Critique of AR Glasses Design

Hello and welcome to episode six hundred eight of the Connected Podcast from Relay. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace and Century , my name is Mike Hurley and I am not going to introduce Federico. I am going to introduce the annual chairman, Stephen Hackett Hi, Stephen. Take that, Federico. Yep. He's going to jump right over him because he's not here. So it's easy to jump over him when he's not here because he would have said something otherwise. Yeah, Federic couldn't make it this week. We're in the summer season and I've, you know, we're all booking in our dates where we're not going to be here. And so, you know, yeah, that's just the summer, baby. Yeah. It is it's a busy time, busy time. So yep . But we're here. We're going to do a show. Yes. We've done six hundred and seven of these and we're going to do one more today . Yes, exactly. I hope so. Are the are the episode numbers getting weird to you ? I mean, I have the pan addict . Sure . So like we're into the seven hundreds now. Yeah, you did seven hundred and twenty one today Yeah. So I just, I don't know what to do with all that information, you know? It's just like it's noise. It's mostly it's funny. So on the homepage of relay dot FM, episode one hundred and thirty of Conduit seven hundred and twenty one of the Pen addict yeah, six hundred sixty one o'clockwise, two of intentional AI . Yeah. Well, you know, things happening. Yeah, you know, like we're finally getting some small numbers back into the CMS again. eight hundred fifty of MPU . That's honestly like incredible and also disgusting. You know, like that number is ridiculous . Yeah. We're not, I mean, it's still a ways away . We're not far away from a four digit number . No, so MPU will be there in three years two point four years . If I did my math right now She's not that long No it's not that is not that far away No It's really not Anyways hello we are here Speaking of ridiculous things I don't understand. Nice . You posted. I think this is this is just follow up because I think we spoke about all of this recently, but you wrote a blog post kind of detailing your home network cabinet . You sent this to me and Federico and Federico said, I don't care. I don't what do you say? I don't operate a school , which is kind of like what this looks like, you know? This is like pure industrial equipment. Yeah. He was having wifi issues and I was like, hey, yes. You could solve it with a whole rack full of equipment . Yeah I mean, look, it does look incredible. It does very beautiful. This is a pure project kind of thing . I am a little uncomfortable about the like one thousand cables going into the wall. Yeah, I don't know, I don't want to write about that part , so I'll talk about it, but it's horrifying. It looks really uncomfortable to me of like it's basically so you've got all the equipment. We've been through it before, I think . And but you can go and read all about it now, especially if you want links to everything, because we probably didn't do that when we spoke about it before . There is what looks like a bundle, a zip tied bundle of like thirty cables, which I'm assuming at ethernet cables just going into what looks like one outlet . Yeah, a little two gang . So it's ethernet and then one fiber cable and CoAX. There's a CoAX cable in there too . It 's a two gang box. It's just completely open. It's actually got brushed it's like a brush material so spides don't come in and out of it . So behind that wall is attic space. My office is upstairs in our house and that's attic space behind me and I use that attic space to get the cables wherever they're going in the rest of the house . A friend of mine helped me with this project and we did it last summer and we sort of got to a point it's like if we do any more work we're going to d ie. It was so hot . And so it's a real disaster on the there's basically a pile of ethernet on a shelf behind that wall . And at some point this winter, what I'm going to do is I'm gonna pull the umbilical out of the office , like cut the cables to a more reasonable length, label them all and do it correctly. They all work. It's just if I had to like track something down, I think right now to just have to run a new cable because it's so it's like a tangled mess back there. But that's my shame that I didn't want to show the internet. So if you'd re wired, you wouldn't have to have all these cables or would you still? No, I would. It's just the management of them on the attic side would be much better . But we don't see that. No, but if I have an issue, like if I have a cable that dies or is flaky right now , isolating what it is would be tricky. I mean , I know what's on the end, but I don't but the middle part is a disaster . But this part , even the part that is ostensibly neat is horrifying to me . I mean, you got you're going to have it, you know , there's no way around it, right with the way that you're Yeah, I'd never really considered this , you know, like obviously people that have whole home in ethernet, there's there's just going to be a lot of cables. I don't know why I just imagined it was one cable but obviously it's not like just one cable. So like this the same friend I helped him wire his house . He moved recently as well. And his setup is similar to mine, but his attic space is above where he put his network rack and so it's just like a sleeve of cable going into the ceiling and you don't even really see it because his rack is wall mounted . Mine is not wall mounted just sitting on the floor and I couldn't go up . I had to go out through that wall. And so you see it maybe a bit more with my setup than you would sometimes and you know, it's not ideal, but it's just in the office. Like, unless you're up here and you're looking for it, you don't see it. And I made it as neat as I could, right? They're all velcroed together , you know, somewhat neatly. I mean, you could just push , you know, like you just push, push it in front, never see it. Yeah, I don't know what you're talking about 'cause that's on wheels, right. You're like yeah, but I mean access that cabinet next to it. So and that two gang box, it was actually like it had like a coax, like a cable connection in it. And I didn't want to like cut a new hole in the wall when I already had one. You know what I mean? It's like, well, it's right there like it's close enough . So but yeah, it's it's been a fun it's complete overkill and silly , but it's super robust . Like I wrote a little bit about it. The way I have it, so I have Comcast, like Xfinity is my main connection , but it's flaky because Comcast is like flaky no matter where you live. And I have an AT and T like DSL connection is my failover because like more than ever, if the internet is down, I can't be at work . And the DSL was cheap and I was contractually obligated to AT and T for a while And this setup can like if the comcast goes down, it automatically moves me over to AT and T and Comcast comes back up, it moves back. Now, a very funny side effect of that is Memphis is in the corner of Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi , Comcast thinks I live in Mississippi and AT and T doesn't. And if you're like streaming Hulu or Netflix and the internet changes out from under you is like, oh, wait a second, you're not in the same place. We have to stop all playback, you know, like it's tripped some sort of where does it think you live? AT and T thinks I live in Tennessee, but Comcast , like if you ping my external IP address, it shows up in Mississippi. I do not live in Mississippi. That's very strange . Yeah. I mean , this is the problem with like so for instance blue sky is I think it's blue sky is blocked in Mississippi you know right now in the US state by state they're sort of doing internet regulation. Oh, that's funny. And so with a blue sky on my phone, like just on cellular on five G, I can I can look at a blue sky . At home, I can't. I had to like, I had to like, I went through the process of like telling the internet like no I am eighteen like I can see blue sky which is a whole and because those things like the state by state regulation kind of doesn't work around the edges because ISPs don't have it's not exact location. You know, your phone knows exactly where you are, but anyway, it's a very strange side effect. But anyways, it can do all that stuff. I have all my stor age , my cameras stored locally, which I really appreciate. There's no subscription cost to any of this . And it looks cool . It sure does. I wanted to just mention the design in California Kickstarter is still running. We're over halfway through now. Yeah . So please go check it out if you haven't already. We're today publishing the third episode out of four of the Apple two series that we're doing on in the upgrade feed. I told Jason this last night we were talking, I didn't tell you I help myself to it. Sometimes I just help myself to things in the CMS. I do this too. I hoped you would actually forgot. Yeah. So basically what Steven's saying, he's just he's just yanked it all out of somewhere. Like what? Where did you get it all from? No, I haven't listened to episode four. I listened to episode three last night because you already had it in our CMS. And so I was like, No, here's the URL for the MP three. Thank you . Yeah, so that's all available for Steven. And it will be for the time this episode's at episode three of that series will come out . Three and four are my favorites . So in this episode we're kind of talking about what the Apple two is and what was Ni ak's genius was, but also the other people around that I didn't know existed who are not really in the condensed history that helped make the apple to a thing. Rod Holt, Recool. Rod Holt. Legend . I know now. