I use it every day, approx ~95% of the days since it launched over 2 years ago. Many hours a day. Far and away my biggest use-case is connecting it to my laptop for gigantic (private) movie theater-sized screen.
Getting it comfortable was the most important step. The 6-months-old DualKnit band is really great for making it a lot more comfortable. An open face mod (eg $10 Macally on amazon) helps a lot with eye breathability, and restoring peripheral vision.
Also really great for being able to work well from anywhere.
Sad that so many people are sleeping on it, but what can you do? Check out r/VisionPro for tons of people that love theirs and use them constantly.
I see some deeply enthusiastic comments like this whenever it’s mentioned. I wonder how much lack of adoption is simply lack of awareness. Apple needs to find ways to make experimenting with it, and experiencing specific use cases, more approachable. I’m not going to go to the Apple Store to try it — I don’t care enough. Maybe one day I’ll happen to do that, but I’ve got enough social anxiety (which is a low amount!) to not want to ask someone in a busy Apple Store to let me strap the VR goggles to my face for 30 minutes of experimenting with a code editor.
Idk if there’s an easy solution to this — maybe shared setups distributed to WeWork type spaces or something… but I suspect it’s the main barrier to adoption, assuming even just 10% of developers would share the same experience as you when they try it for the first time. (Or maybe there’s also a learning curve where it sucks on first experience, and your body gets used to it only after some prolonged usage?)
The biggest barrier to adoption is of course the price. To pay $3,500+ I'd better be damn sure I will use it every day, and even though I did the 30 min demo I still have no idea if it would be tolerable for longer periods.
I've said before and I'll say it again, Apple/Meta need to have rental stands in major airports so I can rent a Vision Pro or Meta Quest for my cross-country flights. That would be a huge way to "try before you buy" !
I wanted to use mine for movies, but cant. The internal reflections or lens flare or whatever ruin it.
Anytime part of the screen is dark and part is bright I get annoying reflections that I can't tolerate. Takes me right out of the film. That said the few 3d movies they have in 4k are amazing during the scenes that arent all dorked up due to the reflections.
Maybe its because I use the prescription inserts, but they're the official ones and it's blurry without them.
Also the battery stopped holding enough charge to get through a full film within a month or two and the replacement was two hundred dollars. I wouldn't resent it if I ever needed a battery, but I had to spring for it even though it stays plugged in the entire time I use. The stupid useless brick is required for it to turn on and it won't even allow pass-through when the cells go.
Do you wear glasses and do you have the prescription inserts for the AVP? I have a very mild prescription, no inserts, and I find text in the AVP to be distractingly blurry. Enough so that I’ve never been able to use the virtual monitor for more than a few minutes at a time.
For context, I have no problem using external monitors without my glasses. The only downside is very tired eyes at the end of a workday, but I can read text just fine.
I have the inserts, they work great. I find using the Vision Pro as a monitor less fatiguing than using a regular monitor with glasses. I think it’s because the Vision Pro Display is optically several feet away due to lens trickery, and focusing on further away things is better for eye fatigue.
Using contacts has been better (for me) than the Zeiss inserts in terms of hand tracking and eye tracking accuracy. Often, I need to run a calibration step if changing between them, otherwise gaze typically targets the item below what I’m looking at, which is great for identifying one might have anger issues to resolve.
I have a moderate prescription so putting on Vision Pro improves my vision compared to unaided eyesight ;) It would definitely not prefer it to my Studio Display but it does the job when I don't have it.
I tried on the Xreal for 3 minutes when I met someone with them at a party. They were cool but noticeably a lot less bright.
Similarly I tried the original HoloLens, many many years ago (2016?), with the similar waveguide technology. It was outside, at night, so relatively easy to see, albeit with jarringly tight field of view.
Without a doubt I'm excited about lightweight AR glasses that I can wear in public. My non-expert opinion is we're still a few years away.
In the meantime, I love my Apple goggles. For home usage only, and not when guests come over. Going open face (no lightshield) makes them feel a lot more like magic AR glasses, with the ~95% accurate passthrough.
> Without a doubt I'm excited about lightweight AR glasses that I can wear in public. My non-expert opinion is we're still a few years away.
Not the same type of AR, but the Even G2 look very promising. Can't use them as an external screen, they're more of an assistant with notes, live translate, app ecosystem, etc. I imagine they might be useful as a moving teleprompter.
I own a pair of the Even G2s (with a prescription) plus the R1 ring - they started out a bit limited, but they recently added an app store for developers to create HUD applications for which has been fun.
They get a B+ as daily glasses, but if more than one of the "killer features" (e.g. teleprompter, conversate, live translate) really gets your attention they are worth it.
While great for travel coding, the faff of battery + cable would have been more elegant as one cable plugged into the laptop; it can be an embarrassing rats nest.
Xcode 27’s Device Hub now allows interacting with nearby dev devices (a bit better than Android Studio’s implementation). Super convenient change that makes it practical to do more things while in the recliner / VP.
Yep. The lack of a video input killed the thing for me, and, I suspect, thousands of other people. All it needed was a USB-C jack for power and video over DisplayPort.
This could have been a great device for gamers, 3-D modelers, drone pilots, cinematographers... but Apple's fear of I/O ruined it.
Stopped using it after about a week or two of usage. The only interesting use case was screen mirroring from my Mac, but that wasn't compelling enough to endure the weight of it on my face. I expected watching a movie would be a good use case, but in reality the brightness of the screen would reflect (I guess?) off my face and create a glare... so it ultimately wasn't a good movie device. Gave it to a friend who was excited about it, and he also stopped using it after about a week or two.
This is the most common scenario. That’s why can’t compare Vision Pro with the iPhone. First iPhone was limited yeah but those who bought it loved and used it all the time. Word of mouth setup the success of later versions.
having developed multiple apps on it and tried every which way to use it (as an XR enthusiast in general), I have never been so happy to put a headset up on the shelf and never pull it out again.
using as a spatial monitor was cool. for about 10min until my neck got tired of the added weight. but I’ll give credit that those 10min were pretty cool.
Unless materials science advances to the point where a display like the Vision Pro weighs as much as a pair of glasses, I don’t think there’ll ever be mass adoption of wearable VR beyond anything more than a novelty, for exactly the reason you stated.
Wearing something heavy on the front of your face is simply not a pleasant experience.
The weight is important but it's only a part of what's wrong with those kind of devices. Wearing something that hides their face is something that people do at Carnival or because they must. It's antisocial. It creates a barrier. It isolates from other people. There is no chance it will become something people will do together with other people not wearing the same device.
Agreed, that’s the other big reason I didn’t mention: most people don’t want a screen on their face. They don’t want their face covered, they want to see out the window or just what’s around them.
I have never seen someone wear a VR headset in public that wasn’t part of a mall VR novelty attraction.
Beyond 2 has almost none of the sensor suite, no eye tracking, no meaningful compute, no pass-through video, no inside-out tracking, no gesture control, and requires two to three entirely separate units set up around the room to do any outside in tracking, yet it still weighs 4-5x what glasses weigh.
Just the displays and lenses will outweigh glasses considerably and there's nothing to strip back when you're down to display and lenses. Throw in a chassis and head strap and you're pretty far from glasses in weight and ergonomics.
In industrial robotics, there is this emergency practice when the payload and tooling on the robot gets to heavy, to connect the payload to a counterweight and pully system, to "neutralize it in weight". Has anyone here tried that ? It should take three thin ropes with weight to make a object neutrally buyont. Yes, its tied to one room, yes its not pretty and futuristic, but its practical? If you want freedom of movement, connect via magnet- and dedock on leaving the room?
Counterweights are common in a lot of industrial machinery. Most CNC mills have them on the Z axis to neutralize the spindle weight. And they're not always a weight on a rope or chain, they can be gas or hydraulic cylinders with valves enabling dynamic loading.
More simply, I wonder if anyone's tried adding an equal weight to the back of their head. This would double the weight, but people can carry very heavy loads on their heads as long as the weight is acting downwards.
First thing I thought of when I tried a Vision Pro was why they never provided a way to attach the battery pack as a pouch on the back so that it sits horizontally across the rear of the head. You have to carry that external battery anyway, so why not use it as a natural counterweight?
Yes. This is how various headsets are made. The HTC focus Vision is one example, and there’s an addon (not sure if third party) for the quest 3 that puts a battery back there.
