Less than 2 percent of console video games include L.G.B.T.Q. characters or story lines even though 17 percent of gamers are queer

To be clear, this isn’t 2% of console games having a queer main character or that 2% of console games have strong themes around LGBTQ characters, this is 2% that have any representation at all.

And yet this significant underrepresentation drives some people mad. “When people get used to preferential treatment, equal treatment seems like discrimination.”

Here’s the good news from the study:

When asked if a game had the option for the player character to be gay, lesbian,or bisexual, 70% of non-LGBTQ gamers say that would make no difference in their decision to buy the game. The resistance toward LGBTQ content in games is waning, as each successive generation of gamers is more diverse and more open to seeing LGBTQ representation in their games.

You love to see it.

The retail giant is in talks to buy smart television-manufacturer Vizio for more than $2 billion, according to people familiar with the situation. The move would give Walmart more places where it can sell ads and pitch shoppers on goods.

The TV market has really gone through a hell of a business model shift in the last decade. It used to be TV makers were out there trying to turn a profit on selling you the TV. Then margins got so low that they ended up selling them basically at cost and then making money on selling ads at best and your data at worst. This article cites being able to get ads in front of more people as the main reason for Walmart to make this acquisition! 😑

According to a recently released report from app intelligence firm Appfigures, over half of Vision Pro-only apps (52%) are paid downloads — a surprising percentage given that across the wider App Store, only 5% of apps monetize this way.

My impression is we’re more in gold rush territory than sustainable business territory when it comes to Vision Pro software. There are a few hundred thousand people out there with cash to spend who want to justify their major purchase, and they’ll YOLO on more paid apps than they normally would for their phone. This isn’t judging, I’m one of these people too!

I will also say that in a world where most software has a free trial, paid-up-front apps are actually great for someone like me who makes a modest business of reviewing apps on YouTube. When an app has a free trial, I think a lot of people will just try the trial and see how they like the app. But if an app is paid upfront, they could be more likely to search YouTube for some hands-on impressions to get an idea of whether the app is worth their money. The open question is whether the relatively tiny market for these apps right now will pay off for me as a YouTuber. Candidly, I hope I can be someone showing how visionOS works in practice so other people can get an idea for when and if they want to jump on board.

1. Gemini Nano, which runs locally on devices as small as your phone
2. Gemini Pro, which runs on a server and was the back end for Bard
3. Gemini Ultra, which didn’t run anywhere public back then

Just last week Google announced they were changing the name of Bard to Gemini. They were also allowing you to use Gemini Ultra in Gemini by using Gemini Advanced. Got it?

Cut to one week later and Google has announced Gemini 1.5. Presumably this will come in the Nano, Pro, and Ultra variants, and Gemini 1.5 Pro will be in Gemini while Gemini 1.5 Ultra will be in Gemini Advanced. The blog post only ever references Gemini 1.5 Pro and compares it to Gemini 1.0 Ultra in performance, so we’ll just have to assume that’s the case.

Anyway, I hope that’s crystal clear and you understand how Google is good at naming and rollouts.

Sony execs also said that its current-gen hardware, the PlayStation 5, is nearing the end of its life cycle.

I think the PS5 and Xbox Series console generation will go down as one of the most anonymous gaming generations ever. Not to say it’s been bad, just that it’s a generation that seems like it still hasn’t gotten off the ground, even in it’s 4th year. Launching in the height of the pandemic didn’t help, extreme stock shortages for over a year made it worse, and we were coming off maybe the most successful generation (sale-wise) of consoles ever so the installed base on PS4/XBO hardware was too big to ignore for game developers (even today, many games from big publishers are still releasing on PS4 and Xbox One). Sony’s done alright with getting some exclusives on their console, although again most of those released on PS4 as well, but we’re also dealing with a Microsoft who despite buying up as many game studios as they legally can, seem to not be able to put out an interesting exclusive game to save their lives.

