This is easily one of Apple’s craziest, most radical, possibly dystopian products of all time. And I have a lot of thoughts here, like I’ve been using it for about a week now. There are some parts of this thing that are absolutely incredible, and some other parts that feel weird, or borderline unfinished.

There are all kinds of new technologies, from a new operating system to infrared eye tracking to virtually reconstructed versions of you. I feel like there are so many actually new things that you have to understand in order to get a sense of what this headset actually is and what it does. So I’m gonna break this down into two parts.Like what is this thing that I’m holding literally? Apple Vision Pro at its core,

This is a VR headset

It is a VR headset. Now, Apple would never say that, and they probably won’t like that. We’ll get there. But the truth is it’s a really, really, high end virtual reality headset. It’s something we’ve seen before, right? It’s got displays and lenses and speakers and fans and buttons. And this is a form factor. This is a thing that we have seen before, but before I even turn this thing on, there are clearly several things that are a little different about this one. So first of all, it’s made of metal. Lots of metal and glass here, which are high quality, but heavy materials, relatively speaking. So there’s this precisely machined aluminum frame around the outside. And yes, those are intakes for fans at the bottom.

And then vents for those fans at the top. On the right side, there’s your digital crown that can be pressed in or turned. And then on the other side is just a single larger button. So kind of basically the same two buttons as an Apple Watch. And then when you get a little further back on this band here, these little pods with downward facing grills, these are speakers which are pointed straight at your ears, and work surprisingly well. Though of course, it also means that people around you can hear a little bit of what you’re hearing. There’s a little bit of bleed, and I have a lot to say about spatial audio, so stay tuned for that. But the main event is at the front. There is an enormous piece of glass, which, yes, is very easy to fingerprint and smudge. And then behind that thing, there’s this outward-facing.

OLED display and a bunch of sensors all the way around, outside facing sensors that go forward, sideways, and straight down. And there’s depth sensors, infrared illuminators, lidar scanners, and just regular old RGB cameras, all being processed by an M2 chip and an R1 chip inside this thing. And then maybe the craziest part, inside the headset, there are a bunch more sensors facing your eyes, tracking your eyes in real time, for all the eye control and everything that comes with that. And also then to display a representation of your eyes on the outside of the headset. Kinda, we’ll get there. But overall, when you put it all together, you get a very well made, very high end, but also pretty heavy computer to wear on your face.

So officially, this headset with this solo knit band when I weighed it, showed up as 638 grams, which some of you on Twitter have already pointed out is actually slightly less than the plastic Meta Quest Pro. But that Quest Pro also has a lot of battery on the back of your head as a sort of a counterbalance, so the weight distribution is very different. Also, the Quest Pro is not that comfortable anyway. But the point is this, for Apple, made the choice of taking the battery off of the headset, which means okay, now there’s nothing on the back of your head, so you can wear it and lean up against things, and that might be an upside, but that also now means you have to deal with this cable all the time running up to your head, and the fact that it’s very front weighted now. All of the weight is on the front of your face.

Battery

This battery is a surprisingly small 3,366 milliamp hours. I say surprisingly small because a normal battery bank of this size, you might expect to be 10, 15, 20,000 milliamp hours. I suspect there’s a lot of heat insulation happening here. But it comes with a non-removable four foot cable, and a proprietary connector at the end of the cable that will twist and lock to the headset. And so the lock is really solid. It makes sense that it’s not just straight USB that could get disconnected easily. Once you connect it, it starts glowing, and then it starts booting up. And there’s even a little Apple logo that displays on the outside screen while it takes, you know, a little under a minute to turn on. So there is no on or off button or switch anywhere on this headset. Maybe kind of like AirPods Max or something like that.

So if you ever take the headset off and put it down, it will enter a standby mode after some time, but it won’t turn off. If you wanna turn it off, you literally have to twist and unplug the cable. That’s the only way to actually turn the headset off. Now famously already, the battery life with this included battery, is not super long on this headset. Two to four hours is actually realistic for what you can expect for just like this built-in battery.

But that’s also kind of right in line with a lot of other VR headsets. Battery life on VR headsets is not that great in general. If you do wanna use it longer, the only way to do that is there’s USB C port on the battery, and you have to plug the battery in. So you could plug the battery into the wall for infinite battery life, or I guess you could plug it into like a, you could daisy chain another battery into the other pocket or something for even longer life.

