I’m writing this in the Apple Vision Pro notes app using my MacBook Pro. This is a collection of my very early impressions. The keyboard and trackpad seamlessly work in Vision OS, and there are a lot of things I haven't tried yet.

Comfort

• This is the most comfortable headset I’ve worn, and I haven’t even tried the dual loop band yet

• The materials that interface with your head are very soft and have just the right amount of give to contour around your head

• It is worth it to play with where the headset sits on your face (you can move it up and down slightly) and where the solo band is on your head (you can also move this up and down). There is a sweet spot where the pressure on your forehead and your cheeks match, which is how you’ll be able to extend your session without one part of your face hurting

• I don’t have my lens inserts yet, so I’m using my contacts which I generally don’t wear. My eyes  get dry at the best of times, and the slight heat in the headset doesn’t help 

• Auto IPD: the headset automatically adjusts to your inter pupillary distance, which none of he current consumer headsets do. The IPD is the stance between your eyes, a key aspect to accommodate for in any AR/VR experience

Fatigue

• Eyes: I’m not used to wearing contacts for long periods of time, but things weren’t more uncomfortable here than usual. Note the headset does get warm and vents heat out of the top, so presumably the inside is warm also though it didn’t feel excessively so

• Face: the headset ships with 2 cushions and I’ve been using the more softer “W” version; it’s very comfortable all things considered, but getting the right size here is key. The light shields come in multiple sizes where the first number is the width and the second is the distance from the lenses, where 1 is the narrowest and closest, so that would be 11. I ended up with a 33W. Note that the larger the second number is, the further away you are from the lenses and the smaller your FOV will be (but this also leaves space for lens inserts and long eyelashes…)

• Back of head: I really like the solo band, it’s extremely well designed and comfortable, and very practical to put on and take off (much more so than other dual strap type bands). On my head the band sits much higher on the back of my head than I thought, in order to balance the pressure on my forehead, cheeks and back of head perfectly. This is where you should start if you have pressure on your face. You also want to only tighten it just enough so that it doesn’t move, but not so much that it feels like everything is pulling from front and back 

• Hands: amazingly, no fatigue. Hold our your arms in front of you for 30 seconds and you’ll quickly see how that would be untenable, but thankfully you can have your arms and hands resting in front or beside you and it picks up what you’re doing on either hand. I’m trying to use my left hand more simply because I can, and to give my right arm a rest. One interesting note here is that the freedom to place windows anywhere means they can be placed beside or even behind you; if you twist far enough around without having your arms follow, the headset won’t actually be able to see your hands. I wonder if they’ll ever include cameras where the speakers are to remedy this

Sensors

• I haven’t used the headset enough outside of an airplane but I can say that inside the airplane things work exactly as you expect. All the visuals are stable, hand tracking works as you imagine, save for a few times where there was an ever so slight wobble in my anchored windows. I didn’t notice this before I used it on the plane. I suspect this might be because the tight quarters make SLAM (mapping the environment and anchoring them in it) more difficult.

• Hand tracking is very impressive compared to what I’ve used before; the select gesture seems to work all the time

• Eye tracking is extraordinary and amazingly, faster than a mouse/trackpad pointed - your eyes move very quickly. 

• Optic ID is super fast and convenient and works exactly as you’d expect, it’s never in the way. It’s faster and more fool proof than faceID and touchID because your eyes are always in the same spot when it needs to use them

Visual quality

• Passthrough (seeing the real world around you) quality is the best of any headset I’ve seen by a long shot, but you can tell you’re looking at the world through camera lenses. This is a rare occasion where the camera quality is lower than the display quality! 

• I’m not sure if I already had grease on the lenses, but when you’re looking at a bright part of the screen on a dark background (my notes app is white and my background is a beautiful nighttime desert scene), there is a bloom at the bottom of the display that looks like a smudge but isn’t

• The quality of the rendered (non passthrough) content is incredible. Text is very easy to read, contrast and colours are excellent

• Panorama photos are a standout, I’m going to be taking a lot more of these

• Hands and arms look great in passthrough and I don’t feel like it I wanted more in this regard

• Reading your watch and phone work, even reading my MacBook screen through the Vision Pro was OK. You don’t want to be doing this as a matter of course, it’s really just that in an emergency when you want to use those devices, you can without taking the headset off

Video

• The Safari browser on the Vision Pro seems limited on YouTube in the sense that you can’t download videos; however, you can download videos (I have a YouTube Premium subscription) on your MacBook and watch these without issue once your MacBook is connected. They look and sound great, just make sure you set the download quality to 1080p as it defaults to 480p

