Apple Vision Pro review

The new Apple Vision Pro, the company’s eagerly anticipated foray into the realm of wearable computing, is under a lot of strain. According to Apple, the $3,499 Vision Pro marks the advent of “spatial computing,” which is essentially the ability to run apps everywhere you look. Additionally, the company’s advertisements for it, which feature people wearing the Vision Pro constantly, do not even somewhat mitigate that pressure. At the office! Laundrying! Having fun with their children! The goal is lofty: to enhance reality by superimposing apps and data on top of the actual world.

Since headset computers have been around for more than ten years, Apple must assert that the Vision Pro marks the start of anything new. In 2013, I tried the first Oculus Rift development prototype. Adi Robertson from The Verge, who edited this article, has tried on almost every headset that has been released since. Due to all of that development, several fantastic devices are now available. The original Oculus developed into Meta’s Quest line, which is currently launching the Quest 3, a very good VR headset that costs $500 and has a large library of games and some AR features of its own.

THE 24 HOUR STARTUP

Using all those concepts, Apple’s first attempt to create a computer that functions in the environment around you is the Vision Pro. The Vision Pro is intended to be a fully functional gadget that can work in tandem with the Mac and iPad within Apple’s ecosystem of gadgets. In addition to using Excel, Webex, and Slack, the Vision Pro allows you to view movies and TV shows on an enormous virtual 4K HDR monitor while relaxing. Additionally, you may utilize the Vision Pro to view a sizable monitor that is floating in virtual space by mirroring the display on your Mac.

Hardware

Though the Vision Pro is a VR headset that almost allows you to believe it’s not one, Apple doesn’t want anyone to mistake it for one.

It covers your whole field of view when worn on your head, giving you the impression that you are looking through the gadget to see a 3D video stream of your surroundings captured by the cameras on the front. However, it may also immerse you in virtual reality to varying degrees. I worked for a while totally on the moon and for a significant amount of time in my kitchen, where many windows floated around a doorway leading to Joshua Tree.

In contrast to other VR headsets, which are mostly made of plastic and frequently have ridiculous designs, the Vision Pro is gorgeous. The Vision Pro, on the other hand, feels like a logical continuation of Apple’s well-known design language because it is constructed of magnesium and carbon fiber inside an aluminum casing. There’s a tiny Apple Watch, a tiny AirPods Max, and a little iPhone 6. It’s the latest in technology packaged in an instantly recognizable way. When compared to some of the enormous VR headsets we’ve seen over the previous ten years, almost everyone I’ve shown it to believes it seems smaller in person than they anticipated.

The headband, available in two thicknesses, and the light seal, available in multiple sizes, make up the remaining two elements. (If you purchase these online, you can have them fitted in-store or have your head scanned by an iPhone.) You should pick this item up by the frame rather than the light seal since doing so could be disastrous because both attach and detach magnetically.

CONTROLS

Apple also takes great pride in its eye and hand-tracking control system, which is far superior to any other consumer-level eye or hand-tracking system available. The entire interface is navigated by looking at the objects you wish to manage and tapping your fingers to do so. Instead of reaching out and touching objects, you might think of your fingers as the button and your eyes as the mouse, tapping together to click on what you’re looking at.

When you use hand and eye tracking on the Vision Pro for the first few times, it’s amazing and feels like a superpower. For the Vision Pro to function, its external cameras just need to be able to see your hands, and they can see your hands in a vast area surrounding your body. Almost anywhere the cameras can view them, you can have them draped across the back of the couch, resting on your lap, or up in the air with your elbows resting on a table. It truly takes a minute to grasp that you don’t have to raise your hands to gesture in front of you, but once you do, it’s entertaining to observe other people as they naturally raise their hands in the air.

However, after a few uses, hand and eye tracking ceases to feel like a superpower and, in certain situations, actually makes using the Vision Pro more difficult. It turns out that it can be rather distracting to have to look at what you wish to control.

I understand that complaining about a hand tracking system requiring you to see your hands is essentially absurd, and you can use Siri and dictation to navigate through a lot of visionOS features, such as managing apps and opening various virtual immersions. You can get an idea of how a computer that you can interact with and manipulate objects in space might operate in the future if you squint.

But the boundaries are clear as of now. Unlike any other computer I’ve ever used, the Vision Pro constantly alerts you to what you are looking at and where your hands are. When it breaks, it aggravates me. Strangely, the newest watches from Apple can identify a pinching motion.

On the other hand, a system that is always observing your hands for input will often record a lot of additional inputs, some of which will be amusing. To ensure that everything flows, I chat while composing video scripts and using my hands. I was using Vision Pro to write the video script for this review when the system continued detecting my hand movements and inadvertently began to scroll and click on objects. The first time I recognized what was going on, I burst out laughing. Ultimately, though, it meant that I had to remove the Vision Pro and finish writing the script on my Mac, which only functions when I ask it to.

I believe that this is the best eye and hand tracking device that has ever been shipped, much like the displays. It can truly seem magical—until it doesn’t. Additionally, the input system must be completely reliable if you want users to perform computations there.

Personas

I won’t go into great detail about Apple’s incredibly strange and unsettling 3D persona system here; the best way to comprehend them is to watch the video review above, which shows Joanna Stern of The Wall Street Journal, Marques Brownlee, and myself using our respective personas during a FaceTime call. Personas are both incredibly awful and incredibly impressive, to borrow Marque’s words. It’s understandable why Apple designated them as beta users; there’s still a long way to go before adopting a character while on the phone isn’t, at best, incredibly inconsiderate and, at worst, irritating.

