00:06:09 · John Coogan
[00:06:09] S1: He says he watches it he watches he uses it every night or something like that. That's a lot of Apple Vision Pro use. Obviously, the product never really found product market fit. Although we have one in the studio, we've been having fun with it. I still think it's an incredible piece of technology, but a little bit of a chicken and egg problem. The developers never showed up And it was very expensive, very heavy, very cumbersome. It requires a lot to put that thing on to watch Lawrence of Arabia. But when you do, it's worth it. It's worth it. What did I watch most recently? I watched Dunkirk in it and I watched Godfather Part two and Master and Commander. Master and Commander, that's a great movie, especially in Vision Pro. Really, you wanna be in the cinematic feel. Feel like you're on a on a on a warship. So, Apple has reportedly stopped development on a cheaper display for a lower cost Vision Pro. This feels like what the industry needs to move forward. The actual display was fantastic. It just needed to be cheaper and lighter so more people could get them. That at least was my thesis, but Apple disagrees with me. What do I know? So the supplier Samsung Display expected to formally end the project by September. And if you remember, there were rumors of the crazy hoops that Apple had to jump through to get that incredible display because they really leapfrogged Meta, who had been working with the acquisition of Oculus, they'd been improving the the display fidelity. They got rid of the screen door effect. They were increasing the resolution per eye. Everything was getting better about that display, but on a very linear trend. And allegedly, what Apple did was they went to Samsung and said, we know that you are working on next year's display. You're also working on displays two years out, three years out, four years out. Now what's the problem with the one that's four years out? Well, it's amazing, but it's not ready for manufacturing at scale. It's not on an automated line. It needs a lot of manual work to get it to actually produce and there's crazy low yield. So in chips, in displays, yield rules everything. If you run the machine a bunch of times, you want to get 99.9% yield, 90%. In the early days, when you're prototyping a new technology, you might be getting just a few percent yield. And Apple said, that's fine.
00:08:25 · John Coogan, Jordi Hays, Vincent Weisser
We'll just jack up the price and pay a ton for these cutting edge displays, jump to the front of the category with the best display technology. We'll charge a fortune for it, but we'll have the best product and that will be our market entry strategy. And so I was waiting for that display technology to commoditize because it's been a few years. I thought it would just naturally get cheaper. It probably has, but it has not solved the problem of virtual reality, augmented reality. We haven't seen someone pick up [00:08:55] S0: Do think they're just bearish on the near term of people watching movies? [00:09:00] S3: Maybe. Yeah. [00:09:01] S0: In in in VR because I don't they're they're certainly not stopping r and d on their specs and their and their sort of everyday glasses product. Yeah. And so it might just be that that they studied you and found that you're built different and you're one of one. You're the only person on earth.
00:09:21 · John Coogan
[00:09:21] S1: Yeah. No. No. I mean, truly, like, sitting down and watching a full movie is a is a rare experience today. People aren't reading. They're watching movies. They're just scrolling and people seem to be satisfied with their phone. And also, the the nature of a Doom Scroll is is somewhat interactive, somewhat multiplayer, although, obviously, people see it as brain rotting and very isolating. There is a game to to be played by actively scrolling, which is something that doesn't require virtual reality, certainly not enhanced by virtual reality. But then also, sometimes you wanna read the comments. Sometimes you wanna send it to a friend. Sometimes you wanna fact check it and ask AI about it or spin off and do something else and go to someone's profile. So I I think the the number of taps and user interaction experiences in a doomscroll scroll session are obviously much, much higher than watching a film, which you just put on and hopefully, you don't pause it at all because you're engrossed the entire time from start to finish. And so if that becomes as scrolling means more and more, maybe the the VR experience is less less and less relevant. So the cheaper display on the Apple Vision Pro or maybe the Apple Vision slim or mini or something. I don't know. They could have used a different name. Pro always always left the door open to just the regular Apple Vision at a more, approachable price point. But the cheaper display that they were working on, would have cut the headset's pixel density roughly in half. That's not what they usually do at all. They need to keep that pixel density because that's the best part of the experience. The move likely reflects Apple's broader shift towards smart glasses. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman previously reported that Apple paused work on a lighter, cheaper Vision Air, yeah, that's the term, in October 2025 to fast track its Ray Ban style glasses effort. This does not mean the Vision Pro itself has been canceled. Apple refreshed the headset in October 2025 with an M5 chip, which does very little, slightly better tracking. I think you can run some applications at slightly higher fidelity, but it is, by all accounts, essentially an identical device. But they are long overdue for a proper refresh if they were taking this seriously and thinking about this as a true growth driver.
