Apple Vision Pro review: magic, until it’s not
– Well, it’s here. The Apple Vision Pro is Apple’s long awaited entry into the world of computers you wear on your face. It’s a headset that starts at 3,499 that Apple claims is the beginning of something called spatial computing, which basically boils down to running apps all around you. Apple has to claim that the Vision Pro is the beginning of something new because people have been building VR headsets for over a decade now. I first tried on the Oculus Rift at CES in 2013. – Here it is. This is a stereo. Oh, oh. Can you
still see it? – No. – My foot just hit this thing. – Oh, we’re back. The latest successor of that Oculus is the Meta Quest 3. A very complete $500 headset with a huge library of games. “Verge” editor Addie Robertson, who helped me with this review has tried on basically every other headset that’s been released in between. In the meantime, Apple, from Tim Cook on down, has largely insisted that it’s far more interested in AR, augmented reality, than VR, but now Apple has up and launched the Vision Pro, which is meant to be a full-fledged
computer with real apps that lets you get real work done. Something that can sit right alongside the Mac and the iPad in Apple’s ecosystem of devices, but the Vision Pro
that I’m willing to mess up my hair every time I put it on? Is it so good that I wanna lug around this giant carrying case instead of my laptop bag? Is it so good that I wanna look at the world around me through screens instead of with my own eyes? Basically, do I prefer using a computer in there or out here? Let’s talk about it. Apple doesn’t want anyone to think of the Vision Pro as a VR headset, but it’s a VR headset. It’s a VR headset with incredibly good spatial tracking that almost lets
you pretend it’s not a VR headset, but it’s a VR headset. You put it on your head in a way that blocks out reality entirely and then it shows you video feeds passed through from the cameras in the front, making it look like you can see right through the device, but it can also show you anything else at various levels of immersion. Here I am on the moon. Here I am halfway immersed at Joshua Tree and halfway still in the loft. It’s neat. The Vision Pro hardware is stunning compared to most other VR headsets, which
are largely plastic and often downright goofy looking. The Vision Pro is built of magnesium, and carbon fiber, and 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 the past decade. The front display on the Vision Pro
is a little bit of marketing genius. In photos, it looks like a big bright screen that shows your eyes to people around you in order to keep you connected to the real world. In reality, it’s a somewhat dim low res OLED covered in glass so reflective it’s actually hard to see in most normal to bright lighting. And from the inside, there’s no indicator of what other people outside are seeing, so no matter what’s on the front of the headset, everyone just perceives you as being in there. It’s not like you’re making real eye contact. On
top of that, the eyes themselves are pretty creepy and kind of off-putting. I’m not sure any of this works like Apple wants it to. The other thing under the cover glass is cameras and sensors, a lot of cameras and sensors, and underneath those you’ve got an M2 processor and Apple’s new R1 spatial co-processor along with a pair of fans to move the heat from all those cameras, processors, and displays at the top. You never really hear or feel the fans as far as I’ve seen, but this thing definitely gets warm, and you can feel that
warmth after long sessions wearing it. On the top edge, you’ll find a large version of familiar Apple Watch controls. A Digital Crown that adjusts both the volume and the level of virtual reality immersion on the right and a camera shutter button on the left that lets you take 3D photos and videos. You get two headbands in the box. The solo knit band and the dual loop band. They both attach and detach easily. You just pull the little orange tab to disconnect them. The solo band is unquestionably cooler and messes up your hair less, but they
both mess up your hair, so if the dual loop fits you better, just go with it. The other two pieces are the light seal, which comes in various sizes, and the headband, which comes in two thicknesses. Both attach magnetically, which means they also detach magnetically. You wanna pick this thing up by the frame because grabbing it by the light seal can lead to disaster. If you have glasses you can click in custom Zeiss lens insert. Apple sent us these reader lenses to see what it all looks like, but I just use the Vision Pro while
