Apple Vision Pro Review - Why does this EXIST?

this is the Vision Pro and apple doesn't really want you to buy it almost every tech product that has ever come out you know that the company has first thought what's the selling point either a key problem that it's fixing or just a clear reason that you would want to buy one and so almost consistently when you get a first generation product in a new category it's still going to have those one or two key selling features cuz they're necessary for it to be a success but then it's also going to be incredibly Rough Around the Edges because the company has prioritized those as opposed to making sure that all the little granular things are right but with the Vision Pro maybe the biggest product in the company's entire history I think it's kind of the opposite I mean Apple are masters of marketing you know how they carefully curate the sprinkle of new features that each and every new iPhone comes with to make sure that you're always wanting to keep moving up that ladder if this company wanted to they could absolutely sell you on this product but I don't think they're trying to The Vision Pro released in the US only with a $35,000 price tag it has no real killer app it has no Blockbuster augmented reality game and instead of those one or two key headline features it actually focuses instead on doing all those little things really well the things that far fewer people are going to notice and far fewer people are going to buy it for why well I think the only reason Apple has made this product is for developers that they're placing a bet that the future of consumer Tech is veering towards headsets and so by making one absolutely banging piece of Hardware that sells devs on this vision of the future and by banking on the high confidence that people already have an Apple product succeeding it's going to make those devs start scurrying to build apps for this platform potentially even making it the default VR platform before most of its competitors have even properly taken a stab it that said we're now a month into launch I've been using this for work for play for travel and this product scares me both in terms of its monstrous and I mean monstrous potential but also with its consequences so let's start with the good like I know that a lot of people are saying the FaceTime is weird the way this headset scans your face and creates this avatar for you feels creepy and uncanny valley and I don't completely disagree with that but in my mind it's not a bad thing see if you plotted a graph of the realism of a character against how acceptable they look you'll get this people are completely okay with something that's distinctly unrealistic it actually becomes even better when that character gets more detailed and the animations improve but then as soon as you hit a certain point of being close to real but not quite we hate it it's creepy it feels possessed and if I had to pinpoint where the Apple Vision Pro avatars currently sit it is around here so as far as actually using this to join a business meeting or FaceTime your mom I don't think she'll be best pleased I think she'll tell you to take that bluming helmet off or once but as a Showcase of progress I think this is a big deal that on this graph we've pretty much Leap Frog all away from here to here this is so far ahead of even last year's metaverse avatars that it genuinely makes them look like a prank and yes we are at an uncomfortable stage right now but we had to get here at some point on the way to True realism so why not get it over with with a us only gen one product and also it is really freeing now that you can actually video call someone without needing to get dressed up without needing to hold anything or find a surface to prop your phone up with and knowing that they can hear you with genuinely studio quality audio it sounds better than this mic here and see you front and center at all times it's meant that I've been able to talk to people while cooking while packing bags while walking on the street and I feel the same way about this whole eyesight feature you know the way that other people can see your eyes through the headset right now it does not achieve its objective of making it less socially awkward to film in front of people I'm wearing one of these around London on planes in Ubers coffee shops I have never had as much side eye in my entire life you can tell that every single person you walk past is trying their absolute hardest to not turn and stare at you but also that that's exactly what they want to do I've had people call me all sorts of things like take off that headset you I'll let you fill in the blanks but the point is right now you look like a donut wearing this in public and that's probably partly because the eyes need to be brighter and the outer plastic area gets lots of Reflections but I do think that the main thing is just the fact that it's new the idea of this is not currently considered acceptable but as an actual concept I do think that eyesight is a super intelligent solution to the problem of others being completely unaware of what you're looking at like yeah it's kind of a waste of battery and yeah you could just stick some LEDs on the outside a green one to let people know that you can see them and a red one to let them know you're recording but this does at least make those interactions feel a little bit more humanlike at least you know as much as they can when you've got a 200 in screen between you now at its core the Apple Vision Pro is a virtual reality headset it's not dissimilar to products like The Meta Quest but for me at least it does do more of the fundamentals right than anyone else it's it's cushioned but Airy it doesn't get clammmy or sweaty yes the headset is heavy and I do think Apple should have added in the option for