Apple Unveils New AR headset – Apple Vision Pro
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One more thing. Yeah, that was all Steve Jobs back in the day. You never knew what he was gonna come up next. And again, I kind of miss seeing him up there doing it. We all do. I mean, some of the devices that he has brought to life. I’m gonna talk about Apple’s new augmented reality, Apple Vision Pro that has come out. Now, I got a full disclosure here, a long time.
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shareholders of Apple, our clients, myself personally. And again, I’ve described this, we talked about this before in Apple’s business and how they’ve in essence created an ecosystem. They get you, you get sucked into their little, their Borg, it’s a kind of like Star Trek with the Borg. And it’s very, very difficult to pull yourself away from that.
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great business model. I don’t know many people, many people that have had an iPhone that have decided to go to Android. I don’t see it. I made a decision years ago to switch from PCs to Apple for our entire business and all of our offices. I just got sick and tired of throwing out computers every couple of years. That’s what you had to do. I mean, Microsoft for a period of time, their operating system was crap. And…
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Every year, a couple of years, blue screen to death, all these problems. Going back to when Apple was running those commercials over Christmas explaining how downloading drivers and how everything works. I have to say they haven’t had many misses over the years. They really haven’t. With that being said, with that being said, have I bought into all of their products? No, quite frankly, I didn’t really get the iPad. In fact, Steve Jobs didn’t even understand the point.
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Steve Jobs, what do you say about the iPad? He said that, what is this for surfing the net when you’re in the bathroom? I don’t use it. I don’t, I know a lot of people love it. They use it all the time. I don’t, I like a regular laptop computer, desktop computer. I like my keyboard. That’s just me. The Apple Watch. I remember I got an Apple Watch as a present. One of the first ones was like 2015.
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Maybe 2015, I got myself an Apple watch. I was like, it was basically, what is this? A remote control, remote control for my phone? I have no use for this. And I gave it to my son who played around with it. Now, obviously the Apple watch has gotten much, much better. Much, much better. My wife and my kid, they love it. They love it. For me, nah, traditional watch. It’s not for me. But I can tell you, I have, obviously.
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use Apple products, whether it be Apple TV, whether it be my desktop, my laptop. Again, I’m not going to change from that. It may be very difficult to pull me away from that. And that’s, again, one of the reasons why Apple gets the valuation that it gets right now. It’s pretty expensive at this point in time. And again, over the years, we’ve taken profits along the way and bought back in for certain clients. When the stock has come back down, it constantly
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readjusting portfolios, but I’ve never wholesale, you know, sold the stock. They’re just too good. I mean, it’s a $3 trillion company. Okay. With that being said, with that being said, we got to get into this augmented reality set that they put together. Joanna Stern, Wall Street Journal had a piece out. She actually got to try it out. She has a really good job. She’s one of the tech writers for the Wall Street Journal.
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and explaining what this thing can do. And again, I’m not gonna spend an hour explaining how it works. You can go online and you can see what it’s capable of doing. You can watch the videos. Again, people are taking a look at the price tag, $3,500. $3,500, this thing is more expensive than the computer I’m looking at right now. And it’s a brand new Mac that I just got. $3,500.
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The Apple itself said they don’t expect to sell maybe 100,000 of these things. I think they’re going to release this in 2024. What does that mean? Well,
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Again, this is a first edition product. I for one, I’m telling you right now, I’m not buying one. I’m not gonna buy one of these. To me, they look ridiculous. They look ridiculous. I know Facebook, man, everybody got their Oculus there. I think it’s like $500 to $1,000. I put it on one time. One of my kid’s friends had one.
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messed around with a little bit and I’m just like, okay, I’m done, done. It just, it’s not for me, okay? Again, I think it might be my Italian sensibility to some degree. I don’t wanna look like an idiot. You know, I think eventually, I think eventually if you can break them down and you can put them into a pair of glasses like this and I don’t look like a fool, yeah, I might mess around with that to some degree.
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But I’m gonna be moving. I start seeing people walking around with these big ass ski goggles on their head. I’m out. I’m gonna be moving to Italy or a small island in Greece somewhere. I don’t wanna see this. I don’t think it’s healthy for people to be disconnected from one another. And Arthur Brooks, if you’re familiar with Arthur Brooks, great writer. He actually teaches a class at Harvard now. And I’m surprised they let him in over at Harvard. He’s a fairly conservative guy in regards to
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happiness and human beings need to, they need, they need to interaction with others. And it’s not through zoom and it’s not through Facebook and it’s not through social media. We need this and this desire to take this away. Again, I see where this, these goggles will be useful. Actually having this conversation with my son last night. I think this, these augmented reality glasses, I think this would be a phenomenal,
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tool for teaching. If you want trying to be a surgeon and you could practice your craft again and again and again and again and again by using something like this, think of the value behind that for medical schools, for mechanics, fixing a car, anything where you’re working with your hands where you need practice. Wow. I mean, that’s amazing stuff.
