“Base reality blows.”

“Base reality blows.” … that is scratched into the bathroom mirror at one of my favorite coffee shops in Chicago. It’s also what I said after my very first test session on the Apple Vision Pro. A friend got one and was kind enough to let a few of us demo it yesterday. I was mostly joking, but my first experience on the thing was certainly enough to make me ponder that message on the bathroom mirror.

Here are the first impressions from my two friends and me:

The Engineer: “My very first impression was that it feels like a proof of concept, not a “real” product yet. All the polish you’d expect from Apple hardware is there, that’s what makes Apple … Apple. Learning the eye-tracking and hand gestures was initially challenging and buggy. But that was before we realized how important it is to redo the Eye- and Hand-Detection set-up every time you switch users. After that, it’s much smoother. I can see why this will be really nice for programmers. It feels a clear step ahead of the Meta Quest. The most impressive experiences are the few pre-loaded demos from Apple and their launch partners: taking apart a life-sized F1 car; standing in Alicia Keys’s studio while records a song; standing on a slack line 2,000 feet above a mountain lake in New Zealand; practicing open heart surgery; looking down on a table-top PGA Tour golf-course while the leaders play around the course simultaneously. Right now, there’s not a ton to do with it, other than those demos and watching videos. But they are enough to make you a believer in what the future holds.”

The PGA tour app gives you a tabletop view of the course, from which you can jump into any hole and “walk the course.“

The Visionary: “There are little moments that are just mind-blowing, like when I realized I could physically walk over to a screen in the room and tap on it. Right now (in base reality) we’re in a small room, and virtual reality I have YouTube on one wall, iPhoto on the opposite wall, and Apple TV+ on a third wall. Looking around at my different screens is effortless and natural. The gestures and commands for interacting with them aren’t 100% nailed yet, but you get used to them in a couple of hours. There are almost no third-party apps, but it will be interesting to see what developers do with it eventually. It feels like there’s more opportunity for voice commands. The number of units sold is still so small (200K so far), but still it feels like there are a bunch of businesses you could build on this thing as more people buy it.”

The Optimist (Me): I had read and listened to a ton of reviews and discussion of the device, so I was probably as primed as anyone could be on what to expect–both the good and the bad. Still, the experience of using it exceeded my expectations. There’s not just one mind-blowing moment, but a quick succession of them as you get used to the different things you can do. The one letdown was viewing Spatial Video that I’d captured myself. We just happened to be on our honeymoon when the iOS update supporting Spatial Video dropped, so I started capturing some in the Torres del Paine National Park in Chile. The timing was lucky–if I’d gotten the update three days later, I would never have had such an epic laboratory to experiment in. Still, I had no idea when I’d get to use a Vision Pro, so it was awesome that I got to try one so soon. But I found the Spatial Video to be not necessarily better than any other iPhone video. And Pano photos were surprisingly as good, if not better.

Quibbles aside, my expectations were shattered. I am truly impressed. My biggest take away is that, if I had one of these, it would likely be enough to get me to switch from Windows back to Mac for my main PC. I left Mac after college, and never looked back. So this is a big change. The productivity potential, especially when traveling or working anywhere other than my main workspace, feels immense. But with a price tag around $4,000 with tax, I won’t be buying one any time soon.

So, while base reality is not yet obsolete, my prediction for how much time I’ll spend here just went down. And my understanding of it may change too. Driving home after playing with the Vision Pro for a few hours, the world looked somehow both more and less real.

“I don’t like that person. I must get to know them better.”

“I don’t like that person. I must get to know them better.” On a podcast today I heard Cass Sunstein attribute this quote to Abraham Lincoln. It stuck with me, and immediately I want to make it a permanent habit.

Hearing this got me thinking of people I’ve disliked in my past. In calling just two people to mind, I was surprised how powerful the negative emotions came on, even though I haven’t seen one in at least 10 years, the since high school, 20 years ago. Reflecting, I why good old Honest Abe’s advice resonates with me. When we don’t like someone, we tend to rehearse the things we don’t like about them, or our specific negative interactions with them, over and over again.