Oh, and Nintendo is on a different schedule (Switch launched in 2017) and has smoked both of these guys in terms of unit sales, and it wasn’t until last year that Sony finally overtook them.

Console generations have gotten longer over time, in large part because the tech has advanced slower than in the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s, and recently it’s been year 3-4 where consoles really start to hit their stride with tons of new games, most gamers having upgraded to the new tech, and developers comfortable with and exploiting the hardware to its fullest potential. That’s why Sony saying the PS5 is nearing the end of its life cycle just after its 3rd anniversary on the market is a bit surprising.

He was immediately struck by the quality of the build. The metal really impressed him and he said tightening the head strap was super satisfying.

He moved on through the guest mode configuration steps and was impressed that the lenses would automatically align themselves. He said he was impressed with the eye tracking before he'd even finished the 4 step calibration process.

Then he jumped into the demo and he was already impressed with how good the app grid looked before getting into any software. He walked around it and got as close as he could and was impressed it all held up to close scrutiny.

His first critique was that the pass through video wasn't as sharp as he expected. This isn't an exact quote, but it was something like, "it's weird, the real world looks blurry, but all the digital stuff looks super sharp."

He once again mentioned how good the eye tracking was and that it felt very natural to look at what he wanted and to pinch to interact. This was the opposite of my wife's experience who said it felt unnatural to focus with one body part and interact with another.

Then we did the 2 things I think a lot of people demo for new users: the dinosaur demo and the F1 car. We did the F1 car first and he was absolutely blown away when it appeared in the middle of the office. He said "wow!" a bunch of times and commented on how he instinctually was walking around the car as if it was real to get to the other side because it felt so lifelike. This demo actually went longer than I expected as he started plucking pieces of the car off and examining them up close.

Then we moved to the dinosaur demo and he did a good job navigating the UI himself and starting the experience. I told him he could put his hand out and he said something like, "stop it! really!?" when the butterfly landed on it. Then the main event began and the bigger dinos showed up. I don't know if he was aware we was doing it, but he clenched his fists and tensed up when it stuck its head out of the frame and came into the room. "Can I pet it?" he asked and I just told him maybe, and he flinched and flew back a foot when the dino snapped at him. By the end he was giggling with glee.

We had to each go to our respective meetings after that, but he really would have kept using it for quite a while if he could have. Ultimately, he said he's not going to get one (price), but that it really was a revelatory experience and was unlike anything he'd seen before.

He says the Quest has a better “immersive” content library than Apple, which is technically true for now, though he admits that the Vision Pro is a better entertainment device. And then there’s the fact that the Quest 3 is, as Zuck says, “like seven times less expensive.”

I currently own both headsets and while I’m very excited about the potential in the Vision Pro, I actually find it hard to fully disagree with Zuck on this one. I think a lot of people have only used the Vision Pro would be surprised how well the Quest 3 does some things in comparison.

For example, the pass-through mode is definitely not quite as good as the Vision Pro’s, but it’s closer than you might expect. And while people are rightly impressed with how well the Vision Pro has windows locked in 3D space, honestly the Quest 3 is just as good at this in my experience. When it comes to comfort, I do think the Vision Pro is easier to wear for longer periods, but I find it more finicky to get in just the right spot in front of my eyes, while the Quest 3 seems to have a larger sweet spot. And let’s not even talk about the field of view, which is way wider on the Quest to the point of being unnoticeable basically all the time. I kinda think field of view will be similar to phone bezels in that you get used to what you have and anything more seems huge — you can get used to the Vision Pro’s narrower field of view, but once you’re used to wider, it’s hard to not notice when going back.

The Vision Pro has some hardware features that help it rise above (the massively higher resolution screen jumps to mind), but I’m just saying that if you’re looking for everything to be 7x better to match the price difference, I don’t think that’s there.