• When your MacBook is connected, you can’t stream video from Apple TV or the Prime Video app to the Vision Pro due to HDCP content protection reasons; this seems like a fail, there should be some wireless HDMI that is also HDCP compliant

• I have very limited access to video content (see my iCloud section below), but video in the browser works well

• The TV app doesn’t show my non US content, but you can stream content from tv.apple.com when signed in in Safari, just like Netflix. You can’t do this with disneyplus.com 

Audio quality

• you’re not using the built in audio on a plane, the speakers simply aren’t loud enough with the ambient noise; thankfully AirPods work great (I don’t have the new USB-C version so I can’t speak to the lossless quality, but even my lightning version sounded great)

• The spatial effect for audio is very strong and sounds in the mid and high end are great, but bass is sorely lacking so you won’t be listening to music this way if you’re an audiophile

Spatial features

• If you suffer from claustrophobia, this headset might help in tight spaces like an airplane cabin. Escaping to one of the environments give you a tremendous sense of space, but I don’t know how the confinement of having a headset strapped to your face with a limited field of view will feel. While the field of view (what you can see on screen without moving your head, ie how wide and tall the display is before it turns black) isn’t as wide as I’d like, the sense of space is vast as you can always move your head in any direction to “extend your view”

• Being able to place windows everywhere is on the one hand very freeing, on the other quickly clutters up your space. I need to experiment with this more, but 

• Spacial videos are very cool, but feel small from a field of view perspective, even in the expanded view

• The Spatial Audio effect is extremely pronounced depending on where the sound is coming from based on where you’re looking, you can tell a lot of work went into this

Interface

• I get the sense that Apple has deliberately kept 1.0 of Vision OS simple, feature wise, such as not to overwhelm the user with all freedom they have in this canvas, which can quickly become overwhelming; they can easily add more power user features in future versions

• I’m not sure if it’s the early adopter in me (and associated pre pick up research), but I found navigating Vision OS very natural very quickly. Look, pinch, done. 

• Text input via looking and pinching is surprisingly fast for things like passwords etc, but you don’t want to be writing like this

• Siri dictation is fast because it’s on device as of a few OS versions ago, works well for most URLs

Connectivity

• Your MacBook will connect to your Vision Pro even when you’re not connected to a Wi-Fi network; this came in handy on the plane. The connection is extremely stable and I didn’t experience any weird compression artifacts once

• My AirPods connected immediately as they’re on the same iCloud ID, just like they do with any Apple device, no special pairing needed

• You don’t need a separate Bluetooth keyboard and mouse/trackpad if you have a MacBook. Once it’s connected, you can simply use the built in as a remote keyboard and trackpad across not just your Mac display but also all Vision OS apps; this is really great

• I should note that external keyboards connected to your Mac will work across apps, but your external Bluetooth mouse for some reason doesn’t (but the trackpad on the MacBook will still work)

• Battery life on the MacBook is quite good when you connect your Vision Pro as the display gets shut off

iCloud & Apple ID for non US users

• I don’t live in the US, so I set up a US ID before I picked up my Vision Pro. I decided last minute to try the setup process with my iPhone which is set up on my non US default iCloud account and to my delight it just worked. Music & News just worked immediately, and my photos downloaded immediately, including spatial videos I took on my iPhone

• Unfortunately, the App Store doesn’t work, and as such no third party apps can be downloaded, including iOS and iPad apps; this means I don’t have access to Disney+ or any of my usual apps unless I switch my iCloud ID to the US one (I suspect this will kill the ability to quickly connect to my Mac with my native iCloud ID, but one can set up the Mac with another profile/account logged into the US ID, which you can fast switch to on the Mac)

• The TV app showed all my purchased content which was available to play back and download, but my Apple TV+ content didn’t show unfortunately

Size & Weight

• This headset is very comfortable, but you definitely feel the weight

• I stuffed it in my backpack without any protection other than the front cover that comes with it and while large, it fit OK. I’m worried about something falling on the lenses, so I think I’ll be stuffing some of those airline eye shades in there when it’s in my bag; I contemplated buying the official case but it’s absolutely massive and there is no way I was going to carry that along with my backpack and hand luggage when I travel

Issues

• I had trouble uploading my prescription and a call to Apple support only resulted in “try again a bit later” even though they wouldn’t confirm if a) they had done something to my account or b) if other people were also having issues; I tried about 8 times with various file formats and it didn’t work, so I’ll call back

Cost

• Hard to justify obviously, but there is a lot going on here

• AppleCare+ is another US$499 btw, seems dangerous not to get this as I’ll a) be traveling with it and b) many people will be trying it

• vs large OLED TV: about $3-4k

• vs computer: $2-4k

Current conclusions

• I should pre-face this with saying I’m an early adopter and have an outside tolerance for new technology and teething problems. While this definitely feels like a v1 product, there is no way this is a fad or something that we’re not going to be doing in the future. 