some sort of rigid strap like basically every VR headset comes with just to take off some of the clamping force from the front of your face and yes if you pay attention to it you of course can tell that this whole pass through thing is a video feed that you're watching as opposed to your real eyes seeing the real world with the motion blur and the Grain and the occasional sign flickering and the dynamic range and of course the headset's camera stabilization not being as good as the stabilization of your own eyes but no one has done it better than this the resolution the latency the color signs so much workers have to go into this and it's a lot harder than it seems It's like shooting a video all the time but with higher Stakes because all of a sudden you can't have sudden changes in exposure the perspective has to match that of your eyes there needs to be none of the Distortion that you would normally get with wide camera lenses like this and also there can't be a delay between when things happen and when you see them and Apple has done all of those things in a proficient enough way that in most lighting conditions your brain can just tune it out and genuinely convince yourself of the illusion that you are placing digital objects into your real world and that is a massive achievement and that is complimented by the fact that the user interface is beautiful icons for example are completely flat until you look at them and then the various different layers separate and you get depth there's no dark or light mode it is all about glass here which makes it even more immersive because you're seeing bits of your room or your sky or your scene behind your apps oh and the Shadows I love the Shadows how the windows cast a little bit of Darkness on the floor how letters cast Darkness on your walls and the Hand occlusion is absolutely phenomenal most headsets like this they can place objects within the room that you're sitting in but that illusion breaks the second you lift your hands up cuz your hands will appear behind the window that the headset is trying to make you think is sitting 3 m from your face but this scans your hand hands in real time at all times such that anytime you Eclipse a window it cuts out a little bit of that window around your hands so that your hands still appear like they're in front it isn't perfect but it's good enough so that as long as you're not staring at your hands the illusion is maintained using the Apple Vision Pro is kind of like that pipe dream we've always had of using transparent phones all the perks of that how unbelievably cool it feels but none of the cons like the fact that you can't see your apps properly or Reflections interfering with everything oh and the interaction model the way that your eyes are used to highlight things in your hands to select them I think this is going to get copied a lot I think it's going to become the industry standard so quickly that in a few years time it will just be well of course this is how headsets work and while of course the idea of big tech companies monitoring your eye movements is particularly scary it feels like apple has well addressed this issue essentially the ey tracking happens on one layer of software that exists completely on device so let's say you're on Tik Tok and you're looking around Tik Tok does not see these hover effects they do not see the room you're sitting in and there's no way for them to access your persona all that stuff runs offline and your Vision Pro only tells the app the minimum amount it needs to know how to function and I got to say darting around your headset with your eyes like this and manipulating a room with a pinch of your fingers when it works it's pure Wizardry yes there's work to be done on it and I still do personally find it a bit less satisfying than a phone screen partly because your phone's inputs are detected more accurately and partly because just hitting something physical it gives you something back as opposed to tapping and prodding and poking stuff in midair but the skeleton is in place in one go I think app has already set the precedent for the future now I've had some pretty major issues trying to use the Vision Pro for work I'm getting to that but one thing is undeniable the media experience you can get from this is oh my goodness part of it is the screens on the inside they're crisp the blacks are really black the colors are vivid and the brightness is super high all of that matters but it's much more than that for those of you who haven't managed to put one of these on yet let me describe it to you imagine you're in your living room you're sipping a cup of tea and you're reading a book and you decide you know I fancy watching something right now so you put your Vision Pro on you drag in a high-end OLED TV screen to whichever angle you find the most comfortable yes even lying down looking directly up you make that screen as big as you want like literally 200 in if you're into that and you hit play you want to darken your surroundings you don't need to go find a light switch your headset can do it you want to change of scenery you turn this dial and you phase in the surface of the Moon or literally any seat of you're choosing within a cinema and maybe the most underrated aspect of the whole thing is the 3D because each of your eyes here has its own screen any 3D movie this can create that effect and the way this thing represents that 3D content is it hands down the best experience I've ever had if I could pick between watching movies on this or going to the cinema on my own and wearing those cheap glasses that darken and already not that bright projector even if I was getting paid to go to the cinema I would pick the Vision Pro if you're on a flight in a cramped economy cabin put some good earphones in your ears put this on your