Apple Vision Pro review: magic, until it’s not

The Apple Vision Pro, Apple’s highly anticipated foray into wearable computers, is under immense pressure to live up to its promises. Starting at $3,499, the Vision Pro is marketed as the launch of “spatial computing,” which essentially means running apps that surround you. Apple’s advertising leaves no room for doubt, showing people wearing the device in various everyday situations: at work, doing laundry, and even playing with their kids. The goal is ambitious — to overlay apps and information onto the real world and enhance reality itself.

Apple frames the Vision Pro as the start of something entirely new, but the reality is that headset computers have been in development for over a decade. I had the chance to try a prototype of the first Oculus Rift back in 2013, and The Verge’s Adi Robertson, who edited this review, has tested almost every headset since then. Thanks to years of development, there are already some impressive options available. The original Oculus has since evolved into Meta’s Quest line, with the Quest 3 offering a fantastic VR experience, an extensive library of games, and some AR features of its own, all for $500.

The good

• Display is a technical marvel with the best video passthrough yet

• Hand and eye tracking are a leap forward

• Works seamlessly with Apple’s ecosystem

• Fun to put windows all over space

The bad

• Very expensive

• Video passthrough is still video passthrough and can be blurry

• Hand and eye tracking can be inconsistent and frustrating

• Personas are uncanny and somewhat terrifying

• It’s pretty lonely in there

Apple, led by Tim Cook, has long maintained that augmented reality (AR) will prove more valuable than virtual reality (VR). The company has been preparing for this shift for years, with AR tools available to developers in iOS and lidar depth scanners featured in higher-end iPhones and iPads.

The Vision Pro marks Apple’s first real attempt to bring all these concepts together into a cohesive product — a computer that interacts with the space around you. The Vision Pro is designed to fit seamlessly alongside the Mac and iPad in Apple’s ecosystem, offering a device that can handle both work and entertainment. You can use apps like Excel, Webex, and Slack, or relax with movies and TV shows on a massive virtual 4K HDR display. Plus, you can mirror your Mac’s screen and use the Vision Pro as a virtual monitor, floating in 3D space.

The Vision Pro sounds incredible, and in many ways, it delivers. However, it also comes with significant trade-offs — some that are hard to overlook. Some of these are practical, like the fact that all this technology crammed into a headset adds considerable weight, which is why Apple opted for an external battery pack connected by a cable. But there are also more philosophical trade-offs to consider.

As I’ve spent the past few days using it, I’ve found myself asking a series of questions — questions that get to the heart of whether these trade-offs are worth it.

Is the Vision Pro so impressive that I’m willing to mess up my hair every time I wear it?

Is it worth carrying it in its bulky case instead of my laptop bag?

Is it so transformative that I want to view the world through screens rather than with my own eyes?

Ultimately, I keep asking myself whether I prefer using a computer inside the Vision Pro or outside in the real world. As fascinating as the device is, there’s still a long way to go before it can outperform the experience of being "out here."

Hardware

Apple doesn’t want you to think of the Vision Pro as a VR headset, but that’s exactly what it is — though it’s a VR headset that almost lets you forget it’s one.

When you wear it, the device completely blocks your vision, but then it displays a 3D video feed of the world around you, captured by the front-facing cameras, making it feel as if you’re looking through the device. However, it can also immerse you in virtual reality to varying degrees: I spent time working entirely on the Moon and plenty of time in my kitchen, surrounded by floating windows and a portal into Joshua Tree.

The Vision Pro is a striking departure from other VR headsets, which are often bulky, plastic, and sometimes comically designed. In contrast, the Vision Pro is crafted from magnesium and carbon fiber, encased in aluminum — materials that make it feel like a natural extension of Apple’s signature design. It carries elements of the iPhone 6, AirPods Max, and Apple Watch. It’s the cutting edge of technology wrapped in a package that feels instantly familiar. Most people I’ve shown it to are surprised by how much smaller it looks in person, especially compared to the large VR headsets we've seen over the years.

The front display of the Vision Pro aims to keep you connected to the world around you while you’re wearing it. In Apple’s marketing photos, it appears as a bright, clear screen that shows a video of your eyes, making it easier for others to approach and talk to you — a feature Apple calls EyeSight. In practice, though, it’s barely noticeable. It’s a low-res OLED display with a lenticular lens that creates a mild 3D effect, but it’s so dim and the cover glass is so reflective that it's nearly impossible to see in normal or bright lighting. When people do see your eyes, it’s a ghostly, low-res image that looks more like CGI than reality. The effect is uncanny, and the idea of making true eye contact feels far-fetched. There are no controls or indicators in visionOS to show what others are seeing, so you never really know if they’re seeing your eyes. It’s like speaking to someone without knowing whether they can see your gaze — and it’s weird!

