I use it every day, approx ~95% of the days since it launched over 2 years ago. Many hours a day. Far and away my biggest use-case is connecting it to my laptop for gigantic (private) movie theater-sized screen.
Getting it comfortable was the most important step. The 6-months-old DualKnit band is really great for making it a lot more comfortable. An open face mod (eg $10 Macally on amazon) helps a lot with eye breathability, and restoring peripheral vision.
Also really great for being able to work well from anywhere.
Sad that so many people are sleeping on it, but what can you do? Check out r/VisionPro for tons of people that love theirs and use them constantly.
Do you wear glasses and do you have the prescription inserts for the AVP? I have a very mild prescription, no inserts, and I find text in the AVP to be distractingly blurry. Enough so that I’ve never been able to use the virtual monitor for more than a few minutes at a time.
For context, I have no problem using external monitors without my glasses. The only downside is very tired eyes at the end of a workday, but I can read text just fine.
I have the inserts, they work great. I find using the Vision Pro as a monitor less fatiguing than using a regular monitor with glasses. I think it’s because the Vision Pro Display is optically several feet away due to lens trickery, and focusing on further away things is better for eye fatigue.
I have a moderate prescription so putting on Vision Pro improves my vision compared to unaided eyesight ;) It would definitely not prefer it to my Studio Display but it does the job when I don't have it.
Using contacts has been better (for me) than the Zeiss inserts in terms of hand tracking and eye tracking accuracy. Often, I need to run a calibration step if changing between them, otherwise gaze typically targets the item below what I’m looking at, which is great for identifying one might have anger issues to resolve.
While great for travel coding, the faff of battery + cable would have been more elegant as one cable plugged into the laptop; it can be an embarrassing rats nest.
Xcode 27’s Device Hub now allows interacting with nearby dev devices (a bit better than Android Studio’s implementation). Super convenient change that makes it practical to do more things while in the recliner / VP.
Yep. The lack of a video input killed the thing for me, and, I suspect, thousands of other people. All it needed was a USB-C jack for power and video over DisplayPort.
This could have been a great device for gamers, 3-D modelers, drone pilots, cinematographers... but Apple's fear of I/O ruined it.
I tried on the Xreal for 3 minutes when I met someone with them at a party. They were cool but noticeably a lot less bright.
Similarly I tried the original HoloLens, many many years ago (2016?), with the similar waveguide technology. It was outside, at night, so relatively easy to see, albeit with jarringly tight field of view.
Without a doubt I'm excited about lightweight AR glasses that I can wear in public. My non-expert opinion is we're still a few years away.
In the meantime, I love my Apple goggles. For home usage only, and not when guests come over. Going open face (no lightshield) makes them feel a lot more like magic AR glasses, with the ~95% accurate passthrough.
> Without a doubt I'm excited about lightweight AR glasses that I can wear in public. My non-expert opinion is we're still a few years away.
Not the same type of AR, but the Even G2 look very promising. Can't use them as an external screen, they're more of an assistant with notes, live translate, app ecosystem, etc. I imagine they might be useful as a moving teleprompter.
Stopped using it after about a week or two of usage. The only interesting use case was screen mirroring from my Mac, but that wasn't compelling enough to endure the weight of it on my face. I expected watching a movie would be a good use case, but in reality the brightness of the screen would reflect (I guess?) off my face and create a glare... so it ultimately wasn't a good movie device. Gave it to a friend who was excited about it, and he also stopped using it after about a week or two.
This is the most common scenario. That’s why can’t compare Vision Pro with the iPhone. First iPhone was limited yeah but those who bought it loved and used it all the time. Word of mouth setup the success of later versions.
I bought the refreshed M5 version with the new headstrap. I read so many complaints about weight and it was just never an issue for me personally. Maybe the new strap is that much better?
That said, the battery cable was super annoying, id accidentally catch it multiple times per day. The battery is good for less than 2 hours so i used it plugged into the wall.
For zoom calls, the persona thing is hilariously bad, unusable in a business context. Interesting for a few minutes as a tech demo though.
The virtual layout is good - a big citrix app screen (its the ipad app) for remote desktop, zoom, safari etc off to the sides and then things like calendar widget pinned to physical wall. But text clarity / quality is just slightly not good enough for software development. Almost, its close. If you dont mind large fonts its good enough.
Ultimately returned it but it was a close run thing, i almost kept it.
I do still hanker for something like this, tempted to try xreal or other glasses but seems like the PPD is even lower.
having developed multiple apps on it and tried every which way to use it (as an XR enthusiast in general), I have never been so happy to put a headset up on the shelf and never pull it out again.
using as a spatial monitor was cool. for about 10min until my neck got tired of the added weight. but I’ll give credit that those 10min were pretty cool.
Unless materials science advances to the point where a display like the Vision Pro weighs as much as a pair of glasses, I don’t think there’ll ever be mass adoption of wearable VR beyond anything more than a novelty, for exactly the reason you stated.
Wearing something heavy on the front of your face is simply not a pleasant experience.
Beyond 2 has almost none of the sensor suite, no eye tracking, no meaningful compute, no pass-through video, no inside-out tracking, no gesture control, and requires two to three entirely separate units set up around the room to do any outside in tracking, yet it still weighs 4-5x what glasses weigh.
Just the displays and lenses will outweigh glasses considerably and there's nothing to strip back when you're down to display and lenses. Throw in a chassis and head strap and you're pretty far from glasses in weight and ergonomics.
In industrial robotics, there is this emergency practice when the payload and tooling on the robot gets to heavy, to connect the payload to a counterweight and pully system, to "neutralize it in weight". Has anyone here tried that ? It should take three thin ropes with weight to make a object neutrally buyont. Yes, its tied to one room, yes its not pretty and futuristic, but its practical? If you want freedom of movement, connect via magnet- and dedock on leaving the room?
