Andrew Sharp
Hello, and welcome to a free preview of Sharp Tech. Hello, and welcome back to another episode of Sharp Tech. I'm Andrew Sharp, and on the other line, Ben Thompson. Ben, how are you doing?
Ben Thompson
I'm doing pretty well, Andrew. I don't know. I've been playing around with my headphones. I have regular headphones on now.
Andrew Sharp
Mm.
Ben Thompson
I did get a haircut over the break. I thought the regular headphones were making me look very bald. It was unfortunate. But I didn't put in the in-ear ones. Then I look at you, and you're wearing your stupid AirPods.
I can't decide if this is the least professional-looking setup ever, or if you've gone full circle and it's actually the most professional. I'm not sure.
Andrew Sharp
Do we need to have a more unified look? Should you be wearing AirPods, or should I switch to the over-ear dorky look that you're rocking today?
Ben Thompson
No, I have the in-ear monitor things, but the problem is they always fall out of my ears. I need to fix them. I need to get new ones.
Andrew Sharp
Well, what you need is—
Ben Thompson
Like custom-molded ones or something like that.
Andrew Sharp
—AirPods. You know what I mean?
Ben Thompson
Yeah, yeah.
Andrew Sharp
But I will continue wearing these purely out of spite until the end of time.
Ben Thompson
It does irritate me that during COVID, everyone started doing these hits from home. You'd watch ESPN, and the reporters were doing these hits from home, and they all looked terrible.
Andrew Sharp
Mm-hmm.
Ben Thompson
Why? We have much better video equipment, and we're not even publishing video. It drives me up the wall.
Andrew Sharp
Yeah. Get your shit together, legacy media. For now, Sharp Tech will hold people down as far as aesthetics are concerned, headphones notwithstanding. But in any event, it's great to be back. Ben, we've got a lot to work through today: a robust mullet section, but we will begin with Apple and the Vision Pro.
Ben Thompson
Oh, literally the front of the head. Nice. I like that.
1. The Vision Pro NBA Test
Andrew Sharp
Indeed. Here we are, pass-through vision all the way. Todd says this came in 10 days ago, and he wrote in and said, “After Ben saw the Apple immersive video sizzle reel in June of 2023, Ben wrote, ‘The company was fairly mum about how it planned to make those cameras and its format more widely available.’ But I am completely serious when I say that I would pay the NBA thousands of dollars to get a season pass to watch games captured in this way. Yes, that's a crazy statement to make, but courtside seats cost that much or more, and that 10-second clip was shockingly close to the real thing.”
Ben Thompson
It was more like 3 seconds, by the way, I think, now that I think back to it.
Andrew Sharp
And that's all a reference to immersive video in the Apple Vision Pro from your original Apple Vision Pro article in June 2023. “Fast-forward 30 months,” Todd says, “and it's finally happening.” Here he links to a press release from Apple headlined, “Los Angeles Lakers games on Spectrum Front Row in Apple Immersive tip off January 9.”
So, Ben, it finally happened, but did it really happen? You have now soapboxed about this feature on a bunch of different platforms. Great to see you on TBPN this week, and you also lit into Apple on Dithering. Do you have a CliffsNotes version of your complaint about the Vision Pro NBA broadcast for the audience here on Sharp Tech?
Ben Thompson
Wait, I thought this was my long-form opportunity, and you're telling me to cut it down?
Andrew Sharp
Feel free to go long-form. You did go long-form with an article, an open letter to Apple, on Monday this week.
Ben Thompson
That is the biggest testament to how strongly I feel about this, because I am aware no one in the world cares about the Apple Vision Pro except maybe me. So I'm giving valuable real estate—
Andrew Sharp
It really cracked me up. Just for the record, earlier this week you described yourself as being on a one-man crusade to resuscitate the Vision Pro. There was overwhelming agreement from the Stratechery and Sharp Tech audiences with your takes on the Vision Pro, but I really enjoyed one guy who wrote in and said, “Ben, that was quite good writing about a product literally nobody cares about.”
So here we are again, talking about a product that no one uses.
Ben Thompson
Well, I cared about things before they were cool. Thinking back to the App Store, I was focused on those issues a ton before they became mainstream.
Andrew Sharp
Yep.
10 years in advance.
