Wavelengths

On this week's episode of Wavelengths I talked to Chris Plante of Polygon.com and The Besties about what it would take for a company to become a major player in the video game console market in 2023 and beyond.

This week on Wavelengths I dig into the mystique surrounding what I believe to be the most exciting new game studio out there: Gardens. Over the past year or so they've been slowly getting their name out there with some unbelievable concept art and a few well-placed news hits that have me absolutely amped about what they're working on. Afterwards we chat a bit about Blizzard's games and old Call of Duty titles taking on new life after the Microsoft acquisition of Activision Blizzard King, and some news surrounding some incoming Metroid Prime and Zelda ports.

This week on Wavelengths we need to talk about the legacy of Gex and why EVERY game is part of video game history. Making his return via a remastered trilogy collection with Limited Run Games, are we ready for some kid to grow up and create a Gex 4?

Also up today: A conversation about what's going on with the Borderlands movie and word from Square Enix on upcoming pixel remasters based on the successes of Final Fantasy.

This week on Wavelengths I absolutely had to talk about the recent Pokemon Sleep information we got via a "how to" video. Generally I am more in favor of The Pokemon Company's version of trying to find a new hit than Niantic's — making apps that help tangibly with people's livelihoods will always be more enticing — but they have SUCH a bad habit of making their games way too complicated.

Less than a single day after launch over 30 million people have joined Threads, Instagram's version of Twitter. The app is very much a minimum-viable-product copycat of Elon Musk's bird site, but their version of an MVP is still significantly more feature-rich and ready for prime-time than most other recent challengers to the throne.

The big advantage here is the use of Instagram's social graph to boost Threads signups on day one. The onboarding flow is as easy as "tap on your Instagram profile, tap on a second button to follow everyone you already follow over there, and you're done" which takes about fifteen seconds and is a significantly simpler experience than Bluesky which requires a highly coveted invite code or Mastodon which requires a whole separate blog post to explain. I think most users will discover pretty quickly that the people you followed for their photos or life updates are absolutely not the same people you want short-form text updates from... but how much does that really matter to Mark Zuckerberg who gets to boast Threads is well on its way to being the fastest growing social app of all time? Whatever gets you on board, baybee!

The app's single home feed is currently algorithm-heavy, mixing very few posts from people you follow in with a majority of posts from random users, celebrities, and brands platform-wide. The ratio is clearly way off here, and users have been loudly clamoring for a change. Adam Mosseri, Instagram and Threads' lead within Meta, has already publicly stated a feed of people you follow is incoming. Beyond that there are a lot of basic social networking features that are surprisingly absent from Threads at launch: Hashtags, usable search, post editing, post translation, alt-text on images — the group of features Mosseri has described as "on the list" feels exponentially huge. You have to wonder what the priorities will be and how long it will take to see some of these features come to the platform. Threads has a huge advantage out of the gate by tapping into Instagram's userbase of over two billion people, but retaining those users by listening to community feedback is going to be as challenging as building the app in the first place.

So it's worth keeping in mind Instagram's track record here. It's 2023 and Instagram still doesn't have an iPad app because it's "just not a big enough group of people to be a priority." Meta, one of the largest tech companies in the world, can't allocate any of their resources towards creating a high quality tablet experience for their app built around sharing and viewing photo and video? It's nonsensical! If the entire iPad userbase doesn't represent "a big enough group" to make a dedicated experience worthwhile, what does that say about accessibility features or other niche-but-important requests?

Assuming the state of Threads as it stands today will remain the same for an extended period of time, I see the app taking on a different life from just being "new Twitter." At launch, Twitter featured a reverse-chronological feed with no algorithmic intrusion, making it a great news delivery mechanism if you followed the right people. Those first few months and years of the service established the norms and future of how Twitter and the social web at large evolved. Third-party apps like Tweetie invented the pull-to-refresh interaction we see in every app on every device today. Users of Twitter began implementing hashtags as a way to more easily find like-minded community members via search, a feature which eventually became core functionality for the experience. But it all started with the launch product and timely updates from friends and proto-influencers. Twitter as a product has never really strayed too far from everyone's initial impression (despite Elon's best efforts).

By comparison, Threads is establishing its own norms in lieu of the aforementioned missing features. Brands are scrambling to figure out the right post-cadence and tone. Is posting breaking news moot in the face of an algorithmic feed? If your Threads and Instagram followers are the same, will posting images to a text-based platform feel redundant? These are questions which will be answered without intervention from Mosseri and team, and instead be dictated by the early adopters and community members who find hacky ways to actualize new methods of interaction with the toolset that is currently available in 1.0.

