I just did my free 30-minute demo of Apple Vision Pro at the Apple Store in Emeryville and figured I'd write down my initial reactions:
- This is the worst Apple Store experience I've ever had. Apparently the connection between the supervisory iPad and the demo AVP unit is very flaky, and their solution is just to have a lot of iPads. The salesperson doing my demo went through five iPads before getting one connected.
- Apple Vision Pro is surprisingly... not that heavy. I expected to really feel it, but it feels subjectively lighter on my head than the AirPods Max that I wear at work every day, despite the Vision Pro weighing 50% more than the AirPods Max (600g vs 384g).
- In general, this product feels heavily inspired by the AirPods Max. Same color1, same Digital Crown and button, etc.
- The IPD alignment wasn't perfect and I still had some doubled vision in the bottom-middle. Easy enough to avoid during the demo by moving my head down when looking at that area, but would be awful if I were using this device every day. I'd want to retry the demo a couple of times and see if it recurs before spending any money on this product.
- For some reason, a small green checkmark appeared in the center of my vision roughly every 60 seconds. Was this some artifact of the remote-viewing iPad?
- The window resize controls disappeared while watching the Avatar: The Way of Water demo and I couldn't get them back until the video fininshed. Not sure if there's some gesture I was missing to bring them up or if this was a bug.
- The Alicia Keys demo is deeply uncomfortable2; all of the other "Immersive Experience" demos are amazing.
- Text was more-legible than I expected given the relatively-low angular resolution of the displays (34ppd, compared to 98ppd on the Studio Display I use all day every day). Definitely could see some color fringing on black text on a white background from subpixel anti-aliasing, but it was more comfortable to read than macOS is on a non-Retina monitor with similar angular resolution. I caught the foveated rendering happening a few times but it was pretty unobtrusive.
- I experienced no nausea at all during the demo, even the high-motion parts. I have always felt a little queasy when trying other headsets.
- The sound was remarkably good. I didn't listen to anything serious, but it had surprising nuance for something that's more open than the most open-backed of headphones.
I'm not going to buy one of these things, but ask me again in a couple of years when a second version. I do, however, think that Apple could make a whole boatload of money charging people $100 to rent one for a few hours to watch a movie. If you have an Apple Store near you, you should definitely do the free demo just for the entertainment value. Heck, we used to pay $25/pop to go see the M.O.M. at the Jordan's Furniture in Avon, and nobody tries to sell you a new couch while you're playing with a Vision Pro.
Silver aluminium, which seems to be getting phased out by Apple in favor of their warmer "starlight" aluminium
Does anyone want to have someone singing at them from 3 feet away? What was this like for Ms. Cook? Singing at max intensity at a featureless white obelisk?
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