Robb Knight, I have been wearing a headset for like six hours a day and I'm here to tell you it's okay, the experience is alright. I think the dumb thing is I'm supposed to ask you which head strap you use. I mean they actually I find them both good and bad for different reasons. I mean the knit one is not the disaster that a lot of people think it is.
And the two, the two, the one with the two straps, the dual strap I guess they call it. It's not as comfortable, it's more fiddly, but you can dial in a more precise fit is I guess what I would say. So it's alright, I mean you know those things are alright. I am right now I am participating. I'm choosing not to participate in the hype which by which I mean that I do think that this thing is really cool and I've really enjoyed using aspects of it.
But I think that there's a lot of over blown hype about it too and I'm just trying to I'm trying to be like put my reviewers hat on and you know and be reasonable about it which is like it has a ton of potential but it's also super buggy like the OS is super buggy.
And a lot of the apps are super buggy and I don't blame developers for that because most of the developers who's apps I'm using never got to use the actual hardware. So you know I mean it is what it is I mean maybe they will at some point look at a lab or they'll buy a vision pro or whatever but but yeah you know I mean it's like it's great for entertainment. I can I've already seen the first in cleans of the you can't do real work in a vision pro.
Debate starting online which also maybe I'll wait into that one because I think you can but it is it is you know it's been fun the I'll tell you what it's really good with. It's it's it's a fantastic Mac accessory which I which I didn't expect I mean it's the most expensive Mac accessory ever because more than a lot of good Mac's cost but you know there's something nice to be able to see you can literally just sit down and have a stretch out your screen as big as you want.
And have this giant screen that you're working on because what it does is it's it's emulating a 27 inch 5k display that is then mirrored at 4k so what you're seeing is 4k not 5k but then you can stretch it out and whatever it looks it looks good and then you can do your little you know your your vision OS apps on the side or wherever. And those kind of act in a way as widgets so you know in a lot of ways it's like the ultimate Mac Mac experience I think.
Yeah I mean yeah I can see that I mean to what you said the the media watching movies and stuff that's the only thing that really interests me I know I've done very little of it. But that I feel like that would be the only thing that would interest me but then we've been doing this podcast what eight years you know for well I'm not using an iPad. Right.
Don't really like using my phone that much right the vision pro just feels like it falls into that category for me it's like it's a nice product for other people but for me it's not it's not going to do anything.
I think for a lot of people I do one of the things that I wonder is what becomes the iPad after this because in a way I mean putting aside the price which is obviously an enormous difference between the iPad and the vision pro I could see this filling the role of an iPad for a lot of people. Because it's both a consumption device but it is a better productivity device than the iPad I think just because of the window you know the ability to use multiple windows and all that kind of stuff.
In a in a non-crampt environment I mean you can use multiple windows on an iPad too but you know you're pretty limited and yeah I don't know I mean I'm still kind of forming my thoughts I've had it for four days and yesterday was probably my biggest day of being in it yesterday was the first day I really did work and I actually was writing it.
And yeah I was writing in it and because you know it's nice is I can like emulate my Mac desktop and then whatever app I'm reviewing I can have it open right next to it and be using it at the same time.
I mean not unlike what I would do with an iPhone or an iPad app to be honest but you know but that's just a handy way to do that and so it's been yeah it's been pretty great I mean we shall see I mean I don't think it's going to be taking off Ganbusters just because it's so expensive but I'm not going to do it. It's not that expensive but there's a lot of potential with it. It's funny because about the entertainment side is that immersive video didn't work for me.
I first tried it at all. I was like I was thought I was losing my mind but watching these I'm watching these immersive videos and all that would show up is like the PG rating in the corner and then the voices the voices would start but I wouldn't see any video and I had a reboot to get that to work. Additionally the environments go from being an environment to mean just like a fog really like being like being in the middle of a cloud.