Am I excited that Mark Zuckerberg's Twitter has the best shot at being "the next big thing" given the many viable alternatives? Absolutely not! But there's no denying that Threads will be a hit despite Meta's track record for lying, stealing, and knowingly upending society. In the face of this, the internet-obsessed kid inside of me who loved to text 40404 to tweet in 2007 is excited to witness the birth and evolution of something that is accidentally unique because of what's missing instead of mind-numbingly samey because of what's already there.

I'm brendonbigley on Threads.

This week on Wavelengths is all about what we know for sure about the Nintendo Switch 2... or Super Nintendo Switch... or New Nintendo Switch? Whatever!!

We finally are getting some concrete information straight from Nintendo and publishers about its power and the possibility of backwards compatibility.

This morning saw the lifting of a preview embargo for the upcoming Final Fantasy XVI, and with it a bunch of quotes from producer Naoki Yoshida that are being both praised and dunked on in equal measure depending on which interview you happen to be reading. One such interview that stood out to me came from a great video by critic SkillUp whose first question asking to clarify some earlier statements about the evolution of the JRPG genre elicited this response:

One thing he wants to get across is that when we create games, we don't go into them thinking we are creating JRPGs. We are just creating RPGs. The term JRPG is used by Western media rather than users and media in Japan. This is going to depend on who you ask but there was a time when this term first appeared fifteen years ago, and for us as developers the first time we heard it — it was like a discriminatory¹ term — as though we were being made fun of for creating these games. And so for some developers the term JRPG can be something that will maybe trigger bad feelings because of what was in the past. It wasn't a compliment to a lot of developers in Japan. We understand that recently JRPG has better connotations, and it's being used as a positive, but we still remember the time when it was being used as a negative. I remember seeing something fifteen years ago which was basically a definition of what a JRPG was versus a western RPG. It's kind of like Final Fantasy VII, and it has this type of graphics, this length of story — and compartmentalizing what we were creating into a JRPG box. And I took offense to that because that's not how we go into creating. We were going in to create an RPG, but to be compartmentalized we thought that was discriminatory.

I've been a bit hesitant to use the term JRPG over the past few months, as I started to question it myself around the release of Elden Ring. I'd seen some discussion online referring to the game as a JRPG despite not containing any of the mechanic elements I usually attribute to the genre. I asked myself why we use JRPG against other terms like ARPG (action role playing game) or SRPG (strategy role playing game) where the first word in the acronym describes how the player will interact with a game's systems². How is the word "Japanese" really helpful as a mechanic descriptor compared to "action" or "strategy?"

As a genre definition, most people attribute it to games containing turn-based combat, games made in Japan, or maybe some combination of both. Yet in the year 2023 we're far enough removed from the early days of Pokémon and Dragon Quest to be blessed with new titles inspired by those franchises and created by developers all over the globe. 2022's incredible Chained Echoes contains all of the trappings of the JRPG genre, but was created by a small team out of Germany. The upcoming Sea of Stars — similarly inspired by Chrono Trigger — is from a studio based in Quebec. Forum-arguers on the internet would likely disqualify both of these titles from the genre, despite allowing a franchise like Kingdom Hearts — which lacks turn-based combat in favor of real-time action. What this means in our current vernacular is that most would argue an RPG is the "default" terminology... unless it's made in Japan... and that seems like a super incorrect way to consider or classify genre.

In light of these comments from Yoshida³ about JRPG possibly being read as discriminatory, along with its definition being so broadly applied as to become almost amorphic, it seems like the term needs a rethink. In my eyes, it's not too much of a leap given the other RPG sub-genres already in use to say that "turn based RPG" is what most people mean when they say JRPG. Going forward, that's probably what I'll be using to describe games like Dragon Quest alongside the more general "RPG."

That said, all terms used to describe genre can and should be malleable. They should grow, evolve, or dissolve with the times. The most interesting and forward-thinking RPGs of today bear small resemblances to the games that defined the genre, but can be classified as RPGs all the same. What we considered to be a Metroidvania ten years ago looks very different than it does today, and I've gone as far as claiming a Sudoku app can be a roguelike so I'll always be the first to tell you to rethink the vocabulary used to describe creative works.

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¹ There's also the entire bit about the lack of diversity in FF16 and Yoshida's disappointing response. His obviously horrible and close-minded take about a made up fantasy setting only having room for white people doesn't discount his very valid feelings about JRPG as a descriptor.

² Next up we'll need to figure out a new one for CRPG considering a lot of those games are available on an Xbox, which is kind of like a computer... but not exactly.

