Vision Pro first impressions: lots of potential, VERY rough around the edges
Vision Pros are selling on eBay for ~$2200, so I bought one from Apple to try out for 2 weeks. If I like it I’ll return it and buy one from eBay, and if I don’t like it I’ll just return it.
It starts with audio issues….
I mostly bought it for the Mac Virtual Display. I upgraded to the Vision OS 2 beta and I was able to up the resolution of the Virtual Display to 5120x2160! Holy hell is this a lot of real estate! That said, it doesn’t render super sharply, so I have to zoom in on most apps. I still prefer 5120x2160 with some zoomed in apps as opposed to a lower resolution with unzoomed apps because some apps don’t need the zoom so ultimately I can fit more in my field of view.
But the rough around the edges parts start coming in very quickly. First of all, any audio from any apps is still coming from my Mac, and there’s currently no option to send that audio to the Vision Pro, even though it has speakers. I can connect my Bluetooth headphones to my Mac and that solves that problem, but it leads us to the next one - Vision Pro won’t connect to my Bluetooth headphones!
Of course, if it did connect, I’d still have the problem of Mac apps outputting their audio through the Mac but right now I’m talking about the use case of just listening to music or watching a movie on Vision Pro itself. It literally won’t connect to my Bluetooth headphones! There’s a workaround where it can connect as a hearing aid, but then if I lower the volume it loses the connection :shrug:. I can raise the volume fine, just not lower it. Online some folks have said that Airpod Maxes connect, and that this limitation has something to do with spatial audio, but it’s still very surprising.
Speaking of listening to music or watching a movie on the Vision Pro, it’s kind of a pain! For one thing, I tried moving an mkv file on my Mac to the Pro, which I was able to do via AirDrop fairly smoothly, but I couldn’t find a way to play it on the Pro. I tried a bunch of apps, but either they didn’t work or they were such a pain I gave up early.
Neither Spotify nor Youtube have native apps for the Pro, but you can use the native Safari app to open their web versions. The Spotify web app is fine except for the aforementioned headphone issues, which basically forces me to run Spotify on my Mac and negates one of the potential advantages of the Pro (separate windows for different apps). The Youtube website is very difficult to navigate with eyetracking and the “thumb + index finger click.” Some of the buttons are so close you have to look very precisely, which is an unusual experience, and if you miss you might end up screwing up where you were in the video.
Back to the good parts
All that said, I really appreciated the big monitor in front of me, even if it wasn’t super sharp. When I did try to watch videos (i.e. through VLC playing on my Mac) it was incredible to have such a massive screen, even if the audio and other usability issues made it not really worth it (the Vision Pro click gesture doesn’t work inside the Virtual Display, so any play/pause/etc has to be done through the laptop).
There’s clearly a lot of potential. I love how apps stay pinned in 3D space. If the apps from the virtual display could be separated, you could potentially put email and slack in the kitchen and your main working area in your home office (if you have such a setup).
I think ultimately this is where AR glasses will go, but perhaps the tech just isn’t there yet to have the high resolutions necessary as well as to integrate it into 3D space, but I wouldn’t be surprised if one day Apple ditched the camera pass-through in favor of glasses.
Where no man has gone before
At one point I needed to use the, ahem, facilities, so I brought the Vision Pro with me, turned on the Moon environment, dialed it up to full immersion and really enjoyed my time in there :D