My jaw spent more time dropped while using the Apple Vision Pro than with any other piece of tech I've ever tried.
I went to an Apple Store this week to get a demo of their new Apple Vision Pro mixed reality headset, and while Apple couldn't convince me to drop $3,500 on spot for a pair, they did convince me that it truly is the most advanced consumer electronics device any company has ever shipped, and more importantly, that there actually could be a use case for headsets outside of just gaming.
But the operative word there is still "could." At its core, the Vision Pro still feels like a cool demo. It's a good glimpse into what Apple wants to build and where they see wearables heading over the next decade, but as it exists today, its still a product where its potential is greater than its performance, even if that performance is really freaking impressive.
These were my initial thoughts from the demo.
A lot of reviewers have raved about the quality of the screens and the video pass-through, and they're correct. It's remarkable what Apple accomplished here. But if you compare it to real life, everything in the headset still looks a little less vibrant and sharp. Not to the point where it's distracting — and it indeed probably makes the outside world less distracting — but it's noticeable. And it's not clear the laws of physics will ever let us improve video pass-through enough to close that last 3% of difference.
I found the controls to be really intuitive. It took me a solid five minutes to remember I didn't have to reach my hands out in front of my face to make gestures and I didn't have to move my entire head to point my eyes at something, but I was flying through the UI after that. I'm sure there will be plenty of instances that arise where the eye tracking is really finicky; the idea of trying to precisely place a curser in between two characters in a textbox would be a freaking nightmare. But I was pleasantly surprised by how all these input methods fit together.
The first thing that truly blew me away was the spatial video demo. I've been waiting for this idea — the ability to take a wide-angle video and relive that moment later in VR — for quite a while. But I wasn't prepared for how wildly realistic the scene would feel. The video I saw was of a handful of kids blowing out candles at a birthday party, and it's not that I wanted to yank the cake away from them in some sort of cruel prank, but I felt like I absolutely could have if I wanted to. The scene genuinely had depth and dimension and felt immersive rather than just feeling like someone pressed my head against a huge 4K TV. I felt part of the moment.
Apple showed two previews of what it would be like to watch a soccer or baseball game inside the headset, and it was stunning. It would be painful to go back to watching an ordinary cable broadcast after experiencing a game in that. This could be huge. Apple needs to milk its sports partnerships with the MLS, MLB, and Disney as much as physically possible because I think this will be the feature that gets the most people to go from "this is neat" to "I want one of these." And they're idiots if they're not trying to make an Eras Tour concert film in Immersive Video.
The pre-loaded landscapes were absolutely beautiful. I kept begging the person leading my demo to let me go back to Mount Hood even as he kept instructing me to leave it. This is one of those interesting areas where Apple beats the competition not because they have better tech but because they have better taste. There's no reason Meta couldn't have made something like this except for the fact they didn't.
This is not anywhere close to an iPad or Mac replacement to me yet. I'm not actually turned on by the idea of having a Safari window hovering in my living room in front of me. That doesn't feel any more useful than just using the Safari window physically in front of me on my laptop screen, especially since you'll still want to use a Bluetooth keyboard with the Vision Pro anyways. I won't be able to wrap my head around the $3,499 price point or the idea of this as a new "platform" until it makes sense as a standalone computer.
Apple is framing the Vision Pro as a "first of its kind" product, and in some ways it is singular. This truly is the most advanced consumer electronics product ever created. But it's not unparalleled. The Meta Quest 3 does the high majority of the same things at a seventh of the price. I have full faith that using the Vision Pro is a much better user experience; eye tracking is a better input method than nunchucks, Apple has a much larger ecosystem to integrate with, and there's still no company better at designing a software UI than Apple. But you can buy a Meta Quest 3 for $499. I can't look at that list of differences and definitively say, "That saved me $3,000 worth of headaches." Don't underestimate the importance of having a clean UI, but also don't underestimate the importance of $3,000.
At some point nothing I said above matters though. Because once again, the Vision Pro is just freaking cool. It's geeky and impressively unsexy and impractical for a lot of tasks and still in search of a home in many ways. But it's freaking incredible tech. And I've said that so seldomly about consumer devices over the last decade that I give Apple a standing ovation for getting this out the door. It might be the most confusing product Apple has ever released, but it's a certifiable jaw dropper.
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