³ None of this really gets into Yoshida's larger point about finding genre trappings in general to be creative constraints he wants to break free from, and that leads into why people are dunking on him relentlessly for saying blitzball doesn't fit into the world of Final Fantasy which he envisions as a dark and gritty and Game of Thrones-adjacent world instead of one capable of containing small joys in the face of great darkness. I sympathize with wanting to chart your own path — especially when it comes to a franchise like Final Fantasy which was built on a foundation of innovation — but to do so while ignoring the legacy and successes of the past titles will only serve to anger the very people you're hoping to win over.

After dropping out of college, joining a band, moving in with the band, watching the band fall apart, and then subsequently finding myself with an increasing amount of pent-up musically creative energy, I decided I wanted to make something of my own.

I was also about five years deep into a stint of severe insomnia — from my first year of high school onward I generally only slept about an hour or two each night. After my friends would fall asleep and there was nobody left awake to play games with or text or talk to on the phone, I'd spend the quietest hours of my evenings teaching myself how to produce music.

The blend of these two issues manifested itself into a love of producing and listening to ambient music, and I set out with the goal of creating an album that would help me fall asleep each night. It was freeing to break away from the verse-chorus song structure I'd become so acclimated to, allowing myself to let long droning synths reverberate for hours into the night or searching for field recordings of windy plains or rainy farmhouses to see how I could incorporate the sounds of nature into my compositions. I'd write a song, load it onto my iPod, hop into my car, and cruise around empty New Jersey streets to hear how it worked as a soundtrack for the drive. In the span of about three weeks, I'd finished and released my first solo album under the artist name Boqeh: Halcyon.

Halcyon saw the beginning of a new habit: Almost every single day I'd open up my laptop and throw some nice sounding synths and chords together and let them loop endlessly while I worked on other tasks. Usually these project files would get deleted at the end of the day, but every once in a while they'd be saved and fleshed out into a full track for a hypothetical future album release. My next few ambient albums as Boqeh all followed that same songwriting process, but I eventually got more into the habit of deleting files than saving them. Slowly but surely, I stopped releasing music altogether as my career and other creative endeavors took center stage in my life.

Although I grew into the habit of deleting my daily project files, I never kicked the habit of starting a new one almost every morning. In 2018 while discussing the rise of ten-hour relaxation YouTube videos and 24/7 lofi hip-hop beats streams with a friend, I wondered aloud why I wasn't using the huge volume of music I was creating and disposing of daily to do something similar.

It's taken ten years since the release of Halcyon for me to feel confident enough to make it happen, but I'm finally done erasing the work I create.

Enter Sleep Buddy.

Sleep Buddy is both a new project and revitalization of the intention behind Halcyon — albums of carefully crafted and original ambient music with the goal of helping listeners fall asleep or relax while working on other tasks. Today marks the release of the first album: Intro.

Intro is a thesis statement. Available as a ten hour YouTube video (of course), on Bandcamp, or through your favorite streaming service like Apple Music or Spotify, it contains just under two hours of original ambient music covering a wide variety of ideas I plan on drilling further into for future releases. Almost the entirety of the album was written and produced over three weeks in January of this year, and in the time it has taken to distribute Intro to music platforms, I have already finished a followup for release sometime next month. If all goes well, expect a new Sleep Buddy release monthly in 2023.

In the meantime I hope you'll give this first album a listen, and if you do I hope it helps you relax.

You deserve it.

Head to sleepbuddy.online for more. <3

I've been getting extremely into Mastodon, a social media platform that cleanly replicates (and in some cases improves upon) Twitter's take on microblogging. I've read, watched, and listened to a lot of explainers about the service, and for some reason most begin by claiming how difficult the platform is to use. The truth is that the hardest part of using Mastodon is creating your account — and even that is about as difficult as deciding where to set up an email address. In the end, using Mastodon is wildly similar to using Twitter.

With that in mind, here's everything you need to know about getting started!

If you feel comfortable poking around and figuring things out for yourself and just want the quickest quick-start guide of all time, feel free to skip the rest of this post and just follow these steps: 1. Head over to https://mas.to and sign up for an account 2. Have fun exploring a new social platform 3. Start posting, baybee!

For those who want a bit more, I got you.

What is Mastodon?

Mastodon is a social network for posting short bits of text or images, just like Twitter. Unlike Twitter, which is an entity that relies on investors and revenue to keep the lights on, Mastodon is an open source project. It has no algorithm and no ads.

It's pretty good!

Why is that better?

It means an Elon Musk style figure can never swoop in, buy the entire platform, fire most of its staff, remove content moderation policies and user safety precautions, ban journalists who disagree with him, etc. While you can only go to twitter.com to access and use Twitter, Mastodon can and does reside on many websites around the internet. Existing through multiple communities — sometimes called "instances" or "servers" — prevents it from being owned and operated by one individual or corporate entity. Anyone can create their own Mastodon server. Some servers have only one user, some have hundreds of thousands.