Beyond this, the products are quite different, though. As Zuckerberg says, the Quest 3 is more focused on fully immersive VR experiences, and while the Vision Pro has a little of that right now, it’s not really doing the same things. And when it comes to gaming it’s not even close. The Quest 3 has a large library of games available and that expands to almost every VR game ever made with Steam Link.

On the other hand, the Vision Pro is much for a “computer” than the Quest ever was. If you can do it on a Mac or an iPad, you can probably already do it on the Vision Pro. And I’m not talking about finding some weird alternate version of your task manager or web browser that doesn’t sync with anything else in your life, I’m talking about the apps you already know and love. This is huge and it’s Apple leveraging its ecosystem to make sure you can seamlessly move from Mac to iPhone to iPad to Vision Pro. And if you can’t install something from the App Store, the web browser is just as capable as Safari on the iPad. If all else fails, you can always just bring your full Mac into your space as well. I will say the Quest 3 can do this and has the advantage of working with Windows as well, but if you have a Mac, it’s much, much better.

This is more words than I expected to write about a CEO saying his product is better than the competition’s (shocker), but I do think that Zuck’s statement is less insane than some may think it to be. I’m returning my Quest 3 before the return window closes, but I’m really happy that I got to use it for a little bit to see what else is out there and how Apple’s entrant stacks up. I think the fact I’m in the middle of both return windows and I’ll be returning the $500 one and keeping the $3,500 one says something about which I find more interesting in the long run, though. Also please watch my YouTube videos 🤣

Though I’ve come to depend on my GPT, it’s the only one I use.

I’ve had the exact same experience. I fully expected that the GPT store would be full of cool tools that I would download and find interesting uses for instead I’ve installed precisely zero of them because none of them seem to solve things that I wanted to do with ChatGPT.

But that’s not to say the custom GPTs are useless, I’ve made several that I use on a regular basis. I have one that fetches movie trivia, another that helps me with alt text, and another that sanity checks and proofreads my blog posts. I built them myself and I find them quite useful. I find them so useful, in fact, that while I’m impressed with Google’s latest Gemini release, my personal GPTs make ChatGPT the more compelling LLM service for me right now.

The interesting thing for me is that this is exactly how I feel about Apple’s Shortcuts as well. I have a dozen or so that I’ve created for myself and I wouldn’t want to live without, but I use precisely zero from the Shortcuts directory and only one that someone else has created. I guess the only automations I enjoy are the ones I make myself 🤷🏻‍♂️

Let's get one thing out of the way: I think Apple's vision for what work could look like in a VR headset is far more compelling than what Meta has shown with its metaverse products so far. Apple's vision feels much more human, and much more about creating a digital workspace in the real world, and that appeals to me.

I’ve used a Quest 3 now as well and I would agree that I still think Apple’s real-world-first headset is more compelling than the PS3-era graphics of Meta’s metaverse concepts.

That said, I still really don't know if this tech is ready for prime time, and I cringed numerous times during the WWDC presentation when people were acting like absolute lunatics.

This is where I think I lost some people, with “lunatics” being perhaps a bit aggressive.

It's also worth mentioning that what we saw today was completely theoretical. None of this was direct capture of real software, it was more of a concept video. Yes, I'm sure the UI will look very much like this, but the fidelity and usability of this isn't proven yet.

So I’m not 100% sure on this, but I have been told that the first-person views in the WWDC announcement video were effectively real, but of course recorded in ideal environments. I suspect Apple had some custom recording software and maybe some other small tricks up their sleeve, but the software experience is basically exactly what they showed, so good on them.

Also, that Disney segment was hilariously CG and the final software simply won't look anything like that (you can quote me on this next year).

Yeah, while Disney was there on day one with a pretty solid Disney+ app, so much of what they showed in their sizzle reel isn’t…real. Again, I have it on good authority that while Apple’s demos were done with real software, Disney’s was very much a CG concept video.

Then I got into the things I expected the product to be good at:

Movies are a great use case, and if the quality of the image I see is about as good as I can get from my 4K TV, then this looks like the killer app for me personally.