There's just like a lot of little things that that are tough about it and taking screenshots I will say I thought this is going to kill me because the first review I did I spent as long on the screenshots as I did writing the review because it's just really really fiddly because you got to do it if you want to get crisp screenshots that aren't fully fully a full of a renderer or whenever you know where they're where they're
when you take it with the unit itself it's it's sharp wherever you're looking and fuzzy everywhere else and if you hook it up through Xcode you can get a fully sharp image edge to edge which is really nice but it's also very
fiddly and tends to disconnect and not get your screenshots the way you want them and you're having to kind of go back and forth between a virtual Mac environment and the actual app that you're recording and it's it's not easy it's not easy but it's I've kind of gotten that process down plus now I have the the developer strap which is kind of an odd name but I've got the developer strap which takes some of the some of the flakiness away because it's not doing it over a wireless network anymore.
The well is my expensive dongle it is a $300 dongle and part of that's because it replaces the entire arm on one side and those arms those arms house the speakers which are essentially AirPods Pro I think and and I mean you know $300 one AirPods Pro doesn't exactly explain that but it's also probably a very low volume product too so I'm not too surprised that it's expensive but just
given the amount of time it took me to do the screenshots for the first couple of reviews I think it's worth it I think it's worth it for me I don't think it's worth it for the average person because you're not going to get much out of this I mean it's really designed to collect data from you know in you know in the instruments panels and X code and to take screenshots and videos and that kind of thing
it's not I tested it didn't work with like an ethernet dongle attached to it or anything like that so it's not like the it's not the answer to gaming on the vision prop no that's not you can't get your can't get your fast speeds that way got to do them the old fashioned way with Wi-Fi
yeah all right well we've done all that's what I would say is I'll I'll compulcery vision pro bit yeah so that's what we call first first impressions with John there we go there we go what did I have in the show notes oh I'm giving a talk this month is nice what about
how my website works and how I'm like collecting kind of everything I do online and getting that into my website so it's more of a it's a technical talk about how I'm you know doing those things or 10 15 minutes but we'll I will put the link in the show notes if anyone's interested nice is that going to be around where you live or somewhere else or what so it's an online online talk so it's 10 am central time I guess I guess that's what that means
so about 4 p.m. my time but yeah we'll put link in and you can you can add it to your calendar or there's no RSS feed that kind of things that's the only one if you're interested it's the 11t meetup right and 11 11t is the is the blogging system you're using right
that's right yeah very cool very cool yeah I'm really interested in those things like 11 and there's a bunch of others that are springing up that I think are making it very easy for people to a blog again which is which is nice and I don't know I mean I haven't
had the occasion to use any of these systems myself but I always find them really interesting because I think a lot of a lot of a lot of cool approaches that make it kind of or plug-in play for some people you know a lot of media little little technical know how but you can you can get by with you know without it too oh absolutely yeah I've been there's I've been I've got a handful in a list in a city I'm right now but off top my head there's a peak
I looked at that just launched this week I think oh yeah that's like a day or two ago I was going to say I looked at it looks really nice yeah then there's scribbles as a new one as well which is in that's a testing right as you know sort of invite only at the moment but I think that's going public next month and I mean those two on the right those are like very like you sign up you just start right in right you know the mean options and that kind of thing right you know just to make
the experience much nicer for people to just sign up and just get on with that right yeah I think that's good to take that barrier down because that is getting started as the hardest part I mean that really the hardest part is getting started writing and to have a technical barrier in front of even the barrier of getting thinking of something or right makes it even harder for people yeah definitely but we'll get those in the show nice as well as people can chat
those out yeah I was I've pico was one that I looked at I was like oh I'm going to save this link for later because I've it seemed like one that would be worth recommending to people if they were interested in in starting a website so Rob I want to talk to you about posting disease and pay walls today I saw you posted put this in the show knows and I don't know what any of what I don't know what that combination of words means I know I know well so this