More simply, I wonder if anyone's tried adding an equal weight to the back of their head. This would double the weight, but people can carry very heavy loads on their heads as long as the weight is acting downwards.
Yes. This is how various headsets are made. The HTC focus Vision is one example, and there’s an addon (not sure if third party) for the quest 3 that puts a battery back there.
The issue with that is you would constantly need to keep your head on the same plane, as soon as you move it around, it becomes unbalanced and now it's even harder to move around because it's heavier. Walking with something balanced on your head is a completely different use case than looking around, up and down etc.
Counterweights are common in a lot of industrial machinery. Most CNC mills have them on the Z axis to neutralize the spindle weight. And they're not always a weight on a rope or chain, they can be gas or hydraulic cylinders with valves enabling dynamic loading.
Since it's tethered anyway for the battery, I think Apple made a mistake just not building it as a (smart) monitor tethered to a separate PC.
Imagine if the vision pro could just be plugged into a small compute module with a battery or just plugged directly into a Macbook. It would be lighter, cheaper, and more flexible. I think a lot more people would have been interested in it.
Yes, make the battery 2x bigger and include the compute in that.
It would be so cool to be able to plug in arbitrary input devices too, like a dvd player, but its understandable that others don’t feel this way, and it would totally not be an apple product if it did this.
One of their main imposed constraints was clearly to make the battery pocketable, which sadly precludes a lot of things which would have made it a better product, in favour of wider acceptability.
> Yes, make the battery 2x bigger and include the compute in that.
You can't move the compute away in a headset. I have worked for an XR OEM, and when you are designing a headset, you want the compute to be as close as possible from the cameras and displays, to achieve the lowest possible latency and avoid motion sickness for the users.
Even moving the compute to the back of the headset was not considered viable by our HW team. And we haven't spoken about the bandwidth required for all those cameras and UHD displays.
A better way to reduce the weight of the AVP would have been to remove the (useless IMO) front holographic screen, and to replace most of the glass and metal by plastic. And maybe move the battery pack to the back, to get a more balanced headset.
Meta has shown pretty convincingly that you can literally stream VR apps/games over Wifi from a PC to a headset and have a great experience. You will need some compute on the device, as close as possible, but the bulk of the computing could be moved off.
A tethered virtual monitor wouldn't be a PC, it'd be a PC peripheral. Cook wanted a PC platform and app store he could call his own, so we got this 1.5 pound strap-on facial PC instead of a really nice virtual display.
Also, it doesn't make the best virtual monitor anyway, as the display fidelity is about half-Retina, so all the pixels really stick out compared to every other display Apple's shipped in recent memory. A 1998 Powerbook has crisper text.
Vision Pro's top talent all moved with their boss, Mike Rockwell, to Siri where they have at least a prayer of promotions, not to mention the satisfaction of working on a product that's not a miserable failure in the market.
Apple shelved the follow up v2 over a year ago and signaled very clearly it was refocusing its XR efforts toward AR glasses.
There hasn't been a new Vision Pro component order since the late 2023, early 2024 original orders that were capped (by SSS's display capacity) at 500k units worth, so Apple hasn't sold even that tiny amount yet.
It was Tim Cook's baby, his last shot at a product legacy, and the guy that just inherited Cooks role put even the lesser Vision Air on ice, the last goggles product that was still on Apple's roadmap.
So, it's not dead, but it's clearly on life support with no goggles of any kind remaining on the roadmap and Apple's attention fully moved to glasses and AI.
This is why I haven't bought one again. I had an M2 and sold it. Then I was thinking I missed it and bought a used Galaxy XR. It is not bad for watching movies. It is close to the same experience for video consumption but significantly worse for everything else. I am always itching to get an M5 AVP, but the org changes are red flags. I will end up with a $4k paper weight.
I don’t think Vision Pro was intended as a mass consumer product. There is so much cost reduction they could have done on the device that they didn’t do to hit a lower price point, and it’s obvious to everyone that $3500 wasn’t going to sell a lot of units (and it must have been obvious to Apple execs as well).
My guess is it is basically a real world survey of how people would use such a device, and what developers would do with it. Then they could later focus on a cheaper product that is only a display, or a product that is only a media viewer, or a product that focuses on VR/AR applications while deemphasizing other use cases.
This is the version of reality that doesn’t require anyone to be stupid. In my experience if a reality candidate requires that someone is just really really stupid to arrive at the outcome (in this case Apple execs), probably you are missing something about someone’s perspective.
Yes, it feels like the future every time I put it on. For work, the ultra wide has been wonderful when I'm not at my desk. I also get to have the NBA playoffs to the side on a 10ft screen while I work. For videos, it's a complete game changing experience. They're slowly but surely releasing more "immersive" features. Eg, I recently watched an immersive Lakers game and immediately thought I'd pay to watch games like this. It reminded me when HD became default and we finally realized what we were missing. I don't want to watch games where I'm not courtside anymore.
The two things that consistently delight me are AI and my AVP. I'm trying to combine the two.
I'm using it ocassionally - whenever I have time to do further WebXR development beyond what I've already done, and when an interesting new immersive video or 3D movie becomes available on it. I'll sometimes use it to relax and catch up on any new VR180 videos on youtube.
For other work or entertainment that doesn't take advantage of its spatial features, I tend to revert to using a computer with an external display. The display in the Vision Pro cannot quite match the resolution and HDR headroom of the external display I ended up having (a Pro Display XDR). Maybe if it didn't get outclassed by my external display when displaying 2D content, I'd have additional motivation to use it more often.
The ability to focus on something while the world around me melts away. When it is just myself, the virtual display of my Mac, and the drifting grains of gypsum at White Sands, I seem to be at peace with whatever I am working on.
I'd love to buy one cause I love the idea of watching movies in that and I watch stuff alone all the time.