wearing my soft contacts and it was fine. The speakers are housed in the little arms on the side, and they are good and loud and do a convincing job of rendering spatial audio. Things really sound like they’re happening where they appear to be happening, which is cool. The downside is they’re pretty loud, and everyone else around you can hear what you’re up to unless you use headphones. You can use any Bluetooth headphones you want, but you get a bunch of extra features if you use the latest AirPods Pro, like lower latency and lossless audio. The
main thing about the Vision Pro is that it’s just heavy. You’re supposed to wear this thing on your face for long stretches of computer time. Depending on what band and light seal you use, the headset alone weighs substantially more than an 11-inch iPad Pro and gets close to a 12.9-inch iPad Pro. In a very real way, this is an iPad on your face. It’s also substantially heavier than the familiar Quest 2 or even the heavier Quest 3, and those headsets include built-in batteries. Apple specifically chose to go with an external battery to reduce weight. The
battery itself is barely worth talking about. It’s a silver brick with a USB-C port and an LED that’s green when it’s charged and orange when it’s not. The cable is permanently attached, so don’t break it. I don’t really have strong opinions on this battery, which feels like a particular kind of win. It’s funny that Apple of all companies shipped this compromise, but it’s also very Apple that the battery isn’t actually bigger so it can provide more than two and a half hours of battery life. The battery being external means that all of the Vision Pro’s
heft is totally front loaded. Other big headsets like the Quest Pro have elaborate headbands to balance out their weight, but no matter which of Apple’s bands you’re using, the Vision Pro just rests it all on your face and after a long session in there, you definitely feel it. (bright upbeat music) Apple is very proud of the displays inside the Vision Pro, which are tiny microOLEDs with incredible pixel density and resolution. These displays are the main reason this thing is so expensive, and they’re at the heart of the Vision Pro experience. You’re always looking at them
after all, and that’s the thing that makes a video review like this the hardest. I can’t actually show you what it’s like to look through these lenses at these displays. They don’t light up unless you’re wearing it. And even if we could trick the Vision Pro into turning on without a head inside, there’s no camera that really acts like your eyes, so I’m just gonna describe it to you and our art director, Alex Parkin, is gonna layer effects over a screen capture to simulate it. The first thing about the displays is that the field of
view isn’t huge, and the essential nature of VR displays makes that field of view feel even smaller. Apple won’t tell me the exact number, but it’s certainly smaller than the Quest 3’s 110 degrees. So you have fairly large black borders around what you’re seeing, a bit like you’re looking through binoculars, and then there’s a little bit of color fringing, distortion, and vignetting around the edges of the lenses, which shrinks the usable field of view even more. You can’t just glance to the side of the displays because they’re not sharp edge to edge. You have to
turn your head a little. And whenever I looked at something particularly high contrast, like a white window of text floating above a dark desert landscape, I could see highlights reflecting in the lenses. If you’ve been paying attention to VR for the past decade, you know these are very familiar VR headset display issues, but Apple is charging 3,499 for the Vision Pro and making it sound like these displays are perfect representations of reality, which is where you can really feel the company’s ambitions getting ahead of the product itself. See, this thing, a VR headset with a
silly external battery pack, isn’t the goal. Apple’s been talking about AR forever, and the true goal of AR is optical AR where light passes directly through a lens to your eyes and digital information gets layered on top of it. The tech for that dream just isn’t there yet. Optical AR headsets like the Magic Leap 2 have huge compromises in them that simply can’t deliver everything Apple wants to do, so Apple settled for video pass through. It is the defining trade off of the Vision Pro, and let me tell you, the video pass through on the
