The Apple Vision Pro Experience (An Honest Take)

So I did it. I spent the money, almost $4,000 after taxes and upgrading to the 512 gigabyte model instead of the 256 as it was the middle model. And I didn't know how much space I was going to need. I've spent about four full days with this thing now playing with it almost nonstop. I've had this thing on for hours and hours and hours. I've put it to the test, and here's my thoughts on it. First of all, the unboxing experience was very Apple. It was a very smooth experience. You feel like you're opening something very, very high quality. When you open the box, pull up in the lid and the Apple Vision Pro is right there on top. It's got a little eye cover on it to keep it from getting all fingerprinty. You lift up the little thing here, and all of the documentation that you need, as well as a cleaning cloth is right underneath. We've got an extra padded light seal, an instruction manual on how to use it and how to get it all set up. We've got our alternate band that kind of goes over our head. We've got our giant power brick. We've got our power brick. And we' a USB C cable. You take the cable from the power brick. It's got a little snappy thing on the side. You go ahead and magnetize it in like that. And then it twists. And now your battery is hooked up and all said and done, you're left with a ton of packaging and paper that you've pulled off of all of the various pieces. But here's everything that it comes with, you know, right in front of me here. So let's go ahead and put it on and I'll show you my first reaction. It starts by walking you through a setup process where it sort of measures your hands, both the front and the back of your hands. It then has you look into the mask so that it can scan your face so it can make the Persona that you'll see later on in this video. I was very sweaty when I was recording this. Cause it was hot in my office. So you can actually notice a little bit of the sweat. My Persona, which. Awesome. And this was my reaction the very first time I went into one of the immersive experiences inside of the Apple Vision Pro. Oh, my God. Holy crap. Holy crap. This is amazing. I just went to Yosemite in the snow. In front of me is El Capitan. This is absolutely insane. This is so much more immersive feeling than the meta quest. I gotta be honest, it is not even close. Oh my God. The first time you experience one of the immersive environments, it's going to blow your mind. It is super immersive, but also super realistic. When using something like the quest here, you get the immersiveness, but you don't really get the realism. When using this Apple Vision Pro, the environments that you go in aren't like this cartoony, digital looking world. They're realistic. They look like you're actually there. Since then, I've had four days of playing with it. So what I want to do in this video is I want to share the things that I like about it. So far. I'm going to share the things that I really don't like about it and then I'll share my opinion on whether I think you should purchase one or not. So let's start off by talking about what I really like about it. Starting off with the pass through. The pass through is really good. Don't get me wrong, it is really good. However, I watched a handful of the early reviews before normal people got access to it and everybody else sort of made it sound like you're looking through a piece of glass and it just looks clear. Like you barely even notice you put them on. That hasn't been my experience. Now it's definitely much better than what you get out of the meta quest, pass through, which looks very noisy and very pixelated. Now the video you're seeing actually looks better than what you're seeing when you look through a meta quest. But when you're actually in the meta quest, it's really pixely, really noisy. Doesn't look amazing. The Apple Vision Pro, much better. But I think I was oversold a little bit when I was watching these early reviews. I was kind of expecting to put it on and feel like I'm just looking through some goggles and just seeing through clear. But there is a little bit of noise. You do get a little bit of weirdness when you're looking at like LED lights. Stuff will sort of twitch around when you're walking. I'll talk about more of that kind of stuff when I get to the things I don't like. Just keep in mind that the pass through is really, really good on this. I mean, so good. I was able to go and ride my bike around with this on. Now I kept on getting an error saying that I was moving too fast, but I was able to see clear enough and the latency was low enough that I could ride my bike. I was able to shoot baskets with this. I went out in my driveway and was able to shoot baskets and actually make shots while wearing these goggles. Definitely wouldn't be able to move around as smoothly wearing something like a meta quest. It's also not nearly as heavy as I had anticipated. All the other reviews that I was seeing, most of the biggest complaints were how heavy it was. I put it on the first time using this strap and I spent three hours with this thing on and the weight wasn't an issue at all for me. I barely even noticed the weight. Will be honest, when I finally switched to this strap, which also kind of goes over your head, it's more comfortable. I definitely noticed that the weight was sort