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. I heard you yeah, I mean, I heard I was like, yeah, the guy . Yeah. I figure you know all this stuff, but I don't. And I think that's the benefit for other people because I'm expecting the vast majority of our listeners also do not know these things . Yes I mean, I know that was part of y'all's plan. Yeah, I'm not just blowing like just blowing smoke. Like I really believe this. The combination of Jason sort of being the expert. He lived through a lot of it. He covered a lot of it, like , you know, when you all get to the iPod, like he's in the keynote. Like he just scans across the room and baby Jason Snell sitting there . That works really well because you are newer to this and it works in a way that , you know, if Jason and I did it, I don't think it would work as well because we're sort of experts at the same level. Yeah, I think that there would be an element of and please don't I do not mean this in a bad way for either of you, but like trying to out expert the other one yeah I know more, no, I know more, which is super normal. I mean, we these are the things we're all doing to each other right now all the time, right? But like , I mean, I just know this is just what I've done for so many of my shows. Like the Panadict is an example, right? Like Brad has all this knowledge and asking questions and over time I build knowledge, but it's never as much as he has. That's right. And so yeah, that is the thing where like when I'm going through our scripts, I'm like , I don't understand what this means or why is this important? And that kind of helps kind of flush it out a little bit more for the many, many, many people who just don't know this history. So yeah, you play the audience . Yes, exactly. That's the thing that I've been doing for most of my care er, so I can do that part. Designing California is going to be a real show coming later on in the year. Everyone will be able to listen to it, but you can become a member in advance, basically and support the show still through to the end of the month by going to design. If M hm. I wanted to talk about betas a little bit because I've had some more experiences that I wanted to share with you, but have you betas indeed. Have you changed have it changed at all? Have you put anything on any more devices or anything like that? No, it's still just on my MacBook Neo and a second ary sort of test iPhone . And not having it on my carry phone, like I do have less experience with the Siri AI stuff than if you're carrying it every day . I will make that switch probably sooner than I normally do on my main phone . But you know, so I've had more experience with GoldenGate, the new MacOS version . And it feels really solid. I really appreciate the design changes. Like at a point where like I'm using Tahoe every day, right on my MacBook Pro . And like, I already didn't like the sidebar design in Tahoe and I've like really come to hate it because I've now seen they're like, oh , right. This is what it should have been all al ong . And so it makes Tahoe really stand out. Like the bad things, like the icons that's positive though? No, no, it's good. Now you're seeing it worse. It means that it's better, right? Yeah, you've had a better experience. The same thing with the icons that they just look so fuzzy and bad on IOS twenty six. And then I pick up my IOS twenty seven phone. It's like , oh, like this, this looks actually really good so that 's all very interesting. And I think I think like you said, it's a sign for me at least that the design changes are , I think universally positive. I don't think they backtracked really on anything in terms of aesthetic or usability and the series stuff on MacOS is really solid. Like I've been doing the thing of like, hey, here are these , you know, here , you know, having the search and series kind of all combined . It does mean though that I think I'm going to end up using Spotlight long term. So I used Spotlight and Tahoe until about a month ago and I was like, I just the friction from after using Alfred for a decade was just still too much. So I went back to Alfred and it's great. I think I'm going to want it all combined in GoldenGate and so like , do I , you know, I'm kind of questioning now like what I do about that . Maybe I don't. Maybe I keep using Alfred and then I just put Spotlight as a as a secondary keyboard shortcut when I want to use Siri AI, but Golden Gate feels really good. The features are really good and it's, you know, it's from a feature perspective like , you know, there's some new stuff in notes and reminders and safar i and things . But overall, I think it's the stability, it's the design and it's the, of course, the series stuff . So I'm trying to be very chatty with Siri at the moment and I'm just like trying things out with it a lot and I had a few experiences that I wanted to share and it really is indicating to me just how LLM like Siri actually is now. Like the more I'm using it, the more I'm realizing in practice how they have stripped out and started again because it just doesn't function the same as Siri used to. And this is like in positive ways . So I want to give like three different examples. So one was I wanted to get my step accounts. Does it have access to my step account, right ? And I asked and it said that it couldn't access health. They just said it couldn't do it. So I was like, well, okay, let me go to health . I think it said I think it mentioned that you can turn it on though. So I went to health and you could turn it on Missiri . And then I asked it again and it didn't have it. But I was like, I think I understand a little bit more about personal cont ext now, don't kind of like give it some data and then immediately think it's going to have it, right? So I gave it a little while and I asked again and it said it didn't have access to health , right ? But I know that it does . So I said, You do have access to health and then it was like, oh okay , yeah, I do. Yeah. That's so annoying with LLMs of like yeah, you pointed at the road. It's like oh, you know, yeah, I do have that. And then it was like, oh, yeah, here's some examples of things you could ask me. Like, what's my step count? Just so funny because it's what I wanted. So I said, great, what's my step count? And it gave me the answer and now does it reliably like the health questions. It doesn't have what I was like I asked it like, you know, what was my sleep like? And it gave me my the amount of sleep sleep that I have. And I was like, what, but what was it like? And it couldn't really give me any answer for that. It's like, okay, that's just not what the model does. But that it was interesting where it was like, I had to kind of convince it. And once I convinced it, it then knew what it needed to do. It's like, oh, I've experienced this before with other LMs, right ? Another one was we've underscored the last couple of days, that was where the stat account one came up. And then he was like, we were talking about this. And he was like, what would it do with a locked note , right? So I wrote an Apple note, just like some details in an Apple note, and I asked Siri to I was like, can you tell me what I put in the note called workflow note or whatever it was called? And it gave me the information . Then I locked this note in Apple Notes and asked it again and it said this note is empty . But in the UI in Seri it showed that the note was locked . So it's again, it's like the LLMness of it , right? Siri AI is going out to Apple Notes and it's like, What do you have for me and this note? And Apple Notes goes, I've got nothing for you. And so then Siri is like, well, it's empty because it's it seems like it's not completely aware of the fact that the note is locked. Now I'm not saying that this is bad or poorly made. It is interesting to me that it really feels like now Siri is just going out to the system and asking for stuff and then reporting what it gets back , which is very different to the previous Siri where it felt like a lot of actions with intents and stuff were very hard coded , right? Like it could do these exact set of things and it could either do them or not do them when now it feels like there's a little bit more negotiation with the operating system . And another way that I've had this is that you can kind of where it's like when you have an LM in the middle , it can do some kind of reasoning to what you're asking. So I have two reminders in my reminders , Apple reminders. One is to take out the bins on bidnight and then one is to collect them the next day , right ? And so I took the bin out and I just said to Ciri I've taken the bins out that's it. I gave it no other context, no other information, I just said I've taken the bins out and it replied Great, I've marked your reminder complete. Yo . And then the next day I said, I've collected the bins and it marked that reminder complete too . And I had one yesterday. I also have one to put my laundry and I said, I put away the washing . And it said, I've marked your laundry reminder to complete. Ooh, boy. That's great. And so it's supernatural. And