Vision Pro is great. It works. It’s convincing. You put the headset on, the display lights up, and you’re right back where you were only with a bunch of visionOS windows floating around you. It sounds simple, but it is an astonishing engineering achievement to do all of this in real time and high resolution in a computer that fits over your eyes. Apple claims there’s only 12 milliseconds of latency between what the cameras see and what’s on the display, and that latency includes the exposure time of the cameras themselves. The actual data processing is faster. Do the
math, and Apple says there’s not even a frames worth of latency. The next frame of video is ready before you’re done looking at the last one, and you can see Apple’s incredible skill at processing video right in front of your eyes. I just sat around scrolling on my phone while wearing the Vision Pro with no blown out screens or weird frame rate issues. I did some work on my Mac in front of a window, which is a torture test for dynamic range, and yeah, there were some weird exposure issues, but it was usable in a
way that basically nothing else would be. The problem is that cameras are still cameras and displays are still displays. Cameras have motion blur, for example. In low light, cameras have to either increase exposure time at the cost of sharpness or increase ISO at the cost of noise, which then requires noise reduction, which makes things blurry and dull. And cameras and displays both have real limits in terms of color reproduction. So yes, you can easily see motion blur when you move your head in the Vision Pro. Motion blur that increases in low light and leads to
some weird warping of straight lines. Low light also causes the overall sharpness of the video pass through to drop as noise reduction kicks in. My iPhone screen got noticeably blurrier when the sun set. And Apple specs say the display supports 92% of the DCI-P3 color space, which represents about 54% of all the colors people can see, which carry the one, that means the Vision Pro can only show you 49% of the colors your eyes can actually see. Look, here’s something really silly. This is what it looked like when I glanced at the clock on my
microwave last night. That’s just some weird camera stuff, and stuff like that happens all the time. I’m a huge display nerd. I love this stuff. I would never tell you about the color gamut of a phone or a laptop, but if you’re asking me to put this thing over my eyes and perceive reality through it, I kind of want it to look like reality. I want all the colors of the rainbow. I’m serious when I say this is the best video pass through I’ve ever seen on the sharpest VR displays any regular person will ever
come across, but reality is really hard to reproduce, and the Vision Pro constantly reminds you that you are looking at video on screens. I think reality is just more interesting than that. This is the best anyone has ever made in there look, and it’s still not as good as out here. One of the headline features of the Apple Vision Pro and visionOS is something called Personas, where Apple has the Vision Pro scan your face, scan your head, and make a 3D model of you that you can then use to video conference with. I’m gonna go
through the process of making that model and then we’re gonna call some friends and see what they look like. It’s in beta. Apple says this isn’t final. They’re still tuning it. They wanna see how regular people react to it. I’m just gonna hit Get Started, and it’s actually prompt me to take the headset off. – Slowly turn your head to the right. Now slowly turn your head to the left. Now tilt your head up, then tilt your head down. Next, let’s capture your facial expressions. Smile with your mouth closed. Then make a big smile with
your teeth showing. Now raise your eyebrows. Close your eyes for a moment. Capture complete. Put Vision Pro back on to continue. – Oh boy. Let’s see how this looks. I would say I look like I’m wearing a beret. Let’s be honest. I feel like I’m wearing a beret in this capture. Let’s call some people and see what they think. (Vision Pro beeping) Marques, you look the most like you of anyone I’ve seen in this, I would say. – You guys, you both look like not like a photo of you, but like someone drew you from
a memory. – From a nightmare they had of me. Like I can’t move my hair, so it’s just all like on my chest kind of. – Like connected to your collar, yeah. – Can you do a big hair swish in real life? What happens? – Yeah. (Nilay laughing) – It just did not move at all. – Not even a little bit. – I will say the spatial audio helps a little bit. It’s actually coming from the side that the person is on. Also, do you see my hand? I’ve seen people where their hand shows up.