The cover glass conceals an impressive array of cameras and sensors. It includes high-res front cameras for video passthrough, cameras that track hand movements, a lidar scanner and TrueDepth cameras for spatial tracking, and infrared floodlights for low-light performance. Beneath all of that is an M2 processor, Apple’s new R1 spatial coprocessor, and a pair of fans to dissipate heat. While the fans were completely silent during my testing, the heat was noticeable — after long sessions, the headset definitely warmed up.

Along the top edge, you'll find controls that feel like larger versions of familiar Apple Watch features: a digital crown on the right to adjust volume and the level of virtual reality immersion, and a button on the left to capture 3D photos and videos.

The Vision Pro comes with two headbands: the Solo Knit band and the Dual Loop band. Both are easy to attach and detach; just snap them on and pull the orange tab to remove them. The Solo band is definitely cooler and doesn’t mess up your hair as much, but neither is perfect in that regard. If the Dual Loop fits better, go with it. Personally, I found the Solo Loop more comfortable. I also wished the mounting points were on the outside of the device so I could wrap the band around my head and clip it on, rather than having to pull it over my hair every time.

The Vision Pro also includes two additional pieces: the light seal, available in various sizes, and the headband, which comes in two thicknesses. You can get fitted for these in-store or by scanning your head with an iPhone if you purchase online. Both pieces attach magnetically, which also means they detach magnetically. It's important to handle the device by the frame, as grabbing it by the light seal could cause issues.

If you wear glasses, you can add custom Zeiss lens inserts — Apple provided us with reader lenses to demonstrate the process, but I wore my soft contacts with the Vision Pro, and it worked just fine.

The Vision Pro's speakers are built into the arms on the side, and they’re loud and clear, delivering impressive spatial audio. Sounds really seem to come from the right direction, which is a neat trick. However, the speakers are fairly leaky, so anyone nearby can hear what you’re listening to unless you use headphones. You can pair any Bluetooth headphones, but if you use the latest AirPods Pro, you get extra features like lower latency, lossless 48KHz audio, and Apple’s Adaptive Audio, which adjusts the mix of real-world sounds as needed.

The most noticeable aspect of the hardware after a while is simply how heavy it is. You're expected to wear the Vision Pro for extended periods, and depending on the band and light seal you use, the headset weighs between 600 and 650 grams. I often joke that it's an iPad for your face, and it’s true — it’s heavier than an 11-inch iPad Pro (470 grams) and almost as heavy as the 12.9-inch iPad Pro (682 grams), so in a very real sense, it is an iPad for your face.

All that weight is concentrated in the front of the device. Unlike other large headsets like the Quest Pro (722 grams), which have more elaborate headbands to distribute the weight, the Vision Pro places it all on the front. Switching to the dual-loop strap helps with stability but doesn’t significantly lessen the feeling of having the headset on your face. Eventually, you’ll feel it.

The Vision Pro is notably heavier than the Quest 2 (503g) and Quest 3 (515g), both of which have built-in batteries. Apple opted for an external battery to reduce the headset's overall weight. The battery itself is a basic silver brick, weighing an additional 353 grams. It features a USB-C port and a motion-activated LED that turns green when fully charged and orange when it’s not. It connects to the headset via a twist connector, but the braided cable is permanently attached to the battery, so be careful not to damage it. Extra batteries are available for $199, but you can’t swap them out on the fly — disconnecting the battery powers down the device entirely.

I don’t have strong opinions on this battery setup, mainly because the Vision Pro doesn’t feel like it’s meant for a lot of movement, so it’s generally fine. It’s amusing that Apple, of all companies, made this tradeoff, but it’s also very much in line with Apple’s philosophy that the battery isn’t bigger to provide more than two and a half hours of runtime. (When plugged in, the Vision Pro runs off wall power indefinitely.)

Setting up the Vision Pro is straightforward, with the headband being the only manual adjustment required. Everything else is automated and sensor-driven. There’s no lens wheel to fiddle with; when you first put on the headset, you hold down the digital crown to adjust the lenses for your eyes, followed by a standard eye-tracking setup. The rest of the process is similar to setting up any other iOS device: if you have an iPhone, simply bring it near the Vision Pro to transfer your settings, and then agree to the terms and conditions. If you don’t have an iPhone, you’ll need to enter your passwords manually, but the device will work fine as a standalone. After that, you’re ready to experience computing in the future.

