This week on The Verge House, Addie Robertson and Alex Rans Hi everyone, welcome to The Verge House, it's the whole thing. It's the whole thing. All kinds of mixed, augmented, virtual. Whatever you want.
We got it here at The Verge House, The reality mart. I'm your line, your friend, Peter Brown is here. I'm your chum. Very nice.
Addie Robertson is here. Hey. Alex Rans is here. I'm your pal.
Yeah, we're all friendly today. We're all in a good mood. There's an app event next week, there's a Google event next week, there's a Samsung event next week. Most importantly though, there's a Verge event next week.
Yeah. It's a real thing that's happening. Ten years in the making. After one decade, they finally let me through a party.
It's been a long planning process, too. Ten whole years to plan this party. It's all they've been doing. Just open a Google Doc.
I've been taking notes about what this party should be in the background of the show while you've all been talking for ten years. I think I'm always so distracted. Oh, another party. It is, in fact, a ten-year party.
It is also an event. It is called On the Verge. It is October 22nd and 23rd in New York City. We have quite a lot of things going on.
Deeter and I are going to host a Verge cast with Joanna Stern and David Pierce, notable Verge traders, Joanna Stern and David Pierce. I'm just going to tell the Verge cast audience this. I'm going to give it away the game a little bit. If you look at our feed, we're missing one episode.
We number the episodes. Yeah. So there is not a Verge cast 69. Nice.
Thank you. I appreciate you. We're going to do it. We're going to make it.
We're going to pull the headlines from that moment in history, which are amazing. I don't want to spoil any of them, but oh my God. That's going to be good. That's my idea there.
Can we get this one here? Sure. Deeter and I are going to talk to Nick Weaver, the CEO of Eero, and we're going to yell at him about specs, which we're told people like when we do. Liz is going to do a panel on NFTs and the metaverse.
That's going to be wild. Actually, there's going to be some clubhouse folks. Casey's going to do some Casey stuff. We have DJs.
There's a party. There's an open bar. There's art installations. It's going to be nuts.
I'll be at the bar, by the way. We thought a lot about what we want this event to be. We just came from the code conference. We talked about it in the show.
The code conference is right. It's power. We're very excited about it. We have selling lots of tickets.
You can go to Vox Media Events.com on the Verge. Enter code $99.99 now. Come see us in New York. We would love to see you.
$99 now brings the price of Santa Ticadown to $99. That includes the price of four drink tickets. I don't know if you've ever tried to get or pay for a drink in New York City, but it's basically a free ticket. It is a free ticket.
Yeah. It's going to be great. I will tell you this. The Verge team is going to be there.
The first time we've all seen each other in two years. I'm frustrated to see everybody. I've only seen Alex in person once. It's great.
That's weird. We saw each other once. We're like nice to acknowledge you. There you are.
There's lots of new facts. I'm excited to see all of our readers and friends come out. If you are in or out of New York next week, we would love to see you. That's enough promotion.
We even had a promo code. Come on. What's a promo code again? $99.99 now.
They really went for it with a promo code. Make it harder. Put a dollar sign in there. This doesn't have both a capital letter and a number.
It's like it's not a character. I'll stop. We love to see you. We love to see you.
We've got news. You're here. I feel like we have you on the show to talk about very complicated regulatory issues and hilarious VR headsets. Is a lane, I think, of most jealous of your lane.
There's not hilarious. This one is particularly hilarious. We have lived in a world where many companies came and went right now. It's pretty dominated by Facebook.
There's a new one for me. Tell us about it. You might remember it makes the Vive headset. It makes several curmutations of the Vive.
It's a very light headset. It looks closer to sunglasses than you'll find. It's not saying it on. It's like gigantic bug eyes sunglasses.
Closer is doing a lot of work there. Yes. You can't see through the lenses. It's not sunglasses.
It's displays. And then it has two cameras on the front. You can do like pass through the lens. It's not sunglasses.
It's not sunglasses. It's not sunglasses. It's displays. And then it has two cameras on the front.
You can do like pass through camera so they can turn on a video feed. But that's just the same thing you can do on lots of VR headsets. It fits on sunglasses so it also doesn't have a strap. It's like glasses arms.
And it doesn't have a controller. It's going to have motion hand tracking. And normally what you do is you use an Android phone. You connect it and it works like basically a laser pointer.