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But you know, people, oh yeah, well, you can go to the Uffizi in Florence and you can look at Botticelli’s paintings on the wall and you can zoom in on the brushstrokes.
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Really? Have you ever been to the Uffizi Gallery? If you haven’t, I highly recommend it. You have to go in there. There’s a great line from Goodwill Hunting where Robin Williams talking about Michelangelo to Will. And they said, oh yeah, you can talk about Michelangelo, but have you ever been in the Sistine Chapel? Ever smelled the Sistine Chapel, actually been in there?
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Again, I say this again, again, again, augmented reality, all this stuff. The people at Apple, as bright as they are, and the things that the tools that they come up with, which again, I applaud. They talk about productivity tools. I mean, a lot of really great stuff out there. They’re not God. They never will be. They never will be. Again, you can’t do it. And you see it from time to time. You get movies out there. You’re like.
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Avatar. There was also that movie with again, a movie with Robin Williams, where kind of went to purgatory and then into heaven. I forget the name of it was an interesting film. But you know, they try to come up with these worlds that are supposed to be different, better and you can’t. You can’t. I can go a walk. I go through walk here in my neighborhood in the North Shore of Long Island. And I the beauty that I see that you
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I don’t want to look at that through goggles. I’m going to go out there and see it for myself. Again, it will be a useful tool. They just got to figure out how to go about using it. Is this going to be for gamers? I don’t know, maybe rich kids. I was thinking about it yesterday too, and I just remembered again, there was a movie in the 1980s.
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with Richard Pryor, it was called the toy. And it was kind of ahead of its time to some degree, but yeah, the rich dad, his son wants, is a spoiled brat, wants, goes into a toy store, can get whatever he wants. He’s got all of these toys and he wants to buy the black man that was funny inside the toy store. And he throws a tantrum and yeah, that the rich guy pays off.
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Richard Pryor to come live with his son and hilarity ensues. But anyway, this is a pretty darn expensive toy. It needs to be a tool. I don’t see, and they were demonstrating how, oh, you got your screen here, you got your screen there. It’s better than having multiple monitors up at the same time. I ain’t putting a fricking pair of goggles on my head. But I am, I’m getting old.
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I guess that’s not happening. It’s not happening. It’s to me, it’s kind of creepy. But again, the technology is extraordinary. It really is. There’s no doubt about it. They knocked it out of the park when it comes to the type of tech that’s involved and what this thing is capable of doing. The applications, that’s what’s going to be key. And if I were the people over at Apple, I’d be working with medical schools,
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I’d be working with everything from airplane mechanics, car mechanics, whatever. You want to be a plumber, you want to be an electrician, how you can practice all of these things again and again and again and again and again. Then the $3,500 cost is nothing if you actually think about it. It will lower the cost of education. And that’s where I think that this tool would be extraordinarily valuable.
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As far as the action in the stock price yesterday, yeah, it’s kind of, you know, people were buying the, they knew what was coming out and then, you know, sell off when the news hit, you know, buy the rumor, sell the news type of a situation. I don’t think it’s gonna be a game changer for Apple anytime soon. But again, this is where I’ve been wrong. This is where I’ve been wrong in the past. I never thought the iPad would be that much of a game changer. I never thought.
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Apple would sell as many watches as they have on the stock, but I was a little doubtful of those items. So, and I could be wrong here, but again, Apple’s already said, hey, maybe 100,000 in the first year. It is what it is. Again, they are miles ahead of everybody when it comes to this type of technology. Nobody can touch them. It’s how we have to go about applying it. Again,
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Unfortunately, sometimes tech and new things aren’t used properly. And I’ll end on this. I, you know, I talk about social media and how much reality is people. I really don’t care for it. Um, I liked its original relation, which Mark Zuckerberg wanted. He, his thing was just to go out there and meet people and, you know, sharing photos and, uh, good times and whatever it may be and staying in contact, uh, with others and it’s, you know, turned into more often, not into a hate fest.
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And that’s not that healthy. And, you know, when I walk around and I see people on their phones all the time, scrolling through social media, tick tock, Instagram, all this stuff, it, quite frankly, it makes me sad. It does. Anyway, watchdog on wallstreet.com. Watchdog on wallstreet.com.