like the more now I'm starting to have I'm doing something with Siri now that I've never done before where I am talking to it naturally . I don't feel like I'm arming myself with all the key phrases that I need, right ? Yeah . Because you used to have to speak to Syria and coded language very literally . Yeah, right. Which would not be able to do anything for you. So there are good sides and downsides to it, right? Like the good side is this kind of like very natural conversation, but then the downside is like because of the architecture that enables that, sometimes it gets a little confused . But I think those things, those are all parts that can be improved upon, right? Like that's all, I think, somewhat fixable with the amount of context it gets and also the amount of like prompting that Apple gives it behind the scenes. It can tweak all of that . But the core of like I can just speak naturally to the system , it understands what I'm saying , knows what's on my phone and can act on it. It's pretty sweet It's sort of wild to me . I mean, I know they've been working on it for a couple of years , right ? But it feels like a lot of this came together in the last year , last nine months, maybe? So in the tech talk that I went to, yes, Mike Rockwell said that they had a version of it working last year, but it still wasn't good enough. So that's when they ripped Zerio apart. So it's only really been a year . Wow , it's very impressive given where they were how far it's come and having I know the tech talk was a lot about this, but having so much of that be on device even, though it comes with a little bit of a cost or like the twelve gigs of RAM, you know, those phones get a little bit better model . That's what I really like about it. I like that, yes, like it was trained, you know, they did their training runs in big data centers, but I like that if I'm asking about something on my phone , most of the time it's just going to happen on my phone. It depends. Sometimes they send stuff. Like, so say like , if you ask about they use this example, right? If you ask about some messages, you said like what did what did Steven tell me about such and such . Sometimes I think most of the time, what will happen is your phone locally finds the messages, then it sends those just those messages to the cloud to be analyzed and then a response is sent back. Okay. So it's a bit of a joint model. It's not completely clear, and I think that's kind of their point of when things are done locally in the cloud because there's a bit of a combination between the two. It'll be interesting to see what works completely offline. If you're I have not tried any of that yet. An airplane motor or something. Yeah. I honestly haven't even I don't even know Siri Walks in airplane mode. Yeah, I haven't I haven't tried it . I had two thoughts on person al context. Okay , right? So there's a lot of questioning about are big developers going to implement this. There's a lot of questions about this. Like why would they do this? Why would they do this? And I'm wondering if we might see more adoption of it because users will expect it , you know, like feel like a lot of things I'm hearing talk about is like your Instagram DMs, or why would Meta open your Instagram DMs to Siri AI? Yeah . And I do wonder if people get used to it, let's imagine that they like it , would it would benefit Instagram to do this? Because if people really value this as a tool to find the things they've spoken about, they may use Instagram DMs less for that reason. Now I know that's like a very there's a lot of things have to go right for that use case to be correct , but I do think that liquid glass adoption is quite is quite key to what to this argument that I'm making. Like Instagram has a liquid glass toolbar. I don't think anyone expected they were going to do that , right? Like I think there was a lot of talk beforehand of like there's no way that these big cross party cross platform apps are going to adopt Apple's redesign . But they have like Instagram, WhatsApp, they're all they're all using a glass UI. Meta did their own sort of janky implementation of it. It's not doesn't matter . I don't think that matters . They didn't have to do it, right? They could have just kept like Google Surrent. Yeah, yeah. So it's just a thought. Yeah, I think I think it will be driven by customer demand if you're a big company. I think it will be driven by are your competitors doing it . Like then do you need to? Are you being left out of something that users are doing ? But I do think, you know, they talked a lot about Neil Laborattel has talked a lot about this on decoder in the Vergecast about like, are you just stripping your app for part s and like the data inside of it? And for some apps, that's a bigger risk than others , right? Being totally just like the user never interacts with your interface. That's a bigger problem for some apps than others. But I think the majority of apps will support this and those that don't, you know, over time will become more and more of an outlier. How fast How fast that happens ? I don't know. I suspect that this fall when this rolls out Remember, it's not in every country, it's not in every language. Like it will be a slower thing to roll out. But I think you're, you know, the end of year one, year two, year three, we will see, I think basically everyone will be there in some fashion, right? It may be that you know, and I don't I don't know how like to what level every app will do it, but I think at least basic support will be pretty widely adopted eventually . Yeah. I think it's, you know, as you said, like third party sorry, like Indie apps, they're all going to start supporting it probably pretty quickly. And then it's like if it catches on enough, then it will spread out. I did have one second thought though, which is there's going to be so many times there going to be so many social media scare posts about Siri knowing all your secrets. Oh yeah, it's it's gonna threads is gonna be useful. Just ask Siri this like people will create this like these things that you can ask it and it will obviously know the information and they're going to be like spying on you. So get ready for that everyone. Look forward to my mum saying, Is it spying on me or whatever, you know? For sure. It's that's going to be a thing. I mean, it already is, right? Like yes, your phone's listening to you. It's not. I probably promise . But is it ? But is it? I mean, it is, but not in the way you think, right? Like we know they're listening to us because how else would it otherwise hear the trigger words? But yeah. But I mean people think in Oh I talk to my wife about a trip to you know Connecticut and then I get an ad for a Connecticut trip in Instagram. There was a good , there was a good point about that on the talk show, the WBC talk show where it's like the actual truth is much worse. Like about how they know this stuff about you. Yeah. The easy thing would be they were listening . Yes. So the horrible thing is they understand what you're interested in based upon what you're looking at like they just there's an algorithm that knows exactly everything you care about just because of some taps that you do inside of a photo sharing application. For sure. That's way worse . This episode of Connected is brought to you by Squarespace, the all in one website platform designed to help you stand out and succeed online. So whether you're starting something new or you're scaling something you've had for a while, Squarespace gives you everything you need to claim a domain name, showcase your offer ings, grow your brand, and get paid , all in one place. I've been using Squarespace forever. It is always what I recommend to somebody looking to build a site . And the reason I do that, the reason I keep coming back is because Squarespace keeps getting better with time . Take Blueprint AI for example . You can quickly build a website, bespoke to your business. You just input some basic information with your industry and goals and it takes that and it combines it with one of Squarespace's beautifully and professionally designed templates and suddenly you've got the start of a great looking website, no experience required . But if you have experience, Squarespace lets you dig in deep with things like custom CSS and you can do header code injection, lots of features in Squarespace for power users as well. This is not a platform just for beginners , it's for everyone. Seriously, I build in Squarespace. It's always what I recommend and you should go check it out. Go to squarespace. com slash connected for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use the offer code connected to save ten percent off your first purchase of a website or a domain name. That's squarespace. com slash connected and the offer code connected to get ten percent off your first purchase. My thanks to Squarespace for their support of the show and all of relay . Something's happening . Oh , something's going on. So Tim Cook has given an exclusive interview to the Wall Street Journal essentially saying that ramp prices they're bad and he says price increases are unavoidable. We're doing our best to mitigate the huge increases that are being passed to us and we've been trying to shield our customers from the increases, but the situation has become uns ustainable. There's less supply at a time when consumers want devices and the memory guys are passing along huge price