It's a remote control. There's an app. It doesn't support iPhone for what seemed to be complex technical reasons. And the goal is that it's supposed to be for very still VR activities.
They promote it as being it's really, really good for meditation. It's good if you want to watch 360 degree video. It has an external battery pack with a battery pack lasts. It's saying four to five hours, which is way longer than you get on say the Oculus Quest 2.
But it's also not super clear about building a really compelling case for why you would spend $500 on it yet. Yeah, I have to answer you. I'm so stuck on how it looks because it looks like a pair of glasses with the arms and the lenses. I feel like the first thing they're going to have to educate people on is that it's not glasses.
I know it's not glasses. I'm looking at it. My brain is like, oh, those are glasses. Yeah, no, I looked at it when we did a demo.
It was in downtown New York and go up to the space and there's this person looking at me through the glasses. I'm like, are those AR glasses? No, no, they're not. And then second, do you have a sense of the complicated technical issue that makes it Android only in the iOS?
Because that is a way to cut your market down to nothing right away. Maybe I shouldn't say complicated so much as it's like, I shouldn't really even try to speculate about it because HTC didn't really explain it to me. It seems like it's a, you need some level of control. Like you need some level of access to the sensors.
Like it's basically you using a gyroscope. You need to be able to sync really closely with it. And it seems like iOS just doesn't let you do that. So you're holding the phone and you're just waving the phone around VR and the motion text on the phone creates the laser pointer talking about it.
Right. If you remember Google Daydream from a billion years ago, it works a lot like that only instead of a little plastic remote. It's a phone. Why do they go with a phone instead of just a little plastic remote?
The argument is it's because if you're putting this in a bag or your pocket, you don't want to have extra bits to carry around with you. You want to just use things you already have. There's already like a purse, right? This is one of those things where I'm going to have a really hard time describing the rationale for all these things.
I think the rationale is bad. My biggest problem with it is HTC at this event, they have this huge pitch about how it's really great for older VR users. People who just want to come into VR for the first time. People who want to use it for therapeutic purposes.
People who are stuck in their house because they have mobility issues. They pitched it as being for boomers specifically. But the problem is that those are the people who are at least likely to have a phone, like a smartphone. And B, if you end up using motion, hand controls, those are also probably the people for whom that's going to be the most tiring and awkward.
Hand controls even now are just really finicky, even if you have incredibly strong fine motor skills. It's like the worst control system possible for the thing that they're saying they want to do. Yeah, the fall off of users at pair this device with another device, there's just a cliff there. I thought the cliff and I'm never going to climb back up it.
It's difficult. And then that category of users is likely to have the other platformer. I do like that you have a quote from one of the app vendors. It's like, this is for the huge boomer population.
That's great. I appreciate that. What operating system does it run? Where do the apps come from?
So HTC has a VR headset flavor of Android basically. It has a sort of custom operating system. Then in general is pretty good. The thing is that this is coming on the heels of the Vive Focus 3, which is a really strong headset that is just not aimed at consumers at all.
It's a pretty expensive, but very sophisticated standalone headset. So the interface looks a lot like it. It's using some subset of the apps. You can go in the Viveport store, you can get this pared-down version of the store that only supports the kind of things that this works for, which again they're talking about as being a productivity meditation.
You can mirror apps from a phone so you can watch Netflix on it. Yeah. I mean, I love it. They got to take a shot, right?
Everything else, the Quest 2, is just like eating the consumer market. And it's a fine product, but I'm not willing to just give it all to Facebook. I'm happy for them to take shots at it. I think the other thing that I was reading your coverage, like they're trying to change the form factor of a headset, right?
Into glasses instead of a thing that mounts on your head. And that seems hit or miss? I just don't think it's there yet. I think that they've, this headset is super light.
It's really, really very light, which is partly what you would expect when you have a mandatory battery pack that you've offloaded the battery onto. But it's just still, I think one of the issues is that it is not as adaptive for different head sizes. I always have trouble with this because I'm just a relatively small person. So it's really hard for me to tell what the experience feels like if you are sort of the average person that they tend to test these with.
But it's not even that it's uncomfortable. It's that you put it on and it slips down your nose and you see half the screen. And they have swappable gaskets, which is the sort of part of the mask that goes between your face and the lenses of the headset. And that's great.