Apple takes great pride in the displays inside the Vision Pro, and rightfully so — they mark a significant advancement in display technology. The two displays are compact MicroOLEDs, with a total of 23 million pixels, each just 7.5 micrometers in size — roughly the size of a red blood cell. Each of these minuscule pixels consists of three RGB subpixels arranged in an S-stripe pattern, a level of precision that’s truly remarkable to consider when you think about how these displays are crafted and integrated into a device like this.

Visually, they are stunning — sharp enough to read text effortlessly, bright enough to bring movies to life. Apple calibrates the colors at the factory, ensuring they are vibrant and accurate, without being oversaturated or overly bright. They’re so tiny, yet perform so well, that they almost feel larger than life.

These displays are a major contributor to the Vision Pro’s steep price tag — they are at the core of the Vision Pro experience and play a crucial role in its functionality. After all, they are what you’re constantly looking at. However, despite their technical brilliance, they do come with their own set of tradeoffs when applied to a device like this.

The Vision Pro, with its passthrough VR headset design, external battery pack, and display that shows ghostly images of your eyes, isn’t the ultimate goal — it’s just a stepping stone. The real ambition is augmented reality (AR), specifically optical AR, where light passes directly through lightweight glasses to your eyes, layering digital information over the real world. AR has the potential to fundamentally change human interaction, and Apple CEO Tim Cook has been vocal about how isolating VR headsets are, and how crucial AR will be for the future.

Tim Cook, 2016: “Few people are going to view it as acceptable to be enclosed in something.”

Tim Cook, 2017: “Unlike Virtual Reality, which closes the world out, AR allows individuals to be present in the world.”

Tim Cook, 2017: “I also like the fact that [AR] doesn’t isolate... I’ve never been a fan of VR like that because I think it does the opposite.”

Tim Cook, 2020: “I think [AR is] something that doesn’t isolate people. We can use it to enhance our discussion, not substitute it for human connection, which I’ve always deeply worried about in some of the other technologies.”

The challenge, however, is that the technology for creating a true optical AR display capable of replacing an everyday computer isn’t quite there yet. The Magic Leap 2, for example, is a smaller, cheaper optical AR headset than the Vision Pro but suffers from significant compromises in field of view and image quality that most people would find unacceptable.

So, Apple has opted for a headset with real-time video passthrough — the key tradeoff of the Vision Pro. It’s a VR headset disguised as an AR device. But let me tell you, the video passthrough on the Vision Pro is incredibly impressive. It works. It’s convincing. You put on the headset, and immediately, the display comes to life, putting you back in your environment, now with visionOS windows floating around.

It may seem simple, but accomplishing this in real-time, at high resolution, within a device that fits over your eyes, is a remarkable engineering feat. Apple claims there’s only 12ms of latency between the cameras capturing the video and what you see on the display, including the cameras’ exposure time. The actual data processing is even faster. In fact, Apple says there’s not even a full frame of latency — the next frame is ready before you finish looking at the current one.

Apple’s impressive video processing capabilities are on full display with the Vision Pro. While wearing the headset, I scrolled through my phone with no issues like blown-out screens or frame rate stuttering. I also worked on my Mac in front of a large window — a challenging test for dynamic range — and while it wasn’t flawless, it was still fully functional. This is by far the best video passthrough experience ever seen in a consumer device.

The challenge is that cameras and displays each have their own limitations. Cameras, for example, are prone to motion blur, especially when lighting is poor. In low-light conditions, cameras either increase exposure time, which sacrifices sharpness, or boost ISO, which introduces noise, leading to the need for noise reduction that dulls the image. Similarly, both cameras and displays have finite color reproduction capabilities.

The Vision Pro can't escape these limitations. Motion blur becomes noticeable when you move your head, and in low light, it worsens, causing straight lines to warp. As the system compensates for low light with noise reduction, the sharpness of the video passthrough drops — my iPhone screen, for instance, became noticeably blurrier as the sun set.

In a mixed lighting scenario, like sitting in your kitchen at night with the lights on and working on a dark screen, you'll notice the display brightness adjusting frequently as the system tries to balance the varying light sources. The LCD clock on my microwave even flickered when viewed through the cameras. Additionally, Apple’s specs state that the display supports 92 percent of the DCI-P3 color gamut, meaning the Vision Pro can only show around 49 percent of the colors that your eyes can perceive.

