I’ve been using the Apple Vision Pro for a bit over a month at this point, and while I’ve gone deep on a few key use cases of using the product already, I thought it was high time I collect my thoughts on the product in one place. When a new smartphone comes out, you can tell within a few minutes what 80% of your opinions on that phone are: it runs a familiar operating system with familiar apps all in a form factor that’s very familiar. Reviewing the Vision Pro is not like that at all. While I do think it’s fair to call this a VR headset, it’s being sold with different use cases than other headsets on the market and to an audience who very well may have never used a headset before. This is why I’ve been taking it slow in gathering my thoughts into what I’m happy to call a “review”. As I think Nilay Patel put very succinctly in his review, “it’s magic, until it’s not.” I feel you need to get past the “magic” phase to get to an opinion with a bit more context.
Let’s kick this thing off with some potentially eye-raising opinions I have about the Vision Pro right now. I promise I’ll explain and justify each of these statements throughout the review.
The Vision Pro is far less useful for me as a computer than my Mac, iPad, and iPhone.
The Vision Pro can deliver fantastic media experiences.
The Vision Pro is appropriately priced for the technology it delivers.
The Vision Pro is fundamentally held back by the fact that wearing headsets sucks.
There are many better ways for almost everyone to spend $3,500-4,000 on computer hardware in 2024.
For the right sort of person, the Vision Pro is a product they simply must own.
A lot of this review is going to get subjective, so let’s talk about some of the basic features of this hardware and software. As always for my reviews, I’m less interested in laying out tech specs and am more interested in the experiences these specs enable, and how they compare to other products on the market.
The hardware is stunning
First up, the hardware itself is pretty incredible, and I just find it to be a very satisfying object to look at. As I said in my initial impressions, I don’t think there’s another company that could make a consumer product like this today. It’s a beautiful piece of kit.
The Vision Pro is powered by the M2 processor and the R1 companion processor. The R1 is new to the Vision Pro and is responsible for most (all?) of the the head/hand tracking and passthrough video logic. From what I can tell, the R1 is a triumph, as the real time tracking in the Vision Pro is basically always spot on. The M2 on the other hand is doing great work, but it’s immediately clear to me how more processing power will help future generations of the product feel better to use. Performance is generally fine, but you really see it being pushed in things like scrolling. If you’re “60fps or bust” for scrolling on your devices, then the Vision Pro is going to bum you out a bit.
Also, based on the titles available now, simple visuals are the name of the game, with more advanced visuals like we’d see on PC and Mac, or 4-year-old VR games like Half-Life: Alyx simply aren’t here yet. Even Quest 3 games like Asgard’s Wrath 2 are far more visually ambitious than what I’m seeing on the App Store right now. Part of that is surely just time, so we very well may see higher end games running on this model of the Vision Pro, but we’ll have to wait and see.
Finally on the performance front, the Vision Pro makes heavy use of foveated rendering to only show the thing you’re directly looking at in full clarity, and everything else at a much lower resolution. Apple's of course not the first to use this tech in VR (PlayStation VR 2 and Meta Quest Pro use it, as well as 2019's Valve Index), but it's a smart feature and our eyes naturally do this a bit as well, but it’s done to a pretty extreme level on the current Vision Pro and it’s plainly obvious to see at all times. One example of this being problematic is when watching movies. I find I can’t make the digital screen quite as large as I might want because it gets to a point where only part of the movie is in focus and it degrades the experience for me. This is another example of the M2 processor simply being pushed to its absolute limit, and more powerful hardware would make this aggressive foveated rendering less necessary.
The displays are world-class
The displays are pretty stellar, and are more clear than anything else you can buy today. That said, they’re also one of the areas of the Vision Pro that I can easily see getting far better in future revisions. I wrote about this at length in this post, so let me just quote the relevant bit from there (emphasis added):
We care about points per degree of vision. In short this is how many pixels are in every degree of horizontal distance you perceive in the headset. In VR we don't care about PPI or DPI, we care about PPD. Using this measurement, the Vision Pro's display is about 34 PPD, which is higher than the Quest 3 (25 PPD) or the PlayStation VR2 (19 PPD), so major improvements there, but how does that compare to the effective PPD of a 4K monitor 24 inches from my face? According to this site, my monitor has 74 PPD, or a little over twice that of the Vision Pro. For those of you with a 5K monitor, you're around 98 PPD at the same viewing distance. In fact, the 34 PPD of the Vision Pro is closest to that of a 1080p 27" monitor when viewed from 24 inches.
So yeah, viewing digital content in the Vision Pro is very much not “retina” by the definition we’ve used for displays over the past decade and change. It’s more crisp than any other headset you can get today, but I think this will be much like the original iPhone’s screen: impressive for its time, but will look archaic within a few iterations.
In much the same way, pass-through video of the world around you is the best I’ve seen on a headset so far, but it’s still far from perfect. Here’s a still from Linus Tech Tips’ review of the Vision Pro giving you an idea for how muted and grainy the real world looks compared to digital content:
Again, this is the best I’ve seen in a headset myself, and the distortion is less than I see on the Meta Quest 3, but it’s still an area where there is clear room for improvement in future versions.
