Apple Vision Pro

There’s a lot of pressure on the new Apple Vision Pro, Apple’s long-awaited entry into the world of computers you wear on your face. Apple claims that the Vision Pro, which starts at $3,499, is the beginning of something called “spatial computing,” which basically boils down to running apps all around you. And the company’s ads for it do not hedge that pressure even a little: they show people wearing the Vision Pro all the time. At work! Doing laundry! Playing with their kids! The ambition is enormous: to layer apps and information over the real world — to augment reality.

Apple has to claim that the Vision Pro is the beginning of something new because people have been building headset computers for over a decade now. I tried on a development prototype of the first Oculus Rift in 2013, and The Verge’s Adi Robertson, who edited this review, has tried basically every headset that’s been released since. All of that development means there are some pretty good products out there: that first Oculus evolved into the Quest line at Meta, which is now shipping the Quest 3 — a very good VR headset with a huge library of games and some AR features of its own, which costs $500.

In the meantime, Apple, from Tim Cook on down, has largely insisted that augmented reality will be much more valuable than virtual reality. And it’s been building toward AR for a long time: developers have access to AR tools in iOS, and higher-end iPhones and iPads have had lidar depth scanners for a few years now.

The Vision Pro is Apple’s first attempt at building a computer out of all those ideas — a computer that works in the space around you. The goal is for the Vision Pro to be a complete device that can sit right alongside the Mac and the iPad in Apple’s ecosystem of devices and let you get real work done. You can use Excel and Webex and Slack in the Vision Pro, and you can also sit back and watch movies and TV shows on a gigantic virtual 4K HDR display. And you can mirror your Mac’s display and just use the Vision Pro to look at a huge monitor floating in virtual space.

Hardware

Apple doesn’t want anyone to think of the Vision Pro as a VR headset, but it’s a VR headset — albeit a VR headset that almost lets you pretend it’s not a VR headset. 

You put it on your head in a way that blocks out your vision entirely, and then it shows you a 3D video feed of the world around you passed through from the cameras on the front, as though you can see right through the device. But it can also put you in virtual reality, at various levels of immersion: I spent some time working entirely on the Moon and a lot of time in my kitchen with a bunch of windows floating around a portal into Joshua Tree. 

The Vision Pro is stunning compared to other VR headsets, which are largely plastic and often downright goofy-looking. The Vision Pro, by contrast, is built of magnesium and carbon fiber in an aluminum enclosure that feels like a natural extension of Apple’s familiar design language. There’s a little iPhone 6 in there, a little AirPods Max, a little Apple Watch. It is the cutting edge of technology in a package that seems instantly familiar. Almost everyone I’ve shown it to thinks it looks smaller in person than they expected, especially compared to some of the huge VR headsets we’ve seen over the past decade.

The front display on the Vision Pro is an attempt at keeping you from being isolated from other people while you’re wearing it. In Apple’s photos, it looks like a big, bright screen that shows a video of your eyes to people around you so they feel comfortable talking to you while you’re wearing the headset — a feature adorably called EyeSight. In reality, it might as well not be there. It’s a low-res OLED with a lenticular panel in front of it to provide a mild 3D effect, and it’s so dim and the cover glass is so reflective, it’s actually hard to see in most normal to bright lighting. When people do see your eyes, it’s a low-res, ghostly image of them that feels like CGI. The effect is uncanny — the idea that you’ll be making real eye contact with anyone is a fantasy. And there are no controls or indicators in visionOS for this external display, so you never really know what other people are seeing. Imagine looking someone directly in the eyes and talking to them without knowing if they can see your eyes — it’s weird!

Notably, the Vision Pro is substantially heavier than the familiar Quest 2 (503g) or even the heavier Quest 3 (515g) — headsets that have built-in batteries. Apple told me that it chose to use an external battery specifically to reduce the headset’s weight. The battery itself is barely worth talking about — it’s a silver brick that weighs another 353 grams with a USB-C port and a motion-activated LED that’s green when it’s charged and orange when it’s not. It connects to the headset with a satisfying twist connector, but the nice braided cable is permanently attached to the battery itself, so don’t break it. You can buy extra batteries for $199, but you can’t hot-swap them; disconnecting the battery from the Vision Pro cuts the power entirely.

I don’t really have strong opinions on this battery setup, which is mostly because nothing about the Vision Pro feels like you’re supposed to move around that much in it, so it’s more or less fine. It’s funny that Apple of all companies shipped this compromise, but it’s also very Apple that the battery is not actually bigger so it can provide more than two and a half hours of run time. (If you plug the battery in, the Vision Pro just runs on wall power for as long as you want.)

Setting up the Vision Pro is dead simple — the headband adjustments are the only manual adjustments involved. Everything else is motorized and sensor-driven. There’s no fiddly lens wheel to dial in; the headset asks you to hold down the digital crown when you first put it on to adjust the lenses to your eyes, and then you go through a pretty standard eye tracking setup. The rest of the setup is almost exactly like any other iOS device: if you have an iPhone, you can bring it close to the Vision Pro to send over all your settings, and you have to agree to some terms and conditions. If you don’t have an iPhone, you’ll have to enter your passwords and so on manually, but it’ll work fine as a standalone device. After all of that, you’re computing in the future.