The displays have their own set of limitations. The field of view is relatively narrow, and the experience of viewing tiny screens through lenses makes it feel even more confined. While Apple hasn’t shared the exact measurement, the Vision Pro’s field of view is noticeably smaller than the Quest 3’s 110 horizontal degrees. This results in large black borders around your view, much like looking through binoculars.

Additionally, there’s some distortion and vignetting around the edges of the lenses, and you may notice green and pink color fringing, particularly in bright environments. All of this contributes to making the usable field of view feel even smaller. When looking at high-contrast scenes — such as a white text window floating over a dark desert landscape — you might also see reflections of highlights in the lenses.

I asked Apple about these issues, and they confirmed that’s how it’s intended to look. Apple spokesperson Jacqueline Roy explained that a mix of hardware and software in the Vision Pro is designed to minimize these effects, but they’re still present, and you’ll definitely notice them.

If you’ve been following VR for the past decade, these display issues will feel very familiar. Light from a screen is passing through lenses positioned on someone’s face, which are then aligned with their eyes—eyes that, of course, vary from person to person. (Our faces aren’t exactly designed for mounting hardware.) So, a bit of distortion at the edges of the displays isn’t unexpected or a deal-breaker. But given that Apple is charging $3,499 for the Vision Pro and positioning it as a device you could casually wear while folding laundry, it’s hard not to be disappointed by these imperfections.

I’m serious when I say that the Vision Pro offers the best video passthrough I’ve ever seen, with the sharpest VR displays a regular person will encounter. But no matter how impressive the visuals are, you’re always reminded that you’re looking at video on screens, and real life is simply far more captivating. In most consumer device reviews, few will ever mention color gamuts—but if you want me to experience reality through a device, I expect to see all the colors of the rainbow.

This is the best anyone has achieved so far, but it still doesn’t compare to what we see in the real world.

Controls

Another feature Apple is particularly proud of is its eye and hand tracking control system, which is light years ahead of any other consumer hand or eye tracking technology available. To navigate the interface, you simply look at the items you want to interact with, then tap your fingers to control them. It’s not about physically reaching out to touch things—instead, your eyes act as the cursor, and your fingers serve as the button. You tap them together to click on whatever you're focusing on.

The first few times you use hand and eye tracking on the Vision Pro, it feels truly incredible — almost like a superpower. The Vision Pro’s external cameras can detect your hands within a large area around your body, whether they’re resting on your lap, hanging by your sides, or lifted in the air. You quickly realize you don’t need to gesture out in front of you, and once you get the hang of it, it’s fun to watch others instinctively raise their hands when trying the Vision Pro for the first time.

However, after using it a few more times, the novelty starts to fade — and in some cases, it even makes using the Vision Pro more difficult. It turns out that having to constantly focus on what you want to control can be quite distracting.

Consider every other computer you use: the input device is separate from whatever you're focusing on. On a laptop, you can click and type while keeping your eyes on a document. On a phone, you can adjust a slider in a photo editing app while keeping your gaze on the changes it’s making to your photo.

The Vision Pro doesn’t work that way — you have to look directly at something in order to interact with it. This means you’re constantly shifting your focus away from your task to locate and look at the button you need to press next. I experienced this frustration while playing a game called *Stitch*, where I had to look away from the piece I wanted to move to the destination. This constant need to refocus made it difficult to interact with the game, and I often missed the tap when trying to pick up a piece.

visionOS seems to be designed for an eye-tracking system that's just a bit more precise than it actually is — many controls are slightly too small and too close together, making it hard to quickly navigate the system. You have to be sure you're looking directly at the thing you want to select before tapping, or you risk clicking the wrong item. Sometimes, the fastest way to select something is to look away and try again.

It works — until it doesn’t. It's magical — until it's not.

Consider how the keyboard and mouse on a Mac directly control the system. The click wheel on an iPod directly controlled the iPod. A lot of effort has gone into making the iPhone’s multitouch screen feel like it’s directly controlling the phone. When it doesn’t, like when autocorrect fails or taps aren’t registered, it’s frustrating.

But with the Vision Pro, your eyes and hands aren’t directly controlling the device. Instead, cameras track your eyes and hands and convert that input. Sometimes, that interpretation isn’t perfect. The on-screen keyboard is a good example: you have to stare at each letter and pinch your fingers to select it, or tap with two fingers on the floating keys. It’s not practical for anything beyond entering a Wi-Fi password — for longer tasks, you’re better off using dictation or connecting a Bluetooth keyboard, so you can control the input directly.

