Category: Apple

I guess there was an anniversary for the Apple Vision Pro a while ago, because I kept seeing people doing retrospectives on it, and I figured I should probably write about my own experiences. If only because I spent so much time leading up to the launch writing about how hyped I was, but then never did a follow-up after the honeymoon period was over.

But that idea, like the headset itself, went back to sitting unused on a shelf.

Even though I almost never use it, I don’t regret getting it, and I don’t have any real intention of trying to sell it.¹And if any early adopters are still considering selling theirs: good luck with that! It sure feels like all the interest dried up not long after the initial hype did. With all my back-and-forth trying to talk myself into getting one, the thing that finally pushed me over the edge was simply owning the device itself. Like the Apple Watch “series 0,” the first iPad, the first iPhone, one of the original iPods, and the used Macintosh SE I’ve got sitting on my desk, I like having it as a kind of landmark of consumer technology history more than for its practical utility. In other words: I still just think it looks neat.

I still think that a lot of the negative reviews early on had too much of a We were promised jetpacks! vibe to them. There’s still an amazing amount of groundbreaking technology crammed into the headset, all in service of trying to make the experience of using it as frictionless and approachable as possible, and it still seems short-sighted to be dismissive of all that to focus on frivolous complaints.²Such as, of course, the complaint that it messes up your hair. Essentially complaining that it’s only 10 years ahead of its time instead of 20.

Ultimately, pretty much everything I like and dislike about the Vision Pro is a result of one key decision Apple made when positioning it as a product: they want it to be a “lifestyle” device instead of an “enthusiast” one.

There’s nothing surprising about that, and it was pretty evident even before the device launched. The Vision Pro in its first incarnation feels like something that could only be made by Apple, because of the industrial design, the focus on interconnected devices, vertical integration, tight connection between hardware and software, and the years spent advancing and refining the state of ARKit on iOS devices. But that also means that Apple would need the device to sell at iPad or Mac levels to make any sense as an Apple product, and it’s probably impossible to get those numbers from being limited just to gamers or fans of the Quest.³And Apple just doesn’t sell hardware at a loss, which Facebook is more willing to do.

What did surprise me was how much that one decision rippled out into everything else, and how much it’s keeping the platform from feeling like it’ll find its audience.

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  And if any early adopters are still considering selling theirs: good luck with that! It sure feels like all the interest dried up not long after the initial hype did.
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  Such as, of course, the complaint that it messes up your hair.
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  And Apple just doesn’t sell hardware at a loss, which Facebook is more willing to do.

A few days ago, I acknowledged that even though I’m pledging to make a break from Amazon, they’re still hard to beat purely in terms of customer service. So when a smaller company with fewer resources meets or beats them in customer service, I think it’s worth calling out.

Last year I wrote a review of Astropad’s Rock Paper Pencil screen protectors, and I gave them an A-. The advantages¹Apart from the obvious advantage that they’re lower-priced than Paperlike were that they can be removed and replaced pretty easily, and the included replacements for the Apple Pencil tips have a finer point that feels more like a ball point pen than a rubber stylus.

The more I used it, though, the more I got distracted by how much the Rock Paper Pencil degrades the screen clarity of the iPad. It’s certainly not unusable, but it’s definitely noticeable if you spend most of the day looking at higher-resolution screens. I also fell out of like with the feel of writing with the metal tip on the coarser screen protector. At first, it felt nostalgic like writing on the ruled paper inside my old Trapper Keeper, but over time it felt more like writing on the plastic cover of the Trapper Keeper.²That’s the kind of solid analogy you don’t get from product reviews on The Verge.

So I decided to go back to the Paperlike, which I’d used for a long time on previous devices and never had any major problems with. They’re more expensive, but keeping in line with Apple philosophy, it feels like getting the version without compromises for a device that I use a lot. As part of the pledge to break from Amazon, I ordered a couple directly from Paperlike, reasoning that the extra time spent for delivery would be worth it for the feeling of smug superiority for ordering from a smaller business.