I just can't justify the $5000CAD starting price to watch movies. I've considered getting a used M2 model, but I believe you still need to get fitted for the eye piece to ensure a proper seal, and the closest Apple Store to me is about a 6 hour drive. Also I'm not even sure all the cool new Siri stuff yesterday would be supported on the M2 model, so it'd kinda suck to spend all that money and be locked out of new features right away.
I use it every day, sometimes for hours. Once I embraced that fact that my family goes to bed before I do, I use it watch all of my "nerdy" shows at night. During the day it's been really great for having a large desktop that I can see throughout the house. For gaming, I use the geforce now service and a playstation controller. It's been quite fun!
I recently just picked up a used, like new, M5 Vision Pro for a steal. I've had it for a month and use it a few times a week, mostly for content consumption but very occasionally when I need to work, want a bigger screen, and don't want to sit at my desk.
Almost every day. Meanwhile my quest pro gathers a lot of dust. The AVP as a screen is just so much more comfortable and productive for me and nothing beats it for entertainment. It also just still feels like a really great user experience and I was genuinely sad to see the project sunsetted.
Just yesterday they announced a new OS with a number of interesting new features, like custom environments, improved click-with-your-eyes-controls (Dwell Control), a bunch more: https://www.apple.com/os/visionos/
It's quite fun and I'll drop into it from time to time, but it's mostly a novel plaything for me. I do have a friend who has used it for full-time work for years though.
I bought it on launch day, and I still use it at least a couple times a week. I also pretty much always take it with me when I travel (along with my MBP). Frankly, I'd use it even more, but because it's a fairly anti-social device I prefer to use it only when I have meaningful alone time. If I were living alone by myself, I imagine it could be a daily device for me.
My main use cases are Mac Virtual Display, movies/entertainment, PS5 gaming [0], casual browsing, and -- most surprisingly -- reading. The first few are pretty self-explanatory, but reading is one of my favorite unexpected niche use cases. It's really nice having a floating book (via Apple Books) perfectly positioned at eye height in front of you in your favorite virtual environment, listening to music of your choice. This use case didn't really take off for me until the recent dual knit band fixed the comfort issue. I dabbled with reading in the Vision Pro before but the comfort level just wasn't quite there yet. The new band is good enough to make this one of my favorite ways to read today.
[0] I use the Portal app for this. It lets you stream PS5 games into a gigantic screen inside the Vision Pro. I combine it with a Dolby Atmos surround sound speaker setup in our upstairs game room. It's truly a stunning experience. The only reason I wouldn't declare this the gold standard way to play games is because it currently relies on WiFi streaming, which introduces some input lag. The lag tends not to be an issue with the games that I play, but it's enough that you wouldn't play competitive twitch shooters with it. If Apple had just allowed you to plug in an external device via HDMI, this would hands down be the most impressive gaming experience out there. I'm personally very sensitive to input lag thanks to years of low-latency PC gaming, but I know not everybody is. If you're not, you may be even more impressed by it than me.
Sadly the passthrough is black and white only. That's the one thing I love about the Vision Pro is it never feels claustrophobic thanks to very good passthrough quality.
The Quest 3S has color passthrough and it's hardly an Apple-level device, and it's $349 in comparison.
I guess as a gamer, I don't care that much. I put on my headset to game, and if I need to step away for a moment, I'm more likely to take it off than to wander around my house with a headset on. Still, I thought color passthrough was now table stakes for a headset.
I think it's not purely unmotivated cost-cutting. They went for IR sensors and have embedded IR LEDs for low-light tracking, and i figure colour passthrough would have required additional cameras.
Yes, same. I'll still get one because I think it being a standalone Linux computer is huge, and I'm so interested in the Proton / Lepton stacks to run Windows and Android games but yeah this is a pretty big compromise.
Will be interesting to see which side of $999 it drops. I'll buy it regardless but the optics (heh) on the high RAM cost issue and the unit price might temper demand a bit.
This is true. I use my quest 3 for adult content all the time and it honestly adds a lot. It's the one thing where immersion really adds value. It's like you're there yourself, especially if you have a toy that can synchronise to the content.
The prudishness is really holding back the industry.
it did add Safari private browsing mode :), but overall iPhone piggybacked off of the Internet, which was created by Military and adult industry were the first large scale content websites that drove innovation
Does the AVP still not integrate with VR games/simulators? I understand why Apple wants it to be a productivity tool not a gaming device, but it really sucks to restrict it in that way.
If you're just watching movies or need a big virtual monitor, and you've got a smartphone on you, you're better off with something like XREALs that cost 1/6th as much, weigh 1/10th as much and look like a dorky pair of off-brand sunglasses rather than a scuba mask. They're just virtual displays, not a whole-ass PC on your face, and they work pretty well for that.
I tried a bit on the original Vive and text was awful. I didn’t get nauseated, but games didn’t make me sick either (I did get some “sea legs” when I took it off).
Haven’t tried on the AVP, I think it has way better displays than the OG Vive did.
They probably have some kind of fallback system, but the visual-inertial odometry they are using for spatial positioning that is working pretty well when stationary (at home) tend to break badly on a train or plane.
A buddy let me try his Vision Pro, but I instead bought USB C display glasses. I just use them as a second display, not the AR experience you're probably thinking of.
I don't specify which brand or model because I have gone through several pairs since then. They're all about the same and somewhat flimsy, but worth it for the reduced bulk.
I also got usb-c display glasses and they've been great as an external monitor while traveling. I strongly recommend them to folks who want to be able to work comfortably on airplanes or other situations where you don't have an ergonomic desk.
I got the RayNeo Air 2 since they had the largest field of view.
Pros:
- Price (~$200 one year ago)
- Display quality/resolution is fine
- Brightness is excellent, can use it in direct sunlight without issue
- Build quality is fine.