increases. I've never seen anything like it in any area in over forty years. So I've pulled in a couple of quotes together. There is a frustration to me in this article of like, Tim is not saying why this is happening. The idea of consumers want devices. That's not the reason consumers have always wanted devices. We have no RAM because it's in all the data centers . Like he never mentions that in this ? Yeah, it's it's that data centers are taking it. It's also that companies that were making DRAM have shifted what they're making in some cases . Some companies have exited the consumer DRAM market or creating DRAM for manufacturing to do other things more geared towards data centers. And the two of those things together has led to this shortage, which means in the economy means RAM is harder to get and it's more expensive . Yeah , but like it's yeah, it's just funny to me like yes this is happening of course but there is a reason for it's just like ah don't worry about that don't worry about why but let's just think about the fact that it's happening . So obviously this means that iPhone prices are going to go up. Yeah, this is laying the groundwork for that . And they're having Tim Cook do it because he's getting ready to leave . And if you're laying the groundwork for this now, it's less of a potentially less of a thing of like, oh, we have a new CEO and the phone's fifteen percent more. Right? Like it's smart to have Cook do this in particular . But I think there's something bigger happening. Okay . And I don't know what it is, but it's like, I don't know if you saw it, but Trump said that he just he truthed that Apple and Int o going are to work together. Yeah . And then also in the Wall Street Journal article , there's a whole thing where Cook is talking about Chinese RAM , which is something that US companies can't access . It's like quite heavily sanctioned . And he's kind of a little bit like , wouldn't it be nice if we could have some of that. And he's like, hey, as I think he says something along the lines of he believes everything should be on the table . And then also starts talking about like, you know, we'll use our money to solve this problem if we have to, but what we can't do is make our own . And so I kind of feel like there's a bunch of little things bubbling here and I'm starting to wonder if we're going to see the impact of some some dealing happening . Maybe hey, you know, we're going to work with Intel. We're going to do stuff in the US. Intel is struggling . Yes , but we also want to come out round some Chinese market components. So it's a quote, I think everything needs to be on the table. I think we should look at all supply and times he's Tim Applin. You know, he's out there doing things. Yeah. So I this is what I'm saying and I think you know, it also says we're willing to use our balance sheet to be a part of the solution . Obviously more capacity is needed , but they're not going to do it themselves. Are they willing to use their profit margin to help offset this, which is famously high on their hardware and astronomically high on services. I think they already have been , right? But I mean, I don't have a sense for how much the pr ices are increasing in a way that would affect the customer . But looking at the industry at large, everything's going up by massive amounts. And so maybe they go up by not as much, but still go up , right? Yeah, in this article , it says that Morgan Stanley estimates a fifteen percent bump of prices of smartphones and PCs in the US this year. So maybe Apple goes five percent, ten percent twelve , fifteen point five twelve point five and and Apple could do it unevenly because they could, you know, you maybe you want the se venteen E to remain cheap, you want the MacBook Neo to remain cheap . And a ten percent increase in a six hundred dollar product is way more noticeable than that same dollar amount added to a two thousand dollars phone or a four thousand dollars laptop. And so this could be a sliding scale where the more expensive products they go up , but they're sort of spreading the pain in a way that's less noticeable on the low end, which I think is important because everyone is affected by price increases. Everyone is affected by inflation , but people with People with less money to spend on less expensive products feel it more . And so maybe they can use their do some math there to kind of figure that out. But I do think you're right. I do think he's angling for a change in policy and that's what he's that's what he's good at, right? I mean, good . Well, that's why he's going that's his job now. It is literally his job. Yeah . My my bet is the pro iPhone. There is no two hundred and fifty six . It starts at five hundred and twelve and it's like a little bit more expensive, like ten percent more expensive. And that's the way to kind of smooth it out. They did the Mac Mini, they got rid of the entry level. Yeah . I think that's going to be I think that's going to be key. Whether they do and I don't think there'll be a two terabyte. I reckon there's five twelve one terabyte and that's it. Maybe maybe yeah . Because like even he says like it's not just RAM, it is also storage. Like I know that's like a thing . But yeah, anyway, what a time to be introducing what will probably be the well known what will be the most expensive iPhone of all time . But now by what level how expensive was this expensive to what degree? Because you can get like the right now, the one terabyte , seventeen pro max is it fifteen ninety nine ? Yeah, I mean, I think the starting price for the fold will be more than that. I think so too . No, sorry, on the Pro Max you can get two terabytes for nineteen ninety nine . I don't know if I'm I don't know if I think it'll be more expensive than that the folding phone. I think probably two grand but I don't know if it starts at two grand, you know? Yeah . I can imagine like seventeen or eighteen ninety nine or something like that. Yeah, it's kind of like the most expensive pro max or the entry level folder close . Yeah . But then the more expensive fold is man, I didn't I didn't remember you could get a two grand two terabyte phone. Me neither. I just like refreshed the store page because I was looking at the Pro I was like, oh wait I think the Pro Max is more. I was like oh boy my word. I mean obviously that is a very specific person and it's like it's good that they offer that phone for that person , but wows . So yeah, it's all good . Basically expect your iPhone to be more expensive , a bit more expensive, right? Like we're not doubling the price of the phone, I don't think. But like it's going to be probably a three figure number more expensive, which is still big money. But my thing here is that I think something's I think something I think some deals are trying to be done and I think he,'s talking a p ublic on purpose. Tim Cook does not give interviews. Right? No . Even outside of cycle. Yeah, even to the Wall Street Journal, which is their usually their preferred outlet for messaging like this . Like this would be an easy thing to just slip to Mark Gumman, right ? Or you know, but this is very rare that this kind of stuff happens. So So they clearly want to start signaling it now so people get ready for it, especially you got like three months . But I still think that the timing of things just seems mighty convenient to me . Yeah . Okay, so for a little while I've wanted to review the iPhone Air and I recently switched back to it. So here we are just in time. Just in time . The iPhone Air is a phone that I love that I shouldn't love , but I do . Sacred love you could say . Sure . I recently switched back to it. So in the fall I had a pro and an Air I needed a phone for work stuff with underscore . I was like, well , I want to review both these phones and talk about both these phones because they're both really interesting so I sort of bit the bullet into both. I use the air for a couple of months and then switched to the Pro and that's what I've been using until recently like every time I pick up the iPhone Air off my desk for something for work is like I really like this I really like this phone. And so I was like you know what? It's June we're now what three months from the end of the cycle is like I should I should use this phone because who knows what I'm going to you know who knows what I'm going to want to do in the fall? So and you have one as well for similar reasons. Yes. It is not your exact reason. It's not your daily no . But you spend a lot of time with it. A lot of time. Yeah . Yeah . So do you before I get kind of into the detail, what is sort of your overall feeling about the air ? I think it feels great to hold , obviously, right? It's just a treat to hold that thing. It's very light, very thin. I don't you put a case on it so I get the full maximum benefit from it. Same . I absolutely could not live with it. It's the camera The cameras are the cameras. Yeah, yeah. That's the weakest part, I think. The battery life is not a problem for me really because in my life I'm typically around charging and when I'm not, I have a solution . You know, I either have a back sa battervey or I have, you know, I've got my backpack and it's got a cable in it, right ? And it's also USB C, which is, you know, it's easy enough to find that stuff and wireless charging. So like the battery is not an issue for me , but the camera is definitely a problem. I like how big the screen is and