The problem is that I’d completely forgotten that I’d already gotten one back when I upgraded my iPad. It had been sitting there unopened and uninstalled the whole time, and I gradually forgot about it as I labored on, drawing with rubber on unprotected glass like some kind of animal.

The company has a satisfaction guarantee, so I sent a note asking if I could return the extra one. I soon got an email offering me a store credit (for 150% of the cost of the item!) instead of returning it. That alone is pretty great customer service. But the downside to being a company that does one thing really well is that I didn’t need anything else from the store. I explained as much in a follow-up email.

And then, they just gave me a refund. They said I could keep the extra to pass along to a friend. I was so pleased by how easy (and non-wasteful) they’d made it that I felt like I had to spread the word.

This kind of thing isn’t exactly unprecedented, if you’ve been dealing with Amazon for a while, but the assumption is that they’re so big that they can write off the losses without a second thought. I’d imagine that it costs them more to do a return than it would just to let customers keep what they’d bought and issue a refund anyway. I don’t want to make it sound like Paperlike is some tiny mom & pop shop, but it’s also a bigger relative hit for them to favor genuinely good customer service, and it deserves a call-out.

As for the screen protectors themselves: they do exactly what they set out to do, which is improve the feel of using an Apple Pencil on the device, with as little degradation to screen quality as possible. And the latest version is all but undetectable once it’s applied; it just gives your screen a matte texture.

I wouldn’t say it’s exactly like writing on paper, but it’s definitely less slippery and more satisfying than writing on glass. And it has less grip than Astropad’s screen protectors, which means that writing or drawing for an extended time isn’t as prone to tiring out your hand.

My biggest criticism — only criticism, really — is that the process of applying it is kind of a pain. They do every thing they can to make it easier. There’s an instructional video that takes you through it step by step. It comes with a microfiber cloth and wet wipes, to clean everything at multiple steps through the process. And there are various stickers to guarantee that everything is lined up perfectly.

When you first open the package and see all of the guides and stickers, it can seem a little anal-retentive for something as simple as putting on a screen protector. But after you try it once, and at least in my case invariably fail, it all seems like a necessity.

Each package includes two screen protectors, ostensibly so you only need to buy one set for the lifetime of your iPad. But in my experience, it’s a necessity because the first one always gets messed up. You practically have to be in a NASA-style clean room to avoid getting nearly-invisible specks of dust or dirt or stray whiskers that’ll get stuck underneath.

I tried applying one to my 11″ iPad, after re-watching the video, cleaning off my desk and everything around it, carefully following every step, cleaning and dusting the screen thoroughly, and I still managed to get a tiny speck of dust trapped under the screen protector. It left the smallest air bubble in the center of the screen, which was barely perceptible but I knew would drive me insane over time. I’d decided to just relax and not stress about it and use the thing anyway, which is when I noticed that I’d applied it upside down. The screen protector was covering the iPad’s camera, and video from it had the Vaseline-smeared look of late-in-life TV footage of Elizabeth Taylor.

So it might be a good thing I have an extra package, since it might actually take me four attempts to get it right. Regardless, I don’t want my general ineptitude and lack of cleanliness to scare anybody away from the brand; they make the application as straightforward as is possible, and once you’ve got it installed, it works great and lasts for years. I’m a fan, and I wish I’d just kept using Paperlike all along.

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  Apart from the obvious advantage that they’re lower-priced than Paperlike
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  That’s the kind of solid analogy you don’t get from product reviews on The Verge.

Yesterday, Adam Savage posted a video to YouTube describing his experiences using the AirPods Pro as replacements for the traditional hearing aids that he’s used for years. It’s a good video, matter-of-factly going over his history of hearing loss, the expensive hearing aids he used when he was on television regularly, and the cheaper ones he currently uses from Costco. (I never in a million years would’ve thought to check Costco for them). Not to spoil the video, but his verdict is that the AirPods are the first OTC ones he’s used that he actually likes.