– Oh yeah. You’re like this emoji, right? You’re like doing this thing, yeah. – Yeah, I can see it. Okay. – All right, how am I? Is it good? – Yeah yours are good. A little faded out. – It’s a little cartoon hand. – Also when you’re close to the face, it does the blur, but if you’ve got like a little bit of space. – It’s both really impressive and really bad at the same time. (Nilay laughs) Because I’m thinking about all the things that it’s figuring out with what our faces are doing. Like it
is getting us blinking and our like eyebrows moving up and down and even the mouth. I don’t know how it sees my mouth, but then I blink and I look at it again and it looks absurd, so. – Literally while Marques was saying it was getting little movements, his face froze on me. It’s like hard to have this conversation right now. That’s what I will say about this. I understand why it’s in beta. I think if they’re like, “This is done,” people would be like, “Is it?” (bright music) The other thing Apple is very proud
of is the hand and eye tracking control system, which again is light years beyond any other mass market hand or eye tracking systems. The Vision Pro unlocks what Apple calls Optic ID, so it just sees your eyes and it’s ready to go, and then you just look at things you want to control and you tap your fingers to control them, and that’s how you get around the entire interface. 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 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, whatever you want. It actually takes a minute to realize you don’t have to gesture out in front of you with your hands in the air, which it’s pretty fun to watch other people instinctively do that the first time they try the Vision Pro on. 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 because forcing you to look at what you want to control is actually really distracting. Just think about every other computer in your life. The input mechanism is independent of whatever you’re looking at, like I don’t think I’ve looked at my mouse while I’m using it in years. Then there’s the fact that visionOS feels designed for eye tracking that’s just slightly more precise than it actually is. All the controls are a little too small and a little too close together to let you bop seamlessly around the
system. You have to look, make sure you’re looking, and then tap, or you might end up clicking on the wrong thing. I was talking to Addie about this and she described it as it works until it doesn’t. It’s magic until it’s not. Think about it like this. The touchscreen on iPhone directly controls the phone, the keyboard on a Mac directly controls the Mac, the click on an iPod directly controlled the iPod, but your eyes aren’t actually controlling the Vision Pro. Cameras are watching your eyes and turning that into input. Sometimes it isn’t perfect. Is it
the best I’ve ever seen? Yeah, but it’s not perfect. It’s the same with hand tracking. It works until it doesn’t. Your hands aren’t actually controlling the Vision Pro. Cameras are watching your hands and turning that into input, which means, one, the cameras have to always see your hands, and two, the cameras are always turning your hands into input. What do I mean by this? Well, first, even if the cameras cover a large bubble of space, they don’t reach everywhere. If you’re like me and you drop your hands to your sides in a chair, you can’t
see your hands. If you’re lying down in a dark room and those IR illuminators can’t reach far enough, you can’t see your hands. If you’re sitting at a counter and your hands are on your legs under the counter, it can’t see your hands. Look, I know you’re already headed to the comments to say I’m complaining about the hand tracking system needing to see your hands, like I get it, but what I’m saying is it’s magic until it’s not. Using the Vision Pro makes you constantly aware of what you’re looking at and where your hands are
in a way that’s unlike any other computer I’ve ever used. It’s a trade off that you are constantly being made aware of. The best example of this is the hilarious onscreen keyboard, which is not worth using for anything beyond entering a wifi password. For any longer than that, you’ll want to use dictation or connect a Bluetooth keyboard so you can directly control the input. If you’re like me, talk with your hands, you will find things scrolling and clicking all over the place. Be warned. (bright upbeat music) The Vision Pro runs visionOS, which Apple told me
is based on iPad OS with a lot of customization around latency and vision to make it work for spatial computing. Starting with the iPad as a foundation is an incredible headstart for Apple. It’s taking years for Meta to build out all the features of the Quest OS and populate its App Store, and it’s still mostly just games. Apple gets to start with the full set of iPad OS features and most of the huge iPad app library. Although some huge developers like Netflix, Spotify, and YouTube have decided to wait before allowing their apps to run on
the Vision Pro. By the way, VR videos on YouTube.com don’t seem to work either. The really big difference between visionOS and iPad OS is that iPad OS has a lot of opinions about how you can arrange apps and how many apps you can run at a time, and visionOS is full on free floating window chaos. You can have apps from three different operating systems going on at once. Native visionOS apps, iPad apps, and then you can also connect your Mac and have a whole 4K Mac display with the chaotic glory of Mac OS floating around
in space as well. I love it, it is bananas, but it can also be a little overwhelming to be honest, and there’s just not a lot of window management tools to help you out. The ones that exist are basically hidden in the UI that no one would ever discover on their own. For example, there’s no Expose or Stage Manager. You can’t collect all your open windows and put them into preset arrangements, but you can tap and hold on the X button in an app to hide all your other apps, and you can ask Siri to
close all your apps. If you need to just take a break, you can double tap on the digital crown and it’ll hide everything. It’s not nothing, but it means you’ll be thinking about literal window management in space more than any other iOS device I can think of, and maybe even more than a Mac, which has vastly more window management tools built into the OS. Speaking of the Mac, I know a lot of you are excited about the idea of buying a Vision Pro just to use it as a giant MAC display. I’ve got good news.