comes from the most the two actually the two most recent podcast episodes that I listen to and one thing that I am trying to do more of in that this is not like a New Year's resolution or anything I've been actually doing it for a while is brought in brought in need my tech horizons and listening to a lot of people outside of kind of the the tight apple sphere that often you know Mac stories people like me moving and so I I started listening to a new podcast called Never Post
very new podcast only two episodes and it's really like an internet culture type of podcast that has a bunch of segments about all kinds of topics about for people who are extremely online which I guess we count as and yeah and this segment in the show was called Never Post
and it was about it was about posting disease which is as they defined it the two people having the conversation defined it as kind of people who get addicted to the attention whether it's positive or negative and just can't stop and and and that was so there was that it was a very interesting conversation about kind of like the motivations how it's like this is not like a political thing is there's like people that do this on the left on the right
in the center you know in this community and that community and and what what is it that causes it and why is it a problem and then the other the other thing that I was listening to was an interview with Casey Newton who runs platformer which is a you know a news a newsletter subscription that he left the verge and he's hired one of the Verges former writers and they are writing about mostly about social media and those kind of big tech platforms and intersection
with like democracy and government around the world and that sort of thing very interesting and very good very good subscription if anybody's interested but he was interviewed on Dakota which is one of the Verge podcasts that Neil I Patel hosts and they were talking about the media and they were talking about how the media is kind of crumbling around us because it's having a hard time keeping itself funded and they were you know one of the things they talked
about a lot was what Casey did which was he went out on his own from an existing media publication the Verge and you know it's just him and one or two other people now and that's one one avenue to potential success in the future as the media industry evolves but you know at least part of that service I mean I think that there's one free newsletter issue every week and at least a couple of better paid and so you know part of that is behind a paywall and one of the
conversations was about whether all the quality journalism is going behind a paywall and that there will be nothing left for that'll be free except misinformation conspiracies and junk you know like AI generate junk which I think is a legitimate concern and that creates like this weird socio economic divide between people who are informed and people who are poorly informed that you know it's like now defined by whether you have the disposable income to afford you know good journalism or
whatever and what it made me think about so those are both good conversations so I and I have they recommend both those shows think people should listen to them to coder probably not as never post his brand new so hopefully it'll continue to be as good as the first two episodes I listen to to coder often interviews CEOs and sometimes they're boring people to be honest and so I'm very picking shoes about that you know I don't really care about a lot
of people that that's talked about there but they know they're always adjacent to the tech industry so that a lot of times it's interesting but what it got me thinking about is two things I've seen online one is the person who has a online business or some kind of creative endeavor that they're trying to achieve but they get sidetracked by social media in other words they feel like they have to feed the algorithm and what they end up
doing is they're not acting it cuts into what they're actually creating because what they're doing instead is putting all of their creativity into posts whether it's Twitter or master on or threads it doesn't really matter which you know it could be any service you know and I've seen that where I've seen people who got off to a good start with like a blog or a YouTube channel or some sort of online business that's you
know like kind of an indie type business you know one two three people and they get caught up so much in the social media aspect of it that they they just stop producing as much and their and their business starts to wither and at the other end of the spectrum I've seen people who have just decided you know to hell with the free internet I put in everything behind a paywall and that's like the last you hear of them unless you're one of the people who for whom you know you're willing to pay
and I feel like these are like opposite ends of the spectrum of the same thing and that both of them are destructive in that in there in their own way you follow what I'm saying oh yeah absolutely absolutely
I mean yeah this is a strange and weird problem that we've sort of found ourselves in that yeah it's a weird tension right because we think about when you think about it and I feel it all the time because I'm like well I'm not going to put all my good ideas on master on or threads I mean I'll
make an article out of it and like one of the things we struggle with I know in Mac stories is like we still have a free website and it's really hard to maintain a free website and have a have a subscription service but I like to me it's like one of the most important things because you know
