One week with the Apple Vision Pro (as a Software Engineer)

I've had multiple arvr headsets over the past couple of years and I've never really taken them as anything other than entertainment or gaming devices but the moment Apple showed the laptop screen seamlessly transitioned from a MacBook Pro into a crisp virtual space I could not help but wonder is this going to be the first headset that is going to go beyond just entertainment as a full-time software engineer can I use the Apple Vision Pro to actually get my work done with that question in mind I went through the very involved process at 5:00 a.m. on January 19th 2024 and place the order for an apple Vision Pro this video is not sponsored in any shape or form and I have swallowed the very expensive pill that is the Vision Pro myself so that you don't have to on the positive side I've now used it extensively for about a week and I hope to help you answer the same questions I have this is not a review of The Vision Pro this is instead a video of how it is to use a Vision Pro as a software engineer to get your work done all right let's get started [Music] okay as you watch me unbox the Vision Pro I wanted to let you know that I paid special attention to three categories when evaluating The Vision Pro coding collaboration and productivity because I think these three areas are critical to any software engineer's day-to-day life and the Vision Pro would need to do quite well in at least one one of these categories if not all to be considered a device that can enable you to get your software engineering work done with that said let's get started with the first category that is coding personally for me coding is not a large part of my day most of my work falls under the collaboration category which we will get to after this but I can see coding being a large part for many software Engineers days but out of the box The Vision Pro only has a few native apps and none of them have anything to do do with coding but by default most iPad apps will also automatically work with it as long as the developers publish the apps for the Vision Pro so that could come in handy but considering the fact that I do have an iPad Pro with the Apple silicon and I've never really thought of it as a device that I can use to get my coding work done I would have to say that the Vision Pro was no different I know that Apple wants you to think of it as a standalone Computing unit but in terms of coding there is no way to tap into that compute to do even the slightest of coding tasks but that being said I was still able to use the Vision Pro in a few scenarios where I think it added meaningful enhancements to my coding workflow the main one is being able to use it as a giant immersive screen for my MacBook Pro if there's one thing apple is good at it is nailing the ecosystem integration so needless to say that the screen from the MacBook Pro seamlessly transforms into a very large and Incredibly sharp virtual screen they do something very intelligent here when rendering the screen or rendering anything on the Vision Pro for that matter to save on compute only the part you're directly looking at is rendered at the highest resolution and it is very sharp the rest or what we call the peripheral vision is rendered at a much lower resolution but if you think of it this is exactly how our Vision Works try it for yourself when you watch TV the TV is in Focus but the cabinet walls Etc are a bit blurry or if you're coding and if you focus on a few lines of code carefully up close you will notice that the rest of the screen is naturally blurry to your eyes and this works wonderfully well on the Vision Pro the screen is incredibly sharp and you can easily use it to code on for long periods of time however the downside here is that you only get one screen surprisingly you can't even use your MacBook screen if you use the vision Pro's virtual screen I was hoping it was more like the iPad where the MacBook and utilize it as an extended screen but unfortunately it's not instead of Simply casting the screen as is I would have loved it if Apple allowed you to drag individual applications over to the headset that way I could have dragged my my visual studio code over to Vision Pro and resize it to a giant portrait ratio for an immersive focused coding session while the rest of my applications remain over in my MacBook Pro maybe that's something will come in a future revision who knows but for now you're stuck with that one screen which still gives you the immersion if you need it you can disable the pass through set your Vision Pro to den Not Disturb mode play a caling tune and just focus on that one screen I did find myself doing this on a few occasions and it was pretty great well all the iPad apps will automatically work with the Vision Pro I suppose the developers will still have to release the apps for the Vision Pro because one app I would have loved to use that isn't there yet is remote desktop while my primary machine is a Mac I still use Windows for a lot of other development use cases and I was hoping that having remote desktop on the Vision Pro would allow me to have both my MacBook Pro screen and My Windows desktop on the same virtual space but yet again I hope that we'll see that in a future iteration so as as far as coding goes all you really get from The Vision Pro is a really high resolution giant virtual screen that can allow you to be fully immersed in what you're doing okay the next category is collaboration where I spent most of my day in things like meetings presentations and discussions about architecture and design um so can The Vision Pro be useful in these scenarios well the first question to answer is can I even use it with existing collaboration apps like teams or Zoom or is it exclusive to things like FaceTime and messaging on Apple ecosystem since being on camera is obviously a big part of remotely collaborating I went ahead and scanned my face to