face and you can genuinely Escape it's probably actually only a matter of time before someone makes an app that allows you to literally escape to a first class cabin but whatever digital location you choose whether it's a desert or a United States national park you genuinely feel like you are in your own world your own world where there isn't a chance that anyone around you can see anything you're watching which is kind of weird at first when you're typing in passwords and you see that it's not censoring anything but the power of this product is it's as if you could pick up your high-end 80-in TV your Apple TV box your surround sound system and you could pack them into your ruck sack and be able to take them out at any time you want without worrying about plugging them in or positioning them that's how powerful and unique a proposition this is I also thought the cameras are pretty interesting like how good is this versus an iPhone well not quite as good which is a little sad since the Vision Pro has both more space and a higher price bracket but I guess it just wasn't Apple's priority here it's different its photos are significantly worse than iPhone photos and its videos are slightly worse but there is something very easy about taking a vision pro video the fact that it's always ready to record the fact that it's carried by your face so both your hands are free and the spatial aspect every photo and video you take on this has automatic depth it's kind of like portrait mode but instead of being compressed into a flat 2D image you can actually experience that depth not a mind-blowing camera but a cool one and finally the apps consider in how new of a platform this is I've actually been quite surprised by both how many apps there are that are well optimized for it and also how quickly they get added it feels like every time I boot the thing up there is something new to explore you can DJ and mash up songs you can look at and take apart fully to scale 3D models you can play augmented reality games there's no one killer Apple feature and there are some very notable gaps too like an augmented reality Maps app or some kind of Blockbuster immersive game but this is such a strong base to build on that my mind is already spinning at what something like this could be capable of in just a few years it very much reminds me of you know in the first iPhone launched how Steve Jobs got on stage and he talked about how they were launching three groundbreaking things and then that all of those three things were actually just one thing this is that all over again it's like a dozen incredible new technologies all happening in one product the key difference being that now instead of apps running in two Dimensions they're running in three dimensions fully taking into account the space that you're operating them in like you know that phone app that plants a tree every time you stick to your work goals well what if that tree gets planted and grows in real time on your actual desk or like Pokémon go all of a sudden that original trailer for it you know the one that looked like pure science fiction that is actually possible now I don't know about you but that well that would get me off the sofa and if you're enjoying this video then a sub to the channel would be the awesome but it's not without issue issues so let's go from the smallest to the biggest one of the first things you'll notice is the app situation while like I just said there are lots of great ones there's no Netflix there's no Spotify there's no YouTube we're talking apps so ubiquitous that they're like the first things you would think to install on any new machine if they're not already pre-installed but here it's not just that you're not getting customade Vision Pro apps these companies seem to have specifically decided to not even allow you to use the iPad versions of their apps which is the default for Vision Pro and yeah you can use the websites but then you can't download your movies or songs like you can on the apps which pretty much renders Your Vision Pro useless while traveling unless you primarily use Apple TV that is and that actually leads me on to my second concern it's not a secret that Apple are the masters of lockin they don't just want you to use their phone they want you to have their watch their home speaker their Mac Pro wheels and they are the best company in the world at achieving that Apple ties each one of their products together so seamlessly and at the same time basically ignores the ex existence of competing products which when you combine those two things together creates the Apple Universe a universe in which you use your Apple airdrop to send files and you watch your Apple TV shows and you use apple shareplay and FaceTime to connect with your friends everything just works and you feel like you're living in an apple commercial until either you or someone Close to You tries to use something that's not apple and then it all breaks down and there's been a couple of times while using this Vision Pro where I have felt like I'm not sure I want that on my face because when you put this thing on it's a lot more than just using another Apple product your vision in the most literal sense possible becomes Apple's Vision you see what Apple has decided you see I noticed this for the first time when I was watching something on Disney plus and I wanted to send what I was looking at to drisha the Apple Vision Pro blocked me from doing that you try and record a quick clip of your scene and it blacks out the show and I understand why like the same reason you can't screen record a TV show on your phone for piracy reasons but this is my vision there's something that feels incredibly intrusive about companies deciding what you can and can't do with your eyes like if I was watching a movie in my living room on