of better distributed, but using this, I honestly didn't find it to be that bad. When using this strap, after a little bit of time, you will notice some weight right here, some pressure right under your eyes, as well as pressure above your eyebrows. I noticed it sort of in those two spots. Now when I switched to this strap, it has the band that goes over your head and the one that goes behind it. It definitely does relieve some of the pressure. You definitely notice the weight's a little better distributed. The head strap sort of takes some of the weight down. However, I was still getting a little bit of pressure under my eyes. It completely relieved the pressure above my eyebrows, but there was still a little bit of weight right here next to my nose. Under my ey was still feeling that weight a little bit. It could just be I need to adjust this better. I'm not sure yet, but no matter what, after long usage you will start to notice the weight a little bit. Nowhere near as bad as the meta quest though. Again, the comfort on this to me is better than the meta quest comfort. Also, I don't get nearly as sweaty using this as I do with my meta Quest. I also found it really surprising how long I was able to use it without getting eye fatigue. Using a meta quest, I I can only go in for about 30 minutes and after 30 minutes or so my eyes are feeling strained. I feel a minor headache coming on. I want to get out. I'm done with it. I'm over it. With the Apple Vision Pro. Like I mentioned, the first time I used it, I went for three hours without even thinking about the weight, without even thinking about eye discomfort. I've since watched full movies on it, full TV shows on it, had it on for a couple hours at a time in the evening to watch shows, and I take it off. No headaches My eyes aren't bothering me. It works fine for me now. Watching movies, watching TV shows, watching YouTube, things like that are amazing on this because you have different sort of theaters you can put yourself in, or you can put yourself in different environments. I've been hanging out in Joshua Tree and Yosemite and throwing up a big screen that looks three times as big as my 80 inch living room TV. It's just this monster movie theater and I could just watch my regular TV shows like Rick and Morty or Mandalorian or something like that right there in my own private movie theater. It looks amazing. I also watched avatar in 3D on it. That looked awesome. Now I can't actually show any previews from that because when you try to record that stuff, Apple doesn't let you. But just Trust me, the 3D movies look amazing on it. The first thing I recommend anybody do when they put this headset on, or if you get one of these and you want to demo it for a friend, show them the dinosaur demo. There's a little dinosaur encounter demo. When you first turn it on, this butterfly enters your room and it literally looks like it's flying there and it will actually interact with your hand. And then of course, dinosaurs pop onto the screen and look like they're coming out at you. This really, really shows off the AR and VR combined, right? You can see the room around it. Plus it looks like this dinosaur is entering the room with me. Amazing demo. Highly recommended you show it off now. The immersion on this thing is crazy. It's next level. Like I mentioned, you feel like you're really in this location when you're looking around. Obviously watching it on a 2D video doesn't do it justice. But one thing that really makes a big difference that you don't really think about is that when you're sort of in this virtual reality world, if you put your hands out in front of you, it actually superimposes the video of your hand and arm into the virtual reality scene. So you're actually seeing your real hand and arm as you're looking around. Compare that to the meta quest where you have this sort of disembodied hand just floating in front of you, which really takes you out of the immersion. But actually seeing your full hand and full arm in the video with you really adds a lot. And it's again hard to describe, but just showing you on a 2D video, the eye tracking is also really crazy the first time you use it and after you've used it a little bit. It literally feels like you've mind melded with the machine. You just look at what icon you want to open, pinch your fingers together like this, and it's like a mouse click. Your eyes essentially become the mouse. So whatever you're looking at is what's selected. Think of looking at something like the mouse hovering over, and then a pinch like that is a click on the icon. It feels weird. At first. You're going to want to, like, put your fingers to where the icons are and press the icons in space. But after a while, you stop moving your hand. You realize you just look at what you want. Do a quick pinch. Doesn't even have to be like, in your field of view, and it will select that thing, and the next thing you know, you're just doing it intuitively, like, really quickly. You're doing it intuitively. You just don't even realize it anymore. You're just kind of looking at what you want clicking. Look at what you want clicking, and you're navigating within this space really quickly. It's a bizarre, surreal, but also really cool experience. Panoramas also look really, really incredible in Apple Vision Pro. As soon as you sync your Apple Vision