Ben Thompson
This is caring about things long after they are cool, so you're going to get both sides of the equation. But I have to write what I'm interested in, number one. And number two, I'm more fired up than ever. I'm not just fired up about being right and being irritated—
Andrew Sharp
Hmm.
Ben Thompson
—that, yes, I wrote this take before. I wrote it when the Vision Pro came out. I wrote it when they released that year-in-review MLS video, which was atrocious.
Andrew Sharp
Yeah.
Ben Thompson
It was published by a YouTuber on crack. It was unbelievable. Just 57 gazillion cuts. Even on the same play, you didn't even know where you were. It was discombobulating.
Andrew Sharp
Mm-hmm.
Ben Thompson
I wrote about the Metallica concerts. Super cool, except that when it got really cool, when you felt like they were there, they started cutting to different cameras.
2. Apple’s Content Problem
The core mistakes Apple is making with all these videos are actually intertwined. Mistake number 1 is that there haven't been enough of them.
Andrew Sharp
Yeah.
Ben Thompson
They went, like, a year without anything. It's like, what are you doing? They published these things that were like Chapter 1 or Episode 1, and then a year later you're like, “Is there an Episode 2?”
Andrew Sharp
Is there a Chapter 2?
Ben Thompson
What's going on here? So, number 1, they haven't had enough content for the Vision Pro.
Andrew Sharp
Mm-hmm.
Ben Thompson
And number 2, the problem with the content on the Vision Pro is it's cut for TV.
Andrew Sharp
Right.
3. Television Rewrote Live Sports
Ben Thompson
What is TV? I actually went back and looked at the history of sports on TV, and the first-ever broadcast was a college baseball game on NBC at Columbia in New York City. They had 1 camera, and they had the radio broadcast.
At the time, it was pretty amazing. You can watch something and not be there. What a concept. I'm not being sarcastic. I'm saying I'm sure that was absolutely amazing.
Andrew Sharp
I mean, relative to radio, which people had been relying on for decades at that point.
Ben Thompson
Well, immediately, the next game that NBC did—the second-ever sports broadcast on TV in the U.S.—was a Major League Baseball game, this time in Brooklyn: the Brooklyn Dodgers versus the Cincinnati Reds. What did they figure out in that intervening 3 months between broadcast number 1 and broadcast number 2?
Andrew Sharp
What?
Ben Thompson
2 cameras.
Andrew Sharp
Mm.
Ben Thompson
Because you have this ability to give different perspectives, and that's important because you're not there. When you're there, it's a 360-degree, every-sense immersive environment.
I still love going to baseball games. I go to multiple baseball games a year. What's the whole thing? Part of it is you go in, and it's the concourse, and you're in your seat, and there's the guy selling drinks or popcorn or whatever it might be, and you're talking to the people next to you.
The last game I went to was the Brewers beating the Cubs in Game 5. It was a fantastic experience, all the better; it almost sucked because there were a lot of Cubs fans there.
Andrew Sharp
Yeah.
Ben Thompson
But the Brewers won, so you've got to rub it in their face. That's part of the experience: being there. Even if you go to a game in the middle of summer, it's a beautiful day, you're sitting outside, and you can talk, be on your phone, or do whatever you want to do. It's a full, immersive—
Andrew Sharp
Baseball is a vibe. There's no question.
Ben Thompson
It is a vibe, but even if you go to a football game, I went to the Packers versus the Steelers in Pittsburgh. So I was the annoying Cubs fan, right? You're there, and I—Tucker Kraft was amazing that game. I had a Tucker Kraft jersey on, and I'm pointing to it. I'm sitting in the front row of the section—
Andrew Sharp
And see, this is the stuff that would never be possible, even if the Vision Pro did get it right. But yes, it's all part of the experience.
Ben Thompson
It's part of the experience. Again, the funny thing about going to a football game is that you do see more. Football is kind of interesting because you see the whole field. You see stuff develop in certain ways.
You also don't see good close-ups of things, like what's happening, with all these crazy cameras that they have. But it's an experience of being there that TV can't capture.
Andrew Sharp
Yeah.
4. A New Way To Watch
Ben Thompson
TV is a 2D flat panel in front of you. What they've done brilliantly is create an entirely new way to experience a sporting event, or any sort of event, that accepts this isn't real life. But because it's not real life, there are lots of things we can do.
Andrew Sharp
Right.