If there are so many servers, how do I know which to join? What if I pick the wrong one?

That's the beautiful thing, dear reader. Every server speaks to every other server. No matter which you join you'll be able to follow, be followed by, and interact with users on every other server. Because of this, you only need to make one account on one server to join Mastodon¹.

Even better: If you don't like the server you've joined for whatever reason, you can easily move your account to another.

You still didn't tell me which one to join, my guy.

True! To make things as easy as possible, the community I'd recommend right now is mas.to. I had an account there for a few months, and I initially picked it because I liked the name a lot! It's short and it's cute!

If you want to peruse some other options, you can head over to Join Mastodon and check out servers that are based around regions, professions, ideologies, or fandoms. Whichever server you end up picking, that url will be the one you visit whenever you want to use Mastodon. Just like going to twitter.com or facebook.com, that server url will be how you log in and post and do everything your heart desires. So if you do end up choosing mas.to as your server, using Mastodon will mean going to https://mas.to!

How do I make an account?

Head over to your server of choice and click the "Create Account" button (usually on right side of the screen). If you've signed up for any website ever, you'll know what to do here. You'll also notice that your username is presented like an email address — [email protected] — and exactly like an email address this is what you'll send to your friends when you want to follow each other.

For example: My server is located at theaether.space and my username on that server is bb, so my username for the wider world of Mastodon is [email protected]!

Once you've gone through the steps required to join (hey congrats, btw), go edit your profile! Add a profile picture and a header! Add a bio! The works! All of that stuff can be found on the Preferences page.

Note: If you want to send people a link to your profile, just rearrange the order of those elements to server.name/@username. So in my case, it would be theaether.space/@bb. Hey, give me a follow while you're at it!

How do I find people to follow?

Luckily there are some great services for this already, with more popping up constantly. To get started, you can use a tool like Movetodon or Debirdify to search for your Twitter friends and find their Mastodon usernames. To follow them, just copy their whole username (which, again, looks like an email address) and paste it into the search box. Once you've followed some people, you can use a tool like Followgraph to see who those people are following and add a few more people to your home feed.

Speaking from experience, one of the more exciting things about joining Mastodon is getting a clean slate. You don't realize how many people you didn't need to be following until you're building the list from zero again. So go out there and follow people who seem interesting. It's 2008 all over again!

Okay, I've followed a bunch of people. Now what?

Sounds like all that's left is to mess around with the site and start posting! As with most social networks, there are some nuances to learn but absolutely nothing is overwhelming. Posts can be up to 500 characters instead of 240, you can use privacy buttons to decide who can see and reply to your post, etc. You'll learn best by poking around and by doing, because what makes Mastodon different is what makes it interesting. For example, there are no "quote-tweets" on here. That means the best ways to interact with others are to reply to or boost (retweet) their posts. It takes some getting used to², but it's worth it!

Brendon, I don't always want to use Mastodon on my personal computer. Tell me about apps!

Luckily there are a bunch of apps to choose from, and it seems like more pop up on a weekly basis. First and foremost, there is an official Mastodon app you can grab for iOS and Android, and I think it's pretty good!

That said — and in the spirit of Mastodon — there are some great apps by independent developers putting their own spin on it. Just like the early days of Twitter apps, these developers are at the forefront of what Mastodon may one day become. If you're using an iPhone, the two I'd recommend at the moment are Ivory or Ice Cubes. If you're on Android, definitely check out Tusky.

All you'll need to do is provide your server url, then log in as you normally would.

A fun recent swerve: Developers are also starting to create alternate web interfaces for Mastodon that replicate the look and feel of things like Tweetdeck. Check out Elk or Mastodeck for a different flavor.

This is all well and good but if Twitter and other bigger social media platforms exist, why would I use Mastodon instead?

I think that point about Mastodon not truly having any overarching owner is the most important point of all. Servers individually have owners, but Mastodon being run on an open protocol instead of by one explicit company or person means there’s no way anyone could step in and destroy it. As long as there are people out there hosting Mastodon servers, Mastodon will continue to exist.

On a personal level, saying “I choose to invest my time in this space instead of those driven by profit” is a step towards a public good. It helps lay the foundation to make the internet a better place for yourself and for future generations, to take some control back. We've spent too much time building our online presence around and for companies who sell our information to advertisers and use algorithms to manipulate our lives and emotions.

Even if Mastodon has some quirks that make it a tiny bit harder to use than some of the larger alternatives, if there's even the slightest chance using it can help make a statement and build something better than what currently exists, isn't that at least worth trying?