It makes it better, but it's still a thing where you're just trying to be really, really careful. And it feels like you're just balancing this thing on your head. And that's not relaxing, but it's not fun. And I'm sure there are people for whom it does work, but it's really frustrating that when HTC and Oculus have recognized that there is a huge demand for ultimate straps on other headsets, that they're just not even trying with this.
I mean, it feels like they're not even trying at all with this headset. Like, there's nothing about it makes sense. I don't understand who the audience is. I don't understand the point of it.
We already have these sit still and put your phone in some cardboard glasses. Like VR experience that this seems to be giving. The main benefit is that it sucks less than that. So it genuinely does feel a lot better.
And you have to put your phone into a thing and use up your entire phone battery on a really bright screen. It has advantages. It works a lot like the Oculus Go, but it still has tracking cameras, so it feels a lot more natural. I like the fundamental things it's doing.
But yeah, I get the feeling they just made this thing a lab and they were like, this seems cool. And then they sold it. It looks cool. Like, I don't know.
We all think it looks stupid. But at the same time, I think it looks like cool. It looks ridiculous. But I think it's fun.
I really like that they decided this way. I feel like it's something that like 10 years from now, we're all going to be like, man, you know who got it right? And we all made fun of it, the Vibe Flow. Like, I feel like it's one of those things.
We're going to look back on it and be like, oh, we should have been slightly nicer. We shouldn't know. The thing that I want is I want them to make that headset. I want them to make the awesome Johnny and I product design, but I want them to give me a strap.
I want them to give me something that I actually want to wear. And then I think I would be able to recommend to people to want to wear. I don't want it to recommend someone thing where I'm like, yeah, no, it's great. You can put it in your pocket.
But once you put it on, it's going to be incredibly frustrating. Nobody wants to get in VR again after that. Were they really big, like, technical, like, kind of breakthroughs they made with this? To get it that small, besides offloading the battery to this little silly pack?
It's kind of hard to tell without knowing a lot about the internals that I think they sort of just stripped some things down. So it has two cameras, a lot of headsets have four. You can manage to get that, like, you can kind of pair down the electronics there. I think that also just reducing the sheer amount of plastic in it probably helps quite a bit.
For context, it's, I think, something, it's like less than half the weight of the Oculus Quest 2. I mean, that's light. That's nice. So two things.
One, Alex, we're doing all this, like, 10 year. We're going to do, like, we're doing a big retrospective 10 year package. Yeah. The version of the turn 10.
There is not a single review that we have looked back at because we're going to publish a credit set. We have not looked at a single one yet, dear, I think, where we're like, oh, we should have been nicer. Almost all of that are like, we should have been way near this thing. Look, I'm being clear, this is not a review.
This is me putting the heads on. I put it around with it. It's possible. I don't know, try it.
And I'll say, actually, when I put this thing on a few times, it's great. My first impression is we're just not strong. And we're not strong in very fixable ways. It has, like, Neo, do you guys know the Neo Geo Pocket?
Do you remember this thing? Yeah. It's handheld. It has real Neo Geo Pocket energy to me, where it's like, there's a lot of cool ideas happening here.
There's a lot of things that are like, we're going to just take for granted 10 years from now. But there's also a reason that most of the people don't know what the Neo Geo Pocket is. I think the same thing here. You're home now.
The reason I wanted to talk about this, and there's some other news we're talking about, but Addi, I wanted you to talk about this because, one, we are constantly surrounded by all of this metaverse talk. It is just the air we breathe now, the weird, extremely on drugs air that we breathe now, that the virtual worlds are coming. God, I wish there were drugs. Nope, it's just venture capital.
We are still, we're at this weird place, we're almost taking the hardware that will enable AR and VR for granted. There's one product that's very popular from Facebook. Then there's some targeted products, HTC's other products. There is HoloLens from Microsoft Enterprise product.
There are just not very many consumer oriented, mixed reality, augmented reality, virtual reality products. They're hard to make. This one is the first one where I've seen a consumerized form factor with interesting ideas that are different than where we have been, for what is it, seven years now, since AR headsets started to be a thing. It's been a long time, and this is the first real different riff on it that I've seen.
So even if there's problems, I think it's important for us to be like, yeah, people are taking shots at consumer AR and VR devices because no one really knows how they're going to come out. No one knows how they're going to be. I think the counterpoint to that is that it's really weird that people tend to assume that if you're not a hardcore gamer, you don't want motion controllers. So a lot of people really like Supernatural, right?
It's this VR fitness app. You can't do anything like that in this. You can't do it because they don't have motion controls. They don't.