Pro to your Apple account, it will actually show your photo library available to you to view inside of the Apple Vision Pro. If you have any panorama videos that you filmed over time, you can just jump into that panorama and immerse yourself in it. I have panoramas from the Grand Canyon, panoramas from Colorado, as well as some of our desert camping trip. A lot of those panoramas I honestly kind of thought I would never really look at again. But using something like the Apple Vision Pro gives a whole new life to these panoramic images that I've shot years and years ago. And now I feel like I can step back into that moment in time and it's a really, really cool experience. I tested FaceTime. It looks really, really cool, especially when you're talking to somebody who's not using the Apple vision pro for FaceTime. Here's a conversation I was having with my buddy Joe Fear from the Hustle and Flowchart podcast, and he looks like he's just floating there in front of me in the office. Compare that to when I am talking to my buddy Bilavel Sidhu here, where we're both using our Apple Vision Pro, and I'm actually seeing him as his Persona instead of seeing his actual face. It looks a little uncanny, but I will admit that after you've been on a conversation for a little while, Bilobal and I talk for probably a half hour, and after maybe 10 or 15 minutes in, you almost forget that you're talking to this Persona avatar and it starts to feel a little more realistic. It is weird. And this feature still is in beta, so it's going to get better. But the uncanniness actually kind of goes away after a little while. It's kind of crazy. Mirroring what you're seeing in your Apple Vision Pro over to your TV is really simple to do. It's like two clicks. It automatically found the TV in my house. Next thing I knew, I was mirroring and everything I was seeing through the Apple Vision Pro, my kids were watching me see it on tv. That was pretty cool. So if you do demo it for somebody else, you can give it to them, put it in mirror mode, and watch what they're seeing as they're experiencing it for the first time. Really cool feature. There are some fun games that come with it. Not nearly enough, but I really, really enjoyed playing Fruit Ninja on there. For whatever reason, it wouldn't let me record my screen when playing Fruit Ninja. So here's a clip from somebody else playing Fruit Ninja, but here's what I look like when I was playing it. There's also a really cool puzzle game where you build a 3D puzzle of like a building. I really, really enjoyed that. Playing with that was fun, but to be honest, I haven't done a ton of gaming on it outside of Fruit Ninja and playing with puzzles. Maybe I'll talk about that in a future video once I've had some more experience and there are more games to actually play on it. Now let's talk about using this as a virtual display, because for a lot of people, this is one of the biggest use cases that they're going to actually use this for. You can basically put on the goggles inside of the menu. You can turn on a virtual display. It will detect whatever imac or Mac is in your room. I was using a Mac Mini and then it will project a virtual monitor to wherever you're looking. So I made a big old monitor that was bigger than the normal monitor I was looking at. And then I can have apps around me so I can have imessage to one side and discord to the other side and have my workspace directly in front of me on this virtual desktop. Now, I must admit, I got into DaVinci Resolve and actually tried to edit a video while in this virtual desktop. And I got a little bit of a lag. Like there was no way I was able to actually do the editing. But I have seen other people say that they've had no problem editing while using the goggles. So it might have just been because my Mac Mini that I was using is an older Mac mini. It's a 2021, so maybe it wasn't really handling it well. I don't get the choppiness in editing when just using a normal monitor, but I was when using the Vision Pro, there's no way I would have been able to edit using DaVinci Resolve with my existing Mac mini plus these goggles. It was just too choppy for me. But anything else I wanted to do that was less graphic intensive. Browsing the web and exploring various apps on my Mac had no issue. Now where the app Vision Pro really shines and this is probably the most impressive thing about it is the ability to multitask and have just different screens in space around you. Above my head to the left, I was uploading some videos to my private file server, and to my right I was text messaging with somebody and all of this was going around me. And everything stays wherever you put it. So you can pin these screens anywhere you want and they'll stay put. You can even walk out of the room, go somewhere else, come back into the room, and they will still stay put where they were originally. So that ability to just set up screens is really powerful. In fact, I've seen people set up screens all over their house, so no matter what room they're in, they have the perfect screen set up for the task they're about to complete. So those are the things that over the last four days I've noticed I really, really like about the Apple Vision Pro saying all that. There's a few things I really don't like about it and I've run into some problems. And these are the things that