how easy it is to hold. I think that combination is very nice. Like I don't long for that screen size when I then use my Pro , but when I'm using the Air, it's like, oh, I really like this. And it's because find the Pro less comfortable to hold than the Air even though it's smaller , right? And so I wouldn't want my pro to have a bigger screen because then I know I wouldn't enjoy holding it . And so you know, it's like , I don't long for it so much, but then when I'm using the air, I'm like, oh, this is a nice treat. I really like the screen size actually . It's six point five inches. It's right in the middle between the Pro and the Max and the Pro Max is haven't used one, used one, but it's too big. Like it's just too big . Yeah, I saw one at WWC like a few actually like people using them and I feel like I had forgotten. It's like, my word, that is unbelievable. It's big . And the Pro feels a little tight to me. Maybe it's because I used an air first and then went to the Pro but the six five inch on the air is I like the real estate. Now it is made. It's got a lock size. It is right in the middle. Just right . Just right , but the thinnest and lightness helps with that as well. Like would I feel the same way if it were as thick as a regular iPhone? Like I don't I don't know, but the combination's really good . The thinnest in lightness for me has not worn off . In fact, sort of the opposite has happened. Like it still feels really sort of bonkers that it's an iPhone . And then I pick up a regular phone, like my wife's iPhone seventeen or my iPhone sevent een pro , and it feels ridiculous in comparison , both thickness and weight. And the air actually isn't that much lighter than the regular iPhone seventeen , like they're fairly close. But the combination of the thinness and the lightness really makes those other phones feel dense in a way that absolutely is sort of strange . Yep , sort of strange. But yeah, the camera is the biggest drawback and for me it's it is the quality like the quality it's the same camera I believe as the iPhone seventeen but the seventy P isro a noticeably better camera at least it feels that way. But for me it's the options that hurt . And for me, I would rather have Zoom than Ultra wide . Okay . And so the iPhone seventeen having ultra wide and the rumor that the iPhone Air two is going to pick up ultra wide that also kind of bums me out because I prefer Zoom . What do you think about that? Are you are you team Ultra wide or team Zoom? If you could get what just one more on an air . Well, there's like an asterisk, right? I prefer a Zoom camera, but the ultra wide lets me take pictures of things that are closer. Yeah, there's no macro mode . And the main sensor the kind of minimum focal length, I don't know if I'm using the right phrases, but I think people understand what I mean. It's just not right. Like I take pictures of things that are close to me all the time. I don't like the quality of the ultra wide in that scenario, but at least I get a photo and I find that to be a problem with the air. But from a usage perspective, like the camera that I choose to use and gives me like perceived utility is the Zoom lens over the ultra wide . Yeah . Yeah, the lack of macro mode and yeah, the minimal focus distance, which is they used it correctly , it's pretty rough. I just actually just like the other day needed to take a picture of a label on something to send to Mary . And I sort of like put the phone as close as I would need it on a regular phone. I was like, oh the air is like it cannot do this. You have to back it up . And that's it takes some getting used to. And I think for most people , the battery life in the camera, maybe the battery life more because I'm like you like I work at home. I could charge it basically whenever I want. I have a charger in my truck. I bought the battery the Maxafe battery and it is very handy sometimes to have that available to you . But the camera like for me that's what sort of puts me on the edge of it and there've already been a couple times since switching back to it that I've thought Ooh , I didn't really get the picture or video that I wanted because of the phone , right? Not because of that It's like I can't live like that . It hurts it hurts a little bit. Like especially where I am at the moment in my life is like prime photo time. Oh yeah . And so I want the best images I can get. I mean , within reason, right? Like I want the best images I can get from an iPhone. Like I'm going to be carrying around a DSLR all the time. And so knowing yeah, so I just can't I just can't make that that choice , you know ? Yeah , no, I get it for sure. And the maybe that's one of the reason I prefer the Zoom is in my stage of life, it's taking video at a track meet or trying to get pictures of my kid in the school play, right? And yep. That's where the zoom is really useful. And where the air just really falls apart because it has the two X, but it's, you know, it's the same two X you get on the main shooter. It's like no, you really want the actual zoom lens to really punch in And that's a that's a bit of a bummer, you know, it is like you are making real trade offs to have something so futuristic , but every time I pick it up or slide it in my pocket, I get a little like this is really cool. Like I really like this and that's that's a very strong pull . And you know, this is really good consumer advice given that the phone's been out nine months, you know, it's really good time to do a review . But you know , I would say like even in the store picking it up and playing with it, which is the vast majority of people's experi ence with the iPhone Air. Like I know from Widgetsmith stats, the iPhone Air is not popular. It's not going well. And that's a bummer and sad , but living with it really is different than just playing with it in the store because it's when you put it in your pocket. It's when you go for a walk and it's in your pocket and you don't feel the weight . That's when it feels magical and like the future in a way that is hard to sort of understand in a couple minutes of a demo . But like what is this going to end up resorting in for a long time, do you think? See, that's where I sort of I don't know because I don't know if the ultra , you know, the foldable phone is gonna be for me in terms of like what I want to use every day. I just don't know. And it's going to have probably very similar trade offs to the air . Right. Potentially battery life, potentially camera quality or options . And Apple's insistence if you have a second camera being the ultra wide, again, like I don't I would probably think that they do that ? I think because it unlocks things like macro mode, and I would imagine they've got the data that they must why it's popular . It wouldn't just put like the least popular camera on there. Like the kids are doing the point five's, you know? Yeah, I mean, it could be a combination of that and what you mentioned, right? Of like it could be because of the closest both things. Like whatever the reason . I also think if you want to upsell somebody to a pro and the camera really matters to them , like, oh, it's the one with the Zoom is a pretty good upsell . P goodretty re ason to upgrade to the Pro Interest in cow. Maybe Maybe. I don't know if they think about that Maybe they do. Like the air is expensive. It is . Like maybe that works more on the regular phone , but still are they put in the least popular sensor in it, who knows . But this might be one of those things where like what people think they want and what they actually end up using more a different and the reason might be just because they haven't got a good enough main camera but whatever the reason maybe the result is one way or another . Yeah , but I do think whatever happens , I don't know if the iPhone error is forever for this world. Like it has the same problem that the mini and the plus have that it's not selling well . You know, we just miss a big app. Got a lot of users. Like it's a pretty good representation of the market in terms of users, especially the wide consumer market. Yes . And I mean , the iPhone errors behind devices that have not been supported by IOS for a couple of years. Like it's a smaller use than the iPhone XR when it comes to Widget users. Oh my god, that's horrible. It's not ideal . So what is its place ? Right? Is Apple content to have a regular phone, two pros and the foldable? Like I could see that being the iPhone lineup , right? I think in a lot of ways that makes a lot of sense for that to be the iPhone lineup . And so does the air the road to the foldable? And eventually more phones will be like the air in terms of thinness and lightness and it's just like is it like the first MacBook Air? It's like, oh this is so far out in front. It's kind of a bad product, but people who loved that first MacBook Air loved it. But you know what happened? Every laptop's like the MacBook Air now , basically, right? They're all thin and light . Is that what's gonna play out here over time? I think probably , but I think in the meantime, the iPhone Air may go away or may continue to sort of bump along at the bottom of usage stats and a weird set of trade offs . Like the people that I know who use iPhone errors and I know a couple. They all love them like I mean knowing knowing that they're making the tradeoffs, right ? So I don't know. The future of it is murky to me , but I do think while it's here, it is a very