create my Persona and as many others like Marquez Brian Tong and The Verge have already pointed out the Persona is quite unnatural you can tell it's me or at least it's trying to represent me and the speed at which it reflects my action is pretty quick but it looks very artificial and downright weird in some cases so it's apt that Apple declared this feature as better the good news is that the Vision Pro and the Persona works well with all major communication platforms I personally tried it with Microsoft teams and zoom and it worked great my Persona while a bit creepy showed up just fine and did a great job of reflecting my facial expressions the Persona feature is really impressive and really bad at the same time it's hard to explain but aside from just talking in meetings if there's any typing involved through chat or anything like that I highly recommend using a physical keyboard I also tried seeing if the Whiteboard feature on Zoom works and unfortunately it seems like it's not supported on the Vision Pro as of now um if someone starts a whiteboard session you simply don't see it on the Vision Pro or get any notifications about it while other participants from other devices can see and interact with the Whiteboard so I suppose other than attending meetings with a weird Persona while chilling at Joshua Tree there isn't much else The Vision Pro can give you in terms of collaboration personally I was hoping for a bit more in this category but I guess this is again a side effect of being a first gen product I fully expect Integrations to come along in due time as apps get updated to take advantage of the Vision [Music] Pro okay The Vision Pro isn't fully there when it comes to directly enabling you to get your work done but maybe it can provide some productivity boosts as a supplemental device which can maybe Aid you in getting your work done more efficiently to explore this idea I Revisited the virtual space with my MacBook Pro screen shared alongside native Vision Pro apps and this is where it sort of clicked for me and I saw a glimpse of the potential a device like The Vision Pro has as a supplemental device as your Sidekick to existing Computing devices or as a plug to your existing workflows imagine this for a moment you have your Vision Pro sitting on your desk while you are doing your work on a single screen things get a little chotic and you want to multitask and keep track of a few different workflows at once well you pop on the Vision Pro and enter a virtual space where you can continue your work you trigger a deployment on one side then set a nice little timer on top of it to remind you of when the deployment completes in fact the app Crouton already does something similar for cooking multiple recipes at once but you then start a 25-minute pomodora timer where you go through your emails for the day when the 25 minute timer hits you take a 5 minute break and Enter a caling meditative space then you hop on a quick meeting without worrying about your hair because your persona hair is always done while you're in the meeting you get a notification that your deployment timer is done this means that your package is deployed and you can pull down the dependency and implement the rest of your code for the project so right after the meeting you fire up your code editor and enter an immersive Focus mode for 2 hours where you wrap up your code in a complete Flow State and that marks the end of your day you take off the Vision Pro and everything disappears The timers emails clutter all gone you are left with a clean desk with one screen to start of a new day tomorrow not to mention the Vision Pro can go along with you for the rest of the day for a gaming session or a theater-like movie experience as well while this is a hypothetical scenario that I would love to use the Vision Pro 4 it's not that far off a few feature updates and apps catching up to it can enable this and many other scenarios where the Vision Pro can enhance your existing workflows instead of trying to replace them look there's no denying that the technology in The Vision Pro is pretty impressive the eye and hand tracking are amazing almost magical the pass through is of the highest quality I've ever seen the ecosystem integration is excellent and the potential to use almost all iPad apps is also pretty great however when it comes to coding collaboration and productivity I think it is far from being a standalone unit the tech just isn't there yet that being said I do think it can be a very useful addition to your existing Apple ecosystem as a sidekick to help you give a decent boost in your productivity for that specific purpose I think it's the best headset I've ever used but I'd be remiss if I didn't bring up the elephant in the room it is also the most expensive headset I've ever used by far and unfortunately for the massive added cost it just doesn't add enough extra things for me to make it worth the investment it is far from a product that can provide tangible and meaningful value when it comes to getting work done especially in the field of software engineering so as cool as some of the tech in The Vision Pro is I cannot recommend it for actual work especially in software engineering at best this is a first generation product that essentially gives you a peak into Apple's vision for the future let me know in the comments below what you think of the Vision Pro as a companion device for software engineering um do you see some extra use cases that I didn't consider it would be cool to hear some of your thoughts and of course please do the usual stuff to help out the channel like comment and subscribe cheers he

Channel: Engineering with Utsav

Views: 223,888

Keywords: software engineering, coding, developer, software engineer, programming, productivity, engineeringefficiency, entrepreneurship, leadership

Id: 12qdf3NAJmo

Length: 11min 3sec (663 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 11 2024