Before, during, and especially after our interactions with the person, we’re talking to ourselves about the things we don’t like. Sometimes for decades.

Abe’s antidote (which I now call it in my head) seems like a memorable, straightforward way to short-circuit that routine before it takes hold. That doesn’t mean it will be easy for everyone. But I’ve been lucky in my adult life that there are few people I dislike, and even fewer I need to interact with on an ongoing basis (actually right now, zero). For everyone I meet from now on, I hope in 20 years to feel about no one the way I feel about those few early antagonists. With this new heuristic, I actually think zero is an attainable goal. And if I ever bump into either of the two people I thought about today, I’ll try to get to know them better.

One of my favorite companies is trying to dump me, and I get it.

One of my favorite companies is trying to dump me, and I get it. I’ve been using Evernote for over 10 years, and suddenly they really, really want me to upgrade, or leave. Every time I open the app, I get a full-screen pop-up like this:

I have WAY more than one notebook and 50 notes.

Part of me does feel jilted … at ~20 years old, this company is one of the longest-running freemium consumer businesses on the internet. Now, the constant bombardment with upgrade pop-ups feels a bit like they’re punishing their free users for opting into that model.

But, I won’t listen to that part of me, because I understand what the company is dealing with. Evernote supports over 200 million users (!), with the vast majority on the free version. The company has weathered 2008, COVID, the latest tech bubble burst, and everything in between. Not to mention thousands of competitors with VC dollars to burn. In the meantime, the product has gotten better every single year, and I have consistently loved it.

Reading the announcement that preceded this upgrade campaign, I wasn’t surprised to learn that I use much more data and more functionality than the typical free user. This is why I’m part of the annoy-till-they-buy-or-quit cohort. And I have to give the Evernote team credit: six months into this, and it’s still just barely below the pain threshold that would have made me either upgrade or leave by now. They could have made it much less tolerable than a pop-up, or straight up forced me to upgrade or lose my data. Instead, I’ve been allowed to keep using the app, even though I’m way over the newly defined free tier. To their further credit, they understood they’d definitely lose some users doing this. They were honest about that in the blog, and they remain committed to users’ data ownership and data portability.

Like all software companies, Evernote is operating in a much tougher economic environment, and they could no longer support so many free users and so much free data. I’ve enjoyed almost 11 years of usage and improvements, at no cost. For all that time, Evernote worked hard to build the best app they could, and erred on the side of giving free users too much value, not too little. Now it’s time for me either to give back some of that value, or upgrade. I will probably upgrade … eventually.

“In all interactions, be either a teacher or a student.”

“In all interactions, be either a teacher or a student.” During my improv class last night, I was reminded of this mantra, which I adopted years ago during a period at work when I was really bored. Last night I was sitting there, a student, brand new, and still terrible at the thing we were practicing. It was uncomfortable, but not unpleasant. I was in the beginner’s mind. It was anything but boring.

Reflecting on that bad time at work, I remember endless meetings and busy work—nothing truly challenging, just overwhelming volume. Usually the answer to this type of challenge would be to prioritize what’s most important and ignore the rest. But I was also stuck in a rut, working on nothing very important. I didn’t want to leave, so needed to find something new to focus on. That search could fill only a small part of my day, so the rest was filled with picking up work no one else wanted to own.

So I was bored. Luckily, around that time a new leader joined us, who had an overt leadership style. He would spend as much time teaching others how to operate, think, decide, coach, as he would doing those things himself. He was always teaching.

And there I saw the answer to my boredom: like so many other problems, the best advice is the advice your grandma or grandpa may have given:

I fully endorse at least half of this sentiment.

Or to put it more encouragingly: Bored? Get curious.

If you feel like you’re on autopilot, ask how you could teach those around you to accomplish these things with as much mindless ease. If you feel others are wasting your time, find out why. Maybe they bored too, but no one has thought about whether this stuff is important.

