Perhaps in the not-so-distant future, we’ll all wrap up our days of immersive work meetings and 3-D movies and turn our Vision Pro headsets toward web browsing, musing at how early reviewers failed to appreciate how groundbreaking Apple Inc.’s new headset would become.
Or, perhaps, we’ll be sitting around with our iPhones, wondering how those reviewers thought Apple
AAPL,
could get any traction at all for a pair of high-tech goggles costing $3,499.
See more: Apple’s Vision Pro is ‘frightening’ in the best way—but many questions remain
In the weeks leading up to Apple’s Vision Pro reveal, many analysts took the opportunity to point out how many of the company’s current blockbuster products, like the Apple Watch and even the iPhone, met doubts upon their initial debuts. Of course, some more minor products, like the HomePod speaker, arrived pricey and late to the game, and they never caught on.
Apple enthusiasts will have to wait until early next year to get their hands on the Vision Pro and see the technology for themselves. But some members of the press got to test the device briefly after Monday’s launch, and they left generally impressed with Apple’s capabilities though still questioning how the device would really come to be used.
Nilay Patel of The Verge called his experience testing Vision Pro “the best handset demo ever.” He praised the “absolutely bonkers” resolution, with a 4K display for each eye and the ease of Apple’s hand-tracking capabilities, which allow people to execute commands.
“Apple has clearly solved a bunch of big hardware interaction problems with VR headsets, mostly by out-engineering and out-spending everyone else that’s tried,” he wrote. “But it has emphatically not really answered the question of what these things are really for yet: the main interface is very much a grid of icons, and most of the demos were basically projections of giant screens with very familiar apps on them.”
Read: Is Apple’s Vision Pro VR headset worth $3,499? Read this before shelling out.
At the end of the day, Vision Pro struck Patel as a fancy virtual-reality headset, not a wholly new type of computing, as is Apple’s portrayal.
The device “feels, and behaves like a VR headset,” he noted. “If you’ve used a Meta Quest, just imagine the best possible Meta Quest running something very much like iPadOS, and you’ll get it.”
Engadget’s Devindra Hardawar agreed that Vision Pro is “still just a VR headset, with many of the issues endemic to the entire category.”
While he was impressed with 3-D viewing capabilities, he commented on some social aspects of the device. For one, he liked a 3-D clip of a child blowing out birthday candles but noted that the parent would have had to have been wearing the goggles to shoot the footage, thus missing out on fully experiencing the moment in real-life.
Additionally, the experience felt isolating to him, and the $3,499 cost of a Vision Pro could prevent people from enjoying immersive perks with others.
“More than one Apple representative suggested that problem could eventually be solved by buying multiple headsets,” he wrote. “I laughed.”
Matthew Panzarino of TechCrunch commented that the Vision Pro marked a “genuine leapfrog in capability and execution of XR — or mixed reality.” He thought the device showed Apple’s advantages in hardware and brought improvements related to issues with latency—or lag time—relative to devices currently on the market.
Users control the Vision Pro with their hands, eyes and voice, a key feature that separates the device from the pack, according to Panzarino. “Many other hand-tracking interfaces force you to keep your hands up in front of you, which is tiring,” he said.
Panzarino said he was “hesitant to make any broad claims about whether Apple Vision Pro is going to fulfill Apple’s claims about the onset of spatial computing,” given that the device isn’t ready yet and he didn’t get to use it for too long. “It is, however, really, really well done.”
Opinion: Vision Pro could be Apple’s biggest hit since iPhone, but that won’t be known for years
Joanna Stern of The Wall Street Journal commented that the Vision Pro is “not for everyone” and, in fact, is “not even for most people.”
In her view, “there are really just two compelling use cases for this thing right now.” One is workplace productivity, with Stern highlighting her experience working on a presentation collaboratively with the Vision Pro and the idea that we could replace multiple monitors with apps scattered across the headset’s display.
Plus, she had been “skeptical” of hype around 3-D viewing “after decades of 3-D TV promises,” but said she was “surprised by how into the 3-D clip of ‘Avatar: The Way of Water’ I got.”
That said, she still felt a bit nauseous and sensed the weight of the device on her nose, areas Apple expects to improve before the actual launch.
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