It reminded me to try the hearing test included on the iPhone as of a recent update to iOS and the AirPods Pro firmware. I’d last tried it a couple of months ago, but I’d get 1/3 to halfway through the test before it errored out. Where I live in LA, we tend to have helicopters flying overhead, or low-T dipshits recklessly drag racing out on the street, so we’re never guaranteed more than 10 minutes of uninterrupted silence. My latest test, however, completed successfully.

I’ve known for a while that I’ve got some degree of hearing loss. I’m having more and more difficulty hearing movies and TV shows, but I just blamed that on a combination of middle age and audio engineering in a post-Christopher Nolan world. More concerning is the number of sounds that I just can’t hear at all. My husband often hears our front gate opening when I don’t hear anything. There’s a set of lockers at my office that have digital keypads that beep on lock or unlock, but I was completely unaware that they beep until a coworker told me. None of it has seemed essential, but enough to be reminded that I haven’t been hearing everything.

The iPhone’s hearing test involves tapping on the phone whenever you hear it play a sequence of three beeps, which vary in frequency and volume. For a lot of the test, I felt as if I was having to skip so many of them that it would just end abruptly and flash a dire warning that I needed to see a hearing specialist immediately. As it turned out, though, it simply ended with a notice that I had mild hearing loss in one ear, and moderate in the other. Not very surprising.

It then offered to have the AirPods Pro correct for my affected hearing, which was as simple as reading some warning messages and then pressing a button. I’ve been wearing them around the house last night and a few hours today.

The effect was initially jarring. Because Disney Parks are my frame of reference for literally everything, I immediately was reminded of Sounds Dangerous, a show at Disney/MGM Studios where guests would be brought onstage to add sound effects to a movie clip playing behind them. Everything I did sounded as if it were being given over-loud sfx from a clumsy and amateurish foley artist. My footsteps were cartoonishly loud and sharp, opening and closing drawers sounded like I was throwing a tantrum. Even sliding into bed sounded like sandpaper against satin, punctuated with a sound like a zip cord-powered toy car as I put my legs under the sheets. And getting out of bed sounded like someone twisting a bundle of celery.

All of that is likely to fade into normalcy the longer I wear them. And everything else is markedly better. In particular, the “light rain” noise machine that we’ve been using at night actually sounds like light rain again, after a year or so of it getting quieter and quieter until I started to wonder what was the point of using it at all. And I can now make out voices on TV more clearly, with the volume set to 8 or 9 less Volume Units than I’d had to set it before. (Normally I have to set it to 24 to hear it comfortably, but now I can hear it at 16 or 17. Am I the only one who wishes there were consistent units for TV volume across all TV and audio setups?)

These still have the limitations of being AirPods, which make me reluctant to wear them all day. My own voice sounds disturbingly tinny and electronic. My chewing or swallowing noises are unbearable. And there is an occasional very-high-register snapping sound that seems to be a side effect of the signal processing.

But as a feature included with the ear buds I was already using, it’s just an amazing addition from Apple. It’s exciting to think I’ll have it available when I most need it, either when I need to actually hear my coworkers, or when I want to watch TV without having the volume set so high it’s painful for everyone else in the room.

And even better, it’s convinced me that the benefits are enough for me to consider getting tested for a real hearing aid at some point. Even knowing that my hearing was deteriorating, it’s unlikely I would ever have tried to get confirmation and a diagnosis. Apple’s made it easy enough that there was no reason not to.

I’ve spent years talking myself out of buying a “vintage” Macintosh or trying to upgrade my old one, each time thinking I’ve put the compulsion to rest for good, only to have it reawakened a few weeks or months later, the second I see a compact Mac in the background of a YouTube video, or I see a screenshot of an old ICOM game.

A couple of weeks ago, I finally decided to stop the lambs from screaming, and I bought a Macintosh SE from a collector on Craigslist. I spent more than was recommended by people online,¹Although honestly, the “never spend more than $50” advice seems unrealistic based on everything I’ve been seeing for years. I’ve never seen a listing for a functional one including mouse and keyboard for under $150. but it included the original keyboard, mouse, manuals, and box, and it appears to be in excellent condition, so I’m satisfied.