¹ For the people who use and know a lot about Mastodon: Hello! I know I'm simplifying some concepts here, and I know not everyone will agree with my approach. At the end of the day, I think some of the more interesting things about Mastodon are lying just underneath the surface, and users who want to discover them absolutely will eventually. I feel getting people started and understanding why they should get started is more important in the long run.

² Hashtags are big on Mastodon, which I kind of can't believe. It feels weird to be using them again!

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Originally published 12/29/22 Updated 1/25/23:

Added a new section with some app recommendations. There are so many out there and I've probably used at least ten over the past month or so. Ivory is great and my favorite of the bunch, but I know the subscription fee can be a bit much for people which is why I threw Ice Cubes on the list as well. On the Android end, Tusky is so clearly the best. I'd recommend it over the official app any day of the week.

As the Nintendo 3DS digital storefront meets an untimely end, it's been heartening to see some of the games I feared would be lost to time popping up in unexpected places. Pocket Card Jockey, one of the many small experiments by the team behind Pokémon, was a game as successful as it was ridiculous about racing horses by playing solitaire — the better at solitaire you are, the better your horse will perform. It's a nonsensical premise, and the game knows it.

The opening moments (this is real!!) find your protagonist dying in a horse-related accident, followed by an angelic resurrection on the condition that you're to win a derby race in your lifetime or be sent to Hell. To make things fair, the angel blesses you with the ability to ride horses as well as you can play solitaire.

Each race involves playing quick rounds of the card game to build up points which can be spent directing your horse around the track based on where they're most comfortable — inside or outside the pack of your competitors. There's a lot more to think about on a race-by-race basis than I can succinctly write out here, and time spent outside the track can present players with a possibly overwhelming web of decisions as you begin to buy and breed horses, all of which I think is the game's greatest fault. While the core loop of playing solitaire and racing is a dream, managing the happiness, stats, and abilities of horses while also worrying about placement on a moment-to-moment basis can feel like elements that distract for players seeking a breezy time.

Despite my grievances with the learning curve, I absolutely adored the game, and would go as far as saying it's one of the best titles ever released on the 3DS. The truth of my gripes with the visual and mechanic clutter is that after a while, I began engaging with and loving everything the game has to offer. The genius of Pocket Card Jockey lies in the understanding that solitaire by itself has always been a perfect game to take on the go, and layering any kind of progression atop it only supercharges the desire to keep returning in free moments. As the 3DS storefront faces impending closure, I'm thrilled to know the game — like its jockey protagonist — will get a second chance at life via today's release on Apple Arcade.

Director Masao Taya spoke to Giovanni Colantonio about the release over at Digital Trends:

“With Apple Arcade, which requires absolutely no in-app purchase beyond the subscription service fees, there was no need to forcefully remodel the game into an F2P style, so we figured that we’d do our best to make the fans happy,” Taya says.

“When it was made public that the game would be added to the Apple Arcade lineup, there was quite a big reaction in Japan, with Pocket Card Jockey trending on Twitter,” Taya says. “I was really surprised when the number of new unread items on my Twitter app showed up as 999. It impressed on me the number of players who’d been waiting for this.”

I was curious how the game, which uses the top screen of the 3DS for horse racing and the bottom for solitaire and movement, would translate to the single screen of an iPhone, and have been pleasantly surprised so far. While the number of on-screen elements can be a bit difficult to parse at first, I found myself settling right back into old habits as soon as I'd made it through the tutorial.

The dream, after Ride On! was initially announced, was that taking a game famous for its quick-burst gameplay and making it available on an even more convenient piece of hardware would possibly help it surpass the original. I am absolutely an outlier in that I usually have my 3DS on me when I'm out and about, always ready to chip away at a project in Animal Crossing or meander through Hyrule when on a long subway ride. More often than not, though, I would dip into Pocket Card Jockey to knock out a race or two when given the opportunity.

Having the stickiest and most bizarre game of the Nintendo 3DS' library available on my phone means one less device in my pockets, and that's a plus in my book.

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Pocket Card Jockey: Ride On! is now available for iPhone, iPad, and Mac via an Apple Arcade subscription.

Jason Schreier on Twitter (and Bloomberg):

Microsoft is laying off 10,000 people today, including in its gaming divisions such as Xbox and Bethesda. This mass layoff arrives exactly one year after Microsoft announced plans to purchase Activision Blizzard for $69 billion.

In exactly one week's time Microsoft is holding their first big gaming event of the year, The Xbox and Bethesda Developer_Direct. Their own blog post states the showcase will be "presented by the game creators themselves," which now feels morbid in the face of today's report.