It’s also not guaranteed that the Vision Pro will always detect your hands. The cameras can only see within a fairly large bubble in front of your body — roughly the length of your arms in a semicircle. If you lean back in a chair with your arms at your sides, or if your hands are resting on your legs at a table, the cameras might not detect them. Similarly, if you’re lying down in a dark room and the IR illuminators can’t reach your hands, the cameras may struggle to pick them up. Even standing with your arms at your sides can make it difficult for the system to track your hands if they drift too far behind you.

Controls

I get that it’s somewhat ridiculous to complain about a hand-tracking system needing to see your hands, and it’s true that you can navigate quite a bit of visionOS with Siri and dictation: managing apps, opening virtual environments, and more. If you squint, you can almost imagine a future where you interact with a computer by talking and moving things in space.

But right now, the limitations are clear. Using the Vision Pro constantly reminds you of where your hands are and what you’re looking at in a way no other computer does. When it fails, it’s frustrating. (Interestingly, Apple’s latest watches can detect a pinching gesture, but there’s no way to use those gestures for control on the Vision Pro.)

The downside is that a system constantly monitoring your hands for input tends to pick up a lot of extra, unintended inputs — which can be pretty funny. I talk through my video scripts to ensure they flow, and I use my hands a lot. While writing the script for this review in the Vision Pro, the system kept detecting my hand movements and started scrolling and clicking by accident. I laughed the first time I realized what was happening, but it eventually got to the point where I switched to my Mac to finish writing, which only does things when I actually want it to.

As with the displays, I still think this is the best eye and hand tracking system anyone has released. It can genuinely feel like magic... until it doesn’t. If you want people to do serious computing in the Vision Pro, the input system needs to be rock solid.

Personas

I won’t dive too deep into Apple’s odd and extremely uncanny 3D persona system here — the best way to understand it is by watching the video review above, which features a FaceTime call between The Wall Street Journal’s Joanna Stern, Marques Brownlee, and myself, all using our personas. As Marques put it, personas are both really impressive and also really bad. You can see why Apple labeled them as a beta; there’s still a long way to go before using a persona in a call feels anything other than distracting — or, at worst, awkwardly rude.

Just a quick note: personas can appear whenever an app activates the front-facing camera, so they’re available in nearly everything. I used mine on a Google Meet call in Safari without issue, although the other participants on the call didn’t exactly think it was fine.

Spatial Cameras

I wouldn’t recommend using the Vision Pro to take photos unless you really have to. Pressing the shutter once captures a 2560 x 2560 still image, which is about 6.5 megapixels. From what I can tell, it’s always taken with the left main camera, which has an 18mm f/2.0 lens, according to the EXIF data. The photos look like what you'd expect from a 6.5-megapixel image captured by a small sensor optimized for video—essentially, they look pretty bad.

Video Quality

The video quality is slightly better — the Vision Pro captures 2200 x 2200 square videos at 30fps. While they look a bit sharper than the photos, there’s still significant compression, and you’ll notice some barrel distortion when watching them on anything other than the Vision Pro. That said, I can’t think of many situations where I’d want to shoot video while wearing the headset, especially since these videos come with a lot of excess motion from your head moving around. Plus, trying to take photos of your family with this thing on your face just makes you look ridiculous. It’s safe to assume that most Vision Pro owners also have iPhones, which produce great video, so it's not a huge deal.

Spatial Videos and iPhone 15 Pro Max

One of the most impressive features is capturing spatial videos on the iPhone 15 Pro Max and watching them in 3D on the Vision Pro. I filmed some footage of my daughter at the zoo and around Christmas, and, like any proud dad, I could watch them on repeat forever. The playback is tinted with a ghostly white haze, creating an incredibly bittersweet experience — you get to relive a fleeting moment, but you're isolated in the headset, unable to share it with others. The current limitation is that you have to choose between shooting spatial video at 1080p at 30fps or at full 4K resolution. For now, I’m sticking with the higher-res option, but there will come a time when shooting in spatial by default will feel like the smarter choice, marking a significant turning point.

visionOS

The Vision Pro runs visionOS, which Apple says is built on iPadOS with heavy customization for latency and spatial computing. Starting with the solid foundation of iPadOS gives Apple a major advantage — it took Meta years to develop the Android-based Quest OS and populate its app store, which still largely focuses on games. Apple, on the other hand, benefits from an established iPadOS with access to a huge app library and a mature set of features.