- It really is just a plug-and-play USB-C monitor that overlays on whatever you're looking at.
- The focal distance (~4 meters) is really nice since my eyes often get strained when working on my laptop screen
Cons:
- (BIG con) it turns out that the field of view is TOO large - I often can't see the system clock in the corner of my screen or the quickbar in games.
- It just has normal pads like for glasses, and they can get a little sore/leave a red mark since they're heavier than normal glasses
- It's powered by the same USB that delivers the display data, so while it works fine for my macbook, it won't display from my phone. I've seen that there are battery/power converter dongles to add power to the cable but haven't tried one.
So if I did it again I'd just check reviews and get whatever is cheap and well reviewed currently. I was thinking about finding some sort of airplane-friendly keyboard+mouse setup as well but it turns out that just using my laptop keyboard and touchpad works fine.
Not the OP but I use mine a lot too. I use them with Samsung DeX and a foldable keyboard. Means I functionally have a desktop computer with me all the time. It's pretty amazing.
I like them a lot and carry them as one would with headphones. My use case is boring and I mostly plug them into my phone and laptops, but they "just work" on most devices made in the last few years. I use them any time I'm stuck sitting somewhere for more than about 15 minutes.
With this form factor, the main limitation is physical user input, not compatibility or fatigue. There's no battery or adapters or walled garden to mess around with. I would not be opposed to a touch pad or gesture system if it actually worked reliably and didn't require accessories or excessive motion from me.
For now, they're literally just a screen in a pair of glasses, and that's all I ever wanted. I'm sure there will be improvements to this category, but any product that strays from this core functionality will be a hard pass from me.
I'm an indie that travels a lot. I'm interested in it to have more flexibility with ergonomic setups for development, such as being able to stand without needing a way to elevate my laptop to eye height (it's easy at least to find ways to get my keyboard halves to proper height for standing) or lying with keyboard halves at my sides.
Curious if anyone is using it successfully for ergonomics (not just for the convenience of having a big monitor which is secondary for me - Macbook + iPad sidecar display is very travel-friendly but very difficult to use ergonomically away from home).
I can't see any realistic way that the ergonomics would be better than your haphazard hotel room setup. Reality is that the device still has weight on your head and neck and is still kind of tiring to wear for long periods of time.
It's still 1.5lbs hanging off the front of your face and over hours that's still straining.
Lying down or in a recliner or something where you're not really having to support the device yourself is about the only way that I feel you might achieve any kind of better result in an ergonomics sense for a significant length of use time.
(Disclaimer: I had one to demo for a few months and used it/experimented with it sporadically, I don't own one.)
I use it every day, approx ~95% of the days since it launched over 2 years ago. Many hours a day. Far and away my biggest use-case is connecting it to my laptop for gigantic (private) movie theater-sized screen.
Getting it comfortable was the most important step. The 6-months-old DualKnit band is really great for making it a lot more comfortable. An open face mod (eg $10 Macally on amazon) helps a lot with eye breathability, and restoring peripheral vision.
Also really great for being able to work well from anywhere.
Sad that so many people are sleeping on it, but what can you do? Check out r/VisionPro for tons of people that love theirs and use them constantly.
Do you wear glasses and do you have the prescription inserts for the AVP? I have a very mild prescription, no inserts, and I find text in the AVP to be distractingly blurry. Enough so that I’ve never been able to use the virtual monitor for more than a few minutes at a time.
For context, I have no problem using external monitors without my glasses. The only downside is very tired eyes at the end of a workday, but I can read text just fine.
I have the inserts, they work great. I find using the Vision Pro as a monitor less fatiguing than using a regular monitor with glasses. I think it’s because the Vision Pro Display is optically several feet away due to lens trickery, and focusing on further away things is better for eye fatigue.
I have a moderate prescription so putting on Vision Pro improves my vision compared to unaided eyesight ;) It would definitely not prefer it to my Studio Display but it does the job when I don't have it.
No glasses or prescription, sorry.
Have you tried w/ contact lenses? I've seen that work well for friends when they try them out.
Using contacts has been better (for me) than the Zeiss inserts in terms of hand tracking and eye tracking accuracy. Often, I need to run a calibration step if changing between them, otherwise gaze typically targets the item below what I’m looking at, which is great for identifying one might have anger issues to resolve.
When I bought one they had "reader" lenses that were not prescription, they did well enough. I use 2.0 diopter reading glasses otherwise from Costco.
While great for travel coding, the faff of battery + cable would have been more elegant as one cable plugged into the laptop; it can be an embarrassing rats nest.
Xcode 27’s Device Hub now allows interacting with nearby dev devices (a bit better than Android Studio’s implementation). Super convenient change that makes it practical to do more things while in the recliner / VP.
Yep. The lack of a video input killed the thing for me, and, I suspect, thousands of other people. All it needed was a USB-C jack for power and video over DisplayPort.
This could have been a great device for gamers, 3-D modelers, drone pilots, cinematographers... but Apple's fear of I/O ruined it.
Have you used XR glasses (e.g., from Rokid or Viture)? If so, how do they compare for that use case?
I tried on the Xreal for 3 minutes when I met someone with them at a party. They were cool but noticeably a lot less bright.
Similarly I tried the original HoloLens, many many years ago (2016?), with the similar waveguide technology. It was outside, at night, so relatively easy to see, albeit with jarringly tight field of view.
Without a doubt I'm excited about lightweight AR glasses that I can wear in public. My non-expert opinion is we're still a few years away.
In the meantime, I love my Apple goggles. For home usage only, and not when guests come over. Going open face (no lightshield) makes them feel a lot more like magic AR glasses, with the ~95% accurate passthrough.
> Without a doubt I'm excited about lightweight AR glasses that I can wear in public. My non-expert opinion is we're still a few years away.