if we went all the way behind a paywall all we'd be doing is cutting off growth yeah you're not going to get anybody new right right right they'll be people there would be people if we did that there would be people who would continue to subscribe for years and years and years and we would probably be pretty fine for quite a while but we would be writing our own death sentence in that sense and I see people doing that now because if you look at it like in a compartmentalized way like if I looked
at just Mac stories I think oh this doesn't make much financial sense as a business because it's got one sponsor a week and you know just not making like huge amounts of money by any stretch of the imagination and it takes a lot of work to do all those articles and everything but but it's the
you know it's kind of like that that classic funnel system where a lot of people that's all they want and that's totally good and but and it brings a lot of people in and all you need is like a small percentage of them to be willing to pay something more through a subscription service which you know
but for the subscription service I don't think Mac stories would it wouldn't exist in the form it does today by any means so but but it's that balance it's like trying to live in that middle place where you're not like you know and and the thing on the other end of the spectrum on the other end
from the paywall is the posting and the posting has value I'm not I don't I'm not suggesting that doesn't because it's it's publicity and and you know promotion and all that stuff if you like got some sort of online business but it is also awfully easy to get caught up in it and then
all this and because this is what happened this is the what people think happened with blogging is that you know people stopped writing blogs because they were just posting all their thoughts on Twitter instead and I you know I so I can see that end of the spectrum as well and I've seen people
who who just pretty much put you know put all their effort into their follower accounts and there and and then what they end up with is like a really big following on some social media service and a neglected website where they could actually make money I don't know I may have you seen
any of that at all yeah I I feel like I definitely feel that about when we were all still using Twitter I mean I you could look at my website and look at the stats for blog posts and you can see the car if you know there's there's you know right the start of the site there's quite a few
yeah fairly regular posts yeah and then there's a good like four five year period where I may be posted like once or twice a year on my blog and yet I'm also sitting on an archive of 50,000 tweets or something right like you know and you know they're then certainly not all blog posts
no um they're not all right but they're probably a good right but they're probably also some ideas and they're worth blog posts right exactly and I have done exactly that as well like you know like if I see if I'm in the archive look if it's something I see something I was why didn't I write
this as a blog post or right um you know so not that I'm necessarily looking to you know make money or funnel membership to my website but it's a good example of like yeah we all got on Twitter and we're like yeah we'll just post on here well we don't need we need websites anymore we need all
that for right exactly yeah and yeah and I guess money puts it is it's just a different layer of the same problem good it is a problem that I think existed regardless of whether there's money involved or not and I feel it with like what we post on Mac stories too like we're doing more
link posting than we did for several years and a lot of that is because it's there were there were times when Twitter was such a big deal that it didn't feel like there was any point to doing link posts anymore and now it feels like there is again because and part of that is it's not that
there aren't social media sites and services I mean there certainly is threads and master on and other blue sky and others but but I think because it's kind of fragmented now you know that a lot of people aren't gonna see it if it's if you just put it in one place and I think discovery one
thing Twitter was very good at was discovery and so there was there was a there was always the promise of reaching more people than you normally could and that has kind of gone away because the I think that the the algorithm on threads is pretty dampened when it comes to that and it's virtually it's
virtually non-existent unmested on in that you know like I always think of it as like uh I don't know like when you throw a rock in a pool you know you get ripples and that was what you would get on Twitter but on master done you throw the rock into a sandbox and it makes a little
sand splash to the sides but it doesn't cause the ripples and and that seems like a John Gruber analogy I I I told you I told you to get what you mean I think as well you know certainly looking at what Twitter was like when we were using it though it was it was almost like there was a
handful of posts or tweets or whatever links every day right that would just get retweeted and recycled through everybody yeah for a 24 hour period and then that would just start again like I don't feel like I feel like the the range of things that I see now on master done is so much better
than what it was on Twitter because because I think I don't know what you know did back to what you were saying about you know doing link posts and things like that I think people are way more consciously going no do you know what I've seen this cool thing I'm not just gonna boost it
