“You know, one of our most common reactions we love is people go, ‘Hold on, I just need a minute. I need to process what just happened,’” said Greg “Joz” Joswiak, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, as we ate lunch at Apple Park. “How cool is that? How often do people have a product experience where they’re left speechless, right?”
I wasn’t really left speechless until the second demo. A few months after my initial experience, I went back to the LA offices. Two Apple employees led me into a room. I put on the Apple Vision Pro and the curtain opened and I was looking at them. The only difference this time was I had a cup of tea with me. In the middle of this new demo, I reached down and grabbed the tea and I took a sip, and as I did, one of my fingers flickered, like I was in a simulation no different from reality and there was a glitch.
“Wait, what am I seeing?” I asked, confused. “Are you real? Or…”
“No, you’re seeing a video of us that’s being rendered in real time,” one of the employees explained. I sat there for a moment, speechless. I had thought what I had been seeing was the real world, and that all the digital wonder was layered on top of that. That the Apple Vision Pro was transparent and there was a layer of technology on top of it. In reality, it was the other way around.
“I think it’s not evolutionary; it’s revolutionary,” Cameron said to me when I told him about my experience. “And I’m speaking as someone who has worked in VR for 18 years.” He explained that the reason it looks so real is because the Apple Vision Pro is writing a 4K image into my eyes. “That’s the equivalent of the resolution of a 75-inch TV into each of your eyeballs—23 million pixels.” To put that into perspective, the average 4K television has around 8 million pixels. Apple engineers didn’t slice off a rectangle from the corner of a 4K display and put it in the Apple Vision Pro. They somehow compressed twice as many pixels into a space as small as your eyeball. This, to people like Cameron who have been working in this space for two decades, “solves every problem.”
But even with all this wonder, with 23 million pixels that are so clear and crisp that you can’t tell reality from a digital composite of it, there are some problems Apple hasn’t solved—at least not yet.
There’s an old story about Steve Jobs that has become folklore in Silicon Valley. It takes place about 25 years ago, in that same nondescript black ops building, Mariani 1, where Cook would see the first Apple Vision Pro prototype years later. Back then, in the late ’90s, Jobs had a team of engineers building the first iPod. They’re toiling away, bending physics and doing engineering acrobatics to make the smallest prototype of an iPod they can squeeze into a box. Finally, when it can’t get any smaller, they take it to Jobs. Now, these prototypes cost millions of dollars, sometimes more, and Jobs looks at it, he inspects it, and he says it needs to be smaller. The engineers say it’s as small as it can get, and Jobs walks over to a fish tank and drops the prototype in—splash! And as it drowns, Jobs says, “You see those air bubbles? That means you can make it smaller.”
“You’ve got your M2 chip here…R1 chip…near zero latency…5,000 patents…seven years…” Richard Howarth, the vice president of industrial design, said in a thick Leicester accent as he pointed to the dozens of disassembled components splayed out in front of me, all of which made up the cadaver of the Apple Vision Pro. And yet, all I could think about was the fish story and that iPod prototype, and whether Jobs, if he were alive today, would throw the Apple Vision Pro into a fish tank and say, “There’s bubbles. Make it smaller!”
If there’s one consistent grumble about the Apple Vision Pro, it’s about the size and weight. It’s around 20 ounces, which might not sound like a lot, because you cook with ounces, you don’t necessarily wear them. But that’s the same as five sticks of butter—imagine walking around with five sticks of butter on your face all day. Carolina Cruz-Neira, a pioneer of virtual reality, told me that the way a device sits on your face really impacts how you respond to the technology. “I’ve been working in VR for over 30 years, and until we can get the scuba diving mask off your face and we make it less noticeable, we’re not going to make this a mass-adoption technology,” Cruz-Neira said. “And the size and weight of these scuba diving masks are not going to be solved in a year.”
