Apple Vision Pro review: The future is here, but it’s uncomfortable

Our Rating :

Price when reviewed : £3499

inc VAT

It took quite a while for the Apple Vision Pro to make its way to the UK but now it’s here you can buy one for the princely sum of £3,499. For your money, you’ll be getting what is easily the best mixed reality/VR headset ever made.

It has the sharpest visuals I’ve come across in any headset, the most intuitive control system and it makes the most convincing case for a headset to be used for something outside gaming of any device yet. It is, quite simply, an astonishing piece of hardware.

And yet, despite all its accomplishments, the Vision Pro fails in one crucial area. It can be uncomfortable to wear for long periods.

Apple Vision Pro review: What you need to know

It’s sorely tempting to put up with that discomfort, though, simply because the Vision Pro is such fun to use – and you can use it for a lot of things. You can use it as a VR gaming headset, you can work on it or watch movies and TV. You can use it to video conference and collaborate with colleagues in a virtual space and it can be used to capture and view 3D “spatial” photos and videos, too.

There are so many applications and uses for this thing that it’s hard to know where to start. So I’ll begin with the hardware, which is only slightly less complicated to describe.

On the surface, the Vision Pro looks like any other virtual or mixed-reality headset. It’s more glossy and exotic than most headsets on the market, but it works effectively the same way. It’s made up of a pair of goggles that strap to your face and inside those goggles is a pair of screens with lenses in front of them to focus the two images onto your retinas.

The Vision Pro, however, is stuffed with an awful lot more tech than your average VR headset. Scattered around its compact glass and aluminium body is a stereoscopic 3D camera with an 18mm focal length, f/2 aperture and a 6.5 “stereo” megapixel resolution. There are six further “world-facing” cameras for tracking your environment, four internal cameras that track your eye movements, a TrueDepth camera, a LiDAR scanner, four inertial sensors and an ambient light sensor.

There’s also a pair of speakers built into the head strap with head tracking, six microphones and not one but two processors inside. These take the form of an M2 chip (8-core CPU, 10-core GPU) for powering the headset’s main functions – the very same as features inside the 15in Macbook Air (2023) – and Apple’s new R1 processor, which is used to monitor all the headset’s various sensors in real time.

All this, coupled with a frame that combines glass and metal, rather than the plastic of rival headsets, plus an extra display beneath the curved glass at the front, results in quite the chunky fellow. The Apple Vision Pro weighs up to 650g depending on which headband and light seal you choose, and that weight can cause discomfort if the headset is worn for long periods.

It also means it’s very expensive. Prices start at £3,499 for the basic model with 256GB of storage, rising to £3,699 for the 512GB model and £3,899 for the 1TB model. If you normally wear glasses, you’ll also need to stump up for the Zeiss optical inserts, which cost either £99 for the “readers” inserts or £149 for a pair of prescription inserts to be made up.

Apple Vision Pro review: Resolution and optical image quality

The most impressive thing about the Vision Pro is its optical system. Other headsets I’ve tried have always looked grainy – a far cry from the high-resolution screens on modern smartphones and laptops – and that lack of visual fidelity has put me off using them.

Not so with the Apple Vision Pro. Its twin micro-OLED displays host 23 million pixels in total and while Apple doesn’t quote a per-eye resolution, you can work it out. Divide it by two to get 11.5 million pixels per eye, which is higher than the roughly 8.3 million you’ll find on a 4K TV. The result is an image that’s as crisp as can be.

I didn’t find it quite as sharp as watching the 55in 4K TV in my living room, simply because the screen is so much larger, relatively speaking – it does, after all, fill your entire field of vision – but it’s close enough that it makes little difference. I was quite comfortable watching 4K movies and TV on the Vision Pro via the Apple TV+ app – and colours looked great. These screens can reproduce 93% of the DCI-P3 colour gamut at refresh rates up to 100Hz, so HDR content looks impressive too.

The only problem I had was with light scatter. Occasionally, when I hadn’t cleaned the internal lenses for a while, light from the displays would dust on the surface of the glass and cause a slightly washed-out image.

Equally important as the screens is the optical system and here, again, the Vision Pro hits it out of the park. I was able to quickly and easily achieve an optically stable image right out to the edges of my field of view every time I put on the Vision Pro – and that’s important considering you’re likely to be taking it off and putting it on again quite frequently. This is something I’ve had problems with achieving on other headsets but isn’t an issue with Apple’s headset.

The Vision Pro even sets the IPD (interpupillary distance) of the eyepieces automatically, so there’s no fiddling around with manual adjustments, and sensors inside the goggles will tell you if you have the headset positioned too high or low on your face.