The issue with that is you would constantly need to keep your head on the same plane, as soon as you move it around, it becomes unbalanced and now it's even harder to move around because it's heavier. Walking with something balanced on your head is a completely different use case than looking around, up and down etc.
Since it's tethered anyway for the battery, I think Apple made a mistake just not building it as a (smart) monitor tethered to a separate PC.
Imagine if the vision pro could just be plugged into a small compute module with a battery or just plugged directly into a Macbook. It would be lighter, cheaper, and more flexible. I think a lot more people would have been interested in it.
Yes, make the battery 2x bigger and include the compute in that.
It would be so cool to be able to plug in arbitrary input devices too, like a dvd player, but its understandable that others don’t feel this way, and it would totally not be an apple product if it did this.
One of their main imposed constraints was clearly to make the battery pocketable, which sadly precludes a lot of things which would have made it a better product, in favour of wider acceptability.
> Yes, make the battery 2x bigger and include the compute in that.
You can't move the compute away in a headset. I have worked for an XR OEM, and when you are designing a headset, you want the compute to be as close as possible from the cameras and displays, to achieve the lowest possible latency and avoid motion sickness for the users.
Even moving the compute to the back of the headset was not considered viable by our HW team. And we haven't spoken about the bandwidth required for all those cameras and UHD displays.
A better way to reduce the weight of the AVP would have been to remove the (useless IMO) front holographic screen, and to replace most of the glass and metal by plastic. And maybe move the battery pack to the back, to get a more balanced headset.
Meta has shown pretty convincingly that you can literally stream VR apps/games over Wifi from a PC to a headset and have a great experience. You will need some compute on the device, as close as possible, but the bulk of the computing could be moved off.
To each their own, but I do it every day, nearly. I’m using wifi 6 though, so that might be the difference. 2.4Ghz might not be sufficient. There’s also very likely local faking on the device (Quest 3) that can rotate your vision before the new data arrives.
Either way, it’s pretty alright nowadays, at least in my experience.
Though time in the seat *might* be making it easier for me.
This is how most consumer vr used to be before the (oculus) quest, and it worked fine. The data path was massive with base stations etc. A lot of people did get motion sick, but its probably more to do with framerate, one would have thought
Considering the short battery life, I’d prefer they ditch the battery and just tether the headset completely. Maybe have a small internal battery just to facilitate a 5 minute change of input.
A tethered virtual monitor wouldn't be a PC, it'd be a PC peripheral. Cook wanted a PC platform and app store he could call his own, so we got this 1.5 pound strap-on facial PC instead of a really nice virtual display.
Also, it doesn't make the best virtual monitor anyway, as the display fidelity is about half-Retina, so all the pixels really stick out compared to every other display Apple's shipped in recent memory. A 1998 Powerbook has crisper text.
What are the logistics of wearing this on a flight?
It seems like it would take up a majority of your personal item space. As someone who only packs a personal item for most flights, that’s a hard sell.
Can you reliably plug it in? It seems like the battery doesn’t last long enough for a long haul flight, and for shorter flights where the battery would hold up, the bulk doesn’t seem worth it. Of course, on the long flights, I’d hope to sleep, and having a cumbersome VR headset seems like it would be more trouble than it’s worth vs just watching the screen in the seat back.
When you get to your destination, do you use it there, or does it just sit around like a neck pillow?
Vision Pro's top talent all moved with their boss, Mike Rockwell, to Siri where they have at least a prayer of promotions, not to mention the satisfaction of working on a product that's not a miserable failure in the market.
Apple shelved the follow up v2 over a year ago and signaled very clearly it was refocusing its XR efforts toward AR glasses.
There hasn't been a new Vision Pro component order since the late 2023, early 2024 original orders that were capped (by SSS's display capacity) at 500k units worth, so Apple hasn't sold even that tiny amount yet.
It was Tim Cook's baby, his last shot at a product legacy, and the guy that just inherited Cooks role put even the lesser Vision Air on ice, the last goggles product that was still on Apple's roadmap.
So, it's not dead, but it's clearly on life support with no goggles of any kind remaining on the roadmap and Apple's attention fully moved to glasses and AI.
I don’t think Vision Pro was intended as a mass consumer product. There is so much cost reduction they could have done on the device that they didn’t do to hit a lower price point, and it’s obvious to everyone that $3500 wasn’t going to sell a lot of units (and it must have been obvious to Apple execs as well).
My guess is it is basically a real world survey of how people would use such a device, and what developers would do with it. Then they could later focus on a cheaper product that is only a display, or a product that is only a media viewer, or a product that focuses on VR/AR applications while deemphasizing other use cases.
This is the version of reality that doesn’t require anyone to be stupid. In my experience if a reality candidate requires that someone is just really really stupid to arrive at the outcome (in this case Apple execs), probably you are missing something about someone’s perspective.
This is why I haven't bought one again. I had an M2 and sold it. Then I was thinking I missed it and bought a used Galaxy XR. It is not bad for watching movies. It is close to the same experience for video consumption but significantly worse for everything else. I am always itching to get an M5 AVP, but the org changes are red flags. I will end up with a $4k paper weight.
Yes, it feels like the future every time I put it on. For work, the ultra wide has been wonderful when I'm not at my desk. I also get to have the NBA playoffs to the side on a 10ft screen while I work. For videos, it's a complete game changing experience. They're slowly but surely releasing more "immersive" features. Eg, I recently watched an immersive Lakers game and immediately thought I'd pay to watch games like this. It reminded me when HD became default and we finally realized what we were missing. I don't want to watch games where I'm not courtside anymore.
The two things that consistently delight me are AI and my AVP. I'm trying to combine the two.
I bought the refreshed M5 version with the new headstrap. I read so many complaints about weight and it was just never an issue for me personally. Maybe the new strap is that much better?
That said, the battery cable was super annoying, id accidentally catch it multiple times per day. The battery is good for less than 2 hours so i used it plugged into the wall.
For zoom calls, the persona thing is hilariously bad, unusable in a business context. Interesting for a few minutes as a tech demo though.
The virtual layout is good - a big citrix app screen (its the ipad app) for remote desktop, zoom, safari etc off to the sides and then things like calendar widget pinned to physical wall. But text clarity / quality is just slightly not good enough for software development. Almost, its close. If you dont mind large fonts its good enough.
Ultimately returned it but it was a close run thing, i almost kept it.
I do still hanker for something like this, tempted to try xreal or other glasses but seems like the PPD is even lower.
Careful using body-worn devices when plugged in. Medical power supplies have special requirements to avoid electrocution, because they are often powering equipment in contact with a person's body. Consumer power supplies probably don't, on the assumption that the device will not be charging whilst being worn.
People have died from using headphones plugged into USB chargers.
I got bored with mine after a week and returned it. I couldn’t even muster up the energy to actually use it on the final weekend I had it.
The window management was buggy. I didn’t see a point to the virtual displays on the Mac. Maybe it was me, but some elements were tack sharp while others felt blurry, which messed with me a lot. The battery didn’t last long enough to feel like I could be cordless, but also got in the way while plugged in. Overall the whole experience felt really finicky.
Some of the immersive content was cool, but the cuts in the video were really jarring. I felt like they should have been done in a single shot.
Movies were… ok… I watched Avatar for the first time, and in 3D. It was fine. Not enough for me to sit down for 3 hours to watch the 2nd one before returning it.
I thought the dinosaur demo was the most impressive, but it was rather short and I didn’t know where to go for more stuff like that. I had the new one, so that demo was already old by the time I tried it, and still the more impressive part of what I tried.
I found some immersive 360 travel videos on YouTube, which were cool, but limited.
I wanted to like it, but the discomfort wasn’t worth what it gave me.
I still use mine pretty consistently for some specific use cases. Video editing in DaVinci Resolve using my MacBook Pro w/ Mac Virtual Display helps a ton with workflows where I need the extra space, and is definitely what I find the most helpful for it. I've also used it some for music production with Logic Pro, and it can be somewhat helpful, as long as I'm not live tracking instruments. Pretty much anything that benefits from more screen real estate is great on it.
Also, media consumption in general on it is unparalleled. I watched Lawrence of Arabia a few weeks ago in the Super Panavision 70 native resolution and was in awe of how much a difference it made for my appreciation of the film.