It’s largely this question that will determine if the Apple Vision Pro will be a financial success. While Apple execs would only tell me “we’re excited” about the sales numbers so far, Wall Street analysts believe the company sold around 180,000 units in the opening weekend of online preorders. Morgan Stanley anticipates that sales will ramp up to 2 million to 4 million units a year over the next five years, and it will become a new product category for the company. But others, like Ming-Chi Kuo, an Apple supply chain analyst, thinks it’s going to remain a niche product for some time. Almost all the analysts I spoke with believe it will eventually get there. “We think a few years from now it’ll resemble sunglasses and be less than $1,500,” Dan Ives, a senior analyst at the investment firm Wedbush Securities, told me.
I didn’t even have to ask Howarth about the weight; he brought it up himself. But he did so as he explained that this component and that component are made of magnesium and carbon fiber and aluminum (he pronounced it a-loo-min-e-um, not a-loo-min-um, which I respected as a Brit myself), and he noted that these are the lightest materials on earth, and that there is no more diminutive alternative. “There’s nothing we could have done to make it lighter or smaller,” Howarth explained. “This is the state of the art.” Everyone else I spoke to at Apple proffered a similar sentiment. “It feels like we’ve reached into the future and grabbed this product,” Joswiak said to me. “You’re putting the future on your face.” As did Rockwell, who told me: “We packed just about as much technology as you could possibly pack into that small of a form factor.”
“You can actually lay on your sofa and put the displays on your ceiling if you wish,” Cook told me. “I watched the third season of [Ted] Lasso on my ceiling and it was unbelievable!” When I got home and hooked up my own Apple Vision Pro, I watched Ford v Ferrari on my ceiling, and with the spatial audio it felt like Ken Miles’s Ford GT40 was in the room with me. “I think meditation is on a different level than anything I’ve ever experienced, and I’ve meditated for a long time,” Cook said. I’ve always had trouble meditating, and he was right about that too. “And I use it for productivity,” Cook told me.
Typing with the Apple Vision Pro virtual keyboard is a little like trying to write with a pen between your toes. Not impossible but impractical. But when I opened my MacBook Pro while wearing the Vision Pro, the screen popped into my augmented reality and I was able to work pretty seamlessly. I’m actually writing these words here, the ones you’re reading, on the Vision Pro using the MacBook, and all I can say is I bet if you were watching me now you’d think I looked just like Tom Cruise in Minority Report, only slightly more handsome. And then there’s those spatial videos. I’ve recorded and watched dozens of spatial videos of my kids just playing and talking, reliving moments that seem mundane but when played back are so emotionally immersive, it’s like stepping into a living, breathing memory. Again, it’s hard to describe how realistic the environments feel, but I’ve found myself periodically returning to Mirror Lake, turning off all my notifications, and just sitting there at the edge of the water, peacefully watching and listening to the rain for 5 or 10 minutes before returning to work.
There are plenty of quirks using the device. One of my favorites is when you use the Vision Pro in one room and then go to another, open the same app, and you have to find it by looking all around the room; sometimes it’s on the ceiling or the floor. I couldn’t find my text app the other day and turned around to find it was in my bathroom. (I later learned you can reset the apps by pressing the digital crown for a few seconds.) But the more I’ve used the Apple Vision Pro over the past two weeks, the more one glaring problem revealed itself to me. It’s not the weight (which is a problem but will come down over time), or the size (which will shrink with each iteration), or the worry that it will drive us to consume more content alone (almost half of Americans already watch TV alone). Or how tech giants like Meta, Netflix, Spotify, and Google are currently withholding their apps from the device. (Content creators may come around once the consumers are there, and some, like Disney, are already embracing the device, making 150 movies available in 3D, including from mega-franchises like Star Wars and Marvel.) And it’s not even the price, because if Apple wanted to, the company could subsidize the cost of the Apple Vision Pro and it would have about as much financial impact as Cook losing a nickel between his couch cushions.
Nick Bilton
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