But yeah, 2 to 4 hours. Now at first it seemed weird to me that the port is on the same side of the battery as the non-removable cable, but I think it’s because they just want you to default to putting this battery in your pocket, probably in your back pocket. So even if it’s plugged into the wall, it can still be in your back pocket. You’re just gonna want to get a longer USB C cable. So there are no controllers that come with this headset.

Controls

Now it does support other input methods that are like game controllers, and mouse, and keyboard, and those can be incredibly useful, but by default the primary input method for everyone using the Vision Pro is your eyes and your hands. So the first time you put on this headset, it goes through this calibration process, and it’s pretty interesting. So the first time you ever put it on, it first adjusts the distance between the lenses, physically moving them inside the headset to match the distance between your eyes. Then it does this sort of a hand scan so it understands your hands.

And then you go through this process of basically looking at a bunch of dots all the way around the screen, and then tapping your fingers together to select them. Kind of feels like an eye test or something. And then you’re in. So first thing you’re gonna notice is you can actually kind of put your hands anywhere as long as the headset can see this, just your fingers touching together.

So there’s a lot of pictures of people using a headset with their fingers, like out in front of them, pinching like that. But you actually don’t have to do that. It’s such a wide angle because of the sensors facing forward and sideways and down. You can kind of just rest your hand anywhere, in front of you, in your lap. As long as you pinch like that, it can generally pick it up, which is impressive. So you’re pinching to control anywhere in that 180 degree bubble in front of you. And then the digital crown, you hit that once, and the app drawer comes up, pretty simple. Doesn’t seem that impressive.

just appearing locked in place in 3D space in your room, and no matter how much you move your head, or move around, it stays exactly kind of floating where it’s supposed to be. But when I say floating, I think you’re picturing like a, a soft float, but it’s locked, and that’s how it starts. So now you’re in Apple’s new Vision OS

Vision OS

I would describe this as kind of similar to iPad OS, but way more glassy, and of course with the extra dimension of 3D space. So hitting a digital crown will always get the app drawer back in front of you, and then simply look at the icon you want and pinch your fingers together, to select it and open that app. Scrolling is basically as you’d expect, you just kind of pinch and grab in the air, and then pull as if it’s on a string, and physics let you pull things through the air. It’s pretty intuitive, it’s responsive, it’s fluid. Sometimes it’s kind of bouncy even. I would say the biggest adjustment is only being able to control exactly what you’re looking at.

And I don’t think people realize how often they’re controlling things that they’re not exactly looking directly at with other computers and other UIs.But with this, you can look at the button to select it, and if you look at the next thing you’re gonna do, you’re no longer controlling the button. You have to look exactly where you’re trying  to interact with things. It takes a few extra brain cycles to remember to always be looking exactly at the thing you’re controlling. So when you open a window of a Vision OS app, like any one of the default Apple apps here, it locks into place, it’s floating there. It kind of looks, again, like an iPad app, but very glassy, like this frosted glass around the UI sort of lets you see through a little bit to the color behind it. And it even sometimes casts a shadow on the ground in the correct Z space, so it really solidifies that it’s floating in front of you.

All this makes it feel like the window is in the space around you. Then if you look at the bottom of the window, you get a little bar, you can always just look at that bar and pinch to drag it around. So drag it forward, backward, anywhere you want in X, Y, and Z space, and then let go and it just stays absolutely locked. And then you can look at either bottom corner to resize to make it bigger or smaller. And then finally there’s a little X at the bottom, you select that, that closes it.

Passthrough

So that is the basics of Vision OS, and just using an app. Now this entire time, by default, and almost any time they can, passthrough is on, which means you have the headset on, but you can see with the cameras right through to everything around you. And I think this is where Apple really wants to normalize the term spatial computing, because it feels like augmented reality. It feels like you’re always able to see the space around you, but technically it’s not actually AR, because you are still looking at a reconstructed version through a camera feed of the world around you instead of the actual world around you. But maybe it’s all just semantics.

I will say, this is the best passthrough of any VR headset I’ve ever used, and it’s not even that close. Because of the pixel density, because of the 90 hertz refresh rate, and because of the impressive dynamic range of the cameras and the correctly adjusting shutter speed, you just almost don’t, you almost just feel like you’re looking at the real world, not through a headset. Also the passthrough is so close to real time that I could legitimately interact with all kinds of things. I could catch items flying at me.