Not the same type of AR, but the Even G2 look very promising. Can't use them as an external screen, they're more of an assistant with notes, live translate, app ecosystem, etc. I imagine they might be useful as a moving teleprompter.
I have AVP and Xreals amongst other things, and the Xreals definitely get brighter in my moderately shaded living room.
But also not really a surprise given the difference in optics.
Stopped using it after about a week or two of usage. The only interesting use case was screen mirroring from my Mac, but that wasn't compelling enough to endure the weight of it on my face. I expected watching a movie would be a good use case, but in reality the brightness of the screen would reflect (I guess?) off my face and create a glare... so it ultimately wasn't a good movie device. Gave it to a friend who was excited about it, and he also stopped using it after about a week or two.
Wow, if you can't get a buddy to use it for free... this really is not the same league as the iPhone.
This is the most common scenario. That’s why can’t compare Vision Pro with the iPhone. First iPhone was limited yeah but those who bought it loved and used it all the time. Word of mouth setup the success of later versions.
I bought the refreshed M5 version with the new headstrap. I read so many complaints about weight and it was just never an issue for me personally. Maybe the new strap is that much better?
That said, the battery cable was super annoying, id accidentally catch it multiple times per day. The battery is good for less than 2 hours so i used it plugged into the wall.
For zoom calls, the persona thing is hilariously bad, unusable in a business context. Interesting for a few minutes as a tech demo though.
The virtual layout is good - a big citrix app screen (its the ipad app) for remote desktop, zoom, safari etc off to the sides and then things like calendar widget pinned to physical wall. But text clarity / quality is just slightly not good enough for software development. Almost, its close. If you dont mind large fonts its good enough.
Ultimately returned it but it was a close run thing, i almost kept it.
I do still hanker for something like this, tempted to try xreal or other glasses but seems like the PPD is even lower.
What makes zoom bad ? Lag ?
It's literally half-Retina visual fidelity. I couldn't stand reading text on it for more than a few minutes.
Once they make such a headset with full retina I'm in
having developed multiple apps on it and tried every which way to use it (as an XR enthusiast in general), I have never been so happy to put a headset up on the shelf and never pull it out again.
using as a spatial monitor was cool. for about 10min until my neck got tired of the added weight. but I’ll give credit that those 10min were pretty cool.
Unless materials science advances to the point where a display like the Vision Pro weighs as much as a pair of glasses, I don’t think there’ll ever be mass adoption of wearable VR beyond anything more than a novelty, for exactly the reason you stated.
Wearing something heavy on the front of your face is simply not a pleasant experience.
Beyond 2 is 107 grams. The new M5 Vision Pro is 750 grams. It's easily doable, but Apple deliberately makes them heavy for some reason.
107 grams is still pretty heavy. Regular glasses are 35 grams or less. My sunglasses are below 20 grams.
Vive Flow is 189 grams btw
the steam frame is apparently 440 grams.
Beyond 2 has almost none of the sensor suite, no eye tracking, no meaningful compute, no pass-through video, no inside-out tracking, no gesture control, and requires two to three entirely separate units set up around the room to do any outside in tracking, yet it still weighs 4-5x what glasses weigh.
Just the displays and lenses will outweigh glasses considerably and there's nothing to strip back when you're down to display and lenses. Throw in a chassis and head strap and you're pretty far from glasses in weight and ergonomics.
In industrial robotics, there is this emergency practice when the payload and tooling on the robot gets to heavy, to connect the payload to a counterweight and pully system, to "neutralize it in weight". Has anyone here tried that ? It should take three thin ropes with weight to make a object neutrally buyont. Yes, its tied to one room, yes its not pretty and futuristic, but its practical? If you want freedom of movement, connect via magnet- and dedock on leaving the room?
More simply, I wonder if anyone's tried adding an equal weight to the back of their head. This would double the weight, but people can carry very heavy loads on their heads as long as the weight is acting downwards.
Yes. This is how various headsets are made. The HTC focus Vision is one example, and there’s an addon (not sure if third party) for the quest 3 that puts a battery back there.
So yes, this is done and it can help.
The issue with that is you would constantly need to keep your head on the same plane, as soon as you move it around, it becomes unbalanced and now it's even harder to move around because it's heavier. Walking with something balanced on your head is a completely different use case than looking around, up and down etc.
Here is a video:
https://old.reddit.com/r/VisionPro/comments/1cki7jc/brillian...
Counterweights are common in a lot of industrial machinery. Most CNC mills have them on the Z axis to neutralize the spindle weight. And they're not always a weight on a rope or chain, they can be gas or hydraulic cylinders with valves enabling dynamic loading.
Since it's tethered anyway for the battery, I think Apple made a mistake just not building it as a (smart) monitor tethered to a separate PC.
Imagine if the vision pro could just be plugged into a small compute module with a battery or just plugged directly into a Macbook. It would be lighter, cheaper, and more flexible. I think a lot more people would have been interested in it.
Yes, make the battery 2x bigger and include the compute in that.
It would be so cool to be able to plug in arbitrary input devices too, like a dvd player, but its understandable that others don’t feel this way, and it would totally not be an apple product if it did this.
One of their main imposed constraints was clearly to make the battery pocketable, which sadly precludes a lot of things which would have made it a better product, in favour of wider acceptability.
> Yes, make the battery 2x bigger and include the compute in that.
You can't move the compute away in a headset. I have worked for an XR OEM, and when you are designing a headset, you want the compute to be as close as possible from the cameras and displays, to achieve the lowest possible latency and avoid motion sickness for the users.
Even moving the compute to the back of the headset was not considered viable by our HW team. And we haven't spoken about the bandwidth required for all those cameras and UHD displays.
A better way to reduce the weight of the AVP would have been to remove the (useless IMO) front holographic screen, and to replace most of the glass and metal by plastic. And maybe move the battery pack to the back, to get a more balanced headset.
