At last, I’ve tried the Apple Vision Pro: Here are my three favourite things about it
I went hands on with the Apple Vision Pro and while questions remain over its comfort, it’s a highly immersive triumph of engineering
I’ve had a bit of an odd relationship with the Apple Vision Pro headset since it was unveiled in the US on 5 June 2024. It looked amazing but a combination of factors has since served to dampen my enthusiasm. The first? It wasn’t slated for an official launch until much later in the year. The second? When it did finally arrive, it was only available to a US audience. The third? That price: $3,499 for the base model was – and still is – an awful lot of money.
The final factor counting against it wasn’t anything to do with the Vision Pro itself, more my own personal baggage – the fact that I’ve been disappointed with pretty much every VR or AR headset I’ve ever tried. And I’ve tried a lot of them, from the first Oculus Rift through the HTC Vive to the Meta Quest Pro, and smart glasses at pretty much every tech show I’ve been to in the interim.
Now that it has finally arrived in the UK, at the equally high price of £3,499, it’s the turn of the Apple Vision Pro to meet my cynicism head-on. However, having had the chance to give it a try in advance of its UK release, I can report that my mind has been changed. It’s easily the best VR product I have ever tried. Indeed, I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I said it was possibly the most impressive product I’ve been shown in my 20+ year career writing about technology.
It would be remiss of me to recommend you immediately go and splash what is a huge chunk of your cash on one. Ultimately, this is a niche product that, not to put too fine a point on it, is not for everyone. But technically, it’s incredible. Here are my three favourite things about it, and a couple of things I’m not so keen on.
1. Apple Vision Pro: Optically sharp, resolution that’s just right
If there’s one thing that has always gotten in the way of my enjoyment of VR to date, it’s image sharpness or the lack of it. No matter how impressive the immersion, headsets have always delivered somewhat grainy, pixellated and blurry images. Not the Apple Vision Pro.
After having optically corrective Zeiss inserts fitted into the headset – an impressively simple process – everything looked ultra-sharp through each eyepiece, with no blurriness, and very little visible pixel structure.
In one demo I was shown – the Museum That Never Was – I was able to pick up an exhibit, rotate it and bring it right up for a close look, and I was impressed that I could discern no grain and pixelation beyond what was visible in the textures of the model itself.
TV and video looked equally impressive. I loved, in particular, a multi-screen view of “live” NBA basketball games that allowed me to keep tabs on five games at a time, each huge screen stretched across a virtual wall in front of me. I was able to switch between games seamlesssly, bringing one of the peripheral screens into focus, effortlessly maximising and minimising screens at will.
I guess that’s not exactly surprising given how impressive the specifications of the displays serving each eye are, but it’s still impressive to experience, nonetheless. Apple doesn’t disclose the resolution per eye but the total pixel count of 23 million is more than double that of the Meta Quest 3 (9.1 million pixels) and the Meta Quest Pro (6.9 million pixels), while the micro-OLED technology of Apple’s displays deliver an impressively impactful, vivid image.
2. Apple Vision Pro: Intuitive controls – it’s all in the eyes
The other thing that has always felt a little clunky to me with most VR headsets has been the requirement to point and click to navigate the UI, whether with your hands and fingers, a dedicated controller, or a mouse.
The Apple Vision Pro shifts that paradigm to eye tracking and it works amazingly well. This is calibrated by looking at a series of icons in the display and tapping a forefinger and thumb together to “click” when you first set up the Vision Pro. Once done, selecting, clicking and scrolling feels effortless in a way that fumbling around for a controller does not.
The headset uses a total of four internal infrared cameras and LEDs to track where your eyes are pointed, and six “world-facing” tracking cameras, some of which face downwards to capture hand motion, even in dark environments.
The only criticism I would have of the system is that sometimes you forget that you only have to look and click, partly because the icons only change appearance very subtly when you look at them. When you’ve spent your whole life with fully intentional UI control systems like touchscreens, touchpads and mice, it’s quite a step – and I think a more obvious feedback system would have eased the transition.
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3. Apple Vision Pro: In your own world, but not isolated
Perhaps the most important aspect of my experience with the Apple Vision Pro was how it deals with the whole AR aspect of headset design. You can choose to be completely sealed off from the outside world if you want, but if you need to speak to someone else in the room, or you want to see what’s around you or where you’re going, you only need spin the digital crown, mounted above your right temple, to fade in the outside world.
There are also several automatic systems in place to help you keep tabs on your surroundings. The People Awareness system, for instance, identifies people in your space so if you turn to face them, they’ll fade in through whatever you’re doing on the headset. Those inward-facing eye-tracking cameras also present an image of your eyes on the Vision Pro’s external displays. Motion sensors, meanwhile, will automatically fade in your surroundings if they detect you’ve got up from your seat and you’re moving around, or you’re approaching an immovable object like the wall too fast.
Critically, the quality of the passthrough image presented by the Apple Vision Pro’s camera system – which captures images of your surroundings in 6.5 stereo megapixels with an aperture of f/2 – is sharp and clear and a world away from the noisy, blurry mess you’ll find on, say, the Meta Quest Pro or even the Meta Quest 3.
You’ll probably still want to remove the headset to read or operate your smartphone but, for everything else, you can leave the headset clamped to your face.
Apple Vision Pro: What I don’t like
While there’s no doubt you can leave the Vision Pro on for hours, whether you’ll want to is another matter. Although the Apple Vision Pro is technologically highly impressive, one of the things it doesn’t successfully address is long-term comfort.
To Apple’s credit, it does try. The stretchy mesh strap and light seal that fits around your eyes do feel, initially, very comfortable. But there’s no getting away from the fact that even with the off-board battery – which attaches to the headset via cable – the Apple Vision Pro is a heavy thing to strap on the front of your face. It weighs between 600g and 650g depending on the configuration of straps and optical inserts – the Meta Quest 3, for comparison, is 515g.
Fortunately, if you can’t get comfortable with the mesh strap, there is another strap provided in the box – a dual-loop system that takes some of the strain off the back of your head and redistributes it across the top. However, I don’t think this is a piece of technology you’ll want to wear for hours on end.
Finally, I can’t quite get away from the fact that VR still feels niche, specialised – like a technology seeking an application rather than the other way around. It’s amazing to play games fully immersed, review family photos in 3D – captured on your iPhone no less – and watch movies on your very own personal giant cinema screen, but is that enough for people to justify spending this much on a headset?
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Apple Vision Pro: Final thoughts
Ultimately, though, I’m not sure it matters whether or not the Apple Vision Pro has a killer application. It’s such a triumph of engineering, such a big leap forward over what has gone before that it deserves to be evaluated purely on its own technological merits.
It may be expensive, but what Apple has achieved here, after many years of misfires, proves that VR is a practical technology that can be delivered convincingly. The resolution of the display, the optics and the method of control all work brilliantly, and almost every concern I’ve ever had about VR has been addressed, save for long-term comfort.
Can I promise that, in 30 years, we’ll all be wired up to headsets experiencing life in a virtual universe, working remotely in mixed reality, watching TV and playing games without the need for a console or TV? No, I can’t. Some other technology may come along and supersede the need for VR – directly piping social media video into our optical nerves thus destroying society forever.
But, failing that, Apple Vision Pro shows the way like no other VR product has ever done before. It’s so good that, if I was a very rich man, I’d very seriously consider splashing out on one.