This is a great headset for glasses wearers, too, as where other models make do with accommodating your eyewear, here you have custom Zeiss inserts made up to your prescription. You have to order and pay for these separately – yup, that’s an extra £149 you’ll have to stump up – but once they arrive, they simply snap into place magnetically on top of the existing lenses. Use the cameras on the Vision Pro to scan the QR code on the box and you’re good to go.

Apple Vision Pro review: UI and controls

The Apple Vision Pro is festooned with sensors and cameras, and these are not simply technological cruft. They’re used for several purposes: to sense your environment and people in it, and to sense your eyes and hands to control elements within the VisionOS UI and environment.

This is, to use a Jobsian phrase, precisely what makes the experience of using the Vision Pro so magical. Instead of a pair of physical controllers, which is what most other headsets rely on, your main means of control with the Vision Pro are your hands and your eyes. Internal cameras sense where you’re looking, while external cameras sense what you’re doing with your hands.

There are a couple of physical controls – a rotating digital crown on the top right and a button on the top left of the visor – but most of the time you’ll be looking and pinching your thumb and forefinger together to select. Look and pinch-dragging, meanwhile, scrolls and resizes windows, while looking and pinch-dragging with both hands at once is used to zoom in and out.

It sounds complicated, but once you’ve gone through the calibration process during setup, it’s very intuitive. The biggest problem I had with it was getting ahead of myself with my eyes while looking and pinching. You have to teach yourself to let your eyes rest a little longer on what you’re selecting – or typing.

The UI itself is just as easy to get to grips with, mainly because it’s essentially iOS but in 3D space. When you first power on the headset, a honeycomb grid of app icons floats in front of your eyes and to launch one you simply look and pinch. Oddly, you can’t rearrange your apps or organise them in folders on VisionOS but other pieces of iOS furniture are present and correct.

Look up to the top of the 3D space and you can launch the Control Centre, where you can quickly adjust things like brightness, volume, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. This is also where you can quickly bring up notifications and adjust the virtual environment between dark, day and automatic. Most other settings are accessed via a settings app, and there are a couple of things you can quickly get to by spinning or clicking the digital crown.

Apple Vision Pro review: What is it like to use?

Despite being completely radical, it all feels very familiar, and that is quite the achievement. It makes new elements such as dragging flat app windows around in 3D space easy to get used to and eliminates much of the learning curve, making you feel instantly comfortable, from a usability standpoint.

Physical comfort is a different matter entirely and it’s the weight of the Apple Vision Pro that gets in the way here. To create a nice snug fit, I found that the pressure on my temples and cheekbones was just too much to bear after a couple of hours or so. After one particularly energetic late-night session of Synth Riders – VisionOS’ version of Beat Saber – I removed the headset to find that my entire scalp had gone numb.

To Apple’s credit, you do get a couple of different head straps to try. The default option is a wide, elastic band that wraps around the back of your head and tightens using a small dial on the right edge, but I settled on the slightly more awkward dual loop strap, which takes the weight on the top of the head and the rear to secure the headset. Apple might have alleviated this by mounting the battery pack on the rear of the strap, as other manufacturers do, but instead, the battery attaches to the left side of the headset via a 120cm-long braided cable.

That’s a design decision I’m not convinced by. I’ve gotten up from my seat and forgotten that I’m tethered on more than one occasion and it’s pure luck that I haven’t dragged a cup of coffee onto the floor as it flew off the desk to follow me. And I’m constantly rearranging the cable so I don’t get my arms and hands tangled up in it.

I wouldn’t mind if it compensated with amazing battery life, but it doesn’t: the claim is for two and a half hours of video playback, which isn’t long enough for a lot of modern movies and two hours of general use will barely get you through a morning of work. You can use the headset while the battery pack is charging but that’s even more awkward to arrange around yourself with the battery pack attached to the wall via its USB-C port.

Take it off, and the awkwardness continues. No element of the Vision Pro makes it easy to stow away.  You can remove the face frame and strap quickly but the stiff rubber brackets protruding from the main part of the visor don’t fold flat, making it awkward to store. Even completely dismantled, this means it occupies a surprisingly large amount of space in your bag.

Apple Vision Pro review: What is it good for?

All of this means that the Vision Pro is most at home if you wear it in bed, on the sofa, at a desk or on the train or plane. And here Apple’s focus on productivity really comes to the fore. The ability to position multiple screens in virtual space means it’s like being able to take a multiple monitor setup with you anywhere you go.