> You can't move the compute away in a headset.
Meta has shown pretty convincingly that you can literally stream VR apps/games over Wifi from a PC to a headset and have a great experience. You will need some compute on the device, as close as possible, but the bulk of the computing could be moved off.
Have you ever tried that? For me, the lag was the tiniest bit perceptible and was enough to make me sick
Played Half-Life Alyx this way entirely and I do get sick in VR, in general, but I had no problem with it.
The technology has actually gotten better since I last tried it.
The Big Screen Beyond and WiFi-enabled video streaming like for the Quest 3 and upcoming Steam Frame disagree with you.
I agree w/ most of what you said about reducing latency.
Just wanted to let you know the new Dual Knit bands are weighted in the back, and improve the balance a bunch.
A tethered virtual monitor wouldn't be a PC, it'd be a PC peripheral. Cook wanted a PC platform and app store he could call his own, so we got this 1.5 pound strap-on facial PC instead of a really nice virtual display.
Also, it doesn't make the best virtual monitor anyway, as the display fidelity is about half-Retina, so all the pixels really stick out compared to every other display Apple's shipped in recent memory. A 1998 Powerbook has crisper text.
Is there a headset you like use for prolonged periods?
I regularly wear a Quest 3 for 4-7 hours at a time. Before that, I used a Focus Vision for the same.
I have a battery pack I put in my pocket for the Quest 3 and I’m generally very happy with it.
I don't have any issue going a couple hours with my HP reverb g2, it is wired though, and I imagine quite a bit lighter.
If you are not going to pick it up from the shelf, why wouldn't you sell it before it loses even more value as tech evolves?
most gen1 apple products are a small retirement investment if you keep it in working condition for long enough
Not regularly, but I do watch movies on it once in a while (in those beautiful environments), especially when I'm on a flight.
WWDC also just rolled out some quite exciting features to RealityKit: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2026/279/ as well as visionOS itself (https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2026/287/)
It makes me wonder if Apple is really giving it up as news have claimed.
> It makes me wonder if Apple is really giving it up as news have claimed.
I don't think anyone serious has claimed that.
https://www.macrumors.com/2026/04/29/apple-vision-pro-m5-flo...
https://www.pcmag.com/news/report-apples-incoming-ceo-cancel...
https://lifehacker.com/tech/apple-reportedly-scraps-apple-vi...
Vision Pro's top talent all moved with their boss, Mike Rockwell, to Siri where they have at least a prayer of promotions, not to mention the satisfaction of working on a product that's not a miserable failure in the market.
Apple shelved the follow up v2 over a year ago and signaled very clearly it was refocusing its XR efforts toward AR glasses.
There hasn't been a new Vision Pro component order since the late 2023, early 2024 original orders that were capped (by SSS's display capacity) at 500k units worth, so Apple hasn't sold even that tiny amount yet.
It was Tim Cook's baby, his last shot at a product legacy, and the guy that just inherited Cooks role put even the lesser Vision Air on ice, the last goggles product that was still on Apple's roadmap.
So, it's not dead, but it's clearly on life support with no goggles of any kind remaining on the roadmap and Apple's attention fully moved to glasses and AI.
This is why I haven't bought one again. I had an M2 and sold it. Then I was thinking I missed it and bought a used Galaxy XR. It is not bad for watching movies. It is close to the same experience for video consumption but significantly worse for everything else. I am always itching to get an M5 AVP, but the org changes are red flags. I will end up with a $4k paper weight.
I don’t think Vision Pro was intended as a mass consumer product. There is so much cost reduction they could have done on the device that they didn’t do to hit a lower price point, and it’s obvious to everyone that $3500 wasn’t going to sell a lot of units (and it must have been obvious to Apple execs as well).
My guess is it is basically a real world survey of how people would use such a device, and what developers would do with it. Then they could later focus on a cheaper product that is only a display, or a product that is only a media viewer, or a product that focuses on VR/AR applications while deemphasizing other use cases.
This is the version of reality that doesn’t require anyone to be stupid. In my experience if a reality candidate requires that someone is just really really stupid to arrive at the outcome (in this case Apple execs), probably you are missing something about someone’s perspective.
Asked recently here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48275508
Yes, it feels like the future every time I put it on. For work, the ultra wide has been wonderful when I'm not at my desk. I also get to have the NBA playoffs to the side on a 10ft screen while I work. For videos, it's a complete game changing experience. They're slowly but surely releasing more "immersive" features. Eg, I recently watched an immersive Lakers game and immediately thought I'd pay to watch games like this. It reminded me when HD became default and we finally realized what we were missing. I don't want to watch games where I'm not courtside anymore.
The two things that consistently delight me are AI and my AVP. I'm trying to combine the two.
I'm using it ocassionally - whenever I have time to do further WebXR development beyond what I've already done, and when an interesting new immersive video or 3D movie becomes available on it. I'll sometimes use it to relax and catch up on any new VR180 videos on youtube.
For other work or entertainment that doesn't take advantage of its spatial features, I tend to revert to using a computer with an external display. The display in the Vision Pro cannot quite match the resolution and HDR headroom of the external display I ended up having (a Pro Display XDR). Maybe if it didn't get outclassed by my external display when displaying 2D content, I'd have additional motivation to use it more often.
Yes, nearly every working day.
The ability to focus on something while the world around me melts away. When it is just myself, the virtual display of my Mac, and the drifting grains of gypsum at White Sands, I seem to be at peace with whatever I am working on.
No, haven't found a killer use case for it as of now. Was only a really good personal movie theater.
I'd love to buy one cause I love the idea of watching movies in that and I watch stuff alone all the time.
