Vision Pro launch: all the news about Apple’s pricey new headset

1 month ago 25

Mysterious new Vision Pro retail app appears in the App Store
Apple has quietly released a new app that suggests it may soon allow third-party retailers to sell its Vision Pro headset. The “Vision Pro Demo Fit” app was spotted in the App Store Preview by Apple firmware detective Aaron Perris (seen via 9to5Mac), and includes various features for matching customers to their required Vision Pro sizing and accessories.
The Vision Pro is currently only available to purchase directly from Apple. Customers who aren’t being fitted at an in-person Apple Store demo need to use an iPhone or iPad with Face ID to determine a “precise fit” when ordering a Vision Pro via the Apple Store website or app.
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The Apple Vision Pro’s eBay prices are making me sad
Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge
I paid a lot of money for the privilege of getting an Apple Vision Pro brand-new in February. All-in, with optical inserts and taxes, I financed a little over $3,900 for the 256GB version of the headset. A day or so ago, I made a mistake that I’m sure many early adopters are familiar with: I looked up how much it’s been selling for on eBay.
On Wednesday, a 1TB Vision Pro, complete with all the included gear, Apple’s fluffy $200 travel case, $500 AppleCare Plus, and claimed to have been “worn maybe about an hour” sold for $3,200 after 21 bids. The listed shipping estimate was $20.30. Brand new, that combination is $5,007.03 on Apple’s site for me. Another eBay listing, this one with my headset’s configuration (but sans optical inserts) went for just $2,600 — again with most, if not all, of the included accessories. Several other 256GB and 512GB models sold for around that amount this week.
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The Vision Pro bathes your eyeballs in infrared light.
You can see that in this Slow Mo Guys YouTube Short showing the flashing of the invisible-to-the-human-eye IR illuminators of Apple’s face computer, both on the front and around the lenses’ edges.
At 1,000fps, the Guys show the Vision Pro’s very fancy micro-OLED displays alternating between images and black frames, with a ring of IR lights popping on during the dark moments to help track where your eyes are looking.
Is the MLB’s Vision Pro app ready for the big leagues?
Jason Snell of Six Colors details his experience with the MLB’s visionOS app now that the season is underway. Of the Gameday feature that puts a 3D-animated baseball field in your space during a game, he writes:
I couldn’t find support for Gameday when I first used the app, though later when playing back an archived stream, I did find Gameday available—from within the video playback, so you can’t use it for a game you’re not watching on the app. And it’s immersive, so you can’t put it up and then do something else, which is also probably a mistake.
The Vision Pro is getting some new Apple Arcade games.
Alto’s Odyssey: The Lost City, Gibbon: Beyond the Trees, and Spire Blast will each get Vision Pro “spatial” apps tomorrow, Apple shared in a release emailed to The Verge.
Also, rhythm game Synth Riders — aka the only game I’ve been coming back to besides bullet hell shooter Void-X — has been updated with Game Center leaderboards and a pass-the-headset Party Mode.
The Apple Vision Pro is $150 off... if you’re feeling lucky.
But there’s a catch: they all ship with a 21W light seal and small-sized headbands. Buying a seal separately from Apple costs $200 and the headbands are $99 apiece, so you might pay more than the retail price if you aren’t happy with the fit.
Update March 27th, 4:41PM ET: Adjusted pricing and added more specific sizing details, courtesy of Woot.
Where in the world will the Vision Pro launch this year?
Apple CEO Tim Cook told press at the China Development Forum in Beijing that China will get it this year, according to Reuters this morning, citing a Chinese state media Weibo post.
You can now browse Vision Pro apps on the web.
It’s essentially the same thing you’d see if you were browsing the store in the Vision Pro itself — a few curated lists of native apps here, some recommended iPad apps there.
But at least there’s a way to casually cruise those sweet spatial apps without popping the headset on now.
Mark Zuckerberg has more to say about the Vision Pro and how much worse it is than his Quest headsets.
Once Apple released the Vision Pro, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg responded with a video saying his company’s Quest 3 headset is “the better product, period.”
Now he’s back with more takes, posting this on Threads in response to a post that said, “Apple is selling pretty much the device Meta wants to reach in 3-5 years.”
I don’t think we’re saying the devices are the same. We’re saying Quest is better. If our devices weigh as much as theirs in 3-5 years, or have the motion blur theirs has, or the lack of precision inputs, etc, then that means we’ll have regressed significantly.
Yes, their resolution is higher, but they paid for that with many other product tradeoffs that make their device worse in most ways. That’s not what we aspire to.
Is my Persona better?
There’s a new Vision Pro update out, and visionOS 1.1 supposedly improves everybody’s favorite feature, Personas. But I think it’s still the stuff of nightmares. I FaceTimed my friend, and according to her: I still look too sleepy, my mouth moves more, and my eyes are better but not quite right.
“It looks more like you, but it’s still not you.” What do y’all think?
Apple’s visionOS update that could make Persona avatars better-looking is almost here.
MacRumors points out that this release also has updates for the virtual keyboard, Mac Virtual Display, mobile device management, and more. With the iOS 17.4 update close to a public launch, Apple also put out release candidates for tvOS, macOS, watchOS, and Xcode.
Apparently Foxtrot is still going?
As a nerd kid, this was one of my favorite newspaper comic strips. But I haven’t looked at the funny pages in many years, and had assumed this one had long since expired.