Eye tracking is super impressive
Eye tracking is generally pretty great, and it’s one of the “wow” moments I had early on with the product. If you have any issues with it, I suggest going through the calibration steps again, this time going very slowly through each step. I sped through the configuration my first time and things weren’t quite right, but redoing it helped me a ton. I will say that there are some cases where UI elements are close together and it’s frustrating to try and properly select the item I want. I’ll talk more about eye tracking further down in the review.
Personas ain’t it (yet)
All I will say about personas is that they just aren’t right and I would never use them in their current form in any professional or personal situation. And yes, I have installed visionOS 1.1 and made a new one, but these are simply not ready for use in the real world for me.
In fairness, they are a clever solution to a fundamental problem with wearing a headset, but as we’ll get into below, a lot of visionOS is working to offset the fundamental problems with wearing a headset on your face.
EyeSight doesn't do much for me
Apple seems to think that EyeSight is an important feature, but I think it’s kind of a miss. Per Apple’s docs, there are 3 modes people can see from the outside, and I think it’s a lot for someone else to remember what each state means.
I don’t have a ton of experience with this feature since I only really use this product while I’m alone, but the outer screen is dim enough and the effect is subtle enough that when I asked my wife what she thought about the feature, she said she wasn’t even sure the screen was showing anything she was supposed to be paying attention to. This is anecdotal, but from her perspective, if I am wearing the headset, I’m somewhere else and a couple digital eyes don’t really change that for her.
Guest mode needs some work
This is also a good place to mention guest mode, which lets you give your Vision Pro to someone else so they can try it out. It’s relatively well thought out, as it does things like asking if you want to mirror the display to a nearby AirPlay receiver so you can see what the other person is doing. It also lets you choose whether the guest can only access the current app or if they can freely navigate the system.
The tricky thing about this mode is that it takes a long time to set up. The guest puts on the headset and they need to align the lenses and go through the eye tracking calibration steps. I understand why this has to happen, but it does mean that it takes a few minutes of un-fun work to get someone to the fun stuff you were trying to show them. What’s worse is that the moment the guest takes the headset off, everything is immediately reset and they need to go through the setup again.
This is one thing when I’m trying to give someone a one-time demo, but it’s really annoying trying to share the good experiences the Vision Pro enables with my wife. As it stands now, she doesn’t want to be bothered with seeing photos or spatial videos because it’s so much work each time. That’s a real bummer and it’s a real missed opportunity for Apple who I would guess wants families sharing this thing so that once it gets cheaper, additional family members want to get a headset of their own.
What I’d like to see in an update is the ability to create multiple users, but given Apple seems to have no interest in this on any platform created in the past 20 years, I’d suggest being able to mark a guest as a “VIP” so that their lens alignment and eye tracking calibration settings are saved and automatically used when you indicate that you are entering guest mode for this VIP user.
The virtual keyboard is better than I expected
The virtual keyboard got a lot of criticism in the early reviews, but honestly I find it pretty good considering the limitations inherent to the VR space. You can look at keys on the virtual keyboard and pinch to hit them, or you can reach out to them in 3D space and press them that way. I find the second method to be quicker most of the time. I would never write a blog post that way, but for entering a password or search term, it’s fine.
Battery is alright
iPhone 15 Pro Max for scale
The external battery is definitely a little annoying, but you do manage to get used to it relatively quickly. I do still get hooked on things like the arms on my office chair, snapping my head in that direction unexpectedly, but more often than not it's just a minor annoyance. It really makes me appreciate the Quest 3's completely wireless operation, but it's not the end of the world either.
In terms of battery life, I seem to get a bit over 2 hours when watching a movie. Rogue One is 2 hours and 13 minutes and I just made it through on a full charge. Anything longer and I'd make sure I could plug in while watching. I don't have any great battery tests to share for doing productive work because frankly I haven't worn it for more than an hour or so at a time.
One last quirk is that while we have become used to Apple devices having pretty insane standby battery life, that's not the case with the Vision Pro. If I charge this thing up to 100% and just let it sit for 2 days, the battery will be dead or close to death when I pick it up again. I guess the device is just more "alive" when it's sleeping than other devices, but it was a bit of a surprise. If you want to leave it for more than a day, just unplug the battery from the headset.
Audio quality surprised me
The built-in speakers are surprisingly excellent. John Gruber called them better than any headphones he’s ever used, and while I wouldn’t go that far, I do think they’re pretty excellent, and if I’m watching a movie on the Vision Pro, I’m always using the built-in speakers rather than popping in headphones because they sound so good (and I don’t want to add even more bulk to my head).
I’m not an audiophile by any means (AirPods and AirPods Pro sound the same to me, lossless audio sounds the same as any old MP3, etc.) so take this with a grain of salt, but color me surprised how fantastic these little speakers sound.