475: Roper & Ametek (+ Danaher, Mettler Toledo, Heico, Transdigm, etc), Amazon & Meta & Google Q4, Apple Vision Pro, and The Sopranos

"don’t miss Evil Emperor Jim!"

I believe empathy is the most essential quality of civilization.

—Roger Ebert

🍎🥽 The hot takes on the Apple Vision Pro have been pretty bad lately.

Most of what I see are complaints/mockery that are really just social signaling.

Almost everyone is missing the point.

The current meme is that it looks goofy when you’re wearing it.

If something is good, people quickly get over that. People can get used to almost anything once it’s ubiquitous. Fanny packs are back in fashion ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Google Glass sucked, so it never got to have that happen to it, but there was a lot of noise about AirPods looking weird and dorky when they came out. Now, everyone has wireless earbuds and nobody cares.

Same for the Apple Watch. Smartwatches are everywhere.

People felt self-conscious about pulling out cell phones in public. They were initially mocked as unnecessary, decadent, and pretentious (oh, Mr Big Shot gets such important calls he needs to have a phone everywhere!). Remember Gordon Gecko talking on the phone on the beach?

Vision Pro isn't intended to be used walking around in public anyway. It's primarily a screen replacement to be used at home, to watch 3d footage of sports, relive your kid’s first steps, or watch Deadwood on a 50-foot virtual screen. 🤠

Everybody's goofing around with it to generate clickbait and siphon off some of the attention it’s getting because it just came out, but very soon it'll be just another tool like a laptop or home projector.

I would love to have one, but it's still too expensive and too V1 for me, so I'll probably wait for the next version. I’d love to have a VR headset with such a high resolution and low latency.

Check out this video for an idea of what having floating virtual screens around your home may look like:

🛀💭 🎨👨‍🎨✍️📝🎭 With creative stuff you never know in advance how it's gonna turn out, which can be nerve-wracking.

But it would be *boring* if you knew everything in advance and just had to go through the motions of executing… That’s anti-creativity.

🗣️🗣️🗣️🎙️🎂🎈🍾🥂 Last week, Infinite Loops reached 200 episodes! A nice milestone considering that most podcasts don’t make it past 10.

I had the pleasure of “driving Jim’s car”, so to speak, and co-host the podcast with Ed William (who also joined me on the Sicario podcast), turning the tables and interviewing Jim (with all kinds of interesting tangents and anecdotes, of course — make sure you don’t miss Evil Emperor Jim! 😈):

• 🎧 Jim O’Shaughnessy — Turning the Tables (EP. 200) 🥳

I hope you enjoy it. It certainly was a fun conversation to have!

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🏦 💰 Liberty Capital 💳 💴

💻💾 Roper and Ametek 🏭👨🏻‍🏭 (Parallels: Heico, Danaher, Mettler Toledo, Transdigm, etc)