Remember this news when the executives on stage talk about how they couldn't do it without their teams, and the money they took home last year despite knowing what was coming just a few weeks later:

After decades of buying the cheapest Windows laptop available on the show floor at Best Buy and using them until they effectively destroyed themselves from within, my mom upgraded to the M2 MacBook Air last month1. As the dutiful "techie" son, I drove to my parents' place in New Jersey to help walk her through the process of setting up her first ever Mac — importing passwords and other preferences from iCloud, walking through how the dock and menu bar each function, explaining little differences in how window management works, etc. After about an hour of this I sat back and asked myself if there was anything else I needed to go over, anything markedly different about MacOS that was worth touching on for someone who had, until now, only used Windows.

"One last thing," I noted as I stood up and removed the MagSafe cable, "is that you're going to find yourself needing to charge this guy less than you're used to. It's much more portable than your last laptop. There's a reason when you walk into cafés almost everyone with a Windows laptop has theirs plugged into a wall and most of the people with MacBooks don't."

Apple dropped some updates to their Mac lineup today after some last-minute rumor-milling over the weekend. They're exciting releases2, and I'll let other, more qualified people explain why.

What really struck me was a piece of marketing material towards the end of the keynote that began with a title card: 3 Pros, 1 Day, 1 Battery Charge. It follows three creatives who all unplug their fully charged 2023 MacBook Pros at the same time and delve into their field of choice — one proceeds to film and edit 4k footage, the second recreates and old Zeiss lens via CGI along with a scene to shoot through said lens, and the third builds an iPad app. While they push the hardware past their perceived limits, the combined power of the M2 lineup of chips and the battery efficiency of the entire laptop effectively proves these three are more hampered by available time in the day than by the machine itself.

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It's a great ad that gets to the heart of why I've found Apple's computing lineup so exciting since making my own switch way back when: It all feels frictionless due to the attention given to nuances like battery life. The big question for viewers, extrapolated out, is that if this laptop can cater to three super-users and survive an entire day's workload on a single charge, can you even imagine what's possible for yourself?

Creativity and recreation and work can all feel limited if you're confined to one specific space. While those kinds of limitations can sometimes be helpful, I've always found I'm more productive when I'm on the move.  There are entire teams at Apple who are not only aware of this, but are dedicated to it. How efficient can we make this device, plugged in or not? In conjunction with every other team collaborating to focus their attention on other seemingly menial elements like trackpad response, hinge design, or user experience touches, everything adds up to create The MacBook Experience: It's a machine built to go unnoticed.

While you're in your element, you shouldn't have to think about it.

If all goes well, you shouldn't even have to plug it in.

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1  That's the same laptop I'm using to write this! Wow!

2 My biggest takeaway is that the Mac Mini lineup is here to stay for the time being, which is a relief to this M1 Mac Mini owner. To be clear: It is still the best computer I have ever owned, and at no point have I felt like I've gotten close to the ceiling of what that chip is capable of despite hitting it with game streaming, audio production, photo editing, video editing, and more. That said, if it ever does start to show it's age I'll be happy to know there will likely be another Mac Mini to replace it with.

Mark Gurman for Bloomberg:

Apple Inc. is ramping up work on a mixed-reality headset, its first major new product category since the Apple Watch, and has renamed the accompanying software in the latest sign of an approaching debut.

In offering both AR and VR technologies, Apple’s new headset takes a different tack than most existing models from companies like Meta and HTC Corp.

And Wayne Ma for The Information (filtered through a bulleted list of features from MacRumors:)

A small, Digital Crown-like dial on its right side that enables users to quickly transition between the virtual and physical world. Unlike the Apple Watch, it will not offer haptic feedback.

It's a safe bet to say we'll be seeing this long-rumored headset in 2023; Gurman's reporting gets as close to a "sure thing" as possible in the fraught world of Apple rumors. While on television the other day he stated this thing has been in the works for at least the past seven years, signifying a strong possibility that Apple expects entering this product category to be a seismic shift in the way we interact with devices and the world around us.

I don't like to be a naysayer, a lot of the way I drive my life is on the path of open-minded optimism. That said, Apple's incoming foray into the headset market already feels like a bit of a misstep if these rumors are to be believed. Price and form-factor aside1, the thing that most puzzles me is the commitment to mixed reality instead of a focus on either. I do see virtual reality and virtual spaces as an eventual massively-adopted method of interaction, but it's going to take a long time to get there. Since the unveiling of the Oculus Rift, VR has been a hotbed of conversation and a totem by which companies like Meta né Facebook stand by, investing all of their resources into making sure they don't miss "the next big wave."

And Meta was right to bet big on virtual reality, despite being much too early (and despite my own feelings about the company being a reprehensible entity). Their strides with devices like the Quest lineup — headsets that don't require an active connection to a computer and sold for somewhat reasonable prices — take the once cost-prohibitive and technologically cumbersome niche into a product consumers are legitimately interested in trying out. The big issue with virtual reality at the moment, though, is the lack of any real function in daily life. Meta hopes to eventually solve this via virtual spaces and offices for users to coexist within2, most public examples of which become memes instantaneously.