Ben Thompson
For the Super Bowl, I talked about how they have 130 cameras or some crazy amount. Football, again, is so well-suited to TV. You can show the play, and then they always show a replay of the play right away, and it's cued up. It all seems so seamless.
They show the All-22 view, or they show a close-up to see if the guy actually caught the ball or not, and then we can have a debate: Was that a catch? Was that not a catch? Whatever it might be. In baseball, you see the replay, or you see those videos of the massive—like, in the playoffs, when there's a game-winning home run and everyone's going crazy. Sometimes they'll show it on Twitter, like the production-truck view of that.
Andrew Sharp
Yeah.
Ben Thompson
It's like, “Cut to camera 3, camera 5.” It feels totally seamless. As a viewer, that's our expectation, and it's part of what makes it great: we get to see the—
College football is going on right now. No one knows because they put too many teams in the playoffs and completely killed the product. But whatever.
Andrew Sharp
Well, and there's a 2-week gap between the semifinals—
Andrew Sharp
I know.
Ben Thompson
—and the finals. Suboptimal as far as momentum is concerned.
Andrew Sharp
What is the classic college football shot?
Andrew Sharp
A shot of 2—
Ben Thompson
The crying coed in the stands.
Andrew Sharp
Coed in the stands.
Ben Thompson
That's right. That's just part of the college football TV experience, right?
Andrew Sharp
Mm-hmm.
Ben Thompson
All this takes advantage of the fact that it's actually a really brilliant example of accepting that this is an inferior product if measured on the basis of being there in person.
Andrew Sharp
Yeah.
Ben Thompson
But let's lean into what is possible given technology and what we could do. You end up with—
Andrew Sharp
We can move around the stadium, up and down the field, in ways that fans sitting in a seat cannot.
Ben Thompson
That's right.
Andrew Sharp
And so, yeah, there are obviously some advantages—
Ben Thompson
Some things, like football, I would argue, are better on TV.
Andrew Sharp
Oh, sure.
Ben Thompson
Right? With a big group of people. That varies. Basketball, I think, is probably the best one in person, especially if you're courtside.
Andrew Sharp
Mm-hmm.
Ben Thompson
There's so much of the physicality and power and incredible grace of these giants striding across the court.
Andrew Sharp
Right.
Ben Thompson
That's just impossible to really get when you're watching on TV. But it varies by sport for sure. They're totally different experiences. What makes the Vision Pro amazing is that it actually gives you a legitimate facsimile of being there in person.
Andrew Sharp
Mm.
Ben Thompson
You get that feeling. When you've got this in the Bucks-Lakers game, you could be sitting there, and Giannis has the ball. Giannis taking the ball down the court on a transition or secondary-transition opportunity is one of the most incredible basketball experiences you will ever have, particularly if you're close to the court.
Andrew Sharp
Mm-hmm.
Ben Thompson
It's impossible that someone this large and this powerful moves the way—
Andrew Sharp
Moves that fast.
Ben Thompson
—that he moves.
Andrew Sharp
Yeah.
Ben Thompson
It's breathtaking. LeBron James is a very similar experience. A thing you get when you're at a game that's hard to get on TV is the degree to which certain players control the game.
Andrew Sharp
Mm-hmm.
Ben Thompson
The all-time great example was—I never felt this more tangibly. I think it was the 2015 Finals, Game 1, where the Warriors had this huge breakthrough. No one expected them. Suddenly, they're in the Finals. They're playing the Cavs, who seemed overmatched.
LeBron's control of that game was so tangible. I was there in the stadium, and every single second of that game had his fingerprints on it.
Ben Thompson
Mm-hmm.
Andrew Sharp
You can get that through TV a bit, but in person, it's like you can sort of feel that.
Ben Thompson
You feel it. Yeah.
Andrew Sharp
I will lean on basketball. It's the sport I know the best. It's the one I've had the most experience with, including courtside experiences, and I know what it's like being there. You get—
Ben Thompson
Also the sport that Apple was trying to broadcast with this product here, unsuccessfully.
Andrew Sharp
Right.
Ben Thompson
Mm-hmm.
5. Apple Keeps Breaking Immersion
Ben Thompson
You get that feeling. What was so frustrating about this presentation was the exact same thing that frustrated me about every other Apple Immersive Video that I've seen.