I’ve got bad news. The good news is that the Mac display sharing works really well, and the little Apple ecosystem tricks like Handoff and Continuity are pure joy. You can copy in your Mac and paste in vision OS, just works. You can open your Mac display in visionOS, drag the mouse off the screen, and suddenly your Mac’s trackpad is controlling the Vision Pro and the keyboard is entering text. I love it. It was amazing to just put a huge virtual display over my MacBook Pro display and edit photos in Lightroom like I had a 50-inch
MacBook. Although I will say no one else could see what I was doing or look at the photos on my screen, which is a little sad. The bad news is that you only get one single 2560 by 1440 Mac display in visionOS. You can’t have multiple Mac monitors floating in space. I know. That’s gonna break a lot of hearts out there. Let’s stay strong. One of the weirder things about visionOS, the Vision Pro itself really, is that there’s not a lot of AR in there, as in actual interaction between physical objects in space and digital
ones. I counted exactly three true AR things in my entire time with the Vision Pro. One, when you look at your Mac, the Vision Pro sometimes puts up a Connect display button above it and starts screen sharing, and when you’re typing on a Bluetooth keyboard and look down at your hands, it pops up a little text preview window so you can see what you’re typing. These are little features, yes, but they are some of the first true AR computing features that have ever shipped on a mainstream device, and they also happen to be incredibly useful.
The third AR thing I saw was the loading screen of “Super Fruit Ninja,” which allows you to throw a strawberry at a pig that’s running around on the floor. It seems slightly less historic. But that’s it. There’s not a lot of AR in visionOS in the sense of reality being augmented. There’s a lot of MR, or mixed reality, where virtual objects float around in real space, and there are a lot of really great VR features because the Vision Pro is so fundamentally a VR headset. Watching movies on this thing is so much fun, especially in
the immersive theater mode that lets you pick what seat you wanna sit in. It’s also very cool to watch a movie in one of Apple’s virtual environments, like Mount Hood, and see the colors from the screen reflect onto the landscape. You can get pretty far making the argument that the Vision Pro is worth it simply as a very expensive TV. For many people, it will be the biggest and best TV they own with capabilities no other TV can match. Since the Vision Pro is sending separate images to each eye, it can do true 3D movies,
and Apple and its partners, like Disney, have already released quite a few, but you know what I’m gonna say. There are trade-offs. After a while, the weight of the Vision Pro reminds you that it’s on your face, and it’s a very expensive TV that doesn’t have an HDMI input, so you’re limited to Apple’s game situation, which, you know. And unlike any other TV in your life, the Vision Pro can DRM your eyes. If you’re watching a movie in Disney+ and go to take a screen capture, the content blacks out. It is strange to think of
living in a reality where big companies can block you from capturing what you see. Plus, it goes without saying, you’ll be watching TV alone. By the way, it’s notable that there aren’t any real VR games or fitness apps so far. There’s nothing like “Supernatural,” or “Red Matter,” or “Population One.” All hit games on the Quest. The Vision Pro just doesn’t seem suited to those kinds of physical experiences. You don’t really want to move around while wearing it, and that might be a good thing because there are no guardrails against VR motion sickness anywhere in visionOS.
