The Apple Vision Pro: A Review

When the Vision Pro was announced in mid-2023, I was not immediately desperate to buy one. I had an Occulus, from 2021, and it was... fine. Entertaining for a week or two, and then mostly untouched since then. I was curious what Apple's take on something like virtual reality might be, but felt no particular sense of longing.

The needle began to move for me when I started hearing accounts of people who had tried the initial demos of it at WWDC. They spoke about it with such apparent genuine emotion that I became fascinated with what they could possibly have experienced. Maybe this really would be the equivalent of the iPhone in 2007 - fundamentally not comparable with the Occulus.

(In retrospect, the announcement that it would be coming to the US first and the UK at some unspecified later point also may have contributed to me wanting one. Nothing increases desire quite like being told you can't have something.)

When the UK release date and price was eventually announced many (many) months later (July 12th 2024, starting at £3500), there was a slight dampening of enthusiasm. I had stopped thinking about it much by this point (it was a long wait between US release and international release) and now it was time to actually find the money, that fascination had to contend with some more practical realities. Did I really want this more than I wanted that money in my savings?

You can probably infer from the fact that you're reading this at all, that at some point I came to the conclusion that I did. Apple were pretty good about returns after all, what was the harm in at least trying it for a few weeks? If it was anything less than the quasi-mystical experience I had heard from others, it would cost me nothing to try it and return it.

So, after scanning my head with their app to get the band sizes, I ordered, and waited.

Collection

While they do offer to deliver the device to you, they strongly suggest you collect it in person. Partly this is so that they can check the band you've selected fits, but also so they can give you a quick in-person walkthrough. After a brief wait, while you watch other people having their demos, and wondering if you yourself will look quite as awkwardly uncool as them, the device is brought over on a literal platter. It is hard not to feel excited at this point - they have nailed the theatricality of it all.

On putting it on, I was first struck by how relatively light it is - at least compared with the Occulus. You aren't exactly going to forget it's there, but you could feasibly wear it for long periods of time. Or at least, if you can't wear it for long periods of time, it won't be the weight that makes you take it off. This impression has been reinforced since then - the weight has never been an issue.

The in-store demo is designed to do two things - to make sure you're familiar with the controls, and to wow you. Both were pretty successful - the pinch and zoom controls are as intuitive as touch controls were in 2007, and the spatial video examples and immersive video they show you are genuinely stunning, and give you a powerful sense of the potential of the device. Within a few minutes you are confident in navigating it, and looking forward to what you can do with it. They want you to leave optimistic and excited about owning a Vision Pro - and I did.

Initial Impressions

The Vision Pro comes with two bands - the things that actually wrap around your head to hold it over your eyes. A traditional dual-loop band that goes behind and over your head, and a solo 'knitted' band which only goes around the back of your head, and frankly looks a lot nicer. I first tried wearing the knitted band, but after a few minutes I found the device was digging into my face below the eyes quite painfully, so I switched it out for the dual-loop over-head band. This resolved the issue immediately, and I haven't touched the knitted band since. The knitted band may look slightly cooler (or at least, less ridiculous) but nobody who is bothered about how they look is going to wear this anyway.

The initial experience was just as stunning as the demo had been - with the added benefit of being relaxed at home. The visual/pinch controls just work (mostly). It has a browser, notes, etc. It is a fully featured Apple operating system, with working controls, and all the hook-ins to the existing Apple ecosystem that you'd expect (iCloud, Find My, etc.).

The built-in Apple apps are likewise quite swish. The photos app was an obvious first stop, and one feature which I loved more than I expected was its ability to take panoramas you might have taken on your phone previously, and place you 'into' them by wrapping them around you in 180 degrees. It is a little like returning to a memory, in a way that just looking at a photo doesn't quite manage.

The spatial videos and photos (snapshots you can take while wearing the device, which are captured in 3D) are quite engrossing when you see examples of them in the demo, but there aren't really that many opportunities to take them in reality. You always have your phone with you and can take it out to take a picture at almost any moment, but you only really have this on at dedicated times - and usually not when you're with others. I also couldn't quite get the video quality to match what I had seen in the demo. In some ways spatial videos and photos are one of the most revolutionary aspects of the Vision Pro - but in practice, opportunities to use them are rare.