Just yesterday I wrote about the movie-watching experience in the Vision Pro and this lines up nicely with my prediction.

Working at my desk on basic things could work really well too. This won't run macOS, and I have big questions about how iPad apps in this environment will function, but if the software is there, I could see some situations where working on this space could be appealing.

Still to be determined long term as there’s not enough software here to prove anything definitively. We need to see how the visionOS software library grows from here, although one thing I didn’t fully appreciate at the time was how compelling using my Mac in this space would be.

Being on a video call where I don't have to be on camera would be fun.

A pretty mild point, but yes camera-off meetings are nice in this thing.

Then I got onto the things that didn’t resonate for me.

I cringed so hard when the dad took a video of his kid playing. I don't care about the digital eyes peeking through, this feels dystopian to me.

I still think this is true, and looking at Apple’s marketing and training videos since WWDC, I do think it’s notable that they have never again shown someone at a social gathering (let alone their kid’s birthday) with the headset on. Adding spatial video capture to the iPhone 15 Pro also lessened the need for them to show this use case, which was a great update that removed the need to capture spatial videos with the headset.

Likewise, the guy walking around the office with the headset made me chuckle. “There’s Phil, he’s on his computer 100% of the time at work. What a legend.”

Again, I stand by this one — you may wear the headset at your desk, but you aren’t going to wander around the office with it on. And as we now know from using the headset, we know this wouldn’t even be useful since all your windows would be back at your desk so you’d be wearing the headset for no reason at all in the break room.

And while I think calling into video calls would work, I would never have my video on with those weird 3D models. We are deep in the uncanny valley, friends.

Here’s what my persona looks like today:

I’m not joining a video call with my colleagues looking like this.

Then I got into my final thoughts:

There’s something here, but a lot of things aren’t fully cooked yet, and the price tag is so astronomically high that it’s going to be a massively niche product for the foreseeable future.

I still agree there’s something real here and that many aspects of the device are not fully cooked yet. That’s not a burn, it’s just the fact of every single 1.0 product ever made. And yes, the $3,499-3,899 price tag makes this super niche.

I think people who buy this in 2024 will get a product that lets them interact with software in a way they never have before, and I think there will be magical moments that turn these people into proponents of the platform as “the future,” even if the utility right now is limited.

Again, yes!

I also think that the actual things people use this headset for will be things they do alone. As soon as you’re interacting with someone in person, the headset is coming off. Wearing this thing at a kid’s birthday party will be seen as borderline psychotic behavior.

Can you tell the birthday party scene bugged me? I may have once again chosen aggressive (“borderline psychotic behavior”) language here, but I do think that if you walk into a room and want to talk to someone wearing a Vision Pro headset and they don’t take it off, I think that’s rude and isn’t likely to change soon.

Finally, this is how I wrapped things up:

Ultimately, we saw Apple’s vision for the 1.0 of this product today. I’m interested to see what it’s like to actually use from journalists and regular users, and I’m excited to see what use cases end up working well and which don’t. Maybe my initial impressions from today will hold up, or maybe they won’t, but it’s going to be an unusually unpredictable time in the Apple space, and that’s pretty exciting.

Leading up to launch I started describing my Vision Pro feelings as “skeptically optimistic,” and looking back on this post from the announcement day, I think that is where I was right from the start. I do believe this is an exciting time and I am enjoying seeing real people use the Vision Pro and I’m enjoying being one of those people trying to figure out what this is good for and how it can improve over time. I do think it’s still very niche and I do think that wearing this at social occasions is not socially accepted, and Apple’s updated marketing seems to agree those aren’t angles to push. Honestly, I worried I was going to have to eat crow on some of these points, but I think I was more on point than I expected. Maybe 10 years down the line things will change and it will be weird not to obscure your face in front of your kid at meaningful moments in their life or when you talk to a coworker at the coffee machine at work, but that’s not what any of this was about (and still color me skeptical we get there with headsets like this).