 10?
01:35:32 ◼ ► We're talking about a fraction of a fraction of an already small market. No developer is going to port a game to the Vision Pro that requires controllers.
01:35:42 ◼ ► The Vision Pro is already a tiny market and then you're saying we're going to only target people or have a game that mostly pretty much only works or only works well with these add-ons.
01:35:52 ◼ ► After you've spent four grand, you're going to also now spend another whatever it would be, a hundred bucks to get some VR controllers and then be able to play a game?
01:36:05 ◼ ► For a platform to have games that run on game controllers, the platform's hardware has to come with the controllers.
01:36:14 ◼ ► If Apple TV started shipping with a game controller in the box, which they will never do, but if for some reason they would do that, then you would start having a lot more games on Apple TV that were designed for the controller and could therefore accommodate more game types pretty well.
01:36:28 ◼ ► Look at iOS. iOS is as big of an addressable market as you can find. There are lots of third-party game controllers that work with iOS and yet no major iOS game requires a controller.
01:36:45 ◼ ► Why? Because effectively almost no one has them, even though it's a huge market and by raw numbers it's going to be way more people who have iOS devices plus game controllers than Apple TVs or Vision Pros.
01:36:57 ◼ ► But because the iOS devices don't come with an official controller with everyone sold, game developers cannot count on there being a very large market that has that.
01:37:08 ◼ ► So they have to design for like touch mainly and maybe you can also work with an external controller.
01:37:15 ◼ ► If anyone is making games for it, which they're not and they shouldn't, but if anyone's making games for it really, what you're going to keep seeing is, well, maybe you can use a controller once the support is there.
01:37:28 ◼ ► But you're not going to get anything shipping on the Vision Pro that is only good with a controller because it makes no sense for anyone to develop that.
01:37:35 ◼ ► I mostly agree with that. I do find this idea to team up with Sony to be less frustrating than I think the two of you do.
01:37:45 ◼ ► If you look at the situation, you know, based on rumors, Apple hasn't sold a lot of Vision Pros.
01:37:51 ◼ ► It doesn't seem like by and large it's catching on as a productivity device with the possible exception of Mac virtual display, which we talked about, I don't know, last week or the week before.
01:38:00 ◼ ► What is the purpose of the Vision Pro other than to sit there and let movies wash over you?
01:38:07 ◼ ► And I think the obvious answer could be to play games, but it's obvious as well that doing that with hand tracking just isn't cutting it.
01:38:16 ◼ ► And if you're Apple and you want to solve this problem yesterday, then you team up with Sony and make a pairing out of it and make it work.
01:38:34 ◼ ► Now that doesn't mean that Jon is wrong by any means. I think in a perfect world, Apple would have already come out with their own controllers.
01:38:44 ◼ ► Similarly to the head strap that Belkin just came out with that probably should have launched with the Vision Pro, probably should have even been in the box with the Vision Pro.
01:38:53 ◼ ► But that's neither here nor there. So in the end of the day, I'm not put off by this partnership, and I think it does make a lot of sense, probably for both companies.
01:39:03 ◼ ► But I also concurrently agree with Jon that really Apple should be solving this problem themselves.
01:39:09 ◼ ► Yeah, they should have first party controllers and also support third party ones. Like in that scenario where they ship a first party one, it's getting to Marco's point.
01:39:15 ◼ ► At least the software developers know everybody has a controller, and those people can choose not to use it because they don't like it.
01:39:26 ◼ ► You know, consoles, you can use third party controllers. PC, you can use third party controllers.
01:39:36 ◼ ► It's like, I was going to say, it's like a computer not coming with a keyboard and mouse, but the Mac Mini does that.
01:39:45 ◼ ► Sometimes it's optional. I think some of the motion things have said, like, well, you get it with this kind of controller, but not with that kind.
01:39:50 ◼ ► But, you know, look at the VR headsets. The MetaQuest, I believe, Marco can correct me, that comes with controllers, right?
01:39:56 ◼ ► Yes, of course it does. Because here's the thing. The way you design a game console, or a hardware meant to play games as its primary or one of its main functions,
01:40:08 ◼ ► it has to come with the controllers that it needs. That's what, of course, of course the Quest comes with controllers. They all have.
01:40:15 ◼ ► For like, you know, the whole Quest is only, like, I think the entry level one is like 300 bucks now, including the controllers. Like, of course it does.
01:40:30 ◼ ► Trying to make the Vision Pro have gaming as one of its significant uses, I think is never going to work.
01:40:39 ◼ ► Because the Vision Pro is not a good game console, even if it came with actual game controllers in the box.
01:40:47 ◼ ► Which, if they want to be serious about it, it needs to come in the box. But, even if it did, the Vision Pro is, first of all, way too expensive to be a game console.
01:40:56 ◼ ► It's also way too heavy. You've got to get rid of the dangling battery. Because, look, what games are popular in VR?
01:41:04 ◼ ► Most of them are motion games, where you're moving. You know, you have things like the rhythm games like Beat Saber and whatever the version of it is for version OS.
01:41:12 ◼ ► You have rhythm games, you have kind of, you know, virtual shooting games where you're turning around constantly.