Apple is very proud of the displays inside the Vision Pro, and for good reason — they represent a huge leap forward in display technology. The two displays are tiny MicroOLEDs with a total of 23 million pixels that are just 7.5 micrometers in size, which is about the size of a red blood cell. And each of those tiny pixels is composed of three RGB subpixels laid out in what Apple tells me is an S-stripe pattern. Just thinking about the level of precision required to make these displays and then make them work in a device like this is mind-blowing. 

They also look generally incredible — sharp enough to read text on without even thinking about it, bright enough to do justice to movies. Apple calibrates them for color at the factory so they are also vibrant and color-accurate without looking oversaturated or blown out. They are so small, but they work so well that they seem huge.

The displays are the main reason the Vision Pro is so expensive — they’re at the heart of the Vision Pro experience and what makes the whole thing work. You are always looking at them, after all. But for all their technical marvels, they are not without tradeoffs of their own when deployed on a device like this.

Controls

The other thing Apple is very proud of is the eye and hand tracking control system, which is light years beyond any other consumer hand or eye tracking systems out there. You look at things you want to control, you tap your fingers to control them, and that’s how you get around the entire interface. You’re not reaching out and touching things — it’s more like your eyes are the mouse, and your fingers are the button: you tap them together to click on what you’re looking at.

The first few times you use hand and eye tracking on the Vision Pro, it’s awe-inspiring — it feels like a superpower. The Vision Pro’s external cameras just need to see your hands for it to work, and they can see your hands in a pretty large zone around your body. You can have them slung across the back of the couch, resting in your lap, up in the air with your elbows on a table, pretty much anywhere the cameras can see them. It actually takes a minute to realize you don’t have to gesture out in front of you with your hands in the air — and once you figure it out, it’s pretty fun to watch other people instinctively reach their hands up the first time they try the Vision Pro.

But the next few times you use hand and eye tracking, it stops feeling like a superpower — and in some cases, it actively makes using the Vision Pro harder. It turns out that having to look at what you want to control is really quite distracting.

Think about every other computer in your life: the input mechanism is independent of whatever you’re looking at. On a laptop, you can click on controls and use the keyboard while keeping your focus on a document. On a phone, you can do things like drag sliders in a photo editing app while keeping your eyes focused on what those changes are actually doing to your photo.

The Vision Pro simply doesn’t work like that — you have to be looking at something in order to click on it, and that means you are constantly taking your attention away from whatever you’re working on to specifically look at the button you need to press next. I spent some time playing a lovely little game called Stitch that quickly became maddening because I kept looking away from the piece I wanted to move to the place I wanted to move it, which meant I wasn’t picking it up when I tapped my fingers.

VisionOS

The Vision Pro runs visionOS, which Apple says is based on iPadOS, with a lot of customization around latency and vision to make it work for spatial computing. Starting with the iPad as a foundation represents an incredible head start for Apple — it’s taken years for Meta to build out all the features of the Android-based Quest OS and populate its app store, and it’s still mostly games. Apple gets to start with the full set of mature iPadOS features and most of the huge iPad app library.

It’s funny to keep saying that the Vision Pro is an iPad for your face, but when it comes to the current set of apps, it’s also not totally wrong. Most of them work like iPad apps, and the homescreen comes preloaded with a folder labeled “compatible apps” that’s full of actual iPad apps. It’s hard to judge the app ecosystem for a product that has barely launched, but I feel totally comfortable judging the iPad app ecosystem at this point, and Apple shipping its own podcast and news apps as iPad apps on the Vision Pro feels like a sign in a lot of ways.

There’s already controversy in the world of Vision Pro apps: some huge developers like Netflix, Spotify, and YouTube have decided to wait before allowing their apps to run on the Vision Pro and aren’t even allowing their iPad apps to run. As always, the open web serves as the pressure release valve for Apple developer politics, and Safari on the Vision Pro is a capable riff on iPad Safari: I watched Netflix in Safari and it worked without a hitch, although you can’t put the video in a nice environment like you can with the native apps. I also watched the NFL playoffs on YouTube TV in Safari on the Vision Pro, and it worked with a few minor hiccups, although it did keep asking me to confirm my location over and over again.

The stranger thing is that Safari on the Vision Pro is pretty disconnected from web-based 3D experiences. Apple has made noise about supporting the WebXR standard, and there are flags in Safari’s advanced preferences to turn on support, but it’s pretty hit-or-miss in terms of actually working right now — it mostly does not.

I asked about this, and Apple told me that it is actively contributing to WebXR and wants to “work with the community to help deliver great spatial computing experiences via the web.” So let’s give that one a minute and see how it goes.

On the other hand, I asked Apple why the huge library of VR video on YouTube doesn’t work at all on the Vision Pro, and the company basically told me it wasn’t good enough to support, saying that “much of this content was created for devices that do not deliver a high-quality spatial experience” and that the company’s efforts were instead focused on “delivering the best spatial media experience possible including spatial photos and videos, Apple Immersive Video, and 3D movies available on Apple TV.”