It's, again, pretty finicky to just keep on your head if you're doing intense fitness. There was this product design that HTC had a while back that was a concept for a fitness headset. It seemed like a great idea because that's exactly the kind of thing that people really want in VR. And this is just going the other direction.
It's just it is pushing in a direction that I feel like is not even VR at all. And it's really frustrating that VR that uses hand controllers and VR that really lets you use your body and that is full-featured is getting painted as this thing that only hardcore gamers want when I think that's just absolutely not true. Yeah, if you on Supernatural is an interesting case, right? So if you look at how they market themselves and who they are marketing, it is not people you would think of as gamers and that's their audience acquisition, right?
Like people that you just like regular people who like want to use that thing, want to use a fitness app or buying the headset and controllers and using it and figuring out how to charge it and buying the anchor. That's just a different conception of the market than gamers are going to play VR games, which is where this all kind of started. I think that is carried through. The other thing that I think is you're hitting on that I think has just been like a kind of a big realization.
Is it really good VR makes you super aware of your body because you're moving around. You just feel like you're doing something else. That's one example of most of the games that I play in VR are like involved moving around. Like the ping pong game is still like one of the audio systems.
Like you're definitely like, oh, I'm moving. This thing is like you're going to be really still and you're going to like float away into space. And it cuts against almost everything that I think a lot of the game developers and the Oculus have figured out about what makes the Oculus fun. Without providing the thing that I think a lot of people do want, which is a super no frills, I just want to watch 360 video headset where it has a pretty simple controller.
It's often a thing like film festivals or schools want where it's really easy to swap devices between people. A smartphone controller is not really great for that. And it should cost less than the Oculus Quest 2 not more. Yeah.
Like I said, what's interesting to me is we all are taking it for granted that there's going to be AR experiences and VR experiences. And then you're like, look, you're like, yep, there's like three things that can enable that right now. And two of them are like very expensive. And then there's some weird glasses that give you the bug eyes.
And like we should pay a lot more attention to that. This could have been the Supernatural machine. I just get kind of upset about that. Like you're explaining it to me.
And I was like, oh man, this would be great for Supernatural. And then you had to stationary. And I was like, now it is useless for Supernatural. I just, I just...
When does it come out? The pre-order has actually started today and it's shipping in November. How is the view on it? How is the quality better than the Quest?
The field of view is 100 degrees, which is smaller than I feel like the standard is 110. That's the roughly the Quest. But you don't really notice it. It feels, I think, after a certain point VR headset, FOVs kind of blend together.
I didn't really have problems with the optics when it actually fit. Well, like the resolution, though. The resolution is, it is 1.6 k per i, which is not like five focus out of this, three like out of this world. But it's totally doable.
So are you like seeing all the pixels? Because I think that's something that always messes me up with VR. Because you can see all the pixels on the screen. If you, we're most current gen VR headsets and that bothers you, then it will probably bother you here.
Aww. Alright, so that thing's coming out. There's a little bit of other VR news I want to talk about. We should start with Facebook.
Zuckerberg, who's the C-O Facebook. And Bob's who's the new CTO Facebook. Took a lot of photos and sells wearing prototypes. Did we learn anything from them?
I think the thing that Alex Heath pointed out is that we learned that they have a prototype that looks a whole lot like what people think Apple's AR headset is going to look like. It is hard to read too much into this because Facebook reality loves just shows off prototypes that never turn into anything based on that before. It's just off VR gloves, things that just it's working on, but you shouldn't take as being a roadmap to a product. But it's definitely interesting that they're being much more open with showing this stuff off.
When they've been a little bit more cagey and a little bit more focused on we're just going to show things that clearly are internals and are not a thing you could even possibly mistake for a consumer device. Yeah, I think it's funny. The Zuckerberg photo, he says it's a retina resolution prototype, which Alex your point, high resolution, but Apple made up the phrase retina resolution. They just invented it.
So you can't see the pixels and now everyone has to use it. That one looks kind of chunky. It's very prototypy. The one that Bob is wearing the tweet absolutely looks like that rendered.
The reason he knows that is because he's the one who broke the story about what the headset would look like at the information. So it's like seared in his brain. But yeah, that is fascinating to me that it's weird that there's not as much design divergence in this market. Maybe it's just a fit on your head and the technology is all kind of the same.
