Apple Vision Pro resting on couch
The Vision Pro is an astounding product. It’s the sort of first-generation device only Apple can really make, from the incredible display and passthrough engineering, to the use of the whole ecosystem to make it so seamlessly useful, to even getting everyone to pretty much ignore the whole external 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 it could think of in order to find a challenge.
That’s good! There are a lot of ideas in the Vision Pro, and they’re all executed with the kind of thoughtful intention that few other companies can ever deliver at all, let alone on the first iteration. But the shocking thing is that Apple may have inadvertently revealed that some of these core ideas are actually dead ends — that they can’t ever be executed well enough to become mainstream. This is the best video passthrough headset ever made, and that might mean camera-based mixed reality passthrough could just be a road to nowhere. This is the best hand- and eye-tracking ever, and it feels like the mouse, keyboard, and touchscreen are going to remain undefeated for years to come. There is so much technology in this thing that feels like magic when it works and frustrates you completely when it doesn’t.
The other way to look at the Vision Pro is that Apple knows all of this, but 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 or a developer kit. A dream factory for people to build apps and meaningful use cases for the imagined hardware yet to come: true optical AR glasses that let you share digital experiences with other people. In that framework, this Vision Pro is the hardware Apple 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 that possibility, and a lot of people have already assumed that’s the case.
Nilay Patel dawning Apple Vision Pro
But there are a lot of tradeoffs — big tradeoffs, not little ones. And the biggest tradeoff of all is that using the Vision Pro is such a lonely experience, regardless of the weird ghost eyes on the front. You’re in there, having experiences all by yourself that no one else can take part in. After using the Vision Pro for a while, I’ve come to agree with what Tim Cook has been saying for so long: headsets are inherently isolating. 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.