Once the initial novelty had been experienced, it was time to go through its features and work out how I would actually use this. One feature which, like the Panoramas, I hadn't really thought of as a big feature but which quickly became apparent would be quite useful, is watching TV and movies. The ability to essentially transport yourself to a cinema with a huge screen, with nobody munching crisps or chomping on popcorn in your ear, is very useful. I watched an entire 40 minute episode of a TV show without feeling like I needed to take it off.

So, with one use already apparent, I decided to check out the app store. As with the iPhone, it is the ecosystem of third party apps that really makes something like this useful after all.

Finding the Use

A repeating pattern began to emerge once I sat down to really investigate how this might be useful. I would think 'oh wouldn't it be cool to do X with this, I bet it would excel at it'. I would google 'Vision Pro X'. And inevitably, I would just see reddit posts from people agreeing it would be cool and asking if there was anything, or developers talking about an initial pre-alpha prototype they had begun working on. Flight Simulators? Nothing. Street-View apps like Google Street View or Occulus's Wander? Nothing yet. Immersive versions of video games like Minecraft. Nothing.

And of course there aren't really any immersive videos of note, other than the one incredible one that Apple presents with you in their demos. It's a truly impressive four minutes or so, but there's only so many times you can watch it.

None of this is Apple's fault of course, and is to be expected. This is very early. It is unreasonable to expect all of this to be available straight away - it wasn't for the iPhone in 2007, and it was never going to be for the Vision Pro. But it does affect the value calculation of buying one in 2024.

Even those examples I listed, were they to exist, are all about fun in some way. But can it be useful? Can it help you be productive, rather than just give you new ways of consuming entertainment? You can pair it with a Mac and use it to project a big screen, but that's not a radically new way of working, and it's hard to do it for long stretches of time.

The initial novelty vs day-to-day utility is best exemplified with Facetime on the Vision Pro. When you first setup the device, you create a 'Persona' of yourself. It scans your face from various directions, and then you can take video calls wearing the headset, with it as your digital stand-in. It's extremely technically impressive, but it is very eerie and uncanny too. It is hard to imagine a situation in which it just becomes how you do video calls to do day-to-day work, without the person you are speaking to thinking anything other than 'this is really, really weird' all the time. And it isn't adding anything to the call other than that - and of course letting you do the call in the first place, which would be tedious otherwise while wearing the device. It isn't solving any problem that the Vision Pro didn't itself create in the first place.

Ultimately then, this is an incredible piece of technology with a state-of-the-art core operating system, but which can currently only really provide that initial 'wow' feeling - it can't (yet) function as a useful piece of kit every day.

Final Thoughts

There are two basic metrics by which to judge the value of something like the Vision Pro, and it performs very contrastingly on these - the underlying technology and operating system, and the ecosystem of apps available for it that make it useful.

On the core device itself - they've nailed it. It is leagues ahead of its competitors in ease of use, intuitiveness, and convenience. Everything Apple excels at. But the ecosystem isn't there yet.

I want to be the kind of person whose problems are solved by something like this. But I'm not. And the thing about a price tag of £3500, is that it is very good at cutting through all the quasi-delusional stories you might tell yourself about how you're going to use something, about the uses you'll eventually find for it etc. It forces you to accurately assess how much value it would actually bring to your life.

When you put it on for the first time in the morning, and you're greeted with that still almost magical floating display, and the elegance of its controls, you are tempted yet again to convince yourself that this is what you need, that it isn't a solution in search of a problem - and to find a plausible story about you can make it work. But after allowing you to indulge in those fantasies for a few moments, the price intrudes on your thoughts and entirely deflates them.

I think this would bring a lot of value to my life - but as its ecosystem currently stands, absolutely nowhere near £3500 of value.

I returned the device three weeks after buying it. There's a reasonable chance I will buy it again in 18 months time, once things are more fleshed out. Or perhaps not.