Apple Vision Pro review: Incredible Unrealized Potential

Price When Reviewed

$3,499

Best Prices Today: Apple Vision Pro

$3499

Apple’s Vision Pro spatial computer, a VR headset with pass-through video, hand tracking, and eye tracking, is not just another VR headset. It’s not just an expensive Meta Quest 3 with higher-quality displays.

It is those things, but it’s not just those things. There are moments when you really do feel, in your gut, that you’re doing things that are going to be the way it is at some point in the future. After a week of using Apple Vision Pro every day, one thought keeps passing through my head. “This is going to be great…one day.”

But that’s the rub. That greatness of this product feels like it is always just off in the distance somewhere. Really trying to use the Vision Pro as anything more than a media consumption device right now is an exercise in compromises and inefficiency, and even as a pure consumption device there are big drawbacks and tradeoffs.

If only it was lighter. If only it was less expensive. If only I could plug USB-C devices into it. If only there more apps. If only the apps were better.

If only.

When the “wow” moments pass (and there are some big “wow” moments) you’re left wondering when Vision Pro is going to do this, or why it doesn’t do that, and eventually decide to just go ahead and use your Mac or your iPad or iPhone to do what you want to do.

Some of Vision Pro’s shortfalls can be addressed with software updates, others are hardware related, but either way it’s hard to recommend this pricey face computer right now for any but the most die-hard early adopter Apple fans.

Incredible but limiting hardware

You have no doubt seen videos and screenshots online which show the point-of-view experience of Apple Vision Pro. It may look to you very much like using a Meta Quest 3 or similar competing consumer headset.

These videos in no way capture the experience. Apple’s micro‑OLED displays have incredible fidelity, color depth, and dynamic range. You don’t see pixels. There’s no “screen door effect.” In the right lighting, you can get a bit of lens glare but it’s less pronounced than with most other headsets.

Looking at rendered content on something like a Meta Quest 3 vs an Apple Vision Pro is like using an old 1080p TV vs a new 4K HDR OLED. Apple pulls a lot of tricks behind the scenes to make this work, like foveated rendering (where only the specific part of the screen you’re looking at is rendered in full resolution and everything else is a little fuzzy–just like your actual vision).

Foundry

Speaking of tracking: It’s kind of like magic. Just look at something and it immediately highlights. Pinch, even with your hand relaxed down low, and you’ll select it. There’s no need to wildly swipe and poke at the air in front of you and people near you will barely know that you’re doing anything at all.

“Look and pinch” is the primary means of interacting with visionOS, and it’s both technically impressive and limiting. After years of multitouch interfaces, having one touch point (per hand) feels like a handicap. Locking your gaze on things takes some adjustment, too. Our natural instinct is to look at something to target it but look away, which doesn’t work here. You have to keep staring at the interface element in order to operate it. Imagine turning off a light switch: You just look at it long enough to accurately move your hand toward it, but Vision Pro wants you to keep staring at it until the action is complete.

If you bring a window close enough you can literally poke and swipe at it directly, but with no tactile feedback, it’s not really a great experience. It’s like wrestling a ghost. It all works incredibly well, but it also gives you the sense that in a generation or two, it’ll be much more intuitive and fluid.

The same goes for pass-through video. The view of the outside world is both the best I’ve ever seen and still not good enough. Apple keeps the entirely photon-in-to-photons-out latency down to 12 milliseconds or less, but the video feed quickly becomes grainy and colors mute when you leave a brightly-lit area. I don’t think of my home as particularly dark, but my typical lighting wasn’t bright enough to get great fidelity unless I turned on a lot more lights than I’m used to.

Sound quality from the little speakers integrated into the strap is surprisingly good, and though it “leaks” to others pretty easily at higher volumes, it’s a comfortable way to mix outside audio (which you want if you’re seeing the outside world) with spatial audio from the apps you’re using. AirPods Pro make a great way to prevent others from hearing your content, but they typically prevent you from hearing the world, too. Ideal for isolated, immersive experiences but not so much for augmented reality.

The straps work well—the dual loop band distributes the headset weight more evenly, the light seals are comfortable and block out light very well, though the magnetic attachments can’t keep them on well enough. It can be tricky to physically handle the Vision Pro without accidentally popping the light seal off. The tendency is to grab it by the light seal to remove it, but Apple instructs you to grab the front display instead. Otherwise, you risk separating the light seal from the display and dropping it.