But like we're many years into it. We're still like, all right, here's what we're going to do. We're going to put a shoebox on your face. That's as far as we've gotten.
I think they've converged a surprising amount. If you're on the PlayStation VR, which is a thing that we are probably going to be seeing more of soon given that PlayStation, so many things just be teasing a PlayStation VR to all the time now. But PlayStation VR was super weird looking. It's used to be really divergent.
And I think they've kind of coalesced onto a no matter what you do. You're never going to look cool. So you might as well be utilitarian and be there are like two consumer headsets now. Until we get something like a PlayStation VR to.
Yeah. And then the last piece of X Reality News, Magic Leap, which I feel like just telling the history of Magic Leap would be another 20 minutes. But Magic Leap is a company. They raised a lot of money.
They fell apart. They got rid of the CEO. But they've now raised another half a billion dollars to make an AR headset. I love it.
I want to just the respect for these people and how they just get money. They do just get money. They demoed it on CNBC. They've got a Magic Leap too.
And they're like, it's got the largest AR field of view. And then what they sort of like mumbled through is that they meant vertical field of view. And it's like a little bit, not horizontal field of view, which is the same. I keep going back to that there's like a checklist of AR stuff you need to build, right, to make an AR headset.
The first is the display technology. And no one has one. Like we're all still putting LCDs in front of our face, right? Well, Magic Leap is in.
It's still right in that zone. Remember they were hacked? It's a transparent waveguide. It bounces stuff.
So there's stuff where you're staring directly at the screen and there's stuff where the screen's bouncing light off something else and then it's projecting the light in front of your eyes. But I think there's something else for them still an LCD display. No, as far as I know, they use waveguys, which are like just layers upon layers of glass and they beam it through and it diffracts. Same with HoloLens 2, I believe.
Right. But that's one of the most fun things. Those are my wife's work's miraculous. I've been very quiet for this whole conversation.
You're so close. But there was also the one that shot that beam the image did in your retina that I did some time ago. Yeah, the... I forgot.
Yes, I forgot. Yeah. Actually between Deeter and Addy's got the library of headset photos. But Deeter's like Avagon photos like on the walls in billboards in China.
It is an environment beyond belief. No, but the way... I understand what you mean by the waveguys. But the Avagon was like a very novel application of a technology.
It was like a totally different way of getting your eyes to see an image. Waveguys are still a thing that's in front of you that you have to see through and their image still comes from a bunch of LEDs. And that to me is like it's still right in the... There's just something there about the display technology that is not allowing the thing to happen.
It's the big problem. Then there's the processing problem. Then there's the battery life problem. Then there's the operating system problem.
And then there's the application layer problem. And the control problem. And the social problem. Right.
And then who gets to augment reality problem? I mean, control is just literally how you use the controls. No one's come up with a really great control interface method yet. The HoloLens one is pretty good.
Right. I use that and I felt like they figured it out. And it's looking at tracking? Yeah.
You disagree. I can see it. I think that the problem with hand tracking is that hand tracking is not super reliable. That it is largely reliable.
But imagine that you have a mouse trackpad and every one, every ten times it fails. It's going to drive you crazy. The great thing about a hardware button is that a hardware button almost always works. And I just don't think that the air tap system...
Again, I think it's super technically innovative and I really applaud them for doing it. I don't think it's a great control method yet. I really like rings. I like the idea that you have these rings on your finger and it's mostly motion tracking, but also you have these buttons and you can click them and they're kind of like brass knuckles.
I think I saw them in a cotton one. That sounds really... I am now on board with that one. That one sounds incredible.
Yeah. But the magic leap at the beginning, right? Remember the line was they're going to hack the GPU of the brain? Because all of that was about display technology.
They were going to beam light into your eyes. Right. Which the abandoned midway through development because they couldn't miniaturize it. Right.
Remember there's that great picture and wired of the light pipes coming off? It was great. It was great. So now they're chasing after this, but they've lost...
Magic leap had all kinds of famous people on board. They hire all these artists. It's just unclear. They're chasing this technology now.
This enabling AR technology. But it's unclear if this is the thing that iterates to the final one or if they're still trying to build the hack the GPU of the mind tech or even once they get there, what applications it will run. But I'm happy to have another half a billion dollars. If you just look at that stack of problems, they're pretty narrowly focused on the first display problem and all the rest of them are just way more complicated.