It's not a product for everyone, but I've not used anything quite like it. One of my favorite memories of it was getting my father to send me some of his favorite photographs from his travels (he's a professional photographer with a great camera setup) and making an album of spacial and panoramic photos for him and some other family members to relive. My grandma literally cried because she can't travel anymore so being able to see the world as if she was there was super meaningful :)
Yes, I use mine many times per week for hours at a time, and my top use case is as the ultrawide theater sized screen for my Macbook Pro. I'm a software developer and the lack of text clarity doesn't bother me much. It's really not that bad. Of course it helps that I make the screen really big so it's easier to read everything.
And it doesn't put strain on my neck like others have experienced.
One bonus benefit is that with normal computer screens I have to wear glasses, but inside the Vision Pro, I don't. So when eye strain becomes an issue after hours of programming, it's very comfortable to switch to the Vision Pro. Much less eye strain.
I'm using it ocassionally - whenever I have time to do further WebXR development beyond what I've already done, and when an interesting new immersive video or 3D movie becomes available on it. I'll sometimes use it to relax and catch up on any new VR180 videos on youtube.
For other work or entertainment that doesn't take advantage of its spatial features, I tend to revert to using a computer with an external display. The display in the Vision Pro cannot quite match the resolution and HDR headroom of the external display I ended up having (a Pro Display XDR). Maybe if it didn't get outclassed by my external display when displaying 2D content, I'd have additional motivation to use it more often.
It's quite fun and I'll drop into it from time to time, but it's mostly a novel plaything for me. I do have a friend who has used it for full-time work for years though.
well, i never could afford it, but was so intrigued by it. i was hopeful that this would be the product to usher in HMDs as more than a medium for indie gaming. i thought that perhaps, with the biggest in consumer tech producing their very own XR headset, we'd surely see rapid developments in device weight, lens and display quality, pricing, and whatnot. don't get me wrong, great strides have been made, but still, XR for productivity doesn't feel as if it has crossed a certain threshold. The devices are still too weighty, 4k-per-eye is still too expensive, and glasses like that of XREAL are heavily limited in FOV. ultimately, not enough is offered, in my mind, to justify dropping two bands on something like the Galaxy XR, when two 1080p monitors costs ~$300, and a portable laptop monitor extender costs ~$150. one of these days, but certainly not now.
The ability to focus on something while the world around me melts away. When it is just myself, the virtual display of my Mac, and the drifting grains of gypsum at White Sands, I seem to be at peace with whatever I am working on.
I'd love to buy one cause I love the idea of watching movies in that and I watch stuff alone all the time.
I just can't justify the $5000CAD starting price to watch movies. I've considered getting a used M2 model, but I believe you still need to get fitted for the eye piece to ensure a proper seal, and the closest Apple Store to me is about a 6 hour drive. Also I'm not even sure all the cool new Siri stuff yesterday would be supported on the M2 model, so it'd kinda suck to spend all that money and be locked out of new features right away.
This is true. I use my quest 3 for adult content all the time and it honestly adds a lot. It's the one thing where immersion really adds value. It's like you're there yourself, especially if you have a toy that can synchronise to the content.
The prudishness is really holding back the industry.
No. The videos are usually made from the perspective of the male actor. Similar to "POV" videos in 2D porn. So basically you'd see the female talent on top of "you".
Cuck style content is of course available too. But not very common.
The content is usually VR180 meaning it's 180 degrees field of view (you can look around a bit but not behind you) and stereoscopic so you can see depth.
There's many live streamers in this mode of vision too.
it did add Safari private browsing mode :), but overall iPhone piggybacked off of the Internet, which was created by Military and adult industry were the first large scale content websites that drove innovation
Sadly the passthrough is black and white only. That's the one thing I love about the Vision Pro is it never feels claustrophobic thanks to very good passthrough quality.
The Quest 3S has color passthrough and it's hardly an Apple-level device, and it's $349 in comparison.
I guess as a gamer, I don't care that much. I put on my headset to game, and if I need to step away for a moment, I'm more likely to take it off than to wander around my house with a headset on. Still, I thought color passthrough was now table stakes for a headset.
I think it's not purely unmotivated cost-cutting. They went for IR sensors and have embedded IR LEDs for low-light tracking, and i figure colour passthrough would have required additional cameras.
IIRC there were rumors that the headset would have an open PCIe slot for such things to be added. Presumably they were passed on as defaults for cost reasons.
Yes, same. I'll still get one because I think it being a standalone Linux computer is huge, and I'm so interested in the Proton / Lepton stacks to run Windows and Android games but yeah this is a pretty big compromise.
Will be interesting to see which side of $999 it drops. I'll buy it regardless but the optics (heh) on the high RAM cost issue and the unit price might temper demand a bit.
I use it every day, sometimes for hours. Once I embraced that fact that my family goes to bed before I do, I use it watch all of my "nerdy" shows at night. During the day it's been really great for having a large desktop that I can see throughout the house. For gaming, I use the geforce now service and a playstation controller. It's been quite fun!
I recently just picked up a used, like new, M5 Vision Pro for a steal. I've had it for a month and use it a few times a week, mostly for content consumption but very occasionally when I need to work, want a bigger screen, and don't want to sit at my desk.
Almost every day. Meanwhile my quest pro gathers a lot of dust. The AVP as a screen is just so much more comfortable and productive for me and nothing beats it for entertainment. It also just still feels like a really great user experience and I was genuinely sad to see the project sunsetted.
Just yesterday they announced a new OS with a number of interesting new features, like custom environments, improved click-with-your-eyes-controls (Dwell Control), a bunch more: https://www.apple.com/os/visionos/
Reading these responses it's clear the biomechanics works for some, but also clearly doesn't work for others. How much this could be compensated for by physio or gym isn't clear, but it says to me that that the system may simply never suit some people who have higher sensitivity to the weight and momentum.
In the same sense, your dependency on corrective lenses and the nature of the problem also stand out. Some people feel fine, Some people feel fine with script matching inserts, some people can't handle internal reflections and the focus effects of a "pseudo horizon" on your focus region.
I bought it on launch day, and I still use it at least a couple times a week. I also pretty much always take it with me when I travel (along with my MBP). Frankly, I'd use it even more, but because it's a fairly anti-social device I prefer to use it only when I have meaningful alone time. If I were living alone by myself, I imagine it could be a daily device for me.
My main use cases are Mac Virtual Display, movies/entertainment, PS5 gaming [0], casual browsing, and -- most surprisingly -- reading. The first few are pretty self-explanatory, but reading is one of my favorite unexpected niche use cases. It's really nice having a floating book (via Apple Books) perfectly positioned at eye height in front of you in your favorite virtual environment, listening to music of your choice. This use case didn't really take off for me until the recent dual knit band fixed the comfort issue. I dabbled with reading in the Vision Pro before but the comfort level just wasn't quite there yet. The new band is good enough to make this one of my favorite ways to read today.
[0] I use the Portal app for this. It lets you stream PS5 games into a gigantic screen inside the Vision Pro. I combine it with a Dolby Atmos surround sound speaker setup in our upstairs game room. It's truly a stunning experience. The only reason I wouldn't declare this the gold standard way to play games is because it currently relies on WiFi streaming, which introduces some input lag. The lag tends not to be an issue with the games that I play, but it's enough that you wouldn't play competitive twitch shooters with it. If Apple had just allowed you to plug in an external device via HDMI, this would hands down be the most impressive gaming experience out there. I'm personally very sensitive to input lag thanks to years of low-latency PC gaming, but I know not everybody is. If you're not, you may be even more impressed by it than me.
Does the AVP still not integrate with VR games/simulators? I understand why Apple wants it to be a productivity tool not a gaming device, but it really sucks to restrict it in that way.
I think apple needs to turn the page on it's 'not friendly for game developers' stance that they've had for a very long time. They've done some embracing on phones/ipads for sure but the m-series graphics capability is massive, they should be making investments with game engines to really squeeze performance out of their stack.
This might be a little difficult seeing as how the largest gaming engine in the industry for AAA (unreal) is owned by a dude that has sued them for their store practices but shrug.
If you're just watching movies or need a big virtual monitor, and you've got a smartphone on you, you're better off with something like XREALs that cost 1/6th as much, weigh 1/10th as much and look like a dorky pair of off-brand sunglasses rather than a scuba mask. They're just virtual displays, not a whole-ass PC on your face, and they work pretty well for that.
Not really. I keep waiting to see if Apple would take it as a trade-in for something else. It's great for watching movies but only as a solo-experience.
I tried a bit on the original Vive and text was awful. I didn’t get nauseated, but games didn’t make me sick either (I did get some “sea legs” when I took it off).