enticing look at what the iPhone could be like one day. I don't know though. Like I get that I get that impulse . But iPhones keep getting thicker. That's true . Because I feel like the ideal scenario is they get thinner , but people like good cameras and big batteries. And I think they value that more over the thinness. And I think that's shown in the fact that the iPhone Air didn't succeed . Yeah . It's like ideally yes, they would get super thin and light, but I think even in a scenario where the battery technology improves, I'm not sure that they're going to make it that much thinner because then they could put more other stuff in the in the box. Right. And because there's trade offs with the way the iPhone Art is designed where of the compute part is up in the plateau and the camera sticks out a lot even from the plateau. You just have one camera , partially because under where the second camera would be is logic board. It's like that's where the computer lives . And boy does the bottom of the plateau, like the bottom edge get hot, like a little posty. If you for some reason all phones are like this, but if you edit your log screen for a while, your phone only heats up like I don't know what it's doing. I don't know why that system is so intense . It's true though. The OS H's always been that way. It's wild . Definitely. By the way, they did add the new extend feature to the lock screen . So you know like the extend an image that's photo built into the lock screen . Now extend the extend image option in the lock screen performs that action. Good. That's a good idea. I did it yesterday. Yeah, it's good . The yeah, so the trade offs are real . It's compelling but it's definitely not perfect and I keep just coming back in not because of the name, but I do keep coming back to that first MacBook era that there were severe trade offs with that laptop, in terms of performance, in terms of livability, like you got weird ports under a weird door. Like that's strange . You it was the first MacBook to ditch the optigicalve, which Dri sound s silly now, but in two thousand eight, it was a real thing , like a real big change in zero eight . Apple had to invent things like the remote disk software like, oh you could put, your install CD and another computer and then I can read it over the network. Some people had to go and vent about that. You know? Oh, I forgot about that. Yeah, what a time. There was a hack to in because it only enabled for the MacBook Er at first , but there was a hack to get it to work on other machines. And it was important for me because in that era like twenty ten, I guess, I was using a Mac Book Pro that I had taken the optical drive out and I put an SSD in. So it had a small SSD in the optical drive bay and I kept the factory hard drive in. So I could boot from the SSD but have like bulk storage on the drive. It was a real time to be alive man. Yeah, I remember all that stuff. Yeah, there was like OWC like sold parts that like screwed into where the optical drive was. Yep. Yeah, I ran a mapping program like that for a long time. And I was surprised, Stephen. Yeah, another . And at that point, someone had like figured out how to install remote disk on other Macs. So that was very useful to me as someone who did not have an option drive in their computer. Very helpful. Until what was it lying when they started putting it on the USB keys? Yeah. Just lying, actually, 'cause then it was download only. Just download only. I've got one of those. It's like a surprise again, not surprised. Yeah. When you do your lying episode , call me. Yeah, you just send us to just look at it. Like , look at the USB here. Ooh, it's so tiny . Many, many, many years into the future. Yeah, that's a low priority episode . We want to do all the OS Tans, I think is the plan , but we're not going to do them all at once. No, yeah. Lions when they took a bunch of ideas from iPad OS and just slammed them in my Mac. Was that back to the Mac? It was Hm m It was back to the Mac . So yeah, so that's the iPhone Air. It's flawed but I love it but sometimes I'm frustrated by it This episode of Connected is brought to you by Century . Most AI tools help you write code. Sear by Sentry , is built for when it breaks. Sear is Century's AI debugging agent, and it's built right into Century. That means it has full context of what's going on in your app. Errors, traces, logs, replays and code all in one place . So when something goes wrong, it finds the root cause and opens a PR before you even see the alert . It also reviews your PRs against real production failures so bugs don't ship in the first place . Other AI tools, they're guessing. Sear knows why your app is broken . I really want my apps to perform smoothly. That's why we use Century At Relay. We run it against our content management system, a custom web app that we wrote and develop over time . And it means that when we have an issue , our web developer who works for us extremely part time has all the information he needs when it's time to deal with something that's broken. It has saved us tons of time over the years . So join millions of developers at companies like Anthropic and Disney Plus and here at Relay who use century to move faster . Try it for free at century. IO that's SEN TRY SINTRY. IO and tell them that we sent you . They have a free dev plan and listeners of connected can use the code connected twenty six to get a hundred dollars in century credits if you're a new user . My thanks to Century for the support of the show and all of relay. So there was a topic that I was seeing a lot on the internet in the last day or two, which is the SNAP specs . If you've been on social media, you've seen these things . And I thought to myself , man, this feels like a mess to talk about. I don't I thought about talking bringing it to the show and then was I like, I don't want to . And then I opened the notion document and you'd written a lot. All right, we'll talk about it. We could read some more articles . Yeah. Because it's just one of these things where it's like , I just don't know if anyone really has anything good to say. And so it's like I just wasn't really I didn't really have a take , but going through some articles I developed some takes. So yeah, so this is the snap Specs . Yep. They're AR glasses and they're going to be twenty two hundred bucks . Yep. A lot of money. They look ridiculous, which we'll get to. Yeah . But from the technology and product perspective, I do think there's some interesting things to talk about. Okay, because at first I felt like you did like well, I mean, yeah, like we would just dunk on them and that's that's fun sometimes, but it's not topic , right? And we want to be fun and positive . There is, I would say shockingly little coverage about what they do because of the looks. Yeah , like when you go to their website, they have examples of like these are things you can do and feels like no one's really talking about what it could do, which is I don't I mean , I understand, but also it's interesting at the same time. Yeah . So they are stand alone AR glasses. So that they made a point of like you don't have a cable running over your ear to like the compute module in your pocket or a battery in your pocket, you know, looking at the vision pro . And it's not like beaming everything from the Snapchat app Snap app on your phone or whatever. Is that the case? Like it's not Yeah, it's like a stand alone computer . And unlike what met a is doing, which is like a fixed display in one of your in one of the lenses , these are full on AR displays . So they can do things like I mean, you know, one of the one of the one of the classic examples of AI is like, take a picture of these ingredients and tell me what to make for dinner. That's a stupid example. Like no one is living life that way , but Mark German keeps repeating it . One cool thing about AR I actually think is cool is I'm walking in a city I'm unfamiliar with give me directions , right? Do you remember when that when turn by turn came to the Apple Watch? Maybe it was there from the beginning, but I remember the first time like navigating a city I wasn't familiar with, just with my watch and it felt like the future because I didn't have to be looking down at my phone , right ? It would just tap me. I could glance at my wrist and say, okay, you're gonna turn left here . It's a fantastic use for the watch. One that I still use when I travel, honestly, like all the time. I mean all the time , I don't travel very much, but when I travel, I use it . So one of the things this can do is provide AR directions . Another thing it can do is provide AR answers. So one of the examples they give is is where does the coolant go in this car? And like as a car person, I understand what it's doing is it's looking for like basically the universal label for like coolant goes here . But for someone who doesn't know that, who is intimidated by things like that , it's compelling. Now, how good is that? How good is the model they're using for that? Like, who knows, right? That's yet to be determined . But those are the sorts of things you can do . Their set of demos are like the greatest hits of AR glasses, right? It's like that one that you just mentioned, that's the hollow lens one. Yes, right? Like here's how to fix the sink, right ? And then they've got Watcher YouTube video , right? There's a bunch of Vision Pro like things in here . You know, there's a lot of apps