Apple’s Vision Quest

Uncanny Valley | WIRED

WIRED

Technology

4.1 • 574 Ratings

🗓️ 8 June 2023

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

After years of rumor and speculation, Apple finally took the wraps off its virtual reality headset this week. The Apple Vision Pro made its debut at the company’s big developer conference in Cupertino, California. The new headset lets the viewer enjoy a fully immersive experience, or dial in a little bit of their visual surroundings to mix the real world and virtual elements together. It’s an impressive feat of engineering. When it goes on sale next year for $3,500, Apple hopes it will serve as its next big platform for app developers—and the usefulness of the apps that wind up on the Vision Pro are what its success or failure really hinges on.

Our own Lauren Goode got to try the headset, and she tells us all about it. We also welcome WIRED product writer and reviewer Brenda Stolyar onto the show to go over all of the other updates Apple announced at its Worldwide Developers Conference, including new Macs, and new software features coming to iPhones, Macs, Apple Watches, and iPads.

Show Notes:

Read Lauren’s hands-on (face-on?) report of the Apple Vision Pro. Read Brenda’s roundup of the new features coming to macOS. Boone Ashworth asks if people really want to wear VR headsets. We also have a roundup of all the big WWDC announcements. Khari Johnson looks at why Apple didn’t talk about GenAI this week, even though it’s currently the hottest discussion topic in Silicon Valley.

Recommendations:

Brenda recommends watching all of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel on Amazon Prime Video.

Lauren recommends the outdoor consumer tech website, DC Rainmaker. Mike recommends the book The Rest Is Noise by Alex Ross.

Brenda can be found on Twitter @bstoly. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode and @laurengoode.bsky.social. Michael Calore is @snackfight and @snackfight.bsky.social. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab on Twitter. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth, @boone.bsky.social). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.

Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	All right, you ready?
0:01.0	Ready.
0:02.0	Everybody good?
0:03.0	Mm-hmm.
0:04.0	Energy up.
0:05.0	Yes.
0:06.0	Yes.
0:07.0	Lauren.
0:08.0	Mike.
0:09.0	Lauren, where are you?
0:10.0	I can't see your eyes.
0:11.0	Like, I look at your face and I just see sort of a bluish purple blob where your eyes are.
0:16.0	Are you in there?
0:18.0	Hold on.
0:19.0	Let me twist my digital crown on my Apple Vision Pro headset. Oh, I can see your eyes now. But you still feel kind of distant like you're not really paying attention. That's the thing with mixed reality. You're really teeing this up quite well. Well, thank you. You're there, but you're not. But you're here, but you're not. Are you present enough to do a podcast? I think we should podcast. Okay, let's do it. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Gadget Lab. I am Michael Collori. I'm a senior editor at Wired. And I'm Lauren Good. I'm a senior writer at Wired.
0:54.9	And we are also joined this week by Wired Product Writer and reviewer Brenda Stolia. Welcome back, Brenda.
1:00.8	Thank you. I'm happy to be back one year later. Yes. You are here in the room with us for our 600th
1:06.1	episode. You should feel totally honored. Oh my gosh. It's the 600 episode. It's number 600. Congrats, you guys. I wonder what that number means in like numerology. We should look at it. Ooh, might be a special number. Look it up for the end of the show. Yeah, I will. It means the singularity is approaching. We should probably tell people what we were originally planning for our 600 episode. We were going to float in a pool.
1:28.3	We were. We had an extremely random idea that we were just going to go find a pool somewhere.
1:33.9	And all of us were going to sit there and tread water with our little Zoom handy recorders
1:40.2	up to our faces and record a podcast.
1:42.5	And our producer was actually on board with this. Sure. Boone, the most excellent producer in the world. Most producers would be like, this sounds like a nightmare from an audio perspective. Like, you're bringing electronics into the pool. We were like, no, we're going to do this. And we had a pool in mind. And we were going to invite Matt Honan to come on the show. Yeah, just ghosts of Gadget Lab passed, I think.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from WIRED, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of WIRED and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.