It’s amusing to call the Vision Pro an “iPad for your face,” and in many ways, it’s true. Most of the apps work like iPad apps, and the homescreen comes preloaded with a folder labeled “compatible apps,” filled with actual iPad apps. While it’s early to fully evaluate the app ecosystem for a product that has just launched, I feel confident in assessing the iPad app ecosystem, and the fact that Apple’s podcast and news apps are essentially iPad apps on the Vision Pro says a lot about where things stand.

Controversy and Safari on Vision Pro

The Vision Pro app ecosystem is already facing some controversy. Major developers like Netflix, Spotify, and YouTube have opted to hold off on supporting the Vision Pro, even blocking their iPad apps from running on the device. As always, the open web offers an alternative, and Safari on the Vision Pro is a solid variation of iPad Safari. I watched Netflix in Safari without any issues, though you lose the ability to view videos in a custom environment, as you would with the native apps. I also streamed the NFL playoffs via YouTube TV on Safari, which worked mostly fine, but it repeatedly asked me to confirm my location.

What’s more perplexing is Safari's lack of support for web-based 3D experiences. Despite Apple's claims of backing the WebXR standard, Safari's support for it is spotty at best, and it often doesn’t work as expected. When I asked Apple about it, they mentioned that they are actively contributing to the WebXR standard and are committed to working with the community to deliver better spatial computing experiences via the web. So, we may need to wait and see how this evolves.

On a related note, when I asked Apple why the large library of VR videos on YouTube doesn’t work at all on the Vision Pro, they explained that much of this content was designed for devices that don’t offer a high-quality spatial experience. Apple’s focus, they said, is on delivering the best spatial media experience possible, including spatial photos, videos, and Apple Immersive Video, as well as 3D movies on Apple TV.

Translation: don’t expect YouTube VR support anytime soon.

The Chaos of visionOS vs. iPadOS

The biggest distinction between visionOS and iPadOS is that while iPadOS imposes a lot of structure—determining how you arrange your apps and how many you can run at once—visionOS is pure, free-floating window chaos. And I love it. It’s wild.

In visionOS, you can open as many apps as you want and place them anywhere in space. You could open windows in the kitchen, leave them there, then walk into the living room to open more. When you return to the kitchen, all your windows are still there, waiting for you. One night, I turned our office’s open café area into an impromptu art gallery, filling the space with massive Safari windows, each displaying huge webpages. It was a surreal experience, just walking around and browsing them. It’s absolutely bananas.

Unfortunately, visionOS doesn’t yet allow for sharing these windows or experiences with anyone else. If two people are in Vision Pro headsets in the same room, they can’t both see the same virtual objects or windows in space. Apple has mentioned that some enterprise developers are working on shared-view experiences, and you can mirror your Vision Pro’s view to another device over FaceTime. But ultimately, my Safari art gallery was a solo exhibit—just me. While it’s incredible that you can do all of this, it also feels a bit lonely, knowing no one else will experience it the same way.

Managing Windows in visionOS

Moving windows in visionOS is simple: just grab the bar at the bottom and place it anywhere in space. You can layer windows, position them above your head, or even set them on the floor—basically, you have complete freedom. To switch between them, just look at the window you want and tap your fingers. Inactive windows become slightly translucent, so multiple tasks can unfold simultaneously across your virtual space.

What’s even more impressive is the ability to have apps from three different operating systems on-screen at once: native visionOS apps, iPad apps, and even your Mac’s display via Wi-Fi, bringing the full chaotic beauty of macOS into the mix.

However, visionOS does have some clear room for improvement when it comes to window management. Unlike macOS, there’s no Exposé or Stage Manager to organize your open windows or set them into preset layouts. The current management options are somewhat hidden and not entirely intuitive. You can hide all your other apps by tapping and holding the X button in one app, or double-click the digital crown on the headset to hide everything. To close all apps, you can simply ask Siri. If an app misbehaves, you can force quit it by holding down the top button and digital crown at the same time.

Once you get the hang of these actions, navigating the interface becomes easier, but it still requires more thought and effort than managing windows on iOS devices or even a Mac, which has had decades to refine its window management systems.

Mac Display Sharing with Vision Pro: The Good and the Bad

Many people are excited about the possibility of using the Vision Pro as a giant virtual monitor, and there’s good news and bad news about that. The good news is that Mac display sharing works flawlessly, and features like Handoff and Continuity are even more magical in this context. You can copy something on your Mac and paste it directly into visionOS, and it works seamlessly. You can also open your Mac’s display in visionOS and drag your mouse off the screen, and suddenly, your Mac’s keyboard and trackpad control the apps in visionOS, just like the seamless experience between a Mac and an iPad. I even found myself placing a virtual Mac display over my MacBook Pro's screen, making it feel like I had a 50-inch laptop to use Lightroom on—awesome.