Instead of being able to luxuriate in that feeling and lose the sense that, yes, it's a little pixelated, yes, in your peripheral vision it's not perfect, and yes, if you move your head really quickly there might be a little bit of tearing, you could get the suspension of disbelief that you were there.
Andrew Sharp
Mm-hmm.
Ben Thompson
And the moment you would start to feel that, boom, it would cut to another camera angle. It would switch to a replay. It was so frustrating, and it was kind of uncomfortable to watch. There's one thing in a fast break where I'm on one camera and it suddenly switches to another camera, and I literally missed the basket because I was discombobulated as to where I was.
Andrew Sharp
Well, that's the thing. Hearing you and reading you describe your experience, it seems like something that would drive me completely insane. As immersive as the Vision Pro can feel, it's still disorienting, and so you have to adjust to whatever the view is. Then, as you make that adjustment, it switches again. It apparently was like that the entire game.
Ben Thompson
The entire game.
Andrew Sharp
It's maddening that they would do it that way. The sizzle reels you were complaining about earlier—watching that, with the jump cuts and everything else, even watching it in 2D, I feel like I'm getting vertigo. I don't know who that is supposed to appeal to.
All of it comes back to Apple's penchant for over-engineering and overproducing this content, which flies directly in the face of your recommendation literally 30 months ago to just put 1 camera on the baseline or courtside and allow people to experience the game that way. That still makes sense.
Ben Thompson
Well, here's the thing. It's not just that they're making it worse. They're also exacerbating problem number 1, which is not having enough content.
Andrew Sharp
Not enough content. Yeah.
Ben Thompson
When you start this broadcast, there's a dedicated studio show for the Apple Vision Pro.
Andrew Sharp
Why do I want this sort of B-list studio presenter giving me a presentation about the—
Ben Thompson
You know what I like to do when I'm at a game?
Andrew Sharp
Watch.
Ben Thompson
I like to watch the players warm up.
Ben Thompson
Yeah.
Ben Thompson
To use another Warriors-Cavs example, I was at Warriors-Cavs—I think it was Game 5, the game that Draymond was suspended for.
Andrew Sharp
Oh, okay.
Ben Thompson
I remember I was with another guy. These were the worst seats I ever had. We were literally on the second-to-last row at the top of the stadium for this game.
Andrew Sharp
Mm-hmm.
Ben Thompson
I know it was the second-to-last row because we got towels for that, and we went to the bathroom, whatever was behind the store towels. But anyhow, Kyrie did not miss a shot the entire warm-up.
Andrew Sharp
I was going to say.
Ben Thompson
It was—
Andrew Sharp
Unbelievable Kyrie game.
Ben Thompson
No, but you could tell. Before the game, my buddy said, “We've seen Steph warm up, whatever. It was nuts.”
Andrew Sharp
Mm-hmm.
Ben Thompson
He's like, “Kyrie might go off tonight.” And he 100% went off that night. He made some crazy shots. Being in the stadium and seeing that happen, seeing him warm up, talking about it, and then seeing him actually do it was amazing. It was the totality of the experience.
Guess what would've been less amazing? “We're going to put you in a little room before the game so you can watch some presenter talk about what's going on.”
Andrew Sharp
Listening to some C-list broadcasters. Yeah.
Ben Thompson
Yeah, it's nuts.
Andrew Sharp
It is. It's more overhead for Apple to do it that way.
Ben Thompson
That's the thing.
Andrew Sharp
Which is what's so insane.
Ben Thompson
To have multiple cameras, to have a studio show, to have dedicated announcers—all of this makes it worse and also reduces the amount of content available. I don't understand. All I want, and I'm more convinced than ever that I'm right about this—even if I'm not right—is to put a camera at every game. That's it.
Ben Thompson
Yeah.
Andrew Sharp
Just—and nothing else.
Ben Thompson
I don't need a play-by-play announcer. I can listen to the crowd. I can listen to the PA announcer. I don't need a scoreboard. I can look up at the scoreboard, which is, by the way, what I did in this game.
In this game, they did have a score bug. It was way at the bottom, so you had to look down weirdly to see it. I just looked up at the scoreboard around the ring—
Andrew Sharp
The jumbotron. Is that right?
Ben Thompson
In the stadium. Yeah. Well, I looked at the ones around the edge, right?