I just can't justify the $5000CAD starting price to watch movies. I've considered getting a used M2 model, but I believe you still need to get fitted for the eye piece to ensure a proper seal, and the closest Apple Store to me is about a 6 hour drive. Also I'm not even sure all the cool new Siri stuff yesterday would be supported on the M2 model, so it'd kinda suck to spend all that money and be locked out of new features right away.
I use it every day, sometimes for hours. Once I embraced that fact that my family goes to bed before I do, I use it watch all of my "nerdy" shows at night. During the day it's been really great for having a large desktop that I can see throughout the house. For gaming, I use the geforce now service and a playstation controller. It's been quite fun!
I have bought one recently and am using it almost daily.
Primarily as an external monitor and when good 3D or immersive videos are released.
I recently just picked up a used, like new, M5 Vision Pro for a steal. I've had it for a month and use it a few times a week, mostly for content consumption but very occasionally when I need to work, want a bigger screen, and don't want to sit at my desk.
If you don’t mind answering, where did you get it?
Almost every day. Meanwhile my quest pro gathers a lot of dust. The AVP as a screen is just so much more comfortable and productive for me and nothing beats it for entertainment. It also just still feels like a really great user experience and I was genuinely sad to see the project sunsetted.
The sunsetting rumors are almost certainly untrue. See https://daringfireball.net/2026/04/on_the_future_of_apples_v... for example.
Just yesterday they announced a new OS with a number of interesting new features, like custom environments, improved click-with-your-eyes-controls (Dwell Control), a bunch more: https://www.apple.com/os/visionos/
That’s very exciting! Thank you for the reference!
It's quite fun and I'll drop into it from time to time, but it's mostly a novel plaything for me. I do have a friend who has used it for full-time work for years though.
I use it about once every 3 months now to watch content while laying in bed when I don't think it'll annoy my wife too much
I bought it on launch day, and I still use it at least a couple times a week. I also pretty much always take it with me when I travel (along with my MBP). Frankly, I'd use it even more, but because it's a fairly anti-social device I prefer to use it only when I have meaningful alone time. If I were living alone by myself, I imagine it could be a daily device for me.
My main use cases are Mac Virtual Display, movies/entertainment, PS5 gaming [0], casual browsing, and -- most surprisingly -- reading. The first few are pretty self-explanatory, but reading is one of my favorite unexpected niche use cases. It's really nice having a floating book (via Apple Books) perfectly positioned at eye height in front of you in your favorite virtual environment, listening to music of your choice. This use case didn't really take off for me until the recent dual knit band fixed the comfort issue. I dabbled with reading in the Vision Pro before but the comfort level just wasn't quite there yet. The new band is good enough to make this one of my favorite ways to read today.
[0] I use the Portal app for this. It lets you stream PS5 games into a gigantic screen inside the Vision Pro. I combine it with a Dolby Atmos surround sound speaker setup in our upstairs game room. It's truly a stunning experience. The only reason I wouldn't declare this the gold standard way to play games is because it currently relies on WiFi streaming, which introduces some input lag. The lag tends not to be an issue with the games that I play, but it's enough that you wouldn't play competitive twitch shooters with it. If Apple had just allowed you to plug in an external device via HDMI, this would hands down be the most impressive gaming experience out there. I'm personally very sensitive to input lag thanks to years of low-latency PC gaming, but I know not everybody is. If you're not, you may be even more impressed by it than me.
Waiting for Steam Frame.
Sadly the passthrough is black and white only. That's the one thing I love about the Vision Pro is it never feels claustrophobic thanks to very good passthrough quality.
Wow, Steam Frame has only B&W passthrough...[1]
The Quest 3S has color passthrough and it's hardly an Apple-level device, and it's $349 in comparison.
I guess as a gamer, I don't care that much. I put on my headset to game, and if I need to step away for a moment, I'm more likely to take it off than to wander around my house with a headset on. Still, I thought color passthrough was now table stakes for a headset.
[1] https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/vr-hardware/the-steam-frame...
I think it's not purely unmotivated cost-cutting. They went for IR sensors and have embedded IR LEDs for low-light tracking, and i figure colour passthrough would have required additional cameras.
Yes, same. I'll still get one because I think it being a standalone Linux computer is huge, and I'm so interested in the Proton / Lepton stacks to run Windows and Android games but yeah this is a pretty big compromise.
Will be interesting to see which side of $999 it drops. I'll buy it regardless but the optics (heh) on the high RAM cost issue and the unit price might temper demand a bit.
Does the AVP actually compete with it? I thought it didn't do games?
It does local stuff of course, and some are trying to bring PC streaming to it, e.g. https://github.com/Kross82/KRVR-releases
Ooh share results here when you get it!
My wife is the primary user and frequently uses it when she works. She also travels with it and doesn’t mind occasional weird looks.
I use it occasionally, either to watch movies or the content that Apple releases specifically for it.
unless Apple allows adult content applications on Vision Pro its future is doomed.
There are only two first-adopters for any new technology: military and adult industry.
Without these you wont get any traction
This is true. I use my quest 3 for adult content all the time and it honestly adds a lot. It's the one thing where immersion really adds value. It's like you're there yourself, especially if you have a toy that can synchronise to the content.
The prudishness is really holding back the industry.
There are no adult apps but they’re not needed for stereo videos. And the videos do exist, and they’re not hard to find, and they work well on AVP.
I don’t think either of those drove smart phone adoption.
Adult websites were never banned on those, as far as I recall.
That's some insane revisionism.
You can watch porn on devices most people already have.
doesn't work well on an airplane
?
use reasoning mode
Don’t forget advertising
Web browsers exist
You mean web browser, singular.
then why buy expensive vision pro if I have a browser on my phone?
Stereo
iPhone has never allowed those and it seems to have done alright.
it did add Safari private browsing mode :), but overall iPhone piggybacked off of the Internet, which was created by Military and adult industry were the first large scale content websites that drove innovation
Yes, absolutely no one uses an iPhone to go to Pornhub and spank themselves into oblivion because Steve and Tim said it's wrong
And nobody does that on Vision Pro despite it including the same browsing capabilities, apparently.