Haven’t tried on the AVP, I think it has way better displays than the OG Vive did.
I've done it on an index, higher res than the old vive and significantly less 'screen door'.
PPD (pixels per degree):
* vive ~10ppd
* index ~11pdp
* quest3 ~25ppd
* steam frame ~30ppd
* AVP ~34ppd
while the ppd between the vive and the index is similar, from personal experience the coding experience on the index is far more comfortable, perhaps because of the significantly reduced 'screen door effect'.
I haven't purchased a meta quest 3 simply because i have no desire to give zuck money or have any kind of meta account, but perhaps i will have to see if i can't find one on ebay or something for cheap.
They probably have some kind of fallback system, but the visual-inertial odometry they are using for spatial positioning that is working pretty well when stationary (at home) tend to break badly on a train or plane.
A buddy let me try his Vision Pro, but I instead bought USB C display glasses. I just use them as a second display, not the AR experience you're probably thinking of.
I don't specify which brand or model because I have gone through several pairs since then. They're all about the same and somewhat flimsy, but worth it for the reduced bulk.
I also got usb-c display glasses and they've been great as an external monitor while traveling. I strongly recommend them to folks who want to be able to work comfortably on airplanes or other situations where you don't have an ergonomic desk.
I got the RayNeo Air 2 since they had the largest field of view.
Pros:
- Price (~$200 one year ago)
- Display quality/resolution is fine
- Brightness is excellent, can use it in direct sunlight without issue
- Build quality is fine.
- It really is just a plug-and-play USB-C monitor that overlays on whatever you're looking at.
- The focal distance (~4 meters) is really nice since my eyes often get strained when working on my laptop screen
Cons:
- (BIG con) it turns out that the field of view is TOO large - I often can't see the system clock in the corner of my screen or the quickbar in games.
- It just has normal pads like for glasses, and they can get a little sore/leave a red mark since they're heavier than normal glasses
- It's powered by the same USB that delivers the display data, so while it works fine for my macbook, it won't display from my phone. I've seen that there are battery/power converter dongles to add power to the cable but haven't tried one.
So if I did it again I'd just check reviews and get whatever is cheap and well reviewed currently. I was thinking about finding some sort of airplane-friendly keyboard+mouse setup as well but it turns out that just using my laptop keyboard and touchpad works fine.
Not the OP but I use mine a lot too. I use them with Samsung DeX and a foldable keyboard. Means I functionally have a desktop computer with me all the time. It's pretty amazing.
I like them a lot and carry them as one would with headphones. My use case is boring and I mostly plug them into my phone and laptops, but they "just work" on most devices made in the last few years. I use them any time I'm stuck sitting somewhere for more than about 15 minutes.
With this form factor, the main limitation is physical user input, not compatibility or fatigue. There's no battery or adapters or walled garden to mess around with. I would not be opposed to a touch pad or gesture system if it actually worked reliably and didn't require accessories or excessive motion from me.
For now, they're literally just a screen in a pair of glasses, and that's all I ever wanted. I'm sure there will be improvements to this category, but any product that strays from this core functionality will be a hard pass from me.
I'm an indie that travels a lot. I'm interested in it to have more flexibility with ergonomic setups for development, such as being able to stand without needing a way to elevate my laptop to eye height (it's easy at least to find ways to get my keyboard halves to proper height for standing) or lying with keyboard halves at my sides.
Curious if anyone is using it successfully for ergonomics (not just for the convenience of having a big monitor which is secondary for me - Macbook + iPad sidecar display is very travel-friendly but very difficult to use ergonomically away from home).
I can't see any realistic way that the ergonomics would be better than your haphazard hotel room setup. Reality is that the device still has weight on your head and neck and is still kind of tiring to wear for long periods of time.
It's still 1.5lbs hanging off the front of your face and over hours that's still straining.
Lying down or in a recliner or something where you're not really having to support the device yourself is about the only way that I feel you might achieve any kind of better result in an ergonomics sense for a significant length of use time.
(Disclaimer: I had one to demo for a few months and used it/experimented with it sporadically, I don't own one.)
> I can't see any realistic way that the ergonomics would be better than your haphazard hotel room setup
Looking down onto your lap sucks over time. Resting your head (pillow or other head support) while wearing AVP vs. holding it up is the key to using AVP for better ergonomics compared to using just the laptop.
I'm thinking of trying to make a DIY easy rig for holding it up from a backpack mount above my head like this: https://youtu.be/o_guGeVboRg?t=75 (but with lighter weight parts because it's not as heavy as a serious camera)
I use it every day, approx ~95% of the days since it launched over 2 years ago. Many hours a day. Far and away my biggest use-case is connecting it to my laptop for gigantic (private) movie theater-sized screen.
Getting it comfortable was the most important step. The 6-months-old DualKnit band is really great for making it a lot more comfortable. An open face mod (eg $10 Macally on amazon) helps a lot with eye breathability, and restoring peripheral vision.
Also really great for being able to work well from anywhere.
Sad that so many people are sleeping on it, but what can you do? Check out r/VisionPro for tons of people that love theirs and use them constantly.
I see some deeply enthusiastic comments like this whenever it’s mentioned. I wonder how much lack of adoption is simply lack of awareness. Apple needs to find ways to make experimenting with it, and experiencing specific use cases, more approachable. I’m not going to go to the Apple Store to try it — I don’t care enough. Maybe one day I’ll happen to do that, but I’ve got enough social anxiety (which is a low amount!) to not want to ask someone in a busy Apple Store to let me strap the VR goggles to my face for 30 minutes of experimenting with a code editor.
Idk if there’s an easy solution to this — maybe shared setups distributed to WeWork type spaces or something… but I suspect it’s the main barrier to adoption, assuming even just 10% of developers would share the same experience as you when they try it for the first time. (Or maybe there’s also a learning curve where it sucks on first experience, and your body gets used to it only after some prolonged usage?)
The biggest barrier to adoption is of course the price. To pay $3,500+ I'd better be damn sure I will use it every day, and even though I did the 30 min demo I still have no idea if it would be tolerable for longer periods.
I've said before and I'll say it again, Apple/Meta need to have rental stands in major airports so I can rent a Vision Pro or Meta Quest for my cross-country flights. That would be a huge way to "try before you buy" !
I wanted to use mine for movies, but cant. The internal reflections or lens flare or whatever ruin it.
Anytime part of the screen is dark and part is bright I get annoying reflections that I can't tolerate. Takes me right out of the film. That said the few 3d movies they have in 4k are amazing during the scenes that arent all dorked up due to the reflections.
Maybe its because I use the prescription inserts, but they're the official ones and it's blurry without them.
Also the battery stopped holding enough charge to get through a full film within a month or two and the replacement was two hundred dollars. I wouldn't resent it if I ever needed a battery, but I had to spring for it even though it stays plugged in the entire time I use. The stupid useless brick is required for it to turn on and it won't even allow pass-through when the cells go.
Do you wear glasses and do you have the prescription inserts for the AVP? I have a very mild prescription, no inserts, and I find text in the AVP to be distractingly blurry. Enough so that I’ve never been able to use the virtual monitor for more than a few minutes at a time.
For context, I have no problem using external monitors without my glasses. The only downside is very tired eyes at the end of a workday, but I can read text just fine.
I have the inserts, they work great. I find using the Vision Pro as a monitor less fatiguing than using a regular monitor with glasses. I think it’s because the Vision Pro Display is optically several feet away due to lens trickery, and focusing on further away things is better for eye fatigue.
No glasses or prescription, sorry.
Have you tried w/ contact lenses? I've seen that work well for friends when they try them out.
Using contacts has been better (for me) than the Zeiss inserts in terms of hand tracking and eye tracking accuracy. Often, I need to run a calibration step if changing between them, otherwise gaze typically targets the item below what I’m looking at, which is great for identifying one might have anger issues to resolve.
I have a moderate prescription so putting on Vision Pro improves my vision compared to unaided eyesight ;) It would definitely not prefer it to my Studio Display but it does the job when I don't have it.
When I bought one they had "reader" lenses that were not prescription, they did well enough. I use 2.0 diopter reading glasses otherwise from Costco.
Have you used XR glasses (e.g., from Rokid or Viture)? If so, how do they compare for that use case?
I tried on the Xreal for 3 minutes when I met someone with them at a party. They were cool but noticeably a lot less bright.
Similarly I tried the original HoloLens, many many years ago (2016?), with the similar waveguide technology. It was outside, at night, so relatively easy to see, albeit with jarringly tight field of view.
