Hello, it's been a while, and if you're wondering what happened, it's this.
I got into a motorcycle accident.
I'm fine. I broke a few bones, namely this one, the pinky toe, and the worst being my right shoulder
scapula. And so the last two months have had me recovering from a screw getting drilled in, I guess right
here. A lot of things have happened with Apple in the intervening time, and when I crashed
I was in the middle of making this video.
The Apple Vision Pro is one of the most anticipated and biggest launches in the company's history.
And yet in the months of my recovery, people have largely gone silent on it.
And I know exactly why. It's because despite it feeling amazing, it only takes less than an hour for reality
to set in. This thing doesn't do anything.
This headset is probably the most first generation Apple product they have ever made.
It's well designed, but you'll know it'll soon be better.
But there are frustrating limitations that you don't know will be addressed or not.
What I can see is how Apple has laid a foundation for their mixed reality headset.
They focus solely on questions of how will the interface look like and how will you
interact with it. And it's in these areas where the Vision Pro excels.
The feeling. Controllers? Ugh.
You got controllers right here. It's remarkable how Apple can make pinching my fingers together feel like such a physical
action in the interface. It feels like my hands themselves are actually controlling things so much that I end up trying
to pinch with my hands under my arms forgetting that the headset can't see them.
We have to do it one more time. I actually got my friends toddler to try a Vision Pro, and I have to say kids pick up
on these interactions fast, though his little head was too small for the eye tracking to
stay accurate. But how do I grab those two guys?
It's not just pinching, I also love walking up to the interface and controlling things
that way too. It's funny to command these giant Windows by waving one's hand like they're at a white
board. Now we are in the theater, so you really get a chance to feel like Steve Jobs, I'm on
a stage to do a presentation.
This is also how the keyboard works too, though you won't be typing very fast because this
interaction method only recognizes your index finger.
And the keys look like buttons. And look at the inner drop shadow on the text fields.
There's dimension in window chrome.
VisionOS is just so beautiful.
It's so much more serious than the cartoony blue vibes I get from Meta's offerings.
The pass through too. This really feels like real life, okay real life through a cellphone camera.
And if you want to leave real life, simply twist the digital crown and you're taken
to beautifully recreated scenic outlooks.
With birds chirping and clouds moving, this really is a refreshing take on the desktop
wallpaper. These environments are probably my favorite thing about the headset.
They're beautiful, peaceful, and really take you out of the messy real world.
The only things you'll actually see in here are your own hands and other people looking
at you. There are no phones or exploring to be had here.
Because playing a video content and you've got a giant screen to enjoy it on, especially
when you play anything from Apple TV Plus as it reflects beautifully on Trillium Lake
near Mount Hood. And because this is a 3D display system, 3D movies look really cool, whether from Disney
or your iPhone 15 Pro.
As you might have heard, the Vision Pro is heavy. It pushes almost one and a half pounds.
Considering everything this contains, I have no problem lugging the battery pack in my
back pocket. Battery life is around two hours, which is short, but that's twice the amount of time
I can handle in this thing.
Now for the weird. This is what my persona looks like.
I don't think this was taken in the best light, and I got a haircut since then, so I'm gonna
do a re-scan and see what we get. This looks best if everyone is using their persona in a call, since comparison is the
thief of joy. And these are definitely in the uncanny valley, but in a funny way.
Eye sight is funny too. My friends say I look like Dr. Carol from Perfect Dark, albeit with a whole body attached.
Come on, I have vital information!
Do I look like a dork with this on?
Did you know that for less than the price of this Vision Pro, I got laser eye surgery?
And it's a good thing too, because if you wear glasses, you need to order special corrective
lenses from Apple when you order the Vision Pro.
Even with those inserts, the optics aren't perfect. I've been reading Karl Guttag's analysis of the screens and optics of the Vision Pro
online, and he demonstrates that the optics in contrast are worse in the Vision Pro than
the Quest 3. And I can kind of see what he means.
Despite Apple using these sharpest OLED panels on the market, there is still a softness in
here. It's amazing for the environments and the movies you play in them, but when it comes
to computer work, the trade-offs start to bubble up.
App Windows are really big. If you resize Safari to fit a web page, it becomes very large, and bringing it closer
to you doesn't make it any more compact.
This is because if it was smaller, it would be noticeably blurrier.
This is exacerbated when you're using the virtual display with your Mac, which I've
been having trouble connecting on this Vision Pro if I'm logged into someone else's user
account. Once connected, the small text and interface elements of the 5K output will make you think
that something's wrong with your new laser eye surgery.
The clarity size issue is really demonstrated by the fact that the Vision Pro team's app,
for instance, cannot be sized smaller than the MacBook's screen.
And this is weird too because I'd hope that the Vision Pro's mixed reality concept would
let me spread my Windows and computing beyond a screen.
But I'm quickly running out of space, and this narrow field of view isn't helping.
Apple has not used the Retina branding anywhere on this Vision Pro, and I'm sure they're
saving it for the future.
Let me be clear, this is amazing hardware for the technology we have right now, but it's
quite interesting how far away and how hard getting it right is.
The headset needs to be lighter for comfort. The screens need atomic pixels for clarity, and the computer needs to be powerful and
efficient to run all that. The Vision Pro isn't all those, but Apple is known for pushing towards precisely those
aims. So what about the elephant in the room?
The reason why I say you should just try this? Well, it's because you'll instantly find out there's nothing to do.
The Vision Pro is as empty as the environment it puts you in.
It's not that you can't do anything in it. It's just that, like the iPad, it's another audiovisual consumption device.
Apple built Vision OS off the iPad, and I don't agree with that decision.
You can see it throughline to the Vision Pro from features added to iPad OS over the past
few years, like stage manager window resizing and the mouse cursor button behavior.
iPad apps do work on the Vision Pro, though not perfectly.
UI elements get hidden, and the expectation of multi-touch makes the eye tracking feel
bad. It's not just in iPad apps either, because navigating some websites is a real pain, especially
if they're designed for desktop. All the weird things that make the iPad annoying are kind of magnified here, right in front
of your eyes.
It makes me wonder how different things would be if the Vision Pro was based off macOS.
Imagine how useful a proper file system and fully established library of professional
apps that you could spread out into space would be.
Game developers too could more easily port the already made VR games to the platform
and maybe distribute it through Steam?
It's clear after using this that a Mac Vision Pro would be much harder to make.
The screens would have to be even clearer and the eye tracking more precise.
But it's a vision I can see clearly, and it's the one I'm waiting for.
The Vision Pro's biggest weakness is the restrictive nature of the exclusive app store
model and the lockdown nature of Apple's mobile operating systems.
It's so impenetrable that it doesn't even have a USB-C port for God's sake.
That's a $300 dongle for developers by the way.
Unlike the removal of the headphone jack, it's taken real courage for Apple to develop
and release this headset. The irony here is that Apple and their locked app store model could ultimately be the ones
that compromise the Vision Pro.
This is too niche to be locked down. Everyone needed a phone when the iPhone came out, but no one needs this, so getting developers
on board to make the next great gamer application is a really tall order.
This is a huge step forward in the headset space, but man is it ever hard.