And I'm saying way more complicated even though the display problem is yet unsolved. You have to kind of split it into consumer AR which is still absolutely no one's even started to crack and enterprise AR where it's just you're trying to do a specific thing or I don't know trying to put factory overlays on an airplane so you can learn how to do troubleshooting. And I feel like it's just people think Magic Leap can build that thing and that thing is worth the level of investment. Yeah.
And that's what Microsoft has built. Right. That is their whole... They did it.
I don't know. In the before time, you could go to a basement in Redmond and they'd be like, do you want to change the spark plug on this ATV? And they'd be like, here's a HoloLens, follow the steps. And they'd be like, I did it.
I don't think that's often that simple. Also, people have been changing ATV spark plugs so that's real fun. But they built that thing and they're a part of the bunch of companies to train people. I think about AR, we talk about it.
That stack of problems starts with the first hardest one, which is the display problem. And it ends at the who gets to augment reality. Do you see the video that James posted, James and some posters we can cite of real-time image replacement? Yeah, they're replacing a...
Did you see it? Yes. So it's like filming cars on the street in a real-time, it's being replaced with like bugs or like spaceships. Okay, then we're like replacing the cars with hover cars and then they replace this person with a much shorter cartoon character.
And then a giant whale splashed into the room and everything here. With the ultimate magic loop. But just imagine if you're wearing these glasses and like someone else next to you's wearing glasses and you're like, man, look at those cars and like, oncy cars. It's like, you think Facebook is a problem now?
I don't know. Look, I understand that. And I think that that's a valid concern. But it also relies on a pretty intense level of people not realizing that they can take their glasses off.
Should I contact lenses and I'll get a little more worried about that? I don't know. I think that people have at least adapted to a certain level of functionality with say the CGI in movies. Like people don't think that the adventures are real, mostly.
Mostly. Mostly. But they want them to be real. It's not the same thing.
That's true. I watch that video and I look at the air glasses and I'm like, oh man. Like it might not be great that Facebook is in the lead with this technology in terms of divergent fractured realities. What's one company.
You should talk about facial recognition unless I am going to rant for pages. Like facial recognition and surveillance is the thing that I'm really worried about with Facebook and AR stuff. Like when you just have a camera in front of your face all the time. Yeah, they are.
They've won. They've already built it with Rayman. Did you see Rayman posted like an Instagram ad for their glasses with Facebook? I know.
All of the replies are like, no, no, we're not doing this. Like this is like this. Like, and maybe it's bomb. Maybe it's role like, I don't know, but it was just one of those moments where I was like, oh, the people get it.
You know, you don't want to use what's the color for AR though, right? I look at a stranger or somebody I've met before. And it tells me, I would you tell me what ideals of mine I need to compromise to get there. Seriously consider.
That's my game. If I could just remember people's names, I'd be the most powerful person in the world. I've always believed this. It is not incentivized me to get better remembering people's names, but it's a core belief that I want.
Okay. We have to take a break. Thank you so much for joining us. We'll have you back the next time there's an AR headset or a complicated legal issue to.
We're both at once. That's when the Apple AR headset comes out. We're at a lockdown store. All right.
We'll go back. Hey, I'm AppiShel, comedian, writer and floating head. You may or may not have seen on your 4U page and I'm starting a brand new podcast. Wait, wait.
Don't swipe away. It's called That Sounds Like A Lot. As in, that feeling when you check your phone in the morning, you read three headlines and you immediately think, oh, that sounds like a lot. I can't deal with all this because what?
I can deal with it. And I'm going to get into it every Friday. I'll break down whatever chaos is happening in the world, then I'll sit down with a comedian. You can be progressive and not be like fucking annoying.
Maybe an actor. They go, communism is going too far. You go, why? Does the Sadie Hawkins dance happen?
Maybe a filmmaker. Since leaving that show, I'm challenged to sparing. I just got to hang out and try to do so. You're the one with the charmed line.
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Okay, we're back. Dina, you're here to watch this week. You reviewed this series seven watch, and there's an event next week. Let's start with the watch.
The watch is the series seven. It's like a millimeter bigger, a little sizes, but the important thing is the screen is bigger, and it's all more durable, and I didn't really express this well in the review, but the important thing about the screen being bigger is actually that the bezels are smaller. If that makes any kind of sense. Yes.
It looks nicer. Honestly, I started the review by saying here are the questions that are important to ask about your watch, not about this watch, because all of the questions you might have about this watch are less important than whether or not your watch is still good, because your watch is almost surely still good. And if it's not, go get this watch. It's great.