Without a doubt I'm excited about lightweight AR glasses that I can wear in public. My non-expert opinion is we're still a few years away.
In the meantime, I love my Apple goggles. For home usage only, and not when guests come over. Going open face (no lightshield) makes them feel a lot more like magic AR glasses, with the ~95% accurate passthrough.
> Without a doubt I'm excited about lightweight AR glasses that I can wear in public. My non-expert opinion is we're still a few years away.
Not the same type of AR, but the Even G2 look very promising. Can't use them as an external screen, they're more of an assistant with notes, live translate, app ecosystem, etc. I imagine they might be useful as a moving teleprompter.
I own a pair of the Even G2s (with a prescription) plus the R1 ring - they started out a bit limited, but they recently added an app store for developers to create HUD applications for which has been fun.
They get a B+ as daily glasses, but if more than one of the "killer features" (e.g. teleprompter, conversate, live translate) really gets your attention they are worth it.
I have AVP and Xreals amongst other things, and the Xreals definitely get brighter in my moderately shaded living room.
But also not really a surprise given the difference in optics.
While great for travel coding, the faff of battery + cable would have been more elegant as one cable plugged into the laptop; it can be an embarrassing rats nest.
Xcode 27’s Device Hub now allows interacting with nearby dev devices (a bit better than Android Studio’s implementation). Super convenient change that makes it practical to do more things while in the recliner / VP.
Yep. The lack of a video input killed the thing for me, and, I suspect, thousands of other people. All it needed was a USB-C jack for power and video over DisplayPort.
This could have been a great device for gamers, 3-D modelers, drone pilots, cinematographers... but Apple's fear of I/O ruined it.
The problem is if the power cable comes out the machine cuts off and you are in complete darkness. Having a locking cable makes a lot of sense.
Stopped using it after about a week or two of usage. The only interesting use case was screen mirroring from my Mac, but that wasn't compelling enough to endure the weight of it on my face. I expected watching a movie would be a good use case, but in reality the brightness of the screen would reflect (I guess?) off my face and create a glare... so it ultimately wasn't a good movie device. Gave it to a friend who was excited about it, and he also stopped using it after about a week or two.
This is the most common scenario. That’s why can’t compare Vision Pro with the iPhone. First iPhone was limited yeah but those who bought it loved and used it all the time. Word of mouth setup the success of later versions.
Wow, if you can't get a buddy to use it for free... this really is not the same league as the iPhone.
having developed multiple apps on it and tried every which way to use it (as an XR enthusiast in general), I have never been so happy to put a headset up on the shelf and never pull it out again.
using as a spatial monitor was cool. for about 10min until my neck got tired of the added weight. but I’ll give credit that those 10min were pretty cool.
Unless materials science advances to the point where a display like the Vision Pro weighs as much as a pair of glasses, I don’t think there’ll ever be mass adoption of wearable VR beyond anything more than a novelty, for exactly the reason you stated.
Wearing something heavy on the front of your face is simply not a pleasant experience.
The weight is important but it's only a part of what's wrong with those kind of devices. Wearing something that hides their face is something that people do at Carnival or because they must. It's antisocial. It creates a barrier. It isolates from other people. There is no chance it will become something people will do together with other people not wearing the same device.
Agreed, that’s the other big reason I didn’t mention: most people don’t want a screen on their face. They don’t want their face covered, they want to see out the window or just what’s around them.
I have never seen someone wear a VR headset in public that wasn’t part of a mall VR novelty attraction.
Beyond 2 is 107 grams. The new M5 Vision Pro is 750 grams. It's easily doable, but Apple deliberately makes them heavy for some reason.
107 grams is still pretty heavy. Regular glasses are 35 grams or less. My sunglasses are below 20 grams.
107 grams is still too heavy. That’s four times as heavy as my glasses.
the steam frame is apparently 440 grams.
Vive Flow is 189 grams btw
Beyond 2 has almost none of the sensor suite, no eye tracking, no meaningful compute, no pass-through video, no inside-out tracking, no gesture control, and requires two to three entirely separate units set up around the room to do any outside in tracking, yet it still weighs 4-5x what glasses weigh.
Just the displays and lenses will outweigh glasses considerably and there's nothing to strip back when you're down to display and lenses. Throw in a chassis and head strap and you're pretty far from glasses in weight and ergonomics.
In industrial robotics, there is this emergency practice when the payload and tooling on the robot gets to heavy, to connect the payload to a counterweight and pully system, to "neutralize it in weight". Has anyone here tried that ? It should take three thin ropes with weight to make a object neutrally buyont. Yes, its tied to one room, yes its not pretty and futuristic, but its practical? If you want freedom of movement, connect via magnet- and dedock on leaving the room?
Here is a video:
https://old.reddit.com/r/VisionPro/comments/1cki7jc/brillian...
Counterweights are common in a lot of industrial machinery. Most CNC mills have them on the Z axis to neutralize the spindle weight. And they're not always a weight on a rope or chain, they can be gas or hydraulic cylinders with valves enabling dynamic loading.
More simply, I wonder if anyone's tried adding an equal weight to the back of their head. This would double the weight, but people can carry very heavy loads on their heads as long as the weight is acting downwards.
First thing I thought of when I tried a Vision Pro was why they never provided a way to attach the battery pack as a pouch on the back so that it sits horizontally across the rear of the head. You have to carry that external battery anyway, so why not use it as a natural counterweight?
Yes. This is how various headsets are made. The HTC focus Vision is one example, and there’s an addon (not sure if third party) for the quest 3 that puts a battery back there.
So yes, this is done and it can help.
This has been done as a mod for the Valve Index, it works pretty well. Really is mainly a balance issue.
The issue with that is you would constantly need to keep your head on the same plane, as soon as you move it around, it becomes unbalanced and now it's even harder to move around because it's heavier. Walking with something balanced on your head is a completely different use case than looking around, up and down etc.
Since it's tethered anyway for the battery, I think Apple made a mistake just not building it as a (smart) monitor tethered to a separate PC.
Imagine if the vision pro could just be plugged into a small compute module with a battery or just plugged directly into a Macbook. It would be lighter, cheaper, and more flexible. I think a lot more people would have been interested in it.
Yes, make the battery 2x bigger and include the compute in that.
It would be so cool to be able to plug in arbitrary input devices too, like a dvd player, but its understandable that others don’t feel this way, and it would totally not be an apple product if it did this.
One of their main imposed constraints was clearly to make the battery pocketable, which sadly precludes a lot of things which would have made it a better product, in favour of wider acceptability.
> Yes, make the battery 2x bigger and include the compute in that.
You can't move the compute away in a headset. I have worked for an XR OEM, and when you are designing a headset, you want the compute to be as close as possible from the cameras and displays, to achieve the lowest possible latency and avoid motion sickness for the users.
Even moving the compute to the back of the headset was not considered viable by our HW team. And we haven't spoken about the bandwidth required for all those cameras and UHD displays.
A better way to reduce the weight of the AVP would have been to remove the (useless IMO) front holographic screen, and to replace most of the glass and metal by plastic. And maybe move the battery pack to the back, to get a more balanced headset.
> You can't move the compute away in a headset.
Meta has shown pretty convincingly that you can literally stream VR apps/games over Wifi from a PC to a headset and have a great experience. You will need some compute on the device, as close as possible, but the bulk of the computing could be moved off.
Have you ever tried that? For me, the lag was the tiniest bit perceptible and was enough to make me sick
To each their own, but I do it every day, nearly. I’m using wifi 6 though, so that might be the difference. 2.4Ghz might not be sufficient. There’s also very likely local faking on the device (Quest 3) that can rotate your vision before the new data arrives.
Either way, it’s pretty alright nowadays, at least in my experience.
Though time in the seat *might* be making it easier for me.
This is how most consumer vr used to be before the (oculus) quest, and it worked fine. The data path was massive with base stations etc. A lot of people did get motion sick, but its probably more to do with framerate, one would have thought
Played Half-Life Alyx this way entirely on a Quest 2, and I have gotten sick in VR, but I had no problem with it.
The technology has actually gotten better since I last spent a significant amount of time with it.
The Big Screen Beyond and WiFi-enabled video streaming like for the Quest 3 and upcoming Steam Frame disagree with you.
I agree w/ most of what you said about reducing latency.
Just wanted to let you know the new Dual Knit bands are weighted in the back, and improve the balance a bunch.
