Through the Lens of Apple Vision Pro: A Lukewarm First Experience
It launched. It came to Canada. I tried it. I’ll pass.
After several months of waiting with fading interest, I finally tried out an Apple Vision Pro at an Apple store in downtown Montreal. As mentioned on my blog this week, I was eager but not that much excited about the prospect of trying Apple's headset. Upon my arrival at the store, while waiting for my turn, I observed the demonstration area, which prompted me to make a few observations.
General observations
The store's demonstration area occupies a substantial portion of the first floor, spanning approximately one-third of the space. This seems excessive for a product that struggles with low sales. The store was relatively quiet during my visit, with only a handful of customers showing interest in the headset.
An Apple employee overseeing a demo uses an iPad mini to view what the person experiencing the Apple Vision Pro is actually seeing, which I found fascinating. This made me wonder if Apple could expand on this concept and develop an iPad app that allows people to share content, such as a movie. Imagine a couple sitting on the couch, with one person wearing a headset to browse the web. If they want to share something with their partner, they could momentarily share the screen using an iPad.
It's worth noting that demonstrating the Apple Vision Pro requires significantly more education and preparation than other Apple products. This raises questions about whether Apple might be missing some design fundamentals, such as discoverability and affordability. Additionally, the demo setup seems designed to obscure any waiting time for the Apple Vision Pro to boot up or connect to the iPad mini.
During my visit, I didn’t see a single person purchase the headset. I’m curious about the percentage of people who, after receiving a demo, decide to buy the headset. It’s probably pretty low.
About the device and the experience
Now that I have experienced the Vision Pro device on my head, I have a few hot takes.
The front screen is really low-res and could be the first thing to be dropped from the next iteration of the headset. This is a gimmick. The headset isn’t as heavy as I was expecting. It’s probably because I was conditioned by the numerous reviews that noted the weight of the device to be excessive. It’s relatively easy to put and secure on my head. Once in place, I could see light leakage inside. I asked if my headset was correctly in place, and the employee told me it should be fine. It wasn’t.
The user interface is sleek and thoughtfully designed overall. Gesturing is intuitive, though I sometimes forget to take that brief moment to look at the intended target before performing the select gesture; it's something you really need to be mindful of. The immersive mode is spectacular but makes you feel even more isolated from the world around you. Watching a movie feels convincingly like being in a theatre, although the device's weight constantly reminds you that you're not actually there. The 8K videos and spatial videos are stunning, with impressive quality. Unfortunately, the store was too noisy to fully appreciate the headset’s sound quality. Oh, and typing on the virtual keyboard is hard and takes time to get used to. I tried to type the numericcitizen.me address in Safari to visit my blog. It was tedious, but I eventually got through. Locating the digital crown while wearing the header can be a challenge at first. The field of view is significantly narrower than I anticipated. Given the price, I expected a broader perspective. On certain occasions, when I became acutely aware of this limitation, it felt as if I were looking through a tunnel.
The Apple Vision Pro is the first Apple product that doesn’t resonate with me. I struggle to see its use case or purpose. This starkly contrasts previous Apple products like the iPhone, Apple Watch, iPad, iPod, or the original Mac, which all felt immediately intuitive to me. A headset, though? Really? While it is a remarkable showcase of Apple’s design and technological prowess, some tech pundits argue that Apple should have been more transparent by presenting it as a development kit. They might have a point.
As I walked out of the store, I couldn’t help but think of a quote from Steve Jobs: “You've got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology – not the other way around.” Here’s hoping that future iterations of the Vision Pro heed this wisdom more closely.
One more thing: the price in Canadian dollars with Apple Care for the base configuration is 6400$, all taxes included. That’s not exactly cheap. Another thing: I think that some powerful groups at Apple were pushing for the idea that virtual reality and augmented reality were the future of computing. It was before generative AI, back in November 2022. The rest is history.