One tiny note: personas are compatible with almost all apps that require the front-facing camera for them to appear. While some on the Meet call did not think it was at all fine, I used mine on a Google Meet call in Safari with no issues at all.

Spatial cameras

If it’s not necessary, I wouldn’t advise taking pictures with the Vision Pro. A single press of the shutter produces a still image with dimensions of 2560 x 2560, or 6.5 megapixels. To the best of my knowledge, the left primary camera—which the EXIF data indicates has an 18mm f/2.0 lens—is always the source. The images appear to be poor quality 6.5-megapixel pictures taken with a small camera sensor that was designed for video.

Though not as good, the Vision Pro captures 2200 x 2200 square films at 30 frames per second. Although they appear somewhat less grainy than the images, they still undergo a great deal of compression. If you view them on a device other than a Vision Pro, you may also detect barrel distortion when the camera pans around. Nothing about this feels especially significant: since all of these movies and screen captures include a ton of extra motion from your head moving around, I really can’t think of any circumstances in which I would want to be filming while wearing a headset.

Using the iPhone 15 Pro Max to capture spatial films and seeing them in three dimensions on the Vision Pro is one highly convincing method. Like any dad, I could probably watch the movies I took of my kid at the zoo and around Christmastime indefinitely. The entire effect is really bittersweet, as you can relive a fleeting moment while alone in the headset and unable to share it with anybody else. They playback in a sort of ghostly white haze. The other issue is that you can’t capture iPhone videos in both the full 4K resolution the phone offers and 1080p at 30 frames per second.

visionOS

Running visionOS, which Apple claims is based on iPadOS, the Vision Pro has extensive customizations related to latency and vision to make it suitable for spatial computing. Having the iPad as the platform from which to grow is a huge advantage for Apple; it took years for Meta to complete the development of the Android-based Quest OS and fill its app store, which is still primarily filled with games. Apple gets to start with the majority of the vast iPad app store as well as the entire suite of sophisticated iPadOS capabilities.

Although it’s amusing to constantly compare the Vision Pro to an iPad for your face, it’s also not entirely inaccurate in terms of the apps available right now. The majority of them function similarly to iPad apps, and the home screen has an iPad app-filled “compatible apps” folder installed. It’s difficult to evaluate the app market for a product that hasn’t even been released yet, but at this point, I feel quite qualified to evaluate the iPad app market, and Apple releasing its podcast and news apps as iPad apps for the Vision Pro seems very promising.

What’s even more peculiar is that Safari on the Vision Pro seems to be somewhat cut off from web-based 3D applications. However, at the moment, support is quite patchy and rarely works.

When I inquired about this, Apple said that it aims to “work with the community to help deliver great spatial computing experiences via the web” and that it is actively participating in WebXR. So let’s see how that goes and give it a minute.

However, when I questioned Apple about why the vast majority of the VR video content on YouTube doesn’t function at all on the Vision Pro, the company essentially told me that it wasn’t good enough to support.

The main distinction between visionOS and iPadOS is that the former is completely free-floating window anarchy, while the latter has strong beliefs on how to arrange apps and how many apps you can run at once. I adore it. Bananas are the item.

You have infinite space to arrange and launch as many apps as you’d like. All of your old windows will be ready for you when you return to the kitchen after opening some more in the living room and leaving the kitchen. One late evening, I created an art gallery of enormous Safari windows in the spacious open café area of our company and strolled around, glancing at enormous web pages for a while.

Although there is a lot of intricate display scaling going on here, it’s best to just imagine that you’re essentially receiving a 27-inch Retina display, similar to what you’d find on an iMac or Studio Display. Your Mac operates macOS at a 2:1 logical resolution of 2560 x 1440, precisely like a 5K display, and it perceives itself as linked to a 5K display with a resolution of 5120 x 2880. (The gadget alerts you to the fact that alternative resolutions you choose will result in inferior quality.)

Wrap up

What a fantastic product the Vision Pro is. With its amazing display and passthrough engineering, its seamless usage of the ecosystem, and its ability to make everyone pretty much overlook the whole external battery scenario, it’s the kind of first-generation product that only Apple can truly build. A part of me believes that Apple is so strong, resource-rich, and talented that the firm just engineered the hell out of the most difficult issues it could come up with to find a challenge, which is why Vision Pro exists.

That’s excellent! The Vision Pro has a lot of ideas, and each one is carried out with a level of consideration and thoughtfulness that very few other businesses can match, much less accomplish on the first try. Given that this is the greatest video passthrough headset available, camera-based mixed reality passthrough may not be the way forward after all. The mouse, keyboard, and touchscreen feel like they will continue to be the best devices for years to come—this is the best hand- and eye-tracking ever.

That is a significant number of trade-offs, not minor ones. Despite the peculiar ghost eyes on the front, the worst drawback of all is how lonely it is to use the Vision Pro. There you are, alone in your sensations, able to have no one else join you. I now agree with Tim Cook’s long-held assertion that headsets are intrinsically isolating after using the Vision Pro for some time. That’s OK for conventional VR headsets, which over the past ten years have essentially become disposable game consoles, but far more strange for a primary computing device.

Targeting vloggers specifically, the new Sony ZV-E1 is a small, mirrorless full-frame camera designed for video makers. This new flagship model from Sony’s vlog-focused ZV range of cameras has a 12-megapixel full-frame backside-illuminated sensor, comparable to the pro-focused FX3, and combines AI autofocus technology from the A7R V to make producing high-quality video footage easier. How does it stack up against the iPhone 14 Pro, which is one of the most widely used everyday cameras in America?

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