What’s the Vision Pro like after a month?
Joanna Stern writes in The Wall Street Journal that Apple’s face computer isn’t so great for work, but serves well as an escape from day-to-day life. You know, like a VR headset.
Still, even if the Vision Pro isn’t always magic, she finds it handy for focusing “on a single task, like writing a column.”
This is why we can’t have nice [360-degree YouTube videos on the Vision Pro].
It’s about codecs and resolution. 4K-and-up videos only use either YouTube’s VP9 codec or the royalty-free AV1. Christian Selig, developer of the Juno YouTube app, writes that 360 video of the former can’t work because it requires Apple’s blessing. And the Vision Pro’s M2 chip has no AV1 hardware decoder, so that’s out, too.
Why not 1080p, he asks? Because it looks like doo-doo.
It’s a party in the AVP.
The San Francisco Standard documents some parties where attendees are encouraged to shake their butts while wearing the Vision Pro (from pictures, it seems like most didn’t go along with the ask).
Before you dismiss the idea, consider this: If you don’t have a kid or a dog, “I gotta go; my Vision Pro died” could be a great excuse to leave a party early.
Vision Pro owners are reporting a mysterious crack in the front glass
Vision Pro owners are posting near-identical reports of a crack appearing on the front glass of their headsets. None of them seem to know how it happened, either.
The issue was first spotted by AppleInsider, and so far, there have been five separate Redditors who have posted about it in the r/VisionPro subreddit. Engadget also reported that the same happened with its review unit. What makes it curious is that all of the uploaded pictures appear to show vertical hairline cracks in the same exact area above the nose bridge. All the affected Redditors say they didn’t do anything obvious to cause the cracks, like dropping the device or storing it improperly. Reddit user @dornbirn claims that they polished the front glass, placed the soft cover on, packed it away in the case, and woke up to see the crack the next morning. Most of the other affected Redditors also noted they either stored their Vision Pros in cases or placed the soft cover on.
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Comfort isn’t just a Vision Pro problem — it’s a wearable one
As I sit here writing this in the Apple Vision Pro, I’m acutely aware of how the light seal presses against my forehead and cheekbones. It was relatively comfy when I slipped it on an hour ago. But now, every so often, I push up on the bridge — as if I’m a cartoon nerd saying, um, well, actually — just to give my face a break. This is despite the fact that I’ve done the scan to figure out my perfect light seal fit (33W, in case you’re wondering). So no, I’m not surprised that many Apple fans who returned their Vision Pros cited comfort as a major issue.
But this isn’t exclusively a Vision Pro problem. It’s a wearable problem.
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This video comparing Apple Vision Pro hand tracking to the Meta Quest 3 is mesmerizing.
Holonautic co-founder and developer Dennys Kuhnert says he is “both disappointed and impressed” by the Vision Pro’s performance and showed off this comparison of the two headsets with a real-time visualization tool.
As he wrote in another post, “The quality and accuracy is fantastic but the lag with passthrough hands feels currently higher than on Quest 3. Could be explained by AVP’s very low passthrough latency... ~11ms vs ~35ms for Q3.”
A stand for the Vision Pro.
Apple doesn’t sell a stand for the Vision Pro, so developer Christian Selig took it upon himself to create one — just like the unofficial YouTube app he made for the headset, too.
This stand allows the headset to hang vertically, making it take up a bit less space on your desk as opposed to some other storage options out there. Selig has uploaded all the design files onto MakerWorld, so you can 3D print the stand for yourself.
What it’s like to make an app for the Vision Pro.
In this interview for the Voices of VR podcast, Apollo developer Christian Selig shares his experience creating Juno, an unofficial YouTube player he created for the Vision Pro in only a week’s time.
Despite the small number of people who own the headset, he says he’s earned enough from it to buy “multiple” Vision Pros.
My Vision Pro has no idea when I’m talking.
I keep a pretty bushy mustache, and it seems to prevent the headset’s downward-facing cameras from seeing and translating what my mouth is doing to my Persona’s real-time expressions during a Vision Pro FaceTime call. Apparently, I’m not alone.
Vision Pro decision time.
If you bought one on day one, the return window is closing now, so let us know if you’re deciding to keep your headset and why.
Why does Apple make it so hard to share the Vision Pro?
Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge
Shortly before The Verge published its review of the Apple Vision Pro, I put it on to sit for some photos. The review unit had been fitted for our editor-in-chief Nilay Patel, but I’d worn it a few times as a guest and had a surprisingly good experience. That afternoon, though, I foolishly decided to skip the typical guest setup, which involves about a minute of calibration for the Vision Pro’s eye-tracking cameras. I put the thing on, and it didn’t work at all.
The Vision Pro’s cameras, I quickly realized, were expecting somebody else’s eyes. The cursor darted around wildly or refused to move. It wasn’t an unexpected outcome, but it drove home an inconvenient fact: not only would I need to go through the setup again, I’d need to do it every time I wanted to use the headset.
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Apple fans are starting to return their Vision Pros
For some Apple Vision Pro buyers, the honeymoon is already over.
It’s no coincidence that there’s been an uptick on social media of Vision Pro owners saying they’re returning their $3,500 headsets in the past few days. Apple allows you to return any product within 14 days of purchase — and for the first wave of Vision Pro buyers, we’re right about at that point.
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After trying the Vision Pro, Mark Zuckerberg says Quest 3 ‘is the better product, period’