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More than a year after Apple’s Vision Pro headset was released in Australia, it’s still exceedingly rare to meet someone who owns one.
The headset is expensive, its benefits over other mixed-reality headsets are difficult to discern, and it’s locked to an Apple ecosystem that hasn’t seen a lot of developer interest.
And yet, it remains an incredible device that’s gradually becoming more refined. With the release of its M5 chip, Apple has refreshed the Vision Pro (along with the iPad Pro and entry-level MacBook Pro) with more processing and AI power.
So I took it as an opportunity to revisit the headset and see what’s changed.
VisionOS 26 makes for many improvements
I hadn’t used a Vision Pro extensively since it launched and, while a lot has stayed the same, software updates have added significantly to the experience.
When you put the headset on you can perfectly see your surroundings, but you can also turn the dial to gradually replace reality with your scenery of choice, from a mountainside lake to a moon of Jupiter. App windows and menus hang in space around you, and you interact by looking at them and tapping your fingers together. The weird outward-facing EyeSight screen shows people whether you can see them or not. So far, so familiar.
The biggest new arrival in VisionOS 26 (which released in September) is spatial widgets. These work like widgets on your phone, except they anchor to your walls and stay. If you wander to your kitchen and back, the widgets you placed in your office will still be there. Most of these widgets are skeuomorphic so they somewhat blend in to your view of the real world. For example, the clock looks like a wall clock, photos look framed shots, and a favourite music album or playlist become a concert poster. One of my favourites is a virtual window, behind which you can place a panorama photo from your library so it appears to be looking out into a past holiday.
And speaking of photos, another new software element is the ability to automatically transform most recent pics into Spatial Scenes, which uses AI to give the photos a sense of depth, and moves them as your head moves for the impression that you could walk into them.
Some photos handle this better than others, but it’s an interesting step towards effectively revisiting memories, even if they’re frozen in time for now.
The final software element I noticed was the much more realistic Persona system. This is where you scan your face to create a CGI mask that others will see when you’re on FaceTime calls inside the headset.
It looks like you, and it animates when you move your eyes or mouth, even when you blow out your cheeks or stick out your tongue. It’s a bit creepy, but paired with hand-tracking it does make virtual meetings feel more natural than Zoom calls.
More power doesn’t solve the Vision Pro’s biggest problems
One of my big bugbears with the original Vision Pro was that its strange and futuristic headband didn’t offer enough support, with the weight of the headset falling down on the bridge of your nose. That’s comprehensively fixed here with a new version that includes a counterweight at the back and a second loop at the top.
But if you have the old Vision Pro, you can just buy this new band separately. And also, you’ll get all the new features of VisionOS 26. So what’s actually better about the version with M5?
The new headband is a huge improvement in comfort. The screen on the front continues to be a bit weird.
The main benefit is that the visuals are sharper and smoother, now running at up to 120Hz. This makes simply looking around feel comfier, and it means when you connect to your Mac to create a giant virtual display, even smaller text will be crisp and readable. The M5 should also allow for significantly better game performance than the M2, and the Vision Pro now supports Sony’s VR controllers. But that leads into one of the biggest unresolved issues with Vision Pro; a dearth of content.
There are some cool apps available natively on the platform, but nothing I’d want to use for longer than a quick demo. The App Store has around 3000 Vision Pro apps and games, plus millions more that just work like floating iPads.
Consuming video content remains the absolute best thing to do in Vision Pro, but as awesome as some of the native spatial videos are (including the new Metallica concert), it’s cumulatively a weekend’s worth of watching at best. The rest of the time you’ll be watching 2D content in your own private virtual theatre. If you don’t specifically need to manipulate 3D objects, and you have access to another screen, it can be tough to find reasons to put the headset on.
Compounding this, and arguably the bigger issue, is the fact it still costs $6000. That may well be a fair price for the hardware, but regardless of how well it can track your movements, how seamlessly you can blend digital elements into your work space, and how nice it is to see your photos made spatial (and your videos too – though for now you have to specifically record them in spatial), there’s just no realistic use case I can think of that wouldn’t be better addressed with other devices costing much less.
Rivals are arriving
Meta has been in the headset business for a while, and its team has ties back even further to the Oculus VR days. So it’s not really a surprise that it has a more mature product than Apple. It is notable, though, that you could buy 12 units of its latest headset, the Quest 3S, for the price of one Vision Pro. Apple beats Meta on practically every measurement of hardware, and can boast functionality with Macs and the App Store, but the Quest has an integrated battery (rather than the pocketable one on the Vision Pro), its colour pass-through works, and it has heaps of apps and games available.
Last week, Microsoft released an app called Mixed Reality Link for Windows 11, which supports Meta’s headsets. The experience is very similar to the Mac virtual display on Vision Pro; you just look at your computer, pair it, and then you can sort your view into multiple virtual displays or one big curved one that covers the space in front of you.
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Meanwhile, Samsung is launching the first headset based on Google’s Android XR software, and it seems to crib every feature from the Vision Pro but will be sold for half the price. The Vision Pro will have more computing power and run at a higher refresh rate, but the Galaxy XR appears to have an equivalent resolution display and tracking hardware, it’s lighter, it will leverage Google AI and it may benefit from a more open ecosystem.
If Apple can’t find a way to get developers making software for its headset, no amount of chip upgrades are going to help it compete.
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