Interestingly, practicing this mindset also helps you notice more viscerally when you’re the new, struggling, or confused person in the room. It makes you a better, more willing student. If every interaction is a teaching or learning moment, you can never be bored.

We’re on the road again.

We’re on the road again, skiing in Vail with our friends. It’s my ~13th annual trip with my friend Brian, who now lives here with his wife and son. One of my favorite traditions, and now Kelly joins. It’s the best.

Honeymoon Recap: The Horse Incident

In Bariloche Kelly captured these majestic horse photos.

The other horses all left. They know his deal.

Actually chasing me! He was like an eager puppy but 100x bigger.

Horses are **not** just Men Extenders. They have minds of their own.

Honeymoon Recap: Photos #3

Bariloche in the Lake District of Patagonia.

East face of Cerro Torre, taken the next day on our shorter hike.

Now down to the Calafate area, visiting the Perito Moreno Glacier.

Even when you’re next to it, it’s impossible to comprehend the size. There is just no sense of scale. These peaks are about five stories above the water. The electric blue piece in the water, which is closer to us than it looks, is at least the size of two school buses. Because of the color, you can tell this piece is super-dense ice, meaning it broke from the bottom and floated up.

~Five miles of glacier, slowly advancing over the mountain, fed by the Southern Patagonia Ice Field. The field is 6,000 square miles, larger than Connecticut.

All three faces, seen from the catwalks across the water. The part we walked on in the first picture is just barely visible at the far left. It’s the tiny peak you can see at the edge of the frame.

Back on the glacier side. Every four years or so, the ice reaches the opposite shore, and creates an ice bridge and a dam. This sign marks the highest level of the lake during the last the bridge in 2018. Apparently, glacier fanatics from all over the world booked stays for that whole summer, and bought tickets into the national park every single day, wanting to see the rupture. Then it broke overnight and no one saw it 😦 .

We saw Dune Part 2, and OMG.

We saw Dune Part 2, and OMG. I’ve never been in a theater so packed where the audience was so imperceptible. One of the things about going to the movies is you hear the people around you … crinkling wrappers, chewing popcorn, whispering to their date, whatever. Not Dune 2. For two hours and forty-six minutes straight, it felt like the entire audience was holding its breath as one, and digging its fingernails into the Music Box’s 90-year old armrests, not a muscle twitching in any of a couple hundred bodies. Go see in theaters, on the biggest screen you can. Look for a theater showing it in IMAX or 70MM. It’s worth it. To anyone in Chicago, I always recommend the Music Box.

Even more than the picture quality, the reason to see it in a special format like IMAX or 70MM is the sound. Just like the first installment, the sound design and sound effects for this movie are like nothing else you’ve ever ~~seen~~ heard. Part One won the Oscar for sound, and I’d be shocked if Part Two doesn’t win that, and probably more*. I joked coming out of the movie that they should just retire the sound category from the Oscars altogether, because this feels like the pinnacle sound effects in the movies. One of the big rewards for those who read the book (humblebrag) is hearing their bone-rattling depiction of “the voice,” a mind-control technique used by the Bene Gesserit.

A few days after seeing it, the other thing that has stuck with me is how scary this movie is. Not with jump scares or atmospheric creepiness like a horror movie. But the genuinely terrifying villains, who are scary in their delight for violence, their naked power seeking, their disdain for freedom and the law. It’s the worldview on display that is scary, more than the individual villains and their mobs. Because the parallels to our world today are so easy to see, where territorial imperialism, ethnic violence, drawn out trench warfare, and threats of atomic escalation are all back with us.

Edit: I realized I hit publish without finishing this post. I still hope everyone will see it, don’t let my downer of a review stop you. The movie is fun and it’s always darkest before the dawn!

May Shai-Hulud clear the path before you (to the Music Box or the nearest IMAX theater).

*PS speaking of the Oscars, how much of a bummer was it for the filmmakers who made shorts this year … when they heard WES ANDERSON made not one short, but several! I’d have been so mad!