While Mr. Zuckerberg says we’ll eventually do it all in the metaverse (shop, socialize, etc.) right now the company is focusing on work. Inside the headset, five sensors are pointed at your face so, in a meeting with colleagues, your avatar can now mimic your real expressions, including smiling, frowning and blinking. And soon, the avatars won’t be just floating torsos. Mr. Zuckerberg showed off legs but didn’t give an ETA on their arrival.

Also, the new controllers can double as a pen to write on a virtual whiteboard and a mixed-reality mode allows you to display multiple virtual monitors within your real office space.

In an interview with The Verge, Mr. Zuckerberg said that he thinks face computers can take the place of some real computers in the future. He believes “you’re going to be able to do pretty much everything and more you can do on PCs on VR,” he said.  Bold, if garbled, words. I look forward to seeing if that really happens!

As I said in my column this week, the Quest Pro is more comfortable than the Quest 2 but it still looks like an oversized pair of ski goggles. And yes, while it has better optics and graphics capabilities the battery only lasts between one and two hours—just like early portable computers.

Many consider the spreadsheet one of the first killer apps for desktop PCs. (See VisiCalc for Apple II.) It made manual and complicated tasks easier, and people started to realize they could do things better and faster on a computer. What’s the face-computer experience that accomplishes that? Uh, yeah, sure, with the new Microsoft partnership the Quest Pro will soon run Excel, but I think we can all agree that 3-D cells aren’t the secret to face-computer success.

Most of Microsoft’s announcements were of the predictable, rather boring fare: mildly upgraded Surface Laptop 5, Surface Pro 9 and Surface Studio 2 Plus. BUT then there were a few surprises. The company is bringing OpenAI’s Dall-E 2 AI image generator to its new Designer app and Bing Photos. That means you’ll be able to easily summon up any image you can think of, for your PowerPoint presentation or just whatever. (I signed up for the Designer waitlist here and will have more to talk about on the AI art trend soon!) Oh, and Apple and Microsoft have teamed up to bring Apple TV to the Windows Store and integrate iCloud Photos so you can sync your iPhones images to your Windows PC.

Also, as I tweeted, these are just a few of Microsoft’s announced partnerships over the last few weeks:

Starting in November, Netflix subscribers will have a $6.99-a-month option, which will include four to five minutes of ads an hour. Here’s the fine print, though: The ad-supported version won’t have Netflix’s full library, and users won’t be able to download content. The company will continue to offer a basic ad-free plan for $9.99 a month, as well as additional plans for $15.49 and $19.99 a month. Netflix’s ad offering is $1 cheaper than the one Disney+ plans to launch in December.

Last week: Google announced the Google Pixel Watch. This week: Nicole reviewed it! You should just read the whole thing here, but a few points stuck out to me. First, it’s really a fancy Fitbit. This could be, as I said last week, what allows Android smartwatches to really catch up to the Apple Watch’s fitness and health features. Then there were the 🐜🐜 🐜. In one instance, Nicole’s watch froze during her workout, and none of her activity was recorded. A Google spokeswoman said this was an early software issue. Between the iPhone 14 issues and these, I vote that all products start shipping with OFF!