There's been news recently of Apple scaling back on their Vision Pro plans. Sales have been pretty low since its launch in February 2024. It is a bit disappointing, but also understandable. The heavy weight of the headset makes it uncomfortable to use for longer periods, and it's priced really high for the average consumer. Developers don't have much incentive to build for such a small user base either. Meanwhile the Meta Quest exists at a fraction of the price, and now there's a whole new wave of glasses tech entering the space. I wanted to share my thoughts having owned one of these since launch, now questioning if I should sell it used on eBay.
One of the main use cases people bring up is productivity, like connecting your Mac screen and working with a much larger display. I've tried it and it works well, but my PC setup at home already covers everything I need so I don't really use it for that. The most important feature to me is the display quality. Apple advertises ~23 million pixels total across both eyes, compared to the Quest 3's ~9 million. Having owned both headsets, the difference is noticeable and it matters more than I expected. I can watch movies and YouTube at a size that feels like a real theater without any of the graininess I associated with VR before.
Apple has these environments built into the OS. Immersive spaces you can sit inside while using the headset. Yosemite, Bora Bora, the Moon, Jupiter. You can dial the immersion up or down so your room slowly disappears and gets replaced by the environment around you. One environment, Mt. Hood, especially resonated with me. Its real location is Trillium Lake in Oregon, with a lake view and mountain backdrop.
I know I'm not actually there. But the display is sharp enough and the sound design is convincing enough that my brain responds to it anyway. The raindrops that ripple onto the lake water, the sound of winds rustling the leaves in the forest that you only discover after you turn your head. You can switch between day and night versions too, and the night version is even more mesmerizing. The reflection of the snow-capped mountain on the water is even more prominent, and if you have a video playing, it mirrors accurately onto the water as well. It reminded me of summer nights in high school when my friends would walk around parks at night and just talk. The sky never dark enough where you can't see anything, the feeling of having the entire place to yourself since everyone else is gone. I ended up actually booking a trip to the real Trillium Lake too (shameless plug, @gaofiles on YouTube).
It does sound a little dystopian to be using a virtual world to relax. The obvious response is to just go outside and enjoy these same things, and yeah, I do go outside. But going outside has more logistics. You have to drive somewhere, deal with weather, deal with people, etc. You're not going to sit beside a perfectly quiet mountain lake and also get work done, or project a movie-theater-sized screen over the lake. The Vision Pro gives me maybe 70% of that feeling instantly, with no people around, and that's good enough for me.
What makes the environments work as well as they do is that Apple clearly put a lot of money and effort into building them. According to an interview with an Apple engineer, there are dedicated teams that travel to these locations, spend days capturing them, and then spend even more time in post making them feel right. For Mount Hood they even removed a road from the real location so the final version would feel more serene. That's a pretty big difference from the VR videos on YouTube that are usually just captured on a consumer action camera like a GoPro.
The environments feature is also really useful in different situations. As I've mentioned earlier, I don't usually work at home with my Vision Pro. Instead, I use it for the situations where I need to get some work done outside of that environment. If I'm on a trip with friends who are being loud in the living room, I can use Vision Pro environments to get rid of that noise. I've also used it on flights and genuinely forget that I'm on the plane. Doesn't matter where I am, the screen is the same, the environment is the same.
Apple has shown that these environments can be genuinely impressive, and that's with first-generation hardware that's still too bulky and expensive. But they don't release that many of them, and I think that's tied to the same problem everything else on this platform runs into. Not enough people using it to justify the investment. So if you find yourself with some free time, go try out a Vision Pro demo. I hope they don't scrap it entirely, and we get more environments in the future. Just gotta wait long enough for more people to adopt I guess.