When Apple revealed the Vision Pro, it was not only presenting a flashy product, but also pointing to the next chapter of its computing journey. The Vision Pro is certainly not a virtual reality device for gaming or some huge display that is inconveniently fixed to your head. The Vision Pro is Apple’s first big move into a world where the digital and the real merge, and with that, the company is betting everything on such a future.
You can immediately tell how much work has gone to the design just by taking it off the shelf. The blend of laminated glass and recycled aluminum looks and feels like a premium product, and Apple ships two different headbands—the Solo Knit Band and the Dual Loop Band—along with swappable light seals. The knit version looks a little more streamlined, but most people choose the dual band for comfort, as the 600–650 grams of the headset are just on your face. If you wear glasses, you will need to use special prescription inserts from Zeiss. They are quite expensive, but they do improve clarity a lot. Starting up is very Apple-like: connect the battery, put it on, and suddenly app icons appear floating around your living room. The external cameras handle passthrough video so that you are never completely cut off from the outside world.
The difficult part is getting the perfect fit. Apple’s face-scanning tech doesn’t always get it, and if it’s off even a little, you’ll know. A bad seal or poor adjustment can turn the stunning near-4K display into something more like a grainy 720p screen, and very soon, you’ll feel the pressure building. Sharpness and comfort depend on those little things, which can make the first time using it quite frustrating.
However, once you are inside, it really does feel like something out of a sci-fi movie. The Vision Pro is powered by visionOS, which uses your eyes, hands, and voice as the means of control. You look at an icon, do a pinch gesture with your fingers, and it opens. You grab a window by the side and drag it to another place in the room. When it is all working, it is like being in a scene from Minority Report. But the magic is not flawless. Sometimes the eye tracking chooses the wrong thing, the virtual keyboard is inconvenient, and if you do not have a Bluetooth keyboard, typing is unbearably slow. Even if you use one, bugs still occur—e.g., the software keyboard may pop up at a random location or your cursor may jump to the wrong position. The system borrows heavily from iOS and macOS in terms of user interface and thus feels familiar, but at times it seems that Apple tried to impose a 2D interface on a 3D environment.
The hardware within the Vision Pro is genuinely impressive. It contains tons of cameras and sensors, and twin micro-OLED screens that, them, output 23 million pixels with no gaps to see. The displays go up to 100Hz with deep colors and inky blacks, and the passthrough sight of the actual world appears crisp. The LiDAR sensor allows virtual objects to interact plausibly with actual surfaces, even shadows on your desktop. Spatial audio creates another aspect, adapting sound to your head shape and room so voices and effects sound like they’re coming from specific locations in the vicinity.
For work, the headset is surprisingly good. You can toss apps around your environment, project the screen of your MacBook out in front of you, and work with your keyboard and trackpad as normal. Some already use this as a main setup for a desk. But there are boundaries. The virtual keyboard is slowing you down, apps such as Excel or Word are bare-bones versions, and you can’t even, in actuality, use your hands to touch the Mac screen in front of you, which doesn’t feel like it should be a missed opportunity.
Entertainment is where the Vision Pro truly excels. Watching a film feels like having your own personal cinema, complete with realistic lighting and giant virtual screens. Immersive settings, such as a desert night sky or a white mountain environment, make it even more of a movie. Space videos and documentaries place you in the midst of action in a manner that flat screens cannot. Games are not as big an attraction at the moment. A few use the hardware creatively, but the selection is limited, and streaming from a console is marred by lag and resolution problems.
The app landscape is expanding but remains with gaps. Apple boasts of supporting millions of iPhone and iPad apps, yet few merely exist as floating windows. There are more than 2,500 apps created specifically for the headset, but some major brands are still absent—such as YouTube, Spotify, and Slack. Apps of many feel they’re just touching the surface of what spatial computing can achieve.
All of this has real-world tradeoffs. The Vision Pro is heavy, and after half an hour, you’ll feel it pressing into your face. The external battery only lasts about two hours unless it’s plugged in, which makes using it on the go awkward. Bugs and glitches pop up often, from drifting eye tracking to disappearing windows, and sometimes the only solution is a reboot. Add to that the eye-watering cost of $3,500 before you even begin to tack on upgrades or accessories. For that amount of money, you could purchase a brand-new MacBook and iPhone as a package.
Beneath those shortfalls, however, there is something undeniable about the Vision Pro. When everything comes together—fit, hardware, and software—it feels like you’re looking ahead to what’s next. You can work on floating screens, view movies on what amounts to a personal IMAX, and communicate with people in ways that feel remarkably lifelike. It’s not ready to take the place of your laptop or phone, and it’s hardly flawless, but it’s a strong start toward a new way of conceptualizing computers.
Right now, the Vision Pro is for early adopters and enthusiasts, not the everyday user. But it’s also one of the most daring and ambitious devices Apple has ever made. It may not be the future just yet, but it’s the clearest vision we’ve seen of where things are heading.