or retweet it which can potentially just end up in the ether if nothing if people don't see it and like people are excited again to say no I found this cool thing I'm going to actively share and say no I really like to this thing you should go see it right right and I think it's I think
you know it's been long enough now that this has been kind of a phenomenon that I think it I think it has legs really I don't think it's gonna I don't think it's gonna peter out maybe it'll slow down a little bit but I think it's it's good it's refreshing I mean I think it's
it feels like you know I don't know 2005 all over again and it's it's kind of nice because people are being a little more I don't know or as you said you see in a wider range of things people being a little more thoughtful about what what's been posted online so it's a little less
little less sensationalistic and and you know clickbaiting in that sense when it comes to when it comes to individuals I mean the clickbait will always be there they'll just be driven by AI now but yeah but if we have this core of you know good bloggers around it doesn't really matter if that
stuff is out there float around and all that you can find on on Google anymore as long as you can find your way to the blogs yeah yeah definitely I will say speaking of Google because I've been thinking about this and this was to do what we were talking about remember we mentioned mango baby
right the baby tracking app yeah yeah and I thought why didn't I come across this before and so I thought let me see if it's even possible for me to find this on Google you know just generic sort of oh best baby tracking apps that kind of thing the first three websites on Google were all a variation of bestbaby tracking apps.com and there was like three of these websites all three of them just have the exact same list of 10 that they'd clearly just scraped off the app store
or something yeah I could I could not deliberately find mango baby even when I knew what I was looking for obviously without using the you know the search terms because all I would hear is these ridiculous like and then these these websites have been around for ages but I think AI is making it way worse now because they're just like rewriting descriptions so it at least looks like it's a different website
you know yeah no I I was recently researching like an exercise bike and boy I found I found a place that the AI has found which is you know they're just doing these they're doing these listicles that are pretty clearly AI written that don't really have any substance they're just a way to
you know create amazon affiliate money by linking out linking out to amazon or something like that yeah definitely I mean that that was the kind of thing I'm sort of writing notes as I did it but there wasn't really anything more there other than Google's not very good at this right now
but I thought it was worth noting because we spoke obviously spoke about that yeah that's good that is interesting we'll be interested and see what what ARK can do they seem to be trying to fix search a little bit with some of these features that were announced last week I'm I'm a I'm an ARK
skeptic yeah because I was turned off by the design I know a lot of people really like the design I just never really really really jelled with me but I do think at the that the team over there is doing a lot of interesting things and has some interesting ideas I wish they would do more
with mobile I mean they're kind of doing it with this new search app I but they don't have but the problem with the search app is one none of the stuff syncs with the with the Mac app and two there's and two there's no iPad app and so to me that's like a real half-low in terms of mobile I mean
it it what it does and I think it was smart that they call it search I suppose because it really does in a lot of ways replace those kind of quick searches you do I view it as kind of like the the search engine engine for when you're at the pub and you have a question about who won the
the football match you know or whatever it's that kind of search where you're looking for quick facts and it's very good at that it's not like it's not a full-fledged browser yet though I hope they get there though yeah well I was worth keeping them all out cool all right well I think that's
probably do it for this week yeah I think so very good conversation don't don't get posting disease and and go out and read some more go out and read some more blogs and listen to some different podcasts that's that's my advice of the day yeah I'm gonna subscribe to Neva Pist right now
why don't we list in the morning yeah you should check it out they're doing like they're very new and they're gonna do some kind of they're doing you know they're doing free and subscriber-based stuff with bonus material you know the usual the usual thing that podcasters do and so far
it it does have that kind of NPRE feel like you get to the end and there's like three producers to executive producers and I know is here that I'm like that's me that's me that's me or yeah or that's you yeah I could do that right now if you want this broadcast was produced by Rob Knight
that is by Rob Knight distributed by Rob Knight under rights from Rob Knight absolutely oh anyway but it's all right but that doesn't take away from the fact that it is good so you should try it out okay I will they all right I'll speak to Sanca bye