I watched a handful of 3D movies and immersive shows and sort of immediately realized I’d gone too far too fast. What’s weird is that I know I have issues with certain kind of VR motion from my time and other headsets, but the Vision Pro is so convincing and so unconcerned with whether you might have limits that it’s easy to just get yourself a little queasy. I recommend early adopters go slowly and make sure you find your limits gently. That first bout of VR motion sickness is no joke. It’s possible that the best feature of the
Vision Pro is actually taking spatial videos on the iPhone 15 Pro Max and then watching them back on the Vision Pro. (gentle music) They play back in a sort of ghostly white haze, and the overall effect is incredibly bittersweet. You can relive a brief memory, but you’re alone in the headset and you can’t share it with anyone else. The other problem is that you can currently choose to shoot iPhone video in spatial at 1080p 30 frames per second or at the full 4K resolution the phone supports, but not both. For now, I’m gonna pick the
higher res video, but there’s gonna come a moment where shooting in spatial by default will be the smart move and that will be a real turning point. I would not recommend shooting photos with the Vision Pro cameras unless you really need to. Pressing the shutter button a single time delivers a 2560 by 2560 still, which works out to about 6.5 megapixels. As far as I can tell, the photos are always from the left main camera, which the EXIF says has an 18 millimeter F2.0 lens. The photos look like 6.5 megapixel photos from a tiny camera
sensor optimized for video, which means they look bad. Video is slightly better. The Vision Pro shoots 2200 by 2200 square videos at 30 frames per second. They look a little better than the photos, but there’s still an awful lot of compression going on, and if you happen to watch them on anything but a Vision Pro, you’ll notice some barrel distortion as the camera moves around. All of these videos and screen captures come with a ton of excess motion from your head moving around, and I will just note, you’ll look fundamentally ridiculous trying to take photos
of your family with ski goggles on your face. I think it’s fair to assume most Vision Pro buyers also own iPhones, which take great videos. Just use your phone, you’ll be fine. (upbeat music) So that’s the Vision Pro. It is an astounding product. It’s the sort of thing only Apple can really do. From the incredible display and pass through engineering to the use of the whole ecosystem to make it seamlessly useful, to even getting everyone to ignore the whole battery situation. There’s a part of me that says the Vision Pro only exists because Apple is
so incredibly capable, stocked with talent, and loaded with resources that the company simply went out and engineered the hell out of the hardest problems they could think of in order to find a challenge. That’s good, I think. There are a lot of ideas in this thing, and they’re all executed with the kind of thoughtful intention that few other companies can ever deliver at all. But I think the shocking thing is that Apple may have inadvertently revealed that some of these ideas are bad, that they can never be executed well enough to become mainstream. VR headsets
with camera mixed reality pass through might just be a dead end. Replacing input devices with hand and eye tracking may never be good enough. There is so much technology in this thing that makes it work like magic until it doesn’t. Joanna looks like the worst PS3 version of herself. I just wanna be honest. (laughs) The other way to look at the Vision Pro is that Apple knows all this and the technology to build the true AR glasses it has long hinted at is simply not there, so the Vision Pro represents something like a simulator, a
dream factory, for hardware yet to come. You can look at this whole thing as a trade off. The hardware it can ship right now to get everyone thinking about these ideas while it pours all those resources into the hardware it wants to build. Maybe. It’s fun to think about. But I wanna come back to the idea of trade-offs in this device. The one you can go out and buy right now. One of the oldest rules at “The Verge” is that you review what’s in the box, not the promise of what’s to come. And so I
wanna come back to all those questions I’ve been asking myself ever since I first strapped the Vision Pro onto my head. Starting with the most important one. Do you want a computer that messes up your hair every time you use it? Do you want a computer that allows the Walt Disney Company to prevent you from taking pictures of what you see? Do you want to use a computer where you can’t easily show anyone else what you’re looking at? Do you want to use a computer that has two and a half hours of battery life? Do
you think the fanciest TV you own should have HDMI inputs? Do you want to use a computer that doesn’t work as well in a dark room? Listen to me. Do you want to use a computer that is always looking at your hands? That’s just a lot of trade-offs, big trade-offs, not little ones. And the biggest trade off of all is that using the Vision Pro is such a lonely experience. Regardless of the weird eyes on the front and the uncanny Personas, you’re in there having experiences all by yourself that no one else can take part
in. I think that’s fine for traditional VR headsets, which have basically turned into single-use game consoles over the past decade, but it’s a lot weirder for a primary computing device. It’s fun to look at this Vision Pro as a glimpse of the kinds of experiences spatial computing might one day provide. There’s a wild new kind of future coming if some of these huge trade-offs get resolved. But right now with this Vision Pro, the one you can actually buy, the trade-offs of going in there just aren’t worth it. I get my work done with other people,
and I’d rather be out here with them. – Almost five. – Five hours. I haven’t taken it off in five hours. – Are you (bleep) kidding me? – No. – Are you ever coming out? – Not coming out. – You’ve been wearing that thing for five hours straight? – Five hours straight. – So you’re just plugged into the wall. You haven’t moved from your chair. – I’ve been in two chairs today. – Has someone fed you? – I ate a sandwich with this headset on. – I love you, but I worry about you. (laughs)
