A LOT better than I was expecting. I was 95% sure I'd be returning it. Now, after about 18 hours of solid use, I'm about 50%. For context, I've had (and hated) several VR headsets from the Oculus to the PSVR2 to the Hololens and I'm nearing the end of a 30 year career in film and video.
The Good...
For a 1st Gen product, it's very slick and polished. Adjusting to a totally new way of interfacing feels considered and natural. The basic principle is look to select and pinch to click/drag/scale, which quickly becomes second nature. It's nice for prolonged use that you don't have to hold your hands out in front of you - the cameras work perfectly well when your hands are just resting on your lap or a desktop. The eye tracking is astonishingly good for Native VisionOS apps, but see below for so-called 'compatible apps'. Within VisionOS, text is surprisingly sharp (unlike all the other VR headsets I've used) and visual quality is generally very good, with a few major caveats which I'll come to below. It's
fairly comfortable, but I really can't see anyone wanting to wear one for a whole working day due to the weight and bulk. The battery cord is a nuisance, but I don't really see a viable alternative until they can find a much lighter way of powering things.
The environments (where you replace your living space with a virtual rendered space) are amazing - probably the best thing about the Vision Pro. Being up above the clouds at the summit of Haleakala (the Maui volcano) looking into the crater at night and gazing up at the stars is remarkably peaceful. The sense of immersion is extraordinary, even down to the spacial wind sound effects. You can then summon up a massive movie screen and settle in for what is honestly a fantastic experience. If you have Disney+ you can sit in the driving seat of Luke's Landspeeder in front of the setting twin suns on Tatooine, on the deck of the Marvel Avengers HQ in front of a New York skyline marveling (ha!) at the Easter eggs in the animated environment, or summon up some porn in the Disney Theatre and go full PeeWee Herman!
The sound from the built in speakers is surprisingly good, although of course it's far from full-range. It's very well executed and really adds to the sense of immersion. I'll try the Airpods Pro over the weekend which I expect will be much better still.
The Bad...
Battery life and weight are inter-related in a way. Unless you're plugged into the wall charger, you won't be using it for more than 3 hours or so at a time, but then after 90 mins you really do start to feel the weight of it on your brow, so it's good to take a break to recharge!
Pass-through video quality (ie the ability to see the space around you which is beamed into the internal screens via the external cameras) is surprisingly poor, even in optimum daylight conditions. Fuzzy, a little laggy, with very obvious motion blur and video noise. I imagine this will be one of the things they prioritize to improve in future hardware revisions.
3D movie content - it takes a lot of horsepower to render an immersive 3D environment and then stream a 4k 3D movie into it. 2D films play very smoothly and look great, but 3D films need double the frame rate to get the same smoothness and it looks like the hardware isn't up to it - 3D movies look noticeably more juddery. For launch, Apple has produced some fully immersive 3D content available through AppleTV+ which I've seen touted as 8k, but in reality it looks more like 480p with a ton of fringing and artifacts. It's certainly impressive, but the video quality isn't that great.
The thing that really got my interest when I watched the Keynote a few months ago was the potential to use the Vision Pro for multiple virtual monitors on your existing Mac setup. In practice however, this is severely limited. It does work with Intel Macs, but the virtual screen can only be up to 3k resolution. With Apple Silicon Macs it will go up to 4k. You can only have a single screen, and the screen on your laptop/desktop will go black while you're using the virtual screen, so you can't really use it as a desktop extender - just a replacement within the VisionOS environment. Unlike apps running natively, the quality is not great - it looks like an over-compressed jpeg - fuzzy and somewhat laggy. I really wouldn't want to use this for work. Also, for some strange reason, it doesn't work with a Bluetooth mouse, but a Trackpad works fine.
The eye tracking, which works superbly on Native VisionOS apps, doesn't work nearly as well on so-called 'Compatible Apps', which are basically pre-existing iPad apps. I couldn't even get past the login screen on a couple of these as I couldn't select the 'Next' button. I'm sure this will be a priority for OS revisions.
I really don't see the need at all for the front screens, which are just adding cost, weight and power draw to the device. The ability for someone else to be able to see representations of your eyes seems like a nonsense feature.
It doesn't work in the dark as it can't track your hands, so you won't be using it in bed while your partner is sleeping for example...
...which brings me to the worst aspect of the Vision Pro. Like the iPad, it only supports ONE SINGLE USER. This is ridiculous. If you live in a household, everyone will want to use it of course, but the only way to do that is for the main user to enable a temporary Guest user who will have to set the device up (ie go through the initial eye and hand scanning procedure) every single time they want to use it. This is a new Operating System - it could have been designed from the outset with multiple user functionality, but Apple have chosen not to do that. Do they really think people are going to just buy 4 of them?!
TLDR: Great Cinema Experience! The rest, not so much.