show that this really is that Gen1 piece of hardware that they're still working some kinks out on. For example, like I mentioned in the beginning, pass through is good, but it's not perfect. I definitely notice noise. You can look at your monitors through it. You can actually look at your iPhone and read what's on your iPhone through it. But you do start to feel a little eye strain when you're trying to do something like that. Like if I'm trying to read my iPhone while looking through the screen, it doesn't feel great on the eyes. Also, when looking at things like LEDs, it tends to flicker and tweak out a little bit. In fact, if you look at this keyboard here in the video. It looks like the keyboard's blinking. It's not. That's a solid light. When walking around, you do get a little motion going on. You get a little bit of blur as you're walking around, which can be a little uncomfortable. That's where you might start to feel a little. The eye strain is. If you are moving a lot, you might notice a lot of the motion, the LEDs acting up. The passthrough is good, but it's not perfect. The other thing I noticed that I haven't heard really anybody else talking about yet. I haven't seen other reviewers say this or any tweets about it or anything, but if you're in a low light environment, using the Apple Vision Pro kind of sucks. Like, you're not going to be able to go into your bedroom at night. And if your spouse is sleeping next to you with all the lights off and you want to put the Apple Vision Pro on and watch a video in bed but all the lights are off, you're not going to be able to do it. I've noticed that in low light, not only does the hand tracking kind of stop working and get way less accurate, but the eye tracking degrades a lot too. So I'll have my goggles on in a lower light environment and it stops noticing where I'm looking. Like I have to look really hard at something to get it to select that. And a lot of times I can't get it to select it. I'll have to, like, look to the side of it or look right above it and it eventually will kind of select it. And then when it does select it, if it's lower light and you try to do the little pinch gesture, a lot of times it doesn't see it. Or you might be in YouTube or something trying to scroll, scroll through videos. If it doesn't see your hands, the scrolling doesn't work very well. I don't really know what the solution is for this for future iterations, but it's definitely something that's not great, especially if you want to, like, lie in bed and watch TVs or movies while somebody's got the lights off next to you. The other thing I don't really like is the field of view really shrinks in on you. Now, the first time I ever used it and put it on, I felt fully immersed. It just felt amazing. But the longer and longer I used it, the more I started to notice that field of view sort of shrink in on me to the point where after a little while it feels like you're looking through like ski goggles. You can see this sort of outline on the edges, like you're looking through goggles. So you don't have an amazing field of view. The meta quest definitely is better in that area. You're definitely going to get a better field of view where you see more in your peripheral vision than you do on one of these guys. I did mention the virtual monitor is really cool. Open up a Mac, have your virtual monitor in front of you. It can be as big as you want. You can position it wherever you want. It only lets you do one monitor. So if you want a Mac to have like three monitors all connected to that Mac where you can drag the mouse across all three monitors, it won't do that. You can only have one Mac monitor mirrored from your actual Mac. Saying that a lot of the other apps that you might use while using a Mac might already be native to the Apple Vision Pro. So you can already have like text messages open and discord open and Twitter open and have a lot of the other apps that you might have open while multitasking. So you might not actually need more than one virtual display because a lot of the other tools you need, you just open up the Apple Vision Pro version of it and get that on your screen. Another thing, with the virtual monitor, it's only going to work on newer Macs. I actually first started trying it out by syncing it to my MacBook Pro. But my MacBook Pro is a 2015 MacBook Pro and from what I read online, it's only going to work on MacBook Pros that are 2018 and newer. Luckily I have a Mac Mini which was a 2021, which it worked fine on. I had to upgrade to the latest version of Mac OS cause I don't use my Mac very often. But when I upgraded it, the virtual monitor worked perfectly. Another thing I don't like about it, you've got this separate battery that hooks up to it, and this hooks up right next to your ear. And then the battery, you know, you're supposed to stick it in your pocket or something. Most of the time, fine. I don't even notice the cord. It hasn't really been much of an issue. However, if you start playing games like when I was playing Fruit Ninja and I was like moving around a lot and chopping at the air and stuff, I started to notice the cord flopping around a little bit because it's literally right next to my ear. I kept on feeling it sort of rub against my ear. I would go to chop, and because the cord was swinging around, the cord might sort of get stuck