Considering the short battery life, I’d prefer they ditch the battery and just tether the headset completely. Maybe have a small internal battery just to facilitate a 5 minute change of input.
A tethered virtual monitor wouldn't be a PC, it'd be a PC peripheral. Cook wanted a PC platform and app store he could call his own, so we got this 1.5 pound strap-on facial PC instead of a really nice virtual display.
Also, it doesn't make the best virtual monitor anyway, as the display fidelity is about half-Retina, so all the pixels really stick out compared to every other display Apple's shipped in recent memory. A 1998 Powerbook has crisper text.
Is there a headset you like use for prolonged periods?
I regularly wear a Quest 3 for 4-7 hours at a time. Before that, I used a Focus Vision for the same.
I have a battery pack I put in my pocket for the Quest 3 and I’m generally very happy with it.
is that 4-7 hours with the Quest 3 mostly for working or entertainment?
Mostly entertainment. Oftentimes with lots of generalized movement, including head turning, tilting, etc.
I don't have any issue going a couple hours with my HP reverb g2, it is wired though, and I imagine quite a bit lighter.
If you are not going to pick it up from the shelf, why wouldn't you sell it before it loses even more value as tech evolves?
most gen1 apple products are a small retirement investment if you keep it in working condition for long enough
This is gambling on a 50 year timeline.
You mean 40-50 years? It would make more money if you invested in a tech stock. Apple itself has gone up 3,000x since its ipo. $1K would be $3M today.
Yes. Best YouTube and Movie/TV viewer. And occasional large screen interface to my MacPro.
It is still heavy as hell on my head, even with tons of 3rd party harnesses. On the other hand, my neck muscles are getting stronger.
Not regularly, but I do watch movies on it once in a while (in those beautiful environments), especially when I'm on a flight.
WWDC also just rolled out some quite exciting features to RealityKit: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2026/279/ as well as visionOS itself (https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2026/287/)
It makes me wonder if Apple is really giving it up as news have claimed.
What are the logistics of wearing this on a flight?
It seems like it would take up a majority of your personal item space. As someone who only packs a personal item for most flights, that’s a hard sell.
Can you reliably plug it in? It seems like the battery doesn’t last long enough for a long haul flight, and for shorter flights where the battery would hold up, the bulk doesn’t seem worth it. Of course, on the long flights, I’d hope to sleep, and having a cumbersome VR headset seems like it would be more trouble than it’s worth vs just watching the screen in the seat back.
When you get to your destination, do you use it there, or does it just sit around like a neck pillow?
> It makes me wonder if Apple is really giving it up as news have claimed.
I don't think anyone serious has claimed that.
https://www.macrumors.com/2026/04/29/apple-vision-pro-m5-flo...
https://www.pcmag.com/news/report-apples-incoming-ceo-cancel...
https://lifehacker.com/tech/apple-reportedly-scraps-apple-vi...
Vision Pro's top talent all moved with their boss, Mike Rockwell, to Siri where they have at least a prayer of promotions, not to mention the satisfaction of working on a product that's not a miserable failure in the market.
Apple shelved the follow up v2 over a year ago and signaled very clearly it was refocusing its XR efforts toward AR glasses.
There hasn't been a new Vision Pro component order since the late 2023, early 2024 original orders that were capped (by SSS's display capacity) at 500k units worth, so Apple hasn't sold even that tiny amount yet.
It was Tim Cook's baby, his last shot at a product legacy, and the guy that just inherited Cooks role put even the lesser Vision Air on ice, the last goggles product that was still on Apple's roadmap.
So, it's not dead, but it's clearly on life support with no goggles of any kind remaining on the roadmap and Apple's attention fully moved to glasses and AI.
I don’t think Vision Pro was intended as a mass consumer product. There is so much cost reduction they could have done on the device that they didn’t do to hit a lower price point, and it’s obvious to everyone that $3500 wasn’t going to sell a lot of units (and it must have been obvious to Apple execs as well).
My guess is it is basically a real world survey of how people would use such a device, and what developers would do with it. Then they could later focus on a cheaper product that is only a display, or a product that is only a media viewer, or a product that focuses on VR/AR applications while deemphasizing other use cases.
This is the version of reality that doesn’t require anyone to be stupid. In my experience if a reality candidate requires that someone is just really really stupid to arrive at the outcome (in this case Apple execs), probably you are missing something about someone’s perspective.
This is why I haven't bought one again. I had an M2 and sold it. Then I was thinking I missed it and bought a used Galaxy XR. It is not bad for watching movies. It is close to the same experience for video consumption but significantly worse for everything else. I am always itching to get an M5 AVP, but the org changes are red flags. I will end up with a $4k paper weight.
Your ego must be insane to wear a Vision Pro on a flight.
Yes, it feels like the future every time I put it on. For work, the ultra wide has been wonderful when I'm not at my desk. I also get to have the NBA playoffs to the side on a 10ft screen while I work. For videos, it's a complete game changing experience. They're slowly but surely releasing more "immersive" features. Eg, I recently watched an immersive Lakers game and immediately thought I'd pay to watch games like this. It reminded me when HD became default and we finally realized what we were missing. I don't want to watch games where I'm not courtside anymore.
The two things that consistently delight me are AI and my AVP. I'm trying to combine the two.
I bought the refreshed M5 version with the new headstrap. I read so many complaints about weight and it was just never an issue for me personally. Maybe the new strap is that much better?
That said, the battery cable was super annoying, id accidentally catch it multiple times per day. The battery is good for less than 2 hours so i used it plugged into the wall.
For zoom calls, the persona thing is hilariously bad, unusable in a business context. Interesting for a few minutes as a tech demo though.
The virtual layout is good - a big citrix app screen (its the ipad app) for remote desktop, zoom, safari etc off to the sides and then things like calendar widget pinned to physical wall. But text clarity / quality is just slightly not good enough for software development. Almost, its close. If you dont mind large fonts its good enough.
Ultimately returned it but it was a close run thing, i almost kept it.
I do still hanker for something like this, tempted to try xreal or other glasses but seems like the PPD is even lower.
> so i used it plugged into the wall.
Careful using body-worn devices when plugged in. Medical power supplies have special requirements to avoid electrocution, because they are often powering equipment in contact with a person's body. Consumer power supplies probably don't, on the assumption that the device will not be charging whilst being worn.
People have died from using headphones plugged into USB chargers.
https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/faulty-usb-phone-charger...
Huh, so that might be why my headphones refuse to work when charging.
What makes zoom bad ? Lag ?
It's literally half-Retina visual fidelity. I couldn't stand reading text on it for more than a few minutes.
Once they make such a headset with full retina I'm in
I got bored with mine after a week and returned it. I couldn’t even muster up the energy to actually use it on the final weekend I had it.
The window management was buggy. I didn’t see a point to the virtual displays on the Mac. Maybe it was me, but some elements were tack sharp while others felt blurry, which messed with me a lot. The battery didn’t last long enough to feel like I could be cordless, but also got in the way while plugged in. Overall the whole experience felt really finicky.
Some of the immersive content was cool, but the cuts in the video were really jarring. I felt like they should have been done in a single shot.
Movies were… ok… I watched Avatar for the first time, and in 3D. It was fine. Not enough for me to sit down for 3 hours to watch the 2nd one before returning it.
I thought the dinosaur demo was the most impressive, but it was rather short and I didn’t know where to go for more stuff like that. I had the new one, so that demo was already old by the time I tried it, and still the more impressive part of what I tried.
I found some immersive 360 travel videos on YouTube, which were cool, but limited.
I wanted to like it, but the discomfort wasn’t worth what it gave me.
I still use mine pretty consistently for some specific use cases. Video editing in DaVinci Resolve using my MacBook Pro w/ Mac Virtual Display helps a ton with workflows where I need the extra space, and is definitely what I find the most helpful for it. I've also used it some for music production with Logic Pro, and it can be somewhat helpful, as long as I'm not live tracking instruments. Pretty much anything that benefits from more screen real estate is great on it.
Also, media consumption in general on it is unparalleled. I watched Lawrence of Arabia a few weeks ago in the Super Panavision 70 native resolution and was in awe of how much a difference it made for my appreciation of the film.
It's not a product for everyone, but I've not used anything quite like it. One of my favorite memories of it was getting my father to send me some of his favorite photographs from his travels (he's a professional photographer with a great camera setup) and making an album of spacial and panoramic photos for him and some other family members to relive. My grandma literally cried because she can't travel anymore so being able to see the world as if she was there was super meaningful :)
Asked recently here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48275508
No, headaches after 15 min. Same with XReal.