and experiences . There's games . I thought one was pretty cool. I don't know why anyone would need this, which is but like someone's playing basketball and showing them like the trail of the ball into the hoop which is like is an interesting thing you can see. So there's like a lot of like things you've seen in other places, but this is in full AR glasses, which is different, right? Like untethered AR glasses as opposed to, you know, the Vision Pro or something like it. And the technology to do this , like the actual lenses and the way the displays work is it seems like a pretty big step forward. Some of the technology is actually done like in house by SNAP. Like they have like engineers like hardware engineers working on this stuff, which is really fascinating because I don't think about Snap as a product company in that way , right ? Partially because I'm too old to use Snapchat and I don't own any glasses that are smart. And so I just don't think about them as a company that I don't know, like has engineering at this level , but clearly they do . And some of the specs on the display are pretty interesting. So they say the result of this is comparable to a twenty four inch desktop monitor when you're working. It's like sitting in front of an iMac , right ? or a hundred and fifteen inch cinema display cinema screen placed ten feet away when you're watching a movie, which is sort of like this it sounds stupid when you talk about it, but this is sort of like the vision pro. Like sometimes what you're working on in the Vision Pro is small in front of you, but then sometimes it's immersive and really big, right? They can pull off that same effect because they are using more of the lens as a possible display . Which is pretty cool . And again, it's all built in. What do you think the quality of the screen is like the image is like, do you think? You know, that's so hard to tell because everything they show like in their press materials , like how real is it? Like is that captured from the glasses ? I think in some cases like the car, like the car example , the video is kind of grainy and not super sharp. It's like, well, if this was a render, wouldn't you make it look better? So maybe that's actually captured from the glasses . But you know, how does it look in low light? How does it look in bright sunlight? You know, if you have like a lot of contrast behind you, does part of the image disappear? You know, even in the Vision Pro with pass through , you run into that a little bit . But with the Vision Pro, you can dial that out, right? And just be on the moon and be typing your blog post . This because you're always seeing the world behind you , they have to account for a lot of variation in that. And you know it's not going to I don't think it's going to look as good as the Vision Pro can look on its best days, but I think it may have some of the same downsides if that makes sense . Yeah . Yeah, I feel like just light coming in is just not gonna , you know? Like I just think there's going to be a lot of light coming in when you're looking at something. I just can't imagine the clarity of the image being that good . Yeah, but like there's an example in their blog post . You're standing at a street corner and you're looking at a building and it's telling you it's a restaurant and the person turns and the light is coming from their right side and there's a tele there's like a telephone pole or like a light pole with the crosswalk thing on it. And the right side of it where the sun comes in is completely blown out. Like it just disappears in the image. It's so much brighter than everything else. . And you know, is that a side effect of the method it was captured with? Is that how it actually looks like when there's interface up? Like is it dimming the reward a little bit so you run into these strange things . I don't know. That's where reviews are going to come in . And I suspect like Vision Pro reviews a couple of years ago , reviewers are going to have a hard time sharing with their audience what it is actually like . Yeah. You know what I mean? Like remember with the Vision Pro reviews, it was like, oh , using one was different than watching a review of somebody using one. And I think this will suffer from the same thing. You know, I know that you can never really know these things, but it's not super encouraging that they didn't appear to have any hands on demo. That is always a red flag to me. So it's not great. It's not a great . And people know this too, right? Like even if you weren't planning on it, you know that if you don't do it, even if everything's fine, people are going to be like, I don't know. Yeah. So like if you don't do it, it tends to be signal that things aren't hunky dory . Yeah . And actually I'll just if we could just jump a second looks, right ? They look terrible . Yeah, . We were talking about the iPhone Air trade offs to be thin and light . The tradeoffs with this product of clearly was like we want it to be all built in. Like the battery, it's got two snapdragging processors. Wild. I don't know why it needs to. I mean, I'm sure there's a really good reason. I assume I guess assume it's like the vision process two processes, doesn't it? one for computing, one for like the visual pipeline . But to do all of that with any sort of battery life , they're really big. They're like a regular pair of glasses that got like twenty percent bigger. You know, if you put a shirt to the dryer that shouldn't go through the dryer and it comes out, it's still the same shirt, but it's like smaller. Yeah. This is the opposite of that . And there all these pictures from the event with the guy wearing them and his ears are like folded down . So the im agery on the website where they've got models and celebrities to wear them, they look passable because they're framing them in such a way that it works . But Snap CEO Evan Spiegel was wearing them and also did an interview with CNB C and they look horrific on him and they look incredibly uncomfortable. And it's just like the meme is just his ear being like squashed down by these things and it just you figure that is clamping the side of his head, right? And squashing on his ears. Like there is no world in which this is comfortable . And Vic Song at the Verge wrote about this. And she is a wearables reviewer, right? This is kind of what she does . And one of the things she really talks about in this article is the weight . And so they're between one hundred and thirty two and one hundred and thirty six grams , right ? And she said that in research that she's done, most like an optician will say that most people they want something that's between fifteen and thirty five grams for a pair of glasses. Whoa , yeah. And that typical smart glasses are between forty and seventy grams . So they are twice the weight of say meta ray bands or something. Yeah, which I think are sixty nine grams according to her article . So that's not good, Bob. Like it's just and so this the reason I wanted to mention it is to go back to like the no hands on thing of like they know yeah, right? They know there's no world in which the people making this product are not aware of all the things that we're becoming aware of, right? look terrible . People are going to meme it , but you have to do it anyway, right? He can't not do this like he's got to do it. And I find sometimes this kind of product announcement is very interesting because it's like they know as well things we don't know. And I think things we don't know is maybe they don't work very well right now , but like they are they're kind of making it happen , but you kind of just have to do it and go through with it because you've you've at a certain point you have to ship them. You have to start showing it off and you have to ship them. If you're ever going to try and make it something that's good, it has to come out . Which is also like a bigger thing to me of like we're in such an interesting point right now for the next ware platform . Like it's very clear that like a lot of companies want it to be some kind of wearable, right? Yeah. Well, they just want it not to be an iPhone. They want to be away from it. Even Apple, right? Like even Apple want to want it theyed to be the Apple Watch. It wasn't going to be that and they're rumored to be working on a bunch of things now, right? So like even they are like, oh maybe it's going to be a wearable and if it's going to be a wearable we want to be in the game , but these products seem ed to be harder to build than the iPhone was, right? Like realistically , because the first iPhone was good. That was a good product . And importantly, it was also so much better than everything else that it was replacing at doing the things that it did. And none of these devices are even close to that, right? Like for sure. None of these devices , I don't know if they will ever get close enough to being better than what an iPhone is , especially because the features that they have , the iPhone can have them. They're just, you just gotta hold the screen up , right? Or like if it's the AI things where you can just talk to your device. You just talk to your iPhone. You just got to get your iPhone out. And so I don't I don't know, like there is something in this, but it's just such a complicated thing because they have to start shipping stuff so they can make them better , but nobody's going to buy these things . So you know, like meta got closest with the Raybands