Summary

Gruber reviews Apple's first immersive MLB broadcast on Vision Pro, a Yankees-Red Sox game, and finds it a genuine success. He endorses Jason Snell's take that the single-camera-per-half-inning approach works well, and that the virtual jumbotron is a smart addition. He enumerates specific highs — the spatial audio, the infield complexity visible from dugout perspective, the sense of actually being there — alongside real limitations like Vision Pro's weight and the inability to track outfield balls due to camera and display resolution. His conclusion: after going back to flat TV the next day, the regular broadcast felt boring and small by comparison.

Key Insight

Apple's immersive MLB broadcast isn't a better TV — it's a categorically different medium, and a day back on flat TV proves the gap is already real.

Spicy Quotes (click to share)

• 4

  Feeling like you're at another place watching something happen live is magic. Just a few years ago it would have required literal magic. It wasn't possible. Now it is.

• 3

  It felt like something new and different. Something at least as different from watching on TV as watching on TV is different from merely listening on radio.

• 4

  It's exciting to feel 43,000 fans roar around you. Baseball is a slow game but when the crowd roars, it erupts. That never comes across on regular TV broadcasts. It did here.

• 3

  Yankee Stadium is huge. Watching this game immersively felt huge. Awesome, in the literal sense.

• 4

  It felt slightly wrong not to take the 'hat' off my head (where the 'hat' was the Vision Pro).

• 6

  I'm writing these notes on Saturday afternoon while watching the old flat broadcast of game 2 of this 4-game series, and it feels ... well, boring. And small.

• 5

  It didn't feel like watching a 3D TV broadcast. It didn't feel like a better version of TV broadcasting.

• 3

  You really see how much more stressful it is for the pitcher once there's a runner on base — let alone more than one.

Tone

enthusiastic, candid, detail-oriented