Yes, I use mine many times per week for hours at a time, and my top use case is as the ultrawide theater sized screen for my Macbook Pro. I'm a software developer and the lack of text clarity doesn't bother me much. It's really not that bad. Of course it helps that I make the screen really big so it's easier to read everything.
And it doesn't put strain on my neck like others have experienced.
One bonus benefit is that with normal computer screens I have to wear glasses, but inside the Vision Pro, I don't. So when eye strain becomes an issue after hours of programming, it's very comfortable to switch to the Vision Pro. Much less eye strain.
What's the text clarity equivalent to? 27" 1080p monitor?
I'm using it ocassionally - whenever I have time to do further WebXR development beyond what I've already done, and when an interesting new immersive video or 3D movie becomes available on it. I'll sometimes use it to relax and catch up on any new VR180 videos on youtube.
For other work or entertainment that doesn't take advantage of its spatial features, I tend to revert to using a computer with an external display. The display in the Vision Pro cannot quite match the resolution and HDR headroom of the external display I ended up having (a Pro Display XDR). Maybe if it didn't get outclassed by my external display when displaying 2D content, I'd have additional motivation to use it more often.
No, haven't found a killer use case for it as of now. Was only a really good personal movie theater.
Primarily as an external monitor and when good 3D or immersive videos are released.
It's quite fun and I'll drop into it from time to time, but it's mostly a novel plaything for me. I do have a friend who has used it for full-time work for years though.
well, i never could afford it, but was so intrigued by it. i was hopeful that this would be the product to usher in HMDs as more than a medium for indie gaming. i thought that perhaps, with the biggest in consumer tech producing their very own XR headset, we'd surely see rapid developments in device weight, lens and display quality, pricing, and whatnot. don't get me wrong, great strides have been made, but still, XR for productivity doesn't feel as if it has crossed a certain threshold. The devices are still too weighty, 4k-per-eye is still too expensive, and glasses like that of XREAL are heavily limited in FOV. ultimately, not enough is offered, in my mind, to justify dropping two bands on something like the Galaxy XR, when two 1080p monitors costs ~$300, and a portable laptop monitor extender costs ~$150. one of these days, but certainly not now.
Yes, nearly every working day.
The ability to focus on something while the world around me melts away. When it is just myself, the virtual display of my Mac, and the drifting grains of gypsum at White Sands, I seem to be at peace with whatever I am working on.
I'd love to buy one cause I love the idea of watching movies in that and I watch stuff alone all the time.
I just can't justify the $5000CAD starting price to watch movies. I've considered getting a used M2 model, but I believe you still need to get fitted for the eye piece to ensure a proper seal, and the closest Apple Store to me is about a 6 hour drive. Also I'm not even sure all the cool new Siri stuff yesterday would be supported on the M2 model, so it'd kinda suck to spend all that money and be locked out of new features right away.
unless Apple allows adult content applications on Vision Pro its future is doomed.
There are only two first-adopters for any new technology: military and adult industry.
Without these you wont get any traction
This is true. I use my quest 3 for adult content all the time and it honestly adds a lot. It's the one thing where immersion really adds value. It's like you're there yourself, especially if you have a toy that can synchronise to the content.
The prudishness is really holding back the industry.
Why would I want to be "there yourself"?
You mean sitting in the cuck chair?
No. The videos are usually made from the perspective of the male actor. Similar to "POV" videos in 2D porn. So basically you'd see the female talent on top of "you".
Cuck style content is of course available too. But not very common.
The content is usually VR180 meaning it's 180 degrees field of view (you can look around a bit but not behind you) and stereoscopic so you can see depth.
There's many live streamers in this mode of vision too.
I don’t think either of those drove smart phone adoption.
Adult websites were never banned on those, as far as I recall.
That's some insane revisionism.
There are no adult apps but they’re not needed for stereo videos. And the videos do exist, and they’re not hard to find, and they work well on AVP.
Don’t forget advertising
You can watch porn on devices most people already have.
doesn't work well on an airplane
Thankfully, you’re right. No one should be watching porn in a public place.
?
use reasoning mode
Web browsers exist
You mean web browser, singular.
then why buy expensive vision pro if I have a browser on my phone?
Stereo
iPhone has never allowed those and it seems to have done alright.
it did add Safari private browsing mode :), but overall iPhone piggybacked off of the Internet, which was created by Military and adult industry were the first large scale content websites that drove innovation
Yes, absolutely no one uses an iPhone to go to Pornhub and spank themselves into oblivion because Steve and Tim said it's wrong
And nobody does that on Vision Pro despite it including the same browsing capabilities, apparently.
Sir, this is a Wendy's.
I don't think that's true, 3.5k for a porn machine is an incredibly steep price.
People "happily" spend that on drugs, tobacco, and alcohol, so why not on porn.
True, but people are more willing to spend that kind of money $20-50 at a time than all at once.
Sign up for Apple Card and you can purchase on a payment plan.
I don't believe the two thoughts are mutually exclusive.
Waiting for Steam Frame.
Sadly the passthrough is black and white only. That's the one thing I love about the Vision Pro is it never feels claustrophobic thanks to very good passthrough quality.
Wow, Steam Frame has only B&W passthrough...[1]
The Quest 3S has color passthrough and it's hardly an Apple-level device, and it's $349 in comparison.
I guess as a gamer, I don't care that much. I put on my headset to game, and if I need to step away for a moment, I'm more likely to take it off than to wander around my house with a headset on. Still, I thought color passthrough was now table stakes for a headset.
[1] https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/vr-hardware/the-steam-frame...
I think it's not purely unmotivated cost-cutting. They went for IR sensors and have embedded IR LEDs for low-light tracking, and i figure colour passthrough would have required additional cameras.
IIRC there were rumors that the headset would have an open PCIe slot for such things to be added. Presumably they were passed on as defaults for cost reasons.
Yes, same. I'll still get one because I think it being a standalone Linux computer is huge, and I'm so interested in the Proton / Lepton stacks to run Windows and Android games but yeah this is a pretty big compromise.
Will be interesting to see which side of $999 it drops. I'll buy it regardless but the optics (heh) on the high RAM cost issue and the unit price might temper demand a bit.
Does the AVP actually compete with it? I thought it didn't do games?
It does local stuff of course, and some are trying to bring PC streaming to it, e.g. https://github.com/Kross82/KRVR-releases
Ooh share results here when you get it!
I use it every day, sometimes for hours. Once I embraced that fact that my family goes to bed before I do, I use it watch all of my "nerdy" shows at night. During the day it's been really great for having a large desktop that I can see throughout the house. For gaming, I use the geforce now service and a playstation controller. It's been quite fun!
I use it about once every 3 months now to watch content while laying in bed when I don't think it'll annoy my wife too much
I recently just picked up a used, like new, M5 Vision Pro for a steal. I've had it for a month and use it a few times a week, mostly for content consumption but very occasionally when I need to work, want a bigger screen, and don't want to sit at my desk.
If you don’t mind answering, where did you get it?
No
Almost every day. Meanwhile my quest pro gathers a lot of dust. The AVP as a screen is just so much more comfortable and productive for me and nothing beats it for entertainment. It also just still feels like a really great user experience and I was genuinely sad to see the project sunsetted.
The sunsetting rumors are almost certainly untrue. See https://daringfireball.net/2026/04/on_the_future_of_apples_v... for example.
Just yesterday they announced a new OS with a number of interesting new features, like custom environments, improved click-with-your-eyes-controls (Dwell Control), a bunch more: https://www.apple.com/os/visionos/
Two out of the three links in this post are from less than a week ago and paint a much less optimistic picture.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48467606
That’s very exciting! Thank you for the reference!
My wife is the primary user and frequently uses it when she works. She also travels with it and doesn’t mind occasional weird looks.
I use it occasionally, either to watch movies or the content that Apple releases specifically for it.
Reading these responses it's clear the biomechanics works for some, but also clearly doesn't work for others. How much this could be compensated for by physio or gym isn't clear, but it says to me that that the system may simply never suit some people who have higher sensitivity to the weight and momentum.
In the same sense, your dependency on corrective lenses and the nature of the problem also stand out. Some people feel fine, Some people feel fine with script matching inserts, some people can't handle internal reflections and the focus effects of a "pseudo horizon" on your focus region.
TL;DR Some people.