01:41:18 ◼ ► You have stuff like Guerrilla Tag, which is massively popular on Quest, where you're being physical. You're physically moving around in the headset.
01:41:25 ◼ ► You have the wonderful ping pong game, 11 Table Tennis, where you're physically playing ping pong.
01:41:30 ◼ ► You have games where you're moving a lot. The Vision Pro is so not made for motion on so many levels.
01:41:38 ◼ ► It's terribly physically designed for it. The screens have too much motion blur and have too much latency for that. I mean, pass-through latency.
01:41:46 ◼ ► There's so much about the Vision Pro that is clearly not designed for the kind of games that people enjoy on the Quest series right now.
01:41:54 ◼ ► So, this whole idea of trying to make game controllers compatible with it is not going to go anywhere.
01:42:00 ◼ ► I'm very optimistic if they get good content out there, like video and sports and experiential content.
01:42:08 ◼ ► The Vision Pro is designed for that kind of thing. It is not designed for motion in games.
01:42:13 ◼ ► And you know Apple will hinder itself even further, because even a grassroots behind-the-scenes thing where some developers make a really compelling game, they're like, "Oh, this is a really good game for Vision Pro."
01:42:27 ◼ ► And now the $1500 one is out, and I know Apple doesn't ship controllers, but you can use this third-party controller.
01:42:32 ◼ ► It's just so popular that it gains momentum all on its own, and despite Apple, it starts to make the Vision Pro and 2 gaming platform.
01:42:39 ◼ ► But that will never happen. You know why? Because Apple, which controls all software that ships on the Vision Pro, will say, "Oh, you can't ship this game that requires a controller. Sorry. Rejected from the App Store."
01:42:48 ◼ ► They will never even allow someone to help them. Like, "Help me help you." And Apple's like, "No, you cannot help us. Your game has to support the Apple TV remote."
01:42:57 ◼ ► I know they went back on that one, but it was too late. But you just know they would never allow a game on the Vision Pro that requires a controller, because they'd be like, "Oh, that's not the way we think about our platform."
01:43:08 ◼ ► It's like, "Well, then we can't help you. You won't ship your own controllers. You won't let people ship games that require them. It's just they cannot get out of their own way."
01:43:16 ◼ ► Because if there was side-loading or if there was third-party stuff or if the EU decided that the Vision Pro was too dominant in the market and the Vision had some, and you had to allow third-party.
01:43:28 ◼ ► Because if people can do whatever they want on it, you can get that kind of grassroots phenomenon, surprise, viral hit that makes people go out and buy the controller.
01:43:38 ◼ ► But with Apple being the gatekeeper for these platforms, it'll never happen on the Apple TV. It'll probably never happen on the Vision Pro, because there's no room for a third party to do a thing that definitely will be janky and low-interest at first that might catch on.
01:44:16 ◼ ► There's been a number of recent hardware releases from other companies for Mac-appropriate monitors.
01:48:35 ◼ ► They'll say, "What's new in StarKit 2?" They assume you already know what was old in StarKit 2,
01:48:45 ◼ ► And so you're like, "Okay, but that's not all the videos. What you should do is go and find the WWDC 2021"
01:48:56 ◼ ► Apple spends a lot of money on WWDC. The production values are great. The people who present them are great.
01:49:01 ◼ ► I think the presentations are great. But you go introducing StarKit 2, and you watch that video.
01:49:06 ◼ ► If there's a conceptual part about big picture what a StarKit is about, hopefully that's still relevant.
01:49:13 ◼ ► But with the current rate of development and transition to SwiftUI, almost all the code in that presentation
01:49:20 ◼ ► is not what you want to be doing today, because in future years, there'll be a session called
01:49:27 ◼ ► "What's new in StarKit 2 and SwiftUI" or something. And those are the APIs you want to be using,
01:49:33 ◼ ► because those are the new ones that work really well with SwiftUI. The old ones, you could get it done.
01:49:44 ◼ ► and the new course expects you to already have experience with the old API, but you have neither.
01:49:55 ◼ ► just making mistake after mistake, as I stumble my way through this, I start fantasizing about writing documentation.
01:50:02 ◼ ► I've already written it in my head based on what is surely my current misunderstanding.
01:50:08 ◼ ► I could explain this to somebody who has zero knowledge. Granted, my information is probably wrong at this point,
01:50:15 ◼ ► but I could explain my wrong information and say, "Look, here's the problem you're facing,
01:50:23 ◼ ► here's a way to arrange it," stuff like that. And as far as I've been able to determine,
01:50:28 ◼ ► that kind of documentation almost doesn't exist at all anywhere in the Apple ecosystem, like first party.
01:50:36 ◼ ► It provides a third-party opportunity for people to do that, but even the third-party ones,
01:50:40 ◼ ► because things are changing so rapidly, in particular because so many APIs predate SwiftUI
01:50:46 ◼ ► and then work with SwiftUI but just barely, and then there's the new ones that are made in an age
01:50:55 ◼ ► if you make that tutorial two years ago, maybe it's out of date now, it's extremely frustrating.
01:51:08 ◼ ► they'll keep enhancing the same app like the food truck app or the backyard birds app or whatever,
01:53:31 ◼ ► You can't tell that by looking at it because it's not Perl with an @ sign in front of it.