It’s pretty easy to find tons of software for vintage Macs — more than I ever would’ve been able to get in the late 1980s — but actually getting it from the internet onto an actual computer means using a device like the BlueSCSI. I ordered an external one and received it about a week later, and it was so straightforward to use that within a few hours, I’d already ruined it.

That’s just me being over-dramatic. I’d just made it so that the BlueSCSI keeps booting into Dark Castle, which was designed to run from a floppy, meaning it never returns control back to the Finder. So I had a dedicated Dark Castle machine, which honestly wouldn’t be so bad, except that I at least want to be able to run HyperCard as well.

It’s not that complicated to fix, but it does mean re-installing the Basilisk II emulator on my MacBook Pro to fix up my SD card. And running the emulator on a modern computer, with gigabytes of ram instead of 1MB, and a high-speed connection to the internet, and a processor that’s so fast it makes everything open and run instantaneously, is a stark reminder of how much computers have improved since the late 1980s.

And it’s actually made me reassess what kind of nerd I am, and exactly how much. The Mac SE I bought only has 1MB of RAM, meaning it can barely run System 6 comfortably²Hence all the disk swapping I had to do on my Mac Plus back in 1988, and can’t run System 7 at all. I ordered an upgrade to 4MB over ebay³Which, hilariously, cost as much as 16GB in modern RAM, which seemed like a no-brainer, but now has me more than a little anxious about trying to install it.

There’s no shortage online of instructions on how to open up a classic compact Mac, and they all come with warnings about how dangerous it is to work around a CRT. I’ve spent enough time working with PC motherboards that I believe it’d be easy enough for me to do, but there is something that would be even easier for me to do, and that’s not bother with the memory upgrade at all. It already feels like with a machine this old, I’m playing Russian roulette every time I turn it on, just daring the hard drive to finally fail, the power supply to go out, and the computer to demand I leave it to its well-deserved eternal rest.

What kind of computer nerd is reluctant to open up a machine and do a simple memory upgrade? I’m starting to think I’ve spent the last several decades in denial about what kind of computer nerd I actually am.

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  Although honestly, the “never spend more than $50” advice seems unrealistic based on everything I’ve been seeing for years. I’ve never seen a listing for a functional one including mouse and keyboard for under $150.
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  Hence all the disk swapping I had to do on my Mac Plus back in 1988
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  Which, hilariously, cost as much as 16GB in modern RAM

One thing to know about the Vision Pro headset is that it’s very expensive. If you weren’t aware of that, I’m not sure exactly how, since people will remind you of it every possible chance they get. Even though it’s been several months since the initial announcement, and everyone’s had a chance to get over the initial shock, and everybody’s had time to decide whether or not it makes sense for them to buy one¹And again: even as a fan of the device, I still say it doesn’t make sense for most people to buy one, it’s still near-impossible to see or hear anyone mention it without also mentioning the price. I’d been wondering whether Apple had maybe stealth-changed the name of the thing to “The $3500 Apple Vision Pro.”

And I’m not claiming it’s inexpensive; it’s objectively not. I’m a lifelong gadget hound who’s been obsessed with AR and VR to varying degrees over the past several years. When I first tried the headset, I felt like I’d been teleported a decade or so into the future. And even I had considerable difficulty spending that much money.

But what’s been confusing to me is why this product in particular is getting singled out as beyond the pale. Camera drones have gotten pretty popular, but I can’t recall ever seeing a comment to the effect of “Glad you paid $1200-$2100 for that video of your backyard, chief!” Cell phones crossed the $1000 barrier a while ago — and that’s not even mentioning paying $1500-$2000 for an Android phone if it’s got a folding screen on it — but I don’t hear a lot of, “Nice work, boss, you spent over a thousand bucks to send text messages!” I keep seeing recommendations for this video from The Verge about a popular fixed-focal-length, point-and-shoot camera that “won’t break the bank,” and I was stunned to see that it was $1600! And some of the people who most relentlessly kvetch about the price of the Vision Pro will often, in the next sentence, casually mention that they use an Apple Studio Display, which is an Apple-branded monitor that costs $1600.²At least Apple includes the stand with that one, as far as I can tell.