Still using the AVP but not exclusively, about 3 hours a day, with a hardware Bluetooth keyboard.
Mostly multiple safari windows opening on servers via webterm, cli and emacs.
It’s especially great when traveling.
Only problem, I cannot share a window when presenting…
I bought it on launch day, and I still use it at least a couple times a week. I also pretty much always take it with me when I travel (along with my MBP). Frankly, I'd use it even more, but because it's a fairly anti-social device I prefer to use it only when I have meaningful alone time. If I were living alone by myself, I imagine it could be a daily device for me.
My main use cases are Mac Virtual Display, movies/entertainment, PS5 gaming [0], casual browsing, and -- most surprisingly -- reading. The first few are pretty self-explanatory, but reading is one of my favorite unexpected niche use cases. It's really nice having a floating book (via Apple Books) perfectly positioned at eye height in front of you in your favorite virtual environment, listening to music of your choice. This use case didn't really take off for me until the recent dual knit band fixed the comfort issue. I dabbled with reading in the Vision Pro before but the comfort level just wasn't quite there yet. The new band is good enough to make this one of my favorite ways to read today.
[0] I use the Portal app for this. It lets you stream PS5 games into a gigantic screen inside the Vision Pro. I combine it with a Dolby Atmos surround sound speaker setup in our upstairs game room. It's truly a stunning experience. The only reason I wouldn't declare this the gold standard way to play games is because it currently relies on WiFi streaming, which introduces some input lag. The lag tends not to be an issue with the games that I play, but it's enough that you wouldn't play competitive twitch shooters with it. If Apple had just allowed you to plug in an external device via HDMI, this would hands down be the most impressive gaming experience out there. I'm personally very sensitive to input lag thanks to years of low-latency PC gaming, but I know not everybody is. If you're not, you may be even more impressed by it than me.
Does the AVP still not integrate with VR games/simulators? I understand why Apple wants it to be a productivity tool not a gaming device, but it really sucks to restrict it in that way.
It can with:
KRVR - https://krvr.app/
ALVR - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/alvr/id6479728026
I think apple needs to turn the page on it's 'not friendly for game developers' stance that they've had for a very long time. They've done some embracing on phones/ipads for sure but the m-series graphics capability is massive, they should be making investments with game engines to really squeeze performance out of their stack.
This might be a little difficult seeing as how the largest gaming engine in the industry for AAA (unreal) is owned by a dude that has sued them for their store practices but shrug.
My buddy hasn't used it to do any work in a while. Only uses it every now and then to watch movies.
Yeah -- mostly for media, though. Occasionally with my laptop while traveling for work, for the sake of the huge screen.
Almost every day, watching videos, having meetings, hands on (the agent) coding and playing games.
I have bought one recently and am using it almost daily.
No I barely use it
Are they worth it if you fly frequently?
If you're just watching movies or need a big virtual monitor, and you've got a smartphone on you, you're better off with something like XREALs that cost 1/6th as much, weigh 1/10th as much and look like a dorky pair of off-brand sunglasses rather than a scuba mask. They're just virtual displays, not a whole-ass PC on your face, and they work pretty well for that.
probably intended to be the rehearsal for building applications that will power more ergonomic form-factors released when the hardware is perfected
never owned one but this makes sense
Not really. I keep waiting to see if Apple would take it as a trade-in for something else. It's great for watching movies but only as a solo-experience.
Got mine on launch day. It's been sitting in the case for over a year. It's frankly just not comfortable to use for more than 10 minutes.
The only feature that looked compelling to me was the ability to have "multi-monitor" on a plane.
Did anyone ever use that and did it live up to the hype? Or did you just get sick from having a headset on?
I tried a bit on the original Vive and text was awful. I didn’t get nauseated, but games didn’t make me sick either (I did get some “sea legs” when I took it off).
Haven’t tried on the AVP, I think it has way better displays than the OG Vive did.
I've done it on an index, higher res than the old vive and significantly less 'screen door'.
PPD (pixels per degree):
* vive ~10ppd
* index ~11pdp
* quest3 ~25ppd
* steam frame ~30ppd
* AVP ~34ppd
while the ppd between the vive and the index is similar, from personal experience the coding experience on the index is far more comfortable, perhaps because of the significantly reduced 'screen door effect'.
I haven't purchased a meta quest 3 simply because i have no desire to give zuck money or have any kind of meta account, but perhaps i will have to see if i can't find one on ebay or something for cheap.
They probably have some kind of fallback system, but the visual-inertial odometry they are using for spatial positioning that is working pretty well when stationary (at home) tend to break badly on a train or plane.
there is a travel mode
A buddy let me try his Vision Pro, but I instead bought USB C display glasses. I just use them as a second display, not the AR experience you're probably thinking of.
I don't specify which brand or model because I have gone through several pairs since then. They're all about the same and somewhat flimsy, but worth it for the reduced bulk.
I also got usb-c display glasses and they've been great as an external monitor while traveling. I strongly recommend them to folks who want to be able to work comfortably on airplanes or other situations where you don't have an ergonomic desk.
This is the comment I came here for. Which ones?
I got the RayNeo Air 2 since they had the largest field of view.
Pros:
- Price (~$200 one year ago)
- Display quality/resolution is fine
- Brightness is excellent, can use it in direct sunlight without issue
- Build quality is fine.
- It really is just a plug-and-play USB-C monitor that overlays on whatever you're looking at.
- The focal distance (~4 meters) is really nice since my eyes often get strained when working on my laptop screen
Cons:
- (BIG con) it turns out that the field of view is TOO large - I often can't see the system clock in the corner of my screen or the quickbar in games.
- It just has normal pads like for glasses, and they can get a little sore/leave a red mark since they're heavier than normal glasses
- It's powered by the same USB that delivers the display data, so while it works fine for my macbook, it won't display from my phone. I've seen that there are battery/power converter dongles to add power to the cable but haven't tried one.
So if I did it again I'd just check reviews and get whatever is cheap and well reviewed currently. I was thinking about finding some sort of airplane-friendly keyboard+mouse setup as well but it turns out that just using my laptop keyboard and touchpad works fine.
>but I instead bought USB C display glasses
How did you use these? Did you like them?
Not the OP but I use mine a lot too. I use them with Samsung DeX and a foldable keyboard. Means I functionally have a desktop computer with me all the time. It's pretty amazing.
I like them a lot and carry them as one would with headphones. My use case is boring and I mostly plug them into my phone and laptops, but they "just work" on most devices made in the last few years. I use them any time I'm stuck sitting somewhere for more than about 15 minutes.
With this form factor, the main limitation is physical user input, not compatibility or fatigue. There's no battery or adapters or walled garden to mess around with. I would not be opposed to a touch pad or gesture system if it actually worked reliably and didn't require accessories or excessive motion from me.
For now, they're literally just a screen in a pair of glasses, and that's all I ever wanted. I'm sure there will be improvements to this category, but any product that strays from this core functionality will be a hard pass from me.
I'm an indie that travels a lot. I'm interested in it to have more flexibility with ergonomic setups for development, such as being able to stand without needing a way to elevate my laptop to eye height (it's easy at least to find ways to get my keyboard halves to proper height for standing) or lying with keyboard halves at my sides.
Curious if anyone is using it successfully for ergonomics (not just for the convenience of having a big monitor which is secondary for me - Macbook + iPad sidecar display is very travel-friendly but very difficult to use ergonomically away from home).
I can't see any realistic way that the ergonomics would be better than your haphazard hotel room setup. Reality is that the device still has weight on your head and neck and is still kind of tiring to wear for long periods of time.
It's still 1.5lbs hanging off the front of your face and over hours that's still straining.
Lying down or in a recliner or something where you're not really having to support the device yourself is about the only way that I feel you might achieve any kind of better result in an ergonomics sense for a significant length of use time.
(Disclaimer: I had one to demo for a few months and used it/experimented with it sporadically, I don't own one.)
> I can't see any realistic way that the ergonomics would be better than your haphazard hotel room setup
Looking down onto your lap sucks over time. Resting your head (pillow or other head support) while wearing AVP vs. holding it up is the key to using AVP for better ergonomics compared to using just the laptop.
I'm thinking of trying to make a DIY easy rig for holding it up from a backpack mount above my head like this: https://youtu.be/o_guGeVboRg?t=75 (but with lighter weight parts because it's not as heavy as a serious camera)
Yes, except, wait, I don't have one. Nvm.
I forgot those existed