Andrew Sharp
Oh, okay.
Ben Thompson
Like where you normally look if you're sitting courtside. That's where you look anyway, because it's a pain in the neck to look up that high. And so they could solve both problems. They could, I think, have a better product, and they could have way more stuff.
This is why I'm super worked up about this. It's not just that I think I'm right and I'm disappointed I'm not getting what I want. To me, this is a reason to buy the Vision Pro. I would rather have 10 things that are way overproduced—even if they were awesome, and they're not awesome—
Andrew Sharp
Yeah.
Ben Thompson
Even if they were awesome, I would rather have 10,000 things that are pretty good, and I can experience all these things that I couldn't otherwise.
Andrew Sharp
Mm-hmm.
Ben Thompson
And the funny thing is, the whole world is conspiring to make this an opportunity. Everything digital is commoditized. There are a gazillion things. Why was— We talked about this with Taylor Swift and the Eras Tour.
Andrew Sharp
Right.
Ben Thompson
There's something about live experiences. Now, is the Vision Pro the same as being there with a bunch of crazy teenage girls and getting friendship bracelets? No. But live events and something that's happening in the moment are increasingly rare and increasingly special.
I think Apple has the capabilities. They've built all the pieces. They made these cameras, which, by the way, are dramatically smaller. It's actually pretty amazing how small they are compared to the way they used to be. You could see them dangling from the basket and things on those lines. They built this pipeline. They've now shown they can do it live.
They have these devices that are incredible experiences. They could build a marketplace to sell live tickets to basically everything on Earth. They could—
Andrew Sharp
Well, and they would also have users for the Vision Pro, which they don't currently have, and then who knows what flourishes from there, from that foundation.
Ben Thompson
Once you have users, you'll get developers. That's the thing. There is no chicken-or-egg problem. It's a one-way street. You need to get users first, which means you need that core use case. And to me, this core use case is there. The only thing standing in the way is Apple's refusal to—
Andrew Sharp
Loosen the reins.
Ben Thompson
To overengineer, to over— Right, overengineering. That's why I put it on the front page. I'm like, look, I already wrote this in the Daily Update. Maybe you're not subscribers, whoever's in charge of this, and you didn't read it. Can someone please—
6. Apple Must Save The Vision Pro
Andrew Sharp
Let me address it directly to Apple. Directly to Cupertino: please, for the love of God, save this device.
I mean, just for the record, I care about the Vision Pro and will always enjoy talking about it because it was a product that I thought was stupid. Reading about it and hearing people like you—
Ben Thompson
You don't want it to succeed.
Andrew Sharp
—and John Gruber rhapsodize about it, I was like, “These nerds.” But then I tried it, and the experience of using that hardware is undeniably really cool. And as a tech podcast—
Ben Thompson
No, it remains one of the best 30-minute demos of all time. It's mind-blowing.
Andrew Sharp
Well, totally. You and I are on here talking about software, cost structures, and regulation. If I think about the coolest piece of new tech hardware that has been released this decade, it's pretty clearly the Vision Pro, in my book.
Now, Apple has not given me a reason to spend $4,000 on a headset to date. And you offered to buy one for me, and I was like, “You know what? I don't want to waste the company's money on something that I'll use once every 6 months.” So I would be a customer, and there's just no content for me to consume.
Related to all this, though, I'll read this note from Aaron. He says, “Guys, I wholeheartedly agree with Ben's takes on live events and where the Vision Pro has gone wrong. His solution is lower cost, higher volume, and a differentiated viewing experience. It's so baffling a decision that I can't figure out what could possibly be driving it. One of Ben's axioms”—paraphrasing here—“is don't assume people are stupid. Assume they are smart. So, assuming the Apple executives sort of know what they're doing, what is the possible steel-man argument for why they've hitched the Vision Pro to this terrible wagon?”
7. Apple’s Strategy Needs Explaining
Can you make a steel-man argument? Do you have theories on why Apple is here?
All right. And that is the end of the free preview. If you'd like to hear more from Ben and I, there are links to subscribe in the show notes, or you can also go to sharptech.fm. Either option will get you access to a personalized feed that has all the shows we do every week, plus lots more great content from Stratechery and the Stratechery Plus bundle. Check it out, and if you've got feedback, please email us at email@sharptech.fm.