Behind the scenes, a lot of complex display scaling is happening. The simplest way to think about it is that you're essentially getting a 27-inch Retina display, similar to those on an iMac or Studio Display. Your Mac believes it’s connected to a 5K display with a resolution of 5120 x 2880, but it runs macOS at a 2:1 logical resolution of 2560 x 1440, just like a 5K display. You can choose different resolutions, but they will be lower quality. This virtual display is then streamed as a 4K 3560 x 2880 video to the Vision Pro, allowing you to resize it as needed. While this means 4K content plays at its native resolution (just like an iMac), the limitation is that you only have 2560 x 1440 to place your windows in, even if you scale the Mac display up in space. So, you won’t see a pixel-perfect 5K image.

While it’s incredible that all of this works with just a button click, the downside is that you can only use a single Mac display in visionOS. You can't have multiple Mac monitors floating in space—maybe that’s something for the future.

The AR Experience (Or Lack Thereof) in visionOS

One of the more surprising things about visionOS—and the Vision Pro itself—is that it doesn’t have much true AR, at least not in the way you might expect. By true AR, I mean the ability to interact with physical objects in your space alongside digital ones. After all the hype and talk from Apple about AR, I only encountered three instances during my time with the Vision Pro that could be considered a real preview of what AR could look like in the future.

The first is when you look at your Mac; the Vision Pro occasionally pops up a "connect display" button above it, which triggers screen sharing. Second, when you’re typing on a Bluetooth keyboard and look down at your hands, the Vision Pro shows a little text preview window above the keyboard so you can see what you're typing. These features are small, but they’re genuinely useful, and, importantly, they’re among the first true AR features to make their way into a mainstream device. They offer a tantalizing glimpse of what's possible in AR computing.

The third AR feature? The loading screen of Super Fruit Ninja, where you can throw a strawberry at a pig running around on your floor. It's not exactly groundbreaking, but it’s a bit of fun nonetheless.

Beyond that, though, there’s not much in terms of augmented reality in visionOS. Most of what you encounter is more accurately described as mixed reality—virtual objects floating around in space with no real connection to the physical world. Those floating app windows, for example, exist completely independently of your environment. In fact, when it comes to entertainment, the Vision Pro is best when it falls back into the role of a VR headset, and it truly excels in that space.

Watching movies on the Vision Pro is a blast, especially in the Apple TV app's immersive movie theater mode, where you can choose your seating. It's also a treat to watch a movie in one of Apple’s virtual environments, like Mount Hood, where the colors from the screen reflect off the landscape, or in a Disney Plus environment like Avengers Tower. The movie quality itself is stunning—the clarity and vividness of the Vision Pro’s displays are especially striking when you’re watching something in full screen, like Top Gun: Maverick, which I ended up watching way more of than I’d planned, just because it looked so amazing projected onto a mountain backdrop.

The Vision Pro's ability to send separate images to each eye means it can deliver true 3D movies—and Apple, alongside partners like Disney, has already rolled out a number of them. If you own a large movie library on Apple, the 3D versions are included at no extra charge. You simply choose between 2D and 3D playback when you hit play. Additionally, Apple is creating immersive versions of some Apple TV Plus shows, offering 180-degree 3D experiences that feel like the best Google Cardboard demo you’ve ever seen. I watched someone walk a tightrope in Adventure, and it was incredibly convincing. However, if you’ve never experienced VR or 3D videos before, take your time getting used to VR motion before jumping into these types of experiences. Apple has also promised immersive sports content, though I wasn't able to test any of that yet.

It’s easy to argue that the Vision Pro could justify its hefty price tag just as a very high-end TV—but after a while, the weight of it reminds you that this amazing TV is literally sitting on your face. I typically lasted about 30 minutes to an hour before I needed a break. Plus, it’s a very expensive TV that doesn’t support HDMI inputs, limiting you to Apple’s gaming library, which feels a bit restrictive. Even stranger, unlike any other TV, the Vision Pro can literally DRM your eyes—if you're watching content in the Apple TV app or Disney Plus and try to take a screenshot, the image blacks out. It’s a surreal experience to be blocked from capturing what you're seeing, especially if all you're trying to do is show off how amazing it looks in a review. While you can bypass DRM restrictions on an iPhone by snapping a photo of the screen, there’s no similar workaround for the Vision Pro.

