Apple wasn’t merely unveiling another flashy gadget with the Vision Pro—it was redefining how we will interact with computers. To put it plainly, this is not a VR headset designed for gaming, nor is it just a large screen awkwardly fixed to your head. Apple sees a world in which the virtual and real worlds merge without any seams, and the Vision Pro is essentially the first instance of this new concept.
Right off the bat, with a glance out of the box, one can tell that the design was meticulously thought through. The marriage of laminated glass with recycled aluminum has the appearance and the feel of a luxury product, and Apple includes two different headbands—the Solo Knit Band and the Dual Loop Band—along with interchangeable light seals. The knit one appears to be more compact, but most people choose the dual band for the sake of comfort, as the 600–650 grams of the headset are just lying on your face. In case you are wearing glasses, you will need to use special prescription inserts from Zeiss. They are quite expensive, but they do make the view much clearer. The initiation is very much like Apple: charging the battery, powering it up, and in a flash, app icons start appearing as if they were floating in your living room. The external cameras are responsible for passtrough video that is why you are never completely cut off from the outside world.
The tricky bit is getting it fitted just so. Apple’s face-scanning tech doesn’t always hit it, and if it’s off even slightly, you’ll know. A bad seal or poor adjustment can transform the gorgeous near-4K display into something more like a grainy 720p screen, and before long, you’ll feel the pressure building. Clarity and comfort rely on those little details, which can make initial usage frustrating.
Once you’re in, though, it really does feel like science fiction come to life. The Vision Pro runs on visionOS, which relies on your eyes, hands, and voice to control everything. Look at an icon, pinch your fingers, and it opens. Grab a window by the edge and drag it across the room. When it all works, it’s like living in a scene from Minority Report. But the sorcery is not perfect. Eye tracking occasionally picks the wrong thing, the virtual keyboard is cumbersome, and typing with no Bluetooth keyboard is agonizingly slow. Even using one, bugs occur—such as the software keyboard popping up at random or your cursor jumping to the wrong location. The system takes a lot of cues from iOS and macOS, so it feels comfortable, but sometimes it seems like Apple attempted to force 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.