00:11:39 · John Coogan, Jordi Hays
I think they have recognized that this was an experiment that needs to be put on the back burner for at least a little bit. And so this report only suggests the cheaper display project is no longer moving forward. So the VisionPro fans have hope. They it's not fully canceled. Maybe there's something else going on. Maybe there's more in the works. But anyway, it's it's it's interesting. I I with all the acceleration in AI, I was hoping that we would get some some, you know, advancements in this since it is an adjacent technology, but we've been few and far between on the updates. We're get an update from the big screen VR team because [00:12:16] S0: That's right. [00:12:17] S1: They have done a great job creating high fidelity VR that's also lightweight, but it needs to be tethered to a PC. It's a little more prosumer, a little more dev kit styling. [00:12:27] S0: VR really attracts these, The visionary chats [00:12:35] S1: coolest guys. [00:12:36] S0: That are willing to go that that seem no. No. I I'm I'm actually Yeah. [00:12:40] S1: You're serious. [00:12:40] S0: I could make that joke, I won't. But just people that are willing to just continually look silly for a long time to ride through the hype cycles and just keep building. Think Big Screen is an example of that. The founder that we had on that has a very cool glasses demo product, he's, from my understanding, probably using AR and VR more than anyone else on the planet, like so committed to just like winning. Yeah. And so I really appreciate that about the category.
00:12:40 · Jordi Hays, John Coogan
[00:12:40] S0: I could make that joke, I won't. But just people that are willing to just continually look silly for a long time to ride through the hype cycles and just keep building. Think Big Screen is an example of that. The founder that we had on that has a very cool glasses demo product, he's, from my understanding, probably using AR and VR more than anyone else on the planet, like so committed to just like winning. Yeah. And so I really appreciate that about the category. [00:13:11] S1: Yeah. Let's see how Apple's doing on the news. Are they trading up or trading down? I pushed the button. Will it come up? We'll see next time. Anyway, let me tell you about Figma. Figma agents agents meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. [00:13:29] S0: Production teams been on. Swearing in [00:13:31] S1: the team chat. Well, here is a crazy story. I mean, it's such a minor story, but it certainly grinds my gears. I think we're going to dig into it and see what you think, what I think once we dig into it. But Getty Images, we know and love them from their trove of Silicon Valley titans photographed [00:13:51] S0: At Sun Valley.
00:13:51 · Jordi Hays, John Coogan
[00:13:51] S0: At Sun Valley. [00:13:52] S1: At Sun Valley, which is happening now. If you don't have a Getty Images subscription, sign up now because you're going to be first to know when the new Josh Kushner paparazzi photo drops. But Getty Images was planning to merge with Shutterstock. These are two essentially stock photo sites. In theory, they should be absolutely decimated by AI image generation. Meta put out a new one, Muse Muse Image. Nano Banana Pro has been fantastic. Images too from OpenAI has been really good. And, like, they're they're honestly getting to the point where a lot of the example images are just like, okay. That's just a photo. I saw Adam Messeri posted some on Instagram, I was like, is this AI, or did you just take this photo? Like, it's just you. And then he did a couple with filters and hair and crazy hair, and those were cool, and and that breeds creativity. So I think there's a bit a lot of value in the technology. But in terms of just, like, I'm trying to illustrate I'm trying to make a point visually. I need a picture of a forest. AI image generation is very, very competitive with the stock image industry and this should have this should be a business that's sort of affected like the way, you know [00:15:08] S0: Yeah. I imagine a lot of a lot of these businesses Cheating what [00:15:11] S1: I checked. [00:15:11] S0: Their net new revenue Yeah. Over the last couple of years is just working with labs that need