My preferred setup was working on a document in the centre, with the Notes app off to one side and Safari to the other, allowing me to scratch my productivity itch in the most efficient manner possible. You can also bring in content from your Mac, streaming the desktop right into VisionOS, so you can access all the apps you need to do your job.

You can’t control elements within the desktop stream via eye- and hand-tracking, which is a little jarring, but it does work the other way around: if you’re typing on the keyboard and mousing using the touchpad, you can enter text and manipulate UI elements within VisionOS.

The only irritation I found with desktop streaming was that whenever software updates got out of step, the responsiveness of the link suffered badly, making the stream almost unusable. It also affects other features, such as the ability to look at your Mac through the visor and click a virtual button above it to connect – one of my favourite features in VisionOS.

Video calls get an extra dimension, too, with the ability to join meetings and be in the same virtual room with other meeting attendees, collaborate on virtual boards, and view content while “sitting next to” your colleagues. For the full effect, you’ll all need to be wearing an Apple Vision Pro, so this one is strictly for the demo room for now.

Video meetings on more mainstream platforms such as Zoom and Google Meet still work, but you may want to stick with the more traditional method because video calls carried out this way on the Vision Pro project a scanned facsimile of your face into the call, which looks uncanny.

Of course, the Apple Vision Pro is also sold as a media consumption and creation device; a device you can watch TV and movies on and a thing to play VR and AR games on. For the latter, it suffers in much the same way as the iPad and the iPhone do, certainly in comparison to traditional consoles and headsets such as the Meta Quest 3, which have a stronger PC gaming heritage.

Much of the gaming content, understandably given VisionOS’ provenance, feels mobile-focussed and more casual than what’s found on dedicated platforms. Indeed, click the list of recommended titles for the Vision Pro on Apple Arcade, and the top ten include Puzzle Sculpt, Alto’s Odyssey, Super Fruit Ninja and Synth Riders, with not much in the way of fully immersive, VR games. I’d say at this stage, if you want to get into “proper” VR gaming, you’d be best off saving a bit of money and buying a different headset.

For watching movies and TV, however, it’s much more convincing. Fire up Apple TV+ or any other of the supported streaming services and you’ll be able to watch content on a huge virtual movie screen no matter where you happen to be.

This is where the optical and display sharpness truly come into their own – imagine being able to watch the latest blockbuster in full movie theatre scale from the confines of your economy aeroplane or train seat. That’s precisely what the Vision Pro delivers, and combined with Apple’s head-tracking smarts, which lock the screen in place as you move your head, it feels utterly convincing.

If you’re worried about cutting yourself off from the outside world, there’s no need to be concerned. Apple’s sensors can detect people and the environment around you so if, say, a flight attendant approaches you while you are wearing the Vision Pro, you’ll see that person gently fade into your environment, so you get the opportunity to stop what you’re doing and remove the headset to make conversation.

Apple envisages you being able to carry on a conversation with the headset left on – the exterior screen shows a representation of your eyes, complete with eye movements and blinking – but, honestly, I’m not at all certain the world is ready for that just yet.

Apple Vision Pro review: Verdict

In fact, I’d question whether the world is ready for the Apple Vision Pro full stop. This is a product so advanced, so futuristic, that it’s light-years ahead of the competition. No other headset looks this good, works this well and feels so fully realised. And no other headset has got this close to convincing me that VR might just be the future. I’ve used it and I think it’s a phenomenally exciting piece of technology.

Apple is very proud of the Vision Pro, and justifiably. The eye and hand tracking alone are worthy of praise but to combine that with the best visual system in the business and a UI that feels so simple to use is a feat that I don’t recall any tech company achieving in my many years as a hardware reviewer. The Apple Vision Pro is, truly, that impressive.

Alas, I think that, in this case, the technology has run ahead of itself. Yes, it works and, yes, what it can do is beyond impressive. But to achieve this feat, Apple has had to squeeze in huge amounts of hardware, leading to something that feels too big, too heavy and too unwieldy. It’s done its level best to alleviate this by offering different straps and face cushions but the simple fact is that it isn’t comfortable enough to wear for hours and hours at a time.

Perhaps that isn’t important. Perhaps it isn’t too expensive. Perhaps some will be willing to put up with a little discomfort in exchange for all the benefits the Vision Pro conveys. After all, people spend this much money on gaming PCs, laptops and mobile workstations all the time. Why would something this astonishing be any different?

But my feeling is that this is a product that desperately needs to be lighter, more portable, more wearable and cheaper. Because if it were all those things, I’d seriously consider buying one.