Sir, this is a Wendy's.
I don't think that's true, 3.5k for a porn machine is an incredibly steep price.
People "happily" spend that on drugs, tobacco, and alcohol, so why not on porn.
True, but people are more willing to spend that kind of money $20-50 at a time than all at once.
Sign up for Apple Card and you can purchase on a payment plan.
I don't believe the two thoughts are mutually exclusive.
No
My buddy hasn't used it to do any work in a while. Only uses it every now and then to watch movies.
Still using the AVP but not exclusively, about 3 hours a day, with a hardware Bluetooth keyboard.
Mostly multiple safari windows opening on servers via webterm, cli and emacs.
It’s especially great when traveling.
Only problem, I cannot share a window when presenting…
Yeah -- mostly for media, though. Occasionally with my laptop while traveling for work, for the sake of the huge screen.
Does the AVP still not integrate with VR games/simulators? I understand why Apple wants it to be a productivity tool not a gaming device, but it really sucks to restrict it in that way.
It can with:
KRVR - https://krvr.app/
ALVR - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/alvr/id6479728026
Are they worth it if you fly frequently?
If you're just watching movies or need a big virtual monitor, and you've got a smartphone on you, you're better off with something like XREALs that cost 1/6th as much, weigh 1/10th as much and look like a dorky pair of off-brand sunglasses rather than a scuba mask. They're just virtual displays, not a whole-ass PC on your face, and they work pretty well for that.
No I barely use it
Almost every day, watching videos, having meetings, hands on (the agent) coding and playing games.
Got mine on launch day. It's been sitting in the case for over a year. It's frankly just not comfortable to use for more than 10 minutes.
The only feature that looked compelling to me was the ability to have "multi-monitor" on a plane.
Did anyone ever use that and did it live up to the hype? Or did you just get sick from having a headset on?
I tried a bit on the original Vive and text was awful. I didn’t get nauseated, but games didn’t make me sick either (I did get some “sea legs” when I took it off).
Haven’t tried on the AVP, I think it has way better displays than the OG Vive did.
They probably have some kind of fallback system, but the visual-inertial odometry they are using for spatial positioning that is working pretty well when stationary (at home) tend to break badly on a train or plane.
there is a travel mode
A buddy let me try his Vision Pro, but I instead bought USB C display glasses. I just use them as a second display, not the AR experience you're probably thinking of.
I don't specify which brand or model because I have gone through several pairs since then. They're all about the same and somewhat flimsy, but worth it for the reduced bulk.
I also got usb-c display glasses and they've been great as an external monitor while traveling. I strongly recommend them to folks who want to be able to work comfortably on airplanes or other situations where you don't have an ergonomic desk.
This is the comment I came here for. Which ones?
I got the RayNeo Air 2 since they had the largest field of view.
Pros:
- Price (~$200 one year ago)
- Display quality/resolution is fine
- Brightness is excellent, can use it in direct sunlight without issue
- Build quality is fine.
- It really is just a plug-and-play USB-C monitor that overlays on whatever you're looking at.
- The focal distance (~4 meters) is really nice since my eyes often get strained when working on my laptop screen
Cons:
- (BIG con) it turns out that the field of view is TOO large - I often can't see the system clock in the corner of my screen or the quickbar in games.
- It just has normal pads like for glasses, and they can get a little sore/leave a red mark since they're heavier than normal glasses
- It's powered by the same USB that delivers the display data, so while it works fine for my macbook, it won't display from my phone. I've seen that there are battery/power converter dongles to add power to the cable but haven't tried one.
So if I did it again I'd just check reviews and get whatever is cheap and well reviewed currently. I was thinking about finding some sort of airplane-friendly keyboard+mouse setup as well but it turns out that just using my laptop keyboard and touchpad works fine.
>but I instead bought USB C display glasses
How did you use these? Did you like them?
Not the OP but I use mine a lot too. I use them with Samsung DeX and a foldable keyboard. Means I functionally have a desktop computer with me all the time. It's pretty amazing.
I like them a lot and carry them as one would with headphones. My use case is boring and I mostly plug them into my phone and laptops, but they "just work" on most devices made in the last few years. I use them any time I'm stuck sitting somewhere for more than about 15 minutes.
With this form factor, the main limitation is physical user input, not compatibility or fatigue. There's no battery or adapters or walled garden to mess around with. I would not be opposed to a touch pad or gesture system if it actually worked reliably and didn't require accessories or excessive motion from me.
For now, they're literally just a screen in a pair of glasses, and that's all I ever wanted. I'm sure there will be improvements to this category, but any product that strays from this core functionality will be a hard pass from me.
I'm an indie that travels a lot. I'm interested in it to have more flexibility with ergonomic setups for development, such as being able to stand without needing a way to elevate my laptop to eye height (it's easy at least to find ways to get my keyboard halves to proper height for standing) or lying with keyboard halves at my sides.
Curious if anyone is using it successfully for ergonomics (not just for the convenience of having a big monitor which is secondary for me - Macbook + iPad sidecar display is very travel-friendly but very difficult to use ergonomically away from home).
I can't see any realistic way that the ergonomics would be better than your haphazard hotel room setup. Reality is that the device still has weight on your head and neck and is still kind of tiring to wear for long periods of time.
It's still 1.5lbs hanging off the front of your face and over hours that's still straining.
Lying down or in a recliner or something where you're not really having to support the device yourself is about the only way that I feel you might achieve any kind of better result in an ergonomics sense for a significant length of use time.
(Disclaimer: I had one to demo for a few months and used it/experimented with it sporadically, I don't own one.)
Yes, except, wait, I don't have one. Nvm.
I forgot those existed