my own TV and I want to pull out my phone to record a quick clip of that scene it might be frowned upon by Netflix but I can still do that but all of a sudden on this being told that I can't that I have no choice I just felt my first twinge of that dystopian future that a lot of people fear one where companies are the ones in charge of your free will and you notice this apple level of control in lots of other areas too like this thing refuses to let you both screen record or take video when you're in low light why not just try like I can see the view from my headset and I think it looks fine but Apple doesn't want you to and the only reason I can think of is that they don't think it would be a good enough looking video and it may poorly represent the Apple Vision Pro online but that's on me if it's a poor looking video I should be able to make that decision the fact that the thing is portless apart from the power connector so if you want to send files to anything Wireless oh and what's the easiest and best way to wirelessly send those files to anything Apple airdrop got it you want to video call your Android buddies there's no WhatsApp app I mean yeah you could set up a zoom meeting but really this is designed for FaceTime and you know that absolutely awesome ability to sit yourself in an actual Cinema and pick your seat from everything I can see that's for Apple TV content only and there's absolutely no reason why that needed to be the case why not enable this feature for all content I'd love to watch my YouTube videos that way too instead of in Safari what I'm saying is that there's no one thing that's outwardly wrong here it's just there are definitely the classic undertones of things being built for the Apple users as opposed to things being built to be the best no matter what app you're using and as someone who has just recently switched over to a Samsung phone I definitely feel like I am at the butt of that joke but even more bothersome than that is that the Vision Pro Pro is not particularly great for work at least not my work while it is very cool that you can mirror your laptop's display and make it bigger and place it anywhere and it's extremely thoughtless in how you start the feature you just stare at your laptop screen and hit connect it doesn't really add anything it's not like my Mac suddenly enters the virtual realm and I can start interacting with Final Cut Pro through my headset it's just a screen within a screen you can't suddenly add in multiple monitors or turn your existing monitor into an ultrawide so I can't have my video editor open on one screen here and then the preview window over here which would be a value ad and working in this is not higher resolution either you still get a better resolution out of a good quality Monitor and yeah you could say good quality monitors are expensive but if you can afford one of these you can definitely afford one of those when I'm scripting while your MacBook screen does reappear within the headset your keyboard does not so it's very hard to read meaning that unless you're an aade touch typer writing is about to get significantly slower and that's not even factoring in the slightly more fundamental issue that in most computers your input device is independent of where you're looking like most people don't look at the mouse for example your hands just do it whereas here because the entire system navigation is your eyes while sometimes it can be way less effort sometimes it can be a lot more there are times where it feels like your mind is being read where like you're typing something and you think of the letters you're trying to type and as you do that your eyes naturally move to those letters and the vision just knows and it feels like magic but at the same time I think we naturally as humans we're always thinking of the next thing so you will notice that by default your eyes will want to move on to something else as you're entering the last digit of your PIN for example that is not really going to fly here because the Vision Pro requires you to be looking exactly at that input which leads to all sorts of weird situations where let's say you're deleting a bunch of text or trying to click the undo button many times if you try and look up at the text that's being selected Your Vision Pro is no longer selecting the delete key and so often times you will just stop deleting there's actually a whole load of small Kinks like this that clearly do need to be figured out in the second gen like trying to drink The Vision Pro camera's point of view is not quite the same as that of your eyes so sometimes you miss your mouth you get a notification on your phone and you want to check it well tough cameras don't Focus nearly as close as your eyes can so I guarantee it will be a strain the field of view is a little smaller than you'd expect so you don't get the full peripheral vision that you're used to there's a fair bit of sound leakage so while you do have complete privacy with what you're seeing everyone in the room will hear it which is especially amusing for a headset like this since it's the only thing they can experience don't get me wrong the hardware is incredible it's better than anything I've used before but it's just when you try and put something on your face like this naturally it's competing with your eyes and that it still isn't quite up to scratch with and that leads me onto I would say the biggest barrier towards this hitting mainstream it's kind of lonely in here and that's not to say that shared experiences don't exist like if I'm FaceTiming a friend and I have them on one side and then a movie that we're both watching at the same time using share play over here it is actually the best experience I've ever had catching up with people long distance but it's the people who are right in front