The time it takes to create a compelling and proprietary VR world has left Meta in a position where their current focus for the Quest lies in gaming, an industry whose bread and butter lies in building and inhabiting virtual spaces. Porting games like Resident Evil 4 and Among Us to the Quest makes sense when it comes to providing unique VR experiences, but also keeps the headset firmly planted in niche. Meta doesn't want niche. Long-term, Meta wants mass market adoption. But unfortunately, the idea of putting on a headset and isolating yourself from the outside world is already a nonstarter for most people — when it also demands a heavy cost investment, the possibility of requiring additional computing power, and contains scant software of note, it becomes a ridiculous ask of anyone outside of the enthusiast market.

Given these obstacles, I don't think the road to mass adoption of virtual reality actually starts with virtual reality, it starts instead with augmented reality — a technology that can quickly prove its function if presented in a frictionless way. While even the best VR headsets demand isolation and escapism, a hypothetical product focused first and foremost on augmented reality would be all about enhancing the world around you rather than hiding from it.

It's not hard to imagine the uses for a device that cleanly presents contextual information about your current environment, because most use-cases exist in some form or another on our phones right now — directions towards a destination projected onto the street in front of you, synopses and ratings for books you check out at the store, envisioning furniture in a living space before buying it, etc. But it's the act of opening an app, navigating to its (likely buried) AR options, waiting for the camera to open, and then waiting for the information to process that's currently creating the friction preventing the technology from really feeling usable. This friction goes away when the device is built from the ground-up to facilitate these kinds of interactions. The way my Apple Watch pings to ask if I'm exercising while going for a brisk walk or reminds me to stand throughout the day, an augmented reality device could act much the same for providing helpful information that reinforces and heightens our place in the world.

This is why I've found the prospect of an Apple headset focused on AR so exciting. The yearly WWDC segments about ARKit, their augmented reality framework for iPhones and iPads, indicated to me that the oft-rumored device would offload its processing to the other Apple products in your ecosystem. The idea of the iPhone in my pocket bearing the brunt of the load when it came to providing contextual information to my eyes meant the headset could take on more aesthetically pleasing designs, not weighed down by the need for hefty onboard chips or the massive batteries required to power them. This thing could be sleek, maybe even stylish if we got lucky, and come with something akin to the AirPods' H-line of chips to ensure the wireless flow of information and ease of connectivity to match what users expect from Apple devices. I've been thinking about a device like this for so long I feel like I could reach out and grab it. It feels so obviously like the future.

Of course, as with most unfounded speculation like this, the truth is a fair bit muddier than the image I'd conjured up in my head. Reporting steadily seems to indicate the device will be invested in providing AR and VR experiences in equal measure, but I worry that any investment in the latter will hamper the viability of the former if they're to exist within the same product. The headset described in these recent reports sounds cumbersome at best, and at worst adjacent to Google Glass in the kinds of ire it will draw if worn and used in public. Imagine yourself sitting in a cafe, wire tethered from your bulky headset to the battery in your back pocket, trying to look normal, trying to feel like the other people in the cafe aren't in the middle of uploading photos of you to Twitter.

It feels like Apple is trying to gain a foothold in the virtual reality market before the technology has had a chance to prove itself to the general public, a far cry from the usual "sit back, watch, then dominate" playbook we've seen with MP3 players, tablets, smart watches, and more. Truth be told I am legitimately excited to hook this thing up to my Mac and see what Apple has cooked up from the comfort of my own home, but I can't see a world in which I'd ever bring something capable of complete virtual immersion out into the wider world unless it defied every aesthetic expectation. To weave a new wearable into my life demands a confluence of design and function, something I'm not embarrassed to be seen wearing that actively makes my life better to boot.

The Apple Watch is the furthest I've seen this rationale pushed out of the "form" end of the "form x function" Venn diagram, as its squircle shape looks admittedly silly sitting on most wrists despite it functionally working to make its wearers healthier of the body and mind, or just better-informed. When I first started wearing an Apple Watch, I did so purely to curtail the seemingly endless notifications streaming into my life. I thought it looked absolutely ridiculous, this big bulky thing that needed to be charged daily, but choosing which apps and people could ping me throughout the day freed me from checking my phone as often as I had been. In my eyes the Apple Watch was a device built to be ignored, and I loved it for that.