It's amazing. I love it. It's the best smart watch. Nobody else is competing.
Nobody else can compete on iOS because it's locked down so much. And on Android, we will see if somebody besides Samsung makes a Wear OS watch worth a damn. Samsung's Wear OS watch is worth a damn, but it's so Samsung got up that I don't think it's worth buying if you're not a Samsung user. Ties in the supervans.
I just went straight to the dark part of the. Let's talk about wearables. I'm going to talk about how I'm depressed about the ecosystem. The watch is great.
I don't think that the features that are exclusive to the Series 7, there's a couple of watch faces and then the little type E, so I D keyboard thing really need to be. There's one that puts the numbers around the edge. And I think the reason it's exclusive is if you had a bigger bezel, this watch face would look super dumb. It would be readable, but it would look dumb with a bezel around it.
But yeah, man, it's great. It's a supervans. It's a new pen to watch. I was rewatching my review video made of Viren.
And I just was like, you know, it was like the third time I previewed it or whatever. And I realized if you just listened to the tone of my voice in the review and like you pay attention to what I got more excited about something, you would think I hate this thing. I'm just like, the watch is great. But let me tell you about how I'm mad about Ant Plus.
The watch is great. But why does Apple, you know, it's like all the stuff that I'm frustrated with. I get more excited about it. But yeah, it's a very good watch.
I kind of long in the short of it. They're still selling the S E, which I still think is like worth buying, you know, you compromise a few things. But they're also still selling the Series 3 for like super cheap. It's still like 200 bucks.
So that one, you should, I don't know. I hate saying don't buy the cheap one because like it does most of the stuff that the more expensive ones do. And it's like perfectly good as a fitness tracker and it's like Apple supports it with software very well, et cetera, et cetera. But you can buy a 40 millimeter refurbished Series 4 for 249.
Yeah, do that. Absolutely do that. Right. You can buy the 44 millimeter refurbished Series 4 is 270.
Yeah. By that. Yeah. I was buying a series three.
The most inspiring thing about picking this angle of like, tell me whether or not your current watch is like failing you before you think about what's interesting about this watch is I had one guy who's still using a Series 0. Wow. He's like ending the day with over 30% battery life, which is wow. Very.
So here's my big question. They haven't really had a new sensors. It seems like there's a new chip. It's a very familiar one.
They've made the screen bigger. Yeah. And if you just think about the, I'll just give it away. I was on John Cooper's podcast.
I said this to him too. And we've got to struggle with it. You just think about what has made people upgrade their Apple watches like why I have upgraded. It has been the largest screen on the series for was instant and immediate upgrade for me.
And then always on there's an instant and immediate upgrade for a lot of people. Yeah. Same for me. And now I'm looking at this one.
I'm like, oh, the string got even bigger. And I'm like, but it, my watch is great. I also don't leave my house very much. The screen getting bigger on the four.
It was it, it didn't make that big of a functional difference, but it made a big enough one where it felt it felt like something new and better. It didn't feel so constricted. The bezels on the three and earlier, like you look at it like, oh, it's like got squared off edges and it just felt constrained from the four five six to the seven. You know, it's like, what's the old movie trope where like you're watching something and then it's like, it gets fully wide screen.
Oh, I'm in it now. You know, it's not that kind of moment. The series four was like that moment. The series seven is not.
Well, it's like one, the case is like one millimeter larger, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
It's like, I thought that noticeable. I guess my big concern before it came out was that it would feel, even though it's not a lot bigger, it would feel bigger because that screen so much bigger doesn't feel bigger. Not that way. Yeah.
I just came back to like people like bigger screens that always drives an upgrade cycle in every part of our industry. People like always on screens driven up a cycle. Like there's this one. The next time around, they can't make the screen bigger again.
Like, what is the upper round and how can they can try harder on battery life? They did not aim higher on battery life. Oh, this is the thing that actually makes me unhappy is they're still saying we're aiming for 18 hours. And it's like, you, I would have taken a smaller screen and more battery life in a heartbeat.
I would have done it because I like to use it for sleep tracking. And so like you have to deal with this dance of a charge in the morning and for how long do I charge again at night? You'll like send you warnings if you're not charged up enough before you go to sleep and blah, blah, blah, blah. So the other other new thing that comes with the USB-C charger instead of a USB-A charger and the coils have been set up slightly differently.