• I’m surprised at how much the external battery didn’t bother me; obviously having this built in eventually is what is needed for mass adoption

• I’ve now had the headset on for a combined 4 hours and about 2 hours and a bit on battery now and just got the 20% battery warning. I’ve had my MacBook tethered all this time and have been listening to music via AirPods. 

• My killer use case is using it as “multiple external monitors” when traveling, and possibly even when not traveling. I can see this replacing all the external monitors with the wework crowd

• This is an amazing VR headset that allows you to seamlessly connect to the real world without taking the headset off; it is not an AR first headset as I was expecting, in the sense that the “reality” part isn’t high enough quality and in the sense that all the base apps don’t interact with the environment, they simply seamlessly live in it. This was surprising to me, and will change over time, but an important distinction to make it seems

• I was surprised how I immediately thought this headset was too heavy only to go on to use it for over 2 hours without really feeling must strain; obviously this needs more testing, but they’ve done quite a good job on the ergonomics

• Auto IPD adjustment is awesome, we really need liquid lenses that adjust to your prescription automatically…

• I really enjoyed sitting outside in the sunshine yesterday working in my back yard, while the sun was shining. While I was in a headset, I was clearly sitting outside with the world dialed in, with 3 very large screens around me getting some work done. I made a phonecall on my iPhone’s speakerphone which just worked seamlessly (I picked it up and dialled it as I normally would); this is where the penny dropped that they nailed the blended world, you can truly exist in the real world and the spatial world at the same time, this hasn’t been possible before. I walked through one of the screens inside, and when I came back out again, all the windows where fixed in place where I had left them and didn’t move a mm as I was walking around. The environment tracking and translation is truly magnificent (it has to be, I’m just amazed at how well it works)

I’m writing this in the Apple Vision Pro notes app using my MacBook Pro. This is a collection of my very early impressions. The keyboard and trackpad seamlessly work in Vision OS, and there are a lot of things I haven't tried yet.

Comfort

• This is the most comfortable headset I’ve worn, and I haven’t even tried the dual loop band yet

• The materials that interface with your head are very soft and have just the right amount of give to contour around your head

• It is worth it to play with where the headset sits on your face (you can move it up and down slightly) and where the solo band is on your head (you can also move this up and down). There is a sweet spot where the pressure on your forehead and your cheeks match, which is how you’ll be able to extend your session without one part of your face hurting

• I don’t have my lens inserts yet, so I’m using my contacts which I generally don’t wear. My eyes  get dry at the best of times, and the slight heat in the headset doesn’t help 

• Auto IPD: the headset automatically adjusts to your inter pupillary distance, which none of he current consumer headsets do. The IPD is the stance between your eyes, a key aspect to accommodate for in any AR/VR experience

Fatigue

• Eyes: I’m not used to wearing contacts for long periods of time, but things weren’t more uncomfortable here than usual. Note the headset does get warm and vents heat out of the top, so presumably the inside is warm also though it didn’t feel excessively so

• Face: the headset ships with 2 cushions and I’ve been using the more softer “W” version; it’s very comfortable all things considered, but getting the right size here is key. The light shields come in multiple sizes where the first number is the width and the second is the distance from the lenses, where 1 is the narrowest and closest, so that would be 11. I ended up with a 33W. Note that the larger the second number is, the further away you are from the lenses and the smaller your FOV will be (but this also leaves space for lens inserts and long eyelashes…)

• Back of head: I really like the solo band, it’s extremely well designed and comfortable, and very practical to put on and take off (much more so than other dual strap type bands). On my head the band sits much higher on the back of my head than I thought, in order to balance the pressure on my forehead, cheeks and back of head perfectly. This is where you should start if you have pressure on your face. You also want to only tighten it just enough so that it doesn’t move, but not so much that it feels like everything is pulling from front and back 