The weight, around 600-650 grams, is not necessarily heavy in itself, but all that weight is hanging out in front of your face instead of distributed around your head. So to keep things in place, the strap has to place significant pressure on the light seal. Apple’s pathological aversion to plastic means they used aluminum and glass to give the device a premium feel, but I’d take plastic any day if it shaved 150-200 grams off this thing.

The entire front of the device is incredibly glossy, making it difficult to see what’s going on and diminishing its trademark feature, EyeSight. It’s definitely a nice idea but it simply does not work as Apple advertises and merely serves to add cost and complexity for no good reason.

And while it looks clumsy in pictures, the external battery pack was the right move. It’s not very cumbersome in practice, and any weight that can be put somewhere else is a good thing. Eventually, it will all need to be integrated, but for the next few years, making the headset lighter by detaching the battery pack is the way to go.

Finally, there’s no data input at all—no USB-C, no Lightning, nothing—though Apple sells a $300 Developer Strap that replaces the audio strap with a dongle that “provides a USB-C connection between Apple Vision Pro and Mac.” The USB-C port on the battery pack is for power only and won’t recognize any other peripheral devices plugged into it.

Early, often clunky software

The software situation is best described as “fledgling.” For the world’s biggest and most valuable tech company with decades of software to lean on, it’s a little frustrating how limited some of the apps and interfaces are. With the exception of immersive video and some games, everything feels like a floating iPad window, even the ones that aren’t iPad apps.

You can resize windows freely, but they just don’t look and feel like the “big boy” versions you get on a Mac. Third-party apps are mostly iPad apps, with fewer than a thousand visionOS-specific apps. Those that are there feel rushed. They’re frequently buggy, often just a floating window that resembles an iPad app, and feature “spatial” features that are gimmicky.

For example, Carrot Weather is great, but it’s little more than an iPad app with an option pop-out “full globe” view that makes you say “oh neat!” but isn’t actually useful. I want to look around the real world and see isobars and radar precipitation in the sky.

Foundry

In fact, most of what the Vision Pro experience amounts to is floating windows anchored in the spaces around you. I don’t mean to discount this technical feat. The windows are incredibly crisp and vibrant, and really appear to be an part of your real environment. They occlude the real world as appropriate, cast shadows on flat surfaces, and never waver even a millimeter.

But they’re also always anchored to the space, instead of to you. If you want a window to follow you as you walk around, you have to literally grab its little window bar at the bottom and carry it. More than once I have awkwardly been unable to find a running app because it’s in the other room. The first time you walk around your house looking for where you left the Safari window hanging, it’s kind of amazing. Every time after that, it’s frustrating.

Why can’t I double-pinch the window bar to anchor the window to me, instead of to its position in my living room? Something so simple feels like a slam-dunk visionOS 2.0 feature.

If you want to run multiple apps at once (and of course you do), you’ll quickly find yourself running out of physical space. Layering windows on top of each other is a poor experience that makes it hard to select what you want or switch to the desired app, so you find yourself arranging these large-ish windows in the air all around your desk or couch or whatever.

Then you have to turn all over the place to use different apps. Again, it’s amazing at first, and quickly becomes an exercise in frustration when you start asking, “Where do I put all this stuff?”

Foundry

There are no window management features to speak of. A command that gathers and arranges all your windows around you, akin to Mission Control on a Mac, feels like an obvious omission. There’s nothing like Split View on iPad to let you glue two apps together. Something like Stage Manager would let you “stack” multiple apps and switch between them without finding new airspace to locate every app you want to run, but it’s not there.

App management problems aren’t just limited to the apps that are running. The Home View presents apps as little circles in a honeycomb-like array, with the first page full of fixed Apple apps and the next pages full of your apps, in alphabetical order.

The first page is not in alphabetical order, confusingly. There is no way to change any of this, and it’s frustrating as hell. Perhaps most perplexing is that iPhones, iPads, and Macs have a dock but the Vision Pro does not. Top of the list for visionOS 2.0 is an entirely new Home View and app management experience.

It’s easy to complain about this stuff because the limitations and potential solutions to them seem so obvious. And yet, the experience of physically placing apps in the real world is kind of amazing. As limited as everything feels right now, it still hits you in your gut, on that very first day, just how useful it’s going to be to put apps in a place.

One day, an AI-powered smart grocery list will be pinned virtually on your fridge, the way you used to attach a paper shopping list to it with a magnet. It will update automatically as you open your cupboards and fridge to see what is missing, and it will pop up into your view when you go to the grocery store, following you around and highlighting aisles and shelves with the items you need.

The possibilities for integrating computer-rendered graphics into the real world, combining interactivity,…