They're all still backwards and forwards compatible. They also work with each other, whatever. But it can charge faster off of the USB-C plug. So that's all fine.
What's just like deeply fascinating is if you look at the USB-C end of the plug, look at like your Apple USB-C plug and like how long is like the white plastic part at the end, right? Yeah. The white plastic part on the end of the USB-C charger for the Apple watch is one and a half times bigger. It's like half has begun longer.
It's bigger. It's longer. It's a longer plug. And I asked why and they said it was like spreading out the electronics for heat.
And I was like, that doesn't make sense. It's not like the thing draws that much power. Is this a sign of USB-C plugs to come from Apple that they're all going to be just a little bit longer? And of course, Apple doesn't come in future products or whatever.
But yeah, it's a different shape, hunk of plastic next to the USB-C plug. It's longer. Maybe that doesn't draw a lot of heat, but they're pushing more power through inductive to make it charge faster. Yeah.
But I mean, the watch can't take like, it's not taken like five watts. It's not a monster. Well, it supports fast charging now and it didn't before. Well, it's faster.
But it's not fast charging like your phone was fast charging. Maybe USB-C pushes enough that they needed more space to slow it down before it hit the watch. I don't know. It's wild.
That's hilarious. Okay. That's the watch. It's very nice.
It's very nice. But you know, I think everyone's waiting for the next time around. There's all these rumors of new sensors and new capabilities. Well, so the rumors like really hurt this thing's reception because everyone was expecting a big redesign and they didn't get it.
And then what we got instead was some pretty iterative stuff and so everyone's feels disappointed. And I think that's all fair, but I also think it's fair to start recalibrating our expectations of like what year over year improvement looks like, right? The watch had pretty massive year over year improvement for a very long time. And I think that time is over for a while.
Like you look at, unless there's like a big new generation of Intel chips, you look at year over year improvement of, I don't know, the Dell XPS 13 or whatever and you're not expecting like a revolutionary change. The Surface Pro was the same damn computer for five years. Right. I think that's where we're going to be with the watch.
Yeah. Did you read, we covered it on the site, but this is inside our big story this week about Apple's health division, lack of focus, some weird ideas about running their own clinics. It turns out that that's like running a medical clinic is like harder than Apple thought. I think it's like my parents are doctors like they could just ask them.
It's also like the context you need to understand for the health sensors you have in your watch is, again, I say it every time. It's not a medical device. It's not a diagnostic device. And so the amount of work that you can do with the data that this thing can actually accurately glean from your body, there is a huge gulf between like cool, fun, track some sleep and fitness stuff and have a little bit of quantified self data or whatever.
It's a fall detection and like genuine medical purposes. And I think that Apple assumed that they would be able to cross that gulf at the same pace that they've gotten to where they are now. And the answer is you can't and you definitely can't unless you have a very, very clear purpose and that the article is really good at showing that they did not. Yeah.
There's also just like a feedback loop problem. You can generate data. Then maybe you can make your sensors really good at generating clinically valuable data. Then you got to get people to do something about it.
Yeah. I think there's still a guy go. I think it's like garbage in garbage out, but it's like recycling in. There's been some studies that like the heart rate tracking is really reliable.
Yeah. Okay. Heart rate up with you. Yeah.
And even like the new blood oxygen sensor, I think there was a study, a peer reviewed study that said it was like in the same accuracy band as clinical devices, but none of it is a proof. None of it's FDA approved. So doctors can't rely on it. They can rely on it to say we're going to measure you as an actual medical device.
But I think the problem is like identifying a healthcare problem and then solving it or actually two different things. Yeah. And I took a piece of your read. I think they did a good job.
The comparison I will draw is like they also don't know what they want to do with the car and like they keep taking shots at these huge ideas without a clear sense of what they want to do with it. The difference between the two is the car is a quote unquote secret. They've now hired like every car engineer in the world and fired that person. It's not so much secret anymore.
But the watch like very loud like the advertising watch is like a health device now. And I think that is the they're going to add more sensors but they need a purpose and a thesis for what it's going to do. All right. Let's talk about next week where I feel like the thesis is I've got some money and Apple's going to get it.
You're given. Give it up. The money. I would straight up do like a Tesla style hundred dollar deposit on a cyber truck like right now just like I want this Macbook Pro with whatever chip it's going to be inside the chip.