• Hands: amazingly, no fatigue. Hold our your arms in front of you for 30 seconds and you’ll quickly see how that would be untenable, but thankfully you can have your arms and hands resting in front or beside you and it picks up what you’re doing on either hand. I’m trying to use my left hand more simply because I can, and to give my right arm a rest. One interesting note here is that the freedom to place windows anywhere means they can be placed beside or even behind you; if you twist far enough around without having your arms follow, the headset won’t actually be able to see your hands. I wonder if they’ll ever include cameras where the speakers are to remedy this

Sensors

• I haven’t used the headset enough outside of an airplane but I can say that inside the airplane things work exactly as you expect. All the visuals are stable, hand tracking works as you imagine, save for a few times where there was an ever so slight wobble in my anchored windows. I didn’t notice this before I used it on the plane. I suspect this might be because the tight quarters make SLAM (mapping the environment and anchoring them in it) more difficult.

• Hand tracking is very impressive compared to what I’ve used before; the select gesture seems to work all the time

• Eye tracking is extraordinary and amazingly, faster than a mouse/trackpad pointed - your eyes move very quickly. 

• Optic ID is super fast and convenient and works exactly as you’d expect, it’s never in the way. It’s faster and more fool proof than faceID and touchID because your eyes are always in the same spot when it needs to use them

Visual quality

• Passthrough (seeing the real world around you) quality is the best of any headset I’ve seen by a long shot, but you can tell you’re looking at the world through camera lenses. This is a rare occasion where the camera quality is lower than the display quality! 

• I’m not sure if I already had grease on the lenses, but when you’re looking at a bright part of the screen on a dark background (my notes app is white and my background is a beautiful nighttime desert scene), there is a bloom at the bottom of the display that looks like a smudge but isn’t

• The quality of the rendered (non passthrough) content is incredible. Text is very easy to read, contrast and colours are excellent

• Panorama photos are a standout, I’m going to be taking a lot more of these

• Hands and arms look great in passthrough and I don’t feel like it I wanted more in this regard

• Reading your watch and phone work, even reading my MacBook screen through the Vision Pro was OK. You don’t want to be doing this as a matter of course, it’s really just that in an emergency when you want to use those devices, you can without taking the headset off

Video

• The Safari browser on the Vision Pro seems limited on YouTube in the sense that you can’t download videos; however, you can download videos (I have a YouTube Premium subscription) on your MacBook and watch these without issue once your MacBook is connected. They look and sound great, just make sure you set the download quality to 1080p as it defaults to 480p

• When your MacBook is connected, you can’t stream video from Apple TV or the Prime Video app to the Vision Pro due to HDCP content protection reasons; this seems like a fail, there should be some wireless HDMI that is also HDCP compliant

• I have very limited access to video content (see my iCloud section below), but video in the browser works well

• The TV app doesn’t show my non US content, but you can stream content from tv.apple.com when signed in in Safari, just like Netflix. You can’t do this with disneyplus.com 

Audio quality

• you’re not using the built in audio on a plane, the speakers simply aren’t loud enough with the ambient noise; thankfully AirPods work great (I don’t have the new USB-C version so I can’t speak to the lossless quality, but even my lightning version sounded great)

• The spatial effect for audio is very strong and sounds in the mid and high end are great, but bass is sorely lacking so you won’t be listening to music this way if you’re an audiophile

Spatial features

• If you suffer from claustrophobia, this headset might help in tight spaces like an airplane cabin. Escaping to one of the environments give you a tremendous sense of space, but I don’t know how the confinement of having a headset strapped to your face with a limited field of view will feel. While the field of view (what you can see on screen without moving your head, ie how wide and tall the display is before it turns black) isn’t as wide as I’d like, the sense of space is vast as you can always move your head in any direction to “extend your view”

• Being able to place windows everywhere is on the one hand very freeing, on the other quickly clutters up your space. I need to experiment with this more, but 

• Spacial videos are very cool, but feel small from a field of view perspective, even in the expanded view

• The Spatial Audio effect is extremely pronounced depending on where the sound is coming from based on where you’re looking, you can tell a lot of work went into this

Interface

• I get the sense that Apple has deliberately kept 1.0 of Vision OS simple, feature wise, such as not to overwhelm the user with all freedom they have in this canvas, which can quickly become overwhelming; they can easily add more power user features in future versions

• I’m not sure if it’s the early adopter in me (and associated pre pick up research), but I found navigating Vision OS very natural very quickly. Look, pinch, done. 

