Vision Pro Review: Apple's first headset lacks polish and purpose
About seventeen 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 one device and we call it iPhone.”
At $500, the first iPhone was relatively expensive, but I was eager to ditch my mediocre Motorola flip phone and splurge. There were shortcomings, including slow mobile internet speeds. But the iPhone delivered on its promises.
This past week I had a very different experience with a new first-generation product from Apple: the Vision Pro, a virtual reality headset that resembles a pair of ski goggles. The $3,500 wearable, released Friday, uses cameras to let you see the outside world while juggling apps and videos.
Apple calls it a “spatial computer” that merges the physical and digital worlds so people can work, watch movies and play games.
Apple declined to provide an initial review copy to The New York Times, so I bought a Vision Pro on Friday. (It costs a lot more than $3,500 with the extras many people want, including a $200 carrying case, $180 AirPods, and $100 lens inserts for glasses wearers.) After using the headset for about five days, I'm not into it. convinced that people will get a lot of value out of it.
The device feels less polished than previous first-generation Apple products I've used. It's no better for working than a computer, and the games I've tried so far aren't fun, which makes it hard to recommend it. A key feature – the ability to make video calls with a human-like digital avatar that resembles the wearer – terrified children during a family FaceTime call.
The headset does an excellent job of delivering on one of its promises: video playback, including high-definition movies and your own recordings in 3D that allows you to immerse yourself in memories from the past, which is both creepy and cool.
Over the past decade, companies like Meta, HTC, and Sony have struggled to sell headsets to mainstream consumers because their products were difficult to wear, their apps were limited, and they didn't look cool.
The Vision Pro has a superior user interface, better image quality, more apps and higher computing power than other headsets. But it's a little heavier than Meta's cheaper Quest headsets and can be connected to an external headset battery pack that only takes two hours.
The ski goggle aesthetic of the Apple product looks better than the bulky plastic headphone visors of the past. But the videos posted by early adopters walk around outside with the headset – guys I call Vision Bros – confirm that people still look ridiculous wearing tech glasses, even if they're designed by Apple.
A better interface
The Vision Pro is miles ahead of other headsets I've tested by easily creating an immersive 3D interface that users can control with their eyes and hands. I had four colleagues wear the headset around the office and watched them all learn to use it in seconds.
That's because it's familiar to anyone who owns an iPhone or a similar smartphone. You will see a grid of app icons. Looking at an app is the same as hovering over it with the mouse cursor; to click it, tap your thumb and index finger together and make a quick pinching motion. The pinch gesture can also be used to move and expand windows.
The Vision Pro contains a button called the Digital Crown. Turn it counterclockwise and you'll see the real world in the background while your apps' digital windows stay in the foreground. Turning it clockwise hides the real world with an opaque background.
I preferred to look into physical reality most of the time, but I still felt isolated. The headset cuts off part of your periphery, creating a binocular-like effect. I must admit that it was sometimes difficult to remember to walk my dogs because I didn't see them or hear their whining, and during another session I tripped over a stool. An Apple spokeswoman referred to the Vision Pro's safety guidelines advise users to remove obstacles.
If you use the headset for work, you can surround yourself with multiple floating apps: for example, your spreadsheet can be in the center, a note app on your right, and a browser on your left. It's the 3D version of juggling windows on a computer screen. As neat as that sounds, squeezing floating screens doesn't make work more efficient because you have to keep turning your head to see them.
I couldn't bear to juggle a note-taking app, a browser, and the Microsoft Word app for more than 15 minutes before feeling nauseous.
The least fun part of the Vision Pro is typing with its floating keyboard, which requires you to tap one key at a time. I was planning to write this review with the headset before I realized I wouldn't meet my deadline.
There is an option to connect a physical keyboard, but at that point I prefer to use a laptop that doesn't weigh down my face.
The Vision Pro can also work with Mac computers, allowing you to mirror the screen in the headset as a virtual window that can be expanded to resemble a large screen. In my tests, there was consistent lag: it took a split second for each keystroke to virtually register, and the mouse cursor moved sluggishly. I also instinctively wanted to pinch control the Mac even though it wasn't set up to work that way, which was frustrating.
Then I tried the headset in the kitchen, loading a pizza recipe into the web browser while I grabbed and measured ingredients. As I walked around looking through the camera, I felt nauseous again and had to take the headset off. The Vision Pro is most 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 the Vision Pro is inferior to a laptop with a camera. The headset uses its cameras to take photos of your face that are stitched into a 3D avatar called a Persona, which Apple has called a “beta feature” because it isn't finished yet.
Personas are so cringe that people are embarrassed to use them during a work conversation. The Vision Pro produced an unflattering portrait of me with no cheekbones and blurry ears. During a FaceTime call with my in-laws, they said the blur evoked the atmosphere of '80s studio portraits.
One of my nieces, a three-year-old, turned and walked away upon seeing virtual Uncle Brian. The other, a seven-year-old, hid behind her father and whispered in his ear, “He looks fake.”
Video is where the Vision Pro shines. When streaming movies through apps like Disney+ and Max, you can pinch and drag the corner of a video to expand it into a giant, high-resolution TV; some films, such as 'Avengers: Endgame' and 'Avatar 2', can be viewed in 3D. The image looks much brighter and clearer than the quality of Meta's Quest products. The audio quality on the Apple headset is excellent, but the speakers are loud, so if you want to use them in public spaces, you'll need AirPods.
The headset's two-hour battery life isn't long enough to get through most feature films, but in my experience this proved moot as I couldn't watch movies for more than 20 to 30 minutes before having to rest my head. neck and eyes from the heavy headphones.
(A warning: The Netflix and YouTube apps are not available on the Vision Pro, but their websites work fine 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 television, such as in a small apartment or on an airplane, or on the couch when someone else is watching a TV program you want to tune to.
Videos recorded with an iPhone 15 Pro camera or with the Vision Pro's 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 was able to reach out and pretend to pet them. The videos looked grainy, but were delightful.
Not many games have been made for the headset yet. I've been trying some new Vision Pro games like Blackbox, which involves moving through a 3D environment to pop bubbles and solve puzzles. It looked nice, but after the novelty wore off, my interest disappeared. It's hard to recommend the Vision Pro for virtual reality gaming Meta's $250 Quest 2 and $500 Quest 3 headsets have a deeper library of games.
In short
The Vision Pro is the start of something – I don't know exactly what.
But the point of a product review is to evaluate the here and now. As it stands, the Vision Pro is an impressive but incomplete first-generation product with problems and major drawbacks. Besides being a nice personal TV, it lacks purpose.
What strikes me most about the Vision Pro, for such an expensive computer, is how difficult it is to share the headset with others. There is a guest mode, but there is no option to create profiles for different family members to load their own apps and videos.
So it's a computer that people can use alone, and it comes at a time when we want to reconnect after years of masked loneliness. That may be the Vision Pro's biggest blind spot.