and now people don't like those anymore. And so they're kind of go back to square one. But then they have their Ray Band display and no one would want to wear those either because they're also still too big and chunky. And so like, how do you keep pushing the technology? I'm just not sure that they can. And also the story is messed up. So Spiegel did an interview with CNBC, right? Where he's wearing them the whole time and it looks during the whole interview every, time he moves his head, you can see the displays, right? There's like when light hits the glasses, you see that there's a display in these glasses. I want to read you a quote from this interview. Okay . I think something that this is Spiegel took in. I think something that people are really looking for in this moment where they feel like screens are distracting them. People are spending on average more than seven hours a day staring down at screens instead of connecting with their friends and staying present in the world. And we think specs offer a totally new opportunity to bring computing into the world around you and help computing feel more human and more personal. Ah, buddy, you know that, ain't it, though? You know, like you know you're wrong. So the way to get people off screens is to put screens in their eyes . Yeah . You want to go from seven hours a day to twenty? Yeah, yeah. This ain't it. Like it. And we're back to the human e thing again . You can't sell someone a product that's supposed to be in their lives for every moment they're awake, attach to them physically and tell them it's to help you get away from your devices. No , you're wrong. Like you can there are reasons you can say these things exist. Do that second part, but don't talk about how we're creating this product which is screens in front of your eyes to get you away from looking down at screens. What we really need is looking up at screens. Ah, you fixed it for us, Spiegel. Thank you. Yeah, it's just, it's just not it. I mean, I think back it's actually kind of still a thing, I think when you look at your Apple Watch and you're with somebody and there's that thought of like do they just check their watch so they can get out of here ? That's awkward and like it has faded I think with the Apple Watch but it,'s still a little bit of a thing, I think how much more is it gonna be when someone walks in with one of these products and it's like, are you doing something else while you're looking at me . Right. It's I will never feel, I don't think like I have someone's full attention to wearing a product like this . Because you will always assume, I mean, because we all know what our phones are like, right? Our phones are always wanting our attention . And so it's going to be putting the notifications in your eyes. Like we spoke about this on this show years ago and I think we shared the point of viewers, we do not want notifications in our eyes . Yep . Like it's a bridge too far. And so like I just don't know like I think that there is a product type which is really interesting . But I think too quickly a lot of these companies want to be everything and then it starts to fall apart . Like I think the meta ray bands technologically wise pull meta out of it, just the technology, right? Headphones and a camera in a pair of sunglasses is just a good product . Like again , please just pull away all of your issues for as much as you can about dystopian fut ures, I understand. But we all take photos of our friends and our families and our loved ones all the time. Like assuming people use these things correctly , if you want to be able to take a picture, being able to take a picture with your with your sunglasses is good. Like and being able to listen to podcasts from your sunglasses is just good technology. Like it's that is a good piece of technology, but now we're like, yeah, what if we put a display in it? And what if we do this and what if we do this and what if the camera's always looking it's like no , come back. Come back. So I don't know. I get what you mean by saying they need to do it, right? Because part of these announcements are also like it's a develop er platform and they tout how many updates they've done to their OS and the API calls and all that stuff . And if you want to build a platform, you got to have awkward hardware, most of the time you have awkward hardware at the beginning, right? Like the first iPhone was amazing but flawed , right? The first Apple Watch could do some cool things, but the battery life was really bad. I mean, how many years did it take for the Apple Watch having always on screen , right ? This is the way these things go , but when they're on your face , it just feels like the curve you have to overcome is much steeper. Yeah , absolutely. Is that fair I think it's huge curve. Like so like the steepness is massive and I just I don't know if any of these companies can do it . I don't know if anyone's going to be able to handle it . Yeah, I don't know. It's such a big ask for so much money . Like, yeah, I know this one is what it is now, but it's not like it's going to get rat like massively cheaper in a lot of time. No one's going to buy this product , right? No, no , there are so hundreds of them . Who's no one's going to buy this like realistically? So I don't I mean to like I mean think about the meta ray bands , the number they've sold, right? Which I don't think we know, but it's not it's a lot, but it's not I have sold a lot, but it's not an iPhone. It's not an Apple Watch. It's not AirPods, right? This is going to be a fraction of a fraction of that because of the looks, because of the weight and the comfort Upload VR report that they well, in twenty twenty five, they sold seven million of them. That's pretty good. , that's pretty good . So So that's a product Like that's a, you know? Yeah . Yeah, this is this is not . Well, okay, so this is interesting, right? So in twenty february twenty twenty five, they had sold two million to date , but then in twenty twenty five total, they sold seven . So it really shot up . Snap's not going to be able to do that not with this. I mean, I'm really not exaggerating. I think they will sell in the hundreds of pairs because what is this ? Who's wearing? No one's going to wear that. I don't think they mentioned it four hours of battery life . Ooh , like, I understand why, but it's like, well , that's but I'm supposed to wear them all the time . Like kitched, I don't know, man. I know when they're doing it, they got to do it , but so you're not preordering . No, I don't think I will be. I would like with all of these things because I'm interested in technology, I would like to try them . Like saying what is that like? Like I would like to see what it looks like. I would like to see how well it works and how well it doesn't. Like it would be just interesting . But I don't know who the past I? don't imagine a consumer that wants these. Like I don't know why you would want them they don't they don't look good . If they looked good , yeah, maybe. Like that's the only reason the methods worked out, right ? Because they look like raybands. And so it's like people were willing to wear them. Who's gonna wear these? Even if somebody doesn't know they're a display, they're going to think you're wearing some really weird glasses . Yeah , you know? It's not even so much that like, oh if I wear these people know I have a display on my face. No think that you have very strange taste, I think in eyeware . You know what I have strange taste in? What is that? Podcast closings . Okay , show me . Hey yo, it's the end of the show. I don't know, I got nothing. Yeah, that was with right. We'll be back next week, but there's a lot of stuff you can do in the meantime , you don't have anything going on the next seven days until we're back, right? So here are some things you could do . You should check out the show notes at relay dot ofM slash connected slash six hundred eight links to everything we spoke about are there. Two very special links. You can leave feedback to leave us a comment , suggestion, a question, anything you want , drop us a note there. It can be anonymous if you have secret things to tell us . And you can join and get connected pro, which is the longer and ad free version of the show that we do each and every week . That also comes with a bunch of good ies from relay, access to our discord, a couple of members only podcasts, and over the summer some member specials from some of our shows. So we'll be doing one next month, so stay tuned for more details there . Get connected pro. It's a great deal at just seven bucks a month . Federico is not here, but you can read his writing at maxstories. net. Mike is here and you can hear him across a bunch of shows here at Relay. Episode three of his and Jason's series on the Apple two just dropped. As we were recording, I saw it go up. So go check that out. I will also use this as a moment to say we're doing a thing next week on Upgrade, which is essentially we wanted to do another taster of what people can expect from design in California . We have been recording the beginning of our history of OS ten with John Syracuse. And the first episode of that will be a part of next week's upgrade. That'll be exciting. Yeah . You can find my writing over at five hundred twelvepixels dot net. I'd like to thank our sponsors this week for supporting the So Squarespace and Century . Until next time, Mike, say goodbye. Bye bye. Bye y'