It's only in the past few years that my reasons for wearing it have veered into the realm of health. Measuring my daily activity and receiving automated reminders to pause and breathe have provided an off-ramp from a detrimental lifestyle and into something better. For most people, the same kind of praise can be heaped onto the AirPods lineup (or in my case, the Beats Fit Pro), which I consider wearables as much as the Apple Watch. People made fun of the way AirPods look when they were first released, and yet I can't leave the house without seeing at least one person wearing them in public.

How often are products released that you refuse to leave home without? What would an Apple headset have to look like to reach such heights? What would it need to do?

There's something to be said about the fact that this headset doesn't necessarily need to become the next AirPods, or even the next iPhone. Not every product is going to be for every person. In the case of an Apple headset, though, the path to success has always seemed so clear to me.

Like the AirPods and the Apple Watch, adoption will take time, but it also needs to come in a form that feels effortless to wear and provides clear, demonstrable value. It needs to be a device that gives context to reality, and makes an already stunning world even more interesting. It may be ridiculed at launch, but if the core idea is sound people will come around in time. Only years later, after everyone is comfortable with the act of wearing glasses to augment reality, do we make the next step to a virtual reality. Building habits is not something that can be rushed, but most profit-driven enterprises don't like to play the long game.

Even with market pressure, I can't see most people adopting an expensive escape into virtual reality until we've sufficiently improved upon our own.

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1 Again via Wayne Ma:

A waist-mounted battery, connected via a magnetic, MagSafe-like power cable to the headset's headband. One battery charge lasts no longer than two hours, but users can swap the battery out for longer sessions.

lmao??

2 Apple is reportedly working on something similar to this:

MKBHD's new video about the lag between the iPhone's camera system against that of the competition strikes a nerve I've been feeling for the past few years. I consider myself an amateur photographer, which is the only reason I've ever needed to get the new Pro-level iPhone every year. The camera upgrades are usually worth it.

But I remember receiving the iPhone 12 Pro on launch day and taking a few test shots against my trusty 11 Pro — a camera system I truly loved — and noticing something that threw me off. A lot of the reviews I'd read highlighted improvements in the hardware, but it seemed to me that the machine-learning photo-processing was overdoing it. I thought I must be wrong, and wrote as much in my review at the time:

The cameras feel about on par with the last generation of phones — I personally haven't noticed their supposedly being better when taking photos in everyday situations, but I'd believe they were better if you or some other tech columnist told me so.

Should have trusted your gut, Bigley!

Over time though, it's become more and more evident that the software side of iOS has been mangling what should be great images taken with a great sensor and superbly crafted lenses. To be clear: The RAW files produced by this system in apps like Halide are stunning. But there's something lost in translation when it comes to the stock Camera app and the ways in which it handles images from every day use.

This is not a phenomenon that has flown under the radar of non-techie users either. I saw a TikTok (which I unfortunately didn't save and I'm sure will never see again) earlier this year showing an iPhone "hack" that involved taking a photo, opening the preview, and taking a screenshot before the processing could hit to produce a more natural and softer look than the sharpened and HDR-laden final image. On my end, I've gone all out.

I like the speed the stock Camera app provides, especially having it accessible from my lock screen. To curb the over-corrections, I've tuned my own version of a Rich Contrast photographic style and turned on Live Photos. To my eyes, both in conjunction with one another reduce the amount of work the iPhone's chip does to "improve" images, creating a more natural photograph when all is said and done.

Either way, ever since the iPhone 12 lineup hit I've gotten into the habit of throwing photos into an app like Huji or DazzCam to dirty them up. But I'd rather not! I'd rather share a barely-altered and high-resolution image if possible, as I used to do when I was a Google Pixel user. For now it seems like fake film grain and Live Photos are the way to go.

I'm hopeful Apple will course correct in time. They usually do!

2023's Consumer Electronics Show is upon us, and with it another year of horrifying SAW-adjacent photos of willing participants hooked up to the most deranged virtual reality peripherals ever conceived. This year's early standout — without a doubt — is Mutalk, a microphone designed to make sure all of your conversations are relegated to the metaverse, ensuring not a word of it will leak into the physical world we so long to escape. Here it is in all of its Crimes of the Future glory:

Mutalk comes from Shiftall, a subsidiary of technology conglomerate Panasonic, best known for products like the KX-T7731 digital desk phone. According to their official blog post about the product, Shiftall describes the Mutalk as helpful for those "conducting a conference call in a quiet office or open space such as a cafe" because it "can cause annoyance to those around you and may lead to information leakage." One day, Panasonic hopes, all corporate jobs will include a work laptop and a Mutalk to make sure you never accidentally divulge classified corporate knowledge¹ to those around you.

The whole post is worth reading, but if there's one thing I can't get over, it's how I misread this header to mean "us" and not "United States."

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¹ Like, say, a followup to the world-famous KX-T7731 digital desk phone.