On the gaming front, there’s a noticeable absence of VR games or fitness apps—no Beat Saber, Red Matter, or Population: One—all hits on the Quest. Fitness apps, in particular, have helped the Quest gain mainstream popularity. As Supernatural’s Chris Milk told me in 2021, his user base is split 50/50 between men and women, with 60% of them being over 40. That success led Meta to acquire Supernatural, fearing Apple might buy it first.

At launch, the Vision Pro is missing something that many would expect, especially given Apple’s focus on fitness and health across its other devices. It’s clear that the Vision Pro isn’t built for the kind of physical, motion-based gaming experiences that we see on other platforms—it’s heavy, with that external battery, and it’s tough to imagine how some games would even function without controllers. Apple assures me that Unity developers are working on porting over more games, and that visionOS lets developers create custom hand gestures, which could potentially address some of the controller limitations. I tried a pre-release version of Super Fruit Ninja, which used a custom slashing gesture, and it seemed promising—but that’s all I’ve seen for now.

A quick note on VR motion in the Vision Pro: it doesn’t offer any protection from your own limits. I’m relatively comfortable in VR—I use Supernatural with my wife, and I was briefly obsessed with Gran Turismo 7 VR on the PSVR 2. I’m well aware of my limits in VR and usually have no trouble, but the Vision Pro is so immersive and convincing that it’s easy to push too far too quickly and end up feeling a bit queasy. I watched just five minutes of Avatar: The Way of Water in 3D on Disney Plus—the Vision Pro is the first consumer device to support high-frame-rate 3D movies—and had to stop immediately because the motion was too much. I recommend early adopters proceed cautiously and figure out their limits slowly. That first experience with VR motion sickness is no joke.

Wrap-up

The Vision Pro is a remarkable product. It’s a first-generation device that only Apple could have made, with its stunning display, impressive passthrough engineering, and seamless integration with the Apple ecosystem. Apple has even managed to make the external battery situation feel almost negligible. Part of me believes the Vision Pro exists because Apple is so incredibly capable, filled with talent, and loaded with resources that the company simply set out to solve the toughest problems it could think of, just to see if it could.

That’s great! The Vision Pro is packed with ideas, and they’re executed with the kind of precision and intention that few companies could ever hope to achieve, let alone on their first iteration. But the surprising takeaway is that Apple may have unintentionally revealed that some of these core ideas may not be viable for mainstream use. This is the best video passthrough headset ever made, but that could mean that camera-based mixed reality passthrough is a dead-end technology. It’s the best hand- and eye-tracking around, but it feels like the mouse, keyboard, and touchscreen are going to remain king for years to come. There’s so much magic in this device when it works—but when it doesn’t, the frustration is real.

Another perspective on the Vision Pro is that Apple is fully aware of its limitations, but the technology needed to create the true AR glasses it has teased for years simply isn’t here yet. So, the Vision Pro could be seen as a kind of simulator or developer kit—a tool to inspire developers to create apps and use cases for the AR glasses Apple is working toward. In this context, the Vision Pro is the best hardware Apple can ship right now to spark interest in these ideas while it continues to develop the hardware it truly envisions: true optical AR glasses that allow shared digital experiences. It's an exciting possibility, and many have already speculated this is the plan.

But as one of the oldest rules at The Verge goes, you have to review the product that’s actually in the box—not the promise of future upgrades. And so I keep returning to the questions I’ve asked myself every time I’ve worn the Vision Pro. Starting with the most important ones:

• Do you want a computer that messes up your hair every time you use it?

• Do you want a computer that smears your makeup if you wear any?

• Do you want a computer that lets the Walt Disney Company stop you from taking pictures of what you see?

• Do you want a computer that makes it difficult to show anyone else what you’re looking at?

• Do you think the fanciest TV you own should have HDMI inputs?

• Do you want a computer that doesn’t work as well in a dark room?

• Do you want a computer that is always looking at your hands?

These are big trade-offs, not small ones. And the biggest trade-off of all is how isolating the Vision Pro feels to use. Despite the "ghost eyes" on the front, you're left alone, experiencing things no one else can join in on. After spending time with the Vision Pro, I find myself agreeing with Tim Cook's long-standing point: headsets are inherently isolating. That’s fine for traditional VR headsets, which have largely become single-purpose gaming devices over the years, but it feels a bit strange for a primary computing device.

I don’t want to use the Vision Pro to get work done. I get my work done with others, and I’d much rather be out here with them.