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Apple's bold new vision —

What to make of Apple’s intriguing $3,499 Vision Pro headset

Some instant analysis of Apple's boldest product experiment in years.

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Vision Pro: The computer you can keep using while grabbing unbranded sparkling water from the fridge
Enlarge / Vision Pro: The computer you can keep using while grabbing unbranded sparkling water from the fridge
Apple

Further Reading

Apple reveals Vision Pro, available for $3,499 “early next year”
We're still reeling a bit from today's announcement of Vision Pro, Apple's biggest new platform/hardware product rollout in years. The magnitude of the entirely new computing interface the company is trying to sell here is matched only by the augmented reality headset's significant $3,499 starting price.

Further Reading

What happened to the virtual reality gaming revolution?
Whether or not Apple's gambit here can succeed in a headset-curious but still largely headset-skeptical market will depend in large part on the quality of the "immersive" experience Apple can deliver. We'll only know by actually putting this thing on our heads. Before we get that eyes- and hands-on time, though, here are some immediate thoughts on how to position Vision Pro in the market and in your mind.

Don’t judge Vision Pro by the standards of VR

Comparing the Vision Pro to the current state of the art in virtual reality makes its value proposition seem like a real uphill climb for Apple. After all, for the same price as just one Vision Pro, you could buy three-and-a-half Quest Pro headsets (after the recent price drop to $999) or a full seven of Meta's upcoming Quest 3 headsets (one for every day of the week).

But while the Vision Pro looks a bit like existing VR headsets, this is first and foremost an augmented reality device (i.e., one that projects images on top of your natural view of the "real world"). That puts it in the same category as Microsoft's Hololens 2, which launched for developers at $3,500 in 2019, or the Magic Leap 2, which launched for $3,299 last year.

That difference matters for more than price-competitiveness reasons. The use cases for a true augmented reality device go way beyond those for a dedicated virtual reality device (which fully blocks your view of the real world). [Update: To be clear, the Vision Pro's display presents a live view of the real world as it senses it through its multiple cameras and sensors, with a claimed latency of just 12 ms. This is often referred to as "mixed reality" (MR) or "extended reality" (XR), but the use case is still more akin to AR devices that project images on top of your natural view of real-world scenes.]

Not how most people use their VR headsets.
Enlarge / Not how most people use their VR headsets.
Apple

To see how, note that the software market for VR headsets is currently dominated by games and other interactive experiences that usually have you stand in an all-encompassing virtual environment. Apple's presentation today, by contrast, barely mentioned gaming. Instead, it mainly showed Vision Pro users lounging on a couch and flicking through apps or movies or sitting at a keyboard and working on massive virtual displays (not to mention getting up to grab a drink from the fridge without taking the headset off—something that's tough in VR, even with high-quality passthrough cameras).

Those Vision Pro users were shown using casual gestures to wander through an iOS-style environment rather than using the kinds of big motions that characterize interactions in VR games. Vision Pro doesn't even come with handheld controllers, which could make it difficult to port existing VR games that rely on those controllers.

Whether Apple's device can live up to the vision presented by this carefully crafted presentation is an open question. But the product's focus highlights just how different this AR headset could be from previous VR headsets—if Apple can get it right.

Kyle Orland Kyle Orland has been the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica since 2012, writing primarily about the business, tech, and culture behind video games. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He once wrote a whole book about Minesweeper.

Promoted Comments

The difference between a $3500 first-gen headset and a $499 ($730 in today’s dollars) first-gen iPhone are that the iPhone was subsidized by AT&T and the threshold of “good enough” is a lot lower for a fancy feature phone than it is for a headset.

It feels like a long way from $3500 to commodity pricing, but if any company can pull it off, it’s probably Apple. Imagine showing someone in line for the first iPhone an SE 2022 and telling them that not only does it cost $429 without any carrier subsidy, but carriers literally give them away for free to attract new business.
Remember, before the Macintosh, Apple had the Lisa. It was hideously expensive (it started at $30,000 in today's money) and 'nobody' bought them. But they learned what they'd need to make the Macintosh.

And the technology is absolutely not out there for cheap, decent AR (if you want cheap, awful AR, Facebook will have you covered). What Apple needs to do here is get these out in the hands of people who wanted Hololens to be decent, like factory applications. Or designers who want the 3D stuff. And then they can figure out what UI AR really needs. Nobody's ever done this before. And then they can make it better and then work on a cheap(er) version.

Am I going to get version 1? Hell no, this is all beta test, and it usually takes Apple three versions or so to get things right. The first two iPhones were so primitive you'd throw them across the room if you tried to use one now - which led to Ballmer's silly comments (and from all the other phone makers), but eventually they figured out what they were doing. It's going to be the same here. Your $3500 device has a 1 year shelf life. But there will probably be enough beta testers for Apple at that price.
As ever, the rule is: never buy a version one apple product. Apple Watch and the iPhone 1 were quickly superseded, but this device might not be on a yearly cycle. Maybe, just maybe, this product will have some relevance in the late 2020s, which is such an enormous length of time that I don’t think the hype will be able to continue. There’s only so many “it also runs excel” stories that can run
Everyone keeps saying this about the 1st iPhone. But they forget the 1st iPhone was a GD marvel when it came out. My wife had one, and it made me hate my state-of-the-art traditional phone.

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