on my arm. It wasn't amazing. For something where you're moving a lot, if you're just chilling, watching a movie or TV or kicking back, doing some work, you're never going to notice the cord. But if you are trying to get active with the thing, the cord becomes very apparent very quickly. The other thing that I wish they did with this, you've got your light seal right here, right? And this is the light seal. And it pops off pretty easily. It's magnetized to this section right here. So if I just drop this here, it magnetize, clicks in. There's my light seal. Really cool. But the problem with that is you have to be very careful when you pick it up. I now always either pick it up by the strap or between, like, where the nose goes and where the forehead goes. Right? Pick it up like this. When I first got it, there was a few times where I tried to grab it by this and pick it up by the light shield here. Because it's a magnet, it easily pops off. So if you go to pick it up like this, it quickly just can fall to the ground. So you got to be careful where you pick it up. You don't want to pick it up by the light shield. I wish this magnet on the light shield was a little bit stronger. So if I accidentally did pick it up from this, the whole thing doesn't fall to the ground. I haven't dropped it yet. It's just something that's been a concern because I've accidentally almost picked it up by that light shield a few times. I do love the virtual environments that are in there. They're really cool right now. There's Yosemite, there's Haleakala, there's Joshua Tree, there's like a nice serene lake, and then there's the moon. And those are really the only environments that it launched with. Now there are more that say coming soon, but I wish they launched with more of those environments because they really feel immersive, and I really want to explore more environments. It only came with five. That was kind of a bummer for me. Finally, the last downside I want to share with you is there isn't a ton of apps at launch. They've got the dinosaur demo, which is really cool. Fruit Ninja is really cool. It's very immersive. You see, like, plants growing out of your room. It looks like it's following the environment around you. That's really cool. Watching movies and TV is really cool. But there aren't a ton of killer apps for this yet. In fact, most of the apps that are available when you look in the App Store are iPad apps that say they work well with Apple Vision Pro but weren't necessarily designed for Apple Vision Pro. So I wish there was a lot more available as of right now. Now there are some other things that people have complained about with the Apple Vision Pro that I might not have mentioned. For example, a lot of people have talked about the battery life only being a couple hours. So far it hasn't been a problem for me. I've only really used this inside my house. Whenever the battery starts to get low, I just kind of plug it in close to me and keep on going. You can also plug in an external battery power to it. So if you have like another battery that you use to charge your phone, you can plug it in here and just extend the battery life of this. I have noticed a few little bugs on it. Like I try to open the settings sometimes and the settings won't show up for me when I press the button. You're supposed to be able to press the Digital Crown on the top and it recenters whatever app you're trying to use, but the settings just won't show up and I have to force quit out of settings and then reopen it to get into settings. Kind of annoying, but there are some little bugs that do pop up from time to time that show that it's sort of a first generation thing. When you are using apps that are designed for iPad as opposed to Apple Vision Pro. Sometimes there's little tiny user interface elements that you need to look at to click on, but they're so small it's hard to get the vision to line up with it perfectly and click some of those things with just the eye tracking and finger tracking, a lot of that stuff. I'm pretty sure they're gonna work out by the next generation, but they're definitely issues right now. Some of the things I'm really excited about with this are I wanna try playing music with augmented reality. I have a piano and a keyboard in my house. To use an app like this to sort of Guitar Hero eyes my keyboard. That would be really cool. I'm excited about this concept of virtually touring homes. So when homes go on the market, you could just plug into your Apple Vision Pro and walk around that home in virtual reality and get a tour without ever actually showing up. That looks really cool to me watching live sports like this Formula one demo where you can actually see the map and the race going on at the same time. Or watching NBA games like Brian Tong here from the NBA League Pass and being able to see multiple games and scores all at the same time. Interact active 3D modeling where you can take things apart and understand what's inside of them. This looks really, really cool, and it's not something I've played with yet, although I'm pretty sure there's already apps that allow you to do this. I just haven't gotten there yet. I also think it'll be really cool to try it on a plane, although I have a feeling I would still feel pretty awkward wearing these giant ski goggles on a plane with other people looking at me.