I even tried playing ping pong. It was easy, no hesitation. So officially, the R1 chip is doing all the processing of all this stuff and adjusting the shutter speed for different lighting conditions and always keeping passthrough latency under 12 milliseconds, which is the lowest in the industry. But it’s really combining that with how close to reality the colors and brightness and everything are that keeps it feeling kind of real. Basically, the only noticeable restriction is super close up items and objects can get a bit blurry, and then you can’t quite make out really small or fine texts, so you can’t read an email or a tiny text on your phone in your hand, but you can absolutely text people, or read your notifications, while keeping the headset on. If you’ve tried other VR headsets, you know how impressive that is. It’s just, it’s really good with the tech that exists now for VR headsets. But you can definitely still take the headset off and be like, oh, it’s way brighter in here than I thought it was.

Full Immersion

Either way, that’s all passthrough, but if you ever wanna fully immerse yourself, I mean it is a VR headset after all, all you gotta do is rotate this digital crown clockwise, just keep turning it, and it will slowly dial your environment more and more into your field of view until you dial it all the way up to fully surrounding you. So all of the windows you might have had open will still stay stuck where they were, but everything you’re doing is just on the moon now. So yeah, there’s a couple environments Apple has built in here, most of them relaxing scenic locations, like in California somewhere, or one really nice one is Mount Hood with a little bit of rain falling. They’re not quite photorealistic, but they’re just short of photorealistic, like they’re the most realistic digital environments that I’ve seen. So then the last two big quirks of the UI, control center. So the only way to get to control center is to look up, and you can’t just look up, but you have to physically turn your head up and look at this arrow that appears above you. So once you see that, you select that and then you get your control center for things like, you know, battery life and notifications, focus modes, and screen recording, and pairing to a Mac.

The Keyboard

But the other big quirk is text input. So you might be wondering how does text input work with no physical controllers? So there’s basically three ways to do this. So let’s say you are in Safari, and you want to go to mkbhd.com. You really want one of those shiny new Chevron hoodies for the rest of winter. Great, how do you do it? So the first way is to literally hunt and peck poking the keys on the keyboard that appears in the air in front of you. So this one is tough, because it literally only reacts
to your pointer finger on each hand. So you actually can’t type fast, like with home row or anything like that. Not great. The second way, though, I think is actually kind of good. It’s at least faster, which is looking at the key you want to interact with, and then pinching to select it.

But in this super glassy frosted window, and shows the colors of whatever’s behind it.
And you have the sort of sorting menu on the left hand side instead of across the bottom. That’s the basic layout. Same thing with the Notes app and the Settings app. Very glassy, almost looking like an iPad app in the air, just rebuilt with this new material design. And then there’s the media apps. So Apple TV and Disney+, they both come pre-installed, which they have built entire environments inside of them for watching media. And there’s even a small collection of videos on the Apple TV app that are shot on a new proprietary format specifically for Vision Pro. So it drops you into a space with a full 180 degree video, and Alicia Keys walks right up to you and starts singing right to your face. It’s crazy.

There’s also the Photos app, which will let you look at panoramic photos, for example, in this fully immersive view. So you can blow them up to full screen, and then it gives you a bit of a parallax effect around the edges, so it feels like you’re looking into a window of your own photo and looking around. It’s kind of incredible. And then there’s also some other really fun third party apps that I’ve tried that were built ahead of time. So Sky Guide, this is a good one. You can look around a real representation of the sky around you or any of the constellations would normally be, you can look at it a little longer and it’ll pop it out. You can pull it outta the sky to get more information about it. It’s a pretty great idea.

There’s another one called Jig Space, which is, it’s a sick app, I don’t know if I’d ever use it, but basically it lets you load 3D models into the space you’re in and mess around with them, take ’em apart, view them in actual size. And this really takes advantage of how good the placement lock is on the Vision Pro. And you can walk around, and really gets you a better understanding of the scale of things that you don’t get to see up close very often. And then Keynote is another funny one. So you can of course go through and edit a Keynote just like normal if you want to, but then they’ve built this whole environment for practicing your presentation skills. So you press that and it says, oh, would you like to go to a conference room, or the literal Steve Jobs Theater, so you can rehearse talking to your audience with your Keynote slides behind you. It is genuinely incredibly immersive.