I’m proficient enough in arithmetic to recognize that the headset is more expensive than any one of those examples, but it’s also got a lot more stuff in it. It’s essentially an M2 iPad Pro with a secondary processor dedicated solely to passthrough, two displays with bleeding-edge pixel density, a couple of really good speakers, and an assload of sensors and cameras. (Not to mention the polishing cloth). If it were simply a case of dollar-per-component, the math doesn’t justify the outrage.

I didn’t really get it until just recently. I was watching a video on YouTube, and the Algorithm must’ve been so pleased with itself for choosing a video so specifically suited to me, because it was about a bougie gay couple going on a Disney cruise. As they were describing the boarding process, they showed their luggage, panning over a stack of suitcases. And right there at the top of it was the unmistakable white, puffy Vision Pro case from Apple, which retails at $199.³For the record: the case I bought for mine was $20 on Amazon.

And even as somebody who’s a fan of the device, who’s a strong believer in grown-ups being able to make their own decisions about what they spend their money on, and who was able to (after some effort) come up with a justification for buying one for myself, and who’s even considered taking it on a flight and Disney cruise in the near future, I had an immediate, visceral reaction to seeing that case:

“Man, what a douche.”

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  And again: even as a fan of the device, I still say it doesn’t make sense for most people to buy one
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  At least Apple includes the stand with that one, as far as I can tell.
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  For the record: the case I bought for mine was $20 on Amazon.

As a chronicler of the hottest tech trends and their impact on our society, I have to warn you that Apple has released a device that threatens to rip apart our social fabric as we know it, forcing humans to keep their eyes locked on screens instead of engaging in meaningful contact. They did this in 2007, and it was called the iPhone.

I was initially pleased to see that reaction to Apple’s Vision Pro wasn’t just concentrating on technical specs and feature comparisons, and instead seemed to have more high-minded thoughts about the social impact of technology, the future of computing platforms, etc.

But I’d been optimistically assuming that those conversations would be based on a realistic look at the technology we have today, and how we use it. Not on some late-1990s screenwriter’s notion of jacking into cyberspace.

I’m not objecting to the notion that technology is isolating. I just object to the claim that the problem is somehow unique to a head-mounted display, or that it’s significantly more ominous than what we’ve got now, or what we’ve had forever. It’s a social problem, not (strictly) a technology one.

Well, the good news is that nobody has to listen to my constant debating whether I should get a Vision Pro headset anymore. The bad news, of course, is that now I’m going to be constantly talking about what it’s like to use the Vision Pro headset.

By the time I’d ordered one, it wasn’t scheduled to arrive until the end of February. But as early as the day after launch, I heard that there were plenty of opportunities to make a same-day order, or even to just walk in and buy one. I’m not sure whether that means demand for the device was overstated, or whether Apple had anticipated the rush of early adopters, and I don’t think that it actually matters that much. I doubt that anyone realistically expected this to be flying off the shelves, and anyone outside of Apple who declares this a flop or a hit within the first year and a half (at the earliest) is being foolish.

So far I’ve only used it for about 10 or so hours, and only half of that with the correct lenses (see below). And my early impressions (spoiler) don’t differ all that much from the non-Verge reviews that I’ve seen so far. The stuff that it does well is amazing, it’s easy to imagine¹And, obviously, probably much harder to implement all the ways that future versions are going to improve on it, and it really does feel like the start of a new platform, instead of just a failed experiment. With the emphasis on start of a new platform; it’s still absurd to call this a “developer kit,” but it’s also not yet something that will be useful to more than a fairly niche audience.

For context, if you’re stumbling onto this post somehow: I’ve used the Oculus Rift 2, the HTC Vive, the HTC Vive Focus, PSVR, the Quest, and the Quest 2. And I’ve worked on a couple of VR and AR projects. This is my “first few hours impressions” post. (There are many like it, but this one is mine).

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  And, obviously, probably much harder to implement