About 17 years ago, Steve Jobs took the stage at a San Francisco convention center and said he was introducing three products: an iPod, a phone, and an Internet browser.
“These are not three separate devices,” he said. “This is a device and we call it the iPhone.”
At $500, the first iPhone was relatively expensive, but I was willing to ditch my mediocre Motorola and sell it out. There were flaws — including sluggish cell speeds. But the iPhone kept its promises.
In the last week, I had a very different experience with a new first-generation product from Apple: the Vision Pro, a virtual reality headset that looks like a pair of ski goggles. The $3,500 laptop, which launched on Friday, uses cameras so you can see the outside world while juggling apps and videos.
Apple calls it a “spatial computer” that combines the physical and digital worlds to work, watch movies and play games.
Apple declined to provide an early review unit to The New York Times, so I bought a Vision Pro on Friday. (It costs a lot more than $3,500 with the extras that many people will want, including a $200 carrying case, $180 AirPods, and $100 prescription lens inserts for people who wear glasses.) After using the headset for about five days, I’m not convinced that people will get a lot of value out of it.
The feel of the device is less polished than previous first-generation Apple products I’ve used. It’s no better for work than a PC, and the games I’ve tried so far aren’t fun, which makes it hard to recommend. One major feature — the ability to make video calls with a human-like digital avatar — terrified kids during a family FaceTime call.
The headset delivers on one of its promises: video playback, including high-definition movies and your own 3-D recordings that let you immerse yourself in memories of the past, which is as eerie as it is cool.
Over the past decade, companies like Meta, HTC, and Sony have struggled to sell headphones to mainstream consumers because their products were cumbersome to use, their apps were limited, and they looked weird.
Vision Pro has a superior user interface, better image quality, more apps and higher computing power than other headsets. But it’s slightly heavier than Meta’s cheaper Quest headphones, and it’s connected to an external battery that lasts just two hours.
The ski goggle aesthetic of Apple’s product looks better than the bulky plastic visors of headphones of the past. But the videos posted by the first users walking around out with the headphones — men I call the Vision Bros — confirm that people still look ridiculous wearing tech glasses, even when they’re designed by Apple.
A better interface
The Vision Pro is miles ahead of other headsets I’ve tested in making an immersive 3-D interface simple for users to control with their eyes and hands. I let four colleagues wear the headset in the office and watched them learn to use it within seconds.
That’s because it’s familiar to anyone who owns an iPhone or similar smartphone. You’ll see a grid of app icons. Looking at an app is equivalent to mousing over it with the mouse cursor. to click it, you tap your thumb and index finger together, making a quick pinch. The pinch gesture can also be used to move and expand windows.
The Vision Pro includes a knob called the Digital Crown. Turning it counterclockwise lets you see the real world in the background while keeping your app’s digital windows in the foreground. Rotating it clockwise hides the real world with an opaque background.
I preferred to see physical reality most of the time, but I still felt isolated. The headset cuts off part of your circumference, creating a binocular-like effect. I admit it was hard sometimes to remember to walk my dogs because I didn’t see them or hear them whine and on another session I tripped over a stool. An Apple spokeswoman referred to the Vision Pro’s safety guidelines, which advise users to remove obstructions.
When you’re using the headset for work, you can surround yourself with multiple animated apps — your spreadsheet might be in the center, a notes app to your right, and a browser to your left, for example. It’s the 3D version of juggling windows on a computer screen. As neat as it sounds, pinching floating screens doesn’t make work more efficient because you have to keep turning your head to see them.
I could handle juggling a notes app, a browser, and Microsoft Word for no more than 15 minutes before feeling nauseous.
The least joyous part of the Vision Pro is typing with the floating keyboard, which requires you to press one key at a time. I had planned to write this review with the handset before I realized I wouldn’t make my deadline.
There is an option to plug in a physical keyboard, but at that point I’d rather use a laptop that doesn’t add weight to my face.
Vision Pro can also work with Mac computers, where you can mirror the screen on the headset as a virtual window that can be expanded to look like a large screen. In my tests, there was a constant lag – each keystroke took a fraction of a second to register virtually, and the mouse cursor moved slowly. I also instinctively wanted to control the Mac with pinches, even though it’s not set up to work that way, which was frustrating.
I then tested the headset in the kitchen, loading a pizza recipe into the web browser while grabbing and measuring ingredients. Continuing to look through the camera, I felt nauseous again and had to remove the handset. Vision Pro is more comfortable to use while sitting. Apple advises people to take breaks to reduce motion sickness.
Video calling is now an essential part of office life, and this is where the Vision Pro falls short of a camera laptop. The headset uses its cameras to take photos of your face stitched into a 3D avatar called Persona, which Apple has labeled a “beta” feature because it’s incomplete.
Personas are so screwed up that people would be embarrassed to use them on a job call. Vision Pro produced an unflattering portrait of me without cheekbones and fuzzy ears. On a FaceTime call with my in-laws, they said the blur had 1980s studio portrait vibes.
One of my nephews, a 3-year-old, turned and walked away at the sight of virtual Uncle Brian. The other, a 7-year-old, hid behind her father, whispering in his ear: “He looks fake.”
Are we having fun?
Video is where the Vision Pro shines. When streaming movies through apps like Disney+ and Max, you can pinch the corner of a video and drag it to expand it on a high-definition jumbo TV. Some movies, such as “Avengers: Endgame” and “Avatar 2,” can be viewed in 3-D. The picture looks much brighter and clearer than the quality in Meta’s Quest products. The sound quality on Apple’s headphones is great, but the speakers are loud, so you’ll need AirPods if you want to use them in public.
The headphones’ two-hour battery life isn’t enough to last through most full-length movies, but in my experience, that proved moot because I couldn’t watch movies for more than 20 to 30 minutes before needing to rest. neck and eyes from the heavy headset.
(One caveat: The Netflix and YouTube apps aren’t available on Vision Pro, but their websites work OK for streaming content.)
I prefer watching movies on my flat screen TV because it can be shared, but there are scenarios where a headset would be useful as a personal TV, like in a small apartment or on an airplane or on the couch when someone else is watching a TV show from which to wanted to tune in.
Videos shot on an iPhone 15 Pro camera or with the Vision Pro cameras can be viewed in 3D on the headset, a feature called spatial videos. While watching a video of my dogs eating snacks at home, I could reach out and pretend to pet them. The videos looked grainy but were enjoyable.
Not many games have been made for the handset yet. I tried some new Vision Pro games, like Blackbox, which involves moving around a 3D environment to pop bubbles and solve puzzles. It looked cool, but after the novelty wore off, I lost interest. It’s hard to recommend the Vision Pro for VR gaming when Meta’s $250 Quest 2 and $500 Quest 3 headsets have a deeper game library.
Conclusion
Vision Pro is the start of something – what exactly, I’m not sure.
But the point of a product review is to evaluate the here and now. In its current state, the Vision Pro is an impressive but unfinished first-generation product with issues and major trade-offs. Other than a fancy personal TV, it serves no purpose.
What’s most impressive to me about the Vision Pro is, for such an expensive computer, how difficult it is to share the headset with others. There is a guest mode, but no ability to create profiles for different family members to load their own apps and videos.
So it’s a computer that people can use on their own, arriving at a time when we seek to reconnect after years of veiled solitude. This may be the Vision Pro’s biggest blind spot.