• Text input via looking and pinching is surprisingly fast for things like passwords etc, but you don’t want to be writing like this

• Siri dictation is fast because it’s on device as of a few OS versions ago, works well for most URLs

Connectivity

• Your MacBook will connect to your Vision Pro even when you’re not connected to a Wi-Fi network; this came in handy on the plane. The connection is extremely stable and I didn’t experience any weird compression artifacts once

• My AirPods connected immediately as they’re on the same iCloud ID, just like they do with any Apple device, no special pairing needed

• You don’t need a separate Bluetooth keyboard and mouse/trackpad if you have a MacBook. Once it’s connected, you can simply use the built in as a remote keyboard and trackpad across not just your Mac display but also all Vision OS apps; this is really great

• I should note that external keyboards connected to your Mac will work across apps, but your external Bluetooth mouse for some reason doesn’t (but the trackpad on the MacBook will still work)

• Battery life on the MacBook is quite good when you connect your Vision Pro as the display gets shut off

iCloud & Apple ID for non US users

• I don’t live in the US, so I set up a US ID before I picked up my Vision Pro. I decided last minute to try the setup process with my iPhone which is set up on my non US default iCloud account and to my delight it just worked. Music & News just worked immediately, and my photos downloaded immediately, including spatial videos I took on my iPhone

• Unfortunately, the App Store doesn’t work, and as such no third party apps can be downloaded, including iOS and iPad apps; this means I don’t have access to Disney+ or any of my usual apps unless I switch my iCloud ID to the US one (I suspect this will kill the ability to quickly connect to my Mac with my native iCloud ID, but one can set up the Mac with another profile/account logged into the US ID, which you can fast switch to on the Mac)

• The TV app showed all my purchased content which was available to play back and download, but my Apple TV+ content didn’t show unfortunately

Size & Weight

• This headset is very comfortable, but you definitely feel the weight

• I stuffed it in my backpack without any protection other than the front cover that comes with it and while large, it fit OK. I’m worried about something falling on the lenses, so I think I’ll be stuffing some of those airline eye shades in there when it’s in my bag; I contemplated buying the official case but it’s absolutely massive and there is no way I was going to carry that along with my backpack and hand luggage when I travel

Issues

• I had trouble uploading my prescription and a call to Apple support only resulted in “try again a bit later” even though they wouldn’t confirm if a) they had done something to my account or b) if other people were also having issues; I tried about 8 times with various file formats and it didn’t work, so I’ll call back

Cost

• Hard to justify obviously, but there is a lot going on here

• AppleCare+ is another US$499 btw, seems dangerous not to get this as I’ll a) be traveling with it and b) many people will be trying it

• vs large OLED TV: about $3-4k

• vs computer: $2-4k

Current conclusions

• I should pre-face this with saying I’m an early adopter and have an outside tolerance for new technology and teething problems. While this definitely feels like a v1 product, there is no way this is a fad or something that we’re not going to be doing in the future. 

• I’m surprised at how much the external battery didn’t bother me; obviously having this built in eventually is what is needed for mass adoption

• I’ve now had the headset on for a combined 4 hours and about 2 hours and a bit on battery now and just got the 20% battery warning. I’ve had my MacBook tethered all this time and have been listening to music via AirPods. 

• My killer use case is using it as “multiple external monitors” when traveling, and possibly even when not traveling. I can see this replacing all the external monitors with the wework crowd

• This is an amazing VR headset that allows you to seamlessly connect to the real world without taking the headset off; it is not an AR first headset as I was expecting, in the sense that the “reality” part isn’t high enough quality and in the sense that all the base apps don’t interact with the environment, they simply seamlessly live in it. This was surprising to me, and will change over time, but an important distinction to make it seems

• I was surprised how I immediately thought this headset was too heavy only to go on to use it for over 2 hours without really feeling must strain; obviously this needs more testing, but they’ve done quite a good job on the ergonomics

• Auto IPD adjustment is awesome, we really need liquid lenses that adjust to your prescription automatically…

• I really enjoyed sitting outside in the sunshine yesterday working in my back yard, while the sun was shining. While I was in a headset, I was clearly sitting outside with the world dialed in, with 3 very large screens around me getting some work done. I made a phonecall on my iPhone’s speakerphone which just worked seamlessly (I picked it up and dialled it as I normally would); this is where the penny dropped that they nailed the blended world, you can truly exist in the real world and the spatial world at the same time, this hasn’t been possible before. I walked through one of the screens inside, and when I came back out again, all the windows where fixed in place where I had left them and didn’t move a mm as I was walking around. The environment tracking and translation is truly magnificent (it has to be, I’m just amazed at how well it works)