of you who feel it every time I hand The Vision Pro to someone to test it genuinely feels like they've disappeared into their own world they'll be standing and prodding the air not really paying attention to you or even able to hear you properly and yeah the whole pass through thing exists the person is somewhat aware of the room and who's in it but you know they may well have literally planted a screen in front of your face talking to someone wearing one of these feels a lot like talking to someone who's doing this and that's if you can actually get it to work with other people when you order a Vision Pro there's a very Advanced fitting process that makes it essentially custom made for you this is why you almost definitely should not try and import one if you live outside the US because you likely won't get it fitted properly but anyway for me the one I have it fits great and the light seal and the eye tracking Works incredibly but I haven't had a single smooth handoff every single time I take this thing off to hand to someone else to try there's always some sort of issue that crops up whether it's because their eyes are further apart on their head or they normally wear glasses or the strap won't tighten enough for the size of their head it's so cumbersome to actually show people things that after a while you just don't bother and that's a little sad now that isn't specific to the Apple Vision Pro it's the same with all headsets but I would say that that is why even though we've already had multiple VR revolutions over the last few decades none of them have stuck so far it's always been an incredible party trick it's always blown everyone away when they first try it but then it gets forgotten again when people realize that they can't use it to connect with the people who are close to them so if Apple really does want it to stick this time around that is the key problem they're going to need to solve solve and you can tell they're trying okay I do also worry about what Apple Vision Pro and products like it are going to do to our attention bans I don't think it's really an issue in the state that the thing is in now since it's going to be a few people using it for a few hours a day mostly for quite specific specialized tasks but bigger picture it could well be I mean I see it in myself when I have periods of spending lots of time with my tech like all day scripting on the laptop or gaming on the couch music while in the gym filling every little Gap of time with a quick video to watch I feel incredibly on edge I feel antsy and I think it's because my body is used to persistent dopamine hits and it just wants them to keep coming and that is not good for you it's counterintuitive but too much stimulation can quite easily lead to a persistent feeling of stress and I've actually a couple of times started to get physical symptoms from that and the only thing that has ever helped me is to lock my phone away in a box for a few days and completely forget it exists I always think back to a quote I read over 10 years a ago that boredom is the precursor to creativity I think it's actually really healthy to be bored once in a while because it's what grounds you but this I think this is the opposite of that this is anything you want in the entire world brought to you and being able to experience that in the biggest way possible this is effectively an anti-boredom device so what's my overall Take On The Vision Pro well I think it's very exciting it's slightly scary and no one really needs one I've also seen a lot of comparison being drawn to this meta Quest 3 which people are rightfully saying does a lot of what this does in fact honestly features wise this is more and the price difference is wild 3,499 499 but they are two very different propositions like The Meta is great for gaming it's got a more mature ecosystem the hardware is basically subsidized because meta wants it to be a mass Market product apple does not I think the Vision Pro is one day aiming to directly replace your computer it's more powerful than the meta the screens are sharper and more contrasty this whole Outer display thing it's trying to make it a more socially acceptable lifestyle product but it's also pretty clear that Apple knows that that time isn't now and they know that the best thing this can possibly be in its current form is just a high-end Tech demo that excites the people that they need to excite but it does that pretty well one more thing about the Vision Pro is that it has made me more so than ever glad that I have a surf shark VPN subscription I've been using this in all sorts of places around the world connected to varying degrees of Wi-Fi trustworthiness and so knowing that I can have a consistent internet experience that I can watch the TV shows that I want to watch that I can browse not just privately in this but also securely anywhere is a big deal and surf shark in particular is much more than just a VPN it can mock your GPS location as well as your internet traffic so let's say you're playing Pokémon go and you want to catch a Pokémon in Japan you can now do that from your bedroom and save yourself about $11,000 in flights it has a kill switch which means if you want to make sure that you're secure at all times you can set it up so that anytime your VPN connection drops it automatically Cuts your internet connection and honestly like a thousand more features finished off by the fact that with the code boss it's less than $3 a month for an unlimited number of accounts with three extra months for free and a 30-day money back guarantee

Channel: Mrwhosetheboss

Views: 3,114,318

Keywords: apple vision pro, vision pro, apple, vr headset, vr, ar, tech, review, rant, meta quest

Id: 5MhRZp2uunc

Length: 25min 21sec (1521 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 02 2024